7/18/17: Open Game Thread

Last night, the Mariners snatched a win from the best team in baseball, and it was fantastic. Ariel Miranda was mostly sharp through five innings, the big bats bopped bigly, and the defense went full Hogwarts with displays of wizardry, from the outfield to Jean Segura’s game-saving snag to this underrated but impressive play from Danny Valencia:

Tonight things get a little bit harder. Sam Gaviglio shares Miranda’s home run problem, but unfortunately does not share the tall lefty’s fastball velocity or excellent splitter. His starting catcher tonight is also Carlos Ruiz, who really stinks at getting the low strike called, and that’s where Sam is going to need to live in order to keep the ball from flying out of the ballpark, which...

The Mariners were able to take advantage of a slightly-wobbly Lance McCullers last night, but Brad Peacock, since joining the rotation from the bullpen, has been striking out batters with no regard for human life this year. The thing about Peacock’s 12.26 K/9 though, in the monkeypaw 2017 season, is it comes with an attendant 5.40 BB/9. That’s 14%! Andrew Moore is physically ill just thinking about that number. The Big Three have also posted some pretty good numbers against Peacock in limited ABs, although only Kyle Seager has a HR.

Both teams had to dip into their bullpens last night, but the Mariners’ pen was already stretched pretty thin from the White Sox series. If Gaviglio gets into trouble early, only Gallardo and Pagan can offer multiple innings of help. Vincent and Díaz and probably Zych are definitely down, Pazos and Cishek and worn pretty thin, and Zep pitched last night.

In case you missed it, the Astros will be without Carlos Correa:

It’s interesting to me that Houston is going with Marwin Gonzalez at SS instead of moving Bregman, a college SS, over there; I guess they don’t want to mess up Bregman’s development but he’s clearly the more polished defender at the position, to my mind. Well, this is why they pay me the no monies. Over at FG today they postulated that the Astros will go searching for a corner infielder now if they have to move Gonzalez to the infield, but with the call-up of slugging OFer Colin Moran plus Derek Fisher waiting in Triple-A, plus the Astros’ pitching depth situation, I doubt that happens. But like I said, the no monies.

Game Info:

5:10 PM PST; on ROOTNW, 710 ESPN, and on MLB.tv, where it’s the free game of the day! If you don’t live in a blackout zone, I guess.

Go forth and score some runs for poor sweet Sam, you stack of overdue library books.