Game 21, Mariners at Marlins
Robbie Ray vs. Jesus Luzardo, 3:10pm
The M’s have now lost 3 in a row after the Marlins jumped all over rookie Matt Brash in the first two innings. Brash has given up a HR or two before, and he’s had control problems before, but we really haven’t seen him get hit quite like he was yesterday. It’s also part of a disturbing trend compared to his first two games, and at this point, it’s his debut that looks more like the outlier than any of his subsequent outings. So what’s going on?
I should preface this by stating the obvious: I’m still a huge fan, and I don’t think sending him down is either advisable or in the realm of possibilities right now. What I think is happening is that he’s falling behind and making himself predictable. The home run that Jorge Soler hit (that might not have landed yet) came on a 3-1 fastball that Brash piped down the middle. In the second, Jesus Sanchez’s big two-run single came on another 3-1 pitch, and another fastball. It wasn’t too bad, either – very low in the zone, it got the grounder that Brash was presumably looking for, but it found a hole (it was hit hard, to be fair). Too many walks, too many three ball counts. Brash cannot continue to throw called balls on roughly 40% of his fastballs and sliders. Batters aren’t swinging, and find themselves sitting in hitters’ counts too frequently.
After the Mets/Cardinals series featured so many plunkings, and after that M’s/Royals series featuring a parade of relievers who couldn’t find the zone, I did have to wonder if the ball was part of the problem. Plenty of players this year, from Chris Bassitt to Michael Fulmer, have complained that the new balls and the policing of sticky stuff has led to a less safe environment. Ian Kennedy asserts that there are still two different balls in use, just like 2021. It’s actually hard to find data to suggest that there are more walks or breaking balls flying out of the zone, and HBPs are actually *down* as a percentage of plate appearances from April of 2021. Still, the guys paid to throw the things swear something’s off, and it certainly bears watching.
It’s also a bit…uh, funny that baseball saw 44 total HRs hit last night, after a total of 80 homers were hit from Monday-Thursday combined. Conspiracy theorizing will not generally be a consistent theme on this blog, but again: MLB is not helping its own cause here. They keep getting caught doing the opposite of what they say, and so players and fans are left to wonder.
Jesus Luzardo failed out as an A’s prospect. I thought he was a sure-fire rookie of the year candidate in 2020, but inconsistency left him as merely solid, not the electrifying lefty he looked like in a 2019 cup of coffee. 2021 was far, far worse, and he didn’t look better in AAA after being demoted. The A’s cut bait, and he’s trying to remake himself in what is suddenly an org known for developing pitchers (with former M’s pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, Jr.). He looked jaw-droppingly good in spring training, but then, so did Kyle Higashioka.
So far, so good for Luzardo. He’s throwing harder than ever now; he’s up two ticks from last season to 97.5mph with his heater, which has some horizontal movement given Luzardo’s low-3/4 arm slot. The pitch he throws most is actually his breaking ball, a gyro-spin curve/slider thingy. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that it has no horizontal movement. None. It just skips all of that, despite coming in at 84 and with spin. Most of that spin is gyro spin, hence the lack of movement; it’s essentially a breaking ball thrown like a football. That may be why it’s been successful against lefties and righties – it’s almost like a breaking ball/change hybrid. He still possesses a normal change-up, with plenty of armside run, but he’s not using it as much now that he throws his breaking ball so often.
To be clear, he still has some platoon splits, but he is now a terrible match-up for lefties. This is a day to sit Jarred Kelenic. But he’s not hopeless against righties the way he was in 2021. His fastball, despite the plus velo, is still something righties can do some damage on. His handedness and the angle he’s throwing from *should* make up for at least part of the 98mph-ness of his heater (he actually throws a four-seamer and a sinker). Luzardo’s still not a control/command maven, and his walk rate remains elevated this year. The M’s will need to be patient, get into fastball counts, and do damage in them.
1: Toro, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Suarez, 3B
5: Crawford, SS
6: Torrens, DH
7: Murphy, C
8: Rodriguez, CF
9: Moore, RF
SP: Ray
Mitch Haniger left the game in the 2nd yesterday with an injury suffered on a swing. I was very worried it was another lat or muscle injury, the kind he’s had too many of. But the M’s are calling it a high ankle sprain which, while not great, is something of a relief.
Good for 33rd round pick Penn Murfee on making his MLB debut last night and getting his first K. I said he was a big leaguer earlier this year; didn’t think he’d make that prediction come true so soon.
The Rainiers lost a heartbreaker in Vegas, 7-6. The Rainiers scored 5 unanswered to take a 6-5 lead in the 9th inning, only for Vegas to win it on a 2-r HR in the bottom of the frame. The R’s hit 4 HRs in the loss.
Wichita beat Arkansas 3-1, and Spokane topped Everett 4-1.
The star of the system last night was Modesto’s SS Edwin Arroyo who hit two HRs as part of a 4-5 night in the Nuts’ 13-1 win over San Jose.
Game 20, Mariners at Marlins
Matt Brash vs. Eliezer Hernandez, 3:40pm
After a tough series loss to a good Rays club, the M’s stay in Florida to face a somewhat similar opponent: a team blessed with excellent pitching and solid, if underwhelming offense. I know that’s kind of silly to say, given Tampa’s current wRC+, but the offense we saw this past few days isn’t a world-beating, Toronto-style juggernaut, and we’re not going to see one in this series, either.
What’s made the Marlins so intriguing the past year or two has been the development of an excellent starting rotation, anchored by former M’s prospect and MLB’s current ERA leader, Pablo Lopez. Sandy Alcantara and Trevor Rogers were the co-aces last year – a year that saw Lopez miss time with injury. Today’s starter, Eliezer Hernandez, has shown flashes of promise, but those flashes are obscured with one of the biggest, most persistent, problems with home runs in the game.
