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of that the m s haven t been a great offense vs ground ball pitchers bbref has their ops at just under 700 against them lower than vs fly ballers or neutral arms but again the offense hasn t looked anything like the team that played in the regular season so why should they let the past be prologue now on the other side the astros didn t face luis castillo this year and that lack of familiarity may be an advantage for seattle he ll face a line up that also swaps out chas mccormick for jake meyers another rhb but one without the experience success of mccormick that said this is still a very tough test for any pitcher one thing he has going for himself of course is top shelf velocity even good hitters struggle at 97 and castillo will show them 97 often yuli gurriel has a sub 300 woba against high velo fastballs this year and it turns alex bregman and trey mancini into easy outs alvarez fares better so once more with extra feeling they need to not allow alvarez to beat them the best of their remaining hitters against elite velo jose altuve chas mccormick fared quite well against it too so the astros may feel the drop from mccormick s high velo woba 383 to meyers 161 1 juliooooo cf 2 france 1b 3 suarez 3b 4 haniger rf 5 santana dh 6 moore lf 7 raleigh c 8 frazier 2b 9 crawford ss sp castillo go m s 4 comments alds game 1 series preview marc w october 11 2022 filed under mariners logan gilbert vs justin verlander 12 37pm the astros are insanely good this series is five games long at most this isn t the factor that most raises the m s odds that s the addition of luis castillo but it does help there simply isn t enough time for the astros talent advantage to reliably show up as we ve just seen the playoffs are like summer camp affording players the opportunity to try on completely different personalities for a while cal raleigh hit 211 in the regular season then played like a combination of edgar martinez and tony gwynn in toronto adam frazier put up an empty 612 ops a 612 ops is by definition empty but it needs an adjective because after watching frazier this year you would swear there was no way his ops was north of 600 but an even 1 000 in two brilliant games against the jays my last series preview got blown up by reality and i am okay with that i m just hoping the m s can do whatever this is some more the m s strength this season has been their pitching and after the acquisition of luis castillo and the emergence of george kirby especially starting pitching in a short series that s a nice strength to have the problem is that the astros had the best starters and the best pitching staff in baseball with a team era under 3 and the best fip in baseball they gave up 3 2 runs per game in a park we all used to think was hitter friendly the astros have two starters with absolutely elite four seam fastballs in justin verlander and cristian javier they ve got framber valdez and his elite sinker powering the highest gb of any starter in mlb and it s not close lance mccullers has an elite breaking ball that he throws a ton of and to make matters worse the staff gave up the fewest hrs in the american league if they have a weakness it may be control justin verlander is coming off a brilliant season tying his career low in walk rate but behind him the astros starters will give up free passes while m s batters strength is their patience javier valdez and mccullers all have walk rates over 3 per 9 innings if the m s are able to get solid abs from the bottom of their line up the way they did in toronto then this could be an equalizer meanwhile the astros haven t seen castillo in an m s uniform and got several of their wins against seattle before the m s solidified improved their bullpen that helps because the astros line up is a bit scary it s anchored by yordan alvarez the hitter i fear most as an m s fan i was half joking earlier in the season when i said i d walk him every time he s at the dish but as time s gone by i m increasingly comfortable with that strategy a part of that is that a few of the astros superstars have fallen back a bit alex bregman had a very good year with more walks than ks he put up a 136 wrc but i would throw him plenty of strikes bregman hit 41 hrs in 2019 then fell off a cliff with a bizarrely awful 2020 before a partial bounce back in 2021 he s been better this year but he s simply not hitting for as much power as he once had the baseball is part of that certainly but he s a player that derives a lot of his value from bases on balls and the m s staff doesn t give up many bregman s babip has been low for a while so the m s need to make him earn his way on base kyle tucker s in a similar position he doesn t quite have bregman s eye but it s close like bregman tucker has a very high average launch angle and thus hits plenty of fly balls he s a good hitter but the m s should be aggressive with him on the flip side jose altuve s decline may have been exaggerated the 2b