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That game recap below is the last thing I'll be writing for a little while, as tomorrow morning we go away for a week. It's not the best time for a trip, but we didn't choose the timing of this trip, for reasons that aren't worth getting into. I've stepped away from blogging for a few days at a time to go camping, but this'll be the first extended break since late December 2006, so this is gonna be weird. In late December 2006, the Mariners almost signed Barry Zito, so hopefully nothing like that happens this time.

The site is being left in the very capable hands of Matthew. This is not Matthew's job, the way it's my job, so don't expect posts to drone on forever, but Matthew will be forcing content down your throats and you're gonna fuckin like it. Everything that needs to be covered will be covered. And more! Obviously there will still be game threads because we're not complete idiots.

I'll be back around next Friday, which I'm looking forward to and dreading. I'm dreading it because oh god, the catching up, the catching up is the worst. Don't send me too many emails. It'll be interesting to catch up on a week of Mariners action since that'll let me look at a slightly bigger picture than the day-to-day stuff. In closing, here is Munenori Kawasaki's head.*

* (not his real head)**

** (but a picture of his real head)

It can be incredibly easy to make a baseball fan believe something. A year ago, based on small-sample numbers, I wanted to believe that Carlos Peguero was improving his plate discipline. Every spring, fans of every single baseball team believe their team has a chance, and probably a better chance than it actually has. Superstitions exist because baseball fans believe saying "no-hitter" will jinx a no-hitter. A fan will be willing to believe a good performance is sustainable, and willing to believe a bad performance is not. Baseball fans are full of beliefs, and optimism.

Tonight the Mariners hosted the Angels, and the Mariners lost by three runs. There is such a thing as a close-feeling three-run game. All a three-run game needs in order to seem close is for the losing team to have made the pitcher work. If your team is losing by three runs, but every so often it's hitting the ball hard, or it's getting the occasional hit, or it's working good at-bats and making the pitcher work for his outs, you'll have some confidence that a comeback is possible until it is no longer possible.

We're always ready to believe, and we'll start to believe at any positive signal. So I think it says something and a half that this three-run game might as well have been a twenty-run game. As soon as the Angels pulled ahead and the Mariners tried to bat, it became readily evident that the Mariners weren't going to do anything unless Dan Haren issued several consecutive intentional walks.

It doesn't actually work like that - games can turn around on a dime. The Mariners could've started hitting Haren in the second or the sixth or the ninth, and that would've been a normal baseball thing. Momentum and all. But feelings are feelings, and the feeling was that Dan Haren was able to do exactly what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to do was get the Mariners out all the time.

As soon as Dan Haren started to pitch, it looked like he was in absolute command. And he remained in absolute command throughout, such that, at the end, he was charged with but a single line drive. Haren faced 31 batters, and he struck 14 of them out. He'd never before struck out more than a dozen batters in a game. Since joining the Angels, he's averaged about seven strikeouts per nine innings. Tonight he quite literally doubled that. And he didn't walk anyone, although he came close, once, or maybe twice.

The Mariners felt a familiar kind of helpless, and while they haven't looked this helpless very often in 2012, they looked this helpless all kinds of often in 2011 and 2010, and those memories are hard to shake. Our impressions of the Mariners are still in some way colored by those older editions of the Mariners, and so in some way tonight was a return to normalcy. Coming up, they're celebrating a retro Felix Day. This was a retro Mariners Day, a nod to recent season past.

It was only a coincidence that the Mariners struck out 14 times and didn't walk upon Miguel Olivo's return to the lineup, but that's a fun fact for people who like to be bitter about sports. The Mariners also gave a vote of confidence to Alex Liddi by demoting Casper Wells, and Liddi responded by going 0-for-4 against Haren with four swinging strikeouts on the same pitch. Haren kept giving Liddi cutters low and away, and Liddi kept missing them. Eric Wedge said afterward he was frustrated by his team's inability to make adjustments as the game wore on, and while he wasn't talking only about Liddi, he was presumably talking a little about Liddi. Liddi threw in one of the worse defensive diving attempts I've seen, going after a foul pop-up and diving forward seconds before the ball came down. The ball also came down a few feet away. Alex Liddi isn't a left fielder, but these Mariners are all about on-the-job training.

What this baseball game was was the sort of baseball game we expected the Mariners to play against the Angels coming into the year. The Angels were supposed to feature awesome run prevention and some ability in the middle of the lineup, and the Mariners were supposed to be raw and generally under-productive. Today the Mariners struck out 14 times without walking, and Albert Pujols finished 3-for-4 with a home run. Granted, it was a home run off maybe the worst pitch Jason Vargas could have thrown:

But April Albert Pujols probably wouldn't have taken that yard. The Angels stumbled out of the gate and didn't look the way they were supposed to look, but tonight the Angels looked like the projected 2012 Angels, and they made the Mariners look like the projected 2012 Mariners. They didn't kill the Mariners with plastic explosives; they handed the Mariners a pillow and asked them to suffocate themselves. What Dan Haren wanted the Mariners to do, they did, as if they were happy to play along. He finished with 19 swinging strikes. The Mariners attempted 55 swings. Most of them were defensive.

