SB Nation - Mark Lowe

Kenji Johjima Doesn't Care About The Money*

Jeff — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:16:25 -0000

* much

From Kirby Arnold this afternoon, we get this bit about Johjima through Mark Lowe:

"I talked to [Kenji] last year about it during batting practice one day," Lowe said. "We were in the outfield at Shea. He told me, 'I don't care how much money I'm making. I don't play for the money. I want to play every day.' "

Two years ago, the Mariners played a three-game set in New York between June 23rd and June 25th. Prior to that series, the M's had played 75 games, of which Kenji started 56 - 54 of them behind the plate. At that point he was on a pace to start about 120 games and appear in 130, putting him in the company of other regulars like Jason Varitek and Dioner Navarro.

Since that series, the Mariners have played 249 games, of which Kenji started 115. Now, granted, he had some injury trouble in 2009 that kept him off the field and skews that number, but it was evident to anyone paying attention that his role was being reduced, due to both his ineffectiveness and the emergence of whatever skill it is that Rob Johnson's supposed to provide. And for a guy like Kenji, who's barely content starting five or six times a week, you have to imagine that that sort of cutback didn't sit very well. Well, I mean, now it's obvious that it didn't sit very well, so we don't have to imagine anything. But still, it's somewhat remarkable to note how calm and composed and professional Kenji remained over the past year and a half despite having his playing time diminished and his competence as a receiver frequently called into question. Deep inside, he must've been pissed. Remember that, according to Alan Nero, Kenji thinks he's still on top of his game.

Faced with the situation that Kenji faced at the end of the year, a lot of people would've stuck around for the money. Some of them would've kept quiet. Others would've bitched. Few of them would've bailed, and though it's not like many players have the sort of guaranteed playing time overseas that Kenji does, his motives here seem unusually genuine - he just wants to play, and the Mariners didn't have room. So he left a lot of money on the table in the name of greater personal satisfaction. I can understand being cynical and insisting that there must've been some sort of buyout, but me, I don't see it. This particular situation strikes me as being exceptional. Kenji's not poor. He knows there'll be money waiting for him in Japan. And, with the money, there'll be a great deal more playing time. We all make some sacrifices in order to be a little happier. I think Kenji just made a bigger one than most of us get the opportunity to make.

Realistically, this is probably about as pleasant a break-up as a sports fan gets to face. Kenji didn't overstay his welcome. He didn't block any youth, he didn't handcuff the front office or coaching staff, and he never caused a ruckus. By the same token, he was past his peak, his contract didn't project well at all, and the organization's top catching prospect is knocking on the door. So he left, and to top it all off, he didn't leave for another team or another rival; he left to go home, overseas, because he just wants to play, and play close to his family. There's no bitterness, and there's no sadness - there's just appreciation, for what Kenji's done, what Kenji did, and who Kenji is.

That's neat. People don't often get to through through an exit like this one. I wish Kenji all the best going forward, and unlike in previous cases with departing Mariners, this time I mean it unconditionally. Kenji was a good player and an excellent professional with Seattle, and to make the sacrifice he made for the reasons we've seen stated - he deserves for this to be the best decision he's ever made.

Is This Sparta?

Graham — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:21:58 -0000

More photos » by Duane Burleson - AP

His hat is stifling. It narrows his vision. And he must see far. His glove is heavy. It throws him off balance. And his target is ninety feet away.

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We've been hearing about the Mariner bullpen quite a lot this season. For a unit that was entirely comprised of question marks, it's held out particularly well, and is often cited as one of the prime reasons the Mariners have remained above .500 well into September. Perhaps no element of the team has defied expectations so much as the relief corps. With a week left in spring training, there was no closer. Late inning duties this year have been shared by a guy who was traded for a no-name last winter, someone who was a no-name last winter, a guy who's coming back from microfracture surgery in his pitching elbow, someone who isn't Tim Lincecum (he didn't last for very long), and Sean White, who is boring. Complementing the late inning boys was a random crop of AAA arms and Miguel Batista. One can only imagine how bullpen coach John Wetteland must have felt when presented with his men at the start of the year, but eventually he was able to turn them into a functional (albeit more than slightly insane) unit.

How? As the story goes, on an early-season road trip, Mark Lowe downloaded 300, which for those unfamiliar with it, is a ridiculously over-the-top movie about the Spartans at Battle of Thermopylae, which occurred during the second Persian invasion of Greece in late 480 BC (spoiler: they all die). He shared his enthusiasm for the film with Wetteland, and things snowballed from there. Members of the bullpen adopted characters from the movie, Spartan helmets popped up everywhere, and a grand ol' time was had by all. One wonders exactly how badly the relievers expected the team to do if they felt as though they identified best with a bunch of guys who all end up dead, but there's no denying it fueled an us-against-the-whole-damn-world mindset that the bullpen latched onto and used as inspiration to pitch their hearts out. The siege mentality was further reinforced when MLB officials decided to take their helmets away. Small wonder, then, that the bullpen has pitched their collective hearts out this year, keeping games just close enough for the struggling position players to scrape out more wins than losses.

This would be all well and good if the Mariner bullpen was actually as good as traditional numbers suggest. But they're not. They're not even average, despite all the one-run games and saves for David Aardsma. By using tRA-derived valuation statistics, they've been more than a quarter-century of runs below average, which turns out to be the worst mark in the American League. AL West rivals Oakland, on the other hand, are well over the +50 mark, which is a spread of almost seven and a half wins. By the numbers, they have answered the questions surrounding them in spring training, and the answer turns out to have been 'holy crap they're bad'. But this doesn't jive at all with their ability to keep them Mariners in business in close games. The team has won an absurd number of one run games, and generally has the ability to keep games close once the team turns over pitching duties to the bullpen. So what gives? Is the Mariner bullpen an above-average unit with an elite closer as the spearhead, or is David Aarsdma the equivalent of affixing a razor blade to a forty foot tall marshmallow and calling it a weapon? Or is the answer somewhere in between?

I hope it's the last option, because otherwise I've just spent a tonne of time collecting data for no good reason. Let's dig in.

Note: All data current as of 2:39 PM Sept 12th, 2009. Partial innings denoted as .3 for one out, .7 for two.

