So Miguel, how do you feel about the upcoming series?

But Strasburg!

All right then.

Hey, so I got my internet back.  Turns out my cable/internet splitter is shot, so per the tech over the phone, I plugged my wire direct into my modem, and it worked!  So here I am.  (EDIT:  Yeah you didn't see this until now, so I ran out of time AGAIN, but hey.  I'll look to get back on schedule starting next week.)

Curiousity struck, so I perused Baseball Reference, which now has minor league stats, and I discovered that they have fielding numbers for every player!  So, with the standard caveat that defensive stats like Range are flawed/limited, nonetheless I went about compiling the Midwest League to see where the T-Rats regulars stood defensively.

- The T-Rats' .647 DER (Defensive Efficiency: percentage of balls in play turned into outs) has them firmly in the MWL peloton.  League DER, as you'd expect from A-ballers, is .649.  (For comparison, average MLB DER is around .690-.700).  League leaders are Clinton at .680, West Michigan at .677 and Cedar Rapids at .676.  Bottom enders are Fort Wayne at .624 and Quad Cities at .625.

- Average range by position wasn't available, so I had to manually compile to get a good idea of where players stood.

- Edilio Colina's range at 2B (5.10) is pretty good.  Alex Liddi at 2.58 is okay at 3B.  Juan Diaz's 3.74 at SS is terrible.  The outfield without Daniel Carroll is meh: Calvin Beamon at LF is alright (1.50), Maximo Mendez (1.51) is terrible in CF and Joe Dunigan (1.86) is decent in RF.  Carroll, when healthy, is among the best CFs in the league.

Other notes:

- The T-Rats allow the 4th fewest runs/game at 3.91.  League average is 4.26.  Kane County's 3.64 R/G is the best in the MWL while South Bend's 5.00 is the worst.

- However, the T-Rats 3.31 runs scored per game is the worst in the league.  Clinton is far and away the best at 6.00 per.  The only other team with more than 5 per is West Michigan at 5.06.

- The T-Rats are also bottom in the league at team HR, with 8.  EIGHT.  They are the only team in the MWL with a single digit team-HR total.

- Average MWL K/BB is 2.40.  Average K/9 is 7.91.  (To compare, the AL K/9 average is 6.27)  Keep this in mind when monitoring K/BB lines for T-Rats pitching.  It's pretty easy to rack up a solid ratio against 19-23 year old kids who are still learning patience and pitch recognition.  For example, Juan Ramirez has an excellent 10.69 K/9.  But keep in mind that MWL hitters strike out quite a bit regardless of who they're facing.  If these hitters were more patient, he'd still strike out a lot of guys, but it'd probably be more like around 8+ per 9.  And his 2.60 K/BB, which in MLB would be pretty solid, is just a bit above average in the MWL.  This is not to say Juan Ramirez isn't awesome, because he is... just to keep in perspective what environment his numbers are being put up in, and to remind you to mentally 'league adjust' a player's numbers when reading into them.

- Despite having missed serious time from a broken hand that is still healing, Daniel Carroll is still 6th in the MWL in stolen bases with 10.

Doing that took a lot of time, so I'll leave it at that for now and take a look at other levels later.

On to the wrap-up!

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Jeff mentioned originally doing a Felix PITCH f/x and then got sidetracked by rationalizing our continued interest in failure. Well, far be it from me to deny all of you some pretty pictures to look at and Jeff seems like he needs some cheering up and PITCH f/x is like baseball nerd porn.

Let's begin with how Felix starts batters off. Here are plots of Felix's first pitch in each at bat, separated by batter handedness and nothing else. These are heat plots so the brighter the color the more often Felix hits that spot. RHB first, LHB next to it.

The color of the spot is determined by the percentage of pitches landing in that area and since there's significantly less first pitches to RHB (107) compared to against LHB (161), that is why there's nothing as cold as green in the RHB plot.

You'll notice how Felix has a distinguishable pattern to his approach stating off against LHB, that to stay away from them. This is a wise strategy and for the most part he's very successful. Contrast that to the RHB plot where Felix is much more inconsistent and the groupings that do appear are troubling. Notably, that giant blob dead center and elevated. That's a bad place to pitch. That's an incredibly bad place to pitch when batters are sitting first pitch fastball. This also helps to explain why Felix's groundball ratio is heavily down so far this year. These are not the plots of a groundball pitcher, there's far too much elevation.

Now, let's move on from the 0-0 counts to all pitches Felix has thrown in 2008 and while keeping the breakdown by batter handedness, lets add a breakdown by pitch type according to MLBAM. First, fastballs to RHB and LHB.

