Position players report

The gang's all here!  The position players check in today, workouts for the whole team tomorrow. Soon games will be underway.  Baseball is back and eight months of drama, excitement and fun are just ahead.

But some essential, but boring, things first.  I so enjoy using statistics to analyze the world around me that students pinned a nickname on me years ago... Dr. Data.  And it stuck and I liked it, because I enjoy trying to understand reality by representing it in different ways, numbers, images, narratives, metaphors, models.  So it follows I have been intrigued by baseball stats since my first reading of Bill James in the mid-1980s (I was introduced to him by my son, Matt, who was in his teens and used James' stats to clobber me in game after game of Strato-Matic).

Long before my fandom, part of following baseball was keeping track of the stats and at an early age, like all of us, I relied on the time-honored numbers of batting average, on base percentage, slugging percentage and ERA.  After James and other pioneering "sabrematricians," the game has been flooded with what are, today, called "analytics."  And Michael Lewis popularized their use with his profile of A's general manager Billy Beane in Moneyball.  So today we have BABIP and PECOTA and WAR and all manner of trying to understand what happens after a pitch is thrown.

The latest trend is the use of devices designed to breakdown physical performance for closer analysis.  Within a couple of years the the video camera and speed gun have been supplemented by instruments, handheld devices, to register and calculate all manner of data on every single pitch or swing.

One of them, RAPSODO, tracks twelve different features of each pitch: things like spin rate and release angle and a lot of other more obscure details.  Similar information is collected for hitting.  I've never pitched so I have no idea how useful or valid any of these data might be, but it's clear some players and coaches pay attention and used to make adjustments to improve performance.  Judging by the sight of them at the M's bullpen sessions, we must be, too.

This practice, I would argue, represents the best application of statistics: to make comparisons over time or between situations (good versus bad) to pitch or hit better in the future.

If you doubt the sensibility or efficacy of that approach look at Kyle Seager.  The use of analytics to shift the position of infielders player by player (and sometimes pitch by pitch) had a crippling effect on Seager.  In fairness he had a broken toe for much of last season, but it was frustrating to watch Kyle hit last year.

Against the radical shifts analytics commanded, he'd either futilely try to pull the ball where there
were no longer openings or weakly attack the opposite field.  In 2016, before he started seeing radical shifting, Seager hit a career high .278 with 30 home runs.  In '17 and '18, respectively, his average fell to .241 and .221.  More telling perhaps, to use one of my favorite stats, BABIP (his batting average in balls in play, balls he actually hit) fell from .295 to .251.

Another way to look at it is to use a stat called WAR (wins above replacement) a rough way of gauging a player's contribution to his team's winning (compared to an average player).  Seager's WAR has fallen from 5.1 in 2016 to 1.6 last year.

These numbers tell is his performance has fallen:  37 fewer hits over a season, roughly one less hit every four games. 10 more players left on base, 21 fewer rbi's, almost 4 less wins. (Thanks to Fangraphs.com for all these great numbers.

What's really scary, is that for all his difficulty in fighting the shift, he pulled the ball more (hit into the shift rather than to center or left) than he had the previous two seasons.

I know some fan don't like breaking the game down like this, it robs baseball of  some of its art and romance.  But in the end, baseball is just balls and strikes and even the smallest things add up.

Pitchers come and gone

Yusei Kikuchi had his first public bullpen work-out yesterday and, judging by the number of videos posted, he got a lot of attention.  And given the publicity surrounding the M's successful bid to bring him from Japan to the US, that makes sense.  There is no question general manager Jerry Dipoto sees Kikuchi as a critically important piece in rebuilding the team, enough so to trade off ace James Paxton.

I had not seen video of Kikuchi pitching and I was surprised by a couple of things (I'm avoiding posting links in the blog, you can easily find these videos and any other thing I cite by simply typing in the player's name to Google).  He has an easy fluid motion that seems to generate a lot of power.  The surprise is that he lifts his leg in a funny kind of double kick.  He raises it, then drops it a little, and raises it again before completing his motion.  Is this legal?  Is this a balk?  Can't wait to see how umps handle this once the games start.  I looked at some of his archival video from Japan, his double clutch wasn't as pronounced, so maybe he just warms up that way.  

Sad to see the retirement of Doug Fister.  I always liked him.  He broke in with the Mariners in ten years ago.  He didn't do much with them in three seasons, going 12 and 30, but he matured and had some decent years with the Tigers and Nationals. He went 4 and 2 in post-season and the press in Detroit wrote a nice tribute to his years of service there (in the shadow of Verlander and Scherzer). 

