Game 1, Mariners at Angels
King Felix vs. Jered Weaver, 7:00pm (ESPN2/ROOT Sports TV)
Happy Felix Night, and I hope you’re all enjoying a pleasant Opening Day 2014.
I can’t think of a more wide-open AL race in years. Certainly, the AL West is more tightly-bunched than it’s been in recent memory, and the super-teams – the Tigers and Red Sox – have also come back to the pack a bit. It’s not just that there are more teams bunched more tightly around 81 wins, within the margin of error (or the margin of luck). It’s that there seem to be reasons to believe that the variance of these forecasts is somehow higher. Jose Abreu and Masahiro Tanaka are two of the bigger off-season signings, and we don’t have minor league or major league data to generate a projection. Or, looking at MLB veterans, think about how vital bullpen performance has been to so many recent “out-of-nowhere” contenders. The Royals were fringe contenders last year not because of their great young position players, but because no one could touch their bullpen. Not their closer, not their set-up guys…no one. Baltimore pulled this off in 2012 (without all of the strikeouts…even weirder), and then the group fell back to earth in 2013. The Blue Jays were awful in 2012, and then pretty good in 2013 (though every other facet of the team was awful). The point is, bullpen performance is perhaps more important than it’s been in quite some time given the narrower spread in talent. But bullpen performance is notoriously hard to project.
The M’s have holes throughout, but we can be reasonably sure that their team wRC+/wOBA will be better than it was in 2013*. The question remains: will it matter? Tonight’s just one game, but it’s an important early look at another really difficult team to project, the Angels. Mike Petriello had a good article on them today at Fangraphs, and I see that Dave and others have picked them to win the division (gun to my head, they’d be my pick too, but hopefully that won’t be necessary). Albert Pujols’ plantar fasciitis and Jered Weaver’s ailing elbow sidelined two of their best players for a short while, and contributed to poor-by-their-standards performance while they played through pain. Especially on the pitching side, more innings went to replacement-level and below arms, and the depth that they’d acquired blew up in their face.
Now, the Angels rely on a very different Jered Weaver. Since 2011, his average four-seam fastball has fallen from 90mph to 87.5mph last year. This spring, it’s in that same vicinity or a bit lower, and it looks like he’s mixing in more of a sinker around 86mph. Weaver was never a big velo guy, but he’s having to adjust to very different stuff than he had when he came up. With that pop-up generating fastball, he hasn’t had much in the way of platoon splits, but using a sinker more often is usually a way to see platoon splits rise. Thanks to a minor league system bereft of good pitchers, and the departure of guys like Tommy Hanson or Joe Blanton (which most Angels fans applaud) has left them short of good depth. They have Mike Trout though, so…
1: Almonte, CF
2: Miller, SS
3: Cano, 2B
4: Smoak, 1B
5: Morrison, DH
6: Seager, 3B
7: Saunders, RF
8: Ackley, LF
9: Zunino, C
SP: King Felix
GO MARINERS
* This is not a case of projecting growth off a prior season, or mixing up true talent and observed performance. This is about a full year of Brad Miller/Robby Cano and not dealing with Brendan Ryan/Dustin-Ackley-at-2B. It came at a very high cost, and the future’s uncertain, injuries, blah blah blah, but the M’s added one of the 5 best hitters on the planet and subtracted one of the five worst hitters (among everyday players) on the planet. That has an impact on true talent.
The Troubled Mind of the M’s Fan
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior
-Catullus
We are, thankfully, a year removed from the acrimonious debates over the Jaso/Morse trade. The past year has probably been kinder to the M’s than to most of their divisional rivals, due to a combination of injury and Robinson Cano. We’ve spent the past four years, or, if you really think about it, the last TEN years, searching for progress. Here, as the 2014 season begins, we have it. We can quibble about the magnitude of the progress, or what it says about management, or any number of things, but the M’s start the 2014 season with a real chance at postseason baseball. After years of doubt, scorn, and apathy, M’s fans must be ecstatic, right? Well, no, not really. Jeff described the psychological state of the M’s fans in his “If It Goes Right” post, and it’s worth repeating: the 2004-2013 Mariners are a classic case of operant conditioning. A decade spent eradicating hope; glimmers of promise felled by a series of misfortunes (Guti) and missteps (Horacio Ramirez). You can argue that this metaphor obscures more than it helps: that a bad trade for a crappy DH either one or seven years ago doesn’t illuminate the 2014 season, it just illuminates your own cynicism. The problem is that you can’t pretend that these moves aren’t linked. If you’ve lamented the direction the team’s gone, you can’t just tell yourself that the moves this FO made in the past have no bearing on the moves they’ll make in the future. If you believe that there’s something fundamentally wrong in how the team assesses pro talent, you probably aren’t convinced that everything will work out now that the stakes are higher.
