Karen's ex-Mariner playoff post

Teoscar Hernandez

My friend Karen is a relatively new baseball fan. She's always been interested enough to occasionally accompany me to Seattle Mariners games and such, but in earlier years she'd bring reading material and ask things like, "which ones are the Mariners?" Nowadays, she's into it. Hell, she might even understand the infield fly rule better than a lot of the softball players I ump games for. It's a wonder to behold and I love her for it, among other reasons.

Every postseason, though, the newly-minted Mariner fan is almost always on the outside looking in (2022's brief foray as a Wild Card entrant aside) and may not have a rooting interest. Karen's requests have often been to know who in the playoffs used to play for Seattle, so here now is the 2024 rundown of ex-M's still playing in the post (teams already eliminated in the Manfred WC Round have been skipped).

New York Yankees (2/4)

The evil empire does not deserve your support, but they nonetheless have two active and two inactive former Mariners:

• Luke Weaver (RHP): Weaver appeared in five games for Seattle last season and was terrible. He'd been cut by Cincinnati, where he'd also been terrible, then after his five game audition here was waived and claimed by the Yankees. He has been unaccountably splendid in pinstripes, posting a sub-3.00 ERA and a sub-1.000 WHIP out of the bullpen this year.
• Nestor Cortes (LHP): You may remember Nestor from the abbreviated 2020 mini-season, when he suited up for the M's and was abysmal in just 8 innings of play, posting an ERA of 15.26. A Yankees draftee, he had been taken by Baltimore in the Rule 5 draft in 2018, debuted for them and was bad, then had to be sent back to the Yankees when the Orioles cut him. He was bad for the Yankees too, so they traded him to Seattle for the ever-popular "cash considerations." After his dismal mini-season here, he went back to New York as a free agent and was somehow awesome for two years before regressing a bit to be a fair-to-middling starting pitcher.
• Not on the active roster are LHP Anthony Misiewicz, who debuted with the M's in 2020 and left in 2022, traded to Kansas City for those cash considerations again; and OF Taylor Trammell, a former top prospect who hasn't managed to stick in the bigs either in Seattle, where he broke in in 2021, or with the Dodgers or Yankees, each of which claimed him off the waiver wire.

Cleveland Guardians (1)

Not counting manager Steven Vogt, who served as a coach for Seattle last year, Cleveland has but one ex-M and you'd be forgiven for thinking there were none:

• Matthew Boyd (LHP): Boyd spent the bulk of his career in Detroit, but had two forgettable months as a Mariner in 2022, arriving in a trade with San Francisco. He pitched well, appeared in ten games in relief down the stretch and then went back to Detroit as a free agent.

Kansas City Royals (1/2)

I'm making a supposition about there being one active former M here, it's entirely possible both will be left off the roster:

• Adam Frazier (IF/OF): Once a highly-coveted All-Star second baseman, now a struggling utility player in sharp decline, a decline that, of course, started when he came to Seattle in 2022. After his one season here he went to Baltimore, where he continued to underwhelm, and this year to KC, where he barely managed to crack a .200 batting average.
• In the minors most of the year was RHP Dan Altavilla, who was a cog in the Seattle bullpen from 2016-2020, when he was dumped on the Padres in a get-him-off-of-Scott-Servais'-relief-menu-before-he-loses-more-games move. He's been mostly injured since then, but the Royals took a flier on him and he did sort of OK for them in Triple-A.

Detroit Tigers (1)

The mostly-anonymous Tigers are almost entirely guys nobody outside the state of Michigan has ever heard of, excepting pitcher Kenta Maeda, who is known from Hiroshima to Minneapolis. But there is this guy:

• Will Vest (RHP): Not just a contractual pun, this reliever came to Seattle as a Rule 5 draftee from Detroit in 2021. But the M's couldn't keep him on the roster and he had to be offered back to Detroit, where for the past two seasons he's been a more than serviceable option out of the bullpen.

Philadelphia Phillies (1)

Other than the Mariner-adjacent Aaron Nola (brother of Austin), there's little to link the Phils and M's. Except:

• Taijuan Walker (LHP): Traded away from Seattle in a deal that ended up having four All-Stars in it (Walker and Ketel Marte to the Diamondbacks for Jean Segura and Mitch Haniger), Walker was hurt for most of his time in Phoenix, briefly went to the Blue Jays, came back to Seattle for part of the 2020 mini-season, and then had success in Queens with the Mets. This is his second year with the Phillies and he's been splitting time between the starting rotation and the ’pen.

New York Mets (4)

The Metropolitans have the most former Mariners in the tournament right now with these guys:

• Edwin Díaz (RHP): Electric Eddie, the pehnom closer that was dealt to New York as the price of getting out from under Robinson Canó's contract after the 2018 campaign, has been pretty good this year after missing all of 2023 on the injured list. Not elite-level good, but still pretty good.
• Jesse Winker (OF): Making friends everywhere he goes, Winker was by some accounts a toxic presence in the Mariner clubhouse after coming here with Eugenio Suárez from the Reds in 2022. He lasted just that one year here and was traded to the Brewers, where he hit all of .199 and was soundly booed by the Milwaukee faithful. This year he started in DC with the Nationals and then got himself shipped out to the Mets in July. His OBP for the year is respectable, but most of that came in Washington; as a Met he's gotten aboard at just a .318 clip.
• Luis Torrens (C): After arriving in a big trade with San Diego in 2020, Luis saw a lot of action as a backup catcher with the M's in ’21, a bit less in ’22, then left town for ’23, when he played for three teams before finding himself back in Seattle's system for a couple of months. This season he started off at Triple-A with the Yankees before getting picked up by the Mets, for whom he's played sparingly as catching insurance.
• Ryne Stanek (RHP): "Panic," as he's affectionately known here at StarshipTim, started this season in Seattle and was... let's say, unpredictable. He'd often be called upon in key situations and would as often as not blow things up. He was thankfully traded to the Mets in July, and he's been even worse for them (6.06 ERA in 17 games).

Los Angeles Dodgers (2)

Just two? Somehow I thought there'd be more, but no, just these guys:

• Teoscar Hernández (OF): Not asked back after he struck out 211 times for the M's last year, Teo was an All-Star in LA this season. He was even better after the All-Star break and really poured it on down the stretch, posting a line of  .329/.407/.605 since September 1st.
• Chris Taylor (IF/OF): Yeah, he's still there. A useful but not flashy cog for the M's in 2014 and ’15, Taylor was shipped off to the Dodgers in early 2016 for a used rosin bag or some such return; he went on to become a key part of several Dodger teams as a super-utility guy playing six positions and holding his own at the plate.

San Diego Padres (0)

This is just weird—you'd think with all the wheeling and dealing that has gone on between the Padres and Mariners over the past few years that there'd be someone here, but there's not. Carl Edwards Jr., who had a very brief Mariner tenure in 2020, appeared in one game for San Diego this year. That's it.

