Robbie Ray did not replicate his 2021 AL Cy Young-winning form last year. In fact, he struggled down the stretch, but he did make a solid contribution as the Mariners ended their 21-year playoff drought. Alas, he won’t get to help them try to repeat that feat. On Wednesday, the Mariners announced that the 31-year-old lefty will undergo surgery to repair a torn flexor tendon and miss the remainder of the season.

After a promising spring training in which he restored some lost velocity to his four-seam fastball, Ray made just one start, and it wasn’t pretty. Facing the Guardians on March 31, he needed 26 pitches to complete the first inning, during which he issued back-to-back four-pitch walks to José Ramírez and Josh Bell before escaping by striking out Josh Naylor. His fastball velocity quickly diminished and he lasted just 3.1 innings, walking five and surrendering four hits and five runs (three earned).

In the immediate aftermath, Ray didn’t tell reporters that he had felt tightness in his forearm starting in the second inning, a problem that he attributed to the cold weather. After undergoing an MRI the next day due to lingering soreness, he was diagnosed with a Grade 1 flexor strain; only in discussing the injury with reporters did he reveal his discomfort. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the most important thing for a pitcher to do? That’s right, don’t leave the ball up in the zone for Aaron Judge. The second-most important thing for a pitcher to do is throw strikes. Throw strikes to get ahead in the count, throw strikes to challenge hitters, throw strikes to force action early in the count and keep your pitch count down… pitchers talk about throwing strikes the way health nuts talk about kale. It’s good for you. How? Let me count the ways.

Except, nobody actually throws strikes. Last season, 347 pitchers threw at least 50 innings in the majors; nobody threw more than 58.5% of their pitches in the strike zone. Devin Williams, one of the best in the business, worked inside the zone just 42.4% of the time. “It’s good to throw strikes,” then, is something to be taken seriously but not literally.

Seattle Mariners right-hander George Kirby is a greater adherent of the zone than most. Last season, he broke a big league record by throwing 24 consecutive strikes to start a game. This year, he’s working in the zone more than any other pitcher with at least 20 innings under their belt. It was not always thus. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season is only a handful of days old, but already another Cy Young winner is on the shelf. After Justin Verlander was placed on the injured list last Friday, Robbie Ray joined him the following afternoon. The Mariners lefty was removed from his season debut against the Guardians in the middle of the fourth inning, having thrown 91 pitches and given up five walks and five runs. It wasn’t clear his exit was injury-related at the time, but Ray later revealed he’d been feeling pain since the second inning. He was ultimately diagnosed with a left flexor strain, which will keep him out for four to six weeks.

Even before Ray’s injury was diagnosed, the Mariners had cause for concern. For one thing, five walks in three-plus innings is certainly a worrisome sign. To make matters worse, two of those walks came in the first inning, before he began to feel sore. Ray has been notoriously wild in the past — he leads all active pitchers in five-walk games — but he had seemingly gotten his free passes under control the last two years:

In his second start of the 2021 season, Ray walked six batters in five innings of work. From that point onwards, he has posted a perfectly respectable 2.64 BB/9 (84 BB/9+). He needs to keep his walk rate in check to succeed going forward; hopefully his control will improve when his flexor strain heals. Read the rest of this entry »

Last October, I wrote a piece about Jarred Kelenic’s small sample success in the final month of the 2022 season. After a rollercoaster start to his career, he had kept pushing along trying to find the version of his swing that would allow him to adjust at different heights of the zone and be formidable against big league breaking balls. For much of 2022, he could hardly make contact against quality breaking balls, but at the end of the season, his swing began to look more connected. It led to slight improvements in breaking ball contact and contact in general against lefties. It was also a positive way to head into the offseason, where he could have more time to explore his swing and find the best version of himself. Since Kelenic was constantly tweaking during the season while jumping between the majors and minors, it was inevitable he would look at least a little different once spring came around.

That was indeed the case on his first day in Peoria, and so far in spring training, the adjustments he made have been paying off. Yes, it’s only spring training, but sometimes if you read in between the lines and try to find sticky characteristics, this month of baseball can be more than just a tuneup. And Kelenic has been nothing short of incredible at the plate. In his 38 Cactus League at-bats, he has 16 hits, eight of which have gone for extra bases all over the field — many of them crushed at over 100 mph. It’s great to see such a dominant performance from a results perspective, but one key piece of his ongoing changes focuses on the mental aspect of hitting: approach and quality at-bats. That piece has a direct influence on his swing mechanics.