So here I am, feeling both excitement and dread at the same time. Picking apart every minor move because they seem so haphazard and picking apart every minor move because, for the first time in a while, they might actually matter. Lamenting the missed opportunities and the obvious holes, but looking around the division and seeing obvious holes everywhere. Worrying that way too much is needed from Dustin Ackley, Mike Zunino and Roenis Elias, and thinking that I’d rather have Zunino over JP Arencibia, and Elias over Nick Martinez, and wait, are you seriously starting Josh Wilson at 2B, Texas? The M’s bought the premier player in free agency, and then everyone told them that Cano, on his own, wasn’t enough to change the AL West picture. The M’s stayed put, and then the baseball gods changed the AL West picture for them. And now our brains can’t stop debating it all.
“Chris Young is a great stopgap for the 5th rotation spot. This isn’t about giving an “Ex-All Star” a job based on his name, and it’s not about a good spring training line. Chris Young was broken, and now M’s scouts are convinced he’s not. Thoracic Outlet surgery changes the picture completely, and it has the benefit of being a much easier procedure to rehab from than a labrum or rotator cuff tear. Randy Wolf was bad, and then left when he demanded more security than the M’s felt comfortable offering. Young’s problem has been durability, and now he’s in a position where durability just isn’t a big concern. Young’s been good, and with the 45-day opt out, the M’s can remake the rotation in May if Hisashi Iwakuma’s ready to go.”
“Let the record show that perhaps the best argument in favor of the Young pick-up is that he recently had his third shoulder surgery. I’m told he’s now throwing 88mph again, much better than he showed last year. But this sort of thing is trotted out about as often as “best shape of his life” stories. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that Scott Baker came in amid whispers he was throwing harder than he was last year with the Cubs. He came out in early March and touched *92*. Jeremy Bonderman did this last year. The real reason Young is here is that he signed the 45-day opt out and Wolf didn’t. That’s it. Flexibility is important, and no team wants to just waste $500-750,000. But this kind of flexibility can be overstated. In any event, the M’s are going into the 2014 season projected to be very close to the division’s top teams, and the best they they could do was to see what Roenis Elias was capable AND buy high-ish on Chris Young?
“The M’s OF depth isn’t great on paper, but the M’s will be able to mix and match players and get the platoon advantage while also improving the OF defense overall. Abraham Almonte showed signs that he could be a league-average bat, and using Saunders/Ackley in the corners will give the M’s much more range than they had last year. The M’s OF defense was -17.5 runs by UZR in 2013, 1.5 WINS worse than the Angels’, and 2-3 wins worse than the A’s/Rangers. Push them to average, and the division is basically a toss-up. Against good lefties, they can deploy Corey Hart and/or Stefen Romero. That’s an offense-for-defense trade to be sure, but it illustrates that the M’s have actual options both when they look at pitching probables and for late-game situations. This is the M’s weak point, and the ability to swap players around means that it shouldn’t be a black hole. Their depth in AAA isn’t excellent, but it’s no worse than their rivals. Importantly, it means that if Almonte’s awful, they can just swap him out.”
“The M’s actions this offseason, particularly regarding the outfield, show that THEY don’t believe they’re contenders. The division is incredibly tight and the M’s all but gave the starting CF job to a guy with a career MiLB slugging percentage of .399, and who wasn’t really a full-time CF until he was pressed into the job due to injuries/promotions/other people failing. The team has more speed in the OF corners, but they have career wRC+ numbers of 89 and 86, respectively. If they couldn’t run, they’d be out of baseball. And running’s nice, but Ackley hasn’t demonstrated great range in the OF. That’s not necessarily is fault, and the tools are there, but he’s learning on the job, as is Romero. If Hart plays significant time in RF, the OF defense could still be a problem. Hart’s progress has been achingly slow, which seems to hurt the group’s chances of adding value offensively. To top it off, Almonte starts the year in the lead-off spot for reasons no one can fathom. The M’s were contenders by default, and their lack of attention to a clear, known weakness will prevent them from taking advantage of it.”