You watch a game like this and you wonder how Dan Haren ever gets hit, but Dan Haren does get hit sometimes. He usually looks more or less the same, and some hitters can handle him. None of the Mariners hitters could handle him at all and at this point I'm just rambling and being repetitive about how Haren made the Mariners look terrible. It's as if, if I write about this enough, I can put all of my memories of this game on the Internet and remove them from my physical brain. What actually happens is that, by writing about this over and over, I'm only cementing my memories of this game. We're all so self-destructive.

There's really just not much else to say about this. There wasn't even bullet-hole material. At one point Ichiro caught the second out of an inning thinking it was the third out, and he started jogging back in. Nothing bad happened as a result so it didn't matter, but I can't remember the last time we saw Ichiro look that kind of human. Even in Boston, when he dropped that fly ball, he was dealing with the sun, and the sun can blind anything. Has Ichiro ever forgotten about the number of outs? I wonder what this means for Munenori Kawasaki. Has Kawasaki's image of Ichiro been irreparably shattered? Alternatively, will Kawasaki strive to pretend all subsequent second outs are third outs? When Ichiro made the mistake, did Kawasaki run out of the dugout screaming? The camera never shows what you want it to show.

After all that talk of the Mariners competing and looking at least a little tough even in most of their losses, we were given this game, which was a three-run game in which the Mariners never competed. Jason Vargas did, and that's great for him, but after the top of the first he was stuck with a loss. He did a remarkable job the rest of the way, considering he was already doomed. The differences between good Vargas and bad Vargas are usually so subtle that it's hard to know how he did after an outing, but I can't imagine anyone's displeased with the way that Vargas pitched. He made that one mistake in a 3-and-1 count to Albert Pujols, but even the best pitchers are allowed to make some mistakes. The only pitcher who doesn't make mistakes is Hisashi Iwakuma, because he never throws pitches.

Tomorrow these same Mariners face those same Angels, with some key differences: Blake Beavan will slot in for Jason Vargas, and Ervin Santana will slot in for Dan Haren. The consequences of these substitutions are unpredictable, but at least if Santana's better than Haren was, he can only be better by so much. There's an upper bound for these things, and Haren approached it. Good for Dan Haren! He seems like a neat fellow.

Biggest Contribution: Steve Delabar, +3.1%
Biggest Suckfest: Alex Liddi, -11.7%
Most Important AB: Ichiro double, +6.8%
Most Important Pitch: Pujols homer, -15.7%
Total Contribution by Pitcher(s): -2.4%
Total Contribution by Lineup: -47.6%
Total Contribution by Opposition: 0.0%
(What is this chart?)

Jason Vargas

#38 / Pitcher / Seattle Mariners

Height: 6-0

Weight: 215

Bats: L

Throws: L

Born: Feb 02, 1983

Dan Haren

#24 / Pitcher / Los Angeles Angels

Height: 6-5

Weight: 215

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Sep 17, 1980

The Mariners are going to want to direct all outfield balls in play to right. Jason Vargas is going to want to keep the Angels from directing all their outfield balls in play to left. There are some very good defensive outfielders in this game, and some very bad ones.

Jered Weaver’s contact rate against:

2010: 75%
2011: 79%
2012: 83%

As many of us remember, last year the Cleveland Indians got out to a hot start, but frittered away their advantage. However, what happened a year ago doesn't mean much for the present, and in 2012, the Indians are off to another hot start. Thursday afternoon, the Indians wrapped up a three-game sweep of the Detroit Tigers, who were supposed to be the runaway favorites to win the AL Central.

The Indians now hold a four-game lead over the White Sox, and a six-game lead over the Tigers. What does this mean for them and their competition? Tell us, FanGraphs:

However, [the Tigers] are climbing now an uphill battle, and one that won’t be easy to win. If the Indians just play .500 ball the rest of the way, they’ll finish with an 85-77 record. To win the division by just a single game, the Tigers would have to finish 66-52, a .559 pace over the rest of the season. Can they do it? Sure – most people thought the Tigers were a 90+ win team headed into the season, so it’s not an unreasonable projection. But it’s also quite possible that the Indians play better than .500 ball over the rest of the schedule, forcing the Tigers to need to play .575+ baseball in order to close the gap before the end of September.

The Tigers can still win the AL Central, but the early advantage that the Indians have built suggests that they should no longer be expected to come out on top. Cleveland is now the team to beat in that division.

