By Blaidd Drwg

On March 14^th, I made my prediction about the Mariners 2010 season:

I am skeptical about 2010 Mariners team. They downgraded their offense, so 640 runs in 2010 might be a stretch, they still have too many free swingers in the lineup, and I am not sure that the pitching (starting and relieving beyond Lee and Felix) will repeat their 2009 performances. My prediction – 77 to 80 wins for this team IF Felix and Lee are healthy and pitch a full season with the team.

Well, Felix has been health (and quite dominant over the last 2 months) and Lee, well, we know what happened to him. The Mariners have played slightly more than half a season, and currently sit in 4^th with a winning percentage of .398 and a 35-53 record. Not quite the season that most pundits expected. Without Lee, I would revise my final estimate for the Mariners win total to be between 66 and 70 wins, which would mean the Mariners would need to win at about a 42% clip. Do I think this team is better without Lee that they would be able to win more regularly than with him – not at all? This is simple case of regression to the mean – it is hard to maintain a very below average place with an average team.

Let’s break down my statements.

Offense – I said that they would be lucky to score 640 runs this season. That total means they need to average about 3.95 runs per game. Through 88 games in 2010, the Mariners have scored 298 runs an average of 3.38 per game – a pretty significant difference. Even with improvement that generally comes with the weather warming up, I just don’t see this team averaging 4.62 runs a game the rest of the way. I would say that I called this one.

Starting Pitching – I thought this would be a no brainer – you added Lee, but you still had Rowland-Smith, Vargas and Snell in the rotation (not to mention Fister), none of whom I thought would be anywhere close to their 2009 numbers. I was somewhat right on this:

			2009					2010
	W-L	ERA	WHIP	K/9	ERA+		W-L	ERA	K/9	WHIP	ERA+
R-S	5-4	3.74	1.18	4.9	116		1-9	5.89	3.4	1.64	70
Vargas	3-6	4.91	1.33	5.3	89		6-4	3.09	5.7	1.19	133
Snell	5-2	4.20	1.55	5.2	104		0-5	6.41	5.1	1.84	64
Fister	3-4	4.13	1.28	5.3	105		3-4	3.09	4.2	1.07	133

Rowland-Smith has been a disaster and Snell is in Tacoma. Fister started off hot and has turned back into a pumpkin in his last 4 starts, posting an ERA over 6. Vargas has been a nice surprise – he might actually be living up to the potential that made him a top prospect for the Marlins a few years ago. With a rotation of Felix, Vargas, Rowland-Smith, Fister and (maybe) Bedard, I think this team will be hard pressed to match the starting pitching stats from last season. There are too many guys who don’t make batters swing and miss in this rotation.

Relief Pitching – Relief pitching is notoriously hard to predict year over year. In 2009, you had a bullpen that had a guy who had been terrible over his entire career suddenly find himself (Aardsma), a couple of young guys pitch much better than expected (Lowe and Kelley) a soft-tosser who was strangely tough to get hits off (White) and a washed up started who found himself (Batista). Not really a recipe for long-term success. Z did essentially replace Batista with League (a good move I thought), but did nothing else to upgrade the pen. Well, 2010 has not been as kind to these guys:

			2009						2010
	W-L	BS%	IRS%	WHIP	ERA+		W-L	BS%	IRS%	WHIP	ERA+
Aardsma	3-6	10%	0%	1.16	172		0-6	20%	0%	1.34	77
Lowe	2-7	77%	31%	1.25	133		1-3	—	0%	1.55	122
Kelley	5-4	100%	40%	1.17	97		3-1	—	36%	1.52	105
White	3-2	67%	27%	1.08	156		0-0	100%	39%	2.91	61
Batista/  League	7-4	80%	67%	1.65	108		5-6	71%	40%	1.26	107

Note – BS% is the percentage of save opportunities blown by a pitcher and IRS% is the percentage of Inherited Runners that a reliever allowed to score.

The bullpen in 2009 was horrible at keeping inherited runners from scoring and blew a bunch of leads but did manage to keep the hitters they faced off base and were bailed out by the offense when they blew the lead. In 2010, none of those apply. The bullpen has been a mess – Lowe was bad, then got hurt, and then got traded. Aardsma regressed, and Kelley and White have been horrible (and pitching closer to what I think their career norms would be). As much maligned as League has been, he has actually been one of the few bright spots in the pen, but he runs the risk of being horribly overworked. Don’t be surprised if he is the closer for 2011. Overall, the relief corps has been much worse in 2010 than in 2009, so I would say I called this one.

On a side note – something interesting about Aardsma – at no point in the 2009 did he come into a game before the 9^th inning and only twice did he come into a game with runners on base. Might be worth looking at how Wak uses his pitchers.

Fielding – Didn’t really make a statement on this, but the defense has been good, just not as good as 2009 (the Sunday game non-withstanding). The M’s defense was +91 runs better than average in 2009 and has been 27 runs better than average in 2010. Still pretty good, but not great like last season.

To summarize: Nobody likes an “I told you so,” but I told you so.

By Blaidd Drwg

In Saturday’s pitching matchup between Felix Hernandez and Javier Vazquez, both pitchers had the exact same pitch distribution after their 99th pitch – 33 balls, 66 strikes. It is always neat to see 33 66 99 on the pitch count board, really cool to see it twice in one game.

By Blaidd Drwg

According to ESPN, it seems like New York is the likely destination for Cliff Lee. If that is the case, I would expect him to be pulled from tonight’s start against the Yankees sometime before the game. If that deal falls through and his destination is elsewhere, I suspect he will pitch tonight.

Either way, hang onto your hats folks!

Updated 3:15 PM – It is official, Cliff Lee is no longer a Mariner. He is headed to Texas with Mark Lowe and Cash for Justin Smoak and 3 minor leaguers.