First, let's look at our cast of intrepid heroes and Denny Stark. Who's been leaned on the most? The quartet of Mark Lowe, Sean White, Miguel Batista, and David Aardsma have accounted for a little over half of the innings thrown by Mariner relievers this season, as shown in the chart below:

Figure 1: Innings pitched by Mariner relievers in 2009

Chris Jakubauskas and Shawn Kelley have also both seen significant time this year as well, and Kelley was thriving in a late-inning role until he suffered a rib injury in mid-May. Five arms have appeared in both the rotation and the bullpen, including Brandon Morrow, who began the season as the closer before a series of meltdowns got him demoted. Now that we have a pretty good idea of who's soaked up how many innings, let's take a look at their numbers in RA and tRA form:

Table 1: RA, tRA, rRAA, and pRAA for Mariner relievers in 2009

rRAA and pRAA are computed by taking the difference between league RA and tRA respectively and multiplying by innings pitched/9 for rRAA and expected innings/9 for pRAA, with Δ denoting the difference between rRAA and pRAA. As the column on the far right shows, Mariners pitchers have, by and large, far exceeded their expected value as far as defence/park-independent statistics are concerned. This is hardly a surprise, as the Mariners have the best defence in the game and play in a pitcher-friendly park. The biggest differences are in Sean White and David Aardsma's numbers, who between them 'should' be worth around 15 runs less than their actual numbers would suggest. Again, this isn't a surprise, as the pitchers likely to have the biggest negative difference between pRAA and rRAA are those who've been highly effective by ERA and associated metrics. The opposite should also hold true: the poor performers are likely to have been negatively impacted by their fielders.

In fact, the only relief pitchers who have a lower tRA than RA are Mark Lowe, Brandon Morrow, and Garrett Olson, and only Lowe has been part of the bullpen all season. The numbers are fairly remarkable - by using traditional numbers, the Mariner bullpen has been worth +6.4 runs total, and with pRAA, they've been at a rather alarming -25.9. Miguel Batista is particularly notable for having cost us almost ten runs over the course of the season, but he's had a couple of competitors for the suckiest bullpen arm award, with Jakubauskas and Stark (in ten innings somehow) pushing him all the way. Some (most) of the numbers in the table above has to have come from the defence, as Safeco Field isn't going to explain away the whole thing. But before we look at defensive contributions explicitly, I'd like to introduce the concept of leverage.

Most of you should be familiar with Jeff's lovely win expectancy charts, which appear after nearly every game. The idea of win expectancy is straightforward. For each game state (outs, score, runners, inning) we can figure out the likelihood of an average team beating another average team. Despite most teams not being completely average and entirely constituted of average players, win probability can be used as a measure of how important a given event was in terms of winning or losing baseball games. A walk-off home run? Worth a lot. A two-out walk with the bases loaded in the second when down by five? Not so much. In fact, for each game state, we know what the possible swings in win probability are. A team cannot possibly make a big impact in one at-bat when they're ten runs down, even if the batter hits a grand slam, but with the tying run at third with one out in the ninth, the situation can become critically important.

Table 2: 2009 AL relief leverage by
team, descending

Leverage is a measurement of just how important those situations are. Fortunately, the good people at Fangraphs keep track of this number for both teams and individual players. Here we are concerned with the average leverage a pitcher sees, denoted as pLI (the average is 1.00). In general one might expect bullpens to see higher leverage situations than starting pitchers, but as Table 2 to the left shows, this is not the case for most of the American League, which have seven teams below 1.00 and 12 below 1.10. The standout teams are the Boston Red Sox and the Seattle Mariners, with the latter leading the major leagues in bullpen leverage (the Dodgers and Cubs are also both over 1.20 in average bullpen leverage).

There are a number of reasons why we might see such a disparity in the stressfulness of situations seen by a bullpen. One such reason might be that a team is poor enough that they are regularly losing by large enough amounts to make winning improbably: this might apply to the AL's basement teams: Oakland, Kansas City, and Baltimore. Or the opposite could be true and the team could routinely be so far ahead by the time the manager goes to a reliever that their innings simply aren't worth very much, which is the route taken by the New York Yankees and their absurdly powerful offence.

Conversely, a team which finds its bullpen highly stressed will be in contention to win many games, one that relies on excellent run prevention to keep things close. That would be the Mariners. Their bullpen leverage index of 1.23 means that the runs saved or given up by Mariner relievers are worth 132% of those saved or given up by their counterparts in New York.

The same concept applies to individual pitchers on the same team. By multiplying innings pitched by individual pLI, we can see the relative importance of the innings a pitcher has soaked up, as shown below:

Figure 2: IP*pLI for Mariner relievers in 2009

As we can see, David Aardsma springs into the lead once important innings are considered. The top four of Aardsma/Lowe/White/Batista are now responsible for almost two thirds of leveraged relief innings, and the team total has jumped by more than 100 innings (this is insane, by the way). Aardsma and Lowe are entirely responsible for the team's jump in innings total, with the former experiencing the equivalent of 76 extra innings' worth of stress and the latter a robust +38, due to pLIs of 2.21 and 1.55 respectively. Brandon Morrow's adventures in Minnesota and Texas see him grab more innings, and poor Doug Fister, who made his debut at the end of a blowout game, has his contribution marked as wholly irrelevant and thus discarded.

We need to account for leverage when we look at value metrics like pRAA, and again this is a simple case of multiplication. Numbers multiplied by pLI are denoted with an apostrophe:

Table 3: pLI and leveraged rRAA and pRAA for Mariner relievers in 2009

Aardsma's performance is particularly notable, but apart from the fantastic contribution from our closer, what really stands out is how poorly Miguel Batista has been used. His pLI was just a tick below average, and this season he's been running a tRA of almost six. While his contract demanded that he be on the roster somewhere, the damage he's caused could probably have been mitigated by relegating him to mop-up duty rather than deploying him in relatively close games. Denny Stark and Chris Jakubauskas both saw their negative contributions decreased due to their throwing in less stressful situations, which would have left Batista all alone at the bottom if not for the increased impact of The Adventures of Brandon Morrow. The chart does show you why the Mariner pen is held in high regard by those watching, though. The important innings have gone to White, Aardsma, and Lowe, and by and large they just haven't allowed runs, to the tune of 44 runs saved by rRAA. Let's look at an overall comparison between rRAA, pRAA, and the leveraged numbers:

Table 4: rRAA, pRAA, and leveraged values for Mariner relievers in 2009

As shown in the table above, leveraging the numbers results in an increase in both rRAA' and pRAA'. This should go as a feather in the cap of Don Wakamatsu, as it demonstrates his ability use his bullpen arms (sans Batista) effectively - the most important innings have gone to the most able pitchers. It's really no wonder that those watching games and following closely think that the team has a good bullpen. Naturally, we pay more attention when we're in with a shot at winning, and in those situations, the relief corps just doesn't give up runs. It's hard not to be confident in the later innings when your top arms are that good at shutting the opposition's bats. But again, how much of this is the responsibility of the pitcher? pRAA' agrees that the bullpen is generally far better when the game's on the line, but still has the unit as well below average, and almost three wins less valuable than it would appear when simply looking at runs, which is a similar result to what we saw earlier when looking at unleveraged values.