Hernandez has only thrown 240 career big league innings, but his HR/9 remains above 2. Theoretically, this is exactly the pitcher who should be thriving now: a guy with some bat-missing ability and good control, who gives up a million fly balls. Low BABIP, low baserunners, and now, with a deadened ball, great results, right? He’s given up 6 home runs in his first 15+ innings thus far. He uses a 91mph fastball and makes heavy use of a slider with, quite frankly, not a lot of break. He’s also got a change-up mostly for left-handed batters. The slider’s clearly the best of the bunch, but his underpowered fastball makes it harder to get to. He’s throwing the fastball less this year, but he might need to take that usage down again.
It’s kind of nuts to use split stats so early, but as I’ve made clear, this weird inversion of last year’s home/road splits is hilarious. Whether or not it’s persistent or meaningful is something time can help out with, but for now, I’m here for the laughs. The M’s currently have the second-highest batting average *at home*, behind only the Rockies. They have the #1 wRC+, wOBA, OPS, whatever you want to use. Away from chilly Seattle (this was an exceptionally cold month), they’ve been a bottom-10 group. Sure, it helps to play Kansas City at home and it hurts to play Tampa on the road, but it remains striking. So, what’s going on? Did someone really unplug the humidor?
No, probably not. If we look at all fly balls hit between 95-105 mph off the bat and measure the average distance the ball travels, we find T-Mobile sees the 3rd *lowest* distance. If we restrict the query just for “barrels,” or batted balls with optimal angles and velocities to turn in HRs/extra-base hits, we find essentially the same thing: you get *less* out of really good contact at T-Mobile compared to the average park, to say nothing of Coors Field. But if you look at the frequency with which pitches are scalded above 95 mph (excluding grounders), you see T-Mobile has seen the 3rd *most* such batted balls. This is like what I mentioned years ago regarding Detroit’s Comerica park, or Target field in Minnesota. These northerly parks with larger dimensions can push down performance on exceptionally well-struck balls, but they also seem to generate more OF them. It’s like pitchers are expecting the park to bail them out, so they challenge hitters more?
Again, these stats are so early, and are thus biased by specific teams (esp. home teams), so we’ll see where they end up. But we’ve seen this sort of thing before, most notably in 2016, when Seattle’s home park saw the most total HRs hit.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, DH
5: Crawford, SS
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Rodriguez, CF
8: Kelenic, RF
9: Torrens, C
SP: BRASH
Cal Raleigh’s back in Tacoma with Luis Torrens back. I’m still stunned at how much the M’s have used Torrens, and how they trust him to handle the team’s young pitchers after hiding his catchers mitt from him last season. To be fair, he’s looked a lot better, and nailed a runner trying to steal yesterday. Even his framing runs per BP’s metric, while below average, aren’t too bad.
Bryce Miller was the minor league star of the day yesterday, striking out 9 in 5 IP, yielding one run in the AquaSox 9-1 win over Spokane. Noelvi Marte hit his third HR in that contest.
Arkansas got shut out 2-0 by prospect Simeon Woods-Richardson. Modesto beat San Jose 5-0, with Jimmy Kingsbury starting off the four-pitcher shutout.
Game 17, Mariners at Rays
Logan Gilbert vs. Matt Wisler and Josh Fleming, 3:40pm
After a dominant homestand pushed them to the top of the AL West, the M’s head out on the road to take on Wander Franco and the Rays. The M’s held their own to open the season, but a BABIP-driven .192/.292/.338 slash line meant they needed to rely on their pitching staff to win. That’s not impossible, not with Logan Gilbert nearly untouchable in the early going, but .192 is, even in this run-starved environment, not great. So, they decided to come home and hit the crap out of the ball for a week or two, one Justin Verlander gem standing as the sole exception.
The offense is red hot, led by Ty France, who was just named co-Player of the Week by MLB. With 5 HRs, is he suddenly hitting the ball much harder than he used to? France has never been a statcast darling, as he mixed really hard hit balls with a bunch of poorly-hit, low-exit-velo jobs, pushing his average down. In the early going, that’s still very much the case – and his plummeting K rate means there are ever more balls in play. What he does so well, as this piece by Jake Mailhot lays out, is hit the ball on a line. He’s one of the best in the game at hitting the ball at an ideal angle, an angle most conducive to hits. No, that doesn’t mean his barrel rate is elite, but it means he’s not getting lucky: he’s hitting nearly everything thrown at him, and he’s hitting frozen ropes throughout the park. His expected wOBA based on the angle and speed of the batted balls he’s hit place him in the 99th percentile in MLB, just one spot ahead of some guy named Trout.
It’s funny: though France’s strikeouts are down markedly, he’s not actually making more contact. Contact has been critical to France’s overall game since he was a minor leaguer, but nothing’s changed dramatically on that front. His contact rate of 82.1% is good, but it’s actually lower than it was in 2021. What’s different is that he’s making the most of small improvements in pitch recognition: fewer swings at balls, and more swings at strikes. Pitchers can’t get away with trying to freeze him on a slider in the zone; he’ll destroy it. He’s improved on sliders over 2021, when he was already pretty good at facing them, and that’s helped him hit extremely well even when pitchers are ahead in the count. You can get him to swing and miss occasionally, but getting three of them is a tall order.
Just as the slider’s been important in France’s hot start, it’s been just as critical for Gilbert. Despite a good fastball that generated poorly-hit contact, Gilbert’s breaking balls didn’t work so well in his rookie campaign. His slider in particular was quite poor, racking up 9 runs below average per MLB.com. With less-than-average movement in both horizontal and vertical planes, and coming in at 83 – 12 mph lower than the fastball – it was slurvy in all the wrong ways. So what do you? In the year 2022, the answer is clear: make it more sweepy. Gilbert’s slider is now all the way up to 86 mph, and while that reduces the amount of time it has to break, Gilbert’s sacrificed a bit of vertical movement, but given the pitch an above-average amount of horizontal sweep. This isn’t transformational; it’s not suddenly an unhittable pitch, or the reason for his strikeouts. Batters are making *more* contact on it than last year. But they’re doing a lot less on that contact. By expected slugging percentage (using exit velo and angle), the pitch has gone from .462 in 2021 to .310 in the early going this year.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Suarez, 3B
5: Crawford, SS
6: Toro, DH
7: Murphy, C
8: Rodriguez, CF
9: Moore, RF
SP: Gilbert
Kelenic gets a day off with the M’s facing a left-handed “bulk” pitcher in Josh Fleming, who’ll come in after former Mariner Matt Wisler opens the game for Tampa.
