Disclaimer: This is purely speculation on my part.
Somehow I missed this in the daily transaction report on Saturday:
Seattle: Optioned RHP Hector Noesi to Tacoma (PCL). Recalled RHP Brandon Maurer from Tacoma.
I thought that was a little strange – replacing a back of the bullpen guy with a guy who has potential to be a decent MLB starter. I thought it might be that the M’s needed a long guy because Noesi had seen a bunch of action, but that was not the case. Noesi last pitched 2 1/3 innings on July 24th. Maurer last started on July 24th – then it occurred to me why this move might have been made. The M’s are on an East Coast swing. The trading deadline is Wednesday. They have Joe Saunders scheduled to go tomorrow. I would bet dollars to donuts that the M’s are actively shopping Saunders and will yank him from his start if they end up with a deal in place. Maurer is the insurance policy – if they make a deal, Maurer starts. If not, I bet he goes back to Tacoma on Wednesday.
We are just days away from the trading deadline and the question for teams on the fringe of contention is “to sell or not to sell?” Basically, do we trade our fringy marginal veterans to a team in contention for something more than a bag of warm peanuts.
The Mariners are one of those teams; they currently sit 11 games back of the A’s for the division lead and 8.5 games back of Baltimore for the wild card. While teams have come back from further out, the odds are highly unlikely (ESPN has the M’s playoff chances as 1.1%). Considering a heavily negative run differential – only two teams have a worse differential in the AL: Houston and Chicago, I think it is time to sell. What do the Mariners have to sell though? Really not a ton. You don’t want to move any of your young guys, so Ackley, Ramirez, Franklin, Miller, Zunino, Smoak, Seager and Saunders are off the table. Felix is pretty much untradeable because of his contract. So who does that leave? Here are the most likely candidates:
Kendrys Morales – he is a free agent at the end of the season, so he is a likely candidate. He is having a good, not great season and plays marginal defense, which probably means he heads to an AL team as a DH. I would guess he is going to end up in Tampa, Cleveland or New York and they will probably be able to get major league ready talent for him.
Raul Ibanez – he seems to have found the fountain of youth, but he is 41 and I doubt that he can sustain his home run prowess for too much longer. He is a terrible defender and teams constantly take advantage of his weak arm. His defense is so bad, that he has virtually negated his offensive WAR value – baseball-reference.com has him at 2.2 oWAR and -1.5 dWAR. He is a nice story but not a long-term benefit to the team. This is the classic case of buy low-sell high. His likely destination is the same list as Morales.
Brendan Ryan – he can’t hit but he does have great value as a late-inning defensive replacement, so the M’s could probably flip him for a grade-C prospect at this point.
Endy Chavez – He can neither hit nor field and is at best a 4th OFer, but he keeps sticking around the majors for no good reason. The M’s can probably get a warm body for him.
Joe Saunders/Aaron Harang – they are both the kind of pitchers that tend to get traded at the deadline; back of the rotation guys who teams are willing to overpay for because they want a veteran back of the rotation guy down the stretch run.
The Entire Bullpen – yep, I would move any of these guys because, frankly, relievers are a fungible commodity, but your most likely candidates are Oliver Perez (love those lefties) and Tom Wilhelmsen.
Buster Onley seems to disagree:
The chief officers of those franchises must assess what surrendering in July would signal to the fan bases, because once the Royals trade Ervin Santana, or the Mariners trade Raul Ibanez and Kendrys Morales, that means they’re telling their fans that they’re willing to give up any chance of a comeback, and they’ll see the evidence in the attendance.
—
Teams that sell off in July are telling their customer base: We don’t have any chance.
That’s a hard thing to sell for the Royals, who haven’t been in a postseason since 1985, or the Mariners, who have been almost irrelevant for the past decade and seem to be building something in the past month. Keep that in mind over the next six days, as you scratch your head about some decisions that confuse you.
Well, I am not sure that you would actually see it in the Mariners attendance if they traded any of their veterans. Let’s face it, people are not coming out to the park to see Raul Ibanez or Kendrys Morales and you are not going to get an attendance boost because Saunders or Harang are on the mound (but you probably would get a boost from their potential replacements on the mound – Taijuan Walker or Danny Hultzen). I don’t necessarily trust the Mariners attendance figures, since they go by tickets sold and not butts in the seats (and there are a good number of season ticket holders that don’t show up for the game) but they haven’t exactly been going gangbusters with their attendance, drawing just a shade under 22,000 per game and they have yet to sell out a game this season (although I do believe they have officially sold out the game on August 10th). Heck, they never topped 26,000 in any game against the Red Sox in July, and the majority of fans in attendance that series were in Red Sox gear. Here is a nice scatter chart of their attendance this season:
It has been a while since we have had a graph on the blog.
