14-23, Chart

he came to the Jays’ spring training having lost 5-10 miles off his fastball. The official story was he’d screwed up his shoulder by surfing too much, which sounded terribly suspicious. He’s also changed his delivery/arm angle several times over the course of his major league career.

I bailed on the “In Z We Trust” bandwagon in December (after the Morrow trade) and have been calling for Wak’s head since late last season. I was willing to believe, given the divisional mediocrity, that we could compete with ~.500 ball, if not a little better. And the truth is we still can. The problem is that just to get back to .500, we need to play great baseball for a sustained amount of time. As to your specific questions re: Lopez and Kotchman…

I don’t know what to say about Loafie. He looks absolutely lost.againt right handed pitching. Against lefties, he has a .357/.367/.464 slash line for a .361 wOBA. That’s good to very good. Against righties, oh man: .178/.211/.229 for a .201 wOBA. So he’s obviously capable of seeing the ball and making solid contact still. This is why we can reasonably conclude in luck playing a part in it. He has a .400 BABIP lefties (versus .299 for his career) and .198 against righties (.277 career). He has never shown such a significant platoon split as he has this year. Meanwhile, his line drive and ground ball rates are up overall which should show an increase in average, yet it’s not coming. Even in his abysmal line against righties, his LD% is only down by ~1%, GB% is up and FB% is down. There is just something bizarre going on in his results.

Kotchman, meanwhile, had a slightly above average April and has absolutely tanked in May. I’m not sure how to read into it. His ground balls are way up this month (66.7% versus 52.7% career). He might be sustainably awful for the rest of his career, but then you have to account for April.

This team is better than its record, though. Do I see playoffs coming? No. But I don’t see us playing sub-.400 baseball for the rest of the season either.

Playoff series do not always go to the team with the best regular season record. (Insert references to any number of “eh” to good-but-not-best teams who have hardware here.)

Look, the path for the M’s to get to the playoffs is ADMITTEDLY narrow, but if they get there, they almost certainly:

- have Saunders performing well in LF
- have Loafie, Figgins, Bradley and Kotchman performing closer to their historic norms of hitting
- aren’t playing 6-4-3 or Griffdawg at DH
- Bedard comes back and performs at his historic norms, which gives you a 1-2-3 of Felix-Lee-Bedard, which history tells us is very important come playoff time and rotations shorten.

I don’t think this is the most LIKELY scenario (given that the M’s haven’t given up on their ancient DHs yet and we still don’t know about Bedard and Bradley, and there’s undoubtedly going to be more bumps in the road), but I have yet to see a convincing argument why it’s an impossible one.

From that fact, I have concluded that when Bradley returns we need to get him some PAs without sacrificing too much of Sweeney’s playing time (assuming Sweeney is still hitting well). We’ll be able to see if/when Bradley starts hitting better than Sweeney, and when that happens we should make the switch. Annointing Bradley the full-time DH before he starts hitting well is a mistake that could cost us runs, and therefore wins.

As for sample size, we went over this in this thread. I can’t link to the exact part of the conversation, but I showed that the last time Bradley was better than Sweeney was 08.

That being said, I want Bradley to start hitting so he can take the DH role (also covered in that thread). I think he’s immensely talented and a better option for the future. But bleeding runs and wins in the meantime is not something we can afford to do.

Some of what he’s doing is clearly lucky, but he’s trying to find the Doug Fister path to success – throw strikes, keep hitters off-balance (even if you don’t have the pure stuff to miss a lot of bats), somehow profit.

The GB thing in spring training looks like a fluke. Everyone on the team had insane GB rates in spring training, but that hasn’t lasted.