The Hardball Times -- David Cameron http://www.hardballtimes.com/main Baseball. Insight. Daily. en studes@hardballtimes.com Copyright 2013 2013-05-24T08:09:15+00:00 Five Questions: Seattle Mariners http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/five-questions-seattle-mariners2/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/five-questions-seattle-mariners2/#When:04:04:15 When the guys here approached me to write another Five Questions piece previewing the 2007 Seattle Mariners, I started to wonder how I was going to select just a handful of key questions from a roster that apparently was built by throwing darts at a board. While intoxicated. And blindfolded.

So, following an off-season so inexplicable that I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mariners announced plans to bring Steve Trout out of retirement and hand him a spot in the bullpen, let’s take a look at some of the questions surrounding this team and hope we can accurately represent how befuddling this team has really become.


1. Jose Vidro? Horacio Ramirez? Chris Reitsma? Jose Guillen? Jeff Weaver? Is there a plan here?

The Mariners, burned by years of watching big name guys fail to repeat their prior year performances, adopted a new strategy in 2007—acquire as many guys who sucked in 2006 as humanly possible. Okay, that might not have been exactly the plan, but it’s the best way to describe the results.

Over the winter, the team decided to spend a lot of money to try to make a run at a playoff spot in an apparently vulnerable division. After repeatedly being spurned by players everyone would want, they finally found people willing to take their money in the form of guys that no one wanted.

I don’t need to rehash how bad the Mariners' winter acquisitions were in 2006. As a group, the five guys mentioned in the question combined for -4 Win Shares Above Bench last year. It’s a group of guys coming off seasons that were replacement level or worse, and the team handed them two spots in the everyday lineup, two spots in the rotation, and the primary right-handed setup man role. They also cost approximately $25 million in salary for the upcoming season, and the Mariners had to give away Rafael Soriano, Chris Snelling and Emiliano Fruto to help pry away this fantastic group of talent.

Besides being terrible last year, all those new players except Weaver have one other thing in common—they spent a large portion of the season injured. Ramirez battled a variety of injuries that cost him half the season, Reitsma and Guillen had surgery on their elbows, and Vidro was playing with the knees of a World War II veteran. The Mariners are essentially hitching their cart to the belief that these guys are contributing major leaguers when healthy, and expect all of them to take big steps forward.

We are, shall you say, a wee bit skeptical that the best way to assemble a roster is to overpay a group of injured guys coming off the worst years of their career, but this is the theory that Bill Bavasi and crew have essentially tied their baseball future to. Good luck with that, fellas.


2. Did the team do anything right this winter?

Maybe. While the overall reshaping of the roster was not ideal, the team did at least back up some of the questionable moves with a theme that has some potential to pay off—load up on groundball pitchers to complement the abilities of the defenders behind them. From Miguel Batista to Horacio Ramirez and Chris Reitsma, there was a clear pattern of the team targeting guys who get outs on the ground, since the Mariners believe that the Adrian Beltre-Yuniesky Betancourt duo gives them the best defensive left side of an infield in baseball.

This synergy between pitching staff and defenders is an often overlooked tool in building a team that is better than the sum of its parts, and was worked to perfection by the Mariners in 2001, when they stuck a pitching staff of flyball strike-throwers in front of an awesome outfield defense, anchored by Mike Cameron and Ichiro.

Now, one could argue that it would be better to acquire pitchers who are good rather than pitchers whose defenses can make them look good, but if you’re going to get bad pitchers, at least get bad pitchers who work with the pieces you already have in place. In this sense, we can be happy that the organization had some semblance of a plan when it went to rebuilding the pitching staff, and agree that the idea of putting a groundball staff in front of the current defense is a sound one. It’s just too bad that the pitchers they chose aren’t any good at anything besides getting ground balls.

3. How long do we keep calling him King Felix before he actually has to earn it?

After all the glowing reviews written about the kid with the golden arm, many of which I’m responsible for, expectations were pretty high heading into his first full major league season. For various reasons, ranging from his diet—endorsed by Bartolo Colon!—and his pitch selection, he was a pretty massive disappointment. Needless to say, a 4.64 ERA wasn’t what the Mariners or the fans had in mind after watching him dominate to end the 2005 season, and his inconsistency was frustrating to watch.