So there you have it. Factor it into your rooting interests however you like, but I think I'm just going to be rooting for individual players. Shohei. Steven Kwan. Bobby Witt Jr. Maeda. Anyone with Kansas City that can take down the Yankees.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on October 4, 2024 at 11:19pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

The Veep Debate and Wild Card Playoffs

Left: Literal evil. Right: Metaphorical evil.

I really tried to watch the whole thing.

Well, "really tried?" I mean, I could have pushed through. I chose not to for the sake of my blood pressure and my downstairs neighbor, who was probably sick of my screaming "go to hell you lying son of a bitch/smarmy troll/piece of excrement" etc. every two minutes or so.

But I turned it off, "it" being the so-called debate between Vice-Presidential nominees Tim Walz and J.D. Vance. Had I kept on, I would have seen Walz be better; early on he was obviously nervous and appeared out of his depth, but I know from post-debate analysis and the slew of clips that made it around the Internet and cable news that he improved markedly in the second half. Had I kept on, I would also, however, continued to see Vance pour on the bullshit in such a slick, phony faith-healer way, with an abundance of the sort of charm you might find in a sociopathic used car dealer determined to have you drive this lemon off the lot and be happy you did it.

Vance is like a lot of modern-day Republicans in that he can seemingly get away with saying the vilest, most repugnant things so long as he says it in a calm, thoughtful-sounding tone. The film Vice captured this in its portrayal of Dick Cheney, but it's the same schtick you hear form Bill Barr, Kevin McCarthy, even Steve Bannon (though his weird triple-shirts get in the way of seeming sane). But there was Vance, claiming in a calm tone with as straight a face as he could muster that Donald Trump saved the Affordable Care Act (when he actually tried his damnedest to destroy it), peacefully left office (when he actually incited an insurrection to try to stay in power), and didn't crash the economy (when he in fact presided over a massive manufacturing recession, waged a trade war that cost taxpayers billions, and so botched a global health crisis that everything went into the tank not to mention cost hundreds of thousands of lives). The smarmy, lying, weasel. And there were the alleged journalists acting as "moderators," treating a 35-year-old misstatement on a matter of no importance by Governor Walz with the same heft and importance—greater heft, arguably—than the mountain of deceit, lies, gaslighting, and revisionist history being spouted by the opposing campaign on a daily, nay, hourly basis.

Fortunately, it seems the public saw through Vance's facade of crap and credit Walz with authenticity from the event. I admit to being a little surprised at that, given how easily manipulated 70+ million people were in the 2020 campaign. The stakes being what they are, it's no wonder Governor Walz was nervous stepping onto that stage and thank god/fate/whatever he was able to hold his own against Weasel McPantsonfire.

Anyway, I couldn't take it, so I switched over to baseball.

This is now the third year of the "Wild Card Series" in the Major League Baseball postseason and I remain against it. We did have, for the first time, one series go the distance of three games, with the New York Mets pulling out a come-from-behind win to move on earlier this evening; meaning in the 12 WC series to date, the team that did not advance was won one game and the team that lost the first game has advanced zero times. You might say the sample size is still too small, but I say that pretty much negates the argument some had been making about the previous one-and-done Wild Card game setup being somehow less fair than a best-of-three, like we have now. And, illustrating another glaring flaw in the system, the division winners forced to play on the same level as the Wild Card teams were both ousted, meaning that now a division winner has been eliminated before the Division Series 2/3 of the time. (Not that I'm sad to see Houston lose, though. That's a silver lining this year.)

I've gone on at length before about how this is a dumb system that Commissioner Manfred has saddled us with and how it could be better, so I'll go on here only briefly. But it stinks for the fans in Milwaukee to see their team, which dominated its division all year long, bounced out in consecutive years by teams that won nothing in the regular season. Finishing first needs to actually matter. Advancing as a Wild Card team needs to be harder. Again, briefly, if we must have these stupid expanded playoffs, I want to see (for practical reasons only) four WC teams per league instead of three; all division winners skip the WC series; and no offdays for WC teams. Play the day after the regular season to winnow four WC teams to two, survivors play the next day to determine who gets the single WC berth in the Division Series, then straight in to the DS without any rest, meaning any WC team to advance to an LCS needs a deep starting rotation and a capable bench. Also, as a side benefit, this shortens the arguably-disadvantageous layoff for the "bye teams" (division winners) by three days. 

Too obvious?

Anyway, it is what it is this year, and we get an 8-team bracket of finalists with no obvious rooting interest for your's truly. Do I support Detroit as the upstart come-from-nowhere surprise club? The loaded lineup and battered pitching staff of the Dodgers? Cleveland's a possibility now that they've rebranded away from racism; rookie manager Steven Vogt and star power in José Ramírez and Steven Kwan are certainly appealing. KC has Bobby Witt Jr. and a lot of moxie. I don't know, I guess it'll take shape in my head as the series get underway. But I do agree 100% with Michael Schur of The Poscast: No matter how "appropriate" it may seem for the World Series to feature two megastars against each other in Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) and Aaron Judge (Yankees), there is no universe in which the Yankees deserve another pennant, not for decades to come.

Tagged Politics, Baseball   |   Posted on October 4, 2024 at 2:25am   |   Permalink   |     |  

State of the M's

Tonight was the last Friday of the baseball season, and thus Fan Appreciation Night down at the ol' ballpark. Many prizes are given away at Fan Appreciation Nights, but in decades of attendance I have yet to get one. (Though my seats did get one some years back, but it wasn't the one I was sitting in, Bill got it, winning a suite for a game the following April. I and some mutual friends went with him, so it's sort of like winning a prize, I suppose.) I didn't win anything tonight, either, but the Mariners did eke out a victory over the Oakland-for-two-more-days Athletics.

Not that it mattered, as the M's were eliminated from postseason contention yesterday. The entire American League playoff field was set before tonight's first pitch, and most of the National League field as well (the remainder there may well still be in flux after Sunday's games are done as the currently-in-a-three-way-tie-with-Arizona-for-two-slots Mets and Braves have a makeup doubleheader to play on Monday). Still, it was a nice evening and Bryan Woo pitched a great game.

But as we come to the end of the 2024 campaign, some thoughts on the state of the Mariners:

Much was made about the Mariners' rebuild following the 2018 season having the goal of contention within three years. Despite the COVID-truncated season of 2020, they basically achieved that, winning 90 games in ’21 and then again in ’22, making the ’22 postseason thanks to the dumb expanded Wild Card system we're now stuck with. Last year the M's were alive until the final day of the season, finishing one game back of the last WC berth with 88 wins. All of which was utterly astounding when you think about it; how they won that many games with lineups that put up truly atrocious numbers not just once, but three years running, is downright weird.

Then-manager Scott Servais got a lot of credit—undeservedly—for those win totals. The thinking seemed to be, "wow, how good is Servais, look what he did with an offense that was at or near the bottom of the league rankings." But that was backwards. You look at those teams in the preseasons and you'd figure them to be far better than they turned out to be; maybe not World Series-caliber lineups, but certainly playoff quality in today's expanded-postseason universe. The real evaluations should have been, "wow, how bad is Servais, look how few runs his teams scored despite that group of players. If not for that incredible pitching staff he'd be lucky to sniff .500." It took until three-quarters of the way through this season for the club's top brass to figure out that the way Servais ran things was never going to work. You can't get a lineup to hit when you essentially tell all your batters to emulate the late Joaquin Andujar—an All-Star pitcher in the 1980s who's approach with the bat was "swing hard in case you hit it"—and make your goals about "launch angles" and "barrel rates." Good pitching can take you a long ways, but you still have to score more runs than the other guys.