In an interview he did with Seattle Sports in the beginning of March, Kelenic talked about being focused on things you can control as a hitter and battling through unfortunate circumstances. He spoke under the context of an at-bat from the day prior, where he thought the umpire missed two calls that put him down 0–2; he flushed those pitches and ended up scorching a line drive over the center field wall. This mental side of hitting is an important step in the quest to becoming a mature hitter. He talked more at length about this mentality in a separate interview with the Seattle Times. Specifically, he has focused on the idea of “winning the pitch” regardless of the count. This keeps a hitter competitive and able to maintain a short-term memory — a necessary skill in baseball. Kelenic has provided several quotes this spring that give us a better idea of how he is approaching the game, and it allows somebody like me, who has been keen to analyze his changes, to follow his story with better prior knowledge. And the changes have been quite interesting, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Some pitchers approach their craft by trying to hone their established pitch repertoire to make the most of what they’ve always thrown. Then there’s Logan Gilbert. Rather than stick with the pitches that were the foundation of his success in college and through the minors, he’s consistently tinkered with new grips and new pitches to enhance his arsenal, even after reaching the big leagues. Last year, he revamped each of his secondary offerings in an attempt to gain more consistent effectiveness with them. He hasn’t been afraid to make adjustments on the fly during the season either, all in an effort to maximize his abilities on the mound.

This spring, Gilbert debuted a brand-new splitter to replace his changeup. That older pitch was effective in limited action, but he rarely had a good feel for it, making it an inconsistent offering at best. “I’ve always tried the changeup and just kind of struggled with it, [it] just wasn’t natural for me,” Gilbert said in an interview with Daniel Kramer of MLB.com. “So I’m just trying to find basically a variation of a splitter that I can throw like a fastball.”

Before we get too deep into his new pitch, I want to go back and look at how Gilbert’s entire repertoire has evolved over the last two years. To do so, I’m going to be using the new Stuff+ leaderboards recently introduced on the site. Stuff+ is a pitch model developed by Eno Sarris and Max Bay that attempts to quantify the quality of a given pitch using only the underlying physical characteristics of said pitch. Stuff+ becomes reliably predictive very quickly — in under 100 pitches — and is extremely sticky year-to-year. That reliability means it’s sensitive to changes in a pitch’s characteristics, making it an excellent tool to evaluate someone like Gilbert.

The one constant for Gilbert has been his fastball, which possesses excellent raw velocity that plays up even higher when you take into account his elite release extension. With above-average ride and good command, his heater has been the backbone of his pitch mix. If anything, he’s leaned on it a little too much early in his career, but only because his secondary offerings have lagged behind. The graph above puts the inconsistency of those pitches in stark relief. His changeup finally found some sure footing last season, even if he couldn’t command it at all. More importantly, his two breaking balls have oscillated in effectiveness, with neither registering above average at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Harry Ford is one of the top prospects in the Seattle Mariners organization, and he is also unique among his peers. Born Harrison Michael Ford, in Atlanta, 20 years ago this week, the right-handed-hitting catcher is the son of English immigrants. His mother spent her childhood in London, while his father — “a real Brit; he still has an accent”— came to the U.S. a little over two decades ago from Oxford. Moreover, his multi-national upbringing included his family’s having hosted exchange students from Argentina, Brazil, and Germany.

If the above list of countries has you wondering if football — soccer to us here in the States — has been a part of his life, the answer is yes. Ford’s father is a huge Arsenal fan who used to play in a competitive men’s league, while the youngster impressed on the pitch in his schoolboy days before turning his full attention to baseball. Given that Ford is a muscular 5-foot-10, 200-pounds and has been called a unicorn due to the speed that augments his frame, how good might he have been had he pursued his father’s favorite sport rather than America’s national pastime?

“I think I’d go crazy in soccer!” was Ford’s fun-loving (and quite possibly accurate) response to that question, meaning that he would excel. Instead he is excelling on the diamond, and he’s doing so at a position that belies his athleticism. How he found himself wearing the tools of ignorance was a matter of happenstance.

“I was always a third baseman, but when I was eight or 10 we needed someone to play catcher,” explained Ford, whom the Mariners took 12th overall in the 2021 draft. “I remember that there was this royal blue, really ugly gear, and I was like, ‘I’ll try it. Why not? ‘I got back there and liked it, and haven’t left it since.”

As uncommon as it is for elite athletes to end up behind the plate, it has been an even less common destination for African Americans. Black catchers have been few and far between in MLB history. To Ford’s mind, “It will be cool to change that stigma.” Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a pretty quiet offseason in Seattle. The Mariners got things moving fairly quickly, trading for Teoscar Hernández and Kolten Wong to cover the holes left by a couple of departing free agents, but things slowed down after that. They’ve brought in a couple of veterans to provide a bit of depth, but are otherwise largely banking on a repeat of their success last year and some continued growth from their young core. They made one more last minute addition yesterday, signing Kole Calhoun to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.

Bringing in an 11-year veteran like Calhoun is the type of move that plenty of teams make during the spring, but they rarely work out for the player involved. Most ball clubs are content to roll out whatever internal depth they already have instead of clearing a 40-man roster spot to add a player on a minor league deal. But every once in a while, a veteran will show that he has just enough left in the tank during spring training to break camp on the Opening Day roster.

