Miguel Olivo is Meaner than Chris Gimenez

It's a topic that has gone largely ignored by the more influential media outlets covering the Mariners. Miguel Olivo is a selfish stat padder. Unlike Ichiro, who selfishly collects hits and other things that indirectly benefit the overall team, Miguel Olivo's greediness is restricted to a completely meaningless arena that nobody should bother paying attention to. That's right, catcher's ERA.

See, Miguel Olivo has a fantastic catcher's ERA. That's not surprising since he's the primary catcher for a team with a fabulous run prevention unit. However, Chris Gimenez, a person tasked with the job of replacing Miguel Olivo at times, has a poor catcher's ERA. That should not be the case at all! Why could it be? That is what I humbly endeavored to uncover.

The case against Gimenez is pretty stark. Pitchers throwing to Olivo have a much lower ERA and much higher strikeout rate than pitchers throwing to Gimenez. Case closed, Gimenez sucks, time for coffee, right? Ah, not so fast. See, as it turns out, Olivo and Gimenez have not caught the same proportion of pitches from each of the five Mariner starting pitchers.

Now, expecting an exact match would be foolish as there's bound to be some variation, but it should be close and certainly we would not expect to see anything nefarious in the splits. That's what the intimidated "reporters" would have you believe. In reality, Miguel Olivo has caught every single Michael Pineda start. He's caught all but one of Erik Bedard's starts since April 21. And he's caught all but two Felix Hernandez starts, and one of the others went to some guy named "Adam Moore", which I think we can all agree is the sort of generic fake name that Miguel Olivo would make up as a ruse to steal more good starts for his stats.

Yes, there's no denying it. Miguel Olivo is shafting Chris Gimenez when it comes to catching opportunities in what can only be a ploy to wrangle himself more attention. Still, I persist onward in trying to deduce if there's a fair way to judge the two. So I restricted my focus to only Jason Vargas and Doug Fister starts. That is where Gimenez has been allowed the majority of his playing time, but since Olivo has forced himself onto even those two, we actually have a sample to contrast the two against.

There are remarkably few differences. Their overall strike rate is nearly identical. Their called strike rate is mostly the same. Ditto their swinging strike rate.  What about their ground ball, fly ball and line drives rates? Yep, those too show inconsequential differences. Even pitch selection is close and all within a few percentage points of each other. There are some differences in strikeout, walk and home run totals, but the samples are small. They could indicate differences in sequencing, but we'd have to see a lot more data to put any confidence in that claim. Could there be a meaningful difference? Sure, but I don't see one yet and in fact the similarities between the two result sets is almost fishy.

The only way that Miguel Olivo's and Chris Gimenez's catchers' ERA could be different was if Olivo was selfishly stealing all the good ERA starts from Gimenez or if Gimenez was some sort of inferior ERA caller than Olivo. Since it appears that the second case is not true -- at least not yet -- I am left with only one possible conclusion; Miguel Olivo is one selfish jerk.