34-30: Call Hurts Mariners

On Sunday I was driving home from a weekend camping trip on the coast of California. I hadn’t showered for days and had limited access to soap, and yes, those details are relevant for this upcoming story. The drive home from the campsite involved a number of blind turns and windy roads, so paying close attention to the road was critical.

About halfway through I noticed my eye started to itch, and like a dingus I decided to rub it. This turned out to be a big mistake, as the combination of two days of dirt, sweat, allergies, and tiredness meant that my eye was rapidly in severe pain. I could feel it starting to burn and water, and I was having a hard time keeping it open.

But as soon as I closed it I knew that I had to force it open. No matter how painful it became or how much it watered. That is because the moment I closed one eye, my depth perception went away completely, and navigating the turns effectively became almost impossible. I have good vision – no glasses, no contacts, no LASIK – but close one eye and suddenly my ability to judge distance, space, and timing is almost completely eliminated.

This is... uh... not a good strikezone map. pic.twitter.com/0WJwBiklrS

— Kevin Shockey (@KevinShockey) June 15, 2016

Like a Muggle after a shot of Mad Eye Mooney Polyjuice Potion, Home Plate umpire Jerry Meals decided that he didn’t need his left eye today, and so instead he decided to roll the strike zone off a cliff and drown it into the Pacific Ocean.

• We lost today’s game after we should have won today’s game, after a series of games that the Seattle Mariners should have won but didn’t. My recap style doesn’t really thrive in these situations because I do not know how many ways I can say "this game doesn’t matter," especially after a string of losses.
• But I will anyway, in a new bullet point. Baseball is data. Each individual game provides new information. There is no trend. There is no meaning. Each game is simply a small data point in a much, much larger set of data - another coin flip that helps you determine over the course of 162 flips whether or not the coin is loaded in your favor. No individual head means the team is the best in baseball. No individual tails means that they are starting their long spiral towards defeat. A string of several in a row will happen all the time. You can add this new information in your dataset but do not start drawing conclusions else you may sound like a nincompoop.
• The infield of the Tampa Bay Rays is made of up a Logan, another Logan, and a Longoria. This is something that I observed today and it is very important.
• In the 2^nd inning of today’s baseball game, Ketel Marte played a game of hot potato with himself and lost. But then again, everyone loses in single player hot potato. It is not a very fun game.
• Kyle Seager hit a home run today, which by itself is not remarkable because Kyle Seager is very good, and he hits a lot of home runs. What makes it remarkable is that Kyle Seager hit the home run to opposite field, which as a commenter in the gamethread noted is the 4^th time he has done that this month this year in his entire career. Kyle Seager is the only player that pulls so often that other people go blind.
• People were rightfully upset when Taijuan Walker left with an injury (Ed. Note: Supposedly not serious), but he was not actually having a good game at the time of the injury. He lit up in the beginning with some strikeouts that were very pretty and he got a little unlucky with Ketel Marte’s 17 error grounder, but he gave up 2 home runs. His FIP right now stands at 4.60, which is not terrible, but it is not good. His xFIP is a more respectable 3.79, and he came in at 35 out of 101 qualified pitchers (with an xRA+ of 118, if you still follow StatCorner), but it’s hard to get away from the results, because the results happened.
• Mike Montgomery also did not have a good game and I think we can all agree that his struggles are solely the fault of his friend for coming here to LL to leave the same comments every day about how great he will be if given a chance. There is no other explanation for it at all. Make new friends, Mike.
• "So Walker ends the day with 65 pitches and 0 breaking balls." ~Goose.
• Adam Lind does not appear to be a major league quality baseball player anymore. Half of the players in the minor leagues could have a wRC+ of 85 while being heavily platooned with sub par defense. It is time to say goodnight on that experiment.

Baseball is meant to be an escape. But then days like Sunday happened, and not even baseball could help me defeat the Grievers of that Maze, as I found myself distracted – watching video, reading news, and more, all throughout this game.

So I don’t know if there are any final thoughts that I can share here. The world is sometimes a terrible place, and somewhere there is someone struggling in Florida that was able to watch his baseball team come from behind and beat the Seattle Mariners, and now he feels a little bit better. I am genuinely happy for him.