Roughly the same pattern against RHB where Felix either isn't aiming for, or isn't able to hit the corners of the zone and is all over the place with the biggest groupings in the center of the zone between the thighs and the belt a.k.a. the meatball zone. That's a deadly place to toss fastballs.

We still see that pattern against LHB to stay away from hitters, but again, what we don't see is Felix hitting that low *and away* corner. Rather, it's much closer to high and away which ties back to those missing groundballs. Furthermore, the reason pitchers try to pitch away is to make it more difficult for hitters to pull the ball. We often hear about good hitters taking what the pitcher gives them and shoving those away pitchers to the opposite field. Well, guess what the opposite field is for left-handed batters? Leftfield. Remember who mans leftfield when Felix pitches?

Moving on from fastballs, lets look at Felix's offspeed stuff. And now we'll get rid of the heat map style plot and this time the colors denote pitch type. Blue dots are changeups, green dots are sliders and yellow dots are curveballs.

Good thing Felix gets a lot of called strikes on the curveballs because they're landing dead center in the zone to righties. As expected the sliders are going low and away and there are very few changeups since those will tend to tail back into the batter, which is usually not a very good proposition. On the whole, this is a good map for Felix's breaking stuff. The curves are getting him called strikes and the sliders are off the plate and, importantly, low.

We see a lot more changeups to the left handed batters and a corresponding drop in sliders. It's been noted before that Felix has been upping his use of the change and reducing his use of the slider and this illustrates that it might be an effect of Felix facing a slightly higher proportion of lefthanded batters so far in 2008. A very good sign is looking at where the biggest cluster of changes land, that spot on the outside black at the 1/3 line of the zone. Going back up, you'll notice that the brightest spot for fastballs to land to LHB is the outside black at the 2/3 line of the zone. This means that Felix is throwing the changes roughly at the same place he throws his fastballs, but the changes drop more due to the decreased velocity, which helps with deceivingly the batter.

The curves and sliders form a sort of continuous line from high and away to low and in with Felix using only curves up and away and burying sliders down and in. I'm not sure if that's meaningful or not.

Also noticeably missing from all six of these plots is a consistent hitting of the lower left hand corner (down and in to RHB, down and away to LHB) or the upper right hand corner (up and away to RHB, up and in to LHB). You'll notice that those are the corners perpendicular to Felix's arm slot and the ability to hit those corners are one the best measures of a pitcher's command because it's the more difficult areas to hit. Again, this might not be bad command, this might be a plan, we cannot know, but it's worth watching since low and away is one of the best pitch locations there is and and up and in is a tough place to get around on fastballs. Other than that, get the ball down Felix. Get the ball down.

This was originally going to be a Felix PITCHf/x post, but I wasn't sure where that one was going to go. I don't know where this is going to go, either, but I have a beginning, which is enough. I'm just going to write and think at the same time and see what comes out.

Driving to the airport last Friday, my Padres fan friend and I joked about how it was the second week of May and already our seasons were over. Then later that night, Matthew and I checked the Mariners score, saw that they were losing, and laughed. Some people might think that's kind of weird, but what choice did we have? There was no other appropriate way to respond. We laughed because our favorite team is bad.

The Jeff of ten years ago would've taken offense to this. The Jeff of ten years ago would've stood by his team and scolded us for giving up so fast. The Jeff of ten years ago wouldn't dream of abandoning hope until the numbers told him to, because the Jeff of ten years ago saw the bright side of dark.

But the Jeff of ten years ago was never fully exposed to the team, not like I am now. The Jeff of ten years ago didn't spend hours every day watching the Mariners lose and then spend more hours every day writing about how they lost. The Jeff of ten years ago could afford to maintain a high degree of hope because, for the Jeff of ten years ago, hope wasn't a costly investment. And the Jeff of ten years ago could more readily accept bad losses and worse seasons because the Jeff of ten years ago didn't know what it feels like to pour yourself into something and then have to come to terms with one crushing disappointment after another. I guess that's one of those side benefits that comes with age.

I'm more rational about these things now. The Jeff of ten years ago would call it something else, but I'm calling it rational. I'm more rational because I have to be, because once you identify a team as bad, there's no sense in continuing to live and die by how it does. Every action a person takes is preceded by a cost/benefit analysis in his brain. You drive to work because the convenience of quick transport outweighs the cost to your wallet and to the environment. You eat a piece of cake because the deliciousness outweighs your health concerns. Or you don't eat a piece of cake because your health concerns outweigh the deliciousness. Everything we do is done because our brains tell us it's worth doing.