However, at the risk of sounding like a King Felix fanboy one more time, he should be significantly improved this year. Felix’s problems essentially can be tied to the home run; his 18.4% HR/F rate ranked as the worst in the American League. Thanks to the great work done by guys here at THT, we know that HR/F varies wildly from year to year. There’s no reason to expect Felix to be so home run prone again, and his peripheral statistics suggest that he was a frontline pitcher last year who had some things work against him that weren’t totally in his control.

Toss in the fact that he decided to get himself into a shape other than round this winter, and there’s reason to believe that the soon-to-be 21-year-old has decided to dedicate himself to the game and actively make himself better. His stuff is still the best of any starting pitcher in baseball, and with a little more focus and some maturity, he’s still as good a bet as anyone to steal the Cy Santana trophy away from Minnesota. Don’t give up on the King just yet.

4. J.J. Putz—great reliever or greatest reliever ever?

I’d actually pay a lot of money to watch Stephen Colbert interview J.J. Putz, who turned in one of the great relief seasons in recent history last year, but isn’t exactly a Rhodes scholar, shall we say. But it doesn’t take Colbert-like overstatements to explain the greatness of Putz in 2006. Just throw out stats like his 13-to-104 walk-to-strikeout ratio or his 1.81 FIP. Putz was the quintessential relief ace, a dominant end-game reliever who gave the Mariners a huge advantage in the ninth inning.

However, the greatness of Putz was perhaps the least predictable thing to happen in major league baseball in 2006. He was a 29-year-old with a track record of being a decent enough setup guy with some command issues and no out pitch. Needless to say, he wasn’t appearing on too many of those guys-to-watch lists.

However, during spring training, Putz worked with Eddie Guardado and developed a split-finger fastball that gave him a new weapon and allowed him to put American League hitters on notice. The devastating 90-mph splitter gave him a perfect complement to his 98-mph four-seam fastball, and the addition of a second pitch made all the difference in the world.

It’s unlikely that Putz will be able to repeat his 2006 dominance. The question, however, of how much of that greatness he can retain is critical to the Mariners' season. If he shows that the new-found effectiveness is at least somewhat sustainable, he’s still one of the elite relievers in baseball. It would also help if his elbow would stop hurting.

5. So, the team has questions at almost every lineup spot, the rotation and the bullpen. Also, the entire front office has been put on the hot seat. And Ichiro is a free agent at years end. Is there anything with the team that isn’t a question mark?


I’m confident in saying that 12 months from now, Safeco Field will still be a cash cow, and the Mariners will still be rolling as though they were in the money-printing business. But beyond that, things are really up in the air, and the 2007 season could be a history-changing one for the team.

If the injured guys hook themselves up to a juvenation machine, Felix lives up to his nickname and the team stays relatively healthy, this is probably an 85- to 90-win team that could contend in a division that has no obvious frontrunner. With a pennant race in Seattle, the team likely convinces Ichiro to stick around Seattle and tries to build a championship team around the nucleus in place.

However, if too many of the question marks turn sour and the team gets off to a slow start, the bloodletting could begin early. Mike Hargrove’s job is on the line, and he’s not likely to survive the All-Star break if the team is waving the white flag once again. Bill Bavasi and his hand-picked front office aren’t going to get to run the team for another offseason of rebuilding, and Ichiro seems unlikely to re-sign with a perennial doormat.

It only takes a few things going right for the Mariners to challenge for a playoff spot and play respectable baseball this year. It only takes a few of those things going wrong, however, to cause a full -cale housecleaning of the baseball operations department and the likely exodus of the face of the franchise.

So, 2007 is the year of the crossroads for the Mariners. They’re either going to win with their unique brand of talent evaluation, or the franchise is going to go in an entirely different direction. No matter what, it won’t be a boring summer in the Pacific Northwest.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> David Cameron 2007-03-13T04:04:15+00:00 Charting Felix http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/charting-felix/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/charting-felix/#When:06:05:15
Considering I spent the last few years telling everyone who would listen that Felix Hernandez is the best thing to come around since the thermos—sliced bread is old news—his performance to date in 2006 hasn’t exactly been what I expected. In his first 56.1 innings pitched, he’s given up an astounding 42 runs. For comparison sake, he gave up 26 runs in 84.1 innings last fall. He’s already given up twice as many home runs as he allowed last year, and he’s started two fewer games to date. The King has been more like the Court Jester this time around.

