Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

The past two days have been great, but it has been volatile month, losing streaks and shorter winning streaks. Here is a look within the division:

Wins: LA 18
Texas 14
Seattle 12
Oakland 11

The next one is OPS differential, OPS minus OPS Allowed:

LA .101
Texas .078
Seattle -.005
Oakland -.094

And finally more fundamentally run differential:

Texas 23
LA 22
Seattle 11
Oakland -19

Due to the benefit of some of the numbers Seattle might appear a little better than what happened day in and day out due to some large run scoring games in past few days.

They have put a dent into Texas’s limousine read by taking two series from them and then the Angels kicked their butts, but there were no Texas’s series in back to back weeks in recent years.

Reason seems to be surfacing above the turbulent froth of club politics around Ichiro and stupid marketing that comes in front of building and developing a team. Baseball is ascending over Knottsberry Farm bologna.

Seager, Saunders, Montero, Smoak (for ten days, Jaso have started to emerge. Wedge emerged to sit Ichiro and be ready to take some arrows. It has not happened yet, but it might. The Wells and Carp stuff is really stupid. Liddi is somewhere in the mix, but just when you get a little optimistic about him he makes a ton of outs badly, and you start to say it is not there, then he battles back with an adjustment.

I take no pleasure in seeing what I’ve written about over the last year with respect to Ichiro except to not that I was not wrong. So in that vein I would
point out some weakness in the mix now and point to the piece on Felix and note that the pitching has been worse than last year. Vargas will slide if past is prologue, Millwood well he will continue his high wire act until its over. Beavan is not special and Noesi has had a couple of outs that have shown moments of good stuff, he needs more time to pitch to see what he is capable of doing.

Pryor let’s see. Others to come. Franklin, soon.

Ackley, Seager, Smoak, Liddi and Saunders. Why paint the lilly?

The younger players exhibit a gathering confidence.

Ichiro sat. Baker had a piece that seemed to evoke twenty or so previously written posts here about Ichiro’s absolute decline and being miscast as a three hitter. He further lambasted the organization for running things the way it does.

Hallelujah!

Wedge said he will play again and hinted that it would not be the three hole.

Be sure that there will be tough games ahead, but there will be more and more of these.

The numbers are what the numbers are and they show a guy in five starts getting beat up. Now he’s had some ugly months before and there was one really ugly month last September too.

Let’s look at his hitting against slash line for last year.

Month OPS
4.11 .601
5.11 .601
6.11 .659
7.11 .706
8.11 .597
9.11 .834
4.12 .606
5.12 .801

Two of his worst months out of last three competitive months saddling the end of last year and start of this year. There was a horrible game against Cleveland that magnifies the bad May, but that is news as well. So if you dig deeper on the batted ball stuff, which you can do by going to Fangraphs readily, you see a panoply of stats, lots to suggest that he’s kind of right where he’s been, maybe three that suggest there is a problem:

1. Velocity is down into average territory.
2. LD% of balls hit by opponents has risen.
3. O-swing percentage is down over past two years.

What that means is that people are laying off his pitches out of the zone more, which I suggest is tied to the decline in velocity. Hitters see his stuff better now.

Not the same guy, he’s ok, but not the dominating pitcher at this point that he’s been in recent years.

This morning in the Seattle Times Geoff Baker writes a post about the perfidy of the Mariners. The past several days manager Wedge has had remarks with the press that in diplomatic circles would be called direct. While the press is the vehicle, his audience seems to include his own organization (especially the owners), his players, the fans and also the press.

The first reaction to reading the remarks seem to indicate that Wedge has had enough of the bs and might be very angry about being saddled with kids and worn out veterans and with the phony expectations of winning at this point. At various times he has expressed why it is important to play veterans with the younger players, even if the vetarans are the figurative turd in the punchbowl as it helps to develop the younger players. He says if the rest of us can’t figure that out, we don’t know sh-t. I’m not buying how that plays out, because it smells like he’s taking one for the owners there, but I would if those veterans were actually capable of playing well.

Baker has been aggressive in his criticism of the so-called rebuild. The paragraph in italics is the final paragraph to his piece. Below that is the link to his post. I post this not so much that it affirms what I’ve been writing for over a year, but that the entire piece is succinct and on point and worthy to read for anyone that is seriously following the team.