In case you care, here is what the attendance looks like based on the day of the week:
Day of the Week
Avg Attendance
Sunday
25,613
Monday
19,640
Tuesday
14,853
Wednesday
17,475
Thursday
19,160
Friday
24,538
Saturday
30,814
What will cause the attendance to decline isn’t the team signaling it has given up, it is the same thing that it is every year – the team just isn’t that good and will fall completely out of contention, meaning that 5,000 people will show up for the weeknight games in September.
Jeremy Bonderman is a nice story this season because he is coming back from about a dozen surgeries. That story is now unfortunatly finished as the M’s DFA’ed him today and called up Lucas Luetge.
The M’s need a starter for Thursday. My guess is that they will call up Erasmo Ramirez for the rotation slot. You can bet that if it is Taijuan Walker, Blaidd Drwg will be playing hookey to go to the game.
Jeremy Bonderman is a nice story this season because he is coming back from about a dozen surgeries. That story is now unfortunatly finished as the M’s DFA’ed him today and called up Lucas Luetge.
The M’s need a starter for Thursday. My guess is that they will call up Erasmo Ramirez for the rotation slot. You can bet that if it is Taijuan Walker, Blaidd Drwg will be playing hookey to go to the game.
What looking down the barrel of a loaded gun is like.
It is somewhat rare for a player to call it a career while still performing at a high level. Mariano Rivera is a player who is doing just that. Mo is hanging it up after the season. He is going to be 44 in November and has decided it is time to spend more time with his family. Mo should end up his career with 1100+ appearances, 650+ saves, an ERA around 2.25 and a WHIP around 1, not to mention that he is arguably the greatest post season pitcher in MLB history. In 2018, you should be hearing Mariano Rivera’s name called at the podium in Cooperstown.
How good has Mo been in his age 43 season? How about 28 saves, 8.3 K/9 Innings, 4.83 K/BB ratio and a 1.44 ERA. Granted, his WHIP is 1.21 (which would be the highest of his career as a closer), but the guy is still one of a handful of guys I would want on the mound with the game on the line.
A few weeks ago, the Yankees were in town for their only time this season. Mo entered the game in the bottom of the 9th on the last game of the series, giving everyone one last chance to see him. This fact was not lost on several people sitting in my section – people who are Mariners season ticket holder and fans. There were several of us who gave Mo a standing ovation as he entered into the game, giving him the proper recognition he deserves. I couldn’t possibly dislike any team more than the Yankees, but Rivera has been something special for the better part of 2 decades and that needs to be recognized.
I decided to snap the picture in this post, trying to catch the delivery. The batter? Another old geezer – Raul Ibanez who is also north of 40. It is not every day in baseball that you get to see 2 40 year olds square off at the plate.
I am convinced that there is something wrong (an injury perhaps) with both Felix Hernandez and Tom Wilhelmsen. One of the benefits of having seats behind home plate is that you get a good look at a pitcher’s delivery, and in both cases, the delivery looks off.
Felix Hernandez – He got pounded by the Angels again on the 20th and has not looked all that dominating his last few starts. Felix started off the season yielding just 11 earned runs in his first 64.2 innings (ERA of 1.53) with 64 strike outs and 10 walks. Then came the game in New York on May 14th where Felix tweaked his back (that was the last game in the 64.2 inning stretch). Since then, Felix has posted a mortal 24 ER in 45 innings (a 4.80 ERA) with 10 walks and 48 strikeouts. His strike out rate is up, but he has been getting hit with much more frequency.
I looked at fangraphs.com to see what kind of pitches Felix has been throwing and it seems he is throwing more fastballs, which indicates to me that something is not right – in the 9 games before the injury, he threw the fastball roughly 53% of the time and only exceeded that rate twice in a game – against the Angels on 4/27 and the White Sox on 4/6. Since that time he is throwing it about 57% of the time, but has thrown it over 60% of the time in the last 3 games. When your back hurts, you don’t have the flexibility to throw a breaking pitch as easily or as effectively and that means you rely on your fastball more. When hitters realize this they sit on your fastball. No matter how good the pitcher, hitters have an advantage when they know the fastball is coming and it doesn’t move like Mariano Rivera’s pitches. My observations on Felix have been the same – he is not getting the breaking stuff over the plate like he used to and it is exposing the declining velocity on his fastball.
My guess – Felix makes one or two more starts before ending up on the DL and effectively sinking the rest of the season for the Mariners.