had a career high walk rate while maintaining his unlikely slugging ability if he had a weakness in a 6 6 fwar season it s that he was much better against left handed pitching i don t think this match up will determine if robbie ray gets a start in this series but it s an issue given the m s wealth of righty sp options 1 julioooooo cf 2 france 1b 3 suarez 3b 4 raleigh c 5 haniger rf 6 santana dh 7 frazier 2b 8 kelenic lf 9 crawford ss sp gilbert the keys to the series for me 1 alvarez if yordan alvarez has a bunch of rbis and critical hits something s gone wrong if he s on base when someone else hits a hr that s unfortunate but it wouldn t make me as annoyed as if the m s allow alvarez to beat them he will don t let him 2 battle of the bullpens the astros are a bit banged up as rp phil maton s off the roster after breaking a finger punching his locker the stros bullpen performed well overall but it doesn t feel like a shutdown unit former mariner rafael montero s been great all year but closer ryan pressly was awful against seattle a year ago and hasn t pitched up to his fip for several years meanwhile the m s have to hope that paul sewald got his one big clunker of an outing out of his system in toronto andres munoz getting a day off yesterday helps but the m s pen isn t as rested as houston s we ll see if that matters 3 walks logan gilbert has pitched very well against houston and has learned the most important lesson in facing them don t give them free bases with gilbert and castillo plus the potential for a george kirby start the m s are poised to neutralize one of the astros strengths if the m s offense is going to score they could use some free bases of their own if the m s out walk the astros line up that would go a long way towards evening things up and at least on paper that s a real possibility on the other hand if gilbert kirby are a bit worn down and kirby s late season control issues return it gets a lot harder to see them overcoming this juggernaut of a team 4 platoon advantages leo morgenstern s great preview at fangraphs mentions platoon splits for logan gilbert and how good he s been against lefties but i think this is an intriguing series and a very different one compared to the wild card series against the aggressively right handed jays the rules on reliever usage make it harder to make mid inning changes and the astros can altenrate tough righties and lefties in the middle of their order matt boyd is going to get some very high leverage appearances as a left handed reliever but the m s don t really have much behind him if the m s can handle the astros lefties and if the m s can get critical hits from their own lefties they have a chance during the regular season that didn t often happen as guys like jarred kelenic adam frazier and carlos santana had rough years but in the playoffs frazier santana and especially cal raleigh came up clutch although santana s biggest hit came as a rhb they need to do so again as the astros probable starters are all righties and the bulk of their bullpen is as well all of them have been good to great against lefties but still the m s need all the advantages they can get 14 comments recent events fill mariners fans with unexpected emotions marc w october 11 2022 filed under mariners when the m s eliminated the jays i quite literally didn t know what to do i ended up cleaning the kitchen a task i generally loathe the nature of the game was a part of that confusion a warm comfortable variant of confusion but the biggest part of it was that i was not fully aware that baseball could produce feelings like this 21 years of failure constrained my emotional response to critical games because it constrained my imagination i was not prepared for a world in which the m s could come back from 8 1 down in toronto to win and thus my brain did not really process that fact it was fitting then that the image i will always carry with me from that day was photos from t mobile park at the m s watch party thousands of people watching a bonkers game on the jumbotron with shoes perched on their heads it is simultaneously relatable sports and completely ridiculous faced with perhaps the most unlikely comeback in 20 years after 20 years of missing the playoffs in a variety of cruel ways people spontaneously responded to the blessed nonsense of it all in kind by raising the nonsense by wallowing in it basking in it comment al wild card series game 2 the ray game marc w october 8 2022 filed under mariners robbie ray vs kevin gausman 1 07pm well game 1 could not have possibly gone any better luis castillo has been good for the m s since the trade but the kind of performance he had yesterday is exactly why you trade so many prospects for him in the playoffs on the road against one of the best line ups in baseball castillo stole the show he had everything working and utterly destroyed the jays spirit i will remember the sinker running in that got vlad guerrero jr swinging while also nearly hitting him in