Hello Seattle Mariners fans!
Today Matt Brash faces off against Justin Verlander, capping a particularly rough road trip for the team. After a brief respite as the best hitting team in baseball, the offense has gone into freefall….all the way down to 5th in wRC+. Hitting across the league is WAY down to such a degree that it is skewing many of the offensive statistics. Will this correct over time? Will baseball change the ball to restore lost offense? Who knows, but we look at some possibilities and try to figure out what’s real and what’s not in the early numbers. John talks Kelenic’s bat, and how he might be making some mechanical tweaks at the plate. Evan wonders how long Jarred’s leash is, after struggling so mightily. John reminds us that in fact, no one is hitting, and one of the bright sides of the current offensive drought league wide is that it buys some of our younger players more time to turn it on. We look at the first few starts for Matt Brash and try to figure out just what he is. Starter? Reliever? Major league pitcher? The future is uncertain. Lastly we give Logan Gilbert his flowers, as he currently is the most qualified Mariners pitching and development success story of the Dipoto era. ERA is considered to be an empty metric by the sabermetrics community, but Logan setting the Mariners ERA record for the month is nonetheless an impressive feat, and a welcome success in what so far has been a deeply uneven season.
Note: Craig failed us again, but I was able to salvage the discussion. There is a hard transition from the outfield discussion to John talking about Kelenic and his swing, but it’s mostly all there, sorry for any confusion.
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