Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

There are different threads to talk about, Dustin Ackley’s bomb in defiance of my earlier post, Eric Thames allowing a two run sacrifice fly, why Eric Thames is in right field and not left field when Wells has a superior arm and lastly why is Josh Kinney pitching in a tie game in the eighth and ninth inning?

There are seven relievers active on the Mariner’s roster: Stephen Pryor, Carter Capps, Oliver Perez, Tom Wilhelmsen, Shawn Kelley, Lucas Luetge and Josh Kinney. Kinney is a 33 year old who has spread 75 appearances in major league games over five seasons commencing in 2006, never throwing more than 25 innings in a major league season. Over the course of his quest to be a major league player the one thing he seems to do is to strike out people at a slightly elevated level. He gives up an elevated level of extra base hits too, showing an ISO Power Against for his career of .148 as well as an On Base Percentage of .345. That is not special at all. It is like bringing a can of gas to a bonfire.

Maybe the eighth inning, but I don’t even like that. He is not good, not special, not the best, not the second best option. Nobody was too tired on the face of it with yesterday off. In terms of OPS Against, only Shawn Kelley, who should be looking over his shoulder, is worse, Kinney has a pedestrian .739 OPS Against. It is just inexplicable that he’s pitching in either the eighth or the ninth.

I mean you have the rookies in Pryor, Capps and Luetge and maybe Wedge is afraid of damaging their psyche. Ok, but when do they pitch? In blowout losses? Say Wilhelmsen could have been used in the 9th, then what are Wedge’s choices if he does not want to use two 100 mph guys and a nasty lefty? Well he’s got Perez, Kelley and Kinney. Kelley is terrible and afraid to throw his best pitch, so Perez and Kinney. Lots of readers have Met’s memory about Perez, but his stats are much better than Kinney’s.

If Capps and Pryor do not have Wedge’s confidence, he needs to get over it. David Pauley, anybody in Tacoma has got to be better than this.

The two run sac fly was embarrassing. It’s major league baseball.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2012 at 10:27 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.