The defence, then, has to have some responsibility for the perception of the bullpen as an elite unit. How much defensive support has each pitcher received? Is defence clutch in any way (the most likely explanation for this would be sensible use of defensive replacements)? Although you could probably figure things out from the numbers above, we like our graphs around here - the chart below shows the defensive support given to each pitcher per tRA's xRR, which is simply expected runs minus actual runs with park effects accounted for. Both plain xRR and xRR multiplied by pLI are shown.

Figure 3: Defensive support (standard and leveraged) for Mariner relievers in 2009 (click image for full size).

Aardsma and White have been the primary beneficiaries of the defence this season, but it's hard to argue in favour of defensive clutchness: Morrow didn't get much support, and Lowe has been a little better than his traditional line too. In fact, summing leveraged xRR and subtracting plain xRR leaves you with one extra run, which is a little surprising considering the average pLI of 1.23. Overall, the defence hasn't cared who's pitching or what the score is - it's just gone out and made plays no matter the situation. Despite some of it being explained away with leveraged numbers, I have to conclude that the greater part of the difference between 'common knowledge' and a quick statistical peek at our pen's numbers is due to Franklin Gutierrez and company.

All in all, I think it's pretty clear that although the bullpen isn't as good as commonly believed, it hasn't been as bad as simply looking at unleveraged pRAA would suggest, simply because the guys relied on when the games are on the line have been much better than those in mopup duty (surprise!). However, the bullpen has still been below average, and without the safety blanket of the best defence in the game to make them look good, we'd hear less about resilience and esprit de corps and more about fatigue and the need for mechanical tweaks.

If this is Sparta, it's been more Sellasia than Thermopylae.

61-58, Game Notes

Jeff — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:23:56 -0000

More photos » by Duane Burleson - AP

We hugging? We not hugging? Dude you gotta tell me quick

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I watched it all go down, and it made me mad. Then I remembered that the win didn't really matter, and it made me indifferent. Then I remembered that the win mattered to Felix, and it made me mad.

Earlier this week I was thinking about launching a series entitled Why Mark Lowe Is Different. Or maybe What's Different About Mark Lowe? Or possibly Mark Lowe: Different! Why? I don't know, I didn't really think about the name. But what it was going to be was a series of posts testing out different theories as to why Lowe's been pitching so much better. I gave him a lot of crap earlier in the season for pitching well below his ability, but then it looked like he had turned it around, and I wanted to know why. I intended to begin with the hypothesis that nothing had changed, and that it was all just statistical variation, and go from there. Pitch type, pitch movement, pitch location, delivery, and so on - in the pursuit of knowledge, no stone imaginable may go unturned.

Well I'm glad I didn't start running that series because that's three games in a row now that Lowe's really struggled. Not that I don't think he's better now than he was earlier in the year - he had a 1.6 K/BB and 8% swinging strike rate through July 5th and stands at 5.3 and 14% since - but that just would've been really bad timing, and I'm thinking that maybe I should just hold out until the offseason before writing anything like that. You know, just in case. Because the thing about relievers is that on any given night they can make anyone look like an idiot.

Mark Lowe: better pitcher, lousy night. Though he deserved a little better, he made far too many mistakes.

Of course, the whole eighth inning wouldn't have happened as it did were it not for a couple fielding miscues that kind of flew under the radar a little bit. The first - a chopper that got by Josh Wilson's glove - came after a homer and a line drive had already caused viewers to sour on Lowe, and the second - a blown pickoff by Russ Branyan that allowed Ryan Raburn to steal home - came after Detroit had already taken the lead and caused Mariner fans to mentally surrender. Mark Lowe wasn't good, but those four runs were by no means all his fault.

Those were big mistakes. I imagine that Wilson will escape blame on account of his night at the plate and that chopper being a tough short-hop, but if he makes that play - as I think most big league shortstops would be able to do - there's a man on second and two out instead of men on the corners and one, and that's huge. In the former situation, Lowe's one out away and has some wiggle room. In the latter situation, the tying run's 90 feet away and odds are good that he'll have to see Miguel Cabrera. The win expectancy swing of that error was -22.5%, as compared to the +16.6% boost from Wilson's home run, and that error took us from being heavy favorites to a coin flip. That's an unfortunate way for Wilson to remember what should've been a happy night.

As for the other miscue, it's funny; rundowns fall into the category of plays that're really hard to execute yourself but that you expect Major Leaguers to pull off with 100% efficiency. Which isn't to say that I excuse Branyan for his mistake, but the whole time he was chasing Cabrera I was thinking "oh God he has to watch two guys and throw on the run." So although I was disappointed by the result, I understood how it could happen. Just like with the grounder to Wilson, Branyan usually does better and knows what he did wrong, but it just so happened that today they both screwed up in the same inning and as such made a significant contribution to the losing effort. Sorry Felix :(

Felix Hernandez (I'm spelling his name out now at least once for Search Engine Optimization!) came out of the game after seven innings and 106 pitches. As you've probably heard by now, the reason he didn't come back out for the eighth was because his legs started cramping up. Not that he would've been able to go much longer anyway, given his season high of 117, but hey, who knows what would've happened?

That's the downside. Literally the only downside to his start is that minor leg cramps ended his night at 106 pitches. Everything before that was peaches. What is there that's left to be said? Were I in a more eloquent mood I could probably describe his performance with a poem or a fake dialogue, but I feel boring, so I'll just tell you that he missed 14 bats and struck out nine guys while walking one. He whiffed the left-handed and awesome Curtis Granderson three times. And he featured a pitch that - I'm going to say it - looked an awful lot like the Royal Curve I at one point thought he had lost. It was a sharp curve with a lot of break both left and down, and it made the Tigers look helpless. Of the 18 he threw, they only swung at three. And hit one. I love that pitch. Not that Felix really needs a fourth good pitch, but I like when he has it because it lets me feel smug. "Oh, Johan has a good changeup? That's neat. Felix has a good everything."