Time for the Mariners to get serious about rebuilding. Right now, any team still keeping Figgins on the roster and playing Ichiro seven days per week in right field can’t really make the claim that the serious stuff has begun.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2018305052_mariners_have_much_more_evalua.html

How do you answer that question? Is it the right question?

If you want to take the time to figure it out, you can start to approach it.

There are break downs at various levels and sites.

You can look at his splits on ESPN.com for 2012: http://espn.go.com/mlb/player/splits/_/id/30372/dustin-ackley

What does that tell us? Results mostly, but sliced up etc. It tells us that he really struggles against left handers and does not hit especially well in Safeco. They tell us that once he has two strikes against him he is almost a certain out. He rarely swings at first pitch, he’s had his best results with one strike. None of this except the left hander thing is really important.

He’s been very consistent month to month, but has done better as leadoff guy, which is not supposed to matter, but the results ARE very different. The monthly stuff looks like September and the last half of August.

Left handers got him out last year too.

The other place to peruse is www.Fangraphs.com. It has great breakdowns of how people pitch to him, breakdowns of his results, as in line drives, ground balls, flyballs, walking, striking out etc. You can see trends etc. For any player.

He seems to be the recipient of slightly more breaking pitches this year than last, but only two percent or so. One fun stat or series of stats are o-swing, z-swing, o-contact and z-contact. An O-swing is a swing at a pitch outside the strike zone and a Z-swing is a swing in the strike zone. Z-contact is when a swing at a pitch outside the zone is hit.

The only discernible change is that he is making contact at pitches outside the strike zone at a rate of 80.3% versus 73.4% for last year. The salient point is that those balls hit outside the zone do not result in many hits. Smart pitchers will keep throwing it out there and let him get himself out.

From the glory months of June and July of last year, his walk rate has fallen off as has his power. Low onbag and no power usually mean no play or play in Tacoma. But he is a first round pick and there are politics with that.

I don’t want to pretend to be his hitting coach, but a lot of young guys are comfortable with being late as it has never been a problem against lesser talent. He seems late to me almost every pitch. He swings his front side in and then immediately flies open and rolls over on balls or his bat head dips and he pops out. Game after game. Sometimes they start him in off the plate and then work away. In order for him to succeed his stride/swing in need to be perfect. Contrast it to somebody like Seager who’s movements are traditional and can lay off bad pitches.

He’ll figure it out or he won’t. Cal Ripken, Jr. used to change his stance during at bats. He makes a lot of outs and keeps going back to the same well.

Albert Pujols made it close and Brandon League gave it away, again.

It was Dustin Ackley bobblehead night Friday night. Wedge sat him down instead of rewarding the 20,000 that got the figurine.

Geoff Baker has a funny take on that: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/mariners/2018290839_marinotes26.html

It is hard to sift through and see anything but sarcasm. There seems to be a shot at Ackley, but that could be read a couple of ways and several shots at the marketing folks. Generally, he comes across in the piece as kind of pissed off to real pissed off.

Smoak had his best game of the year driving in four runs. He sat on a change-up that was mid thigh and hit a line drive out to right field, it was a nice adjustment, he kept his hands back just long enough to drive the ball. If he does that a few more times and stops chasing stuff in the dirt he will start to see more fastballs.

Beavan made a terrible pitch to Pujols and out it went, 4-0 became 4-3 and then League fell apart. For a guy that is supposed to spot his stuff to a pinhead, it was a horrible pitch.

League’s walk percentage is way up over his recent years with the Mariners as the line drive percentage for balls that are hit, K-rate is down, which is a bad set of trends. Perhaps he’s reading that he is going to be traded, it doesn’t look good especially since the Ms apparently expect to trade him and get something back of value at the deadline.

If that is to transpire, he’ll need to arrest this implosion.

Dustin Ackley sits while his head bobbles in the stands

Mariners manager Eric Wedge doesn’t realize promotion was going on Friday

By Geoff Baker

Seattle Times staff reporter

Dustin Ackley Bobblehead Night at Safeco Field was thrown a little bit of a curveball.