So, I did what any Mariners-obsessed blogger without a family to support would do; I decided to chart every pitch Felix has thrown this year, which means going back and re-watching all of his previous performances on MLB.tv. This is a bit of a time-consuming effort, as you may guess, and it’s still a work in progress. To date, I’ve charted four of his starts in their entirety, logging 405 pitches into a database.

I’m tracking essentially everything I can related to each pitch—velocity, pitch type, and result by batter, inning, and pitch count. Using this data, we can find out just how well Felix is commanding his fastball on 2-1 counts with two out or how many first-pitch curveballs he’s thrown after the fifth inning. You get the idea.

Due to some annoying production decisions by the guys controlling the television cameras (we really don’t need to see a kid eating ice cream when there is a game going on, fellas), I’ve only logged in the pitch type for 372 of those 405 pitches. That gives us a slightly smaller sample, but still one that we should be able to cull decent information from.

The goal, of course, is to answer the question of what is wrong with Felix? However, some would argue the actual answer to that question is nothing. After all, his peripheral statistics are still outstanding—54.4% ground-ball rate, 3.3 walks per game, 8.8 strikeouts per game, all adding up to a 3.65 xFIP, which is good for fourth in the American League among qualified starters.

Only Roy Halladay, Scott Kazmir, and Johan Santana have lower xFIPs in the AL. xFIP has proven to be a quality predictive tool, meaning that if Felix continued to pitch just as he is now, we’d expect him to pitch a lot more like one of the top five starters in the AL and a lot less like a member of the Twins starting rotation (sorry Aaron).

So why is there such a huge discrepancy between Felix’s xFIP and his ERA? Two things jump off the statsheet: Out of 101 qualified starters, he ranks 101st in home runs per fly ball and 95th in Defensive Efficiency Ratio. More of his fly balls are leaving the yard than any other starting pitcher in baseball, and only five guys have fewer of their balls in play being turned into outs.

These are two things that a pitcher has little control over, and so there’s arguably a good amount of luck involved. Every good analyst out there would heavily regress these two numbers to the mean when doing a projection for Felix’s future performances, and like xFIP, would probably come to the conclusion that he isn’t pitching all that badly.

However, while I don’t dispute that we’re likely to see a strong correction in Felix’s performance going forward, I don’t think we can chalk up all of his struggles to bad luck. By looking at the pitch charting data, I believe we can began to answer the real question—why is Felix struggling? We know that a lot of ground balls are missing his defenders and a lot of his fly balls are turning into souvenirs, but xFIP and similar metrics don’t help us understand what the cause may be. They just reassure us that it’s probably not a long-term problem.

That’s where the pitch charting comes in. If we want to attempt to isolate the cause of Felix’s struggles, we need to find out exactly how hitters have been successful against him. To get a more detailed look at his performance, I looked up his expanded splits on ESPN.com and scrolled down to the bottom, where the “By Inning/Pitches” breakdowns are available.

The first thing you’ll notice on that page is opposing batters are hitting .542/.633/.708 off Felix in the first 15 pitches of a ballgame. That’s a 1.342 OPS coming out of the gates. That’s Albert Pujols on a hot streak. You just can’t succeed if guys are starting the game by teeing off on you at that pace.

The performance tails off remarkably in pitches 16-30 (.206/.250/.412) and 31-45 (.200/.306/.300), so this is where the pitch charting can give us a hand. Is Felix doing something differently during the first 15 pitches of a game than he is the rest of the time?

