Game 20, Mariners at Marlins

Matt Brash vs. Eliezer Hernandez, 3:40pm

After a tough series loss to a good Rays club, the M’s stay in Florida to face a somewhat similar opponent: a team blessed with excellent pitching and solid, if underwhelming offense. I know that’s kind of silly to say, given Tampa’s current wRC+, but the offense we saw this past few days isn’t a world-beating, Toronto-style juggernaut, and we’re not going to see one in this series, either.

What’s made the Marlins so intriguing the past year or two has been the development of an excellent starting rotation, anchored by former M’s prospect and MLB’s current ERA leader, Pablo Lopez. Sandy Alcantara and Trevor Rogers were the co-aces last year – a year that saw Lopez miss time with injury. Today’s starter, Eliezer Hernandez, has shown flashes of promise, but those flashes are obscured with one of the biggest, most persistent, problems with home runs in the game.

Hernandez has only thrown 240 career big league innings, but his HR/9 remains above 2. Theoretically, this is exactly the pitcher who should be thriving now: a guy with some bat-missing ability and good control, who gives up a million fly balls. Low BABIP, low baserunners, and now, with a deadened ball, great results, right? He’s given up 6 home runs in his first 15+ innings thus far. He uses a 91mph fastball and makes heavy use of a slider with, quite frankly, not a lot of break. He’s also got a change-up mostly for left-handed batters. The slider’s clearly the best of the bunch, but his underpowered fastball makes it harder to get to. He’s throwing the fastball less this year, but he might need to take that usage down again.

It’s kind of nuts to use split stats so early, but as I’ve made clear, this weird inversion of last year’s home/road splits is hilarious. Whether or not it’s persistent or meaningful is something time can help out with, but for now, I’m here for the laughs. The M’s currently have the second-highest batting average *at home*, behind only the Rockies. They have the #1 wRC+, wOBA, OPS, whatever you want to use. Away from chilly Seattle (this was an exceptionally cold month), they’ve been a bottom-10 group. Sure, it helps to play Kansas City at home and it hurts to play Tampa on the road, but it remains striking. So, what’s going on? Did someone really unplug the humidor?

No, probably not. If we look at all fly balls hit between 95-105 mph off the bat and measure the average distance the ball travels, we find T-Mobile sees the 3rd *lowest* distance. If we restrict the query just for “barrels,” or batted balls with optimal angles and velocities to turn in HRs/extra-base hits, we find essentially the same thing: you get *less* out of really good contact at T-Mobile compared to the average park, to say nothing of Coors Field. But if you look at the frequency with which pitches are scalded above 95 mph (excluding grounders), you see T-Mobile has seen the 3rd *most* such batted balls. This is like what I mentioned years ago regarding Detroit’s Comerica park, or Target field in Minnesota. These northerly parks with larger dimensions can push down performance on exceptionally well-struck balls, but they also seem to generate more OF them. It’s like pitchers are expecting the park to bail them out, so they challenge hitters more?

Again, these stats are so early, and are thus biased by specific teams (esp. home teams), so we’ll see where they end up. But we’ve seen this sort of thing before, most notably in 2016, when Seattle’s home park saw the most total HRs hit.

1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, DH
5: Crawford, SS
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Rodriguez, CF
8: Kelenic, RF
9: Torrens, C
SP: BRASH

Cal Raleigh’s back in Tacoma with Luis Torrens back. I’m still stunned at how much the M’s have used Torrens, and how they trust him to handle the team’s young pitchers after hiding his catchers mitt from him last season. To be fair, he’s looked a lot better, and nailed a runner trying to steal yesterday. Even his framing runs per BP’s metric, while below average, aren’t too bad.

Bryce Miller was the minor league star of the day yesterday, striking out 9 in 5 IP, yielding one run in the AquaSox 9-1 win over Spokane. Noelvi Marte hit his third HR in that contest.

Arkansas got shut out 2-0 by prospect Simeon Woods-Richardson. Modesto beat San Jose 5-0, with Jimmy Kingsbury starting off the four-pitcher shutout.