34-50, Chart
by Jeff Sullivan on Jul 7, 2010 10:20 PM PDT
in Seattle Mariners Game Recaps
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Biggest Contribution: Casey Kotchman, +37.5%
Biggest Suckfest: Brandon League, -62.2%
Most Important AB: Kotchman homer #2, +29.5%
Most Important Pitch: Callaspo homer, -40.3%
Total Contribution by Pitcher(s): -55.9%
Total Contribution by Lineup: -3.4%
Total Contribution by Opposition: +9.3%
(What is this chart?)
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This game summarizes this season
So close, yet so far
If only....
If only he wasn’t saving it for Tacoma. What a piece of work.
by TrustBaseball on Jul 7, 2010 10:29 PM PDT up reply actions
Although, at least the more League struggles, the more he might start thinking "huh, maybe I was wrong to think I am a better pitcher when I don't throw my splitter"
In the article I read where he addressed this, he felt sticking with his fastball most all the time and only throwing the splitter when he was in trouble made him a better pitcher and he pointed to his ERA this year vs last as his support for this…
Personally, I think he’s just afraid to use his splitter when Rob Johnson is catching. ;-)
Pull Johnson at the same time
For an offensive replacement.
Would it be an improvement to trade League for a brain?
Granted we wouldn’t be able to actually give it to him, but at least it won’t be throwing fastball after fastball.
Carlos Silvelite
I'm beginning to hate that trade more and more.
by Cthaller59 on Jul 7, 2010 10:49 PM PDT via mobile reply actions
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Morrow has had a couple of dreadful games but now that he’s strictly starting he might get himself straightened out. I hope so.
ignacio
He might even get himself straightened out to the point that he has an FIP under 3.5...
And an xFIP under 3.9 with a WAR total higher than both Vargas and Fister.
Oh wait, he’s doing that!
I never liked it very much.
Jays fans told me how frustrating League could be. I was momentarily enticed by the nasty pitch but now I see exactly what they mean.
by Fuckmikereilly on Jul 7, 2010 11:25 PM PDT up reply actions
Both of them -- when they're bad they're very very bad,
but Morrow has a much more valuable upside. He’s walked the world a time or two this season, but he’s also been real damn promising in his first season as a full-time starter. The Mariners shouldn’t have fooled around with his role so much.
ignacio
A lot of that fooling around came about because of Morrow, though.
While both parties are guilty, Morrow wasn’t without blame.
Because we’re rebels. Accurate, intelligent, introspective rebels. And damn proud of it my friend. - CapSea
It's been said numerous places, numerous times:
You shouldn’t evaluate a trade after the fact.
At the time, Morrow was a talented headcase who showed no signs of figuring things out. In other words, he was Ian Snell.
If someone came to the Mariners today and offered a possibly useful relief pitcher for Ian Snell, you’d want them to take the deal before the other team came to their senses.
Morrow has shown some improvement this year, yes, and League has been frustrating; but even if both of those things turn out to be sustainable, it was a good move based on what we knew at the time.
by Jeff Nye on Jul 7, 2010 11:55 PM PDT up reply actions 1 recs
What if you didn't think it was an especially good move at the time?
by Aaron Campeau on Jul 7, 2010 11:56 PM PDT up reply actions
I didn't think it was a spectacular move, I thought it was a good way to salvage a bad situation.
Morrow got a fresh start with a team and fanbase that wasn’t sick to death of his “I want to be a starter/I want to be a reliever” waffling, and League got a chance to come in and contribute to what a lot of people thought was going to be a good team.
But it’s SILLY to act as if half a season of what has still been a very inconsistent Brandon Morrow is a) sustainable and b) exactly what would’ve happened if the Mariners hadn’t traded him.
Perhaps, but I was more willing to take that chance than trade him for an equally inconsistent reliever and a mediocre prospect.
by Fuckmikereilly on Jul 8, 2010 12:10 AM PDT up reply actions
That's fine. I wasn't.
And really, who foresaw that League was going to suddenly almost completely stop using a pitch that, lest we forget, was one of the best in baseball not that long ago?
Interesting
Did Pitch f/x only recently add the split-finger? Trying to find League’s pitch types from the last two years and it has his splitter at 0.5% last year, 16.6% this year. While apparently he used his changeup 32.0% of the time last year and only 0.2% this year. Was his splitter classified as a changeup most of last year?
by Fuckmikereilly on Jul 8, 2010 12:15 AM PDT up reply actions
Pitch f/x has a hard time telling the difference, it's generally called a splitter
But here’s a Fangraphs article about it.
