Category: Sports

The Mariners Jekyll and Hyde Pitching Staff

By Blaidd Drwg

Once you get past Felix and Iwakuma, the Mariners starting rotation has been a lovely collection Jekyll & Hyde type pitchers, making them more than frustrating to watch. Don’t believe me, here is what you have to look forward to (stats as of Monday May 13th).

Joe Saunders – pitches like Steve Carlton at home and Steve Blass on the road. Saunders may have the ugliest platoon splits I have ever seen:

W-L GS ERA IP BB SO WHIP ERA BAA
Home 3-0 4 0.93 28.2 7 15 0.82 0.94 .180
Road 0-4 4 12.54 18.2 11 5 2.52 12.54 .424

Now I know it is early in the season and sample size issues still abound here, but if you watch this guy pitch, he looks like 2 completely different pitchers depending on the venue. Now I realize that both the home and road stats will regress to the mean, but it almost feels like Wedge needs to pitch someone else when they are on the road. That is how bad Saunders has looked in those 4 starts. Historically, Saunders was “not bad” at Safeco, which is why I am assuming they signed him, but I am not sure what is going wrong when his is on the road.

Brandon Maurer – pitches like Ricky Vaughn against right handed batters and Vaughn Eshelman against lefties. The guys over at USS Mariner had a good article about this recently. Here is the ugly truth:

AB/H 2B 3B HR BB SO BA OBP SLG
Vs RHB 70/17 4 0 2 3 17 .243 .303 .688
Vs LHB 67/24 7 1 5 7 5 .358 .419 1.135

It is not unusual to see a platoon split with a significant amount of variance for a pitcher against the opposite hand hitter, but this is pretty extreme. The issue, according to USSM is this:

Maurer has four pitches, but he’s primarily a fastball/slider guy. He throws his slider a lot, in fact. Among qualified starters, PITCHF/x only has three pitchers throwing more pitches classified as sliders than Brandon Maurer this year. As you probably know, the slider has the biggest platoon split of any pitch in baseball. There’s a reason every situational reliever in baseball throws a million sliders. It’s why the Mariners have a bullpen full of match-up guys who just come in and throw slider after slider.

The slider is not a good pitch to opposite handed hitters, but it’s great against same-handed hitters. Pitchers who throw a lot of sliders tend to have huge platoon splits. Brandon Maurer has huge platoon splits.

It is obvious Maurer has talent but he needs to learn how to get left handed hitters out at a somewhat better rate if he wants to be successful. The majors are not the place for that. He looks tentative against lefties when he pitches and I really think the Mariners need to do something about that before his confidence is completely shot and teams just stack their lineup with lefties when they face him.

Aaron Harang – well, now that I think about it, he has just plain sucked. If you want a positive spin on this, his ERA in April was 11.37 and in May it is 3.00. That should count for something.

Getting the Call Right

By Blaidd Drwg

What is up with the umpires in MLB right now? Two days last week involved just flat out terrible decisions by the crews involved. I have written about this before – things happen very quickly on a baseball field and calls can get missed or come out wrong. This I understand; the umpires are human and they make mistakes. My issue is when you incorrectly apply a rule or use the replay and still get it wrong.

In case you have been under a rock, here is what happened:

On May 8th in the 9th inning of the A’s-Indians game, Adam Rosales hit a shot to left center field that hit a railing behind the fence and was initially not ruled a home run. Bob Melvin immediately left the dugout and asked for a review, which he was given. Crew chief Angel Hernandez came back out a few minutes later and ruled it a double, even though it was clear to everyone – the players, fans and announcers that the ball did, in fact clear the wall. Well, everyone except the 3 umpires who looked at the replay. Melvin came back out to argue and summarily (and properly) was tossed from the game.

I happened to be watching the Red Sox get pounded by the Twins that evening and was only half paying attention to the TV when they cut into the game about the issue. I looked up at the replay, said, “home run” and immediately tuned back out what the commentators were saying.

