Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

After the disaster that was last night’s game with Arizona, Root Sport’s baseball analyst Bill Krueger remarked that prior to the game, Hector Noesi after his outfield warm up he observed Noesi playing around, laughing and he thought that showed that Noesi was not prepared to pitch and had the wrong mindset before a game.

I know about this second hand because I was stuck in my car driving north towards Skagit County and turned on the car radio and tuned to 710 ESPN and was in time to listen to Deadwood and Salk’s show with guest speaker Shannon Drayer, also an employee of the radio station. She covers the Mariners as a pre-game and post-game reporter and writes a blog as well.

Salk asked her if she had witnessed the hi-jinks by Noesi and she said it was Montero too. Then she reached back to Noesi’s last start where he pitched well but lost and she said that Montero had been questioned about the game and she remarked that he said it was a “great game.”

Then she riffed on that and turned it into a youngster versus veteran thing, where Montero didn’t know that he was supposed to be pissed that the team lost. What’s lost here is that Montero could have been talking about how well Noesi pitched, the answer to which was very well.

To which I have to say really? Montero has more talent than any of the other catchers and will hit fourth or fifth for a long time here.

The other two catchers have enormous holes in their game and Olivo really can not receive without having a ball or two get by him each game. Catcher’s wear out and Olivo can throw, but for every guy he throws out, four or five base runners move over, whether it is scored a wild pitch or passed ball, that is not supposed to happen.

The last week or so Montero has looked so much better behind the plate, receiving and throwing. As a hitter he may be really good, he is adjusting and hitting pitches that he struggled with a month ago and that is a beautiful thing to watch.

Maybe Miguel and Drayer are good friends. She did not need to throw Montero under the bus. Back to Noesi too, Felix used to do that stuff too. I generally like what Krueger has to say, but I did not hear him last night.

When I watched Noesi, the only thing I notice beyond him leaving stuff in the middle of the plate is his arm speed is different on his secondary stuff and he looks like he’s throwing darts. He does not always do that, but when he does it is easy for hitters to figure out. He is young with a live arm and no experience. It is what you get.

Caspar Wells played right field last night and did very well. He was 2-4 with a double and drove in the only run of the game, Seager scoring on his double, only run of the game for the Mariners.

Tonight he is sitting. Ichiro has two doubles so far. Which means nothing.

Geoff Baker has a great post that I will link to and tell you it is the best thing from any mainstream writer yet. Steve Kelley has also commented recently in this vein, but this one is very good, because it touches a bunch of stuff:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2018469475_time_for_mariners_to_start_tre.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 7:35 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.