I have no idea why he’s suddenly decided that it is his “last resort” pitch and wish the coaches would tell him to wake the hell up and start throwing it more; but the point is that it’s revisionist history at it’s worst to pretend that what is happening with the two Brandons this year is something that everyone saw coming.
by Jeff Nye on Jul 8, 2010 12:21 AM PDT up reply actions 1 recs
Agreed.
And I still think it’s very possible our Brandon could very well be useful and their Brandon could lose all control. Thanks for the link.
by Fuckmikereilly on Jul 8, 2010 12:23 AM PDT up reply actions
Honestly, I'm not sure at this point what is going to happen.
If League doesn’t use his best pitch, he obviously isn’t very valuable. We’re seeing that right now.
But again, you should evaluate trades based on what you know at the time. And at the time, there wasn’t a whole lot of evidence that Brandon Morrow was going to be a more valuable player than Brandon League in 2010. If anything, the signs were pointing to Morrow being out of baseball in a couple of years.
It's also important to note that part of the context of the trade
Is that the Mariners were trying to win this year.
Obviously, that plan hasn’t worked the way we hoped; but within the context of the plan, League fit better.
Could Morrow have contributed to a potential playoff run this year? Maybe. Or he could’ve continued to be the same inconsistent, frustrating Morrow that we saw here for years.
by Jeff Nye on Jul 8, 2010 12:35 AM PDT up reply actions 1 recs
I like Brandon League.
I didn’t like Brandon League for Brandon Morrow. Because Morrow’s performance is something that I saw coming.
Even if Morrow pitches at replacement level for the rest of the season, he has already accumulated enough value to be a league average starter. Morrow’s actually doing better than I expected. And I have the fanpost I wrote prior to spring training ever started to prove it.
You're right. I'm not going to dwell on past moves.
Sorry if I fell into that here.
ignacio
This is silly.
Morrow wasn’t Ian Snell because Morrow hadn’t had Snell’s 2007, wasn’t being compensated with 4 million per year and had never been in a consistent role.
Ian Snell was/is a super-expensive Brandon Morrow with less upside—we knew who Ian Snell was going in. Morrow was still a prospect.
With all due respect, since I obviously value your opinion, I'm going to have to disagree.
This was one of those trades where most people were like “Uh… Okay, well… I guess this makes sense if you think this year is going to be really good since he has this one great pitch that he uses. Still, seems odd we couldn’t get more.” I don’t recall many people that were excited about it at all, and the only way we were able to salvage the confusion was “Well at least he had the most unhittable pitch in baseball” and then we get him and find out he doesn’t even use it because he’s a retard. I think it’s fair to hate that trade more now than previously, since few people even liked it previously, they were simply confused and trusted the FO on what was ultimately a wrong decision.
...and now I'm here
by CapSea on Jul 8, 2010 12:32 AM PDT up reply actions 1 recs
I've mentioned this opinion before, but my thought process is as follows.
a) Evaluate a trade based on what you know
b) There are bound to be things you do not know.
c) If you find those things out, and they’re bad/good, it’s okay to change how to see the trade.
In this case, we didn’t know that Brandon League was a retard about his best pitch in baseball. This was an unknown. It is safe to assume that Brandon League was a retard AT THE TIME we made the trade. I doubt that changed. So now we found out a previously unknown fact about what happened WHEN we made the trade, ergo, our conclusion is different.
...and now I'm here
I blame the change in pitch selection on the coaching staff, not League
If he’s decided that his splitter is something to be kept in his back pocket and that he needs to establish his crappy fastball, their job is to smack him around and tell him to stop being stupid.
It’s a bit of a stretch to say “he doesn’t use it” because he obviously DID, and something changed. Your theory is spontaneous mental retardation; mine is that a new coaching staff isn’t doing their job.
And really, the people who were sad about the trade were mostly wishcasting about Morrow’s “unrealized potential” and/or still bitter about him being picked over Lincecum.
It was a good gamble to try to salvage some value from a guy whose perceived value around the league might not have hit bottom, but was pretty close to it.
Morrow has simultaneously improved his walk rate by 35%, groundball rate by 15%, strikeout rate by 23%, and HR/FB rate by 58% from 2009. Stuff like that almost never happens.
People are treating 2010 Morrow as if it’s his true talent level, and it may very well be; but claiming that as if it’s not only the truth, but one that should’ve been clearly seen at the end of 2009, is a little bizarre.
by Jeff Nye on Jul 8, 2010 1:03 AM PDT up reply actions 2 recs
I agree in essence with League. It may have been a coaching staff issue.
But I do take issue with the idea that it is unacceptable to evaluate the trade by the results or by information you learn later. I think that as long as the information was true at the time of the trade, it is okay if you change your opinion of the trade as you learn the information later.