A wonderful start that, even without the win, should help his standing in the race for the Cy Young.

My friend texted me just now to say that Kyle Blanks just hit an inside-the-park home run. Holy shit I love Kyle Blanks

Clete Thomas led off the bottom of the second with a foul pop-up down the third base line. As Ryan Langerhans ran in pursuit and slid to make a catch, a fan reached out a good three or four feet onto the field to interfere. However, rather than call the batter out, umpire Dan Iassonga ruled it a foul ball, offering this justification:

"He said he saw the fan interfere but because because he (Langerhans) was sliding and it wasn't just a routine catch, he couldn't just award him that,'' said Wakamatsu, who ran out to argue.

Here's the play in question:

I get what Iassonga means, and there's probably no 100% right or 100% wrong solution to this. But that's an awful long way for a fan to reach out, and were it not for his glove, I'm pretty sure Langerhans makes that catch. Even had this happened in our favor, rather than to our detriment, I would've supported a ruling of fan interference.

The game ended with a 12-pitch strikeout of Jose Lopez by Fernando Rodney with the tying run on second base. The at bat began with two strikes, but Lopez took three balls and fouled off six more pitches before finally swinging through a low fastball. People love to talk about how at bats like this are a battle of wills between the hitter and the pitcher, but the struggle nobody talks about is the struggle felt by the fans who want to get up, applaud, and cheer for the final strike.

After Pitch 1: Atta boy Rodney, great pitch! Two more!
After Pitch 2: One more! One more to go! Yeah baby c'mooooonnnnnn Fernan-DO!
After Pitch 3: Good pitch, he barely touched it! You got this! WOOOOOOO
After Pitch 4: No biggie, no biggie, gotta waste one. Let's get him now, your pitch!
After Pitch 5: Whoaaa can't believe he held up! Great pitch! Do it again, he can't touch you!
After Pitch 6: Barely got a piece! You just have to
After Pitch 7: WHERE WAS THAT
After Pitch 8: In control, in control, it's...c'mon now
After Pitch 9: uh
After Pitch 10: fuck this COME ONNNN
During Pitch 11: :sits down:
After Pitch 11: :makes a scene of standing back up, sighs: :claps very slowly: all right listen up now you piddly son of a bitch
After Pitch 12: YEAHHHHHHHHHHHH

Tonight, 33,710 Tiger fans were given a reason to find Jose Lopez annoying. They won't necessarily remember why, but they'll remember what. When Lopez plays the Tigers three years down the road, one Tigers fan will say to another "oh God I hate this guy," and when the other Tigers fan asks the first Tigers fan why, the first Tigers fan will reply "I dunno he just seems like one of those guys."

An Assortment Of Thoughts

Jeff — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 07:58:26 -0000

Note: if you missed it, check out Matthew's July pitcher report card below.

When the Ms. is gone, I need things to do, and tonight my thing to do is write.

The Mariners are approaching a dicey situation, where Felix Hernandez only has two remaining years of team control after this one and will be in line for a big pay raise in the winter. It's a situation that could've been avoided had the team earlier signed him to an extension, but as much as Bavasi liked to say "it takes two to tango" (implying that he was open to an extension but Felix was not), the blame for this shouldn't fall on Felix's camp. Felix has always been open to signing an extension with the Mariners. Always. And Bavasi approached him and his agent on a handful of occasions. Bavasi, however, lowballed him with offers to buy out his arbitration years and get options for his first few years of free agency. It would be one thing if Felix turned down reasonable contracts, but Bavasi got frustrated because Felix wouldn't sign for pennies on the dollar. Don't get mad at Felix. Every player deserves the right to a fair contract. It's Bavasi's fault our ace never got one.

Mark Lowe through June 25th: 61% strikes, 8% swinging strikes, 1.7 K/BB
Mark Lowe since June 28th: 63% strikes, 12% swinging strikes, 4.0 K/BB

I've said a lot of negative things about Mark Lowe this year, mostly lamenting the fact that his results weren't matching his excellent stuff, but lately he's picked it up a notch and turned himself into a reliable late-inning arm. While he's not getting hitters to chase a lot of balls, and it's only a sample size of 15.2 innings, this is an encouraging bit of progress.

Jose Lopez is up to a .767 OPS with a .277 BABIP. He hits the worst home runs on the team, but homers are homers, and he's starting to look like a little bit of a power hitter. For as down as some people were on Lopez last winter, now I'm seeing him as a bargain. A bargain who could top out at any moment, but a bargain nonetheless.

A few times I've described Jack Hannahan as a hitter whose overall value is less than the sum of his parts. When you watch him hit, he looks really good, and it's only when you see his numbers that you realize how much of a problem he really is. That said, he's at .264/.344/.415 since coming over from Oakland, and if I didn't know any better I'd almost suggest that he's halfway decent. In a way it's almost too bad that Beltre's going to be back so soon, because I feel like, who knows, maybe when a hitter has the fundamentals down like Hannahan seems to, things can just click overnight.

A little while ago I decided to run through what PITCHf/x information we have on Luke French's five big league starts. Here's what I came up with after a little tinkering:

Pitch %Thrown %Strike %SwS

Fastball 60.6 63.0 3.8

Slider 25.6 74.1 28.6

Change 13.7 50.0 8.3

Now, you should know that the sample size on this stuff is pretty small. Only a total of 437 pitches in there. But what we can tell is that French's big money pitch is his slider, and his fastball is pretty bad. We'll see on the change. I'm not comfortable jumping to conclusions based on an n of 60, and given that French posted a 4.2 K/BB against AAA righties earlier this year, I imagine his change is better than these numbers make it look. But who knows.

It's both interesting and encouraging to see French having such good results on his slider early on, because that's the pitch that's made all the difference between the Luke French of before and the Luke French of 2009. French didn't really throw a slider for a while. He only started throwing it in late 2008, and previously his K/9 in the minors had stabilized around the low- to mid-5's. He was even eligible for the Rule 5 Draft this past offseason and didn't get selected. By throwing the slider and becoming comfortable with it, though, French was able to push his K/9 in AAA up to 7.9 before getting promoted. So while his performance this year looks anomalous, there's a reason for it. French picked up a new pitch, and it turned him into a legitimate pitcher.