The post-’18 rebuild, which went on through the short 2020 season, was supposed to form a core of players who would mature into a contending team with a solid window of opportunity lasting at least five years, after which time some or all of that core will have become financially burdensome. That window might be starting to close now, but some of those supposedly core players are already gone, given up for failures after underachieving with the broken Servais regime: Ty France is a Cincinnati Red and was doing quite well until going into a slump in the last two weeks (.312/.358/.475 as a Red through Sept. 10th, 7-for-50 since then). Jarred Kelenic, who may have been forever ruined by the Mariners' handling and rushing of his development time or might have been a bust regardless, is an Atlanta Brave relegated to their bench. Injury-plagued Kyle Lewis might never play in the bigs again, but if he does it'll be with the Diamondbacks. Lewis was just one of those prospects that couldn't get healthy. Kelenic may or may not be one of those personalities that just wouldn't ever succeed in the Majors. Cutting bait with them is understandable. Losing France was just plain stupid, but I wonder if that move was requested by Servais or a misstep by the higher-ups based on a performance that they didn't understand was being hampered by Servais and his alleged hitting coach, Jarret DeHart.

Anyway, there's still plenty of talent on the club to continue and even expand the window of opportunity. President of Baseball Ops Jerry Dipoto has, aside from dealing France away, done fairly well in adjusting personnel as needed, and with a young starting rotation that could remain together for another few years (possibly sans Luis Castillo) even an average lineup should be able to contend. Most importantly, Servais and DeHart were finally shown the door, which if nothing else is addition by subtraction. Things actually look better than they have in 20+ years for the Seattle Mariners going into 2025.

Biggest offseason questions for the M's: 

1. Does Edgar stay? Edgar Martínez only agreed to return as batting coach for the remainder of 2024. Can manager Dan Wilson talk him into staying on? If not, who becomes the batting coach? The four-plus years of DeHart showed how unequivocally necessary a competent batting coach is, so if Edgar does not choose to stick around, this is their biggest "free agent" need. They need someone with a lot of pro hitting experience, preferably someone who had to work for his successes over a long career. I don't know if Terry Pendleton would be interested, he is in his 60s now, but he'd be an interesting ask. Ditto Milt Thompson. Raúl Ibañez seems more interested in front-office gigs than coaching, but I wonder if he'd be a good batting coach? I mean, so long as he doesn't take up that disgusting chewing tobacco habit again.
2. Who's on first? Having thrown Ty France away for whatever dumb reasons, first base is now essentially vacant, having been manned down the stretch this year by rental player Justin Turner and outfielder Luke Raley. Raley could potentially transition into a regular fixture at 1B, but defense would be lacking in that case. Is young Tyler Locklear a viable option? He flopped in a short stint with the M's this year, but has OK-to-decent numbers at Triple-A, especially on-base percentage (.371, 70 games), after great ones at Double-A (.291/.401/.532, 41 games). Seems to me a full year at Triple-A would be in order, but the M's do like to rush guys.
3. Jorge Polanco: Cut or don't cut? The second baseman's contract has a team option for 2024 at his same $12M salary, or that option can be bought out for $750k. Personally, I'd choose to buy out the option and use the money elsewhere, then use Spring Training as a tryout camp for the position. If he's healed up from his Achilles injury, try switch-hitting Sam Haggerty there. He can compete with Ryan Bliss, Leo Rivas, and the somehow-still-in-the-mix Dylan Moore and maybe some non-roster invitees from the big-league scrap pile.
4. OF logjam: You know Jerry Dipoto is going to trade somebody, he always does. Seems likely that someone from the outfield mix will be dealt somewhere as there's a surplus with Julio Rodríguez, Randy Arozarena, Victor Robles, Mitch Haniger, and Raley on the big-league roster and Dom Canzone, Cade Marlowe, and Samad Taylor at Triple-A. Julio and Victor aren't going anywhere, so Haniger and Arozarena appear to be the likeliest to move; Arozarena would have the most value despite his down year in ’24. A return could be sought in a first- or third-baseman or prospects.

Just having a real batting coach and a manager that doesn't leave his brain in the clubhouse for an entire season will elevate the M's considerably from their disappointing 2024. They could make no moves at all and that would be enough to contend. But moves will be made, a budget will be dictated, some things will change. I just expect them to be relatively minor.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on September 28, 2024 at 2:17am   |   Permalink   |     |  

The Edgar Effect

Edgar Martinez, back as Seattle batting coach (and not a moment too soon)

It's now been nearly a month—25 days, to be exact—since the Seattle Mariners finally got around to firing their manager (Scott Servais) and alleged hitting coach (Jarret DeHart) and replacing them with former Mariner players Dan Wilson and Edgar Martinez, respectively. I said at that time that despite their poor standing the change made me more bullish on the potential of the Mariners making the postseason than I'd been in months, and now, after 25 days, how are things looking?

Well, not great. But a better grade of not-great than before, to be sure.

Currently, the M's are four games over the .500 mark and 2 games out of a postseason berth (the ridiculous third Wild Card) with 12 games left to play. When Wilson took over, the team was at .500 and five games back of playoff standing. So it is marginally better, but time is running out, and it would still be a bit of an upset if they managed to get into the October tournament.

But the difference aside from the standings isn't marginal, it's enormous.

That improvement is, naturally, in the offense. Edgar taking over from the woefully ill-equipped DeHart as batting coach has changed the whole way of thinking for the team, away from the stupid stuff like launch angles and barrel rates and back toward the important things like contact and situational awareness. Here's a very simple stat to show the change in attitude:

Under Servais/DeHart: 18 sacrifice flies (128 games)

Under Wilson/Martinez: 11 sac flies (22 games)

That's a 500% increase in the simple act of getting a runner home from third base with a fly ball. Productive outs in general has been a key point in Edgar's tutelage so far, which you'd think would be a basic, known element for batters, but under DeHart the very idea was apparently discouraged.

But it isn't just making better outs that's improved, far from it. All team batting stats have been raised since Edgar came back to the dugout:

Team slash line under Servais/DeHart: .216/.301/.365

Team slash line under Wilson/Martinez: .254/.354/.416

Runs per game? Up from 3.9 to 5.2. Hits per game, walks per game, RBI per game, doubles per game, homers per game, all up. And strikeouts per game are down, though not significantly yet thanks to one 17-K game against the Rays; if you take that outlier out of the mix, Ks per game are down from 10.2 to 8.6. Still a ways to go on that front, but the way the rest of it is trending, that'll come in time.

