Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - 9-3-19 Locked on Mariners Episode 16: Justus Sheffield dominates the Cubs, but the bullpen blows it

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

The Seattle Mariners blew an unbelievable start from Justus Sheffield on Tuesday against the Cubs. Sheffield threw five shutout innings, striking out seven. Host Andy Patton talks about his excellent outing, and what went wrong with the bullpen. Then, Patton discusses a little-known Mariners middle infield prospect who could make his debut as soon as 2020, but is on very few people's radar.Finally, Patton takes us through the three former Mariners who are celebrating a birthday on September 3. 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 wasted a great, great start from Justice Sheffield yesterday. He threw five scoreless innings, but the team fell to the Cubs five to one. We'll talk about that in segment one. And then coming up in segment two, I'll discuss one of my favorite under-the-radar prospects in the Mariners Farm System. Don't be surprised to see this guy making a headline.

in 2020, if not this month. Finally, we have three Mariners' birthdays to celebrate today. Stay tuned to find out who. But first, I want to talk about crossover Wednesday. The NFL season begins next week, which means crossover Wednesday will be back. For the entire regular NFL season, you will get a special episode every Wednesday as the host from opposing sides meet up to preview the excitement of the games happening that week.

Find your favorite team wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure not to miss the NFL listeners' favorite segment. One of the most popular phrases about baseball is that it is a game of inches, and never was that more true than in yesterday's game when the Mariners dropped it to the Cubs 5 to 1. For those of you who watched, you probably know what I'm talking about. If you didn't watch and you just looked at the box score, you would see Justice Sheffield pitched great, the Mariners couldn't hit, the bullpen blew it. And technically, you wouldn't be wrong.

The Mariners didn't get a lot of hits. Justice Sheffield did pitch great. the bullpen gave up five earned runs. So you're not wrong, but it was a little bit, it happened a little bit differently than that. Baseball has a lot of luck in it sometimes, and sure the Mariners pitchers weren't throwing well, but when you give up a bases loaded triple on a ball that 90-something percent of the time probably would have been fielded cleanly and got you out of the inning, that's just pure bad luck.

But that's what happened yesterday. The Mariners brought in their bullpen after Justice Sheffield, five scoreless innings. we're going to get to him. I want to talk about him. He was awesome. But after he came out, Matt Whistler came in, he managed to give up two earned runs, struck out three, walked two, didn't even give up a single hit, but still not a good outing for him. Tadier Gilbo decided to do even worse. It's one of his only bad outings that he's had so far, but he gave up three earned runs, all of the runs on the triple. Basically what happened is the bases got loaded. They intentionally walked somebody to load the bases to get to Kyle Schwabor. They brought in the left-hander, and

Kyle Schwerber hit a ground ball down the first base line that Aaron Nola, excuse me, Austin Nola, dove for, but it hit the base. And it hopped over the base, went out into the outfield, three runs came around to score, Schwerber made it a third base, boom. That's more or less your ball game. Now, granted, even if that hadn't happened, the Mariners still would have lost two to one, but maybe they would have done some things differently. Who knows, blah, blah, blah, could have been different. That stinks. There's no really other way to put it. That stinks.

That's a bummer of a way to lose a baseball game. you still, as a bullpen, you can't walk guys. You know, between Whistler and Gilbo, they walked three guys. Yes, one of them was intentional. But still, I mean, the bullpen has been, they've been better as of late, but it's been a problem this year. And I think when they traded Rowanus Alius and when they traded Hunter Strickland, it was kind of obvious that it was going to continue to be a problem. And that's okay.

When you're a rebuilding team, you shouldn't be spending a lot of capital on high-end relievers. You should be kind of throwing stuff too well and seeing what that. sticks and that's kind of what the Mariners are doing. Some guys have looked good, some guys have looked bad. Gilbo was a guy who wasn't really expected to be all that good, looked pretty good for a while, had a bummer of an out today. You know, that's what you're trying to figure out. He's a, rookie. He's his first big league season. Like, let's see how he bounces back from a bad outing. These are good things that are happening. I know it's really hard to watch. It's frustrating to watch, you know, your young stud left-hander have a great game and then you blow it. Meanwhile,