George Kirby got the win for Arkansas today, going 5 IP, with 1 R (1 HR) on 3 H, 2 BB and 5 Ks in the Travs’ 10-4 win over Wichita.
Game 14, Royals at Mariner: The Marinerizing of Baseball
Chris Flexen vs. Brad Keller, 6:40pm
I mentioned it before the season, but I was happy to see MLB bring in humidors at *all* parks in MLB, and not just 5-10. It was a weird state of affairs where the same context produced dramatically different results, and magnified pre-existing park effects. In Seattle, you can make a case that it’s depressed scoring more so than the old outfield dimensions. Unable to get any base hits, and with the ball not flying as far, the Mariners slash line cratered. Nearly everything put in play was an out.
So, wouldn’t bringing in humidors result in other ballparks playing like T-Mobile in 2021? No, I thought: it’ll have different impacts in different places (potentially increasing offense in places like San Francisco), but standardizing the way the ball is stored might eliminate unintended consequences of doing pretty fundamental things differently in different places. Maybe the ball will move more predictably (except in Colorado; sorry Rockies), maybe a new ball and the uniform humidor policy will usher in a new era of the game, with more action, more hits, more scoring on plays *other* than home runs.
Instead, what we’re seeing in the season’s first few weeks is…ok, yeah, pretty much every ballpark is playing like T-Mobile park in 2021. The league’s slash line thus far is .231/.308/.369. Not only did we slip back into the little batting ice age of 2010-2014, we’ve gone right past it, past 1968. It’s never been this low. But for those of us living on the leading edge, those of us watching the future emerge each day, those of us who lived through an exciting preview of the new world, this looks familiar. The M’s hit .226/.303/.385 last season, humidor and all.
The area that’s seen the biggest impact is the home run. They’re not just down, they’re falling through the floor. HRs per plate appearance are at 2.4%, down from 3.1% in April of 2021, and 3.4% in April of 2019. I’m not really sure what MLB anticipated, but I doubt it was this kind of impact.
That’s something of a theme these past several years: MLB is flummoxed by its own roll-out of a change or tweak. I think many fans are a bit sick of the juiced-ball era, and want to see runs scored in other ways. But the problem is that defenses are too good, pitching is too good, and the parks too physically small to score runs in other ways. Deadening the ball on hitters raised on “elevate and celebrate” – hitters who were richly rewarded for this approach in the bygone era of…2019 – will produce *outs* not hits. I know, I know: balls in play are good for viewers, even if they don’t result in hits. But I’m not sure a league-wide .230 average is a great way to sell the game, either. I don’t know; I’m a Mariners fan. I live in the future.
Of course, the greatest irony of all is that the one place that didn’t get the memo seems to be Seattle. League wide runs per game has dipped under 4 for the first time since the mid-1970s, but in Seattle, we’re playing Kingdome style: the M’s are scoring 5.67 runs per game. Sure, they’re averaging 3 per contest on the road, but hey, maybe we’re watching a new future emerge for the second straight year. Or maybe some intern thoughtfully left Seattle’s humidor unplugged. If that’s the case, that intern is a hero.
1: Frazier, DH
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Suarez, 3B
5: Crawford, SS
6: Toro, 2B
7: Rodriguez, CF
8: Kelenic, RF
9: Raleigh, C
SP: Flexen
Royals starter Brad Keller posted brilliant ERAs and mediocre K rates from 2018-2020. It seemed like a fluke until physicist Barton Smith’s research into the seam shifted wake, the odd, non-Magnus Force-induced movement. Smith was a seam shifted wake savant, giving his pitches odd movement, producing weak contact (but not whiffs). Eno Sarris wrote this great primer on SSW and Keller before the 2021 season that was to be his coming out party. Aaaaand then Keller got knocked around mercilessly last year. He looked like a different guy: higher K rate, but way too many walks and, in a first for him, a home run problem. How’s he faring this year? The K rate’s back down, he’s got a BABIP under .200, and an ERA under 2. The less said about his 2021, the better, I guess.
Sugarland’s in Tacoma tonight. They beat up on the host Rainiers yesterday, 6-3.
Arkansas beat Corpus Christi 9-5 thanks to a great start from Levi Stoudt. Cade Marlowe had 3 RBIs, and Zach DeLoach tripled. The two teams are back at it tonight.
Everett beat Tri-City 4-3 today, with Bryce Miller tossing 6 1-hit shutout innings for the win. Tri-City came back to win last night’s contest 6-3, but that had nothing to do with Adam Macko who struck out 10 in 6 IP, yielding 2 R on 5H and 0 walks.
Modesto demolished Rancho Cucamonga 11-1, thanks to a dominant start from William Fleming, who K’d 8 in 6 IP of 1-hit, no run, 1 BB baseball. Fleming is definitely one to keep an eye on; he had a sharp fastball and a very good slider working. He was the M’s 11th rounder out of Wake Forest last year.
Game 13, Rangers at Mariners
Marco Gonzales vs. Taylor Hearn, 6:40pm
Taylor Hearn emerged last year as one of Texas’ few home-grown starters capable of sticking around in a big league rotation. The lefty throws a fastball/slider mix, with the four seam coming in at 93-94. He has a firm cutter as his 3rd pitch, and will occasionally mix in a change. He doesn’t miss a ton of bats, his control is good, not great, and he had some HR issues last year thanks to :gestures at modern baseball: and a low ground ball rate. He’s stuck in the rotation because he’s…fine, and the Rangers have been rebuilding. The idea is that he continues to improve into something more than fine, or maybe next year’s spending spree is focused on pitching.
One thing would help Hearn, though: not facing Seattle. He has faced Seattle more than any other opponent, and he is 0-3 with a 6.20 ERA against them. He made his MLB debut in Seattle in 2019. In 1/3 of an inning he gave up 5 runs, walked 4, K’d none, aaaand got hurt, ending his season. It’s only been up from there, but he has continued to struggle against the M’s. If you remove the M’s from his totals, he’s got a 4.46 ERA in 105 innings. With them, it shoots up to about 4.8.
