Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - 9-6-19 Locked on Mariners Episode 19: Mariners go up 7-0, still manage to lose in 13 innings

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

The Seattle Mariners scored five runs in the first and two in the second to take a commanding 7-0 lead against the division-leading Houston Astros. Unfortunately, a stagnant offense and out of control pitching allowed the Astros to come all the way back, and they ended up winning 11-9 in the 13th inning. Host Andy Patton talks about the highs and lows from the game, while spending segment two talking about the ridiculously effective season that backup catcher Tom Murphy is having - using advanced analytics to analyze his breakout. 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 dropped the heartbreaker in 13 innings to the Houston Astros on a walk-off two-run home run from Michael Brantley. We'll talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly from that game in segment one. And then in segment two, I'll do a deep dive using advanced analytics to talk about backup catcher Tom Murphy and the ridiculously good season that he is having. Finally, we have just one Mariner birthday to celebrate today. Stay tuned to find out who. But first, let's talk about bambas.

Bombas are what feet daydream about. With every pair of socks purchased, one pair is donated. I know all you Seattleites could use some new socks with the cold weather coming soon. Buy your bambas.com lock and get 20% off your first purchase. All right, it is virtually impossible to cover the scope of this baseball game in just seven minutes, but I'm going to do my very best to do so. Yesterday's game for the Mariners was absolutely insane. The Mariners scored seven runs in the first two innings and got scored 11 to 2 after that,

yet the game still went into 13 innings. Four runs were scored in extra innings. The Astros scored three runs in the eighth inning. Kyle Seeger hit two home runs. Austin Nola hit two home runs. Kyle Tucker hit his first home run for the Astros. It was insanity. There's just, there's no other way to look at it.

Unfortunately, the Mariners did not come out ahead. It's really, really hard to find the joy in a game where a team was up seven to nothing and lost. There were some good things. Marco was not one of them, unfortunately. He did not have his best outing of the year. He's been really up and down, especially lately. He started out the year well, and then he had kind of a long stretch that was not so good. And then since then it's kind of felt like it's been even more roller-coated.

than it was before. He went five in the third in this one. He gave up four earned runs, seven hits. That is not good, but the main issue, he didn't strike anybody out, and he had five walks. The Astros are one of the most strikeout-prone teams in the league. They've kind of prided themselves on having those high-strikeout guys. Obviously, Uerdon Alvarez has a lot of strikeouts.

George Springer, he didn't play today, but he's a big high-strikeout guy. That's always kind of been a knock on him. and so they just, you can't not strike anybody out. The Mariners only had, it looks like Zach Grotz led the team in strikeouts, he threw two innings and relief in the extra innings, and he had four strikeouts. Dan Altavia had a really nice inning. He threw one scoreless inning, and he struck out everybody he faced. That's fantastic.

I'm actually a big Dan Altavia fan. I hope to get into him longer in another podcast someday because I think he has this stuff to be a future late-inning guy. He obviously hasn't put it. together. That inning lowered his ERA to 7.04, so clearly he's not a guy we're talking about as a late-ending option right now. But I like him. I think he's got some good stuff. But when you have two, you know, a reliever who throws one inning and strikes out more guys than your starter did in just about six innings, you're obviously having some issues. And Marco, you know, he's never

been an overpowering guy. You know, his fastball barely scrapes 90. He relies a lot more on a cutter. He's got a great change-up, but he's really relying on that change-up. When that change-up is on, he looks fantastic. We've seen him strike out. I believe he struck out eight against the Astros at some point last year. When he's on, he's on. But he really lives and dies by that change-up, and I think when teams are on the change-up or when he just isn't feeling it that day, things can go south pretty quick. And again, it's, you know, it's not like he gave up eight runs. He gave up four runs. I mean, he was actually relatively close to having what would be considered a quote-unquote quality start, but five walks and zero strikeouts is ugly. It's not going to get it done. And Marco rarely has

this much issue with the strike zone. I don't know, you know, whether he just wasn't feeling it today, whether he was getting pinched. It didn't seem like it on the broadcast, but hard to say. Anyway, this game was crazy. It was really awesome to see Kyle Seeger continue to be absolutely dominant. Got 20 home runs on the year now. He went two for six. with the two home runs. He had three RBIs. Nola, who had been really struggling, you know, he had an ugly month of August. I actually was planning to talk about him in my Stackast Friday segment that I did, that I'm going to do after this. But after he hit, I was going to talk about here's how good he was at the beginning of the year and here's why he was really struggling in August,