That’s because the doll’s human likeness, the one and only Ackley, wasn’t actually in the starting lineup Friday for the Mariners.

Ackley had played in 45 of the team’s first 47 games and had not been given a day off since being named the team’s leadoff hitter three weeks ago.

Mariners manager Eric Wedge said he wanted to give Ackley a break with the team in the midst of playing 20 consecutive games and 36 games in 37 days. Wedge seemed somewhat surprised when asked about the bobblehead doll promotion.

“Oh, geez, is it?” Wedge asked. “I didn’t get that memo. Well, it shows you how much I pay attention to that, I guess.

“Well, he can revel in his own bobblehead without having to worry about playing.”

Wedge then added: “I’m surprised I didn’t get a phone call on that one.”

The Mariners’ public-relations staff notes that Ackley is the 15th different player the team has honored with a bobblehead doll since 2001. The team is 17-16 overall on bobblehead nights, but had lost three in a row and seven of nine heading into Friday.

The Mariners were 11-11 while Olivo was elsewhere.

Dan Haren was shoving tonight and nobody other than Dustin Ackley with the lead off hit did well for the Ms. Olivo did not throw the fat 2-1 change up to Albert Pujols who launched it for a 2-0 lead…Vargas did.

Game over.

The rest was desultory. The Ms rolled over and died. Olivo boxed some balls around, Pujols stole second and Trout advanced. Pujols scored.

That’s the deal with him…I want to blame Olivo for the crap pitch to Pujols too, since its the worst pitch he’s thrown in three weeks, but that is a reach.

Did I mention some more of the sucky at bats.

For the last month the team has started doing things that good teams do. Hot games by hitters, great defensive plays, pitching that is special. Tonight they looked like the crap product that we’ve watched the past two years.

I get after Geoff Baker a lot, but he’s got a lot of energy and keeps after it. Below is a piece that sums up what the team is doing with respect to the rebuild and the ownership. It is spot on.

My word of the day is obdurate. “Hardened in wrongdoing. Wicked.”

I think it captures the efforts of the Mariner leadership: Armstrong and Lincoln.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2018277930_mariners_avoid_making_chone_fi.html#continue

Mariners avoid making Chone Figgins call, but can’t keep doing nothing with him

Posted by Geoff Baker

Casper Wells looks to be off to Class AAA in an announcement the Mariners will likely make within the next couple of hours. Miguel Olivo is on his way back off the disabled list and will likely be in uniform tonight, especially with the team’s backup catcher, John Jaso, still sore from the other night.

But the Mariners are still not doing anything with Chone Figgins. And that can’t go on indefinitely. Not at the price of young players who are supposed to factor in to this ongoing rebuilding plan.

The M’s could have kept Wells in the majors and simply designated Figgins for assignment. In that case, they would have had 10 days to outright him to the minors (which he’d likely refuse and opt for free agency), trade him or release him.

That the Mariners are not willing to part with a player they are on-the-hook to just under $16 million in remaining money is understandable. You can’t blame any team or general manager for not wanting to swallow that kind of cash. No matter how many good moves Jack Zduriencik makes, once he swallows $16 million with 1 2/3 seasons to go on any player’s contract, that will offset three or four future positive things the GM might do.

That’s how ownership views these types of losses.

So, no. You can’t blame the team for refusing to cut the Figgins cord just yet.

What you can blame the M’s for, as I mentioned on Sports Radio KJR in my one-hour special last night, is continuing with the status quo.

They have given six plate appearances to Figgins since May 3. One long game’s worth of PAs in three weeks.

If the object is to recoup some value for Figgins, how do they plan to do that when they aren’t playing him? That’s what you can blame the team and the GM for. For doing nothing and making others pay for it.

Photo Credit: AP

There isn’t much middle ground here. You’re either keeping Figgins around because you need him, or because you want to trade him.

In either case, sitting Figgins on an almost-permanent basis satisfies neither need.

There are probably still teams out there that value the skillset Figgins brings to the table as well as his versatility. They just don’t value it at $16 million.

Maybe the magic number is $1 million. Maybe $2 million.

Maybe there’s some team out there that figures that type of money is worth the gamble in hoping that they can fix whatever has been ailing Figgins and his game since 2010.