So, the league-wide trend in velocity continues its seemingly inexorable climb in 2022. Fastball usage is down, as hitters see fewer pitches they like to hit, and more and more pitches designed in a lab to be difficult to hit. This year’s cool pitch is the sweeper, a horizontal-breaking slider, kind of like Matt Brash’s or Paul Sewald’s. Driveline’s Chris Langin notes that horizontal break is up on sliders, and noticeably. All of this should be sending strikeouts – already high – through the roof. But league-wide K rates are down.
Is this due to the arrival of new low-K rookies from Wander Franco to Steven Kwan? Or are batters learning to foul off tough breaking balls? Has hitting training focused more on countering pitchers’ specific arsenals, or just trained batters to handle velocity more? I don’t have answers now, but want to dive into this at some point.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Suarez, 3B
5: Crawford, SS
6: Murphy, C
7: Toro, DH
8: Rodriguez, CF
9: Moore, RF
SP: Marcoooo
Game 11, Rangers at Mariners – Brash Talk
Robbie Ray vs. Jon Gray, 6:40pm
The M’s open a series against last-place Texas after beating the Astros in a fascinating early-season contest. It wasn’t perfect: the bats that did so well in games 1 and 3 were silent against Justin Verlander, and despite general better play and flashes of the talent that got them here, Kelenic/Rodriguez are still scuffling. But there’s a general competence, a length to the line-up that we haven’t seen in recent years, and the good will the M’s won in that series against Houston is something that should stick around for a while. This is a solid team, and when their starting pitching is even decent, they can beat good teams. Robbie Ray’s had a good and a so-so start, but I’m not too worried about him. He’ll be fine, and he’ll give the M’s a chance to win against just about anyone.
But Matt Brash…
So, if you look over at Fangraphs, Brash is currently listed with a negative WAR. BaseballSavant says he’s been lucky on balls in play. The walk rate’s too high. He looks OK by Baseball Reference and Baseball Prospectus, so what do we make of a brilliant start and a wild start – two vastly different paths to the same general outcome? I think the thing to take is that Matt Brash is exactly what we thought he was coming out of spring training: the most talented pitcher on the team, yes including Robbie Ray, and one of the absolute best prospects around. He struggled mightily with his command in his home debut, but even when his velo was down and he couldn’t find it, he remained nearly impossible to hit. When batters do make contact, it was mostly on the ground; Brash’s GB% rate through two starts is over 60%. He won’t have starts like his MLB debut every time, but what do you think is more likely: that Brash will walk 5-6 per 9 innings in perpetuity, or that he’ll retain the slider movement that currently has him with the best horizontal movement of any starting pitcher in the game, edging out Shohei Ohtani?
Scouting is extremely tough, and only a handful of people get meaningful looks at most minor leaguers on their way up. Even those people might see a guy on a bad day, or could be influenced by everything from draft round to previous scouting reports, or what have you. Bias is, essentially, baked in, and while we can try and root it out, for people like us on the outside, you have no real way to gauge it. Every year there are plenty of pop-up prospects who shoot through three levels or what not despite being picked in the 25th round, or being a senior sign. There are always guys posting eye-popping numbers in (especially) the low minors thanks to a decently honed change-up. Scouting can help break through the limitations of just scouting a stat line, and they can add important context like, “The guy with the good change in low-A tops out at 86 w/the fastball” or “The guy who popped 4 HRs last week on breaking stuff has a swing that can be measured with a sun dial.” But I’m still trying to figure out what happened when Brash gets ranked behind, say Emerson Hancock. You have a stat line, you have eyes on a few of the wickedest pitches out there, and you’re (presumably) still bearish on his prospects because…what, injury risk? Small college? It can’t be anything on the field.
Part of the issue is tied up with how disrupted “normal” pitcher development curves have become not only after Covid arrived, but after modern pitch design and training evolved. Jarrett Seidler has a great article at BP today about Matt Brash east, the Mets Tylor Megill. Megill was a senior sign guy the Mets picked out of Arizona (where he barely pitched) to save money in their draft pool. He did fairly well, but a low-90s three-pitch mix guy had “middle relief” as a best-case outcome. Just like Brash, he was left out of the alternate site in 2020, but spent that time getting stronger. Last year he showed up in the big leagues with mid-90s velo, and the ability to miss bats at the major league level. I get the sense that even then, non-Mets fans had no idea who he was or why he was a candidate for a rotation that added Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt in the off-season. After refining his delivery, he’s now throwing just fractionally harder than Brash and has been great in the early-going (despite kind of a rough one in his third start today against San Francisco).
The problem wasn’t Megill’s: he did everything right. The problem was that people could actually *see* the changes, *see* that he wasn’t the same mid-relief guy he was throwing 92 in high-A, and, critically, figure out what it meant. Throwing 97 doesn’t make him a can’t miss starter. Pitchers miss all of the time, and it’s one of the sadder parts of this game we love. It is now essentially impossible to predict what a given pitching prospect will do in 2 years. They could transform themselves into a 100mph-throwing behemoth with a high-spin breaker and skip two levels, or they could be selling medical devices, and they almost feel like equally likely outcomes. There is more information, more help, more technology, and it feels like for the first time that stuff is working to *help* players instead of to compute or tabulate their value. That makes scouting simultaneously harder and more important for teams. But we also have to trust what we’re seeing, and what batters are doing. Brash wasn’t the skinny kid out of Niagara throwing 92, but it felt like every scouting report or ranking was still anchored in that no-longer-relevant past.
So, the M’s face ex-Rockies hurler Jon Gray tonight. Gray’s an interesting one; a player who’s alternated between really good and really bad seasons. 2017 and 2019 were the former, 2018 and 2020 were the latter. Pitching in Denver is never an easy task, so it’s not surprising that he’s had a high BABIP or occasional problems with the long ball. He misses plenty of bats thanks to a truly excellent slider, or perhaps better stated: TWO excellent sliders. Add them together, and it’s been one of the most valuable pitches in the game in recent years, per MLB.com.