but it felt wrong to talk about a player's struggles after a day where they had five RBI's and three runs scored and hit two home runs. So I'm going to table that. Maybe he'll have another hot week and then we'll be talking about him in a different capacity. Who knows? I like him. I think he could be really good. We're talking about Nola here. But yeah, he had a really, really rough month of August. Anyway, D. Gordon went two for six. He stole a base. Dylan Moore had a couple of hits. Braden Bishop went 0 for six. The dude is just not getting it done. I want to root for him. For those of you who don't know his story, we're hopefully we'll be able to talk about it more in another time. But, you know, he's from University of Washington. His

mom has Alzheimer's and he has a foundation that he raises money for Alzheimer's relief. And he talks about her a lot and he goes on a lot of podcasts and stuff. It's a really inspiring story. He's a really great kid. But he's not getting it done at the dish right now. I mean, he's hitting 0.098. I don't even know how to say that. He's hitting 98.

It sounds weird when you say it out loud. It's not good when you're batting average sounds weird. I do think he's got the potential. I've talked about this before to potentially be a fourth outfielder, like a capable one. like a Ben Gamal type guy, you know, maybe Guiller, Heredia. But he's not there right now. He's not even close, and he's 25. He doesn't have a lot of time to get to that potential.

I think that that potential is maybe he could be that guy for a couple of years, and that's it. I think that's about the ceiling that we have with Brayden Bishop. And I do hope he gets there, sincerely. I'm just not all that confident at this point. He hasn't really given me any reason to be. Jake Frey went one for six. He did have an RBI, but he's hitting a buck 58.

also a guy that I'm concerned about. I'd rather try, you know, he had a really great minor league season. I'd rather focus on that than focusing on his struggles in the big leagues. He might just be fatigued. It's obviously his first taste of the major league action. I'm a little bit more confident in him going forward, but, you know, the bottom of the lineup today or yesterday went one for 12. That's not good.

That's part of the reason that they didn't get anything done. You know, they went the third through the six without scoring, and then the eight through the 11th without scoring. You can't do that. that. You know, you can't go, even in a 13-ending game, they went eight innings, nine innings without scoring a run. That's problematic. Even if you score seven in the first two, if you can't get any score, he runs after that, especially if you're pitching falls apart, which is what happened. Anthony Bass had a bad outing. Sam Tui Valula gave up a run. Zach Grotz gave up a run,

and then Matt Whistler gave up the two-run, home run to Brantley to lose the game. So, tough one, not a whole lot else to say. I mean, there could be. There could be plenty more to say, but we'll leave it at that for now. We're going to get into our second segment where we're going to dig into Tom Murphy and how excellent he has been this season 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,

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it, postmate it. Download Postmates and save with code locked on today. All right, happy Statcast Friday. So for those of you who are new to Statcast Friday, I pick a player or a T, I pick something, usually a player, and I talk about how they're doing this year and maybe kind of digging a little deeper into their numbers using for hitters oftentimes launch angle, exit velocity, hard hit rates, some of those more advanced stats that I know many of you are probably very familiar with, that some of you may be less familiar with, and so we're kind of going to talk about them and maybe provide some context as to why a certain player is performing the way that they are. So for today, I wanted to talk about Tom Murphy.

For those of you who have not been paying attention to the Mariners this year, first of all, I'm really glad you're listening. Thank you. But second of all, Tom Murphy is the Mariners' backup catcher, and he has had a outright awesome season. It's been incredible to watch what he's done. He'd been with the Rockies for parts of four big league seasons before this. He got released. He came over to the Mariners on, I think, a minor league contract.

Wasn't really expected to do a whole lot. By the time he got to Seattle, he was already 28, so it kind of seemed like he had missed the window to be a very productive big leaguer. And instead, he's got 17 home runs. He's got 28 runs scored, 36 RBIs. He's got a pair of steals, which is weird. He's hitting 279 with a 315 on base percentage. He's got a 131 WRC plus, which means he's 31% better than the average hitter.

He's got a 2.5 war, which I believe would be a top 10 for a Mariners catcher all time for a single season. I know that his 17 home runs is tied for sixth all time. Keep mind, he's a backup catcher. He's played in 64 games this year. That's less than half. Likely, depending on the rest of the season shakes out, I know Omar Narvaez is battling an injury, although he did play yesterday. But depending on the season shakes out, Narvaez, we'll probably play in roughly half of the Mariners games. And he will be nearly, if he hits one more home run, he'll be a top five Mariners catcher by single season home runs as a backup.

