Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - 9-13-19 Locked on Mariners Episode 23: Guest Mikey Ajeto and I discuss Kyle Seager's recent hot streak

Episode Date: September 13, 2019

The Seattle Mariners lost the final game of the series to the Cincinnati Reds, 11-5, but not before rookie Kyle Lewis homered in his third consecutive game to open up his career - a feat which has not been done since Rockies SS Trevor Story in 2016. Host Andy Patton discusses Lewis' hot start and the disappointing outing from rookie Justin Dunn, and then he and guest host Mikey Ajeto discuss Mikey's latest article for PitcherList (linked below) which talks all about Kyle Seager's recent hot streak, and what he has been doing differently that has lead to success.Link to Mikey's article: https://www.pitcherlist.com/going-deep-kyle-seager-is-back-with-a-caveat/Link to Mikey's preseason article: https://www.pitcherlist.com/going-deep-kyle-seager-has-gotten-away-from-what-hes-good-at/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up Mariners fans? I'm Seattle Sports Media's utility infielder Andy Patton, and you're listening to the Lockdown Mariners podcast, part of the Lockdown Podcast Network. The Mariners gave fans a glimpse of the future over the last two games, with the red-hot Kyle Lewis, Justin Dunn, Donnie Walton, and Art Warren all getting a chance to strut their stuff at the big league level. I'll talk about those two games in segment one, and then we have a guest speaker coming on for our Statcast Friday segment.

Pictureless staff writer Mikey Ajetto hops on, and we will discuss his recent, excellent article about Kyle Seeger's performance this season and what it could mean for his future. Finally, we have eight mariner birthdays to celebrate from over the last two days. Stay tuned to find out who. First, a message on Postmates. Anything you're craving, Postmates can deliver. They're the largest on-demand network in the United States and offer delivery from all of the restaurants, grocery, convenience, stores and traditional retailers that you could possibly want or need. For a limited time, PostMace is giving our listeners $100 of free delivery credit for your first seven days. To start your free deliveries, download the app today and use code locked on. Why not, Kyle Lewis?

Why the heck not? Not only did he break up a no-hitter in his first career game by hitting his first career home run, he did it again the next day against Sunny Gray. breaking up a no-hitter in the sixth inning. So, of course, in Kyle Lewis's third MLB game, he didn't need to break up a no-hitter, but why not hit a third home run? Yesterday's home run was an absolute mammoth blast

from the rookie center fielder, who is now homered in three consecutive games to open up his big league career. The last player to do that was Rocky shortstop Trevor's story. Turns out he's pretty good, too. Everybody in Seattle has been hyping up Kyle Lewis ever since he was drafted fifth overall. in 2016. Now they have their reason why. It's very evident that this man has a ton of potential.

His knee is healthy. He'd had so many injury issues in the minor leagues. It was looking like he was going to be another one of the Mariners' early round busts, and hopefully he's already bucked that trend. I still worry about him with strikeout issues. I still think that that's going to be a concern eventually, but the dude is crushing the ball right now. Even his groundouts are torched. I saw a that his ground out in I think the eighth inning of yesterday's game was hit 91.8 miles per hour, which was the softest hit ball of his career up to this point. Obviously, sample size is ridiculously small, but for reference, 91 miles an hour is still above the league average. So every baseball that Kyle Lewis has hit in his big league career has been above average, including three tanks.

We're talking about a dude with tremendous raw power. I said earlier in the podcast, or earlier in previous podcast that I believe that Lewis will start out next year at AAA. I do think that's the case, but man, he is making a real case for that to be a short stint. If he continues to hit like this, he'll be in the big league sooner rather than later. And if he can stay healthy, he's going to have his lumps, you know, he's not going to homer every single game, believe it or not. I promise you, that won't be the case. But he looks like a future star. I saw a comparison to Mike Cameron, and I think there are some tweaks with that. It's not a perfect comparison,

but the fact that it's a name that you can throw around about him reasonably is pretty impressive. And he's going to be a lot of fun. He's going to hit a lot of home runs. If his knee is fully healthy, he's going to steal some bases. He's going to be an adequate defensive player. I don't think he'll ever live up to Cameron's standards out there, which is okay, a few people do. But this has been a real fun stretch.

Kyle Lewis is a guy, without a doubt, the most exciting player to watch for the rest of the year, and I think a guy that's going to turn a lot of heads next season. Wednesday's game, Marco Gonzalez got the win. He is now 15 and 11 for the Mariners. I was going to look this up. Maybe I'll find it for a future podcast. It feels like that's a lot of decisions. Marco has 26 decisions.

