Lookout Landing

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.

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.

The Mariners and Angels are performing quite similarly so far this year with the biggest difference (assuming you credit the same people with hitting and fielding) coming from the relief pitchers. And it's there that we get to see the gap that currently exists between the Mariners' bullpen and baseball's next best unit. It's a big gap.

I do think the Mariners' pen now is better than it looks as the Mariners' bullpen currently has baseball's highest HR/FB rate. That's unlikely to continue, or at least, continue being so high (16.5%). That contributes highly to the pen both having baseball's second-worst tRA and FIP. For reference, the unit's xFIP of 3.60 is tenth-best in all of baseball and the biggest difference between xFIP and FIP or tRA is the regression for home run rates.

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...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.

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?)