The problem is that his four-seam fastball has been one of the worst, sapping the value derived from his slider. Gray apparently calls it a four-seamer, it’s been a four-seamer his whole career, but either intentionally or not (fear of Coors field?), he’s essentially throwing a sinker. It has the seam-shifted wake properties, the movement properties, of a sinker, and it’s been easier of lefties to hit. It’s not purely a platoon split issue so much as it’s just a poorly-designed pitch, and it might be interesting to see if the Rangers tweak it.
Despite adding Gray, Garrett Richards and, uh, Martin Perez, the Rangers remain in last in pitching WAR, and have an ERA well over 6. Their BABIP-allowed is the highest in the game, and they pair it with the highest HRs-allowed rate, too. Their starters, while not exactly great, have been so-so; they have a very high K rate in the early going, though it’s hard to know what to make of that when teams haven’t faced many opponents. But the relievers…ooohh, the relievers. This has been a problem in Arlington for years, and again, their new acquisitions haven’t helped. Just today, the Rangers DFA’d Greg Holland, the former ace reliever who’d signed a one-year FA deal with the Rangers this off season. Some of the starters that got bumped to the bullpen – Kolby Allard in particular – have also been off early.
Corey Seager’s been as-advertised, and the Rangers catching duo of Mitch Garver and Jonah Heim has been an early bright spot on the 2-7 club. But Marcus Semien’s off to a slow start, which can hurt, given the fact that Seager and Brad Miller (another guy off to a solid start at the plate) are left-handed. Semien’s slugging below .200 at the moment, as is Kole Calhoun.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Suarez, 3B
5: Crawford, SS
6: Rodriguez, CF
7: Kelenic, RF
8: Toro, DH
9: Murphy, C
SP: Ray
So Mitch Haniger’s out on the Covid IL, with the M’s bringing up UTIL Donovan Walton a few days ago. Today, however, Luis Torrens tested positive, and the M’s have made a 40-man move, selecting 1B Mike Ford from Tacoma. I wrote about Ford in the spring, the one-time Rule 5 pick the M’s made, who, after returning to the Yankees, had a great 1/2 season. It’s been rough sledding since, but he looked good in Tacoma, hitting for power, drawing walks, and even working a couple of pitching appearances in the opening week (Tacoma’s pitching stats are hide-your-eyes bad, so it’s not as improbable as it sounds). I’m glad the undrafted guy out of baseball powerhouse Princeton is getting another shot, albeit only for a short while and likely off the bench. I do worry that he’ll lose his 40-man spot once someone gets healthy, or when rosters are trimmed down at the end of the month, but I’m sure he’d rather get a shot in MLB now and risk the weird signed/DFA’d/signed/DFA’d life of a minor league vet with some service time.
The M’s also acquired local kid and one-time Reds pitcher Riley O’Brien. O’Brien throws in the low 90s, with a curve and change. He’ll report to Tacoma.
Speaking of Tacoma, they went up 9-0 in the first inning this past Sunday in Albuquerque, then held on for a 12-11 PCL-Classic win. Penn Murfee got the save, and has yet to yield a run, which is something on a team whose collective ERA is over 8. Today, the R’s open up a series against Sugarland at Cheney Stadium.
Arkansas is in Corpus Christi to take on the Hooks. Minor League vet Connor Jones takes the hill for the Travs against rising Astros pitching prospect, Misael Tamares. The Travs aren’t hitting well at the moment. Their .218/.318/.338 line is second-worst in the Texas League. They are second in ERA, though – nice to have George Kirby around.
Everett, too, is scuffling a bit with a collecting .196 batting average, though *no one* is hitting in the cold and wet Northwest league thus far. Everett is the only team with an ERA over *4*. The AquaSox host Tri-Cities today, and have promising righty Isaiah Campbell on the mound. Campbell’s given up just one run in 10 IP thus far.
Modesto hosts Rancho Cucamonga today. The Nuts are in last at 3-6, thanks again to an offense that hasn’t gotten it going thus far. The Cal League, like the NWL, is off to a low-scoring start, so the Nuts have company, but still: a sub-.700 OPS is rough in what is generally a hitter-friendly circuit. The pitchers haven’t been great overall, but they are leading the league in K’s.
Game 8, Astros at Mariners: 2022 Home Opener
Marco Gonzales vs. Jake Odorizzi, 6:42pm
Happy Jackie Robinson day to all.
The M’s kick off their home schedule with a series against the presumptive divisional favorites again, the Houston Astros. The M’s have faced a number of playoff teams or playoff hopefuls, and it’s not getting easier tonight. The Astros come in 4-2, but the way they’ve done it looks a bit different. In their run of success, they’ve often had a dominant offense scoring tons of runs, but in 2020 and 2021, they’ve had to rely on less tested arms in the rotation; this is what happens when you lose Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander to FA and injury, respectively. The problem for M’s fans is that they’ve done so successfully. No, they’re not a dominant rotation/staff the way they were in 2019, but…if they could just fall off for a bit instead of riding Luis Garcia and Framber Valdez into top-10 pitching WAR, that’d really help.
The M’s get something of a break to start off, as they face veteran back-of-the-rotation guy Jake Odorizzi. Odorizzi learned a split-change in Tampa, and it became his primary weapon, playing off high fastballs at around 92. He also had a slider, cutter, and curve. Outside of a bizarre year in Minnesota, he’s never really been a strikeout guy, instead more of a pitch to elevated contact type who used to post ~30% ground ball rates and above-average infield pop-up rates to drive consistently low BABIPs. It’s left him with a career ERA under 4, but he’s been trending in the wrong direction, with a couple of years of below-average to average production. A part of this is just the downside risk an approach like this necessarily comes with: home runs. When he gets pop-ups and keeps the ball in the yard, he’s solid. When he can’t, or when the ball’s a little extra juicy, he struggles (though he didn’t in 2019, to his credit).