Absolutely. I’ll offer the following table for your amazement:
Pitches	FB	CB	CH	FB%	CB%	CH%	Opp. OPS
1-15	48	5	5	82.76%	8.62%	8.62%	1.342
16-30	29	15	11	52.73%	27.27%	20.00%	0.662
31-45	31	14	11	55.36%	25.00%	19.64%	0.606
46-60	33	15	9	57.89%	26.32%	15.79%	1.008
61-75	30	18	6	55.56%	33.33%	11.11%	1.054
76-90	25	24	9	43.10%	41.38%	15.52%	0.543
In the four games I’ve charted, I’ve logged 58 of the 60 pitches that would constitute the first 15 of each ballgame. A remarkable 83% of those 58 pitches have been fastballs. The Mariners, as an organization, preach establishing the fastball early, but that is just ridiculous. Each start is basically the same. The first inning is all fastballs, all the time. And the opposing hitters are treating it like batting practice.

After the first 15 pitches, Felix starts mixing in his curveball and his change, and hitter effectiveness nosedives. That’s because his fastball is clearly his third-best pitch. As hard as it may be to believe, considering he has a 97 MPH fastball and can run his two-seam diving “sinker” up there at 95 MPH, Felix is at his best when he’s throwing junk. His curveball is as good as there is in the game, and the change-up that he doesn’t use enough is probably among the 10 best in baseball.

The Mariners, in all their wisdom, however, have decided that every pitcher’s best pitch is their fastball, and they’re going to have Felix feature his fastball early in the ballgame to “set up the offspeed stuff.” Yet, for some reason, they have yet to realize the correlation between “first inning, establish fastball” and “first inning, Felix lit up like Christmas tree.”

If you run a correlation between the Opponents OPS column and the FB% column from the table above, you’ll find the correlation is a remarkable .858. Correlations run from -1 (meaning that they have a perfect inverse relationship) all the way to +1 (a perfect relationship), and +.858 essentially means that a huge amount of the opposing hitters success off of Felix can be directly tied to the amount of fastballs he throws.

More fastballs, more runs. Fewer fastballs, fewer runs. That’s the screaming message from the above table.

However, we need to look deeper. If Felix is throwing his fastball on 3-0 counts, and his breaking stuff on 0-2 counts, it’s only natural that hitters will be teeing off on the fastball. So let’s take a look at the data by ball/strike count:
Pitches	FB	CB	CH	FB%	CB%	CH%	Opp. OPS
0-0	60	24	17	59.41%	23.76%	16.83%	1.063
0-1	21	21	6	43.75%	43.75%	12.50%	0.889
0-2	17	13	3	51.52%	39.39%	9.09%	0.200
1-0	28	6	9	65.12%	13.95%	20.93%	0.880
1-1	10	9	6	40.00%	36.00%	24.00%	1.080
1-2	29	16	3	60.42%	33.33%	6.25%	0.353
2-0	13	0	3	81.25%	0.00%	18.75%	1.222
2-1	11	0	3	78.57%	0.00%	21.43%	1.000
2-2	10	17	3	33.33%	56.67%	10.00%	0.645
3-0	3	0	0	100.00%	0.00%	0.00%	2.000
3-1	7	0	0	100.00%	0.00%	0.00%	1.758
3-2	9	2	2	69.23%	15.38%	15.38%	1.155
Lots of information there—and yes, small sample size caveats heavily apply—but it all has the same general theme. On counts where you’d expect a hitter to be sitting fastball (1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 3-0, 3-1), Felix is complying, throwing significantly more fastballs when behind in the count than when he is ahead in the count. When he gets two strikes, you see an awful lot of curveballs as he goes for the punchout. However, if the hitter is able to work it into a fastball count, they almost always get one, and they’ve been punishing him for it.

What information can we gather from these two tables? To me, watching these games in detail, it is clear that there is a scouting report on Felix Hernandez circulating MLB that reads something like this:

First inning, all fastballs, so go up hacking. After first inning, only swing if it's straight and hard. Struggles to throw fastball for strikes, so let him fall behind. In a good hitter's count, swing for the fences—if it’s a breaking ball, you can’t hit it anyway.

That is what we’re seeing hitters do. They are attacking Felix early in the game, knowing that they are going to get a steady diet of fastballs in their first trip to the plate, and then hoping to get him to fall behind later in the game so they can sit dead red again.

When Felix is mixing his pitches effectively and keeping hitters off balance, he’s fine. However, he’s shown a tendency to become predictable at times, and major league hitters are really good at hitting what they know is coming.