Certain individual batters have gotten impressive results from consulting with the Hall of Famer, most notably Julio Rodríguez, Mitch Garver, and Luke Raley. Before the regime change, Julio was batting .260/.310/.364. Since the changeover, he's batting .278/.356/.489. It's the middle number, the on-base, that really stands out to me. Garver was having the absolute worst year of his career, and with no one to turn to for help was just getting worse and worse; he was at a miserable .165/.287/.327 under the old guard. With Dan and Edgar, his line is .267/.353/.433. Yes, only 34 trips to the plate, but what a difference. Then there's Raley, who had started out strong in the early season—a high-water mark of .301 in late May—before slumping down into the .220s. What's he done since Dan and Edgar took over? .304/.403/.679 with 15 RBI.

Victor Robles is another guy with huge numbers since Dan and Edgar arrived, but he's been the best hitter on the club basically since he got to Seattle at the beginning of June so it's not as clear that it's an Edgar influence. Still, check it out—Pre-Dan and Edgar: a very good .280/.340/.413; since Dan and Edgar: an astonishing .473/.546/.636.

Other guys aren't seeing big bumps in their numbers, but still some things of note, e.g. Cal Raleigh's average is still anemic, but his on-base mark has gone from a pre-change .303 to a since-then .341; newcomers Randy Arozarena and Justin Turner weren't around long during the Servais/DeHart time, so the comparison doesn't track, but Arozarena's slugged 100 points higher since the change and Turner's post-change slash is a stellar .290/.386/.464.

The Mariners as constructed throughout the year have had plenty of talent in their lineup, they were simply underachieving. Guys who were slumping or falling into bad habits had no one in-house to go to for help and things never got any better. Now they do. And we're starting to see who they really are.

It might be too late for 2024, but it bodes well for 2025.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Edgar Martinez   |   Posted on September 17, 2024 at 1:08am   |   Permalink   |     |  

Random dispatches

Some stray thoughts as I procrastinate doing important(ish) stuff this afternoon...

• I had umpiring to do last night, and as I arrived at the Woodland Park ballfields I was approached by one of my favorite players to ump over the years, a guy named Stephen. His team wasn't on my schedule, they were set to play on the adjacent field that my fellow umpire was handling, but he saw me deliver a gear bag to her and came up to talk to me. A few years back, Stephen was involved in (but by no means instigated) a confrontation between players on opposing teams in a game I was officiating, and after I'd sent combatants back to their corners and resumed the game, Stephen apologized to me and owned his (minor) part in what could have been an escalation of hostilities if I'd not intervened. That impressed me since he was basically the injured party and had cause to be upset. Since that game, whenever Stephen's team and I crossed paths it made my shifts a little more fun/less stressful since I knew at least one team would be well-behaved and good-humored. Anyway, last night Stephen said, "Hey, I'm glad you're here. This is my last game and I'm moving to New York next week. It's been a lot of fun playing in the league these past years and whenever we had you for our ump you made it that much better. The team loves you. Just wanted to you to know." After his game was over we chatted a little more about what he planned to do in NYC and he reiterated his praise. I say this not to toot my own horn—OK, it's partly to toot my own horn, I do enjoy my reputation, as one fellow staff member put it, as "the Ken Griffey Jr. of umpires" in the league—but to say to the Internet masses here that, if there's someone in your associative circle you appreciate for whatever reason, let them know. Odds are they aren't getting such feedback from their boss or co-workers or whomever else that might have authority, odds are they hear negative feedback far more frequently, and it can be more than helpful to know someone appreciates their effort in doing whatever it is they do. For my part, knowing Stephen and a few others appreciate how I run a game makes it a lot more tolerable when other people insult me or otherwise make an umping shift unpleasant. I'll miss Stephen! Thankfully I still have Megan, Yoon, Dae, Frankie, Robin, and everyone on The Leftovers (among others) occasionally peppering my shifts with good cheer. 
• My new car is already in the shop, though this was half-planned. I knew from the inspection I had done it needed a couple of things dealt with right away, and that was supposed to be all handled this afternoon. Unfortunately there was a parts snafu and the mechanics can't finish until tomorrow. So I'll be relying on Ye Olde Metro Transit for getting to tonight's Mariner game and back. Alas.
• Speaking of the Mariners, despite their current second-place standing behind the Houston Astros in the American League West and third behind Minnesota and Boston for the consolation-prize Wild Card position, I'm more bullish on their postseason possibility than at any point since maybe May, and they had a big lead then. All because they finally sent Scott Servais and Jarret DeHart packing. Since Dan Wilson took over last Friday, with Edgar Martinez at his side, the M's are 3-1 (against San Francisco and Tampa Bay) and have gained 1½ games on the Astros, and of those three wins I am utterly convinced that they would have lost at least two of them under the Servais regime because critical runs were scored by runners from third without benefit of a hit. Which had been a foreign concept under DeHart. Edgar made a point of telling the press that one of his goals was to emphasize situational hitting and another was to reduce strikeouts, and it paid off immediately. Even the San Francisco Giants' broadcast team noticed, as they remarked over the weekend that Seattle batters were changing their approach when they had two strikes on them, noting some guys choking up on the bat to shorten their swing and what appeared to be deliberate intent to foul off certain pitches. Shortstop Leo Rivas delivered a game-winning hit in such an at-bat on Friday. Sunday two runs scored on grounders that Julio Rodriguez and Randy Arozarena busted hard out of the box on to avoid double-plays. None of that would have happened before. Yesterday the M's beat Tampa Bay with home runs, more like the earlier regime preached, but they were "happenstance homers," not borne of swinging for the fences but of swinging for a line-drive. Josh Rojas and Luke Raley seem particularly better since the regime change; Wilson even had Rojas in the starting lineup against a lefty yesterday, something Servais never did, and what do you know, Josh was 2-for-3 against said lefty, a line single, a hard double off the wall, and lined hard just barely foul before striking out on a tough pitch. Plus he stole a base and scored the only non-homer-delivered run of the game. There have been bunts and bunt attempts in interesting situations by batters other than Luke Raley. Andres Muñoz was not called in too early from the bullpen in a close game. Surprisingly good reliever Collin "Principal" Snider was not yanked after getting in a spot of trouble but was allowed to get out of it himself. Dan is still batting Cal Raleigh third in the order, which I don't like, but it's only been four games and Victor Robles hasn't been available to lead off. We'll see if that changes soon.
• Shit, I've procrastinated too long. Gotta go.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Umping, Cars   |   Posted on August 27, 2024 at 4:44pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Good news, everyone!

Don't let the door hit you on the way out, dude

It's been a pretty great week in the news, largely because of the absolute delight that has been the Democratic National Convention. So many standout speeches and fantastic energy that I could write long posts about and maybe will.

But not today. Because the best news from today (so far) comes from Your Seattle Mariners. The headline:

Mariners fire manager Scott Servais amid AL West slide

To quote my friend Mack, whose reaction was much like mine only slightly sanitized, "AMFT." (The A stands for "about," the T for "time," and the middle letters for a descriptor Samuel L. Jackson uses for snakes and planes.)