“How can you criticize the M’s for not making more moves to shore up the team when your biggest fear was management making rash moves to protect their jobs? The cynics were the ones lamenting an overpay for Nelson Cruz or David Price or [insert trade candidate here] before they happened; they can’t then turn around and say the M’s didn’t do enough to improve. The division’s tight, and the M’s still have Nick Franklin and Tai Walker in the fold. Walker will be an important part of the M’s rotation and Franklin could either be a factor for the team in the 2nd half or a potentially even-more-valuable trade chip at the deadline. More importantly, the M’s have positioned themselves for 2015 and beyond. They haven’t closed any doors by overreacting to spring training injuries to Oakland/Texas. This means they can actually compete in 2014 while at the same time assessing which players they can count on for 2015. Is Dustin Ackley slow to develop, or is it just not going to work? Is Nick Franklin’s struggles against lefties fixable? Is Mike Zunino making steady progress, or will his contact issues plague him? The M’s have a free year – they’re figuring out who’s going to be a part of the next great M’s team AND they can compete in the short term thanks to Felix/Iwakuma/Cano/Miller.”
“If the only options were “Stand pat” and “make stupid, panic-driven overpays,” we wouldn’t spend much time on baseball. Those are *never* the only options. The M’s shouldn’t have traded the farm for David Price, but they saw Ervin Santana sign a one-year deal and opted to go with Roenis Elias instead. Teams around baseball need help at SS/2B, and the M’s held tight to Nick Franklin, waiting to be blown away by a ludicrous offer that never came. Like Nelson Cruz or Santana, the M’s could’ve adapted to the market, or they could’ve gone for one of the free agents once their market tanked. It’s not enough to say that the M’s can evaluate their youngsters this year when they’ve shown no ability to have contingencies. That’s why they started the season last year with Jesus Montero at C, Justin Smoak at 1B and Dustin Ackley at 2B. Zunino helped them avoid the full effects of Montero’s collapse, but they still need Ackley and Smoak to produce. They’ve had the same “youngsters” for years, and while Cano is a huge upgrade, they’re still surrounded by Almonte/Saunders/Zunino. What, exactly, is going to change next year?”
I’m really glad I’m not anticipating big philosophical arguments with fans of the Morse deal, but all that means is that the big philosophical arguments have moved to my own head. This is a strange, strange 2014, and despite all of the angst and teeth-gnashing, it’s a better version of strange than we’ve seen in a while. How much that has to do with the FO and how much has to do with pitcher attrition elsewhere is still a big question. However you resolve it is up to you, and ultimately, it’s fun that circumstances (“no! prudent management.” “I’ll concede the point only if you can identify the team’s employee who decimated Texas’ clubhouse this spring”) let us have the debate with the gap between the M’s and their rivals smaller than at any point since 2009.
Monday Podcast with Jeff and Matthew
Monday morning podcast(s) continues/begins.
If you’re new to these, this isn’t anything special. Jeff and I go into a recording with a vague idea of stuff to talk about and it sort of organically goes how it goes. It usually goes negative, as much as neither of us prefer it to. I would really like for people to get something out of these other than just us basically chatting with each other, but Jeff has way too many other things to do throughout each day and I’m just kinda lazy. Sorry! Not really, though, because this is free to you.
This week we talked a little about Randy Wolf and the payroll, and got sidetracked into hating the Mariners’ past teams and current FO. Whoops!
Podcast with Jeff and Matthew: Direct link! || iTunes link! || RSS/XML link!
In hopes of capturing some creative juice again, I’m playing around with the format a little. Intro music is The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan by Chris Zabriskie. I don’t know if Kaleetan refers to Basque or the Chinook or something completely else. Context suggests the ferry?
If It Goes Right
I’m sitting here right now, hating the Red Sox. Expressed like that, this is hardly unfamiliar. I remember I made the mistake of rooting for the Red Sox in 2003 and 2004, when I was living in New England, and as good an experience as it was when they won that first World Series, boy do I ever look back on that and shake my head. I haven’t been able to stand the Red Sox since the first day of 2005, and I’ve been pretty actively rooting against them for years. But this whole time, that whole decade, I’m not going to pretend like a lot of it wasn’t jealousy. Or envy. Is there a difference? I couldn’t stand them in large part because they were so successful. I was bitter about my own baseball team, content to lash out. For some time, I’ve hated the Red Sox, and I’ve rooted against them in important games. For the first time, I’m hating the Red Sox because I don’t want them to knock out the Mariners. Used to be I hated them because of what they were. Today I hate them because of what they aren’t. They aren’t us. They’re kind of in our way.