That is wild. Now, digging in a little bit deeper on some of Tom Murphy's numbers, it's interesting because Murphy, he played his home games for the last four years in Colorado, so you wouldn't expect to see a power surge when he moves to T-Mobile Park, which is not known as a Hidders Park. And the rest of the A.L. West, really, the Rangers have a hitters park, but the rest of the Division really doesn't, whereas the NL West, most of them are Hitters Park,

and the Rockies being the kingdom of hitters parks. So it's interesting. So that would be, that's usually a place to look. Obviously, and I've talked about this a bunch, and I'm sure I will continue to talk about it. is the element of the baseballs are a little bit different. But Tom Murphy had 10 career home runs in parts of four seasons coming into this year. He had 17 this year.

That's not just because the baseballs are juiced. There is more at play than just that, obviously. For Murphy, really just taken a kind of a cursory glance at some of his stat-cast data, a lot of times with these guys, they attribute it to joining the quote-unquote launch angle revolution. I know that was a big thing with Logan Morrison. It was a big thing with C.J. C.J. Krohn. There's been a lot of other hitters who've kind of suddenly had power surges later in their career, and they call it the launch angle revolution, which effectively just means they're trying to hit the ball in the air more. It's funny. There's a lot of people who are very anti-analytic, and they think, well, they never use these terms and blah, blah, and sure, hitters probably aren't walking around saying, yeah, I tried to up my launch ankle. They might be now. They certainly weren't ever saying that before. But they do say, hey, well, you need to start to try to hit the ball in the air more. You need to try to get some lift, you need to get under the ball, put some backspin on it. Those kind of coach-speak conversations

that have been happening for decades, borderland centuries, we just have a new term for it in the analytics world, launch angle. And we can quantify it. We can put numbers on it. So Murphy, the average MLB launch angle is 11.1 degrees. Murphy's has always been above that. So it's not that he's just joining the launch angle revolution as much as he's always been a part of it. But But part of your launch angle being successful is you have to hit the ball hard. Again, we're not reinventing the wheel here. This is pretty simple stuff. The reason that the launch angle revolution, for lack of a better word,

really works as if guys are hitting the ball hard. Because obviously, hitting fly balls that don't leave the yard are hits like less than a 100th of a time. Maybe less than that, to be honest, because fly balls get caught all the time. You know, sometimes you'll sneak. week went off the wall, which obviously will go for a double. Sometimes you'll just find a little area where nobody was. But for the most part, if you're hitting a bunch of flyballs, you need to be hitting the ball hard or else it's not working for you. And that's been the case with Murphy.

The exit velocity is the other kind of number that often goes along with launch angle. And the MLB average exit velocity is 87.5 miles per hour. For the year, Tom Murphy's is 90.6. He's smoking the ball. He's hitting it really, really hard. The stack has, or baseball, is where a lot of this data is kept. Savant has his hard hit rate at 45.4%. That's extremely hard. That means that nearly half of the time, Murphy's hitting the ball harder than 90 miles per hour.

That's what is considered a hard hit. That's really good. Last year, in an admittedly very small sample size, he hit it hard 24.5% of the time. So it came up nearly 20%. So for Murphy, you're looking at a guy who, he didn't reinvent his swing in the sense that he started trying to hit more fly balls.

His launch angle is 19.6 degrees. That's good. It was 20.8 last year. It was 17.1 the year before that. It was 20 the year before that. So it's been pretty consistent that he's had a launch angle considerably higher than the rest of the league.

He just started hitting the ball harder. And that'll do it. If you can start to hit the ball a lot harder while you're hitting into the air. Now, the fact that Murphy's hitting the ball hard and in the air, it's not helping his batting average. You know, guys who hit a ball a ball.

bunch of fly balls hit a way higher rate of fly balls than everybody else. They don't hit 300. You know, they barely hit 270. I'd be surprised if many of them hit 270 because, you know, a fly ball that's not a home run isn't out. So, such a high percentage of the time. And for Murphy, what often comes with this kind of launch angle and flyball revolutioning guys who are swinging out of their shoes and trying to hit a bunch of home runs is they strike out a lot. Now that is another thing that has been characteristic of Murphy throughout his career. It's nothing new. But he is striking out at this point 33.2% of time. That's really high. Like really, really high. It's not Keon-Brockston high because that's another level of elite in a bad way, obviously. But Murphy's striking

out 33% of the time is pretty horrendous. He's only walking 4.7% of the time too. So when we talk about three true outcomes players, which are players that hit a lot of home runs, draw a lot of walks, and strike out a lot, you know, the Adam Duns of the world, the Dave Kingmans, for those of you who are a little bit older. Jim Tomey was one of them. You really need to draw a lot of walks to be that guy. Dan Vogelbach is a great example of this because he does strike out a bunch. He's worked on it.