Fister was tall, 6-8, but he had an easy, coordinated motion and you could see he had a "good head," he was always in the game.  I think it was that concentration, that composure, that caught my attention.  He was traded for a bunch of Tiger junk in mid-2011, another Zduriencik blunder.

Baseball fans go through this their whole lifetime: a players comes up, you like them for the unlikeliest of reasons, they retire.  Sometimes as stars, sometimes as busts.  Usually with a career of up-and-downs with a couple of moments of glory...  he once struck out nine consecutive batters in a row.  You can look it up.

The rotation?

It's a sure bet that the Mariner's pitching rotation at the end of this upcoming season will not look like opening night's.  And between now and March 28's opener there are many, maybe too many, decisions to be made.  

With Paxton gone and no reason to believe Felix is going to turnaround his steep four-year decline, Dipoto is banking on Marco Gonzalez to assume the ace spot. Only 27, Gonzalez has shown some good things and made a full recovery after missing 2016 to Tommy John surgery.  He seems to have both the stuff - a nifty change-up - and the head to improve on last year's 13-9, 4.0.  He tends to be overpowering in the first four or five innings, then to fall off around the sixth.  Tired? Batters figured him out the third time through? Concentration?

Mike Leake and Wade LeBlanc are still around, both better suited to handle the 3 or 4 hole in the rotation.  Unfortunately Felix's proficiency has slipped him to the back of the rotation, too.

Faces on the horizon?  Dipoto made headlines obtaining Japanese leftie Yusei Kikuchi, who they plan to phase in carefully, adjusting him to the rigors of MLB and easing his return from a shoulder injury.  Also in the wings are highly regarded, but untested, off-season acquistions Justus Sheffield, Erik Swanson and Justin Dunn.  Roenis Elias is still out there, Kuma, however, returned to Japan.  After that there's a cast of 23 more roster/non-roster pitches to choose from.

Oh yes, and a brand new pitching coach with no major league experience.

February is baseball's month of question-marks and, right now, the M's starting rotation doesn't present many answers.

The first day of major league baseball!

Any true baseball fan knows this day as surely as his birthday: PITCHERS AND CATCHERS REPORT!  

Sometime over the last four months, winter set in.  Could have been after the last pitch of the World Series, maybe earlier when your team fell out of contention; no more box-scores in the morning newspaper or steady hum of play-by-play on the radio or exciting replays of great moments seen on ESPN... it all disappeared.  But the real fan knew, all the time, deep down, this day would come and, even in the midst of a major northwest snowstorm, down there in the Arizona sun, the pitchers and catchers of the Seattle Mariners would step out on the field and start to throw the ball around.

I haven't added anything to this blog since 2015, but as the baseball season wound down last year I decided to start posting my musings about the game everyday from the pitchers' arrival through the end of the Series.  So here we go, post #1.

Spring training can take on all kinds of narratives, but there is one common denominator from camps in Florida and Arizona: optimism.  From now until the first pitch of the regular season in late March, every one has a chance of winning the pennant.  Any one.  It could happen.  It is going to happen to some team... it might just be yours.

Reality will set in soon enough, but these weeks, leading up to the start of games that count, are full of possibility.  Every pitcher could win 25 games or save 50.  Any hitter could blast 35 home runs or steal 70 bases.  It could happen.  The possibilities are endless.  This is before a single hanging curve-ball is blasted out of the park or a backdoor slider strikes out the side with the bases loaded.  The dark side of baseball will reveal itself soon enough; for now, anything and everything is possible, however unlikely.

So welcome home everyone, fans and players alike.  Time to set aside the things of winter and get ready for a spring and summer full of 3-2 pitches, long lead-offs, warning track catches, passed balls, line drives that scatter the dugout and 5-4-3 double-plays.

You Can Look it Up: Some Thoughts on Baseball

There's just no way I can talk over any period of time and not get around to baseball. It has been a passion since I was 8 and today still represents a major interest… all of it, the game, the history, the statistics, the physical activity. Tom Boswell used to speak of the "flash of the green," that first glimpse of the field seen as you enter a stadium tunnel: so full of promise, so inviting. Baseball has been a pastime, both active and passive, and a metaphor for a lot of things in my life. Not a day passes, at least from the start of spring training in February to World Series' final out, that doesn't find me thinking about it.

I grew up a Dodger fan. They abandoned Brooklyn but liberated southern California when I was in the 8^th grade. Somehow I'd already become addicted to the game, following from the west coast the exploits of the Cincinnati Reds and my hero Ted Kluszewski starting a couple of years earlier. The arrival of the Dodgers three years later was truly a dream come true.