My problem here is two-fold – Angel Hernandez made the situation worse by not making himself or the crew available after the game and MLB’s cop-out response to the issue. Hernandez is generally one of the worst umps in baseball and he did nothing to aid that perception by not only getting the call wrong but then not willing to face the music afterwards. At this point, Hernandez needs to be fired – he is horrible at his job and if it was any other profession in America, he probably would have been long gone. MLB’s response was worse:

By rule, the decision to reverse a call by use of instant replay is at the sole discretion of the crew chief. In the opinion of Angel Hernandez, who was last night’s crew chief, there was not clear and convincing evidence to overturn the decision on the field. It was a judgment call, and as such, it stands as final.

I don’t see how replay is a judgment call. This is MLB admitting that the call was wrong but not being willing to do anything about it. Unless Hernandez was looking at a replay from a different game or looking at it on a 13 inch black and white TV with crappy reception, I don’t see any way he could have gotten it wrong.

Here is a montage of the call from all 4 broadcasts – both radio and TV for the A’s and Indians. They all think it is a home run.

On May 9th, the Astros initiated a pitching change. Astros manager Bo Porter brought in Wesley Wright, who took a couple of warm up pitches before Porter came back out and replaced him with Hector Ambriz. Angels manager Mike Scioscia, who probably knows the rules of the game better than any manager, came out to argue that Wright could not come out of the game without facing one batter – Scioscia is right, any pitcher who enters a game needs to face one batter unless he is hurt before the batter is retired or reaches base (which did not appear to be the case here). This is basic rules 101 for umpires and one of the 4 umps on the field – Home Plate – Adrian Johnson, First Base – Fieldin Culbreth, Second Base – Brian O’Nora, Third Base – Bill Welke, should have realized this or at least looked it up if they were not sure. This is a pretty good crew, so it is more inexcusable that they would have botched such a straight forward call.

The Mariners and the Merry Month of May

By Blaidd Drwg

This may be the worst scheduling job in the history of sports. Take a look at the Mariners schedule for the past few weeks:

April 29th – May 1st – at home
….fine so far

May 2nd – off day
May 3rd – May 5th – at Toronto
…ok an East Coast swing

May 6th – off day
May 7th – May 8th – at Pittsburgh
…the off day after a 3 game set is odd, and I hate the 2 game series, but what can you do.

May 9th – off day
…oh look, another off day. 3 off days in one week. Remember this for later.

May 10th – May 12th – at home
…really, a 5 game East Coast road trip? WTF.

May 13th – off day
…another $#@#^@ off day!!!????

May 14th – May 16th – at New York
…another $%&#^@$*(&@#@ East Coast trip?????? How drunk were the schedule makers when they did this.

May 17th – May 20th – at Cleveland
…yeay, a 4 game set against the Indians, with 3 day games.

May 21st – May 22nd – at Los Angeles
…really? No off day, fly to LA and play 2 games.

May 23rd – off day
…you put the $@%&&@$ off day in the wrong spot you $@&$@#^ idiots.

May 24th – May 28th – back home.

The M’s enter a stretch where they play on 20 consecutive days starting on May 24th. Granted 15 of those are home games, but still, it feels like the schedule makers were on something when they came up with this. I give up. I know that there are a lot of moving parts in schedule making, but that is just crazy.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to Wembley

By Blaidd Drwg

I had given serious thought to doing a post on the NBA and Seattle or even the first active gay athlete in major professional sports in the US, but then I decided that, based on the happenings in the Champions League, that would be a more interesting post.

Will Bayern Munich be celebrating in Wembley Stadium at the end of the month? Only time will tell. Photo Credit: espn.com
Will Bayern Munich be celebrating in Wembley Stadium at the end of the month? Only time will tell.
Photo Credit: espn.com

If you are not familiar with the Champions League, it is basically the World Series of European Club soccer. Each season, the top teams from all of the major leagues go through several rounds of games until one team is left standing and is crowned champions. This year, the semi-finals ended up with 2 Germany vs. Spain matchups with Bayern Munich squaring off versus Barcelona and Dortmund squaring off against Real Madrid.