If those teams are out there, let them step up and name their price. And let the Mariners pay it and move on.

Otherwise, waiting around while Figgins takes up a roster spot does nothing.

The Mariners clearly don’t need Figgins on the field. They needed him the past month when Miguel Olivo went down and left the team short yet another right-handed bat. Did they play Figgins and use his switch-hitting ability from the right side? No.

They played Wells instead.

So, if they value Wells and his bat more than Figgins, why is Wells going? Sure, he has Class AAA options left and I’ve always said, in a tough choice situation, there’s a reason they call them “options”.

You don’t want to part with a guy forever if you can part with another guy temporarily.

But that’s only for tough calls. This call isn’t really that tough. It is tough for financial reasons, but again, if the Mariners don’t plan on doing anything to improve the trade value Figgins currently has, why are they keeping him around?

For his good looks? For his sage advice? Players who aren’t good enough to play for a team are not the ones other players seek out for advice. The whole veteran leadership thing only works when you’re actually contributing to something on the field. Otherwise, you’re what’s known as a “coach” and paid a lot less than $16 million over 1 2/3 seasons.

So, if we can be critical of the M’s here, it’s for being stubborn in their refusal to admit the obvious.

They don’t think Figgins is good enough to play for them more than six plate appearances in three weeks, even with a shortage of right-handed hitting options.

They aren’t doing anything that’s going to increase his trade value, like playing him so his attrocious numbers can improve and his reputation can be restored.

And yet, they just sent down a guy they’d been opting to play instead of Figgins in occasional games against left-handed pitchers.

Just curious, if that first inning flyball Wells hit on Tuesday had traveled two more feet for a grand slam, would he have stayed in the majors?

Mariners manager Eric Wedge said prior to that game that he’d like to see Wells do a better job of hitting left-handed pitching. Given the .233 batting average Wells had versus southpaws at the time, it was a fair statement. What wasn’t so fair was the lack of context in noting that Wells had barely played to that point. How’s he supposed to hit anybody if he’s only getting into one game per week?

In the end, that last point by me is probably the excuse the M’s will use to justify demoting Wells. That he wasn’t playing enough. That it was hurting his development. That’s a bunch of poppycock. I’m all for young players earning their playing time and being forced to make do with the scraps they get, but I can’t shake the feeling that this decision had nothing to do with baseball.

That it has everything to do with just under $16 million owed to Figgins.

And this is why fans get confused and eagle-eyed media members get confused as well when teams state that it is about youth and rebuilding. Because for the 2012 Mariners, it isn’t so much about that as it is shedding the contracts of pricey players and then figuring out when they’re going to seriously start trying to contend again.

If the whole rebuilding thing goes well for a couple of guys…hey, man, bonus!

But if not, this rebuilding plan stuff allows the Mariners to tread financial water, keep expenses in-line with declining attendance revenues and simply wait a few years to either sell to another owner, or gain a huge cash influx for the current owner from an updated TV deal. And in the meantime, Ichiro’s contract runs out. And the Figgins contract gets resolved. Then, the Franklin Gutierrez deal (which the M’s no doubt regret) goes by the wayside as well after 2013. Last year, it was about getting Milton Bradley and Jack Wilson off the books.

All about the Benjamins, as Puff Daddy once sang.

And right now, this Figgins stuff trumps player development.

The “plan” seems to be to wait for the trade deadline, let the contract dwindle a little more and then see whether somebody gets hurt and a team becomes desperate enough to fork a few seven-figure bills Seattle’s way to eat a small percentage of the contract.

I don’t like it. You don’t like it. I doubt Zduriencik truly likes it (even if eating the deal right now will cost him big political points upstairs). And I guarantee you Figgins doesn’t like it.

Figgins wants to play. The Mariners won’t play him. And they won’t let him go.

And so, the biggest mistake of Zduriencik’s tenure with Seattle keeps getting magnified while others pay the price.

Torii Hunter is missing, Albert Pujols was frigid, now is tepid, can the team that has whipped the Mariners for years be subdued?

Weaver pitched yesterday. Felix is pitching on Saturday, sets up ok, seemingly.