I'm looking forward to seeing him. My expectations aren't high, and he has a really low ceiling, but I think he can succeed here, and I think he can succeed here for a long time.

I mentioned this in the game thread yesterday, but Jack Wilson has the same problem as me, where the goatee part of his beard is visibly thicker than the rest. It sounds stupid but once you notice it the first time it's all you can see in the mirror. It's annoying. We just want to be even. Now my beard's pretty thick, and I think he's got it a little worse, but it's more than a little disconcerting when you realize that part of your face looks like part of Jack Wilson's.

I'm going to take off my sabermetric hat for a minute and put it down on the desk. Today we saw Chris Shelton get DFA'd to make roster room for Luke French while Mike Sweeney remained on the team. Shelton, of course, is the better hitter of the two. I don't think there's really any question. Sweeney's got a .287 wOBA on the year and he doesn't have much in the way of home run power, while Shelton's come in at .391 in Tacoma with a dozen dingers. When you have a roster spot dedicated to a straight-up right-handed bat, you'd think the right move would be to give that spot to the best option available.

However, as far as this move is concerned, I'm on the team's side, and for three reasons:

(1) In terms of competing for the playoffs, the season is over
(2) Shelton is 29 years old and not a prospect
(3) Sweeney is rather obviously one of, if not the most well-liked player on the team

Because of point #1, it doesn't really matter who's better, because wins now are less important than they would've been two or three months ago. And because of point #2, there's no reason to treat Shelton like some sort of great unknown or valuable youngster with a bright future with the team. He's a known entity and he's not about to get any better.

So we're left with point #3. I know in the past I've come down hard on people who've made a big deal out of clubhouse chemistry, but this is a different and specific situation. Keep Shelton and DFA Sweeney and there's no real benefit. You might score an extra two or three runs over the rest of the year, but that's it, and those runs aren't going to get you much. Maybe a meaningless win. By DFA'ing Sweeney, though, you're left having to explain to the team why you just got rid of everyone's best friend. Sweeney occupies a central role in the Mariner clubhouse. I think that much is pretty clear. And I guarantee you - I guarantee you - that if the team cut Sweeney, the players wouldn't understand. They wouldn't understand, and they'd be upset.

My position on clubhouse chemistry is the same as that of a bunch of other people - given two players, with all other things being equal, you pick the guy who's more likable. Because, while we can't evaluate the effect of chemistry, there's no reason to go against it if you don't have to. Here, there's no reason to go against it. Here, all other things are pretty much equal. Because the tangible production we get out of this particular roster spot no longer means anything. I don't want to see Mike Sweeney in a Mariner uniform in 2010 - and the same goes for Junior - but for these final two months of 2009, I have absolutely no problem with keeping them around. They're going to do more good than harm.

Dodgers Continue To Search For More Bullpen Help

Matt Buggenhagen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:44:09 -0000

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The Dodgers seemed to sure up a need in their bullpen this afternoon with the acquisition of reliever George Sherrill, but according to ESPN.com's Jayson Stark, the Dodgers may not be done yet.

Stark notes that the Dodgers may still be looking to add another reliever, preferably a right-hander.

He mentions that the Dodgers could be interested in Seattle reliever Mark Lowe, Pirates reliever Matt Capps, Blue Jays reliever Jason Frasor, and a pair of Reds relievers in David Weathers and Arthur Rhodes.

It's been well documented that the Dodgers bullpen has been heavily overworked this year, so the idea of continuing to add depth certainly makes sense.

Of the group listed I would think Lowe and Frasor would be the most likely candidates, mostly because of their production and their club friendly contracts.

First Half In Review: Mariners Go Driving

Jeff — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:56:45 -0000

The Mariner players' first half performances as things that can happen to you in the car.

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David Aardsma: somebody texts you a happy score update of a big game, the beginning of which you have to miss because your boss made you work late and you've had it with these stupid East Coast start times.

Wladimir Balentien: somebody texts you a sad score update of said game.

Miguel Batista: somebody texts you a score update of the game, but when you reach into your pocket to see if it's happy or sad, a police officer drives by, sees you, pulls you over, and writes you a ticket.

Erik Bedard: the air conditioner keeps shutting off every few minutes, and while it always manages to fix itself, you wish it would just turn on and stay on because it's a hundred degrees outside and you don't want to roll down the window.

Adrian Beltre: you use the same six-hour permit on your dashboard to park downtown four nights in a row. On the fifth night, you get caught and your car is towed.

Yuniesky Betancourt: the cop that pulled you over for texting while driving hands you the ticket then punches you in the face for being such a sad little fairy.

Russell Branyan: drive-in movie with the prom queen who didn't win because of her intellect. And the movie is Braveheart or something.

Ronny :(edeno: sometime during the night a cat climbs up and dies in your engine.

Endy Chavez: you clean your window, but the wiper fluid leaves some messy streaks and when you try to make those go away you run out of liquid.

Ken Griffey Jr: every time you turn on your vent or air conditioner, it introduces a little tolerable but annoying constant static to your iPod playback.

Franklin Gutierrez: you're driving down a desert freeway and you see a hitchhiker and even though you don't usually do things like this you decide to pull over and pick him up and the hitchhiker is Mitch Hedberg who's alive somehow and vows to repay you with hours of comedy.

Felix Hernandez: reaching for some change to pay for your drive-through coffee, you open up the container you keep under the seat and find $200 in cash that you got from an ATM, stored away, and forgot about.

Chris Jakubauskas: no matter how many times you adjust the rear-view mirror, it keeps slipping out of position and giving you a view of the back seat. But you just re-upholstered the back seat and it looks nice, so that's something.

Kenji Johjima: the switch to electronically move your seat forward and back is broken, so you have to move it yourself with that lever that's by the floor that got all sticky when you dropped that one soda.

Rob Johnson: the cupholder is too wide and too shallow, so every time you drive with a drink you have to lean forward a little and awkwardly position yourself so that you can hold it in place.

Shawn Kelley: you get into the car just in time to hear your favorite radio station kick off an hour block of BRMC.

Ryan Langerhans: during the hour block the DJ mentions that BRMC will be coming to town on Friday with Maximo Park as the opener.

Jose Lopez: leaving work to drive home, you notice that the gas light is on, but you decide, what the hell, I'm gonna go for it.