If you squint, you can see how Calhoun could be primed for a bounce back season in 2023. A long-time Angel, he really started to struggle during his final seasons in Anaheim. From 2017–19, he put up a 94 wRC+ and accumulated 3.5 WAR, with a career-high 33 home runs in his final season for Los Angeles. He joined the Diamondbacks in free agency the following year and produced a career-high 125 wRC+ and 1.5 WAR during the shortened season. The last two years haven’t been kind to him, however. A recurring hamstring injury cut short most of his 2021 season and his production cratered last year after signing a one-year deal with the Rangers, with his wRC+ falling to a career-low 67. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the release of FanGraphs’ playoff odds and the biggest differences between the FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus playoff and World Series odds, then continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Seattle Mariners (18:28) with Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times and the Chicago White Sox (1:03:48) with The Athletic’s James Fegan, plus a Past Blast (1:49:08) from 1970 and a postscript.

Audio intro: Spiritualized, “Do it All Over Again”
Audio interstitial: Superchunk, “Low F”
Audio outro: The Stooges, “1970”

Link to Ohtani’s FA comments
Link to FG playoff odds announcement
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to Ben C. on the playoff odds
Link to PECOTA-based odds
Link to odds differences spreadsheet
Link to MASN statement
Link to Mariners offseason tracker
Link to Mariners depth chart
Link to Ryan’s spring training preview
Link to Ryan’s author archive
Link to 2023 draft order
Link to Vogt hiring news
Link to White Sox offseason tracker
Link to White Sox depth chart
Link to The Athletic’s offseason grades
Link to James’s spring training preview
Link to James’s author archive
Link to FG’s 2B projections
Link to 1970 article source
Link to 1970 Winter Meetings info
Link to SABR’s source
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to McCarver’s NYT obit
Link to Angell’s McCarver profile
Link to Angell on McCarver again
Link to FG’s Negro Leagues stats
Link to info on racetrack
Link to info on photography
Link to more info on photography
Link to third photography article
Link to fourth photography article
Link to fifth photography article

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While the Mariners’ front office has been rather quiet in terms of acquiring new free agents this offseason, they did plenty of work locking up their existing personnel before free agency opened, extending star outfielder Julio Rodríguez and starting pitcher Luis Castillo with combined guarantees up to $578 million. Now, they’ve agreed to a three-year extension with utility man Dylan Moore worth $8.875 million. This contract buys out his final two years of arbitration as well as his first season of free agency, keeping him in Seattle through his age-33 season.

Moore was a late bloomer, first making the Mariners roster in 2019 at the age of 26, and he’s primarily served in a utility and platoon role ever since. While his career wRC+ sits at exactly 100, that mark jumps to 112 against left-handers. The Mariners have done well to maximize his effectiveness by deploying him on his strong side as much as possible, especially last season, when nearly half of his plate appearances came against left-handed pitching, fourth-most among right-handed hitters.

Platoon usage rate often says more about a team than an individual player — plenty of everyday starters arguably should be sitting more against same-handed pitchers — but the Mariners have the right pieces to put Moore in advantageous situations, including a wide variety of left-handed counterparts like Kolten Wong, Jarred Kelenic, and Tommy La Stella.

It’s difficult to thrive exclusively as a right-handed platoon bat, though, given that a significant majority of pitchers are also righties. Players like Moore and Slater only got to face lefty opponents about half the time; sometimes a reliever comes in, sometimes a starter needs the day off regardless of who the other team has on the mound. Luckily, Moore also handles right-handed pitching decently well. His career wRC+ against them sits at 92, and last season, he had a .344 OBP and 117 wRC+ against fellow righties, a good mark for any big league hitter. He definitely has a stronger side, making more contact and drawing more free passes against southpaws, but he’s certainly not helpless on the other side of the platoon either. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s nearly February and the free agent pool is thinning out. Most of the big names have already flown off the board. By our projections, only five unsigned players forecast to amass at least 1 WAR in the upcoming season, only three of whom are position players. Most teams have already filled out their Opening Day starting lineups; now their focus shifts to improving the fringes of their 26-man roster, searching for a couple of additional wins or insurance in case of injuries. The Mariners and the A’s, two AL West teams with very different outlooks for 2023, each recently made such an addition, inking a veteran to bolster infield depth. Let’s take a look.

Mariners sign Tommy La Stella to a league-minimum deal

Formerly a bench infielder and designated pinch hitter for the Cubs (his league-leading 91 pinch hit appearances in 2018 has not been matched since), La Stella was traded to the Angels with two years of team control remaining for a prospect who never threw a pitch in Chicago’s system. In 2019, he maintained the contact skills and excellent plate discipline that made him a league-average hitter, but he improved in another facet of his game that was emblematic of the juiced ball era. That year, his fly ball rate, which had previously sat around the 20% mark, climbed to 25%; that, combined with a small increase in his pull rate, led to a power break out. Despite lacking traditional power indicators like barrels and a high maximum exit velocity, La Stella made the most of his aerial contact (and the favorable dimensions of Angels Stadium) to post a career-high .486 slugging percentage and hit home runs at a rate of 30 per 600 PA, an excellent mark even during the heightened offensive environment. His absolute refusal to swing and miss played a big part in this as well; his minuscule 8.7% strikeout rate gave him plenty of balls in play, many of which left the yard:

Read the rest of this entry »