As I take this short breather to reflect, I think what gets me the most is the very obviousness of this outcome. Not that the Mariners, of course, were ever the favorites in this division, but look at the way things played out. This wasn’t a team that needed any miracles, nor was it a team that received any miracles. We had a sense this would be a talented young team, with upside given development. Talented players developed. Talented players produced and prevented runs. Talented players won games. If you forgot everything you heard about the front office, you’d almost be tempted to think, hey, this team did everything right. They entered the season with upside, and they were carried into first by baseball ability we all already knew about.
I remember paying so much attention to projected standings even weeks before the start of the year. FanGraphs rolled out its Cool Standings stuff, and then there were projections and then there were projected records. Initially, the Mariners were projected to be pretty close to the rest of the AL West best. Then they never really fell away. Not when the system was updated. Not when the depth charts changed. Not when ZiPS was included. PECOTA was saying similar things. On several occasions, I tried to figure out where the projections were going wrong. It seemed like the Mariners were being overrated, and the rivals were being underrated. Now in hindsight I feel like I was just acting damaged. The Mariners made me expect the Mariners to disappoint. It sure looks now like the projections were telling us the truth all along. The Mariners were right there with the other three from the start. The Mariners were a few player developments away from being division champs.
Obvious. The Mariners as a successful baseball team was obvious. Not obvious as a certainty, but obvious as a possibility. So many of us just weren’t ready to believe it. It was obvious the Mariners would be good in 2008, too. It was obvious they’d be good in 2010. When you’re hurt that bad, when you’re caught that much off guard, it changes your psychological DNA. We didn’t want to think that the flower might bloom, but the dirt was fertile and the sun was coming out. Flowers blossom in the right conditions, and it’s as simple as nature.
It was obvious that Felix would dominate. Felix always dominated. Why wouldn’t he continue to dominate? It’s always fair to point out that pitchers are unreliable and success and health can be fleeting, but when it comes to one’s own, there’s an over-inclination to be concerned. How often have we freaked out about Felix’s velocity? How often have we expressed worry when nothing was wrong? It never felt quite right for the Mariners to have one of the greatest players in the world, but that was on us, not him. Felix was amazing, so Felix would be amazing. That’s just pattern recognition.
It was obvious that Robinson Cano would be incredible. That’s what you pay $240 million for. Again, some of us acted like victims of abuse. We entertained notions of Cano coming apart in Seattle. One doesn’t soon forget Chone Figgins or Jeff Cirillo. One doesn’t soon forget another team’s experience with Albert Pujols. But what reason was there to be worried, actually? Cano had been one of the most consistently healthy and valuable players in baseball. Having Robinson Cano wasn’t all that different from having Miguel Cabrera. Cano was a superstar, and he played like a superstar. Yeah.
It was obvious there was other talent. One day in March, for reasons I never figured out, I flipped on a Marlins spring-training game. The broadcasters were talking about Jose Fernandez, then some guy hit a fly ball out to Giancarlo Stanton. I watched and thought, “hey, the Marlins have two unbelievable superstars, and they’re still projected to be the worst team in the league. Why should the Mariners be special?” It took me too long to realize, “oh yeah, the Mariners also have other guys.” Felix and Cano were the selling points. They were the stars, aligned. But there was always an abundance of talented support.
It was obvious Dustin Ackley wouldn’t be a disaster forever. He’d been obvious from the date of his drafting, and he’d shown signs of improvement down the stretch in 2013. It was obvious Kyle Seager would hit enough, because he was the reliable guy before Robinson Cano was the reliable guy. It was obvious Brad Miller would be a stud shortstop, even with the defensive issues, because his bat adjusted to the majors immediately and it always felt like he had a high floor. It was obvious Mike Zunino would improve from his initial, hurried cup of coffee. It was obvious Abraham Almonte would be a better player on this side of his alcoholism. It was obvious Michael Saunders would be regularly playable. It was obvious Justin Smoak would be just good enough.
It was obvious Corey Hart would hit, when he could play. It was obvious Taijuan Walker could overpower quality big-leaguers. It was obvious James Paxton could outmaneuver quality big-leaguers. It was obvious nothing would be wrong with Hisashi Iwakuma’s split-finger. It was obvious there was talent in the bullpen. It was even — dare I say — obvious the Mariners were in better hands with Lloyd McClendon than they had been in recent seasons past. In spring, I kept waiting to find reasons to be annoyed by McClendon as a manager. Obviously there were a few things, there are always a few things, but as managers go, I’ve been surprisingly pleased, and maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. McClendon was saying a lot of the right things from the beginning.