There’s good news here for those rooting for the King. This is about as fixable a problem as you’ll find. It should be quite simple for the Mariners to recognize this pattern, make an adjustment to his pitch selection early in the game, and let the dominoes fall into place from there.

So, to answer the original question, what’s wrong with Felix? In my opinion, it’s as simple as pitch selection. As this 20-year-old kid gets more experience, he’ll learn how to pitch away from predictability, and hitters will resume flailing helplessly at his arsenal. When they don’t know what’s coming, they don’t have a chance.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> David Cameron 2006-05-29T06:05:15+00:00 Five Questions: Seattle Mariners http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/five-questions-seattle-mariners1/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/five-questions-seattle-mariners1/#When:04:05:15 Miguel Olivo was replaced by Pat Borders and it actually constituted an improvement. A full 80% of the starting rotation posted an ERA north of 5.00 while pitching in the cavernous Safeco Field. The opening day middle infield was designated for assignment before the All Star break, and the team’s number one catcher was given away for a player who was subsequently released. Adrian Beltre celebrated his massive new contract with the worst year of his career. The team was so bereft of power that Ichiro finished second on the roster in slugging percentage.

So you’ll understand why everyone-and their mother-is picking the 2006 Seattle Mariners to bring up the rear in the American League West. Thankfully, I am no one’s mother, and I have enough questions about the team to not proclaim this horse dead before the gun sounds.

1. Can the difference in talent between Aaron Sele and Felix Hernandez be measured by human tools?

This would be an unequivocal no. In the last of his 21 starts before he was mercifully released, Aaron Sele threw a “fastball” that still hasn’t crossed home plate. On the 20-80 scouting scale, his velocity ranks as a 15. The Mariners got 116 innings out of Sele, but if they had kept the receipt, they’d have every right to demand a refund, or at least a store credit to Washed Up Pitchers R Us.

Now, Sele has followed my brother to Los Angeles, apparently as retribution for some terrible crime he committed in a prior life. Sorry about that, Jeremy, as well my condolences to the Dodger fans who now have to endure Sele’s attempts to keep baseball’s grim reaper at bay. Replacing Sele in the rotation is a kid you may have heard something about; Felix Hernandez, or, by his proper title, King Felix.

Sele was one of the worst starting pitchers in baseball. Hernandez, at age 19, is already one of the best. If you took Brandon Webb’s groundball dominance, Johan Santana’s strikeout rate, and mixed it with Bartolo Colon’s conditioning program, you’d have a pretty close approximation to El Cartuela, which we can’t translate because this is a family site and there might be kids with the protractors and scientific calculators readings.

I could put up detailed analysis of Felix’s dominance or spend a few thousand words on his brilliance in trying to describe to you the wonder of watching Felix Hernandez pitch, but like every great thing on earth, you have to experience it to understand. So when you wake up and hear the peasants proclaiming “Happy Felix Day!” in the streets, make a date to experience King Felix.

And, Dodger fans, seriously, sorry about Aaron Sele. Good luck with that, though.

2. Is Kenji Johjima any good?

Yes. The last three seasons in Japan, he averaged .325 with 30 home runs and had more walks than strikeouts in each season. Despite the noticeable flop of Kazuo Matsui, Japanese hitters have fared well when crossing the Pacific, and Johjima has a skill set that works in any park. He’s unlikely to repeat the numbers he posted overseas, but that is more due to being a 29-year-old catcher with 1100 major league games under his belt and less so an effect of the transition to Major League Baseball.

My gut feeling is that he’s going to hit something like .270/.330/.440, which doesn’t sound very impressive until you realize the context it will come in. For a catcher playing half his games in Safeco Field, that’s a near All Star performance.

So how much will having Johjima help the Mariners? It might be the largest upgrade any team made at an everyday position this off-season. The Mariners gave 563 plate appearances to seven bad baseball players last year, and for that seasons worth of playing time, they got 35 Runs Created, or a grand total of 2.46 RC/G. For comparison’s sake, Tony Womack posted a 3.0 RC/G last year, so the M’s catchers were the offensive equivalent of the worst player in baseball. In a slump.

