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Mo' Dawg sez

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Last night [Andrew Moore] had his first AAA start that would be labeled as "cruddy":  6 innings, 7 hits, 4ER's, 0 BB.s and 6 K's.  He gave up 3 runs in the  2nd (and 4 of the 7 hits, it looks like).  89 pitches, 63 strikes.

Even when he's bad, he's not far from pretty good.

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Here is a table of 2016 Quality Starts leaders.  If an MLB star is able to go 26-for-32 in a season, he's competing for hardware as the best pitcher in the game.  If he goes 22-for-30 or 22-for-32 he is David Price or Cole Hamels.  Chris Archer had 19 and we are not talking about #3 starters here.

So Dawg is being a little modest about his Adopt-a-Twirler kid, when he offers an admission of "cruddy."  6 IP, 4 ER, a perfect 0:6 CTL, that kind of DAMAGE CONTROL is one of Andrew Moore's biggest stealth skills.  You can't overstate the feeling that you're going to be in the game today, so let's put some good AB's on their guy.  Lockdowns aren't going to be Moore's thing.  Giving the offense a good situation, that will be Andrew Moore's thing.

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And Matty sez

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No room at the inn.  Our entire rotation is about to come back. Unless Iwakuma turns out to be ineffective or Gaviglio turns into a pumpkin or someone else gets hurt, the rotation is full after next weekend.

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And it's nice to hear that G-Money also likes what he sees in Sam Gaviglio:

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The Mariners did not draft the quick-moving college starter I was hoping for in the first two rounds, but they have Gaviglio and Moore to hold down the back half of the rotation. ... The Mariners have a top-5 offense (and have basically since the day Gar took over as hitting coach). He and Brosius have the bats working in fine order.  The pitching staff has been duct-taped together all year but if some clarity and consistency is coming, that's welcome news.

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8 pitchers' worth of cream has risen to the top, if you count Guy Art Dough.  IMPLICATION it's easy to forget that we are very early in Dipoto's 'rebuild.'  If you back up and take the 3-year view, much less the 5-year view, you see Dipoto methodically layering in the talent:

• Paxton jelled
• Ariel Miranda turned out (in view of a scant 24 career starts) to be a keeper, worth committing to.  How brainy does that Miley/Miranda deal look now?
• Andrew Moore, barring the health Q's every pitcher has, gets the Mainframe "best bet" label.  Pretty much.  As a middle of rotation soldier.  Credit to the M's for their nurturing approach here.
• Sam Gaviglio already looks like the quality of youngster you allocate 30-40 starts to 

That is four separate pulls of a face card off the top of the deck.  A guy like Max Povse is a nice POTENTIAL pull.  But the above 4 guys can be classed as ACTUAL pulls as we stand today.

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The April-May rotation injuries were bizarrely timed even by the standards that apply to baseball pitching; our top 4 starters went down like bowling pins within a couple of weeks of one another.  Delicate as pitchers can be, the 2017 Mariners had TWICE the rotation injuries that any GM can reasonably make contingencies for.

And the result is, nobody has caught onto the fact that ---- > Dipoto is layering his rotation successfully.  He gets an A that nobody elsewhere has noticed.  Four face cards in a year, that's a lot.

BABVA,

Dr D