Tom Wilhelmsen – He has been terrible for the month of June (11 ER in 7 innings) after being borderline unhittable in April and May (2 ER in 24 innings). It to judge what is going on with a relief pitcher based on pitch breakdown because the sample size is smaller and subject to randomness, but my observation has been that Wilhelmsen hasn’t been getting the breaking ball over the plate and once again, teams are sitting on his fastball. This has led to more fly balls and more walks. I can’t think of a specific point where he seems to have gotten hurt, so it might just be that his mechanics are messed up and it is all in his head, but whatever it is, he needs to get it squared away soon – the M’s bullpen does not have many effective weapons in their arsenal these days.
Look, there comes a time when you have to send a guy down to the minors before you completely destroy his confidence, and that time has probably come for Brandon Maurer. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about his struggles with left handed batters. Well, he has pitched “slightly” better against lefties recently (they are “only” hitting about .325 against him over his last few starts) but he has suddenly lost the ability to get right handed hitters out also (they are hitting over .400 against him in his last few starts).
Right now Maurer is a mess. If you watch him pitch, he looks like he has no confidence in his stuff. His start on Tuesday night was a disaster and he has given up 10 home runs in 49 innings. It is time for him to go back down to regain that confidence. I would suggest something radical too – sending him to AA Jackson rather than AAA Tacoma. Why? Well Tacoma, and the PCL in general, is a hitter’s league. Maurer has been getting smacked around pretty badly and pitching in the band box that is Cheney Stadium will probably not help his confidence. Maurer wasn’t that great last year in Jackson anyway.
I know the Mariners don’t really have many options at this point, but I think I would rather see Hector Noesi stink it up out there than watch Maurer get destroyed, completely lose confidence in himself, get traded to another organization for a bucket of baseballs and come back in a few years as a serviceable major league starter.
UPDATE – The Mariners sent Maurer to Tacoma sometime between when I wrote this and this morning, calling up Alex Liddi. Supposedly they are looking at calling up Jeremy Bonderman, but Bondo is not on the 40 man roster, so someone either goes to the 60 day DL (Guti possibly) or someone gets DFA (either Ryan or Thames), to add Bondo.
Once again, the Mariners are hitting like they can’t punch their way out of a paper bag. Thus far this season, the Mariners have scored fewer total runs than all but one AL team – the Chicago White Sox (actually they have outscored the Nationals, Phillies (just barely), Marlins and Dodgers, but that is the NL, so it hardly counts, but more on that in a moment). It is actually worse than that – the Mariners have outscored the Pale Hose by a whopping 2 runs and have played 3 more games than Chicago, so the Sox have actually scored more runs per game than the Mariners. It has been so bad that the Mariners have been outscored by the Astros (!!!) by 16 runs in the same number of games. That is the same Astros lineup that I ripped on earlier this season. At least the Mariners offense hasn’t been historically bad this year and they seem to be hitting about as well (if you can call it that) at home as on the road.
Sadly, the despite the vast improvement, they are still in sorry shape. Morales, Seager and Morse have been ok, Shoppach and Bay have been better than expected; Smoak has been drawing walks (but not much else) and hasn’t looked completely hopeless at the plate. Montero, Ackley, Ryan, Andino and Chavez have all been wasted at bats though in this lineup. The M’s have gotten so little production out of their #9 spot in the order that they might as well be a NL team. Here is how the #9 hitter compares to the teams in the NL who have scored fewer runs. Keep in mind that the AB’s for the NL teams come from a combination of the pitchers batting and pinch hitters. Just for the heck of it, I am including the Tigers, who lead baseball in runs scored. (Stats from baseball-reference.com)
BA
OBP
SLG
sOPS+
Mariners
.168
.235
.206
63
Nationals
.134
.185
.190
38
Phillies
.201
.242
.329
107
Marlins
.155
.214
.169
42
Dodgers
.197
.255
.282
96
Tigers
.292
.317
.456
180
Basically the Mariners are getting the same production from Chavez/Ryan/Andino in the 9th spot as National League teams get from their pitchers. That is not a recipe for success.
The M’s took the first step in trying to right the ship by sending Montero down to Tacoma, but they did call up a no-hit, all-glove catcher in Jesus Sucre, so that won’t help much. The next step is probably sending down Ackley and bringing up Nick Franklin. I think Ackley needs to get some time in the bandbox that is Cheney Stadium to get his groove back. The shortstop mess is probably not fixable this season, so we will probably get another 120 games of almost automatic outs from the bottom of the lineup.
My prediction – if the M’s don’t have a winning record on this home stand, Eric Wedge will be looking for a new job. I hear Don Mattingly might be available soon…
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.
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.
FlatbreadGarden 