the Mariners' bats did virtually nothing. They were going up against Kyle Hendricks, who he's very, very good, and their bullpen is very good, and they did a good job of keeping the Mariners off the bases and not letting them get a whole. I mean, they only got four hits the entire game. Aaron, Austin Nola had one. Dylan Moore had one. Dee Gordon had one. D. Gordon had one. Kyle Seeker had one. So it was a good infield party for the Mariners, but just didn't get a whole lot, and they didn't draw any walks. That's what Hendricks is best at is he doesn't walk anybody. So it was just a tough game against a team that's good. You know, the Cubs are in playoff contention. They're not having as good a season as people would have hoped, but

they're still good. But man, it's just, it's hard to waste such a great outing from your starter, and it's hard to do it in the way that it happened yesterday. But let's talk about Justice Sheffield. Sheffield was making his second start of the year. His first start had some ups and downs. We talked about it last week against the Yankees. It was kind of a tough atmosphere for him.

He gave a two-run home run in the first inning, but then looked pretty good after that, but then he got tagged around a little bit a few innings later. This start didn't have any of that. I mean, he was, he shoved the entire game. Five innings, he only gave up five hits. He did walk two, which isn't terrible. Not great, but I'll take that. I'll take two walks and seven strikeouts any day of the week from Justice Sheffield, especially if he's not going to give up any runs.

That's awesome. I loved his pitch mix. I've talked about this before. Sheffield has an awesome slider. He's got an okay fastball. He doesn't have much of a change-up, which is going to be what determines whether he's a big-league caliber rotation piece or eventual bullpen piece. He needs to work on that changeup.

He threw it a fair amount yesterday. He threw it, let's see here. He threw it nine times. He got one swinging strike, which is okay. But he got 14 swinging strikes on his slider. He threw it 39 times, 14 times they swung and missed, four times they took it for a called strike. That is an incredible percentage.

That, I mean, that's really, really, really good. it. There's proof that Justice Sheffield slider is elite in the big leagues. His fastball needs to play up a little bit more. If he's going to use his fastball to attack up in the zone to be able to get hitters to chase the slider, that's great. He just needs to do that with more consistency, have some more command of it. You can see if you look at his pitch chart, it does look like he was attempting to throw his fastball pretty high frequently. So I think that that is kind of the strategy that he's going for. We talked about it with Husei Kikuchi. And when he threw his complete game shutout, that's what he was doing. He was attacking high with his fastball and bringing his breaking stuff down. So I think Sheffield's starting to kind of figure out what's going to work for him. He just needs to have better command, which he has done okay job with the big leagues, but was a pretty tremendous issue for him in the minor leagues. And he needs to develop that change up. You know, your third time through the order, if they've only seen fastballs and sliders, they're going to tag one pretty good. And he got out of this one okay, but he only threw five innings, so he probably didn't make it all the way through. So I'm intrigued to see what he can do

when he's facing a lineup the third time through, what he can do if he develops his change-up. So he's still got some work to do. He's still very young, but it's hard to not be encouraged by a guy throwing five scoreless endings against one of the better hitting teams in the league. So really excited about that, really disappointed how the rest of the game went, and really excited to see tonight's game,

which will feature left-hander John Lester versus Felix Hernandez should be a fun game, Battle of Two Former Salyam winners. So hopefully the Mariners can at least split this series with the Cubbies. All right, coming up, I will talk about an under-the-radar, middle-infield prospect to keep an eye on for the Mariners. When you need red wine at 4 p.m., sushi at 9 p.m., a breakfast burrito at 8 a.m., and ibuprofen at 10 a.m., Postmate it. Postmates is your personal food delivery, grocery delivery, whatever kind of delivery service all year-round. Anything you're craving, Postmates can deliver. They're the largest on-demand network in the U.S. and offer delivery from all the restaurants, grocery, and convenience stores, and traditional retail.

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For a limited time, Postmates is giving our listeners $100 of free delivery credit for your first seven days. To start your free deliveries, download the app and use code locked on. That's code locked on for $100 of free delivery credit for your first seven days when you download the Postmates app. Anything you need, anytime you need it, postmate it. Download Postmates and save with code locked on today. All right, for those of you who are regular listeners to the podcast, you've probably noticed that I tend to have themed days. We have Mailback Monday. We have the A.L. West Wednesday where we kind of look around the rest of the division.