Mark Lowe: you're driving around with a friend and you mention to her "hey you know what song I heard this morning that's really annoying? Lights by Journey. I fucking hate that song" and your friend nods and twenty seconds later she starts to sing Lights by Journey.

Brandon Morrow: on a six-hour nighttime drive through the plains to meet up with friends at the cabin in the morning, the car's GPS breaks and you lose all sense of direction.

Garrett Olson: you drive home and nothing happens.

Carlos Silva: you're driving around a lonely stretch of highway when your car starts to smell funny, and it breaks down just as you're crossing the train tracks, and then the railroad barriers sound off and lower themselves, and then your doors jam and won't open, and OH MY GOD THERE'S A COBRA IN THE GLOVE COMPARTMENT

Ichiro Suzuki: you bring dinner home to have a pleasant in-house date night with your significant other and your car smells like fresh pizza and mozzarella sticks for a week.

Mike Sweeney: lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, you pull over and get very bad directions from a very nice man.

Jason Vargas: In-n-Out accidentally gives you an extra double-double free of charge.

Jarrod Washburn: getting an oil change and buying new tires improves your car's performance by a couple mpg.

Sean White: already running late, you spill scalding hot coffee in your lap and drive all the way to work in blinding discomfort.

Assorted others: you're wasted but not fit to drive home so you recline the seat and fall asleep.

First Half In Review: Passing Out The Grades (Pitching Staff)

Jeff — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:10:25 -0000

Part two of a two-part series. Awwww yeahhhh

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David Aardsma: A-. Aarsdma's been quite a find, helping to somewhat stabilize a bullpen that was sent into disarray by Brandon Morrow. The strikeouts are way up, and he's only had a couple meltdowns through three months. My only concern is that he allows a ton of fly balls, many of them deep. He's definitely benefited from a big park and an awesome defense. He hasn't pitched as well as his ERA.

Miguel Batista: D. It's interesting to me that people don't realize how bad he still is. That 2008 must've left quite the impression.

Erik Bedard: B. Pitched well a lot of the time he was on the mound, but he didn't spent enough time on the mound, and there's not much consistency start-to-start. While it's great that his shoulder MRI came up clean, in some ways mysterious discomfort is worse than the stuff you can explain. I feel about Erik the way aviophobes feel about an overseas vacation.

Felix Hernandez: A. Felix may be a 23 year old All Star with a million-dollar contract and a billion-dollar arm, but I bet he doesn't have an emergency survival blanket in his pocket. You may think you're some kind of hotshot, but come wintertime, we'll see which one of us gets to enjoy complete thermal protection from rain and snow.

Chris Jakubauskas: D+. A few months ago I mentioned how much I liked Jakubauskas' curveball. Recently Harry Pavlidis did some work at Beyond The Box Score showing that Jakubauskas' curve has the lowest swinging strike rate of any curve in the Majors. I will never understand why anyone takes me seriously anymore.

Shawn Kelley: C. Kelley generally did good work on the mound, but he missed a lot of time and his most recent appearances show that he's still not all the way right. I both love Shawn Kelley and wish that he weren't probably the second-most dependable arm in the bullpen.

Mark Lowe: C. Too many balls and far too much contact for a guy with his stuff. USE YOUR CHANGEUP IT WILL HELP YOU AGAINST THOSE SINISTER LEFTIES

Brandon Morrow: C-. The best pitching prospect in our system has 127 games of Major League experience.

Garrett Olson: D+. I like having Olson around, and he has a little decent upside as a 4/5 starter, but his stuff gives him so little margin for error that it's basically impossible for me to feel comfortable in any situation where he's on the mound. I think that's the biggest reason why his bases loaded Houdini act the other day was so incredible. He doesn't miss many bats and he too often struggles to find the strike zone. Hurry up, RRS. And don't take this the wrong way, but you should hurry up too, Brandon.

Carlos Silva: F. Every day for the past three weeks I've thought about posting "Today's Fun Fact: Carlos Silva is still a Mariner" but I couldn't bring myself to do it, so now I'm doing it here. Only $25m left on the books after this season! Silva is living(?) proof that the big league DL system is a farce. Yeah, yeah, he has some wear and tear. That's not why he's sitting. He's sitting because oh my god why why would you ever let him pitch

Jason Vargas: C+. The more I see of him, the more I fall in love with Vargas' changeup. Between that and his ordinary but left-handed breaking ball, he's a starter who's not likely to run a big platoon split. Considering he's not even getting expensive yet, he was one hell of a throw-in, a guy I barely even noticed when we made the trade. I'm worried about how well he'll hold up down the stretch after not throwing in 2008, but to date, he's been quite good for what he is.

Jarrod Washburn: B-. Last year's litmus test of baseball intelligence was Raul Ibanez's defense. This year's is Jarrod Washburn's value as a pitcher. Washburn has taken a step forward - listen to me, everybody, Washburn has taken a step forward - but he's still not very good, and people who want to offer him arbitration or sign him to an extension are pants-on-arms crazy. He's been neat for three months, though. You know what else is neat? This emergency survival blanket. The package says it can be used as a signaling device for air support, and I work right next to Miramar, but for some reason when I took it for a field test the pilots got all uppity.

Sean White: C-. He's last year's Roy Corcoran, only with like 25% less of the only thing that made last year's Roy Corcoran any good. Speaking of percentages, this emergency survival blanket retains 90% of body heat. Great for survival, and great for taking warm pies to a picnic! White probably deserves a D or a D+, but he's flukily avoided home runs, so whatever. I wonder if people back home refer to him as the pride of Pullman. That would suck for Pullman.

Assorted Others: Irrelevant. When Roy Corcoran's on, he covers the ground with his sinker, but nothing covers the ground quite like this emergency survival blanket.

45-42, Game Notes

Jeff — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:57:09 -0000

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Not photoshopped.

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So if last night's game erased the game before, and tonight's game erased yesterday's, then does that mean we have Thursday back? Franklin!!!

Home runs don't come much more unlikely than Rob Johnson's off what I can only imagine was a fatigued Kevin Millwood. I could spend hours trying to explain the magnitude to which I didn't in any way see that coming, but I think Wakamatsu's face did it best. I'm guessing Ranger fans feel about as good about this as we do when the M's let Jeff Mathis tee off. Texas lost for a lot of reasons tonight, but none were more visible than letting Rob Johnson take their ace deep.

