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Nobody cares in July Whether You Won a Game in March, Dept.
Okay, Earl was referring to spring training. A manager gets it from all directions, pressure to do this and to do that and to do the next thing ... only Earl seemed to realize, on March 21, that everybody was inside a dream, that the morning would come, and that everything would simply VANISH later on in the year. So he managed that way.
This is about twenty degrees off topic, but ... when you're inside a 7-of-9 losing streak, it can help to realize that after you wake up, the pain will vanish. (Of course, that's assuming you're not inside a coma from which there is no resuscitation... )
Baseball is for enjoyment. Dr. D's assigned task is to provide his readers with enjoyment. Some mornings, this task is easier than others.
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On April 18, 2014, the Mariners faced THE hardest-throwing starting pitcher in the world, Nathan Eovaldi. Eovaldi's first pitch was only 96 MPH, because he hadn't yet gotten loose. Then he threw 96, again.
The next fastball clocked 97 MPH. The fourth one clocked 98 MPH. From there it didn't get better: Brooks counted 63 fastballs, at an average velocity of 97.0 MPH.
The Mariners' results were rather better than last week against Garrett Richards: they collected 11 (!) base hits, and that doesn't count the screaming foul balls. In one at-bat, Corey Hart hit six different upper-deck home runs, one foot foul each. Can you believe the way that dude gets around on a 96 MPH jam pitch?!
Unfortunately, the Mariners were deploying their #7 starting pitcher, Chris Young, who gave up 4 runs in 3 innings and then left. It says here that after the M's rotation consists of Felix, Iwakuma, Paxton, Taijuan, Maurer, and/or Elias, nobody will care that Chris Young cost them a game in April.
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On April 17, 2014, the Mariners KO'ed the Rangers' Opening Day starter*, scoring 6 runs and sending him to the showers in the 3rd inning with (what should have been) a 6-0 lead.
Unfortunately, the Mariners were deploying their #8 starting pitcher, Erasmo Ramirez, who gave up 3 runs in the first inning, 1 run in the second inning, coughed up a leadoff double in the third inning, and then left. It says here that after the M's rotation consists of Felix, Iwakuma, Paxton, Taijuan, Maurer, and/or Elias, nobody will care that Erasmo Ramirez cost them a game in April.
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On April 16, 2014, the Mariners collected five (5) clean base hits, and another three (3) smoked deep fly balls, and a walk, and a stolen base, against Yu Darvish -- in the first two innings!
Felix was throwing aspirin tablets for the M's, and through some unfathomable sequence of events, the Mariners failed to convert these twin circumstances into a victory. Let me know, the next time Felix is throwing like that, and the Mariners hit 8 tee shots in the first 2 innings, and we don't win.
It says here that after the M's rotation consists of Felix, Iwakuma, Paxton, Taijuan, Maurer, and/or Elias, nobody will care that occasionally gruesome "aborted wins" occur. Because wins won't be safe, legal, and rare.
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On April 15, 2014, the Mariners achieved the impossible: they struck out only 2 times, putting the ball in play every other time -- and yet were shut out.
How do you score 0 runs with that many balls rolling around the grassy green pinball machine? 0 runs off --- > 24 balls in play, 7 hits, 2 HBP, and who knows what else.
Unfortunately, the Mariners were also deploying their #9 starting pitcher, Blake Beavan. It says here that after the M's rotation consists of Felix, Iwakuma, Paxton, Taijuan, Maurer, and/or Elias, nobody will care that Blake Beavan cost them a game in April.
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Earl Used to Go With 4, Sometimes THREE, Starters in April
Lotta weird things happening, ain't they? And the main reason that so many weird things are happening, is that the Mariners are trying to play with their junior varsity rotation.
The Mariners' decision to hold back Taijuan did, we grant you turn out to look like it was right. After he felt a tweak again. Right or wrong, Dr. D despaired for his baseball soul: it signalled a lack of urgency to win, an attitude that would have sent Lou Piniella screaming into the night.
Piniella would have had Taijuan in the A.L. rather than in Tacoma, right now would have Iwakuma in there next turn, would never have had Beavan in there any turn, and so on and so forth.
You can defend any of these rotation decisions individually, of course....
In fact Bill James once measured history's managers by asking, "How urgently does this manager change his rotation, when a starter has a high ERA? Does he let a starter run for 10 more starts after his ERA skies past 5.00?" Piniella, managing a lousy team, will literally have 16 different starting pitchers by the end of the year. His urgency about the rotation is a symptom of his disease. He's got a severe hatred of losing in his blood.
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So when Lloyd McClendon walks out to the mound in the 3rd inning, and grabs Erasmo Ramirez by the collar and waistband, and heave-ho's him into the dugout, I go apoplectic with joy.