We have throwback Thursday, and we have Stackcast Friday. I haven't really settled on a theme for Tuesdays yet, partly because the last couple of Tuesdays there's been some kind of news to discuss once it was the schedule coming out. So I haven't really settled on anything there. I'm still not sure if I have specifically, but I think for today I definitely want to talk about kind of an unheralded prospect in the Mariners system. Obviously, there's tons of people talking about Jared Kellanick, Julio Rodriguez, Evan White, Logan Gilbert, those kinds of guys.

And I'm definitely going to give some time to those guys over the office. season and when it comes up this year as well. But I think it'd be kind of fun to spend each week talking about somebody who maybe hasn't gotten as much press, especially because the Mariners farm system is so much better now than it used to be. Guys who were ranked in the top 10, even top five before are now in the 15 to 20 range, which is a good thing. It just means that there's some guys who are kind of getting flushed under the radar

who might actually end up being big league contributors, some sooner rather than later. So I kind of think that I might try to turn Tuesdays into that. So we're going to try it out today anyway. So the first guy that I want to talk about is middle infielder Donnie Walton. So I talked about Donnie Walton a tiny bit yesterday because there was a question in my mailbag Monday segment about whether there's anybody who's going to come up for the Mariners in 2019 in September who could contribute right away. Walton's a guy who I think could come up this year. I don't know how much of an impact he would have. him coming up would be dependent on whether Shedlong is healthy,

because Shedlong is the only other guy who kind of plays the middle infield, who I think is approaching big league ready. The Mariners do have some other middle infield prospect. Noelvie Marte is a very good one, but he's not getting more close to being ready for the big leagues. So I think that Walton's a guy who could get a shot. I'm intrigued by Walton because he's having the best season in his minor league career to this point, which is always intriguing when guys do that.

And it's kind of interesting to see is there some kind of tangible change he made. This is a lot harder to do with minor leaguers. There's not nearly as much data out there. We don't have launch angles and exit velocities and there's not as much video. The minor leagues in particular are really stingy about releasing video. So it's hard to see highlight films. It's hard to see like gifts of minor leaguers. So I would love to be able to tell you that he made a swing change or that he, you know, he changed his stance or he's focusing on exit velocity or something like that. But I don't have a lot of that data. So, Sorry, I can't help you there.

But what I can tell you is that Walton is in his second year in AA, that he has got 11 home runs, which is very, very much a career high. He has 10 stolen bases, which he had 11 last year, so not quite a career high, but close. He's got an 11.3% walk rate, which is awesome. He's got a 12.9% strikeout rate, which is beyond awesome. That is an incredible number. And he's hit in 300. He's got a 300 average.

He's got a 390 on base percentage, a 4,000. 27 slugging percentage. He's got a 134 WRC plus, which an average hitter is 100, so he's well, he's over 30% above the average hitter in AA. So we're looking at the guy who's having a great season. He struggled mightily when he came to the AA last year. He had 62 games at AA last year, and he had 236. So to see him hit 300 this year is clear that he has made some tangible improvements. Now he's 25. That's old for a prospect. That's very old for a guy who has not even played at AAA yet. And a lot of the prospect reports that I read are not incredibly encouraging. I think I see a lot of like, oh, he doesn't do any one thing really well, but he doesn't do anything

that bad either. He's a switch hitter, which is great. He's got, it says, good bad speed, makes the most out of his average speed on the base paths. He's good at reading pitchers. He's got a high baseball IQ, limited ceiling. So a lot of those kind of things that you see with these guys who were college bats, he spent four years at Oklahoma State. He ended up getting drafted in the fifth round by the Mariners, but he was drafted as more of a senior sign type guy. He drafted him because they don't have to pay him as much money.

I don't know. I'm really intrigued by the fact that he's hitting 300 and AA this year, that there's power that wasn't there before and that there's some level of speed. It's always intriguing when there's guys who you think can potentially put up 15 home runs and or 15 steals in the same season. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I think Donnie Walton's going to be even a 15-15 guy in the big leagues necessarily because I don't think that he's going to earn enough at bats. I think he's more of a utility infielder type guy. He came up as a shortstop.

He's been moved over to second base because of concerns about his arm strength. The scattering report says, quote, he can still fill in at short in a pinch, which is good. I guess it means that he could be used out there if they needed him to, but it definitely sounds like his defensive profile fits more at second base than anything else. I don't know. I'm intrigued. I like guys who peek a little bit later.