Jarrod Washburn has improved this year. That much is measurably true. The issue is that he hasn't actually become particularly good, and people need to stop looking at his ERA and getting carried away. All this business over the past week or two regarding his "Flipper" pitch - look, I'm as excited as anyone that Washburn's getting more confident in his breaking stuff, but this isn't some sort of breakthrough. Take away the cute little name and you're left with Washburn embraces, hones revolutionary new 'curving ball'. What's that? Sometimes it takes hitters by surprise? Messes with their timing? That's what curveballs are supposed to do, and what's more is that this isn't even a new pitch; Washburn's been throwing a slow curve for years. Now, it seems to be better this season, and that's terrific, but let's be reasonable.

You know what the statistical difference is between Jarrod Washburn 2008 and Jarrod Washburn 2009? +1.5% swinging strikes and +1.3% strikes. That's good, and it's really helped his walk and strikeout numbers, but it's not like those things alone punch his ticket to stardom. He's pitching better, and getting lucky, and working in front of a wonderful defense. He is not one of those things. He is all of those things. I will happily admit that I feel more confident going into a game with Jarrod Washburn than with someone like Garrett Olson or RRS, but at the end of the day, that doesn't mean anything.

Ryan Langerhans has played all of nine games in Safeco Field, and already he's become intimately familiar with the walls in left field. In the top of the second he played a carom off the retaining wall behind third base and threw out Marlon Byrd trying for a double, and in the ninth he put himself in perfect position to receive a ball off the top of the fence and almost threw Byrd out again. Side note: after twice getting gunned down on the bases, Byrd must've really, really wanted to make it to second base. I remember one time at school I was waiting outside for a cab in the wind, and it was really cold and annoying, and after about ten minutes of taking a beating I started to yell at it. Then the wind stopped and I was contented and smug. "Fuck you, wind!" "Get fucked, wind!" I imagine that's how Byrd felt about the bag at second once he finally got there safe.

Mark Lowe threw a couple of real good changeups to Josh Hamilton there in the eighth. The change was by far Lowe's best pitch a year ago, but for whatever reason it's gone away in 2009, so it's great to see some signs of his getting it back. He's going to need that pitch if he wants to have a good career.

Aardsma looked as good as ever. Struck out Hank Blalock on a 90mph split and later taught Nelson Cruz a little something about the high fastball. If anyone was concerned about possible lingering after-effects from the Baltimore meltdown, you can stow those away.

Jack Hannahan hit a rope of a double, saw 17 pitches in three plate appearances, and made a couple nifty defensive plays, including picking a short-hop off the bat of Andruw Jones to lead off the ninth. Short-hops always look so simple until you actually have to field one yourself, at which point most people just put the glove somewhere and hope for the best. It's always impressive, then, to watch a big leaguer who knows where the ball is going to go.

43-40, Game Notes

Jeff — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:23:07 -0000

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Baltimore Orioles manager Dave Trembley doffs his cap out of respect for home plate umpire Tom Hallion in the first inning against the Seattle Mariners in a baseball game Tuesday, July 7, 2009, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

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I've always found it interesting how it's the most lopsided losses that make you the least angry. Lose an important game by one and people will bitch for days, but lose an important game by eight and - where you'd think that fans would have the most to complain about - most everyone's happy to just forget about it and move on. Today's game was awful, and observers would have every right to tear apart a disappointing lineup and a bullpen that was all chutes and no ladders, but that's not how blowouts work, and by the seventh I was already looked ahead to tomorrow. As a matter of fact, if there's one common refrain among Mariner fans right now, it's that tonight's game was encouraging, what with the impressive return of Bedard. I mean, I know that's true, but it's weird. Only a baseball fan could find more good in humiliation than in narrow defeat.

It's a shame that it had to come to an early end, but for four innings, Erik Bedard was terrific. That was as sharp as I've ever seen him in a Mariner uniform. He came out in the first with a really good, biting breaking ball and a fastball that looked faster than it was, and though he was initially a little wild and the Orioles got to him for two runs, it didn't take long before he found his command and became almost literally unhittable. He struck out eight of the 16 batters he faced, retiring the final ten after Scott's run-scoring base hit, and for every single person asking whether Bedard was okay to be pitching again, Erik gave an unwavering and positive response. He's back. For however long he's healthy, he's back.

Of the 72 pitches he threw, 46 (64%) were strikes - 66% after the first - and the Orioles swung and missed 12 times. Those 12 whiffs tie his season high, alleviating some of the anxiety that built up as his swinging strike rate dropped prior to landing on the DL. His fastball location was good, his curveball location was better, and he got a handful of pitches up there at 94. It was just - Bedard was awesome. It kind of got on my nerves that it took him a month to get back from an injury that was written off as no big deal when it happened, but if all that patience and preparation helped to get him to where he can pitch like this most of the time down the stretch, then it was worth it. Because this was the version of Erik Bedard that looks like a second ace.

In five innings of work, the bullpen's RA shot up from 4.01 to 4.28. Perhaps, given how the unit looked tonight and last Sunday, people will finally begin to see it as the problem it really is. The only guys out there who're worth a damn are David Aardsma and Shawn Kelley, but even Kelley's no good when he's not at 100%, and given that his velocity was down almost two full ticks tonight from where it was earlier in the season, there's reason to believe that he's not yet back in top form. Which means that, for the time being, we're in trouble. The middle innings right now are like a carnival ride from a Caligula nightmare. It doesn't matter how well the starters pitch - unless they go eight innings, then almost every day we get to feel at least a little bit uneasy, because there exists the ever-present danger of seeing a night like tonight's. The bullpen isn't ten-runs-in-five-innings bad, but it's bad, and this isn't the last time it's going to blow up. I suppose this is the point where I yell at Mark Lowe for becoming so much worse for no reason.

So let's talk about Luke Scott's triple. That hit dealt us all a crushing blow - not only because it put the Orioles in the lead, but also because it was a ball that we've seen Franklin Gutierrez track down in the past. Scott smacked his liner to straightaway center field and it got Gutierrez all turned around, and by the time he turned back in the right direction, he was too late and didn't have a chance to pull it down. As a result, the O's went ahead 5-3, and the game was soon thereafter put out of reach.