Even if Johjima falls on his face and struggles mightily, there’s no chance he can repeat the pure putridity of the Miguel Olivo and Pat Borders led Gang of Awfulness. They left behind some really tiny shoes to fill.

3. Jarrod Washburn—$37.5 million dollars. Really?

Behold the power of Earned Run Average. Washburn’s 3.20 ERA ranked him 4th in the American League last year, and since he kept runs off the board, the Mariners rewarded him like the front line starter he is not. His peripheral numbers continued to dwindle, and the difference between his ERA and his FIP was the highest in baseball. His xFIP, or expected ERA, essentially, was 5.01, almost two full runs higher than his actual ERA.

Why? He stranded a whole lot of runners. He stranded 81.8% of the runners he put on base and led the league in working-out-of-jams. Unfortunately for Mariner fans, he has no history of this kind of runner-stranding dominance, and it’s almost certainly a skill he won’t be able to repeat over the next four years of his contract. I identified Washburn early in the off-season as the number one free agent landmine, so—of course—the Mariners flipped me the bird and signed him anyway.

It was a bad deal from the moment the ink dried, and I cringe thinking about the team paying Washburn nearly $10 million dollars in 2009. But this is a 2006 season preview, and the most relevant question here is just how effective might he be in his next 35 starts. The answer might surprise you.

Jarrod Washburn is a fly ball pitcher. Thanks to Studes work on park factors in the 2006 Hardball Times Annual, we know that Safeco Field turns fly balls into fly outs with more regularity than just about any park on earth. If there’s a place for a fly ball pitcher to succeed, it’s Seattle. Just ask Ryan Franklin, Jamie Moyer, Julio Mateo, or Eddie Guardado. The Mariners have had significant success turning guys with average stuff who allow a ton of fly balls into useful pitchers by showing them the cavern in left center field and telling them to throw it over the heart of the plate.

Washburn might not be a very good pitcher, and the fact that Bill Stoneman admits to openly chuckling when Washburn requested a contract extension shouldn’t make Mariners fans feel very good about the disaster that is his contract, but don’t let the fact that he’s wildly overpaid blind you to the fact that he is now in the best environment possible for him to succeed. The Mariners and Jarrod Washburn are a match made in heaven. That is, if heaven had a really, really expensive entry fee.

4. Isn’t Adrian Beltre the biggest free agent bust in recent history?

That would be a resounding no. While running the risk of having my sabermetric analyst card revoked, I will still contend that there is a great chance that at the end of this contract, the Mariners will have gotten the better end of the deal.

Beltre had a bad 2005 season. So did Eric Chavez and Hank Blalock. It was not a good season for third basemen in the American League West. But interestingly enough, you don’t see too many eulogies for the careers of Chavez and Blalock, and rightfully so. The same goes for Adrian Beltre. The rumors of his demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Clearly, Adrian Beltre’s 2004 season was a career year, a perfect storm of his talent and good fortune meeting to create a season far beyond any possible expectations. Add in the fact that it was his free agent year and people naturally expected a huge regression to the mean.

Beltre regressed far beyond any reasonable mean performance, however. He had the worst year of his career at age 26. Regression to the mean does not predict a collapse to the lowest point of a player’s previously established performance, but that’s what the Mariners got out of their star free agent signing.

So what is Adrian Beltre? He’s pretty obviously not the guy who hit .334 and led the majors in home runs in 2004, but he’s also not the guy who looked like an honors student from the Pedro Cerrano School of Hitting last year. He is a guy with terrific raw power that is undercut by issues with pitch recognition and a poor approach at the plate. Interestingly, however, players of that skill set tend to improve their deficiencies before their power wanes and often improve later in their careers.
Aramis Ramirez stands out as the most obvious current comparison for Beltre. His 2001 season jumps off the page as a fluke just as Beltre’s 2004 season does, but he’s settled into an All Star caliber player in his age 26 and 27 seasons. I’m not projecting Beltre to hit like Ramirez next year, but we have to acknowledge the fact that it’s more than a remote possibility. It’s more likely, in fact, that he hits like the 2005 Aramis Ramirez than it is that he repeats the performance of 2005 Adrian Beltre.