There’s nothing special about his under-powered fastball, movement wise. Cameron Grove’s stuff grades, a machine learning model based on pitch characteristics, gives Odorizzi’s fastball a scouting grade of 25 just based on his stuff this year, but excellent marks for command. That’s somewhat similar to how tonight’s starter, Marco Gonzales looks – his sinker’s “Stuff” grade is below average at 40, but he makes up for it in command. Intriguingly, that model *loves* his cutter, and thinks he should throw it a lot more. It likes his cambio too, though less, and I’ve essentially given up on that pitch after being intrigued by it after Gonzales’ acquisition. He threw it a lot in his first start, and the White Sox…enjoyed it. The cutter was the only pitch that the Sox didn’t homer off of in that start, but today’s a new day.
Once again, I think how this offense plays in this park is the thing to watch. Playing at T-Mobile did an absolute number on the bats last year, and thus there is no better place to see the influence of timing and sequencing than the M’s at home. Last year, they hit .214/.296/.367 in Seattle, yet went 46-35. This isn’t exactly dead-ball era baseball: the only thing not awful in that slash line is their ISO. What they couldn’t do was stop making outs; they absolutely could not get any base hits. A .261 BABIP was largely to blame, and that’s after serious improvement in the last month or two.
But that was last year. Let’s look forward. The new-look M’s and their better true-talent average hitters are…hitting .192/.292/.338, thanks to a .224 BABIP. It’s been a week. They played good teams. They lost hits due to weird stadium walls, wind, and good positioning. It won’t look like this all year. Still: a team that had massive BABIP problems last year is…having BABIP problems, and hasn’t even played yet at the place where the BABIP problems were worst. I don’t necessarily expect we’ll see such striking home/road splits, again because the use of humidors everywhere should reduce some of the park-to-park differences, but…this is something to keep an eye on.
The M’s getting that series-ending win was huge, not only because they did not want to stroll into the home opener 2-5, but because it highlighted just how good Logan Gilbert’s becoming. That was a phenomenal game in very tough conditions, and that’s two in a row for him; the inconsistency he battled last year hasn’t reared its head in, ok fine… ten innings. The bullpen that had looked a bit shaky in Minnesota and game 1 in Chicago looked dominant, with Andres Munoz looking like the star Jerry Dipoto’s talked about since he was acquired, and with Paul Sewald picking up where he left off.
The Astros new-look offense is off to a slow start, as they’ve been dealing with BABIP problems of their own. Kyle Tucker is doing his best Jesse Winker impression, with a K rate under 10% and a putrid batting average thanks to a BABIP of .053, which just looks like a typo. But a bright spot has been rookie SS Jeremy Pena, the heir apparent to Carlos Correa who had a breakout year in the minors last season, but made his MLB debut on opening day this year. With more rookies making their clubs out of spring, there are a few more players to look at even this early in the season. Rookies have a 96 wRC+ thus far, with a higher strikeout rate than non-rookies. That’s a better mark than they had in the full 2019 and 2021 season, though of course, the 96 mark is based off of a league overall wRC+ that will come down over the course of the year. It will be interesting to see how this larger class of new-CBA rookies fares. Pena and Steven Kwan are off to hot starts, while the most talked-about rookies – Julio Rodriguez and Bobby Witt, Jr. – are scuffling in the early going.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, RF
5: Crawford, SS
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Kelenic, DH
8: Rodriguez, CF
9: Murphy, C
SP: Gonzales
It was great to see the rookies contribute yesterday, from Kelenic’s HR to Julio’s second (Easy) stolen base to Cal Raleigh’s bomb. Seriously hope they can keep it up in the home series.
Modesto lost to Stockton 11-6. Harry Ford got a hit, but is just 2-19 on the young season, albeit with five walks.
Everett blanked Hillsboro 5-0 behind a great start from Isaiah Campbell, who gave up just one hit and K’d 6 in 5 innings. Due to injuries, he’s yet to top 30 innings in his pro career, but is plenty talented.
Arkansas sneaked past Springfield 3-2 as Levi Stoudt outdueled Dalton Roach. Er, the losing pitcher was reliever and ex-M’s prospect Tyler Pike, a 2012 draft pick by Seattle out of a Florida HS. Stephen Kolek starts today against Springfield’s Kyle Leahy.
Tacoma came back, but couldn’t overcome some shaky early innings in an 11-8 loss in Albuquerque. Daniel Ponce de Leon, eye opening in his home debut last weekend, went 1 1/3, giving up 7 earned. But Mike Ford went 4-5 with a dinger, and Kevin Padlo hit two to make things interesting. Ford even pitched 1/3 of an inning, his second pitching appearance on the young season (?). Weird, but hey, interesting. Ford got the R’s out of a jam in the bottom of the 8th, facing one batter and retiring him on a fly out. Tacoma’s pulled up Juan Mercedes from Modesto to make the spot start today
Game 6, Mariners at White Sox
Robbie Ray vs. Dallas Keuchel, 4:10pm, but probably later or not at all due to rain in the Chicago area.
Soooo, Matt Brash was pretty good. The young Canuck threw 5 1/3 brilliant innings in his debut against a very good line-up, walking just one and striking out six. A home run in the 6th left him with an undeserved loss, but you had to be encouraged by what you saw. He threw a blizzard of sliders, but mixed in a curve and change along with an at-times dominant fastball.
The M’s ended up losing it despite facing a combination of the struggling Vince Velasquez and struggling Reynaldo Lopez. The line-up isn’t as bad as this, but many of the problems we saw last year are showing up again. Their BABIP is again low, but they also show a huge gap between their actual and expected production. But even that comes with a caveat: the M’s are again near the bottom (they’re 29th) in exit velocity. They were bottom five in that metric last year, and were near the bottom in 2020, too. The team had two big problems last year: they don’t hit the ball very hard, and don’t hit for average. In response, the M’s traded for Adam Frazier, who’s a decent hitter for average, but has essentially the lowest exit velocity in the game. This is a club that is very unlucky, but they may regress towards a level below the league-average mean.