...and now I'm here
So to bring it back to the League trade
(even though again, it is not the League trade itself that I take issue with), if it was the coaching staff’s opinion all along to not let him throw his best pitch, it still means that the League we received was not the League we expected, and it makes the trade worse.
If League was simply doing poorly for no discernible reason other than he became a worse pitcher, it is not okay to re-evaluate the trade. Sort of like the Cliff Lee trade would not be bad even if he got injured for the whole year when the season started. However, in this hypothetical scenario, if you found out that Cliff Lee had an injury before the trade was made, and you find out the FO knew about it and still made the trade, then you learned new information 2 years later, it is acceptable to change your opinion of the trade.
...and now I'm here
I don't think that the Mariners acquired League because they really wanted him to throw his fastball
I don’t know whether the subsequent breakdown was his fault or the coaching staff’s.
But from Fangraphs, lumping their splitter and changeup percentages together since I suspect it’s all the same pitch:
League threw the splitter 32.5% of the time in 2009.
He’s throwing it 16.8% of the time this season.
I have no idea what’s happening, but there’s little evidence to support a theory that League never WANTED to throw it but the mean Blue Jays’ coaching staff made him.
This organization has a bad history of “establishing the fastball” nonsense; in my mind, that’s a much likelier theory.
To address your point too:
I’m being a little lazy by saying “what you know at the time”.
Obviously, in your hypothetical situation, it’d be fair to re-evaluate; so maybe a better way to say it is “what information the organization had access to at the time assuming they did their due diligence”.
But that takes a long time to type.
Be fair to those who opposed the trade.
I doubt there were many that thought Morrow was going to be this good but I in particular was not a huge fan of selling low on a guy with the potential he has. I understand the way you viewed the trade at the time and I don’t think it’s unreasonable, but you’re kind of making it sound like it’s the only rational way of viewing the trade and I disagree with that.
by Aaron Campeau on Jul 8, 2010 7:34 AM PDT up reply actions
I absolutely agree with this.
We stuck with him for so long, dealt with all his crap, and when we finally had him ready/convinced to start the year in the rotation, we sold low on him.
I admittedly look at a player’s ceiling way more than I should, but it was obvious Morrow still had a ton of potential.
This is treating 2009 as Morrow's true talent level when it was statistically a grievous deviation from his norm established in 2007 and 2008.
If Morrow’s 2009 season was infuriatingly bad because it’s not what we expected, then there was no reason not to expect him to regress towards something more reasonable.
Claiming that Morrow straight up for League (who had posted the lowest xFIP and highest WAR value in his six year career in 2009, as if that’s his true talent level)…I just don’t see the logic in your argument at all.
“Sell on Morrow, who tanked and that’s how bad he is.”
“Buy on League, who peaked and that’s how good he is.”
Do you see the conflict in your argument?
Really, really easily.
Morrow, despite all the talk about frustration and role confusion, was a replacement level (or slightly better) reliever for his first two seasons, and accumulated all of his positive WAR last year as a starter (that 0.2 total is with a negative reliever WAR in the first half).
In similar roles as high leverage, overpowering relievers, Morrow had accumulated +1.2 WAR through his first three seasons (197.2 innings). League had accumulated 1.5 in his first six seasons in which he thrown a cumulative total of 202.1 innings.
Morrow had and has far more upside, showed consistent promise and was bailed on by a front office that wasn’t willing to tell him at the beginning of 2009 that he was a starter and close the book.
Given the breakdown this year, Morrow is showing why he was picked ahead of Lincecum. Or at least that someone could make the argument that he was worth such a pick.
I just realized
That’s the first time I’ve ever seen or heard that word outside the movie “O Brother Where Art Thou?”
Have a rec for this historical occastion
by Karma Police on Jul 7, 2010 11:18 PM PDT up reply actions
Huh.
We took 2 of 3 games from the Yankees @ Yankee Stadium for the first time in God knows how long….then follow up by losing 5 of 6?
This team is do broken.
by ThundaPC on Jul 7, 2010 11:17 PM PDT via mobile reply actions 1 recs
I want to print out a copy of the Open Letter to Rafael Chavez
Scratch out “Rafael Chavez,” “Felix Hernandez,” and “slider/curveball” and replace them with “Rick Adair,” “Brandon League,” and “split-finger.”
by Fuckmikereilly on Jul 8, 2010 12:04 AM PDT up reply actions
Am I the only one who gets Betemit and Callaspo confused?
Not because they’re both Latino but because they’re both former top prospects who are now just sort of meh.
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