It's all about probability. The Indians might not be the best team in the division. The Indians probably aren't the best team in the division. But they don't have to be the best team in the division the rest of the way - they just have to be better than four games worse than the White Sox, and better than six games worse than the Tigers. They've built an early advantage and that matters a great deal. At this point, as Dave Cameron writes, the Indians probably have the best odds of winning the AL Central. The odds might not be overwhelming, but they're a hell of a lot better than they used to be, when it looked like the Tigers were going to win it with ease.

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On Wednesday, May 16, Tigers center fielder Austin Jackson was removed from play on account of what was termed a mild abdominal strain. It seemed to be a day-to-day sort of thing, but Jackson didn't recover as he wanted to. After being penciled into the lineup last Tuesday, Jackson was a late scratch due to renewed discomfort. It's not going to surprise anyone now that Jackson is headed for the disabled list:

Jackson will be placed on the 15-day disabled list Friday after missing seven games with a left abdominal strain and leaving the struggling Tigers with a shorthanded bench.

The move is retroactive to May 17 and he'll be eligible to return June 1.

Ryan Raburn has been away on the bereavement list, but he's coming back, and Jackson's going on the DL to make roster room. Even though the Tigers don't anticipate that Jackson should miss a lot of time, they couldn't keep going with an undermanned bench.

Jackson's going to be re-examined on Friday, and he and the team are taking things cautiously so that Jackson doesn't aggravate his injury. If everything goes well, he should be back in the beginning of June. Quintin Berry has started consecutive games for the Tigers in center field, and prior to that, Don Kelly started five in a row.

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Earlier Thursday, Mike Curto tweeted that Miguel Olivo was not present with the rest of the Tacoma Rainiers. Olivo was with Tacoma on a short rehab assignment, and his absence meant that he was rejoining the Mariners.

Later Thursday, Geoff Baker tweeted that Casper Wells was being optioned to Tacoma to make roster room. Shortly thereafter, Larry Stone said he was hearing the same thing, and shortly thereafter, it was confirmed. Miguel Olivo is back with the Mariners from his DL stint, and Wells is becoming a Rainier for the first time in his life.

Olivo is not a better hitter than John Jaso or Jesus Montero, and if you put any stock in these things Olivo presently has the worst catcher-ERA and catcher-OPS of the trio, but now Olivo's presumably going to go back to playing almost all the time, as Eric Wedge forgets that the Mariners survived without him. As long as we prepare for that, it won't make us as annoyed. With luck, Wedge has seen enough good things from Jaso that he'll play more now than he used to, because unlike Olivo Jaso is enjoyable to watch and unlike Olivo Jaso could and should be a part of the future, but I'm going to assume that Olivo will play like he played. I needn't continue to air old grievances. They're all the same grievances. The fair thing to do would be to wait to be annoyed until I'm annoyed, but I'm trying to stay a step ahead.

Now, the other part of this people are talking about is Casper Wells going away instead of Chone Figgins. I'm personally fond of Casper Wells, because he's a good and versatile defender, and he has a power bat that's shown the ability to hit balls out of Safeco. I'm less personally fond of Chone Figgins, whose skillset has been reduced to I literally don't know what. He's struck out a lot. He hasn't walked enough. I don't know about his running game. For someone who's versatile he sure doesn't seem to play very good defense. I don't know what it is that Chone Figgins provides, aside from a guy who laughs a lot in the dugout. Chone Figgins didn't have options, and Casper Wells did.

So moving Wells is the easiest thing. And while Wells might not have much to learn in triple-A, he should be playing more than he has been. If Eric Wedge thinks that Alex Liddi is a capable outfielder, then Wells is a little redundant in Seattle.

But...but. Chone Figgins has started twice since May 4th, once because Mike Carp was a late scratch from the lineup. Wells might not have had much of a role, but Figgins doesn't seem to have any role at all. Munenori Kawasaki has started as many games since May 4th as Chone Figgins has and Munenori Kawasaki is a five-year-old child mascot. There have been days that it's been easy to forget that Figgins is still on the team, because once he got demoted, he really got demoted.

There's an impatience aspect at play here - people just want Figgins to be gone, because they're over him, and they want that finality. The reality is that, if neither Wells nor Figgins projected to play very much, it doesn't really matter which gets bumped. In fact, by bumping Wells, you get to keep two players, where by bumping Figgins, you'd have to lose one player. That one player would be Chone Figgins, but, yeah.

The problem is that the reasons for keeping Chone Figgins are unclear. We want to know what the Mariners' plan is. Presumably the Mariners would love to dump Figgins and some of his salary on somebody else, but if they're keeping him on the team to build his value, how is he going to build his value if he doesn't play? It's not like he's going to play. He's going to continue just sitting on the bench.

Maybe the Mariners think Figgins will be more movable when more time has passed, and less of his salary remains. And, of course, that isn't not true. But the Mariners will have to keep paying Figgins' salary until he's allegedly more movable so I don't know what that matters. The Figgins money is gone. It's either already been given to Figgins, or it's already guaranteed to be given to Figgins in the future. This cannot be salvaged. There is no saving this.

