By Blaidd Drwg

It wasn’t too long ago that Eric Wedge announced that Danny Hultzen, he of 0 minor league innings, was going to get a shot at the rotation, along with the other Mariners pitching prospects (or if you prefer, the Mariners TNSTAAPP – There’s no such thing as a pitching prospect). Well, with the exception of Ersamo Ramirez, who appears still has a shot of making the team out of spring training, Hultzen, Walker and Paxton all have been sent to the minor league camp. It makes sense, considering all that has happened since Wedge made the announcement that the prospects were going to compete in November:

• The M’s retained Hernandez, Pineda and Vargas, so there were really only 2 spots in the rotation open
• The M’s retained Beavan and Furbush, so there were already 2 competitors for those rotation slots.
• M’s trade Michael Pineda for Hector Noesi.
• The M’s sign Kevin Millwood and Hishahi Iwakuma.

I have a feeling that Noesi is considered a guaranteed slot in the rotation, so there are still only 2 slots open. I believe Iwakuma was effectively guaranteed a spot in the rotation so that leaves one open spot. Millwood is on a MiLB deal, so he is competing for the final spot in the rotation.

Based on that you have 4 prospects, 2 returning starters and a free agent competing for the last spot in the rotation. This means it shouldn’t be a real surprise that Hultzen, Walker and Paxton were all sent down after pitching just one MLB game this spring. I fully expect to see Ramirez sent down soon and ultimately Millwood named the 5th starter with Furbush and Beavan the first two candidates to replace anyone in the rotation. I really don’t see any of the young arms cracking the rotation until at least mid-2013, if not 2014 at the earliest.

Note – I wrote this before Wedge announced that the M’s rotation would be Felix, Vargas, Noesi, Beavan and Millwood. I would also be willing to bet that Millwood will be out of the rotation by June and replaced by Iwakuma. Either way, barring some major trade or catastrophe, I think you won’t see Hultzen in a Mariners uniform until 2013 at the earliest.

By Blaidd Drwg

The new ‘aggressiveness’ for the Mariners at the plate is really paying off – in terms of inflating the opponents strikeout totals.

Here are the last 7 Mariners games I attended with the gritty details:

This final stretch of M’s games that I will be at this season started off with a legit 7-3 win. They pounded one of the worst pitching staffs in baseball for 15 hits and 7 runs as they should have, so I could forgive the 12 K’s with only 2 walks. I also got to see Alex Liddi’s first MLB hit and the pitching debut of Steve Delabar, so it was all good. The wheels just came off after that – the next 2 games against the Royals were a disaster, making their mediocre pitching staff look like the Phillies  with the Mariners offense producing just 3 runs on 9 hits, 1 walk (!!!) and 28 strikeouts(!!!!!!).

Things went from bad to worse against the Yankees as the M’s had AJ Burnett on the ropes early, but couldn’t put him away. There was a lot of swinging and missing that night for the Mariners as they managed to strike out more times than I have ever seen one team strike out in a single 9 inning game.  On the flip side, I did get to see Mariano Rivera’s 600^th save, so something could be said for that game.

The Rangers series wasn’t as bad, but the one win was ugly (probably would have been a 1-0 game if Ian Kinsler had not made a bad throw on what was a routine ground ball that should have ended the inning or if the routine bouncer up the middle 2 batters later had not bounced off the bag keeping the inning going), but it guaranteed that they would not lose 100 games this season.

This offensively may be the worst seven game stretch I have seen 12 walks and 93 strikeouts is not a winning formula in any way. It also goes a long way to explaining the attendance in some of those games – the game on the 13^th against the Yankees had a whopping 18,306 show up while the weekend games against the Mariners drew 22,000 for fan appreciation night on Saturday and 21,000 for kids appreciation day on Sunday, although the Sunday game felt a lot emptier than that.

By Blaidd Drwg

Eric Wedge did something the other day that frustrated me to no end. Leading 1-0 in the 8th inning against the Angels, Charlie Furbush was cruising; he had given up a couple of hits and had only thrown 82 pitches. Furbush got the first hitter, Mike Trout, to fly out on a drive to center. The next hitter is where the wheels started to come off. To protect against the bunt, Wedge moved 3B Alex Liddi in on the grass and practically right on the line. Eric Aybar hit a shot that would have been a routine ground ball to 3B had Liddi been playing back, but instead it went by him and was fielded by Brendan Ryan, running away from first base, with no chance of getting Aybar.

