Seattle Mariners Fan

Posts Tagged ‘runs’

Last week at Fenway Park, I was asked if I’d participate in a podcast for the FanGraphs website and after agreeing to, was asked on-air by writer David Laurila about why the Mariners don’t draw many walks. I had no idea what questions were going to be asked, so my quick response was to mention that the team as a whole had to stop chasing pitches out of the strike zone and also learn to better punish pitchers once they came inside the zone.

I was going off memories of watching Chone Figgins, Brendan Ryan, Miguel Olivo and others take some wild swings earlier on. Also, the inability of the Mariners to punish pitchers is a topic we’ve discussed for two years on this blog. In my conversations with personnel from other teams, the one thing they’ve mentioned is that there was no one player any pitcher really feared in the Mariners lineup. Nobody who could consistently change the outcome of a game with one swing. Therefore, opposing pitchers have been taking liberties with the Mariners, coming at them aggressively with little fear of any reprecussions since the start of 2010.

That was my take on it, anyway, but I figured I’d look into it further.

After all, manager Eric Wedge has been working for over a year now to change the approach of M’s hitters so that they attack first and do damage with hittable pitches. But Wedge has also preached to them that they should lay off the unhittable stuff and take walks if they absolutely don’t get anything hittable.

The day after I did the FanGraphs podcast, I happened across this post written that day on the excellent Seattle Sports Insider website. Naturally, having just talked about the subject on the podcast, I was interested to see the author suggest that opposing pitchers had thrown more pitches inside the strike zone to the Mariners (as of a week ago) than to any other team.

Not only that, but he also notes that an abnormally high number of strikes are coming on 1-0, 2-0 and 2-1 “hitter’s counts” which seems to suggest that — rather than risk a walk — the pitchers are simply shrugging, throwing the ball right down the middle without fear and all but daring the Mariners to swing and do something to the pitch.

Sure enough, in the game that day, a struggling Josh Beckett went out and threw 60 strikes among his 93 pitches, practically daring the Mariners to do something.

The Mariners did nothing and were shut out for seven innings by Beckett and 5-0 overall.

After the game, ESPNBoston columnist Gordon Edes and I walked out of Fenway Park together. Edes had rushed over to remind me of an interesting tidbit. That Beckett had allowed a league-high 19 extra-base hits in his first six outings of the season, but yielded only four singles to the Mariners.

I mean, a guy with a near 6.00 ERA, who was getting crushed for home runs and doubles all season to that point had just thrown two thirds of his pitches inside the strike zone and the M’s did nothing with them.

Now, here’s the good news.

Photo Credit: AP

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Some of you were a bit confused about yesterday’s post, even going so far as to proclaim it as an attack on the stat of on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS). Nope. Have used OPS a lot over the past 10 years and will continue to as I feel a growing majority of readers can easily understand it.

No, yesterday’s post — as the title said — was about the Mariners doing better offensively.

As I said, the M’s were 16th in runs scored in MLB but had played more games than other clubs and were probably about 20-23rd in average runs scored per game despite having a 27th ranked OPS. A few of you asked why I didn’t just throw out their runs scored per game stat to begin with and part of it was merely the act of walking some less stats-advanced readers through the process of explaining the lag between OPS and runs scored.

So, anyway, just to help others, the M’s are indeed 21st in runs per game scored, which is not as high as 16th, but, as written here yesterday, is much better than being dead last on an historical level as we’d seen the past two years.

Now, as for the lag between OPS and runs scored, I did feel it was important to delve into it a bit as it broaches the sometimes taboo topic in some corners about the difference between a good stat in theory and why managers and teams do things on the field that confound us.

Photo Credit: AP

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CC Sabathia (Cleveland Indians) just hit one against the Dodgers and Felix Hernandez (Seattle Mariners) hit a grand slam against the Mets’ Johan Santana! Give a real answer plz.