But Casper Wells' options gave the Mariners an out, where they didn't have to make a tough decision. Not that I think dropping Chone Figgins should be a tough decision - I think it should be a very easy decision. Even though it's hard to stomach eating that much money, they're already eating that much money as is. My instinct is to be frustrated, and I am a little frustrated because Casper Wells is a better baseball player than Chone Figgins is. But if neither was going to play, then the Mariners' decision makes some sense. Just some. But not none.

I'm waiting for Chone Figgins to be gone. For all I know, Chone Figgins is waiting for Chone Figgins to be gone. It would've been emotionally satisfying to see Figgins dropped today, but it wouldn't change the actual team very much, and at least he's not regularly batting leadoff. The Mariners already made the decision to not force us to watch Chone Figgins very often, and at least for that one I'm thankful. They'll make the other decision eventually. Today just wasn't the day.

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Smith: Oh boy oh boy
Smith: I can't wait to enter this baseball game!
Smith: I love the baseball game!
Smith: To the mound I-
Smith:
Smith: What's this?
Smith: Oh heavens
Smith: There is egg on my face :(

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And now this is something you’ve seen and can’t un-see.

...split. Brandon League's hidden platoon split. Brandon League isn't keeping soldiers in his yard or closet. What use would Brandon League have for soldiers? Think, you have to think.

When you hear the name "Brandon League", I think your immediate association is with as much emotional movement as there is on his fastball. At the best of times, League looks absolutely unhittable, but at the more normal of times, he does not, and at the worst of times, League is a mess. Especially given his rough start to this season, League's is a name that makes stomachs uneasy. You can feel good about Brandon League only after he's finished.

What seems to get relatively little attention is Brandon League's performance breakdown. All the talk is about whether or not he has a feel for his splitter, and how he needs to throw his splitter, and how the coaching staff wants him to improve his slider so he has an offspeed weapon other than his splitter. But Brandon League has a split that either I just noticed, or that I've noticed before and forgotten about.

This year, League has allowed seven righties to reach base in 35 plate appearances. He's allowed 22 lefties to reach base in 49 plate appearances.

But of course, we don't care about handedness splits over a month and a half. Let's take this back to 2010, when League first became a Mariner. Batting lines allowed:

Righties: .206/.255/.269
Lefties: .269/.338/.391

Other stuff:

Righties: 20% strikeouts, 6% walks, 107 PA per home run
Lefties: 15% strikeouts, 7% walks, 40 PA per home run

And that ignores that League has intentionally walked eight lefties. If you're unsatisfied with these still-limited splits, they exist over League's entire career. Since debuting, League has allowed a .592 OPS to righties, and a .780 OPS to lefties. We should expect all pitchers to have a platoon split, but we don't expect them to be nearly this dramatic, and League's faced more than 1,500 batters. Factor in a little regression and still you're looking at a problem.

Remember when the Mariners had Sean Green, and he threw a side-arm sinker, and we didn't trust him to retire any left-handed bats? The gap in Green's career OPS platoon split is smaller than the gap in League's career OPS platoon split.

Brandon League isn't a nightmare against lefties, but he is considerably worse against lefties. You'll note that yesterday's dominant save came against three consecutive righties. Righties have never been the problem.

This shouldn't actually come as a huge shock. Brandon League lives on a hard-tailing fastball, and research has shown that that kind of pitch generates significant platoon splits. That can be offset by throwing a good changeup, but League doesn't throw a good changeup. He does throw a splitter, which functions a lot like a changeup, but he doesn't throw it for strikes very often. That's a strikeout pitch that League likes to bury when he's ahead, and he has to get ahead first. To do that, he leans on his fastball.

Of course, I have to mention that League has hardly been given the benefit of the doubt by umpires. Here are two PITCHfx charts, from Texas Leaguers. They show called balls and strikes against left-handed batters since 2010.

The first one belongs to the right-handed Brandon League. The second one belongs to the right-handed Felix Hernandez. I selected Felix because he's pitched for the same team as League, and because his pitches also have wicked movement. This is a half-hearted attempt to control for umpires being thrown off by pitch movement. Felix has been given a more favorable zone inside, a more favorable zone low, and a more favorable zone outside, just off the plate. I think. That's the way it looks to my eyes.

Felix has got to be a difficult pitcher to catch and to call, and there's nothing he can do about that. That's just a consequence of the pitches that he throws. But Brandon League seems to have it even worse, and that's hurt him against lefties. Which is rough, because Brandon League doesn't have a whole lot of weapons to throw lefties. I don't know what's to be done about this - League could try to throw more safely within the zone, but then he's asking to get hit. He wants to live on the edges, and he's seldom given the edges.