Investing yourself in a lousy team - that isn't worth doing. It feels kind of bad to say that, since sports are supposed to be this massive catch-all emotional outlet, but in the interest of remaining sane, once you know a team is bad, it doesn't make sense to get up for every game, because the magnitude of the lows will be larger than the magnitude of the highs. That's a losing proposition if I've ever seen one.

Over the last several days, I have compensated for the Mariners' slump by lowering my level of emotional investment. It has indeed reached the point at which I can laugh at losses that - were this a contending team - would drive me up the wall. And I have allowed myself to get to this point because it's the only way for me to ensure the team doesn't break me down. Many of you have probably observed yourselves doing the same thing. Others of you probably haven't, and that's okay. I don't expect everyone to be in the same boat. This is simply what I have determined to be the best course of action for me.

As strange as it may sound to some of you, though, this isn't depressing. This isn't a letdown. Well, it's a letdown in that we all thought the team would be better, but I don't find myself to be particularly upset with the current situation. While it may not be all that exciting, it's comfortable, and it's familiar, and it's steady. For those of us who're fans of baseball more than fans of winning, parts are even rather pleasant. The existence of fans of losing teams is not an empty one. We're granted the option of watching a new game almost every single day, a game that will invariably feature all-world talent and at least one or two things that amaze us. More often than not, that's enough, even in the absence of wild emotion and a winning context. The sport doesn't need a pennant chase to be enjoyable, and following a losing team allows you to focus on baseball's other appealing qualities for which we're all so thankful.

People have asked me if part of the reason I'm okay with the current development is because it proves I was right all along back in the offseason. To which I reply:

(A) I wasn't right
(B) No

I wasn't right because I thought the team would be better than this. I thought JJ would be healthy, I thought Bedard would be healthy, I thought Felix would be more consistent, and so on and so forth. I thought a lot of things that haven't come true. They may come true in the following months, but as of this writing, my overall expectations were wrong. What I was right about was that the team wasn't an ace away from being a title contender, and I suppose this is why people probably ask me that question, but my answer is "no" because I don't derive pleasure from being right. I expect to be right. Everybody expects to be right. And there's limited pleasure to be had from something you expect, pleasure that - if it ever existed in my brain - has been overruled by the disappointment of a losing season.

I don't have any faith in this team. I think this is the year that finally sealed the deal. I don't have any faith in this team, and I don't have any faith in the people running it. When I'm talking about events that could happen down the road, I don't say stupid things to be funny; I say stupid things because I expect stupid things to happen. That is the pattern that I have detected from the front office. This roster is loaded with all kinds of talent, but I have absolutely zero hope that the guys in charge will know what to do with it. Why should I? What reason do I have to believe that the suits will be capable of turning this Potemkin village of a baseball team into something more substantial? There isn't one. The organizational executives have never demonstrated a thorough understanding of how to build a successul ballclub.

But here's what might be the best part of lowering the level of emotion you invest: you're able to let these things go. If you can find happiness in watching a losing baseball team, it makes little difference how the team is constructed. In fact, I'll cast a broader net - it makes little difference how the team is constructed, how the team is run, or how the team performs. In times like these, I find myself to be far less critical and far more forgiving of errors and other assorted lapses in judgment. I didn't get mad at Jose Lopez for blowing that routine groundball the other day. I don't think I've called for McLaren to get fired since last September. And I'm not about to go crazy demanding for Bavasi's head on a stick, even after an offseason that at this point looks like a total catastrophe. I don't get mad about those kinds of things because I've found happiness in being able to come home from work every day and turn on a baseball game, and not even the dumbest of blunders is going to make the games go away. There will always be games to watch, no matter how bad the screw-ups. And so the screw-ups don't get under my skin the way they did a year ago when this team was actually playing for something.

There's always going to be that little part of me that continues to hold out hope until there's no hope left to hold. While the Jeff of ten years ago may have grown up, those childhood qualities never completely die off. Certainly, if the Mariners catch lightning in a bottle and manage to pull themselves into the race, that little part of my brain will admonish the rest for throwing in the towel, and I'll boost my emotional investment back to a level more befitting a fan of a contending team. Of this there is no doubt in my mind.

But assuming that doesn't happen (and probability says that it won't), I'll be okay. I'll be okay because I've managed to find happiness in the sport's most fundamental unit - the game - and as long as I'm able to drive home, make dinner, and watch the Mariners do whatever they end up doing, then baseball will continue to be all that I need it to be. I wasn't drawn to this sport by a winning team, and I sure as hell wasn't sucked in by one, so I don't see why I should make the existence of one be a condition of my continuing love. For 16 years, that hasn't been part of my policy. And for 16 years, my policy's worked.