June 28, 1959 (exactly 14 years to the day my son Matt was born) marks the moment of the first major league baseball game I'd ever seen. By then, an aging Big Klu had been traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Although he didn't play that day (another poor managerial decision by skipper Danny Murtaugh) I did see him hit a ball out during BP. I failed to get his autograph after the game; he rebuffed me with a "get away, kid" and boarded the team bus. He wore a shiny green silk suit and clamped the biggest cigar I have ever seen in his mouth. My mother never forgave him, but he remained a God in my mind.

Later, now residing in the Pacific Northwest, my allegiance… suffering allegiance I should say… shifted to the Seattle Mariners. The one-year wonder Pilots preceded them and I may belong to a very small club of people who have attended every opening day of major league baseball in Seattle, starting with the Pilots in 1969, then picking up again with the Ms in 1977. Sicks Stadium to the Kingdome to Safeco… with a few notable exceptions I've seen a lot of mediocre baseball.

If I'm not mistaken, the Mariners are the oldest franchise to never make a World Series appearance and several that came into existence with or after them have: Toronto, Florida and, most recently, Tampa. Perhaps not as long-suffering as the Red Sox fans were or the Cub fans are, but still pretty sufferable. But like all dedicated Mariner followers, I'll always have 1995 and 2001… soooo close.

Today the Ms are still in recovery. The loss of Lou Pinella as manager and the unproductive reign of Bill Bavasi as General Manager brought us to where we are today: a slightly less than .500 club. Don Wakamatsu, the new manager and the new GM Jack Zduriencik have made some good moves, but the years of neglect have dulled the need to win and the failed the instill the hatred of loss that propelled the Pinella teams.

As much as I find little to support my dreams in this current Mariner teams, unlike many, I'm not in despair about the game in general. The discovery of widespread use of steroids over the last 20 years certainly taints the records and character of many of the players. But I never held baseball players on a particularly high moral pedestal anyway… at least not after being shoved aside by Kluszewski.

Baseball players were among the first professional athletes, an accomplishment regretted by many purists at the time when amateur athletics was looked at as a virtue. No one under the age of 50 can remember what a non-commercialized and subsidized Olympics looked like, but there was really a time when we glorified those who competed for the love of the game. Baseball players were already tainted when the game became an industry in the late 19^th century. They were money-grubbing, hard-drinking, tobacco-spitting, rough and tumble players. The Black Sox scandal on 1919 was an unsurprising result of many seasons of dirty baseball and marginal on-the-field ethics. It was, is and probably always will be a game of cheaters.

Today we look at the exploits of Ty Cobb or the excesses of Babe Ruth as though they are examples of a by-gone, gladly departed age. Nope. A-rod and Clemens are born of the same lineage and they and many of their peers will do just about anything to win. While Alex Rodriguez closes in on Aaron's all time home-run record (the pursuit abandoned by Barry Bonds as he struggles with his own performance-enhanced shame) I have to be fair. I have a pretty good idea what chemical fueled his taters. I have a suspicion Babe Ruth had his own enhancers and maybe even the mythical Aaron did, too. Maybe Babe's beer and hot dogs, while legal, kept him loose enough to hit them out of the intentionally designed short porch of right field in Yankee Stadium. As honorable as Aaron is, I can't believe that he didn't make use of the pharmacy of pain-killers and cortisone discovered and freely prescribed in the 1950s and 60s, which while legal, helped him keep playing until he was 42.

What the 19^th century purists detested about professional sports has pretty much come to pass. They could never have imagined the greed, addiction, cheating and debauchery that came with a paycheck, but they had an idea that sport itself would be transformed in some undesirable way.

I'm not turning a blind eye here. I never attached heroic status to the players and owners. But the sheer beauty of the game, the brilliance of skill required to play it and the inherent drama of two evenly matched players, pitcher and batter, is as compelling to me today as it was to me as a kid.

I was reminded of this last night. My 7-year old grand-daughter Larkin is playing her first season of baseball. Yesterday was team photo night for the Fircrest Giants. She's got a good hitting eye and is a real ball hawk. She's getting the game inside of her. The real game. She has no idea who A-rod is and couldn't care less.

While the kids were playing catch and running around I heard the unmistakable sound any baseball fan loves: solid contact of a bat on ball. I looked over. A local beer league softball team was practicing and the guy at the plate had power. He was really ripping ball. Long looping fly balls and screaming line drives. There was no sophistication in his hitting at all. He was strong with good reflexes… a righty - everything he hit was pulled to left field. His cut-off sleeves brought by memories of Klu.

And oh how that ball rose in the twilight. It looked like it would go on forever.

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