It's always interesting to see guys like that. There are definitely examples of guys who peak later who end up being really, really good. Witt Merrifield from the Royals is a great example. He wasn't good really at all until he was about 28, and then all of a sudden he was dominant. I'm not saying Donnie Walton is going to be. be the next Witton-Marfield. That would be very wild. But I am saying that today the Mariners starting shortstop was Dylan Moore, and I am fairly confident in saying that Donnie Walton

for the rest of September could probably play better than Dylan Moore. That's not a knock on Dylan Moore. He's been fine. But I would kind of rather see this 25-year-old kid who's having a career year. Let's see what he can do. He's not the kind of prospect that you keep down for service time manipulation reasons, so give him a shot. Let's see what. what he can do. I think he definitely does have a role in the big leagues in the near future. I could honestly see him winning the utility infielder job out of camp next year. And I think that his size, his quote, high baseball IQ, the fact that he has a little bit of pop, a little bit of speed, he's played a couple different positions. I mean, that screams future

big league utility infielder. Is he the next Willie Bloomquist? Maybe. I don't know. I could see it. He might even have a little bit more pop than Willie Bloomquist, although he probably has a little bit less speed. In fact, I just noticed he stole 10 bases this year, but he's also been caught stealing 13 times, which is, that's a problem. So he's going to need to, it's funny, the scouting report says that he's got adept at reading pitchers and taking extra bases, which if you get caught 13 times on 10 steals is kind of the opposite of that. So he'll need to tighten that up a little bit. But a guy that I think flies under the radar, I mean, MLB Pipeline has him ranked as their 28th best prospect for the Mariners. Prospects 1500 has him 32nd. So, you know, barely top 30 guy,

fringy guy, 25-year-old. But I'm intrigued. And I think that there could be some potential for him to be a big league contributor potentially as soon as this month and if not definitely starting in 2020. All right. Final segment of the day is our annual or our daily birthday segment. Today is September 3rd. We have three Mariners birthdays to celebrate today. First up, happy 29th birthday to Shea Simmons. Shea Simmons came over to the Mariners in the Alex Jackson trade a couple years ago from the Braves. He only managed to make it into nine games for the Mariners in 2017.

The reason is that he had a horrific 7.04 ERA. He did weirdly have a 1.04 whip, which isn't that bad. But he didn't stick. Obviously, he ended up trying to stick it out in Tacoma, but by the time 2019 rolled around, he's out of baseball. So unfortunate for him, he never really stuck in the big leagues, had some potential. But when you post a 5.56 ERA and AAA in 2018, that pretty much seals the deal. So, bummer for him, an unfortunate trade that didn't really work out for either side.

The Mariners didn't get anybody that really turned out to be great. And neither of the Braves. So just kind of one of those trades. Anyway, happy 29th to Shea Simmons. Next up is Bobby Livingston. Bobby Livingston is turning 37 years old. Livingston played in three whole games for the Mariners back in 2006. He was a pitcher.

He threw five total innings, 10 earned runs. He had three strikeouts and six walks. Not a great appearance, obviously. He ended up getting shipped over to Cincinnati, and he threw D-made 10 starts for them in 2007. Fared a little bit better. He had a 5.27 ERA, still nothing special, and was out of baseball after that.

So happy 37th birthday. Last but not least is Jake Woods. Jake Woods is turning 38 today. Jake Woods played for parts of three seasons with the Mariners in 2006, 2007, and 2008. I'm going to be honest with you. I followed the Mariners very closely in these three years. I don't remember this dude at all. He threw 105 in 2006. He had a 7 and 4 record. He appeared in 37 games, made eight starts, had a save. No idea. Completely out of my brain. The numbers were okay. Like I said, 4.20 ERA, 66 strikeouts. 1.60 whip is not great, but he was okay. And then not so good in 2007. He only threw 10 innings, but he had a 5.91 ERA. 19 innings in 2008 with a 6.16 ERA, and that was it for him.

But, man, I mean, 134 innings for the Mariners in three years. You'd think I'd at least have a vague recollection of that guy. but I don't. So that's a depressing depressing trio of Mariners players, unfortunately, but we still want to celebrate them, so happy 38th birthday to Mr. Jake Woods. All right, coming up on Wednesday,

I'm going to recap what should be a fun matchup this afternoon between former Syung winners John Lester and Felix Hernandez, and we'll take stock of the AL West heading into the final month of the season. Once again, I'm 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, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and go Mariners.