Right now, the M’s are hitting a lot of fly balls this year, and fly balls combined with a low exit velo is a recipe for a bad average and bad production. Some of that will come around as the weather heats up, but yet again, we can’t get away from talking about the baseball. Right now, the wOBA on well-struck balls is not only lower than recent years, it’s miles lower. The same is true for the best contact, barrels. This could be the result of mixing early-April balls with others, but again, we’re holding contact constant. It’s not a fair comparison, exactly, but the *magnitude* here just screams out that the ball’s playing a bit different. The M’s wOBA on fly balls/line drives (ie., the kind of contact they’ve hit most) is just .422, a level not reached by any team in the previous four years. Again, this is apples to oranges, and not scientific, but it certainly *looks* like the ball is playing a bit differently than even the 2021 version.
Today, the M’s face the White Sox’s sinkerballer, Dallas Keuchel. Keuchel’s always seemed like a guy on the verge of falling below MLB-level given his marginal velocity and pitch-to-contact ways, but he was very good for Houston for several years. He looked cooked in 2019 with Atlanta, but had great results for the White Sox in 2020, though the BABIP gods certainly helped. 2021 was an unmitigated disaster, though, as his walks and home runs both hit career highs. He’s giving up tons of very hard contact, and the Sox don’t have an elite defense. It could get ugly this year. That said, he wasn’t as bad last year as Vince Velasquez, and that guy looked fine against this line-up yesterday. Keuchel’s a lefty, which at least partially explains the fairly bizarre line-up. This is one of those times when it’s too bad that the team’s best hitter, Jesse Winker, has such stark platoon splits. It’s probably a good day off for the struggling Jarred Kelenic, though.
1: Toro, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Haniger, RF
4: Torrens, DH
5: Suarez, 3B
6: Rodriguez, CF
7: Crawford, SS
8: Murphy, C
9: Moore, LF
SP: Ray
Per Ryan Divish, Kyle Lewis is working out and doing live AB’s at extended spring training, though he’s not actually playing in any of the games there.
Game 5, Mariners at White Sox – Happy Brash Day
Matt Brash vs. Vince Velasquez, 1:10pm
Given where the M’s are in their contention cycle, we’ve been treated to quite a few pitching debuts recently. Justus Sheffield, Justin Dunn both made their starting debuts in 2019, alongside the NPB vet Yusei Kikuchi. Last year, it was Logan Gilbert’s turn. It remains exciting, but some downright disaster starts (Dunn’s) and retroactive reassessment (Sheffield) can make us cynical about the whole thing. But there’s something about Matt Brash that’s almost cynicism-proof. I think a part of it is the sheer *lack* of hype Brash has until late last season, despite out-pitching many of the M’s top prospects, and the reason for *that* is his undeniable stuff. Sheffield had an underpowered fastball, but a solid slider. Gilbert has a good fastball, but a slider without much spin that he’s still trying to refine. Dunn…I’m not really sure what Dunn had beyond a hard-to-pick-up fastball, I guess. Brash has perhaps the best two-seam fastball and the best slider of any SP in the minors, and I can’t wait to see them in the big leagues.
Isn’t this hyping up of Brash just setting M’s fans up for disappointment? Like, if he’s not instantly successful, then what do we make of his repertoire? I think the most important thing is that this is the M’s fifth starter, and God knows M’s fans know well how to be patient. His command was impeccable in the spring, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a little shaky in the early going. All he needs to do is settle down and trust the stuff that got him here. Brash can get out of jams thanks to his bat-missing ability, and he has surprisingly little in the way of platoon splits despite the sinker/slider combo (he’s got other pitches too). He can probably throw hard knowing he won’t go more than 5 IP at most, and he can trust his defenders to…wait, the OF is Winker/Kelenic/Haniger? Hmm. Ok, go for the K, Matt.
Brash’s super-high spin slider gets astonishingly high horizontal movement, an attribute teams are increasingly looking for due to its correlation with Ks. He gets run on his fastball as well, making it one of the more visually pleasing heaters in the game as well as what we all hope is an effective one. It’s interesting: I’ve been looking for comps for Brash based on pitch movement, and they’re nearly all relievers. I mentioned in the spring that perhaps the best match is Reds’ reliever Tejay Antone, but probably the most famous high-octane sinker/slider combo is Blake Treinen’s. Joely Rodriguez, Michael King, Joe Mantiply, too. Part of this has to do with the fact that sinkers have been horribly out of fashion, especially for starters, and hard-throwing starters even more. Tyler Anderson has a fastball with run, but he’s still a terrible comp for Brash. Four-seamers with rise get more swings and misses, but they also give up a lot of elevated contact, a scary proposition in the current era of baseball. The guys who rely on sinkers almost do so by default; there just aren’t a ton of 90-91 mph four-seam guys anymore (except Dylan Bundy, who dominated yesterday), and so you get the M’s shifting Sheffield’s sinking four-seamer into an even sinkier sinker. Brash is, hopefully, a herald of something different. I think the game is better when not everyone is trying to do the exact same thing. If you could get 85% of Treinen, or 95% of Antone *as a starting pitcher*, you’d take it, right? Ok, Ok: how about this for a comp: Charlie Morton.
Opposing him is one of the many, many reclamation projects starting today. It seems like nearly every team has one, from the high-end/top-shelf reclamations like Kikuchi (starting for Toronto) to the mid-tier guys like Chris Archer, to the bargain-basement ones like Velasquez. A one-time Astros prospect, Velasquez burst onto the scene with the Phillies in 2016, showing swing-and-miss stuff and just barely enough control to make the strikeouts play. With an elevated four-seamer around 95, he got plenty of whiffs but gave up a lot of home runs, too. Over time, the walks increased, and the HRs didn’t go away, and he essentially pitched his way out of Philly. Part of the problem is that his career numbers are worse with men on, leading to poor strand rates, and thus an ERA that’s higher than his FIP. The Padres brought him and Jake Arrieta in last year when their once-promising season was fully engulfed in flames, and Velasquez just added more fuel: in four starts, he went 0-3 with an ERA of 8.53, giving up 4 HRs per 9 innings.