So I don't know if he does end up going pretty deep into games. The 15 wins is the first mariner to get 15. First Mariner left-hander to get 15 wins in a season since Jamie Moyer back in 2003. So this is some good stuff from Marco. He obviously has not had a great season. He's down to a 4.30 ERA now. This start was phenomenal. Seven innings, two runs, seven strikeouts, two walks.

But, you know, he'll take his lumps every once in a while. But it was great to see him throw well here. Hopefully he can finish out the year well and get that ERA closer to three than four. That would be a goal for him. Yesterday's game was shaping up to be a really fun one. Kyle Lewis had already homered. Omar Narvaez had homered. Tommy Malone was throwing absolutely fantastic out of the bullpen. But then the seventh inning happened and the Reds went on to score nine runs between the seventh and eighth inning combined and ended up winning 11 to 5. Definitely not what you wanted there.

Dan Altevia, I believe, gave up a grand slam to Freddie Galvis, which is not what you want. Matt Whistler gave up four earned runs in two-thirds of an inning. bit of a bummer there. But the main story of the game besides Kyle Lewis was Justin Dunn. He made his major league debut. I think he's going to want to forget this one. I don't think it's easy to forget your debut, unfortunately. He only lasted two-thirds of an inning.

Granted, the plan was for him to be an opener. He only threw 37 pitches, but he didn't give up any hits, which is good, but he walked five, which is clearly an issue. He walked five, two of them came around to score. So a really ugly opening first line for, for Dunn, who's one of the Mariners' top prospects. I had a lengthy report on him on, I believe, Tuesday's podcast. So if you want to go back and listen to that, you can kind of hear my thoughts on him. I'm not surprised to see him throw very little in this game, not just because he struggled,

but because I think they're going to want to limit his innings for the rest of the year. He's already approaching his career high, and I don't see any compelling reason to risk getting him injured. He's a guy who has some command issues in the minor leagues, obviously, as well now in the major leagues. I think there's probably a lot of factors here at Nerves may have been a case. Umpires tend to squeeze rookie pitchers. That may have been a situation as well. You know, I'm not going to glean too much from this.

It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. But, you know, you'd like to see him have at least one or two strong outings before the season's out. Hopefully he can do that. Tommy Malone, I think, retired the first 11 batters he faced coming out of the bullpen, which was great. I've been fairly critical of Maloney. and Wade LeBlanc this year.

I think they're guys who ultimately probably shouldn't see a whole lot more appearances on the mound. Now that the Mariners have so many starters, or excuse me, so many pitchers available to them. But Malone came out and pitched well in this one, five strikeouts, no walks, two earned runs, and four and two-thirds. That's a pretty good outing. I think the Mariners needed it. Clearly things went real south after that. Altevia and Whistler combined to throw one inning and gave up seven earned runs, so that is not great. Art Warren made his major league debut.

he is the 21st Mariner to make their debut this season. That is an absurd number. He is the 67th different player to appear in a Mariners game that continues to break the record. They are inching closer and closer to 70. I'm not sure if they're going to get there, but they're going to be close. Last note I want to make on this game in these last couple games against the Reds, Art Warren made his Major League debut. He threw a third of an inning, gave up one hit, walked one.

Not great by any means, but yeah, not terrible. And then Eric Swanson finished off the game in the ninth inning. Swanson threw an inning, struck out two. He's quietly been very good over the last couple of weeks, months, really. Since July 25th, Swanson has thrown 16 and two-thirds innings, and he has 22 strikeouts and just five walks in that time. That is incredible, striking out just over 11 guys per nine, walking well under three guys per nine.

He has given up four home runs in that time, So his numbers aren't exceptional. ZRA's about three and a half or so. But yeah, he's a guy that I think, I'm curious what the Mariners are going to do here. I think they probably want him to eventually be a starter, but I really think that his stuff plays up better in the bullpen. And I know he struggled in the bullpen to start, but I kind of think that that's a future for him. And hopefully that's what they start out with him next year because I think he could be a solid bullpen piece as soon as next year. Anyway, stay tuned for an excellent statcast Friday segment that features pictureless, writer Mikey Ajetto and a discussion about Kyle Seeger's recent resurgence.