You may recall my posts about how the Mariners have been wildly inconsistent this year, or how they were pathetic as a club because batters having trouble had no support from their own dugout/clubhouse and had to seek help elsewhere. Or how the Mariners absolutely suck at driving in runners from third base, generally at worst a 50/50 proposition but with them 40% is a reach.

You may also recall my stance from a couple years back that the only reason the Mariners could possibly get into the postseason going forward is because we now live in the Manfred Era of participation-trophy-level playoffs and roster rules designed to protect managers from their own dumbness, and even then if the M's were to get in they wouldn't last long. And that would hold true until significant changes were made in management.

Well, someone with the power to do something about it finally reached the same conclusion.

Also canned, just as importantly, was alleged hitting coach Jarret DeHart, a primary figure in a couple of the posts linked above and a clear liability to the team.

The firings come at the conclusion of a road trip that saw the M's lose eight of nine games and fall from a first-place tie to five games behind the Houston Astros in the division. Going back a bit farther, since June 18th—when the M's held a 10-game lead over the Astros—Seattle has a winning percentage of just .377 (20-33), including 18 losses by two or fewer runs and 16 losses when their starting pitcher turned in a quality start (6+ innings with <=3 earned runs allowed). And over those 53 games, the Mariners' offense has managed to post a batting line of .208/.300/.354 with an average of 10½ strikeouts per game. For the non-baseball stat nerds, that's bad.

The frustrating thing is that none of this is new. This has been standard operating procedure for the Mariners for four years, and for longer than that no matter how good the roster of personnel was the lineup underachieved. It's astonishing that the team won 88 or more games in four of Servais' nine years at the helm, and all of the credit for that goes to the pitchers. Even there, Servais had issues—he had such a tendency to call on the worst possible option from the bullpen that I actually believe that certain relievers were traded just so Servais wouldn't keep bringing them into critical game situations (looking at you, Dan Altavilla, Ryne Stanek, Rafael Montero, Taylor Williams, et.al). Those unlikely win totals masked what I always thought were Servais' flaws and probably kept him around despite what should have been obvious reasons not to. In addition to the weird bullpen decisions there was the insistence on a three-man bench (before Manfred's reign mandated at least four), odd lineup constructions, and basic inflexibility when it came to deviating from pregame decisions regardless of what happened on the field.

Hopefully this will be a "better late than never" situation rather than one of "too little too late." The M's are still just five games out thanks to Houston's terrible start to the season. It's not likely that they can catch the Astros, but nor is it all that unlikely with five and a half weeks to go in the season (including three games in Houston).

The new manager will be Dan Wilson, former Seattle catcher and a guy who always struck me as possible manager material. He's had no coaching experience other than as a roving minor-league instructor for the M's here and there, but there have been successful big-league managers that came in cold—Craig Counsell, for one, who took Milwaukee to the postseason five times in eight years; also Aaron Boone, though when your first gig is the Yankees you're already a step up. Of course there's also David Ross and Gabe Kapler, who didn't fare so well. 

No word yet on a new batting coach. That might be important. If the M's just go with DeHart's assistant for the rest of the year I doubt much will improve, but just being without DeHart should help. The rumor mill has Edgar Martínez returning to coach in some capacity. We'll see.

I've got tickets for next Tuesday night. Who wants to go?

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on August 22, 2024 at 5:40pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Sweep the Mets

B eat the Mets, beat the Mets, step right up and sweep the Mets...

The 2024 Seattle Mariners continue to confound, having just completed a three-game sweep of the New York Mets in which they outscored the visiting Gothamites 22-1. Coming into the series, the Mets were, by record, a superior team and holding a playoff position in the National League. Now they are not.

In the previous series, the Mariners were bested two-games-to-one by the well-under-.500 Detroit Tigers and were saved from a three-game sweep the bad way by the inexperience of a Detroit rookie right fielder, who let the game-winning runs score after misplaying a base hit into a walkoff double. Detroit outscored Seattle 13-8 in that series, including the three two-out runs that flipped that final game in Seattle's favor. 

There just is no consistency with this team. At least, not in terms of wins and losses; they had one good hot streak when they won eight of nine in June, but they followed that up with a slump that saw them drop 10 of 13. Hey, maybe they're finally on a roll! Ugh, now they're back to stinking up the place.

It's frustrating, because they could be truly great. They have a pitching staff that's the envy of the baseball world, but as has been the case for years, those pitchers have to make do with minimal support from the lineup. Prior to the late-July trades, there was no one in the Seattle offense that could be relied upon for much of anything except a whiff when putting the ball in play is what mattered.

As discussed yesterday, this is a self-inflicted would on the Mariners' part. The front office at some point decided to go all in on the idea of home runs as the only goal of batting. They hired coaches to perpetuate that thinking, and since 2020 those coaches include one Jarret DeHart. For the mini-season of 2020 and for 2021, DeHart was the number-two guy under Tim Laker, who at least was a former big-league catcher with experience to shape his methods even if he proved to be a rather poor batting coach. Since then, DeHart has been the top dog in the offensive coaching department despite never playing professional ball and going into coaching straight out of college—when the joined the M's in ’20, he was younger than rookies Sam Haggerty, Braden Bishop, and Jake Fraley; the same age as second-year big-leaguer Ty France and third-year player J.P. Crawford; and barely older than rookies Kyle Lewis and Evan White.

Now, experience does not equal effectiveness. The M's have had plenty of coaches and managers that prove that. But it helps. It's not only something to inform one's own thinking, it's something that players will rely on when taking instruction. Only with DeHart, almost every guy on the squad has more experience hitting a baseball than he does. Even young Julio Rodríguez was in pro ball while DeHart was still a student at Tulane. None of DeHart's experience involves life as a pro player, not even the low minor leagues, and once someone gets to the Majors the issues coaches face with players are as much psychological as mechanical (if not more so). I can't imagine a player in a slump going up to DeHart and asking for tips on how to work out of it and getting anything back that is relatable.

We've got several years' worth of history now with DeHart in the dugout, so I decided to look at the numbers. Here's a sampling (bold = MLB worst):

We can probably discount 2020 since it wasn't a real season with only 60 games. Still, the only thing better then was scoring runners from third, otherwise the whole DeHart era holds up as being terrible. The fact that the Mariners won as many games as they have in this span is shocking and shows how good they are on the pitching side of things. It's a real Jeckyll/Hyde coaching staff—hitting is the terrifying monster, pitching and defense (under Pete Woodward and Perry Hill, respectively) are the genius doctor.

The biggest item in that table to me is the productive out rate. Being able to advance runners is a necessary skill for any batter, but the M's just don't care about it. The scoring runners from 3rd with 0 or 1 out is in part a subset of the productive out rate, it just happens to be the most important one and the strikeout rates tell us that there is no adjustment being made for situational hitting: an easy RBI opportunity when a run can be batted in without needing a hit is treated no differently than any other trip to the plate.

But let's get a basis for comparison here. In contrast to the DeHart years, here's the same number set from the years Edgar Martínez was batting coach:

Edgar wasn't the greatest coach, it turns out being the best at doing something doesn't necessarily translate into being the best at teaching it. But his experience surely counted for something: Though the runs per game and the on-base rate aren't much different, the productive out numbers are at least around league average and the strikeouts are significantly better. And for all of DeHart's emphasis on power hitting, the slug rates are generally worse under his reign.