I’m a *bit* surprised a team contending for the AL Pennant has slotted him in as the 5th starter, but it’s also true that he’s talented and still misses a lot of hitters. If you can figure out the HR thing, and hopefully keep him in the zone, you’d have a 5th starter with more upside than most (er, outside of Brash, of course). He doesn’t throw 95 anymore; he’s more like 93. He struggles against lefties despite a solid repertoire that includes a fastball, curve, change, and slider. In his second career start in April of 2016, he threw a complete-game shutout of the Padres with 16 Ks and no walks, and that alone will give him plenty of second chances.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, RF
5: Toro, 3B
6: Suarez, DH
7: Kelenic, CF
8: Torrens, C
9: Crawford, SS
SP: BRASH WOOOOOOOOO
Some of the other intriguing match-ups today include the Marlins/Angels game, featuring ex-A’s prospect and probably just an ex-prospect Jesus Luzardo against Pedro Sandoval. Bryce Elder also makes his MLB debut tonight, starting for Atlanta against the Nationals. Luis Garcia, the Astros’ breakout rookie starter last year, makes his season debut tonight against Madison Bumgarner and Arizona. Alex Cobb’s the Giants’ latest reclamation, and he’ll get his first start against Yu Darvish and San Diego. And in a cool battle of dueling reclamations, Chris Archer starts for Minnesota against the Dodgers’ Andrew Heaney.
In the minors, the Rainiers dropped Sunday’s finale in Tacoma 7-1 to Salt Lake. They’re in action tonight in Albuquerque.
Arkansas won last night’s game against Springfield 4-3, with change-up maven Devin Sweet getting the win in relief. Sweet is one of those guys that will likely see time in the big leagues, probably this year. Another is ex-org depth RP Penn Murfee, now in Tacoma. Guy’s simply played his way into prospect status, albeit not exactly blue-chip prospect status. Today’s game was an early one, won by the Redbirds, 6-3. Joe Rizzo hit his second homer of the campaign, but Connor Jones and the Travs pitchers couldn’t make it hold up. Jones did K 6 in 3 IP, though.
Everett’s game on Sunday was suspended due to rain. Today, they’re in Hillsboro to take on the Hops. Jimmy Joyce starts for the AquaSox.
Game 4, Mariners at Twins
Chris Flexen vs. Dylan Bundy, 4:40pm
It’s a little early yet to talk about surprises or good/bad signs, but I have to say I’m impressed with the patience the M’s have shown at the plate. Through three games *against pitchers with good control* they are, as a team, drawing walks at a 13% clip, second best in baseball. No, that alone doesn’t ensure overall success – #1 is Arizona, a team that can’t hit – but it’s a very good sign that they’re not being overly aggressive and getting themselves out. The pitching staff has, overall, done a pretty good job of this too, and if they can just figure out how to keep the Twins in the ballpark, they’ll have something.
Mitch Haniger’s 2 HR and “I only hit XBH” approach has gotten some attention, but the guy who’s impressed me the most has been JP Crawford. I think I’ve been pretty consistently negative about Crawford, who is clearly a solid MLB starter, but just without the upside at the plate that so many other teams seem to have at SS. A big part of that has been good but not great bat control and an extremely underpowered swing. Out of 132 qualified hitters last year, Crawford’s barrel rate (the rate at which he hit the ball more or less perfectly) ranked 126th, just beating out new double play partner Adam Frazier, who ranked 130th. His average exit velocity ranked 120th (Frazier was at 129th), too. In 2020, Crawford’s exit velo ranked 134th out of 142. He just doesn’t hit the ball hard.
Or at least, he didn’t use to. Crawford hit *two* balls over 100 MPH yesterday. In 2021, he had only 10 such balls in all of April, but he picked up speed (ha) late in the year: he hit 20 in August and 17 in September. He’s already drawn 3 walks against a single K, and if he can hit the ball harder, he’s got a much better chance of being a real contributor at the plate. His defense allows him to contribute even with a weaker bat, but weak contact is not generally conducive to a high BABIP. His BABIP was quite good last year, and that’s what allowed him to post a league-average batting line. A bit more pop and a bit more of underlying strength powering that BABIP and you’ve got more of a consistent 3-4 win player as opposed to a 2-3 win guy.
Today, the M’s face yet another Twins reclamation project, Dylan Bundy. Bundy’d been one of the most hyped pitching prospects around before settling in as a below-average starter with Baltimore. A brief 2020 season with the Angels was revelatory, as he finally found a way to avoid HRs, and his secondaries looked sharper than ever before. He used the same mix – primarily a straight four-seamer in the low-90s, a good slider, and a change and curve for left-handed bats – but the results were uniformly better. But he couldn’t carry it over into 2021, when nothing quite seemed to work. His pitches *looked* the same, but batters punished them whereas they swung through them the year before.
A few days ago, it looked like the Twins may have made some slight tweaks to Sonny Gray’s approach, with a few more four-seamers than sinkers. It’ll be interesting to see if those changes stick around, and what they might try to do with Bundy (and Chris Paddack). More sinkers, trying to avoid dingers from a pitcher whose career’s kind of been defined by home run troubles and a park that allows a lot of ’em? Or fewer fastballs altogether? It’s going to take time to see if any variation is the result of intentional changes and which are just rust; one thing I’ve seen thus far is that pitchers don’t seem quite ready for the regular season yet. Walks are up a bit league wide, and pitchers aren’t yet able to go 5-6 innings, let alone 7-8.
1: Frazier, DH
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, RF
5: Toro, 2B
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Crawford, SS
8: Rodriguez, CF
9: Raleigh, C
SP: Flexen
It’s much too early to worry much about Julio Rodriguez – he’s out-hitting Marcus Semien and Enrique Hernandez thus far – but it is stunning to see Cleveland’s rookie OF Steven Kwan’s early success. With a triple and two walks, he’s now 9-14 with 5 walks and no strikeouts in the early going. Not only does he not have any K’s, he’s yet to swing and miss at any *pitch* this year. Not a bad start for the ex-Oregon State Beaver.