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Bluechu is the better cheaper faster choice and we thank them for sponsoring the podcast. All right, welcome back. Like I said today is a special edition of our Statcast Friday segment. I have a guest with us for the first time in Lockdown Mariners' podcast history. I'm here with Pitcherless staff writer, Mikey Ajeto. How's it going, Mikey? Good. How are you? Oh, I'm pretty good. I'm watching this Mariners game and ready to talk a little bit about Kyle Seeger. So for those of you who haven't seen it, I will link the article in the notes. So if you guys are at work listening to this and you want to read along, it'll be there. But he wrote a great, great article about Kyle Seeger for Pitcher List. And I just kind of want to get some of Mikey's thoughts about the article and

kind of a, I know this isn't a fantasy podcast, and I know that Pitcher list is a fantasy site, but I think that there's definitely some takeaways of what we could potentially see from Kyle Seeger for the next couple weeks and maybe next year. So you want to give us a little bit of a rundown on what you wrote about? Yeah. So basically I, you know, I saw, first that, you know, he was hitting a lot of home rounds. It was noticeable, and his numbers, you know, were creeping up and were the best that they've ever, I mean, if you take a little bit, you the first couple months of the year, like, it's, he was on a pretty good pace for about two months. So I saw his numbers were elevated, and then I went, and I looked at the stat cast numbers,

and I was like, okay, there's a discrepancy. His weighted on base average is significantly higher than his expected weighted on base average. And so one of the first things I noticed was that he's had an uptick in first pitch, um, swing percentage. So I was like, okay, that's really cool change because this is a pretty you know he's been progressively swinging at more pitches every year but this is a pretty significant change from last year um and as one of our writers alks fast has talked about a lot the first pitch as a hitter is one of the best counts to swing in because of any count and i wrote about this in the article it's you see the fourth most fastballs, yeah, if any count.

And so, yeah, I think the conventional mindset is, you know, don't swing at first pitches, but I think it's a good change. So he's really started to swing at more first pitches, and he's really honing in on specific areas. If you look at a heat map, it's pretty stark. And so he's really honing in on kind of the middle, middle, middle away area of the plate or of the zone. And I will say that

of his percentages of hits that come on the first pitch, I think from 2015 to 2018, it was about 15.2, and now it's about 16.2. So it's not super significant, but, you know, it's an improvement.

And, you know, when you're called seeker and you've been struggling for, I would say, about two years, we'll take any kind of improvement. so that was the first kind of thing that I noticed and um you know I I I did think that there would be kind of more of um I thought more of his production would be coming out of there than what I actually found but you know it's it's good to find um it's good to be you know to go on with with something and come out and just be realistic with yourself yeah at least there's some

correlation right yeah yeah and so that's the first thing that I saw and then you know looking at spray charts he has a significant amount of what I would call wall scrapers or French home runs and so I went and I looked at so looking at pulled fly balls because

you know that's that's what Kyle Seeger does best I wrote about him in the off season and I kind of said you know like he just needs to get back to what he does best because he talked you know he's a tinker he's pretty known for that.

And he talked a lot about trying to go the other way and everything. And in 2017, it seemed like he was kind of trying to join the, like, quote, unquote, fly ball revolution. So, you know, he's kind of getting back to what he's done. And so I looked at his pulled fly balls. And it might have been, yeah, it was just pulled fly balls. and he ranks really low in, you know, relative to the league. And actually, this is on pole fly balls that resulted in home runs. He ranks really low in average exit velocity and average distance, which are a little concerning.

And he ranks really high in average launch angle and batting average minus expected batting average. So basically, the takeaway there is he's hitting balls really high and not that hard and not that far, but they're becoming home runs anyways. So, yeah, like I said, he's hitting a lot of fringe dingers. And, you know, with this ball, I think it's actually kind of a good example to not use statcast as the be-all and end-all. it's um with this ball he like this is who he is he's he's going to overperform um just because of the inherent differences between you know the ball a year or whatever ago and the ball that it is now so he's he's kind of a perfect fit there's a couple different groups of players that that really

benefit from uh from this ball hitters that is yep um and he's like the guy so yeah it was it was really interesting to look into. I had to do like a lot of digging. Yeah, it's fun. One thing that you're learning and I've already learned is it's very difficult to talk about stats on a podcast. I really hope that people can look at this article. We're kind of going through it. So if you're listening and reading along, it's going to make a lot more sense than it does if we're just talking about it. But yeah, I thought this was super interesting. Seeger hits just these moon shots that barely clear the wall. It really matches up. Like this is a good example of the I-tta. testing up well with the stats. I think if you watch a lot of Mariners games, which I know you do,

like he hits a lot. I mean, that makes sense to me. The fact that his average exit velocity on home runs to the pole side is in the 19th percentile seems about right, and his distance is in the sixth percentile. This is, but this article came out Monday. So it's a little, little outdated. Or no, I even know it was before that. It was last weekend, I think. But anyway, so there have been some home runs since then. I can't imagine it's changed his percentages too much. but yeah I just I find this super interesting I'm curious what you think it means kind of in terms of you know you kind of touched on it a little bit but like you know the juice ball is probably not going anywhere so does this mean that Kyle Seeger is going to stay like this or things going to change he's always been a tinker do you think he's going to mess with this or the fact that well they're going out so who cares I think I think at this point he's seen you know he's tried he's tried to like really really lift the ball he's tried to kind of go the other way but in the offseason And what I said was at this point, he is what he is. And I think he just needs to accept that, you know, a few balls are he's just going to lose them to the shift.