He did it again, tonight, to Chris Young.
Do you realize what a manager risks? If Erasmo now hates his guts? Well ... later on, when Chone Figgins and Ken Griffey start the mutiny against a wobbly manager, Erasmo is one of the guys shanking Lloyd in the back.
Lloyd, as with Lou Piniella, doesn't give a rat's haunches whether his players like him. Lloyd cares about winning. And Dr. D therefore likes Lloyd McClendon.
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Nobody will care, in July, whether Erasmo Ramirez likes Lloyd McClendon. James Paxton will, and Brandon Maurer will, and all the talented and tough players will like him, and that's what matters.
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What Game YOU Been Watchin'?
Let's isolate this out. Corey Hart has already demonstrated -- to the scouting eye, LrKrBoi, which you wouldn't know a blinkin' thing about -- that he's the same hitter that he was before the knee surgery. That is a demonstrated .275/.350/.500 established level of performance.
You want the saber eye, you say? Here are his plate discipline stats. He's better than ever. Check that O-Zone swing percentage! For a power hitter?!
Comparable hitters: Evan Longoria and ... hold it right there. Longoria's slash line, over the period 2011-13, was .264/.353/.503.
Hey, Billy Beane always seems to be sitting on a Josh Willingham or Matt Holliday reclamation. Sixteen games in, you can safely place Corey Hart in that category. (I mean, sure, nothing's a guarantee, but are you saying you wouldn't give Hart a 1x$14M qualifying offer?! This one's a big win, boys.)
Lost in the noise of all this pain, is the fact that Zduriencik has come up with an offensive Evan Longoria to bat cleanup.
Right handed.
Losing is for losers,
Dr D
If Maurer is going to be on a pitch count of 60 or less... why do it?
There has to be someone who is available - free agent or trade - that is capable of going 90 pitches... be it Blanton, Freddie, Jair, or... someone.
Our bullpen is going to need 3 or more replacements by the all star break.
Nobody will care about any one loss, true. But everyone will care tha the club took its annual April/May 4-18 nose dive. 3-7 in the last ten games and I don't think it's gonna get better any time soon. The starting rotation is in tatters, the bullpen is stacked with wild arms that give up walks in bunches and the lineup still has too many holes.
In the course of a season, every team (nearly) has a 2 and 7 streak, the critical element is not to have 3 or 4 of them. If this is it, we're just dandy.
The transfer rule is silly, as enforced. Hey, the deal was to prevent the bobble-but-still-out on the DP turn at 2B, not to deny a clear catch and transfer. Alas, Seager wasn't throwing anybody out at any other base, so cradling the ball would have been just fine.
I was wrong about Hart being dangerously hobbled, but I'm still not playing him in RF that much. I wasn't playing him there from Day One. I want to guarantee we get 145 games from his bat, not from his glove. We acquired a mashing RH bat, not a RF. Let's treat him gingerly. And I know you and I disagree on this, Doc, but I still think he's sitting fastball on almost every pitch AND still has the ability to hold back and hit a moon ball on the curve. His mashing ability is not predicated on his ability to turn on the heater (all mashers do that) but to not corkscrew himself into the ground when the yakker floats up there. David Ortiz from the RH, if you will.
Good for J. Jones on the IF hit. Atta boy, kid. But unless he's a LF and Ackley is a 1B, we don't have a place for him right now. Well, unless Saunders is gone.
Franklin? Unless we dump Bloomquist or Saunders (or Morrison stays DL'ed for an extended time period) I don't see the place for him right now either. We're not demoting Seager or Miller, for sure. And I don't think we're sending Romero out, as that leaves only Bloomquist's RH bat on the bench (unless we figure Franklin as having a real RH bat...which is possible.)
It's a long year and it's early. When the varsity pitchers show up, we will be fine.
moe
What about an entire bullpen of wild non-strike throwers? They're either walking into trouble or behind in the count putting pressure on themselves and their defense. If 8 innings of April 16th aspirin tablets isn't enough, what is? Not like it's an isolated event. Look at Felix record compared to other dominant pitchers. Constant gut-wrenching blowups after his masterful performances. Do we lead the league in blown holds and saves for the guy every year?
Everyone will care in September about the early senseless losses, when the team falls short by a handful of games. Still, comparisons will be made to the previous decade of futility and how much better the team Is now. That isn't the winning attitude that leads to championships. Set out to win 100+ games, and accept a fall back position in the 90's when you face adversity. It seems our goal is rather to get to 81 wins and .500, but unrealistically hope to get lucky for more.
to whine about the bullpen I neglected to acknowledge your main point. The cobbled together rotation has given us a chance and our hitters are battling. I'm impressed with the progress our team has made overall, and there is room for improvement all over the field. It's so deflating to lose Felix gems and walk off grand slams, the rest of the team has to feel it as well. Too early to give up, we have a chance to take 4 of the next 5 and get back on a roll. We'll find out what these guys are made of. Thanks for the optimism, mine has slipped a little this week.