5. Okay, fine, they’re better. But how much can they improve in one season, really?

I’m glad you asked. While common baseball wisdom tells us to look at a team’s previous record, tweak it a bit for free agent additions and subtractions, and call that a prediction for the new year, history rebukes those efforts as folly. Every single year, one or more teams make huge leaps forward and contend for a playoff spot:

2005: Chicago White Sox (+16 wins), Cleveland (+13)
2004: St. Louis (+20), Texas (+18), Anaheim (+15), San Diego (+13)
2003: Kansas City (+21), Florida (+12), Chicago Cubs (+11)
2002: Anaheim (+24), Atlanta (+13), Boston (+11)
2001: Seattle (+25), Chicago Cubs (+23), Houston (+21), Philadelphia (+21), Minnesota (+16), Oakland (+11)
2000: Chicago White Sox (+20), St Louis (+20), Seattle (+12), San Francisco (+11)

It isn’t rare at all to see a team “come from nowhere” to make a strong push for the playoffs. It’s actually so common, you have to expect it. Teams who underperformed the previous year, have significant young talent, and got career years from a key player or two entering their prime often blow the common wisdom out of the water and remind everyone that improvement does not have to come in small, incremental steps.

There isn’t a team in baseball better poised to make that leap this year than the Mariners. They have young players with solid track records or established stars at every position on the diamond besides left field and a pitching staff that will be anchored by the best young arm to enter the major leagues in a couple of decades.

This isn’t to say that the Mariners should be considered favorites in a tough American League West. Clearly, Oakland, Anaheim, and Texas can all claim their own strengths and provide solid cases for why they are better than the Mariners. However, the Mariners have significant talent at key positions and have all the earmarks of a team that could surprise a lot of experts.

And, if I’m totally wrong and the team stinks, it’s okay, because we still have King Felix and you don’t.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> David Cameron 2006-03-24T04:05:15+00:00 A Weekend With Andrew Miller and Daniel Bard http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/a-weekend-with-andrew-miller-and-daniel-bard/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/a-weekend-with-andrew-miller-and-daniel-bard/#When:04:05:15
UNC is led by two of the best starting pitchers in the country: righty Daniel Bard and lefty Andrew Miller. Both have been in the national spotlight since their senior year in high school, and not much has changed in the past three years. The 2006 draft is headlined by a strong group of college pitchers, and no team in the country boasts a better pair than North Carolina. Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to watch both and compose some thoughts on a pair of players who should both be rich men this summer.

Saturday was Bard's turn in the rotation. While he's a legitimate prospect in his own right, he has played second fiddle to Miller throughout his career. I liked the fact that I got to see Bard before Miller, giving me a better chance to evaluate him on his own merits rather than comparing him to his more heavily hyped teammate.

Bard is listed at 6'4" and 202 pounds, but I wouldn't be surprised if the height was fudged by an inch or two. He's not a big kid, but he's tall enough to overcome the short pitcher stigma. He throws from a three-quarter arm slot with solid leg drive and okay mechanics. There's some unnecessary head movement and his release points weren't consistent, but he's in college, so that's to be expected. There wasn't anything in his delivery that isn't fixable, and he's got the foundation of good enough mechanics.

He came out in the first inning pumping gas: 96, 97, 95, 96, 96, 96, 97, 97. Just a steady diet of four-seam fastballs. He clearly believes in the "establish your fastball" mantra. His command was shaky, mostly due to the aforementioned issues with his release point. He missed away a lot, and he appeared to be overthrowing. After a hit batter, Bard settled down and started blowing the ball past hitters, including Wake's star third baseman Matt Antonelli. He busted out a slider that had some diving movement but wasn't located particularly well. In college, though, an 84 MPH slider with movement after a 97 MPH fastball is good enough to miss bats, and Wake's hitters were clearly overmatched.

Bard stuck with fastballs and sliders in the second inning as well, and not long after I mentioned to a friend that he'd have to show a third pitch eventually to show the scouts something, he broke out the curveball. It needs work. It doesn't spin tightly, and he hung a good percentage of them up in the zone. The slider is clearly his go-to breaking ball, and the curve is to show a different look. On the plus side, he did a good job of keeping his arm slot the same on both the slider and the curve, which is a problem for many kids.