Then things went really wrong. Maybe Furbush got too preoccupied with the runner, but he suddenly couldn’t find the strike zone. The second pitch to pinch hitter Alberto Callaspo ended up in the dirt and to the backstop because of a half-hearted attempt on a backhand stop by Miguel Olivo (he didn’t even move to try to get his body in front of the ball to block it). Needless to say, two more pitches that were not even close put Callaspo on first. The Mariners had Tom Wilhelmsen ready to go in the pen.

At this point, I probably would have at least sent the pitching coach out there to calm down Furbush – he really missed badly on balls 3 and 4, but the Mariners chose not to. This brought up Macier Izturus. Furbush again missed badly with his first two pitches and at this point he is looking like he had nothing left and I am practically yelling at the TV for Wedge to get out there and talk to him, if not take him out of the game. Heck, Olivo should have gone out there to talk to him. The young kid has just threw 6 pitches in a row that were nowhere close to being strikes and he looked like he was out of gas, so I am sure in his head he was thinking, “I have to throw a strike,” which he did, right down the middle of the plate, which Izturus smacked up the gap for a 2 run double and the lead, ending the night for Charlie Furbush.

I am not saying that going out to the mound would have made a difference, but leaving the kid out there to make the mistake he did was a terrible move by Wedge, and people wonder why this team is 20+ games under .500. My other question for Wedge – why are you playing Brendan Ryan and Willy Mo Pena? At this point, let the kids play and see if you might have some guys who can help next year. Pena and Ryan will probably not even be Mariners next season, so why bother.

On a side note, the Mariners inept offense was held to one hit by Jerome Williams, a 29 year old former prospect who was out of professional baseball for 3 years prior to this season.

By Blaidd Drwg

The Mariners finally showed some signs of life today by beating the Yankees 9-2. It must be an embarrassing day to be a Yankees fan, not only losing to a team that hadn’t won a game since before the All Star break, but giving up 9 runs to the worst offense of the last 50 years in the process.

Sadly, this won’t even be the lead story on Sportscenter, since Ervin Santana had to go out and throw a no-hitter. It was a strange game – Santana allowed only 2 base runners, the leadoff hitter who reached on an error, stole second, was moved over to third on a ground out and scored on a wild pitch, giving the Indians a 1-0 lead and an 8th inning walk. The Indians also managed to commit 5 errors in the game leading to the wonderful final line of 1 – 0 – 5.

Also pushing the Mariners off the lead will be the impending trade of Carlos Beltran to the Giants and the trade of Edwin Jackson to the Cardinals by way of the Blue Jays.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program already in progress

By Blaidd Drwg

The Kyle Seager experience is over for now as he was shipped back to Tacoma. Seager managed to actually be worse than Chone Figgins in his 22 MLB at bats, posting a whopping .136 BA with no extra base hits and 7 strikeouts. It should have been worse – he had an infield single against Texas that was scored a hit that really should have been an error. You know you are off to a bad start when Chone Figgins looks like a better option; heck I think Bob Seger might have been a better choice at 3B for the Mariners.

I know that the Mariners were trying to catch lightning in a bottle when they called Seager up from his hot start in Tacoma, but what made them think that a guy with 60 PA in AAA was ready for the big club?

In other Mariners news, it seems the never-ending LF tryouts has moved from Bradley to Saunders to Peguero to Halman and now to Carp. Good luck to Carp – you probably have about 100 AB to figure out if you can hit your weight.

By Blaidd Drwg

That is the question. I decided to take a look to see how much of a home road split there has been for the Mariners over the last few seasons; seasons that are stringing together one of the most inept offensive streaks in baseball history (we are talking dead ball era bad).

The first thing I noticed today was the park factor for Safeco this season is 100, which means that the most historically pitcher friendly park in the league is playing neutral this season, which is a huge surprise. Here are the splits for the Mariners between home and road over the last few seasons:

I picked 2004 as the starting point for this since that was the year I became a season ticket holder (has it really been that long) and I wanted to see if my memories of these teams fit the reality of the numbers. Looking at these numbers, the team was pretty consistent between 2004 and 2009 – they were about 12 – 17 % below league average hitting at home and hovering right around league average on the road, then they fall off a cliff offensively; interestingly enough in years 2 and 3 of the Z-era (he can’t take any credit or blame for year 1, those were mostly Bavasi’s players). The numbers indicate that there is a significant enough split between the home and road stats that maybe the Mariners should consider moving the fences in a few feet to try to generate more offense, although I doubt that it would at all help the current offense – they just can’t hit regardless of where they play. I also think that the honeymoon period for Z is long over – he came to Seattle with the reputation of being a great evaluator of talent. His Evaluation has driven the Mariners offense directly into the ground and produced a season and a half of the worst offense since WW2.

To answer the question, should the fences come in, I would say yes!