Seemingly but you never know, Mike Trout and Mark Trumbo have been doing all the heavy lifting for the Angels in May. Trout’s OPS is in excess of 1.000 and Trumbo’s is at .960 and Pujols leads the team in rbis for this month.

It is probably not going to be a walk in the park.

Miguel Olivo hit a home run in Iowa last night, so he’ll be back here today or tomorrow. Then we get to see what happens. Steve Kelley says waive Figgins. Why not actually?

Or you could do that and install Liddi at first and send Smoak down to light a fire…actually, he’s probably working his tail off, but he is not rounding into what looks like a middle of the order major league player. Jack Zduriencik needs to eat his own lunch here before somebody else does and stick Liddi in at first and send Smoak down to see if he can adjust.

My bet is they send Wells down and continue this obdurate course thinking somebody will trade for Figgins.

Much has been made about the Mariner’s need to collectively have higher walk rates which would result in both a higher onbase percentage and improved power because their discipline would improve and they would have better results by swinging at strikes to the relative exclusion of balls outside the strike zone.

In recent days the Times blogger has advanced the theory of the Wedgemeister that being super aggressive is what causes a higher walk percentage. It is convoluted theory and it hurts my head to re-type it, so I have provided a link to the latest of his attempts to espouse it. Jeff Sullivan also talked/wrote about it in his Lookoutlanding blog yesterday in a non-pejorative fashion.

Baseball Bodhisattva maybe.

Actually I’m not buying it as such. Players get better the more at bats they have in major league baseball up to a point where that progress diminishes to their prime level is reached. There are a number of players that are there in that process now and demonstrably getting better. We have some veterans that are past their prime and sinking, we have some younger players that have had a lot of mlb at bats and are still struggling. Mostly though there are four or five young guys at different points that are becoming more mature every day.

That is what I’m thinking is going on. If a guy is playing well, nobody “coaches” him and other than doing his daily work and maybe a little extra work, nobody coaches a guy that is struggling. The players read stuff in the paper like us, or maybe they don’t at all, not trusting to read the stuff in the paper.

Brendan Ryan is a great short stop. I sure wish he could hit even a little bit, on a consistent basis.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2018258287_what_we_saw_tonight_exactly_wh.html

In order ranked by OPS (On base percentage + Slugging percentage):

1. Kyle Seager .808
2. John Jason .779
3. Casper Wells .738
4. Michael Saunders .737
5. Alex Liddi .699
6. Jesus Montero .693
7. Ichiro .689
8. Dustin Ackley .683
9. Mike Carp .637
10. Miguel Olivo .575
11. Justin Smoak .559
12. Chone Figgins .543
13. Brendan Ryan .532
14. M. Kawasaki .440

Carp has been hurt, but had a good week and Ackley seems to be clawing his way up, I just wish he’d look at Seager’s approach and adjust a bit and Smoak has been ok this week, but by and large some of what I wrote this winter is being proved out. The kids are getting better, some faster than the others but you see good games from them.

Wedge has made noise about needing to play veterans and when you look at the list above, none of the veterans are playing well. From Ichiro to Olivo to Figgins to Ryan. One gets this image of a guy trudging back and forth to a well with a bucket, lowering it into the well and when he comes back and empties into a vessel nothing comes out and he keeps repeating the journey and at the end of the day he goes, damn kids what’s wrong with them? I need to play the veterans, I can’t wait to get Olivo back.

Ichiro has played each game in the three hole, if you go back and read the piece from Fangraphs, quoting Manny Acta, where he says don’t bunt and my best hitter should hit third, even Wedge has got to conclude that Ichiro is woefully miscast there. Ninth maybe?

Two nice wins, great pitching back to back from guys that you can’t really expect that from, but there it was, good for them and plenty good hitting.

The other thing you see in the numbers is the preference in the organization for certain of the kids to do well. We’re going to have Ackley bbh night and Smoak night for him knocking a tree down and it really looks like Kyle Seager is the best player on the team. Nice young man, humble and softly spoken.

Casper Wells is treated like dog doo and seemingly should be in right field. More power, best arm on the team, but that is stupid to suggest. If the team was committed to winning all of this would be put aside.