The Day Before
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ICHIRO
Is fretting about losing his eyesight, runs the narrative, but ... ah ... that means from 20/12 to 20/18, not to 20/60 youse mooks. (Actually mook.) It's not like he's Ricky Vaughn out there!
Tuesday he looked good: swing totally vintage, seemed to see the ball out of the pitcher's hand well, had a line-drive single to RF off a LHP that carried too far and took the RF's glove off, a BB, a K on three "hurry the game up" strikes and a popup. Took one ball off the wall and zipped it back in, hitting the cutoff man in the stomach.
He's only had 10 AB's with a 2:5 EYE -- plus a few minors games as Matty pointed out -- so he's in the first week or two of camp. If Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Jayson Werth be the alternatives, I'm stoked to see what Ichiro's got in the twin tanks. As of midnight they were going to wait and see how he felt (after the beaning and then the running around) as to whether to activate him. Obviously they'd love to get the crowd pumped up Thursday. If they DL Ichiro, they add .... Taylor Motter?! I guess that's pretty cool.
Perhaps they'd also rather see whether Ichiro, with his decades-old bag of tricks, could figure out a way on base against Kluber, as opposed to asking Heredia to try it.
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DARIO ALVAREZ AND ERIKC GOEDDEL
USS Mariner likes the stuff they throw. Marc W has a good read on the two. :: slaps head :: Oh, those two would be the depth RP's the M's recently scrounged off a waiver claim and a minors deal, respectively.
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DAN VOGELBACH
Dr. D has blown his breath dry about the M's concept of gauging 'Bach's ability to play baseball over 10 AB's. He'll leave it with this: the M's are just as familiar with these stabilization curves as anyone else. We'll trim a little quote off the top of the FG article:
However, there is no one point at which something stabilizes. Things become stable over time, at a given speed. So after five PA, you know more about a hitter’s walk rate than after one PA, but you don’t know as much as you do after 150 PA or 600 PA. A statistic doesn’t stabilize, it becomes more stable.
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And how many, pray thee, PA's do we need before a hitter's strikeout rate "begins to stabilize" and we have some confidence that his strikeout rate is telling us something about him?
Oh, only 300-400 PA's. After that you can venture a guess if you're a risk-taking type. And Strikeouts are the EASIEST and QUICKEST to diagnose. If you want doubles, then 300-400 PA give you only about a 30% coefficient of confidence in the player's results.
Now you tell me. How foolish is it to say "we'll give him a few games, see what happens"? On a scale of 1-10, now. In 1979 it was utterly foolish; but it was foolish in an intuitive way, simply a data-starved approach that lacked good sense and judgment. The idea has long since been mathematically debunked; and the 2018 Mariners sit in possession of those proofs that the philosophy is debunked. NOW, when you violate stabilization points you are being intentionally stupid, not stupid in an invective sense, stupid in the literal sense.
And yet what is their decision? 12 AB's for ya kid, hit badly, yer back to AAA. ... Brilliant.
DECIDE WHETHER YOU BELIEVE DAN VOGELBACH CAN HIT, AND MAKE A DECISION ONE WAY OR THE OTHER TO INVEST SOME TIME IN HIM. That's free advice from your good friend Dr. Detecto.
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KING FELIX AND HIS PRECIOUS OPENING DAY START
How does the 'Frame feel about Hernandez? He seemed a bit brighter than before, threw a bit harder, the pitches a bit less mushy. Dr. D would have liked for the pitches to have been even brighter. Very possibly that was just spring training, y'know?
Maybe Felix will come out sitting 92, touching 94, throwing dive-bomb dry spitters and he really will be able to bellow to the writers, "I'm back!" Not predicting it, but it's not ruled out yet.
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AND A BIT MORE ON MARC-O
The Olympian has a vidblog asking the Q, "Marco threw better than anybody this spring. Can he carry that into real play?" My own question would be almost the inverse of that. The odds are > 10:1 he can re-execute the pitches he threw; the question in the Mainframe's mind is, What does that make him.
That, and will the elbow hold up to the cutters and if so how many, and finally will the change develop from where it is. But the Marc-O we saw Tuesday was a 3 starter minimum, take that to the bank.
Cheers,
Dr D