I was happy to see the sweep of the Mets. It kept Seattle tied for the top spot in the American League West. But if that productive out rate was even average—just average!—this team, with this staff of starting pitchers, would be running away with the division and already plotting postseason strategies.

Clearly, I had too much time on my hands today.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on August 12, 2024 at 9:14pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Mariner musings

I attended the Mariner game last night with my friend Bill, a game that ended in a 6-0 victory for the hometown M's against the visiting New York Metropolitans. It was a crisply played game, one with timely hitting from the usually-moribund Seattle lineup to go with the great-as-usual starting pitching that was a welcome contrast to the previous series, when the M's dropped two of three—and really should have lost all three—to the rebuilding Detroit Tigers.

All season long—and really this goes back a few years at least—the Mariners' hitting prowess has been a joke. At this moment they are last in the Major Leagues in team batting average (.217), last in hits, and next-to-last in total bases. They are above only the hapless Chicago White Sox (who just snapped a 21-game losing streak), the nearly-as-hapless Miami Marlins, and those rebuilding Tigers in on-base percentage; and above only the White Sox and Marlins in runs scored per game. Yet, somehow they remain tied for first place in the American League West.

That's a testament to the outstanding pitching staff, but if either of the two other contenders in the division were having a typical season, the M's wouldn't be in shouting distance of first place with those kinds of offensive numbers.

Why are they so bad, though? I mean, the M's aren't lacking talented players. Most of the roster has shown real ability to hit.

My opinion? It's institutional. The Mariners themselves—the club entity, not the individual players—have employed a batting philosophy that does not work and coaching personnel that do not help, and rather than address that fundamental issue they have looked to scapegoating individual players as a method of "finding the problem."

After leading the universe in strikeouts last season, their attempt at a solution was to get rid of the players that had the most Ks and bring in less strikeout-prone replacements. Result? This season's Mariners once again lead all of baseball in strikeouts.

Over the course of this season, when things have been going poorly for some players, rather than try to address the struggles they either do nothing or drop them from the team. Mitch Garver is having the worst year of his career by a long shot, but no one is helping him try to right the ship. Having his own down year, Ty France was unceremoniously designated for assignment and eventually traded to the Reds for, I think, a used rosin bag and some sunflower seeds. This for a guy that was an All-Star as recently as 2022, a guy who looked like the second coming of Edgar Martinez until midway through last year's campaign (and a guy who I still believe will win a batting title or two at some point; now, though, it'll be for someone else). He's only had a few games with the Reds so far, but I will be surprised if he doesn't end the year batting at least .275 post-trade.

The Mariners have a batting coach named Jarret DeHart, a guy who has never played above college ball and is somehow in his fifth year as a big-league batting coach despite still being too young to run for President by several years. He's a child of the Statcast Age, someone who lives by the newfangled code of the "launch angle" and wants to see his hitters belt home runs as often as possible. And, since he's kept his job for these five years—there were rookies on the team older than him when he started!—I have to think the front office shares his priorities and hitting philosophies. Even though they haven't worked out. At all.

We've already mentioned the strikeouts. Those come part and parcel with swinging for the fences. Try to hit home runs all the time and you're going to strike out a lot, it's inevitable. So it only pays off if you make up for that in other ways, like drawing walks or hitting an exceptional number of extra-base hits. Even if you do that, a whole team doing that is not going to score much.

So, the M's lead the universe in striking out, but is that offset by slugging? Well, no. As a team they are currently slugging .369, again better than only the bottom-feeding White Sox and Marlins. They do draw a fair number of walks, but that doesn't mean much because once those batters are on base they don't usually come home: The M's leave 62% of baserunners aboard at the end of innings (league average is about 56%), thanks in large part to their inability to drive in runs from third base with 0 or 1 out. Predictably, the M's are last in the Majors in sac flies with just 16 on the year (MLB average is 31).

There are a few Mariners doing well and a few others who've improved, but that's telling as well. The guys doing well are mid-season acquisitions from other clubs: Victor Robles, the team's leading hitter at .310/.378/.460 since suiting up for Seattle, and Randy Arozarena, who in a dozen games as a Mariner has a line of .279/.414/.442. Meantime, Mitch Haniger,  Cal Raleigh, and Jorge Polanco have picked things up of late—Haniger has posted an on-base mark of .340 since the All-Star break (compared to .280 before); Raleigh likewise has an OBP of .340 since the last visit to Anaheim to play the Angels in early July (.294 before); and Polanco has posted a line of .282/.342/.535 over the past month (until aggravating a nagging injury the other night) after batting just .190/.280/.284 prior to that. The telling bit with those three is that each of them started hitting after consulting with outside help, getting coaching sessions with ex-big leaguers they know. Raleigh went to see Denny Hocking at Big League Swings in Anaheim for some private tutelage; Haniger has a history with an ex-player outside coach (I want to say Steve Lake, but I could easily be misremembering that) he reportedly revisited during the break; according to broadcaster Dave Sims, Polanco has a guy he went to for help while he was on the injured list.

This tells me that Jarret DeHart is so not-good at his job, that the Mariners as an organization are so bad when it comes to coaching batting and instruction on fundamentals, that any player needing an assist has to make time for and expend effort in finding it elsewhere; and if guys are going well after learning their craft somewhere else, they shouldn't listen to anything DeHart and his staff tells them.

Bill and I had a lot of fun at last night's game, with the good play on the field and the good conversation not only between the two of us but also with a pair of tourists from San Francisco in the row behind us who knew their baseball despite being far too young (they looked maybe 25) and shared my appreciation for ballpark aesthetics. On the drive home we were still kind of marveling at the score, and when I dropped Bill off he said to his neighbor, "the Mariners scored six whole runs! Can you believe it?"

Still tied for first. A postseason appearance is still as likely as not. But having no batting coach at all might be better than the negative impact the current one appears to inflict on the team.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on August 10, 2024 at 7:34pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Holiday catch-up

It's July 4th weekend (still, barely) and I've been spending my time in the garage building yet another comic cabinet, watching baseball, and binging season 2 of Star Trek: Prodigy.

Some stray thoughts from the week:

• Driving home from umpiring last week, a dashboard warning light came on in my car. It's one I've seen before and I know from that experience that it's nothing urgent, just a computer fault related to overdrive, which rarely kicks in anyway. It was a one-off, hasn't happened again. Even so, it got me thinking that the next time something goes wrong with this 25-year-old jalopy it won't be worth fixing. It probably wasn't worth putting in the new exhaust system I shelled out three grand for four or five months ago. So I've been looking at used cars, wondering what I could possibly afford that would be a significant step up, and I've decided on a Prius. Not immediately, but probably before the year's out, if I find a good enough price on a well-maintained model from a year without a lot of reported issues. If anyone reading this is a Prius person, please let me know if the stuff I'm reading online about Generation III Priuses (Prii?) being inferior to what came before as well as after is real or bunk. A Gen II is likely what I'll end up with as I want to keep the purchase price low.
• It has been one year and four days since I brought Mizuki home from the King County Animal Shelter as a we-think-nine-week-old kitten last July 3rd. It's been a good year and four days. She is healthy, less skittish (but still afraid of unfamiliar people—makes me wonder what happened to her in those we-think-nine-weeks before she came to live here), and maybe 2/3 grown. She loves her kitty fam, playing with Zephyr on the daily and cuddling with Raimei most nights. I am very glad I adopted her and I'd like to think she is too.
  