If you follow European soccer at all, you know that Bayern, Barca and Real are considered to be 3 of the absolute best in the world. If you had asked me at the start of the semis who would advance, I would have put my money on Bayern and Real. It is a good thing that I did not.

Dortmund did not have the world’s toughest (or smoothest) path to the semis, although they did manage to make it through the group stage besting both Ajax and Manchester City. They knocked off Shakhtar Donetsk in the round of 16 and barely got by Malaga in the quarter finals with 2 goals after the 90 minute mark in the second leg of their bout. If they would not have scored the second goal, Malaga would have advanced to the semis instead. Malaga and Shakhtar are both good teams, but not elite, so the expectation was going to be that Real would destroy Dortmund.

A funny thing happened on the way to the finals. In the first leg of Dortmund-Real series, Dortmund lit up an overmatched Real team to the tune of 4-1 with all 4 goals coming from one player – Robert Lewandowski. Real did not roll over and play dead in the second leg, scoring 2 goals in the last 10 minutes to take a 2-0 lead. Dortmund survived a furious onslaught at the end of the game and did not give up any more goals (a 3-0 Real win would have put them through to the finals) to advance to the finals.

Bayern, on the other hand, is on fire. They crushed Juventus in the quarter finals 4-0 aggregate and then utterly destroyed Barca 7(!)-0 aggregate in the semis. Keep in mind that Barca is the team with Lionel Messi, the goal scoring machine who is considered to be the best player on the planet right now. To beat the best club in Italy AND the best club in Spain is difficult at best. To destroy and dominate those two teams is virtually impossible.

If I were a betting man on the finals, how would I bet? Bayern has a 2-0-1 record against Dortmund this season and is 20 points up on them in the Bundesliga with 3 games to go. They do have one more game to play head-to-head on Saturday, but I suspect that Bayern won’t be playing most of their regular players. Bayern is on fire and going to be a heavy favorite on May 25th at Wembley Stadium and that is probably who I would put my money on. But a funny thing happened on the road to Wembley…

Bracket Of Peril Winner Is Annie S!

by A.J. Coltrane

Annie S. has won the Cheap Seat Eats Bracket Of Peril!

Annie correctly picked Louisville as the winner. The big bracket buster was Wichita State, which in retrospect maybe shouldn’t have been a shock — they lost to a very good Creighton team in their conference tournament prior to the big dance.

She wins these things all the time, so this win was a surprise to exactly NOBODY who knows her.

Your big prize of nothing is in the mail! Congratulations Annie!

—

Bill Cosby, the 2nd side of “Why Is There Air?” The Midol bit starts at 7:40, and his Temple Football bit starts at 11:57. If you listen to the Temple Football bit you’ll hear something that I quote fairly frequently…

March Showers Bring April Flowers*…

By Blaidd Drwg

Or do they?

Remember back a few weeks ago when I posted about the Mariners spring training stats and why you should not get excited about them. Well, 3 weeks into the season, the Mariners are 14th in the AL in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging. Remember when Brandon Maurer made the team with a nifty 1.50 ERA in the desert? He is currently sporting a 9.94 ERA in the bigs. Exactly why you don’t get excited about spring stats.

Rob Neyer wrote an interesting article about this very subject concerning Red Sox prospect Jackie Bradley Jr. It is a good read, but he has a great piece of wisdom about baseball’s March numbers:

Spring-training statistics are a lot of fun, but they’re merely a snapshot in time, and they describe the random nature of raw performance statistics as much as they describe fundamental abilities.

Basically making an assumption about how a player will perform over a season is about as useful as pulling a random block of 60 at-bats to do the same.

 

* I know that is not the saying, but it makes my point so I am going with it

Tourney Wrapup II — The 3 Point Shooting Teams

By A.J. Coltrane

For purposes of Vegas/March Madness this year I thought it might be helpful to consider how 3-point dependent individual teams were during the regular season. Some of that screwing around was discussed in this post.