Bard's command continued to come and go, but it didn't really matter. Wake wasn't going to hit him and he knew it. He fired more 96 MPH fastballs by the weak hitters in Wake's lineup (and there are some really weak hitters there) and mixed in the slider for the punchouts. The rain began in the fourth inning and pretty much stuck around the rest of the game, but he did well pitching through it and threw strikes for the most part. He ended up hitting three batters, walking two and throwing a wild pitch, but you can get away with that when you only give up one hit. (Here's the box score, if you're interested.)

Sunday was Miller Time. Come on, you knew the joke was coming at some point. This stuff writes itself. The reports I'd read on Miller basically made him sound like a typical raw flamethrower; 6'6", mid-90s fastball, control and secondary pitches need work. Chapel Hill's own Matt Thornton, basically. So, going in, that's what I was expecting to see.

Apparently, Andrew Miller is tired of hearing it, because he was pretty much the anti-Matt Thornton. He's tall, yes, but not super lanky, and his delivery is actually a bit lower than three-quarters. I'd call it five-eighths, but it's not exactly that either. He doesn't drop down, but the arm comes out from his body, and his release is certainly in the left-hand batter's box. He's going to be murder on lefties with that release point.

Like Bard, he came out throwing fastballs, but unlike Bard, they were all two-seamers: 91, 92, 91, 88, 92, 90, 87. His command was off as well, hitting the second batter of the game and walking Antonelli to put a couple of men on. So Miller busted out a top-down slider that is just pretty much unfair. Coming from his arm slot, it bores in on right-handed hitters while having the bottom fall out, and ends up forcing an awful lot of fisted foul balls. He wasn't using it as a knockout pitch, but it clearly could be.

As the game wore on Miller worked in a few four-seam fastballs, hitting 93 a couple times, 94 once, and 95 once, but mainly he stuck to the two-seam variety, getting a ton of choppers up the middle. While the box score won't show it, he was a groundball machine. There was a lot of weak contact. The first hit he allowed was a slow roller that went about 40 feet up the line and died for an RBI infield single. (It was hit by the left fielder, who came into the game batting .147 with aluminum bats. I hope he's going to class.)

Again like Bard, Miller clearly knew that Wake's hitters weren't going to be able to touch him, and he just focused on inducing contact and letting them get themselves out. While the DIPS theory has gained momentum at the major league level, it's clearly not true in college. You watch guys like Andrew Miller knock the bat out of a kid's hands and you know that he had everything to do with the weak ground ball.

Miller's two-seam fastball was impressive, his slider lethal, and he varied the speed on his fastballs enough to keep hitters off balance even without a change-up. His command wasn't great, but he's clearly not Matt Thornton, or anything like a raw fireballer just getting by on velocity. This kid can pitch.

In the end, Bard and Miller lived up to the hype, pitching 14 innings and allowing only an unearned run (seriously, this run was unearned—two errors and the aforementioned 40-foot single) while just outclassing Wake Forest's hitters. This wasn't a competition as much as it was a showcase of superior talent. Wake's not a great college team, but I'm not sure it would have mattered.

Bard and Miller are vastly different animals. Bard looked like the velocity guy who lights up the radar gun, consistently hitting 97 and showing a good enough slider to miss a lot of bats. Despite the advanced reports, however, Miller's not a project getting by on arm strength; he's got a variety of weapons at his disposal and he showed the better idea of how to pitch. Both have a ways to go; they aren't polished, major league-ready pitchers. But they aren't supposed to be; they are starting their junior year in college, and there is enough there to like to see why major league clubs are getting excited.

They're going to be lumped into the same conversation quite a bit this year. You'll hear Bard and Miller become a phrase much like Laverne and Shirley or Bert and Ernie, but in the end they're going to be separated by the draft. At some point, teams are going to have to decide whether they prefer the right-hander with velocity or the left-hander with movement. I liked Miller's package quite a bit more than Bard, but I wouldn't cry if the Mariners selected Daniel Bard with the fifth pick in the draft either.

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