Since becoming a Mariner, Brandon League has retired three-quarters of righties, with a 75 percent contact rate and limited power. He's retired just two-thirds of lefties, with an 82 percent contact rate and much more power. You'd like a closer to be able to pitch effectively against both types of batters, but while League doesn't get abused by lefties, he can be exposed. It isn't news to hear that Brandon League is limited, and until he learns to throw his splitter for strikes or picks up a cutter, I don't know if we can expect this to change. This is the result of the way that League pitches.

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A lot of times, people will say that one baseball team is sending a message to another baseball team when what they mean to say is that one baseball team is outplaying another baseball team. There are ways that messages can be sent - brush-backs and beanballs, aggressive baserunning, shouting messages - but usually, this isn't what's happening. The other day, Jon Morosi tweeted that the Indians were sending a message to the Tigers. What the Indians were actually doing was scoring some runs against the Tigers.

But today, I think it's fair to say the Seattle Mariners sent a message to the Texas Rangers, and to all observers. That message: "hello, we are a baseball team." All the talk has been about the Rangers' good start, and the Angels' bad start. There are two other teams in the AL West, two other teams who are currently between the Rangers and the Angels in the standings. Neither is a legitimate threat to the Rangers unless you set a low lower bound for "legitimate", but there is more to this division than half of this division. Look at the A's, they're all right! Look at the Mariners, they're also all right! Three teams in this division are all right, and the Rangers are not, in a good way, for them.

Let us now divorce ourselves from talk of message-sending. When the Mariners met the Rangers for four games in Texas early on, the Rangers won three of them. That was about the outcome people probably expected. But the Mariners lost one of those games by one run, they lost another of those games by two runs, and while their third loss was by six, the M's were at one point ahead 5-2. In the standings, it was a lopsided series, but on the field, it was a competitive series, which we took to be somewhat encouraging given how well the Rangers were playing.

Now the Mariners and Rangers have met three more times, in Seattle, and the Mariners lost once, by two runs. The first game was not very competitive, and the Mariners won with ease. The second game was close. The third game was close, but it only became close in the eighth.

The Mariners are 3-4 against the Rangers in seven games. They've scored 24 runs, and allowed 27 runs. I had the idea to talk about this before the Rangers scored three late runs off Tom Wilhelmsen, and before that happened the Mariners' run differential against the Rangers was even. It's not even anymore, but consider that the Rangers have a run differential of +3 against the Mariners in seven games, and +76 against everyone else in 38 games. I don't know how much it actually means, but the Rangers look to be the best team in baseball, and the Mariners have managed to hang with them. In head-to-head play, I mean. The Mariners are still six and a half games back. Those other games also matter.

But a year ago, the Mariners went 4-15 against the Rangers, and were outscored by 42. The year before that, the Mariners went 7-12 against the Rangers, and were outscored by 50. This competitive play has been a breath of fresh air, even if, say, last night it felt like a breath of familiar air. If you believe that the best need to be able to play with the best, then all right, it looks like the Mariners might be one of the best! If you're content with poor arguments then with sports you sure can argue anything.

We talked yesterday about how the game had two moments of exceptional importance. Casper Wells lined out to the track with two outs and the bases loaded, and Hector Noesi hung a curveball to Elvis Andrus. Had Wells gotten a little luckier, or had Noesi thrown one slightly better pitch, the game might've been entirely different. There's a chance it would've been a lot like this game. In this game, the Mariners also allowed the Rangers to score three runs. But in this game, when a Mariner batted with the bases loaded and hit the ball hard, the ball found a railing instead of a glove. This game didn't feel over when Alex Liddi pulled his grand slam, but it felt more comfortable than most games against the Rangers ever feel. There are parallels between these two games, with one major difference. There are lots of differences, so many differences, but one big one, within this construct.

Thanks to Liddi, and thanks to Kevin Millwood, and thanks to Brandon League, the Mariners have now won five of six - three against a bad team, and two against a great team. A great team that's struggling a little bit, but all of the players are the same. I do wonder when people are going to learn about sample sizes and over-interpreting hot starts. What changed between the 2011 Rangers and the 2012 Rangers was C.J. Wilson turning into Yu Darvish. That's the biggest thing. The Rangers now also have a far better bullpen than they did to begin last year, but they addressed that bullpen. Anyhow, on April 25, the Rangers were 15-4, and +55. Since then they've gone 12-14 and +24. They've still been quite good and we can't just ignore the start, but it turns out they're not an unbeatable super-team. They're a very good team that will probably finish with roughly as many wins as they did a year ago. Maybe they'll win 100, because they're good enough to win 100, but last year they won 96. People need to do a better job of staying calm and remaining reasonable, rather than vaulting themselves naked into a heap of conclusions. Vault yourself naked into a heap of anything and you'll usually come away embarrassed.