  

• I am sick and tired of the Mariners striking out. Particularly when it really matters, as all strikeouts are not equal. Like today, when Ty France struck out with the winning run on 3rd and one out in the 9th. It's not a new problem, last year the M's were K machines and their strikeout tendencies actually got worse with that kind of easy RBI opportunity. It still happens a lot, though I've not done the research to know if they again lead the baseball world in Ks with a runner at 3rd and 0 or 1 out. Wouldn't surprise me at all if they do. At some point this season, I predict they will break their own record of 20 strikeouts in a game.
• Two such unforgiveable strikeouts occurred in their July 4th game, which I attended. They overcame that and went on to victory, though, so the failures will be lost to time. But I noted it in the scorecard anyway. Still, a fun game on a pleasant holiday afternoon, viewed from the club level:
  

  

• After that, the B's and I headed up to Everett for a doubleheader of sorts and took in the Class-A AquaSox's rout of the Vancouver Canadians (that club really needs a better name) and had almost the exact same vantage point:

  

  A small-town fireworks show followed, which was pleasantly ordinary as such things go.
• This year, July 4th had a whole different aura to it because of what the Supreme Court has done recently and because of the massive anxiety attack the country is having over the presidential race. But that's another post.
• Star Trek: Prodigy season 2 is really good. Yes, it's a kids show, yes, it's got a lot of Voyager trappings, but it's really well-done and I heartily recommend it to kids of its target demo and to nerds of any age. (Just keep in mind who the target demo is.)

There's probably more stuff I could pontificate on, but it'll wait. It's approaching midnight and I haven't eaten yet. Must rectify that.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Cats   |   Posted on July 7, 2024 at 11:39pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

The straw that stirs the drink

I did not watch the Rickwood Field game saluting the Negro Leagues between the Cardinals and the Giants last night as I was umpiring. But I have read the recaps and seen a couple of clips form the Fox (ugh) broadcast; the clip from the 5th inning when they went to a retro 1950s-style TV picture complete with no color, two or three camera angles only, and primitive on-screen graphics was pretty neat.

But the best writeup of the game comes from Craig Calcaterra, with special kudos for the section he wrote on Reggie Jackson's appearance in the broadcast booth. Rather than pick some pullquotes, I'll just share the whole section here.

Reggie Jackson brings the truth

 

Reggie Jackson joined the Fox MLB panel before the Cards-Giants game at Rickwood Field last night. During his appearance Jackson, who played 114 games for the Oakland Athletics’ Southern League affiliate in Birmingham in 1967, was asked by Alex Rodriguez about his feelings upon returning to Rickwood. Jackson did not lean into any feel-good sentiments that Major League Baseball or Fox likely wanted to hear from him. And he did not hold back.

"Coming back here is not easy," Jackson said. "The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled. Fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody." Jackson then described about how he would be called the n-word and would be denied service at restaurants and hotels.

Jackson then said, that if it wasn’t for his teammates and coaches with the Birmingham A’s, things would’ve gotten even worse:

"Fortunately, I had a manager, in Johnny McNamara, that . . . if I couldn't eat in the place, nobody would eat. We would get food to travel. If I couldn't stay in a hotel, they'd drive to the next hotel and find a place where I could stay. Had it not been for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi . . . I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally, they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless I got out."

Jackson said that without McNamara and his teammates, "I would've [gotten] killed here, because I would've beat someone's ass." Watch:

I embedded that video because it’s the only full-length, embeddable one I could find that focused on this part of his appearance, but it bleeps out the N-words Reggie used. They aired live on Fox, however and, given how prone baseball and baseball fans are to sanitize history and nostalgia, it was important that they did.

Listening to Jackson speak, I was struck by two thoughts.

First: though baseball didn’t put too fine a point on it, the game at Rickwood Field replaced the Field of Dreams Game in Iowa on the schedule as a special, small ballpark event. Though the reasons for skipping Iowa this year had more to do with business and logistics than anything else, kudos to Major League Baseball for moving away from the synthetic, sanitized version of history — if one can even call what was essentially a 1980s movie tribute version of baseball “history” — and embracing real history that actually matters.

Second: Jackson was not describing life in the Negro Leagues or during the heart of the Jim Crow era. What he described took place twenty years after baseball was integrated, over a decade after de jure segregation was outlawed, three years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and two years after the Voting Rights Act was passed. It was a time when many who are reading these words were alive, some of whom were adults. Jackson himself was an active major leaguer into the late 1980s yet he faced the sort of bigotry and discrimination that many people in this country tend to casually assume was the stuff of ancient history if, indeed, they even acknowledge it ever happened.

And make no mistake, we’re at a point in American history where there are many people — including people in positions of power or who are seeking positions of power — who are actively trying to bring back the conditions Jackson described and who want to turn back the clock to before the Civil Rights Era began. Our Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and multiple state legislatures have passed laws forbidding the teaching or even the discussion of racism, institutional or otherwise, in public schools and universities. Republican politicians and activists have their eyes set on eliminating anti-discrimination laws and have, as both a matter of policy and rhetoric, embraced the notion of returning Blacks and other minorities to the status of second class citizenship. And they have done so shamelessly.

Indeed, just two weeks ago, Byron Donalds, a sitting Republican Congressman who is actively seeking to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, argued that things were better for Black people during the Jim Crow era:

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds said. “And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”

Donalds didn’t get caught on a hot mic saying this. He said it before a crowd at a Trump campaign event in Philadelphia. And not a single Republican of consequence, let alone the man at the top of the Republican ticket, offered a word of criticism or pushback.

We’re living in a perilous time. A time when a large number of Americans want to erase the racial and social progress we have realized over the past 50-60 years. Those efforts cannot be stopped by our ignoring them. They must be actively fought, and the first step in doing so is by reminding people of what actually happened in those times and calling bullshit on those who wish to distort history.

In light of that, kudos to Reggie Jackson for not holding back on his account of his own personal history. Kudos to him for not contributing to the sanitization of history at large. It’s only through plain and straightforward words like his that we can keep others from dragging us back to the dark ages which so many fought and so many died to help us escape.

Craig's newsletter, "Cup of Coffee," is free once a week and subscription only for the other four days he publishes.