Internet still on the fritz at home... but a sign of improvement is that my router showed a signal this morning before I left, whereas the previous days it showed none.  I'll try and give them a call this afternoon, but I'm getting bombed at work and I'm amazed I got as much of this written before lunch as I did.  I finished up the write-ups proper during lunch.

Meanwhile, today was a good day for teams not named the High Desert Mavericks.

On to the wrap-up!

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Seattle: 16-26
Padres: 15-26

GAMES

Game 1: Miguel Batista vs Chris Young
Game 2: Erik Bedard* vs Randy Wolf*
Game 3: Felix Hernandez vs Shawn Estes*

Well, I was right about the one game. Yay! I had a whole paragraph written about Washburn and what the Mariners might do and then they went ahead and already announced they were skipping his start. So, shoot. On the plus side, I get to see Felix for the third time this year instead of that asshole Bedard and his regressing self.

Randy Wolf was a pitcher I desperately stumped for this offseason. The Padres signed him for one year and $4.75 million guarenteed with some performance bonuses for games started and innings pitched that could push his salary to a maximum of $8.75 million. That's three less years and at leat $40 million less than Carlos Silva. Randy Wolf is better than Carlos Silva and is also left-handed. Padres = smart. Mariners = dumb. This is the sort of thing that fills me with confidence for our shot at first overall in 2009.

Continue reading this post »

So I was just scrolling through box scores, as I am wont to do when it's nighttime and the Mariners aren't playing, and when I clicked on Houston/San Francisco, I happened upon an unexpected sight:

Brian Moehler. This guy. The guy who the Reds picked up for Noochie Varner at the deadline when he was supposedly on his last legs back in 2002.

I couldn't believe it. I consider myself to be pretty damn up to date when it comes to being familiar with current Major Leaguers and for whom they play, but this one caught me by surprise. Brian Moehler's still around and even getting himself some starts. Who knew?

This discovery inspired me to go through everyone who's played in the big leagues this year to find out who else I'm missing. What follows is a list of such players, in no particular order:

Ramon Santiago
Aaron Boone
Kevin Cash
Wil Nieves
Brady Clark
Damion Easley
Marlon Anderson
Robby Hammock
Luis Rivas
Jose Cruz Jr.
Nelson Figueroa
Mark Redman
Chan Ho Park
Chad Durbin
Justin Miller
Ron Mahay
Ramon Ramirez
Mike Lincoln
Doug Waechter
Seth McClung
Kent Mercker
Keith Foulke
Tim Byrdak
Russ Springer
Chad Fox
Yhency Brazoban
Armando Benitez

Aside from having been forgotten, all these guys also share the common trait of being terrible. Lesson being, if you want me to remember that you're still in the Major Leagues, don't suck. Or suck spectacularly. If you just suck a little bit and either occupy an unimportant role or disappear for a while, that's a great way to make people think you're lying when you introduce yourself at parties.

I only got to watch a limited amount of today's game, so all I really have to say is that Miguel Cairo and Jarrod Washburn might form the worst GWRBI/save combination of all time.

Biggest Contribution: Arthur Rhodes, +34.6%
Biggest Suckfest: Wladimir Balentien, -30.4%
Most Important AB: Cairo single, +31.9%
Most Important Pitch: Byrd DP, +27.5%
Total Contribution by Pitcher(s): +91.4%
Total Contribution by Hitters: -55.5%
Total Contribution by Opposition: +14.1%
(What is this chart?)

Not included in Wlad's Biggest Suckfest WPA is the fact that, once again, he was a circus out there in right field. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for a little while since he has a decent reputation and he's still getting used to a new level and new parks, but through his first couple weeks in the big leagues, he's been an absolute defensive disaster. I wasn't expecting that.

I'll also say this - Byrd's double play in the bottom of the seventh is a pretty good example of how you can still get excited watching a team that's no good. With the recent tailspin firmly entrenched in the forefront of my mind, that at bat had tragedy written all over it once Rhodes fell behind 2-0, and when he fell behind 3-0 it was all I could do to keep from turning away. But he got Byrd to roll over on an inside fastball, and Lopez's relay to Cairo arrived just in time to preserve the Mariners' narrow lead. I thrust a water bottle that was unknowingly capless into the air in celebration, which is pretty much the best you can do in an office environment without coming off as an annoying douchebag.

I'd like to say the game turned on that one pitch, because it would be easy, but considering the Rangers came back to tie things up in the next inning, I guess technically it wouldn't be "correct". So I'll just say it was awesome. A walk or a hit there would've been way too obvious.

End please

We may be on the verge of blowing this lead but hey at least the Stars are doomed.