The Seattle Mariners are enduring a pretty miserable season. After last year’s stinker, the Mariners have followed it up with a .438 winning percentage and a pace-worthy of a scant 71 wins. Well, buck up West Coasters, because the Seattle Mariners should hit better through the season’s end!

In fact, the Mariners should be hitting a whopping 29% better.

For several weeks now, I’ve been playing with fielding-independent-hitting tools, specifically the aptly-named Should Hit metric.

Should Hit (ShH, for short) has a variety of uses, though its best used as a BABIP regressor. For your perusal, I created ShHAP!, a Google Doc that’s free for the world to download and allows anyone to regress a player’s present season (or any stretch of statistics), according to a different BABIP.

Well, today, let’s put this tool to use and look at the Mariners.

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Two years ago, the top two picks in the June draft were pretty obvious – Stephen Strasburg was going to go #1 and Dustin Ackley was going to go #2. Strasburg was the best pitching prospect in the draft’s history, while Ackley had comfortably settled in as the low-risk college position player option. Because of the enormous difference in perceived potential, there was no real question that the Nationals would take Strasburg #1, even with the greater chance of risk associated with drafting a pitcher. I made the case for Ackley at the time, but even I admitted that, given the #1 pick, I’d take Strasburg too.

Now, though, a lot has changed. Strasburg had a remarkable ascent and debut in the big leagues, but then also had to go under the knife and has spent the last year rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. Ackley, meanwhile, had some pedestrian numbers in the minor leagues, took longer to get to the show, but has made a pretty nifty little splash since he got there.

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Mercifully, the Mariners’ historically bad 17-game losing streak is over. Sure, Seattle didn’t play well for the last three weeks, but it found itself on the wrong side of probability on an incredible level.

If Seattle had a 50/50 chance to win every game, the chances that they would lose 17 games in a row can be calculated by using a probability chain. Taking 50-percent to the 17th power results in 0.0008-percent, or 1-in-131,072 odds.

However, the Mariners are not expected to win 50-percent of their games. Read the rest of this entry »

Ichiro Suzuki is getting old. In life, that’s not a bad thing. In baseball, it is.

He is now in season 11 of the MLB portion of his career and season 20 of his professional career. Despite his age, he has played in 102 of the Seattle Mariners’ 103 games this year (not counting today). Moreover, he has more plate appearances (457) than anyone over age 35 in 2011. The next closest, Paul Konerko, is over 30 PAs behind him.

Ichiro may look as healthy and athletic as ever, but his numbers this year have been very un-Ichiro-like:

wOBA: .285
wRC+: 80
UZR: -8.4
Bsr: 2.3

All, except for the base-running (UBR) numbers, are career lows for Ich-dawg. We have long-anticipated Ichiro would slow down his ageless mastery of baseball at some point, but the depreciation in his 2011 statistics seem rather sudden. Worth noting:

BABIP: .289
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Whence we last examined yonder batting orders, we came away with several expected observations (Jose Bautista plays baseball like a video game, the Oakland Athletics do not care much for scoring runs, Rick Ankiel and Ian Desmond are not feared hitters, and so forth) as well as a number of curious findings (the Cubs lead-off combo was tops in the majors, the 7th hitters on AL teams were worse than the 9th hitters, NL managers effectively managed the bottoms of their lineups, and such).

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Sometimes the idea comes to you just after the fact. Sometimes it’s so obvious that you can’t believe that it didn’t occur to you before you wrote the article. Almost immediately after pressing Publish on yesterday’s article on the Mariners putrid offense, a few friends and I started talking about the issue. That’s when one friend said it. Couldn’t Carlos Beltran help the Mariners in every conceivable way? Why, yes he could. While it’s unclear what the Mets seek for their right fielder, and it’s equally unclear what the Mariners are willing to spend, the two make a perfect match for a trade. Adding Beltran’s bat and glove could be the difference for the M’s in the AL West.

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If the Mariners have gotten a lot of ink this season, it’s for good reason. After finishing with the worst record in the AL, and the second worst record in the majors, last season, they’ve surprised some people by hovering around .500 for most of the season. Since the AL West lacks a standout team, they’ve also hung around the division lead. As long as their pitching keeps rolling the way it has in the first half of the season they might never find themselves out of the race.

It’s pretty clear to anyone, even an NL fan who doesn’t delve much into the junior circuit, that the Mariners’ offense has held the club back. This has been the case for the past three seasons, during which the Mariners have been the worst hitting team in baseball to the tune of roughly four wins. But with their pitching staff they don’t even need a good offense to excel in the AL West. All they need is a mediocre one. The team with the best pitching in the league serves as an example.

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Quite often we hear that a relief pitcher does or does not have what it takes to get the high pressure outs. Certain pitchers have “it” while others melt under the spot light. Ryan Madson could not be a successful closer because he lacked the vaunted “closer’s mentality.” I’m sure on a case by case basis you will find players who simply cannot handle the pressure; however, studies have shown that a reliever should perform to his talent level regardless of the leverage. After all, they are just roles not skill-sets.

As a fan of the Rays, I have watched Kyle Farnsworth transform from a guy who also lacks the closer’s mentality in to a true relief ace pitching in high leverage situations. Farnsworth is not the only middle reliever to graduate to the high life with success. Including Farnsworth, I found five relief pitchers who moved from the mid-to-low level situations up to a higher level. All five pitched at least 50 innings last season with a pLI less than 1.0. In 2011, they have tossed 30 or more innings with a leverage index of 1.3 or higher (basically set-up man or more). Here is the list…

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Franklin Gutierrez earned something of a reputation as a saber darling during the 2009 season. As new general manager (and saber darling himself) Jack Zduriencik made Gutierrez the centerpiece of his first trade and the Mariners’ defense-first strategy — yes, the one that inspired “6org” — people stood up and noticed Gutierrez’s tremendous prowess in center field. He earned the nickname “Death to Flying Things” and posted a whopping 6.3 fWAR in 2009, largely behind a massive +30.9 UZR.

Regardless of your thoughts on UZR, though, it was clear that Gutierrez was at the least a pretty good player in 2009. His defense was elite by the eye test, and his bat wasn’t empty either. Gutierrez posted a .283/.339/.425 line in his first year as a Mariner, a good line made even better by how difficult it can be to hit as a right-handed batter in Safeco Field. It has been all downhill from there, however, as Gutierrez only managed an 87 wRC+ in 2010. 2011 was derailed early by a gastrointestinal bug and Gutierrez hasn’t been able to get back on track since his mid-May return: his wRC+ through his first 143 plate appearances is a miniscule 20.

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One interesting aspect of the proposed realignment is the effect it will have on team travel. As Dave Cameron noted without division there would be fewer games between geographically close teams, and more between teams farther way from each other — travel will increase. Last Thursday On the Forecheck, a hockey blog, posted the total distance each NHL team will travel in the upcoming 2011-2012 season (hat tip Tango). That made me think that, in light of realignment, it would be interesting to see how much teams are already traveling — and how much variation is there between teams — as a baseline for the current system.

I wanted to get a broad picture of travel distances for each team under the current system, so rather than use just one year’s worth of data I looked at all seasons from 2005 (when the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals) to 2011. I counted how many miles each team traveled and also the number of miles traveled on trips taken without a travel day (i.e., back-to-back games). Since this no-off day travel should be especially grueling. Here are the results averaged over the seven years, thanks to retrosheet for the data:

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