Kevin Millwood

#25 / Pitcher / Seattle Mariners

Height: 6-4

Weight: 230

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Dec 24, 1974

Scott Feldman

#39 / Pitcher / Texas Rangers

Height: 6-7

Weight: 230

Bats: L

Throws: R

Born: Feb 07, 1983

In this baseball game, the Seattle Mariners will oppose the Texas Rangers. Will the Mariners win? There will only be several ways to find out!

Baseball is a very complicated game built from many individual components. Sometimes studying individual components can get you in trouble, because then it emphasizes the individual component, and you think about trying to improve that individual component. We've seen this with Mariners fans who have been clamoring for a big bat for years. The Mariners, obviously, have had a lot of really bad team offenses, and those offenses could've stood to be improved, but the important issue isn't about the individual component of offense. It's about overall value. The Mariners have never needed to add just offensive value - they've needed to add value, however possible, and offense is one way to do that.

But studying individual components can be worthwhile for learning's sake and curiosity's sake, and in this post we look at the individual component of called strikes. This post is based on this other post that I already wrote elsewhere, and here I'm getting Mariners-specific.

FanGraphs provides raw ball/strike/pitch data, and it also provides plate-discipline data based on PITCHfx. That plate-discipline data tells you what rate of pitches have been located within the PITCHfx strike zone, and also the rate of swings at pitches out of the PITCHfx strike zone. With a little wizardry elementary mathematics, we can figure out which pitching staffs have gotten the most and least strikes, relative to how many strikes PITCHfx would expect them to have.

You can see the overall results if you click through to the other post. It's probably the Mariners you're most curious about. Here's the bottom of the team leaderboard:

28. Seattle
29. Pittsburgh
30. Cleveland

The numbers show that the Mariners have gotten 121 fewer strikes than you'd expect based on PITCHfx. Now, the average isn't zero - it's -36, so you could say the Mariners are 85 strikes below average, according to this method.

It isn't perfect. The PITCHfx strike zone and the human strike zone are different. We know that umpires have non-rule-book zones, including strikes outside off the plate to left-handed batters. Additionally, FanGraphs provides Baseball Info Solutions plate-discipline data as well as PITCHfx plate-discipline data, and the BIS data has the Mariners looking better. But I don't trust the BIS data nearly as much as I trust the PITCHfx data, because the PITCHfx data is all automated and therefore pretty much free of human error.

So the Mariners show up towards the bottom. If this is telling us anything meaningful, a part of it could be that the Mariners have some difficult pitchers to judge. Felix Hernandez generates insane movement on most of his pitches, and Brandon League also generates insane movement on most of his pitches, and that can make an umpire's life more tricky. But I think a bigger part of this could be pitch-framing. That the Mariners' catchers haven't done as good a job of selling borderline strikes as most other teams' catchers.

That's something we've anecdotally observed, and these numbers support it. Now, before you go jumping all over Miguel Olivo, Olivo got hurt at the end of April, and I don't see much of a difference in the numbers between April and May. This issue didn't disappear when Olivo went on the disabled list. The evidence so far suggests that Olivo wasn't framing real well, but the evidence suggests Jesus Montero and John Jaso haven't combined to frame real well in Olivo's absence. Not that we'd expect Montero or Jaso to be pitch-framing magicians. There are questions about Montero's long-term potential to catch. The Rays traded Jaso for Josh Lueke, after Josh Lueke had a rough introduction to the Majors.

I want to emphasize that I might not actually be measuring anything significant here. I could stand to have some smarter people weigh in, and a more useful study would be comparing strikes to the number of strikes you'd expect based on the average human strike zone. I don't know if that's what the PITCHfx strike zone captures. There could also be sample-size issues here, or data consistency issues, or other issues that aren't presently coming to mind. PITCHfx treats the strike zone as two-dimensional, where in reality the strike zone is three-dimensional. That's also a thing. Don't just look at these numbers and declare that the Mariners have had baseball's third-worst pitch-framers.