Tagged Politics, Baseball, Republicans   |   Posted on June 21, 2024 at 3:22pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Quotes of the week

A few notes from over the last week or so. I'd been meaning to post longer bits about each of these, but time got away from me and, you know, there was stuff to do. Anyway, a few things I heard/read that deserve some repetition:

• "I don't care about you. I just want your vote."  This was former president Cheeto Hitler in a rare moment of honesty, talking to the crowd at his hate rally in Las Vegas. The man cares about nothing other than power for himself and becoming a U.S. incarnation of Kim Jong Un.
• "If the hood fits..."  So said David Ferguson on The Bob Cesca Show last Thursday. David was referring to Supreme Court "Justice" Samuel Alito's outrage, outrage! at being called a bigot. "I just can't with these people," Ferguson went on. "They're like, 'how dare you accuse us of being prejudiced! We just hate black people and queers.' I want to Psycho-shower these people."
• “He can’t stand for 90 minutes, but he’s 100% able to be President? Have fun explaining that.”  That was alleged Congressman Josh Hawley (MAGA-MO) criticizing President Biden, thinking that the format for next week's scheduled presidential debate will have the candidates seated at a table and that said format was demanded by the president. I seem to remember President Biden standing for a long address at the House of Representatives a couple months back without any trouble. And guess what—standing is not a requirement to be President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt held the gig for 12+ years without standing at all.
• "Time never applied to Willie Mays the way it applies to others. He is like a Kurt Vonnegut character, unstuck in time, everything, everywhere, all at once, simultaneously the Say Hey Kid playing stickball in the streets of New York and the wizard outrunning baseballs soaring toward the gap at Candlestick Park, and the slugger tearing into baseballs as if it is something personal, and the legend launching a million memories and making parents and grandparents feel like children."  That's Joe Posnanski, remembering the great Willie Mays, who died yesterday at age 93.
• And this, from satirist Andy Borowitz:
  
  THE OCEAN DEEP (The Borowitz Report)—Calling his longstanding fear of being devoured by them “delusional thinking at its saddest,” the world’s sharks issued a statement on Tuesday disavowing “any interest whatsoever” in eating Donald J. Trump.
     “Given his constant intake of Diet Coke and hamburgers, there is nothing to indicate that Trump would be anything resembling a nutritious meal,” the sharks’ statement read. “The very thought of biting into him is nauseating.”
     The sharks said that Trump’s anxiety about being eaten by them demonstrates “an inflated sense of his appeal, to say the least.”
     “We thought the same thing when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed he was eaten by a worm,” the sharks wrote. “Why do these narcissists think they’re so delicious?”
     In perhaps their most withering comment, the sharks concluded, “We might consider eating Trump if the only other thing on the menu was Steve Bannon.”

Tagged Politics, Baseball, SCOTUS, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on June 19, 2024 at 3:47pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

The Chicago way

The critical play in Monday night's Mariner win, from future manager Luke Raley

Whenever my Mariners season ticket group gets together for the preseason ticket draft, I scan the schedule for a home series against the Chicago White Sox to make sure I get at least one of those dates. This is because my friend Dave is a Chicago transplant and a Sox fan and it's become a sort of tradition for us to take in an M's/Sox game every year. Well, the White Sox are in town this week for a series against the host Seattle Mariners and I had my tickets, so off Dave and I went to the ballpark by Elliott Bay on this fine, almost-summery Monday evening.

For those that are not baseball followers, the White Sox this year are historically bad. They recently snapped a 14-game losing streak and figure to challenge the Major League record for most losses in a season, a dubious honor now held by the expansion 1962 New York Mets, who tallied 120 defeats against 40 wins (and two rainouts). Dave, of course, knows this, but even a lifelong fan like Dave has been hard-pressed to follow the hapless flailing of this year's Sox. When I mentioned that I hadn't heard of more than two or three guys in the White Sox' lineup, he could only recognize one or two others.

Yet, he was aware of the various ways the White Sox had lost games both last year and this year—including one by balking in the winning run in the 9th inning, one on a bogus interference call on an otherwise routine infield popup, another after their first-base coach went missing during a rain delay—and how they had lost many games that they had at one point been winning (24 so far this season). So despite the fact that Chicago had managed to get into the late innings with a 4-0 lead, he knew not to count any metaphorical chickens. "Whenever I see the Sox here," Dave said (paraphrasing), "the Mariners end up staging a late comeback."

The view from Section 327,  Josh Rojas at the plate

Sure enough, the Mariners, who had been utterly stymied by Chicago starting pitcher Erick Fedde (whom neither of us was familiar with), went to town on the Sox bullpen. Dominic Canzone, about whom I had earlier in the game said was going to have to pick things up if he didn't want to be optioned to Triple-A, led off the home 8th with a first-pitch laser-beam homer for the first Seattle run. That was the end of Fedde's night. Reliever Michael Kopech took over and promptly loaded the bases, but in tried and true Mariner fashion, the next two batters failed to score the easy RBI from 3rd by striking out. (The second of those batters, Cal Raleigh, objected strenuously to the strike three call—manager Scott Servais ran out of the dugout to keep Raleigh from doing anything to get ejected and was instead ejected himself—but it was a good pitch on the black according to MLB Gamecast.)

Chicago White Sox fan, 2024 edition

I thought the Sox were going to get out of it. Dave knew better.

Mitch Haniger followed Raleigh's K with a single to plate two, and then Luke Raley came up and delivered the best part of the entire game: a two-out, expertly-placed bunt single to score Josh Rojas from third and tie the score. Just brilliant. It was the third time this year I'd seen Raley bunt for a hit, and each time it was not a play dictated by the bench but a sharp exploitation of the opposing defense; I continue to be impressed by his skill at a facet of the game that has largely been forgotten in the 21st century. It was a thrilling dose of "Harr-ball" in a homer-happy world. (If Luke Raley decides to become a manager after his playing days, I bet he'd be quite good.)

It remained tied at four into the 9th, when the M's decided to once again "panic with Stanek"; the Seattle reliever did his typical tightrope walk, going deep into counts with some not-remotely-close-to-the-zone pitches and serving up a couple of hits, but managed to strike out the side and take the tie into the home 9th.

This was when Dave made a prediction. Based on the way the season has gone for the White Sox thus far, Dave predicted that the game would end when the Mariners load the bases, the batter works the count to 3-and-something, and the Sox pitcher is called for a pitchclock violation. Not just a walkoff walk, but a walkoff three-ball walk. It would be only fitting for the 2024 Chicago White Sox.

Rookie Ryan Bliss led off the Seattle 9th with a groundout. Then J.P. Crawford drew a walk. Then Josh Rojas walked. Then Julio Rodríguez singled to short left. The bases were loaded. Then Cal Raleigh came up and took ball one. Hm. Then Raleigh took ball two. I glanced over at Dave and called him Nostradamus. Which, of course, jinxed Dave's prediction as Raleigh crushed the next pitch deep into the night for a game-winning grand slam home run.

"Sorry we didn't get your walkoff pitchclock violation," I said. "But a walkoff slam is also appropriate, right?"

"I guess," came the reply. But it was wistful. I get it. Walkoff grand slams are unusual and exciting—and fun for the home crowd!—but they don't reek of bizarre. And the ’24 Sox need to stumble into as many bizarre ways to lose as possible on their way to 121+.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on June 11, 2024 at 2:56am   |   Permalink   |     |