I’m saying too much about a season that isn’t over yet but I can’t really gain control of my fingers. They’re just typing at this point, happily typing about a baseball season I’m maybe trying to prove to myself actually happened. The more words I write about the 2014 Mariners, the deeper it’ll sink in that, yeah, those Mariners happened, and they’re still happening, and before long they’ll happen before a sellout October crowd at Safeco Field. People have said for years that the fan base was there — the Mariners just needed to find a way to tap back into it. Turns out Safeco can get full and loud, too. Mariners fans, Seahawks fans, Sounders fans — they’re all fans from the same city, and many of them are some loud sons of bitches.
This year’s Mariners aren’t done making memories. Maybe the rest of them will be bad, I don’t know. I thought I would’ve expected so, but these Mariners make me feel differently. Whatever happens, we already have quite the assortment of seemingly unforgettable season highlights. The 2012 perfect game made me feel deeply proud of a Mariner. The four-game May sweep of the Angels made me feel deeply proud of the Mariners, after thrashing their opponents — delightfully — 43-8. That gave me a feeling I hadn’t had in years. There were the two Walker showdowns against Yu Darvish, and it feels like ages ago we were worrying about those pitch counts. I think I remember two-thirds of the pitches Chris Young threw in his one-hitter right after Erasmo Ramirez’s elbow thing. Stefen Romero’s walk-off? Miller’s walk-off inside-the-parker? The game-ending play at the plate in Toronto? The consecutive huge rallies against New York? Every win had something. Every win always has something, but in a successful season, those somethings are connected, lifted to feel like and mean something greater than they would on their own.
I’m definitely thrilled to have finally washed the taste of Lollablueza out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe how long it had been since the Mariners played at least some later-summer games of significance, and this time they didn’t wilt. They didn’t wilt after losing the first one; if anything, it seemed to inspire them. The 2007 Mariners were never going to do anything anyway. It’s not like they could’ve been champs, had they just beaten the hell out of the Angels. But that series made me feel embarrassed, personally embarrassed by a baseball team I like, and now those demons are exorcised. Now it’s time to exorcise some other ones.
When Matthew and I would talk in the before-times, we’d often discuss whether or not we were even Mariners fans anymore. We certainly didn’t feel like it. We felt like they were just going to be terrible, and we felt like that was okay, and we felt like we weren’t even thrilled about the prospect of rooting for this team given some of the decisions it had made. I always knew I liked the Mariners the most, but for long stretches I didn’t feel like I was into them. I wanted to know how I’d feel about a successful baseball team. I couldn’t know, just imagining it.
I’m into them. We’re all into them. We were mostly all always into them — we just also had to protect ourselves. The introspective, philosophical baseball fan is a baseball fan of a bad baseball team. A baseball fan of a good baseball team doesn’t really give a shit about the bigger questions, not in the moment, because the moment is about winning the next baseball game against the next enemy baseball team. It’s just sports. You have to question yourself when you’re following bad sports. There’s nothing to question when you’re following good sports. In our defense, we couldn’t have known that.
I just want to read everything. I want to immerse myself in this, to bathe myself in this, to let this seep into every nook and cranny of my tall and awkward physical and emotional form. I always had so much trouble writing things like series previews about the playoffs for my job, because they always felt so uncreative and it always felt like no one would be interested in whatever analysis I could provide. I couldn’t in any way relate to the audience. I get it now — when your team’s in the playoffs, you never want to stop consuming media coverage, no matter how insubstantial. You just want to experience everything, and you want to force yourself to continue to experience everything. Used to be I’d feel a renewed love of baseball come playoff time, when I could watch good teams in boisterous atmospheres without the Mariners being terrible. Now the Mariners are in the playoffs. I’m not prepared for this, but I really want to try to be.
When I’m not writing about the Mariners, I’m reading about the Mariners. And right now, no matter what I’m doing, I’m also hating the Red Sox. Right now, the Red Sox are the baseball team I hate the very most. It’s not weird to be hating the Red Sox — I’ve been hating the Red Sox for a long, long time. But to hate them the very most? To hate them as my first or second thought after waking up in the morning? To hate them with every sip of hot, delicious, northwest-roasted pour-over coffee? This is all new. The only baseball team I’m used to hating that much is the Mariners.
I still don’t know what it means to be true to the blue. This season has raised a whole lot of questions, which, perhaps, is always going to be the case. I like new questions, anyway. Make me feel curious. But this season has also provided one big answer, separate from the littler ones. I know that I am a Seattle Mariners fan. And it’s October, and I know that I’m going to be an emotional wreck. How about that?