But we've felt like the Mariners' catchers have been bad at framing, and here our feelings are supported. That's not worth everything, but that's not worth nothing. There are some things I'd love for Jesus Montero to learn from Miguel Olivo. There are other things I'm afraid of.

At least for me.

The five highest payrolls in baseball for 2012

Isn't that the way it always is? You're just settled in, preparing for a baseball game, and then you start thinking about maybe winning the baseball game, and then there are events, and you lose. It's always the same story. It's always those damn events. If it weren't for those events, there wouldn't be losses.

I never really approve when people say a baseball game turned on one or two pitches. It sounds nice, but I have trouble buying into it, because any given pitch could turn into anything from a strike to a home run. Games are always turning on pitches, even when it seems like nothing's happening, so to distill a game down to one or two or three individual moments is to ignore the fact that all the moments mattered. Tonight, for example, there were dozens of moments that mattered - some which were obvious, and some which were not.

But if I were asked to isolate the two moments that felt like they mattered the most, that wouldn't be very challenging. I had them in mind when the game ended, and I kept them in mind while eating dinner. I couldn't think of a better way to approach this recap, so here we are, doing this.

In the bottom of the first inning, the Mariners put instant pressure on Matt Harrison, getting runners to the corners with one out. Some of the pressure was relieved when Jesus Montero struck out, but then Justin Smoak singled, and the Mariners went ahead. Then Kyle Seager drew an eight-pitch walk. That meant the bases were loaded for Casper Wells, who was in the game specifically because the Rangers were starting a lefty. Not that Wells is some sort of platoon-mashing specialist - and honestly I'd rather not think about one of those again as long as I live - but he's a talented righty, and the lefty Harrison was dog paddling in hot water.

Harrison threw Wells a first-pitch fastball. Wells swung at it, which is the sort of thing that automatically drives a lot of fans crazy after a walk. But Harrison threw Wells a fastball over the middle of the plate, down in the zone, and that's Wells' hot spot. Wells put a great swing on the pitch and drove it to center field, and off the bat it looked like at least a double and maybe a grand slam. It kept on looking like extra bases until Josh Hamilton turned it into zero bases on the center-field track. Wells did everything right, but Safeco kicked him in the testicles, and instead of having a bigger lead, the Mariners emerged from the first with a narrow lead.

That's one moment. The other came in the top of the third, when the game's remaining runs scored. The Rangers had runners on first and second with two out and nobody in. Elvis Andrus was batting against Hector Noesi, and after Noesi missed with his first pitch, he came back with an absolutely outstanding low slider. Andrus swung through it, presumably thinking fastball, and Noesi was back in command. The next pitch was a fastball that Andrus took for a strike, and Noesi was one strike away from escaping. Jesus Montero called for a curve, which is Noesi's most seldom-used pitch, and Noesi looked to throw it low, below the zone.

What Noesi actually threw was one of the worse curveballs we've seen this season. He got the curveball part right, so he was part of the way there, and he aimed the curveball toward home plate, so he was more of the way there, but Noesi probably knew he screwed up as soon as the ball came out of his hand. I tell this story in screenshots, because I have only so many arrows in my quiver. I've got words, screenshots, and .gifs. Hope you like 'em.

Noesi wants the curveball low. Montero won't give a target yet because there's a runner on second base. Right now, it feels like Noesi is going to get Andrus out, and the Mariners will remain in the lead.

oh nooooooooooooooooo

The thing about curveballs is that, unless you're Tim Collins or sometimes Tim Lincecum or sometimes Felix Hernandez, they're not great swing-and-miss pitches. They're good weak-contact pitches when you spot them, and they're good called-strike pitches when you spot them. When you don't spot them, and you let them hang up like this one, you're flirting with disaster. Then you go beyond flirting with disaster. You're like, "hey disaster, come home with me, I will give you sex." Hector Noesi hooked up with disaster, and while it was a one-night stand, what was done was done.