And that's fine. Because he's historically, you know, hit in terms of weighted on base average and expected weighted on base average. He's lost about like 15 to 20 points just because of what seems like the shift, whether that's psychological or whether that's the actual shift. So, I don't know. I'm definitely not a hitting coach, and I'm not in an analytics department. But if I was to talk to Kyle Seeger, I would say, just hit the ball as hard as you can. He's not exactly doing that right now because he doesn't actually, it's interesting. He has a kind of a reputation for being a home run hitter and for hitting the ball, you know, pretty hard.

But he doesn't really, he just has a really specific skill set, and it suits him well. So I've read that the MLB ball won't change until 2021 at the earliest, and that it should be back next year. So at the very least, he should be what he's been in the past couple months. I mean, that's shooting kind of high because this has been really awesome. But I think we should kind of see the old Kyle Seeger back, because if he is aging, if he is declining, it's just, it's just, doesn't matter as much because he's he's got a juice ball on his side and he's pulling a lot of

from runs so um i feel as a fancy owner as as as um a fan of the mariner's i feel pretty good about him and he'll always have his defense to hang his hat on and i'm i'm not sure enough people are talking about um you know with the changes he's made to his i think he's got a new workout and diet regimen yeah he's he's slimmer so he actually has um gotten a lot more he's just gotten quicker he's in terms of um i think it's stack has uh feet per second he's he's got he's like a tick up which is pretty significant so you know more singles might turn into doubles um but yeah i think just overall i feel really good about it especially with all the youngsters coming up so um yeah i i honestly honestly I honestly kind of thought he was on his way out, but this year's kind of changed my mind.

Really, these past two months. Yeah. So you're buying Kyle Seagre. I dig it. I'll tell you, I don't think a lot of guys see their sprint speed feet per second tick up after they cross 30. So that is impressive for him. He's always been a guy who's kind of honed in on things to work on and then gone out and fixed him. And so I think for him to see, okay, I'm going to try to the ball the other way, okay, this isn't working.

I'm going to just start to hit dingers to my pole side and see what he's. it happens is great. Mikey, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Do you want to tell people if they're interested in following you on Twitter or following your stuff where they can go? Yeah. So that's at Mikey A-J-O-E-L.

So that's M-I-K-E-Y-J-E-T-O-P-L. Great. Mikey, thank you again so much. I really appreciate it. And hopefully we can have you on again soon. All right. Sounds good. All right.

Thanks again to Mikey. for joining us on the podcast. That was a lot of fun. Hopefully we can have him on again. We'll finish out, as we always do, with our birthdays. Because we didn't record yesterday, we are missing two of the last, or missing the last two days for birthdays. So there were eight total guys.

We're going to go through them really quick because we ran a little bit long on the Kyle Seeger segment. I imagine that that was hopefully more compelling to you than a couple of guys' birthdays. But we're going to get through these anyway. September 12th birthdays for yesterday were Matt Whistler, turning 27, Messiah Okita, turning 51, and John Montague, who is turning 62. And then we have five birthdays to celebrate today. The first one is right-hander Luke French, who is turning 34. He came over to the Mariners in the Doug Fister trade, as you might remember. Next up is Ricky Weeks, Longtime Brewer, second baseman. He is turning 37 today. Weeks, I distinctly remember when he came over to Seattle.

He had a quote, I don't know the exact quote, but he was quoted about saying that he loved that needle thing in the sky, which is always fun. So happy 37th birthday to him. Next three are Russ Davis, who is turning 50, Greg Hibbard, who is turning 55, and Tom McMillan, who is turning 68. All right, so I will be back with a Mariners mailbag Monday segment early next week. Stay tuned for that. Once again, I am Andy Patton. You can find me on Twitter at at Andy Patton, S-E-A. You can find the Lockdown Mariners podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Also, if you are interested in reading Mikey's article on Pitcher List or anything else at Pitcher List,

which is a fantastic site, I will have a link in the notes. Please go ahead and go there and check it out. Thank you for listening, as always, and go Mariners.