The Mariners get the Angels next. The Angels are below the Mariners in the standings, but we aren't so far into the season that we can dismiss entirely the pre-season projections. I think a lot of us are still waiting for the Angels to catch fire, and so I think a lot of us are probably thinking this series could be a rough one. But we thought the same thing about the two Mariners/Rangers series, and those have worked out. And the Angels aren't the Rangers. Have you noticed that? The Angels have been so much worse than the Rangers! Haha! Albert Pujols has turned it on lately but he's signed for a decade. And while we're here, Prince Fielder is hardly off to the start the Tigers were hoping for. I wonder what we're learning about free agents and gigantic free-agent contracts. Some of us are learning nothing, because we already know. Others are learning nothing, because they refuse to know. Boy did this paragraph ever get preachy. For whatever it's worth I do naturally have a very big head. "You're developing quite the big head," they say. "I couldn't do anything about it!" I reply.

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Biggest Contribution: Kevin Millwood, +40.1%
Biggest Suckfest: Brendan Ryan, -8.8%
Most Important AB: Liddi grand slam, +16.1%
Most Important Pitch: Cruz fly out, +7.5%
Total Contribution by Pitcher(s): +44.7%
Total Contribution by Lineup: +0.9%
Total Contribution by Opposition: +4.4%
(What is this chart?)

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Torii Hunter hasn't played in a game since May 12, as the Angels placed him on the restricted list so he could deal with a matter involving his son. Hunter's 17-year-old son Darius was arrested in Texas on charges related to sexual assault, and Hunter said he wouldn't come back to baseball until the issue was resolved.

Take it away, Mike Scioscia:

#Angels MGR Mike Scioscia said RF Torii Hunter will "likely" re-join team when it gets home Monday or Tuesday.

— Mike DiGiovanna (@MikeDiGiovanna) May 23, 2012

Not long ago a family lawyer called for all the charges to be dismissed, and if Hunter's planning to return, that suggests that things are nearing a conclusion. Mark Trumbo has manned right field in Hunter's absence, and while Trumbo doesn't offer Hunter's range or charm, he does own a .981 OPS. Since Hunter last played, Trumbo has batted 17-for-41 with five doubles and a dinger. I'd say that is satisfactory production.

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Brett Lawrie and Ricky Romero:

(video highlight)

Kevin Millwood

#25 / Pitcher / Seattle Mariners

Height: 6-4

Weight: 230

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Dec 24, 1974

Scott Feldman

#39 / Pitcher / Texas Rangers

Height: 6-7

Weight: 230

Bats: L

Throws: R

Born: Feb 07, 1983

In this baseball game, the Seattle Mariners will oppose the Texas Rangers. Will the Mariners win? There will only be several ways to find out!

There are 255 players who have batted at least 90 times so far this season. According to Baseball Info Solutions, Mike Trout has seen the sixth-most fastballs. According to PITCHfx, Mike Trout has seen the second-most fastballs. Mike Trout has a .973 OPS and 11 extra-base hits.

Baseball is a very complicated game built from many individual components. Sometimes studying individual components can get you in trouble, because then it emphasizes the individual component, and you think about trying to improve that individual component. We've seen this with Mariners fans who have been clamoring for a big bat for years. The Mariners, obviously, have had a lot of really bad team offenses, and those offenses could've stood to be improved, but the important issue isn't about the individual component of offense. It's about overall value. The Mariners have never needed to add just offensive value - they've needed to add value, however possible, and offense is one way to do that.

But studying individual components can be worthwhile for learning's sake and curiosity's sake, and in this post we look at the individual component of called strikes. This post is based on this other post that I already wrote elsewhere, and here I'm getting Mariners-specific.

FanGraphs provides raw ball/strike/pitch data, and it also provides plate-discipline data based on PITCHfx. That plate-discipline data tells you what rate of pitches have been located within the PITCHfx strike zone, and also the rate of swings at pitches out of the PITCHfx strike zone. With a little wizardry elementary mathematics, we can figure out which pitching staffs have gotten the most and least strikes, relative to how many strikes PITCHfx would expect them to have.

You can see the overall results if you click through to the other post. It's probably the Mariners you're most curious about. Here's the bottom of the team leaderboard:

28. Seattle
29. Pittsburgh
30. Cleveland

The numbers show that the Mariners have gotten 121 fewer strikes than you'd expect based on PITCHfx. Now, the average isn't zero - it's -36, so you could say the Mariners are 85 strikes below average, according to this method.

It isn't perfect. The PITCHfx strike zone and the human strike zone are different. We know that umpires have non-rule-book zones, including strikes outside off the plate to left-handed batters. Additionally, FanGraphs provides Baseball Info Solutions plate-discipline data as well as PITCHfx plate-discipline data, and the BIS data has the Mariners looking better. But I don't trust the BIS data nearly as much as I trust the PITCHfx data, because the PITCHfx data is all automated and therefore pretty much free of human error.

