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Lookout Landing

Series Preview: Seattle Mariners @ Kansas City Royals

Seattle: 54-51
Kansas City: 41-64

SUMMARY

MARINERS ROYALS
EDGE
HITTING (wOBA)
-67.0 (28th)
-81.3 (30th) SEA
FIELDING (UZR)
44.4 (2nd)
-29.1 (29th) SEA
ROTATION (pRAA)
-16.7 (21st)
34.3 (9th) KCA
BULLPEN (pRAA)
-23.3 (28th) -4.9 (18th) KCA
OVERALL(RAA)
-62.2 -81.0 Seattle







The defense went up nearly 10 runs in a week. Thankfully that happened or man would our week have looked just terrible. The rotation got blown up and the offense and pen both also lost significant performance value.

Yuniesky Betancourt, since joining the Royals: .140/.158/.228, -8.3 bRAA, -1.1 UZR (-10.3 UZR/150), -0.7 WAR.

In 17 games.

Meanwhile, Willie Bloomquist, -0.1 WAR, Tug Hulett, -0.4 WAR and Jose Guillen, -1.7 WAR.

GAMES

Game 1: Ryan Rowland-Smith* vs. Luke Hochevar
Game 2: Lucas French* vs. Kyle Davies
Game 3: Jason Vargas* vs. Bruce Chen*

Luke Hochevar (5.06 tRA) is the best starter we face this week. He has been a bit of a ground ball pitcher and has shown above average command and a good ability to miss bats. He has yet to turn the missed bats into an above average strike out rate, but once he does that, he should solidify himself as a solid upper mid-rotation starter. With Zack Greinke, Gil Meche and Brian Bannister, the Royals could field four legit quality pitchers in the rotation.

Kyle Davies (6.77 tRA) has huge issues with his control in the Majors, but has shown some improvement while in Triple-A. He has always managed to get hitters to chase just enough to hold onto a roughly Quad-A level of performance. As with Hochevar, Davies' tRA is inflated thanks to a big home run rate.

Bruce Chen (6.59 tRA) exhibits an average pitch profile, but his batted ball profile is heavily skewed away from keeping any balls on the ground. As such, he yields a lot of line drives and many of those non-ground balls land on the other side of the pesky wall that some moron erected in the outfield.

1 recs  |  60 comments

Comments

If Yuni were to keep up that pace for a full season, he could be a -10 WAR player!

I’m excited for 2010.

Wait, no. But still amazingly bad.
It'll be interesting to see how long Moore waits before admitting his failure and moving Yuni.

I can’t imagine the sickness in the bottom of his stomach at this thought.

Maybe he'll try to do the Halladay method

and send him to A ball to rework his mechanics or something.

-7 WAR, by games, and by per 600 PAs.

Still impressive!

I am thinking a sweep!

Grass Creek will be ours.

The problem with that stupid wall is that it's really hard to climb over it to get the ball back

and sometimes they make it so you can’t even run all the way around

there are doors in most of them

but annoyingly there are usually only doorknobs on the outside. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Woodward DFA'd and Hannahan stays.

According to Baker (to make room for Beltre).

Ballsy move, but I like it.

Hopefully Hanners can play 2B/SS well enough if he has to.

As Baker said, this also gives us good insurance if Beltre has a small setback or anything.
Honestly I thought they would hang onto Woodward.
With Hannahan having options left, it surprised me a bit too.

Guess that tells you what they think of Woodward.

I am sure they think the same of what we all think.
So without Greinke

and with an average starter in his place, it looks like their rotation would drop about ten spots and be about as good as ours. He’s still like 10 pRAA ahead of Lincecum, and already is getting pretty close to being worth as much as last years pRAA leader with like 12 starts left. Insane.

Speaking of which...

…it’s weird to think that the Mariners got such a good/lucky 2/3 year out of Washburn to fill out a nice top 3 starters of a rotation, but have ended up in the bottom 10 of the majors in starting pitching. Is there any word on whether Bedard will pitch again this year?

Last I heard he had played a "vigorous" game of catch, and then they were going to re-evaluate him.

I think he’ll pitch again this year. They’ve yet to find any structural damage to his shoulder.

I wouldn't count on it
I'm not holding my breath or anything,

but I’ve yet to hear anything from the M’s saying it’s season-ending. Actually GMZ was mentioning getting him back this year in a radio interview yesterday.

What gets me is that that's replacing him with an average starter, which is a pretty valuable player.
I'm still waiting for the traditional Battle for Grass Creek trash talk.

Should be a good one with the “addition” of Yuni to the KC roster.

Well the good news is that Yuni's OPS is up 80 points from where it was three days ago
No, the good news is that Yuni is not a Mariner.

[Good news for you, at least]

On a side note: Washburn pitches for Detroit today.

For those needing an hour to burn before this epic showdown with the Royals.

Ahahaha
Mariners DFA Chris Woodward,

GMDM begins recruiting more warriors.
FB post says Corco refused assignment to the minors and is now a free agent.

Forfeiting the rest of his contract seems kind of odd given the season he put together, I don’t quite follow that decision. There might be a reason I don’t understand.

GIT R DUN
Right. Mud, whatever was I thinking.

Of course he hit the free agent market.

To quote RC, you've given me the "church giggles."
They can have Silva, too!
Our season may be long dead

But don’t think we’ve forgot about Grass Creek.

Holy shit Bruce Chen
Willie just needs to play every day!

.265/.309/.364 with mediocre defense.

Fuck you, Willie.

NO ONE HAS GOTTEN MORE CHANCES THAN WILLIE
Some people have
Unlikely
Daniel Cabrera just got a deal with the Dbacks.
Maybe he'll pull a Joel Pineiro

and out of nowhere become unbelievably awesome.

Needed somebody to replace Brandon Webb.
How many different teams has Sidney Ponson played for?
How many chances did he get to crack the rotation with the same team?
Willie's getting chances with two teams now.
And he lost his job to and gut with a .250 wOBA and a -17 UZR
He's like 7 wins better than Yuni
Oh YAY!

Willie & Rizzsy on the pregame!!!!

Reading Baker's blog. The bench coach says Yuni's defensive rating is the result of bad luck..

What does that even mean?

Every single ball hit into his zone is a smoked groundball that he has no chance to get
You're thinking too much.

They just mean that he’s unlucky, in that if nobody hit any balls at him, he wouldn’t have bad stats.

He's like the Albert King of Cuban Shortstops
He lacks mental signals.
Gypsy curse maybe?

Makes more sense than starting him at short

I believe he means it is bad luck to have Moore as your GM.
Everyone knows the only things that belong in outfields are hills and flagpoles.
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

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