But I remember thinking back when we were 4-1 and 6-2 how good it was to have a cushion. When something like this should happen, we won't be in as deep a hole. Seems like we were always in too deep a hole last year, even when we flirted near .500 in mid May. We had to fight like heck to get near .500, just to fall back again. Hopefully, we can get back to playing well, and move over .500 again. And when it happens again, we'll stay above water.
This has got to be the greatest photo ever taken.
A little reminder for those who may not recall this tool from several years back (or for new readers):
Pythagorean W% was simply RS^2 / (RS^2 + RA^2) - this is what Doc quickly refers to to make his basic point that the Mariners are better than their W/L record if you account for the luck of how run scoring happens to have been distributed.
PythagenPat W% is a metric that varies the exponent (from 2) based on the run scoring that is happening per game using the formula X = ((RS + RA) / G)^0.285 basic on an empirical curve-fitting relationship found by another well known saberdude who went by the web handle "Patriot"
PythagenMatt is PythagenPat applied to each game individually and summed over the course of a season (with a minor linear adjustment to account for the fact that doing it this way pulls everyone too far toward .500 due to the lack of decisive 0s and 1s such a method produces).
I'm afraid, Doc, in this case, PythagenMatt doesn't agree with the back of the envelope Pythags. Seattle has benefited from four blow-out wins, but has also been shut out twice already and has decisively lost a number of other low-scoring games. The net result is a club on an 7-9 pythagenMatt track (7.2-8.8 to be exact).
Caution bulbs though...it's a very short number of games, I am not sold that the correct thing to do when a team gets shut out is give it a 0 for its win probability for that day, and some of the final scores are misleading early on here because the Mariners have piled on late and have gotten their brains beat in late on different occasions.
I am inclined to attempt an even lower-level Pythagorean W% estimate based on inning by inning run differential or at the very least...using Bayesian logic for each game (rather than assuming that a team scoring zero runs would score zero runs if it played identically in 1000 rematches under the same conditions...it is probably better to a assume a team is average and let the runs scored and allowed deviate the projection from average).
I would, however, say that PythagenMatt and my visceral reactions to the team are lining up well right now. If we didn't anticipate any roster changes at all, we should expect this team to go about 73-89...the pitching is LOUSY (and was lucky early in the season) and the hitting is average and streaky. Luckily...we expect to get Iwakuma, Paxton, and Pryor back soon and Walker MIGHT also come back.
You know at the reductio ad absurdum, there's the 3-3-3 system in which all 9 :- ) pitchers share the innings equally anyway. It's not that big a deal for a couple of relievers to go 2-3 IP on occasion, is it?
Or not...
I don't think you got into the spirit of this one, Grizz. Abe Lincoln is cracking a joke about the Civil War and you're asking him if he knows the death toll.
;- )
I suppose if you pull a 96 MPH fastball, foul down the 3B line, then you were cheating in some sense of the term. I'll give you that one.
But, like you say, if he can adjust curve, then ...
Which we talked about a fair bit. In my mind we needed at least one dude who -- for sure -- was going to make the other team beat him.
You think Farquhar can serve that purpose?
... is the stuff of epic Greek poetry. And I'm sure I woulda hated his guts, had I been an Oriole...
Would Lloyd McClendon be the most similar manager, among the 30 currently extant?
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BTW, keep it comin' Rick. Like you get up in the morning, hoping there's fresh shtick, I get up hoping you have commented on something. Seriously.
For example, they are 8th and 7th in pitching K's and BB's ... but their ERA+ is 113. The numbers are volatile, misleading, and not triangulated yet, over the first 10% of the season. There's a lot there I would agree with.
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That said, another "wild card" here is that the entire starting rotation is volatile, misleading, and not triangulated yet. The young hitters haven't found their level. The entire process of trying to triangulate who this team is, after 16 games, is dubious.
Hope your visceral reactions and PythagenMatt are wrong for once bro' :- )
But I didn't want us to come in to the season depending on it. It's a shame really. There were a good number of solid, low cost relievers we could have brought in. It never HAD to be a white knuckle bullpen. Pat Gillick didn't white knuckle it. Didn't he bring Rhodes, Hasegawa and Sasaki in quickly? If you're going to win 60 and lose 60 a fantastic bullpen will make a huge difference in the other 40 hard fought games. Gillick and Piniella thrived with strong bullpens.
I hope you are right... or better 4-3-1-1 as I do not think Rodney is too tired yet.
I just do not know who is going to get the ball to Rodney