So the Mariners show up towards the bottom. If this is telling us anything meaningful, a part of it could be that the Mariners have some difficult pitchers to judge. Felix Hernandez generates insane movement on most of his pitches, and Brandon League also generates insane movement on most of his pitches, and that can make an umpire's life more tricky. But I think a bigger part of this could be pitch-framing. That the Mariners' catchers haven't done as good a job of selling borderline strikes as most other teams' catchers.

That's something we've anecdotally observed, and these numbers support it. Now, before you go jumping all over Miguel Olivo, Olivo got hurt at the end of April, and I don't see much of a difference in the numbers between April and May. This issue didn't disappear when Olivo went on the disabled list. The evidence so far suggests that Olivo wasn't framing real well, but the evidence suggests Jesus Montero and John Jaso haven't combined to frame real well in Olivo's absence. Not that we'd expect Montero or Jaso to be pitch-framing magicians. There are questions about Montero's long-term potential to catch. The Rays traded Jaso for Josh Lueke, after Josh Lueke had a rough introduction to the Majors.

I want to emphasize that I might not actually be measuring anything significant here. I could stand to have some smarter people weigh in, and a more useful study would be comparing strikes to the number of strikes you'd expect based on the average human strike zone. I don't know if that's what the PITCHfx strike zone captures. There could also be sample-size issues here, or data consistency issues, or other issues that aren't presently coming to mind. PITCHfx treats the strike zone as two-dimensional, where in reality the strike zone is three-dimensional. That's also a thing. Don't just look at these numbers and declare that the Mariners have had baseball's third-worst pitch-framers.

But we've felt like the Mariners' catchers have been bad at framing, and here our feelings are supported. That's not worth everything, but that's not worth nothing. There are some things I'd love for Jesus Montero to learn from Miguel Olivo. There are other things I'm afraid of.

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Isn't that the way it always is? You're just settled in, preparing for a baseball game, and then you start thinking about maybe winning the baseball game, and then there are events, and you lose. It's always the same story. It's always those damn events. If it weren't for those events, there wouldn't be losses.

I never really approve when people say a baseball game turned on one or two pitches. It sounds nice, but I have trouble buying into it, because any given pitch could turn into anything from a strike to a home run. Games are always turning on pitches, even when it seems like nothing's happening, so to distill a game down to one or two or three individual moments is to ignore the fact that all the moments mattered. Tonight, for example, there were dozens of moments that mattered - some which were obvious, and some which were not.

But if I were asked to isolate the two moments that felt like they mattered the most, that wouldn't be very challenging. I had them in mind when the game ended, and I kept them in mind while eating dinner. I couldn't think of a better way to approach this recap, so here we are, doing this.

In the bottom of the first inning, the Mariners put instant pressure on Matt Harrison, getting runners to the corners with one out. Some of the pressure was relieved when Jesus Montero struck out, but then Justin Smoak singled, and the Mariners went ahead. Then Kyle Seager drew an eight-pitch walk. That meant the bases were loaded for Casper Wells, who was in the game specifically because the Rangers were starting a lefty. Not that Wells is some sort of platoon-mashing specialist - and honestly I'd rather not think about one of those again as long as I live - but he's a talented righty, and the lefty Harrison was dog paddling in hot water.

Harrison threw Wells a first-pitch fastball. Wells swung at it, which is the sort of thing that automatically drives a lot of fans crazy after a walk. But Harrison threw Wells a fastball over the middle of the plate, down in the zone, and that's Wells' hot spot. Wells put a great swing on the pitch and drove it to center field, and off the bat it looked like at least a double and maybe a grand slam. It kept on looking like extra bases until Josh Hamilton turned it into zero bases on the center-field track. Wells did everything right, but Safeco kicked him in the testicles, and instead of having a bigger lead, the Mariners emerged from the first with a narrow lead.

That's one moment. The other came in the top of the third, when the game's remaining runs scored. The Rangers had runners on first and second with two out and nobody in. Elvis Andrus was batting against Hector Noesi, and after Noesi missed with his first pitch, he came back with an absolutely outstanding low slider. Andrus swung through it, presumably thinking fastball, and Noesi was back in command. The next pitch was a fastball that Andrus took for a strike, and Noesi was one strike away from escaping. Jesus Montero called for a curve, which is Noesi's most seldom-used pitch, and Noesi looked to throw it low, below the zone.

What Noesi actually threw was one of the worse curveballs we've seen this season. He got the curveball part right, so he was part of the way there, and he aimed the curveball toward home plate, so he was more of the way there, but Noesi probably knew he screwed up as soon as the ball came out of his hand. I tell this story in screenshots, because I have only so many arrows in my quiver. I've got words, screenshots, and .gifs. Hope you like 'em.