After Noesi allowed some runs in New York, I argued that he had mostly gotten burned on good pitches. There's no way to argue that this was a good pitch. This was a terrible pitch, and while Major League hitters won't punish every mistake, they'll punish a lot of them. As it happens, on the very next pitch, Josh Hamilton doubled home Elvis Andrus. That double came on a good pitch, a first-pitch fastball running away off the plate. Noesi did what he was supposed to do there, but Josh Hamilton has a four-digit OPS and an insanely aggressive swing rate, and this is just one of the things he does. Hamilton wouldn't swing at so many balls all the time if he didn't get rewarded.

Hector Noesi didn't make one mistake tonight. He probably made a lot of them, some worse than others. Every pitcher makes mistakes in games. This was Noesi's worst mistake, a terrible breaking ball right after a magnificent breaking ball, and Andrus plated the winning run.

An easy way to sell this game is that the Rangers got the big hit when they needed it, and the Mariners didn't. Or, similarly, that the Rangers got the big pitch when they needed it, and the Mariners didn't. I wouldn't find that satisfying. Absolutely, Noesi threw the wrong pitch and got burned. But it's not like Matt Harrison escaped the bottom of the first on account of his skill. He tried to allow a bases-clearing double or a grand slam. He threw the right pitch in the right place for damage to be done, and Casper Wells put the right swing on it. The ball just died. You could say that Wells should've hit the ball harder, but Safeco's gonna Safeco. Harrison was a hair away from having a much uglier start.

There were other moments that mattered, of course. Specifically, all of them. But there were other big moments later on. In the fifth, Jeff Datz threw up a stop sign for Brendan Ryan at third base when he probably could've scored on an error. In the eighth, the Mariners began with consecutive singles, and then the runners never budged. Again, this baseball game didn't turn on two pitches.

But when the rest of this baseball game is forgotten, two pitches will be remembered. Neither pitch was a particularly good one. Both of them worked out for the Rangers. You could call it bad luck, or you could call it anything, or you could call it nothing. Casper Wells finished an uninteresting 0-for-3. He couldn't have come closer to having a much more interesting night.

Continue reading this post »

Biggest Contribution: Ichiro, +10.0%
Biggest Suckfest: Jesus Montero, -22.2%
Most Important AB: Ichiro single, +12.4%
Most Important Pitch: Andrus triple, -22.8%
Total Contribution by Pitcher(s): -1.1%
Total Contribution by Lineup: -55.6%
Total Contribution by Opposition: +6.7%
(What is this chart?)

Hector Noesi

#45 / Pitcher / Seattle Mariners

Height: 6-3

Weight: 200

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Jan 26, 1987

Matt Harrison

#54 / Pitcher / Texas Rangers

Height: 6-4

Weight: 240

Bats: L

Throws: L

Born: Sep 16, 1985

For every pitch that Hector Noesi puts in the strike zone against Josh Hamilton, I'm going to make a mark on a piece of paper. What happens when I've made too many marks? You'll see, that's what happens. Don't try me, Hector. You genuinely don't know what I'm capable of.

Wow, we haven't had one of these in a long time! Not because I've been deliberately phasing them out - more because either the words haven't been good enough, or I haven't had time enough. These don't actually take very long to write at all, especially when I skip the introductions that don't serve any purpose, but they take longer in my head than they do in reality, so when I'm scheduling my day, I think, "ooh, I don't know if I'll have time to fit that in." I always have time to fit it in but in this way I sound busy instead of lazy.

Today's word is "cumulus", which you'll recognize if you're familiar with clouds. Incidentally, if any of you are cloud scientists, or whatever the official word is for cloud scientists, please send me an email because I am very interested in your field of study. Cumulus has another definition, though, that doesn't have anything to do with the atmosphere. That definition is most simple:

1. a heap; pile.

An attempted example sentence:

From the tangled cumulus of spring-training arms emerged Lucas Luetge, and he's the only pitcher on the team yet to allow an earned run.

Fun fact: Lucas Luetge has made nearly four times as many appearances as Hisashi Iwakuma, yet Iwakuma has thrown 1.2 more innings. Which of these facts is the fun one? One of them, probably, I don't know.