He's gotten it down, but he still strikes out a bunch. Not as much as Murphy, but a bunch. But he also draws a lot of walks. In fact, I'm willing to bet without even looking it up that Daniel Vogelbach's walk rate is double Tom Murphy's because he's really good. He's got a good eye at the plate. So for Murphy, we're looking at a guy who he's hitting 275, which is awesome. that's higher than you would expect from a guy who hits a lot of fly balls.

His X batting average, which is a stat that people have created where you combine a player's launch angle and their exit velocity, and you take park factors into play, depending on where they were each game, and it spits out a projected batting average. This is what you should be hitting based on your launch angle, your exit velocity, blah, blah, blah. Murphy's is 208, and he's actually hitting 275. it's hard to do a lot. I really, I like X-Stats. I think they're very interesting, but it's hard to do a whole lot with that because they're not predictive necessarily.

I think somebody would say that, see that and think, okay, well, up to this point, Murphy has actually hit 275, but the data on his baseball said he should be hitting 208, therefore his batting average is going to come down. That's not necessarily true because Murphy could change things to a swing. There's lots of different factors that could change. Baseball is not just a, you know, it's not a bunch of numbers on a, screen. You know, it's a game with people and real-life things happen and there's wind and there's

players line up in different spots and there's different pitchers and obviously all this stuff changes. But it is interesting that Murphy is hitting a ton of fly balls and that he's hitting a bunch of home runs, but that he's also got a pretty high batting average. I will kind of almost contradict what I just said in the sense that I do think that Murphy's batting average is maybe a tad fluky. I don't think he's all of a sudden going to be like a two-10 hitter. or anything. He's clearly seen the ball really well right now. But it is odd that he has really

embraced hitting a bunch of fly balls and has still managed to hit really well. Now, strangely, Safeco being such a big park could be helping him in the sense that a lot of fly balls tend to go for doubles at Safeco field, excuse me, T-Mobile Park. A lot of balls go for doubles or even triples there that they may not be hits otherwise because the out-hitters don't have as much ground to cover. more of an estimate on my part. I don't have a lot of data to back that up, despite this being a statcast Friday segment. It's just a potential observation. Regardless, Murphy has been fun. He has been exciting. He has been one of the 10 best catchers in Mariners history in a season where he has only played 64 games. That is fun. That's a cool fact. It's something you can say you remember

about the 2019 Mariners, because frankly, there may not be a ton of things you want to remember. you'll remember they started 13 and 2. Hopefully you'll remember it's the year they first acquired Jared Kellanick, even though he's not going to play in the big leagues. Maybe it's the year that Justice Sheffield. It's the Dan Vogelbach year. We will remember that. And maybe we'll remember the fact that Omar Narvayez and Tom Murphy

combined to be the greatest catching combination in Mariners history and are barreling towards being the greatest catching tandem of all time. All right. I know I sound a little bit like a broken record. on this, but we ran a little bit long in the second segment there. Thankfully, there's only one birthday for us to celebrate today, so we will get through that. Today is September 6th, and we are celebrating the birthday for former, again, Mariners pitcher Nick Rumbolo.

Nick Rumbullo is turning 28 today. So Rumbullo played for the Mariners in 2018 and a little bit this year. He originally came up as a member of the Yankees, and then the Yankees traded him to the Mariners for J.P. Sears and won. Juan 10. And then he came, was with the Mariners for a couple of years. The Mariners ended up reacquiring Juan 10, as you may remember. He's a right-handed pitching prospect of their system. And then the Mariners ended up releasing Nick Rumbleow and he caught on with the Mets. So he's kind of bent he was a big guy by the Yankees. They liked him a lot. The Mariners got him.

He came up. He hasn't been very good. He threw 17.2 innings with the Mariners in 2018. He had a 6.11 ERA. He did have 16 strikeouts in. 17 and two-thirds innings, which isn't bad. He only ended up throwing in three games for the Mariners this year. It was a disaster. He gave up four earned runs and just one in the third innings. He gave up two home runs. He only struck out two.

He walked one. Just did not look good. Now he's in the Mets system. The Mets were kind of out there acquiring a whole bunch of relievers. He hasn't pitched for them just yet. Not sure if he's going to be in their September plans over there. But, you know, he's still kicking, and hopefully he can find a way to carve out some kind of career for himself.

And honestly, who knows? Maybe he'll find his way back to Seattle for a third time. Regardless, that's going to be a happy 28th birthday to Mr. Nick Rumbleau. All right, coming up next week, I'll recap the rest of the series against Houston. Hopefully it will go a little bit better than yesterday's game. And I'll answer some fan questions in our Mariners Mailbag Monday segment. Once again, I'm Andy Patton. You can find me on Twitter at Andy Patton, S-E-A.

You can find the Locked-on Mariners podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and go Mariners.