Noesi wants the curveball low. Montero won't give a target yet because there's a runner on second base. Right now, it feels like Noesi is going to get Andrus out, and the Mariners will remain in the lead.

oh nooooooooooooooooo

The thing about curveballs is that, unless you're Tim Collins or sometimes Tim Lincecum or sometimes Felix Hernandez, they're not great swing-and-miss pitches. They're good weak-contact pitches when you spot them, and they're good called-strike pitches when you spot them. When you don't spot them, and you let them hang up like this one, you're flirting with disaster. Then you go beyond flirting with disaster. You're like, "hey disaster, come home with me, I will give you sex." Hector Noesi hooked up with disaster, and while it was a one-night stand, what was done was done.

After Noesi allowed some runs in New York, I argued that he had mostly gotten burned on good pitches. There's no way to argue that this was a good pitch. This was a terrible pitch, and while Major League hitters won't punish every mistake, they'll punish a lot of them. As it happens, on the very next pitch, Josh Hamilton doubled home Elvis Andrus. That double came on a good pitch, a first-pitch fastball running away off the plate. Noesi did what he was supposed to do there, but Josh Hamilton has a four-digit OPS and an insanely aggressive swing rate, and this is just one of the things he does. Hamilton wouldn't swing at so many balls all the time if he didn't get rewarded.

Hector Noesi didn't make one mistake tonight. He probably made a lot of them, some worse than others. Every pitcher makes mistakes in games. This was Noesi's worst mistake, a terrible breaking ball right after a magnificent breaking ball, and Andrus plated the winning run.

An easy way to sell this game is that the Rangers got the big hit when they needed it, and the Mariners didn't. Or, similarly, that the Rangers got the big pitch when they needed it, and the Mariners didn't. I wouldn't find that satisfying. Absolutely, Noesi threw the wrong pitch and got burned. But it's not like Matt Harrison escaped the bottom of the first on account of his skill. He tried to allow a bases-clearing double or a grand slam. He threw the right pitch in the right place for damage to be done, and Casper Wells put the right swing on it. The ball just died. You could say that Wells should've hit the ball harder, but Safeco's gonna Safeco. Harrison was a hair away from having a much uglier start.

There were other moments that mattered, of course. Specifically, all of them. But there were other big moments later on. In the fifth, Jeff Datz threw up a stop sign for Brendan Ryan at third base when he probably could've scored on an error. In the eighth, the Mariners began with consecutive singles, and then the runners never budged. Again, this baseball game didn't turn on two pitches.

But when the rest of this baseball game is forgotten, two pitches will be remembered. Neither pitch was a particularly good one. Both of them worked out for the Rangers. You could call it bad luck, or you could call it anything, or you could call it nothing. Casper Wells finished an uninteresting 0-for-3. He couldn't have come closer to having a much more interesting night.

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Biggest Contribution: Ichiro, +10.0%
Biggest Suckfest: Jesus Montero, -22.2%
Most Important AB: Ichiro single, +12.4%
Most Important Pitch: Andrus triple, -22.8%
Total Contribution by Pitcher(s): -1.1%
Total Contribution by Lineup: -55.6%
Total Contribution by Opposition: +6.7%
(What is this chart?)

Hector Noesi

#45 / Pitcher / Seattle Mariners

Height: 6-3

Weight: 200

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Jan 26, 1987

Matt Harrison

#54 / Pitcher / Texas Rangers

Height: 6-4

Weight: 240

Bats: L

Throws: L

Born: Sep 16, 1985

For every pitch that Hector Noesi puts in the strike zone against Josh Hamilton, I'm going to make a mark on a piece of paper. What happens when I've made too many marks? You'll see, that's what happens. Don't try me, Hector. You genuinely don't know what I'm capable of.

Wow, we haven't had one of these in a long time! Not because I've been deliberately phasing them out - more because either the words haven't been good enough, or I haven't had time enough. These don't actually take very long to write at all, especially when I skip the introductions that don't serve any purpose, but they take longer in my head than they do in reality, so when I'm scheduling my day, I think, "ooh, I don't know if I'll have time to fit that in." I always have time to fit it in but in this way I sound busy instead of lazy.

Today's word is "cumulus", which you'll recognize if you're familiar with clouds. Incidentally, if any of you are cloud scientists, or whatever the official word is for cloud scientists, please send me an email because I am very interested in your field of study. Cumulus has another definition, though, that doesn't have anything to do with the atmosphere. That definition is most simple:

1. a heap; pile.

An attempted example sentence:

From the tangled cumulus of spring-training arms emerged Lucas Luetge, and he's the only pitcher on the team yet to allow an earned run.

Fun fact: Lucas Luetge has made nearly four times as many appearances as Hisashi Iwakuma, yet Iwakuma has thrown 1.2 more innings. Which of these facts is the fun one? One of them, probably, I don't know.