Below are the top 10 teams in what I called “Vol” (for volatility) in that post. Below it’s called 3DEP (3 point dependency), which is what I’ll stick with going forward. 3DEP is simply 3 point percentage (x) % of 3 pointers attempted. At least in theory these ten teams rely upon the 3-pointer for a large percentage of their offense, so I’d kind of expect their performances to be very “up and down”. (To have a wider than usual deviation in their level of performance.) If the 3-pointer abandoned them, they were screwed. The flipside is that maybe they can get hot and beat a better team.

Look what happened in the game that knocked them out of the tournament:

Team (Seed) 3DEP 3P% 2P% 3PA% 3P% in Loss 2P% in Loss
Creighton 7 1667 42.1 56.4 39.6 10.5 41.2
Iowa St. 10 1624 37 52.1 43.9 48.0 40.7
Florida 3 1539 38.1 54.9 40.4 20.0 45.7
Valparaiso 14 1493 37.5 56.1 39.8 28.0 41.4
Belmont 11 1485 37.6 57.1 39.5 29.6 50.0
SD St 13 1434 39.4 50.3 36.4 34.8 50.0
St. Mary’s 11 1421 37.3 53.2 38.1 20.0 37.2
Davidson 14 1409 36.6 52.2 38.5 35.3 44.8
Arizona 6 1376 36.3 50.3 37.9 33.3 50.0
Boise St. 13 1362 38.7 48.2 35.2 38.9 54.3
Total 38.1 53.1 38.9 31.0 45.4

Well, duh. They didn’t shoot well and they lost the game. They didn’t shoot well from 2 either. I’m sure that happened to a lot of the losers, regardless of how many 3’s they attempted. If something hadn’t gone wrong they’d still be playing. We don’t really learn anything from that.

Continuing to mess with data though — as a group those are some low seeds — 7 of the 10 teams are double digit seeds. They’d all be underdogs starting with their first game. Look at when they got knocked out of the tournament:

Team (Seed) Lost To Round?
Creighton 7 Duke Round of 32
Iowa St. 10 Ohio St Round of 32
Florida 3 Michigan Elite 8
Valparaiso 14 Michigan St Round of 64
Belmont 11 Arizona Round of 64
SD St 13 FGCU Round of 32
St. Mary’s 11 Memphis Round of 64
Davidson 14 Marquette Round of 64
Arizona 6 Ohio St Sweet 16
Boise St. 13 La Salle Play In

In aggregate the underdogs went 2-4 in their first “real” game (St Mary’s won their play-in game.) Given a fat enough money line of between +150 and +200,  maybe they’d be worth betting on. Hmm…

Here’s 2012:

2012 Team 3P% 3PA% 3DEP Round?
Florida 7 38.0 44.6 1695 Elite 8
Vanderbilt 5 38.8 41.2 1599 Round 32
Iowa St. 8 37.3 41.6 1552 Round 32
Belmont 14 38.1 40.1 1528 Round 64
Wisconsin 4 36.8 41.3 1520 Sweet 16
Missouri 2 39.8 37.9 1508 Round 64
Creighton 8 42.4 35.0 1484 Round 32
South Dakota St. 14 39.0 37.8 1474 Round 64
Duke 2 37.1 38.6 1432 Round 64
Nevada Las Vegas 6 36.7 38.9 1428 Round 64

Note the two upsets — both the #2 seeds lost. Is that useful? Maybe. But I am taking a note on it for later.

As far as the underdogs:  This year there were only two. And they both lost their first game. Our underdogs are now 2-6.