At risk of sounding like an apologist, I can't really hold that play against Franklin. Yes, we've seen him make that catch on other occasions, and yes, he turned in the wrong direction, but as I've mentioned before, line drives hit over your head are the most difficult fly balls of any to judge, and sometimes a guy is going to screw up. You can't expect a player to make that play every time he gets it, because then you'd be looking for a perfect outfielder, and there's no such thing. Sometimes catchable balls are going to drop in. The key is that fewer catchable balls drop in with Franklin in the field than they do with most anyone else. Consider that play the defensive equivalent of Bedard throwing a hanging curve. It's okay to be annoyed, but at the end of the day you have to realize that you still have it pretty good.

It doesn't hurt that Gutierrez does other things like hit home runs. His shot today came off a high fastball that looked gone off the bat, and the Safeco scoreboard measured it to be something like 420 feet (403 by HitTracker). I wonder how many people realize that Franklin Gutierrez has an .800 OPS. Remember when there was widespread concern that we traded a lights-out closer for a glove man with a bad bat? Gutierrez has been one of the best hitters on the team, and aside from his inflated BABIP, nothing about what he's doing is a fluke. He is a player that we will be proud to call our own for a long, long time. Meet the new Adrian Belre.

Jeremy Guthrie normally has decent command and works off a fastball in the low- to mid-90s. Today he threw more balls than strikes and topped out at 90.9, averaging 88.7. His heater has now dropped from 93.1 to 91.2 to 88.7 over three consecutive starts. If anyone with the Orioles is still paying attention, they'll probably want to go in first thing in the morning and make an appointment with Dr. Yocum.

The pitch that put Nick Markakis on base in the first inning didn't touch him. Here's your daily reminder that umpires hurt the game.

I've never seen anything quite like Ronny :(edeno's single in the fourth, where he bunted the ball up the first base line, dropped his bat, and reached base after the ball bounced off his bat and rolled away from Matt Wieters. I had no idea that you could still reach if the ball hits the bat again after initial contact. That seems like the sort of loophole that Ronny might as well try to make a habit of exploiting. Ronny makes more contact when he drops the bat than when he swings it.

I don't remember if I knew the name Tom Hallion before tonight, but that was an unforgettable performance. Some of you might think it's hypocritical of me to rip on Angel Hernandez for making a spectacle of umping third base while celebrating Hallion's making a spectacle of calling the game (which you can see here and here), but I think there's a key difference, and that's that, while Hernandez seems to derive satisfaction out of ringing guys up to their faces, Hallion makes his call behind the hitter. Plus there's the matter of Hernandez dealing with check swings and Hallion dealing with called strikes. Hernandez tells the hitter he fucked up. Hallion tells the pitcher he threw a good pitch. One is unnecessarily antagonistic, while the other is indiscriminately supportive. Good on you, Tom Hallion. You make things fun. Note that, when you're watching those .gifs, they're best accompanied by a guttural sound not unlike that of a garbage disposal.

Vargas tomorrow (matinee) in what has become a big game to win. Take it and we gain ground on someone in front of us. Lose it and I'm going to freak out.

Today's Ominous Fact

Jeff — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:19:58 -0000

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When Jack Zduriencik and the coaching staff agreed to come into the season with a bullpen built on the cheap, a lot of people were nervous. They looked at the unit, didn't recognize much in the way of shutdown talent, and determined that this group was likely to be a weakness. After 72 games of action, though, that same bullpen is second in the league in ERA and tied for second in saves, having held the fort on countless occasions when the team needed a scoreless inning. Vindication, right?

Kind of. But not really. See, while the bullpen has certainly worked out and done a good job of keeping the opponent off the board so far, it hasn't actually pitched well. At all. A glance:

ERA: 2nd
Contact%: 29th
K/BB: 28th
Strike%: 26th
HR/FB: 2nd (lowest)
tRA: 25th
tRA*: 30th

Wow. Okay, so according to all that the bullpen looks even worse than I thought it would when I started writing this. The ERA's great, but the unit doesn't miss bats, it doesn't throw strikes, and when you regress everything and look at arguably the most complete single measure of effectiveness, they come out last. Out of everyone. Even worse than the Nationals, who've racked up 11 successful saves and 17 failures. That's...well that's really bad.

What's interesting is that they haven't even been helped by a lucky BABIP. It's been success with men on base and success limiting home runs, and what's bad about those two things is that neither of them are sustainable. The numbers with men on base will rise, and as for the bullpen's HR/FB% of 6.5%, the lowest in baseball last year was 7.8%. Our relief corps to date has been overachieving, narrowly doing the job while treading on the brink of disaster.

This group just isn't very good as currently constructed, and the fact that they've held out this long without hurting the team (Morrow's blow-ups aside) is nothing short of a miracle. Mark Lowe's been a colossal disappointment. Miguel Batista still sucks. Sean White has more walks than strikeouts. And so forth. Only David Aardsma has really impressed among the regulars, and even he has been pitching well over his head.

There aren't enough guys in there capable of throwing strikes, and there aren't enough guys in there capable of pitching to lefties. This is something that's going to have to be addressed over the rest of the season as true talent levels become unpleasantly visible while the team tries to compete.

Fortunately, there's good news. Shawn Kelley is either the best or the second-best reliever in the system, and he's on his way back. With his ability to throw strikes and keep lefties off-balance, he's a perfect fit for the eighth inning. Josh Fields has struck out nine and walked none over his last eight appearances in AA after coming back from an injury. And with lefties littering the big league rotation and RRS getting ready in Tacoma, there are options there to fill a specialist role in relief. The Mariner bullpen isn't very good, but it's far from hopeless. Before long, this has the potential to be a pretty solid unit.

The issue is that this is the group we're going to take with us into LA, New York, and Boston, and while they've scraped by to date, I'm terrified that this will be the point at which things begin to go wrong. I can't imagine many things more deflating than hanging with three of the best teams in baseball, only to fall victim to some sudden regression in the later innings.

Listen up, bullpen. Somehow, some way, you've been good to us through the better part of three months. It hasn't always been easy, but through some sort of black magic, it's been effective. All I ask now is that you muster up the strength and fortitude to help keep this team competitive for just a little while longer until reinforcements start to arrive. You can bend. You can bend until the cows come home. Just don't break. This is your Thermopylae. Make us proud.

Pitch	%Thrown	%Strike	%SwS
Fastball	60.6	63.0	3.8
Slider	25.6	74.1	28.6
Change	13.7	50.0	8.3