the gut for the rest of my life this is the kind of game that makes fans for generations and justifies the focus on the playoff drought even i have been a bit dismissive about ending the drought through a newly expanded wild card while the team s line up still isn t elite this felt like sneaking in the back door as opposed to winning 100 games and running away with the al west but yesterday reminded me that the playoffs are the playoffs every game is capable of delivering the kind of instant classic memorable performance we just saw it s been a focus of m s fans because we ve never had the possibility of a player going thermo nuclear on some unsuspecting opponent on the other side of the coin the m s clearly didn t read my post about alek manoah s contact management they hit him hard and often but in all honesty the game was over at the end of the first inning the m s scored three in the top and then castillo calmly brushed aside the jays in the bottom of the inning and that ended up being that how did the m s jump out to that early lead it felt oddly familiar manoah s slider was working yesterday as seen in the three pitch k of julio rodriguez but in the first it was a weapon he generally kept holstered by the end of the game he d thrown 29 sliders more than any other pitch type but in the first he really attempted that age old pitching advice that rings a little different for long time readers here he tried to establish the fastball he had lead off man julio rodriguez with two strikes and hadn t thrown him a slider what did he do he threw a sinker up that ran in and hit julio on the hand he got france on a breaker but then suarez hit a fastball 103 mph into right for a double cal raleigh lofted a fastball out to right right for an instant 3 run lead before manoah got haniger to ground out on a fastball then struck out santana on a fastball he made the adjustment and went to the slider more often and had generally good results i m still pretty amazed by this the m s line up isn t great but they can do one thing hit fastballs sure julio and suarez have been good against sinkers and julio in particular is better than average against breaking stuff but the overall team lives on fastballs this is the kind of approach that had it worked would ve been lauded he doesn t care about the other team s strengths he s just focused on his own game plan or he wanted to shove it down their throats or some other aggressive cliche but it backfired big time and now the jays are a game away from elimination today they ll send second ace kevin gausman to the hill gausman s splitter is every bit the weapon that manoah s slider is and i don t think he s going to shelve it early no matter what the pitching coach s advice may be gausman is a three pitch guy with a four seam fastball that s got some armside run a show me slider with plenty of gyro spin and thus not a ton of movement and that big diving 85 mph splitter with the armside run of a sinker but the drop of a breaking ball as you probably know the splitter is my favorite pitch type and gausman shows why it induces a swing over 61 of the time even though he throws it at and under the bottom of the strike zone there are many ways to become an effective major league pitcher but among the easiest is somehow getting major league batters to swing at balls out of the zone gausman is among the best in the game at this batters swing and miss at about 45 of these splitters and are slugging 293 against it when they put it in play the average ball in play comes out at 83 mph so with all of those swings at out of zone pitches surely gausman benefits from a low babip right ha ha no well he did in his 2021 renaissance in san francisco but his babip this year is an unreal 363 among qualified starters that s the highest by 35 points his teammate jose berrios is second at 328 you can probably guess what his problem has been that four seam fastball he throws about 1 2 the time park factors are useful but there are some times i think they can vastly underestimate an impact on an individual player gausman s fastball doesn t look any different than the one he had in san francisco it s actually coming in slightly faster with fractionally more rise it s just not working the same as batters have a 371 woba against it this year a far sight from last season s 335 batters are swinging a bit more often and putting the pitch in play slightly more often and from there the park can help them out moving from san francisco to toronto is one of the more extreme park effect shifts a player can make and it s been costly for gausman batters exit velo on fastballs is up over 2 mph from 2021 to 2022 no his home park is not the only reason why his babip is sky high but it is definitely a factor and it s one i hope the m s can use to their advantage today just as they did to manoah it s fun to hit in toronto and i want the m s to have a lot of fun 1 julioooooo cf 2 france 1b 3 suarez 3b 4 raleigh c 5 haniger rf 6 frazier 2b 7 sant...