One more year. Here’s 2011:

2011 Team 3P% 3PA% 3DEP Round?
Belmont 13 37.8 42.3 1599 Round 64
Wisconsin 4 37.4 41.2 1541 Sweet 16
Virginia Commonwealth 11 37.0 41.2 1524 Final Four
Michigan 8 35.3 43.0 1518 Round 32
Northern Colorado 15 38.3 39.4 1509 Round 64
Notre Dame 2 38.6 38.6 1490 Round 32
Louisville 4 36.2 40.8 1477 Round 64
Arizona 5 39.7 36.1 1433 Elite 8
Richmond 12 39.0 36.6 1427 Sweet 16
Boston University 16 35.5 40.1 1424 Round 64

I wouldn’t bet a 16 seed to beat a one seed regardless, so we’re tossing that one out. That leaves four teams who combined to go 2-2 in their first game.  All three years combined for 4-6 (not counting St. Mary’s play-in game).

If we restrict it to only the #10, #11, and #12 seeds the record is 3-2. Maybe there’s something there. I may have to do more digging. Coincidentally, my only money-line bet this year was on #12 seed Oregon at +160, and that one worked out. But Oregon didn’t rely on 3’s — they were 138th out of 150 during the regular season…

The never-ending quest for an angle continues.

The 2013 Houston Astros

By Iron Chef Leftovers

The Astros are horrible. If you think I am exaggerating, Vegas had a closing line of 58 wins for them for the 2013 season. That translates into a 104 loss season. How bad is that? Well it would actually be an improvement over their last 2 seasons in which they lost 106 and 107 games. After seeing them play, I would be surprised if they don’t lose 110 games this season.

So much was made of the dismantling of the Florida Miami Marlins that the Astros managed to take their team apart with no one noticing. They traded just about everyone making more than a few bucks an hour and left themselves with a payroll of somewhere around $25 million for the season. Or, to put it in perspective, less than what the Yankees are paying Arod not be on the DL. Their “highest” paid player isn’t even on their roster – they are paying 5 million to Wandy Rodriguez, who is currently pitching in Pittsburgh. The only 2 guys that are making more than 2 million are Bud Norris (who is actually their “best” pitcher) and Carlos Pena (who will be gone by May the way he is swinging the bat), and they are both making about 3 million for the season.

This is a team that can’t hit and can’t pitch – they went into the season with Jose Veras as their closer, a guy described by Dave Schoenfield as:

Might not get a save opportunity until May

30. Jose Veras, Astros.
Now 32, he’s pitched for the Yankees, Indians, Marlins, Pirates and Brewers and has five career saves.

Before becoming a closer: The Brewers had the worst bullpen in the majors last year and even they didn’t want him back.

In their recent game against the Mariners (in the M’s home opener), their #4 hitter came out of the game. We had to look up who it was since none of us could actually name him. Here is the lineup they used:

Jose Altuve 2B
Justin Maxwell CF
Chris Carter DH
J.D. Martinez LF
Rick Ankiel RF
Carlos Pena 1B
Matt Dominguez 3B
Jason Castro C
Brandon Barnes RF-LF
Ronny Cedeno SS

If that lineup doesn’t scream “110 losses, here we come!” I am not sure what would.

The Slugging Houston Astros

By Blaidd Drwg

How bad did it get for the Mariners Tuesday night? Well they lost to Houston 16-9:  This is the  same Astros team that had not won since opening day and in their previous 7 games racked up these overwhelming totals:

Runs – 17
Home Runs – 2
Walks – 10
Hits – 46

So of course, Tuesday they hang 16 Runs, 5 Home Runs, 6 Walks and 22 Hits on Mariners pitchers. I have an upcoming post on just how bad Houston actually is, so check that out tomorrow.

The M’s also drew a stellar 10,700 for a game that was played on a nice evening, which was right about what I figured they would draw for the game, although I am sure that the number of people who showed up was far less.

In the meantime, I think that young Brandon Mauer may have just pitched himself back to Tacoma, as he gave up 6 runs in just 2/3 of an inning in his second start. After sporting a nifty 1.50 ERA during spring training, he now has an ugly 16.20 ERA in real games. This is why I put no faith in spring training numbers. He is 23, so I think it is time to send him down and bring someone else up before his confidence is completely destroyed. My guess is that Jeremy Bonderman is called up to fill the spot until May when we see Danny Hultzen make his debut.