Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - Can the Struggling M's Survive the Red-Hot Mets?

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

Hosts Ty Dane Gonzalez and Colby Patnode preview the Mariners' upcoming series with the Mets, discuss what to expect from George Kirby's second career start on Saturday and why Seattle cannot count on Kyle Lewis to fix its struggling offense.Be sure to follow or subscribe to Locked On Mariners wherever you prefer your podcasts! For questions and other inquiries, email: [e-mail] the show on Twitter: @LO_Mariners | @danegnzlz | @CPat11For more of Ty and Colby, check out their Patreon: patreon.com/controlthezone/Built BarBuilt Bar is a protein bar that tastes like a candy bar. Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “LOCKED15,” and you’ll get 15% off your next order.BetOnlineBetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! 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.

No soft landing for the Mariners as a daunting East Coast road trip begins with a matchup against the Red Hot Mets. We're going to be talking about it here on the Lockdown Mariners podcast. Colby, hit it. You are Locked on Mariners. Your daily Seattle Mariners podcast. Part of the Locked on podcast network, your team every day. What's up, everyone? It is Friday, May 13th, 2020, and this is the Locked on Mariners podcast. Thank you so much for making us your first.

Listen of the day, we are free and available on all platforms. I'm your host, Taday Gonzalez, reporter and editor over at all-sehawks.com. Joined, as always by my co-host, Colby Patnaud. Be sure to follow the show on Twitter at L0 underscore Mariners. You can follow me at Dane Gonzalez, this D-A-N-Z-L-Z and Colby at C-Pat-11. That's C-P-A-T-1-1. Be sure to also check out our Patreon, where we talk about the Mariners even more and also get into some non-baseball talk twice a week.

Visit patreon.com. For its control zone for more information on that, if you are interested in, want more of us. And if this is your first time joining us here on the lockdown Mariners podcast, welcome to the show. like what you hear, give us a follow or subscribe wherever you listen to this. And if you're watching us on YouTube, hit the subscribe button, turn on the notification bell and give this video a thumbs up. We greatly appreciate it. So the Mariners are heading to New York. And before we hop into what's going down in this series, we should make it clear that we are actually recording this

on Thursday, right after we recorded Thursday's episodes. So there might be some roster moves that we at the time of this recording do not know about. But we are going to try. prior best to preview this series. We're going to be talking about some of the pitching matchups and George Kirby specifically. We're also going to talk about Kyle Lewis some. But tonight's game, when you're watching this tonight, Max Scherzer versus Marco Gonzalez. Went.

Of course. Of course. We've been saying it all week. That, of course, that what the Mariners would do after this really, really crappy stretch that they've been on, they're going to go into New York and drop like seven on Max Scherzer because why not? That's just, you know, that's the, I think that's the peak of Chaos Ball, but let's dial back a little bit here. Objectively speaking, Colby, the Mariners even have a shot of getting a hit off of Scher

tonight? Sure, they've had pretty good Bapit luck the last few days. I mean, should in theory continue. But yeah, that's kind of goal one, right? like forget winning, forget scoring a run, forget even getting a hit. Can we at least draw a walk or hit by pitch just to kind of get that out of the way right away? Please don't get perfected. Please do not get perfected.

No hitters don't matter anymore. So just please just don't get perfected. You're the Seattle Mariners. You have a legacy to protect Felix Hernandez's legacy of having thrown the last perfect game in major league history. Lean into one. I don't care. Let's try to get that done by the third. it like first time through the lineup so we don't have to have that hanging over our head.

Yeah, I mean, obviously they have a shot. Baseball is baseball. You know, the Mariners somehow put up four runs against Aaron Nolo, who had his very good stuff working for him. And I mean, there's a ton of luck involved in that and a ton of fortunate bounces. But hey, they still did it. Like, it's not like it didn't happen. And, you know, we've seen the Mariners, you know, in the past, they put up five runs on Shane Bieber. like they can do this and the lineup is better than it's playing right now.

It's just it's hard to believe with what we've seen over the last two weeks that this lineup is going to do much at all, much of anything against Max Scherzer, who's still arguably the top three pitcher in Major League Baseball right now. But again, you never know. Marco can keep it close. It only takes one mistake, man, as evidenced by Logan Gilbert, Logan Gilbert last night who was great for, you know, basically all but four batters in the entire game.

He lost four to two. So sometimes it's all takes and it happens a lot. And even the best pitchers will give up some hard contact and have the ball bounce against them and have a rough outing. So it's definitely possible. Is it likely? No. No. No, no, no.

But of course it's possible. I mean, it's baseball. Anything can happen. Now, to be fair, the bets offensively have struggled against lefties this year, only in 90 WRC plus. So, never know. And maybe that bodes well for Robbie Ray, who's going on Sunday as well. You're going to see him against Carlos Carrasco. That's probably the most favorable matchup for the Mariners in this whole series, because we got George Kirby going up against Chris Bassett on Saturday, which, you know, who knows how that'll go.

We'll talk about that later on in the show, though. But yeah, so there is some hope that maybe Marco could fare pretty well against this team. Obviously, it's been a pretty up and down year for Marco thus far. Same goes for Robbie Ray as well. But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't go into this series completely expecting to get swept. But there is a pretty good chance that that might happen because the Mets are playing really good ball right now. They haven't disappointed. They haven't let down like some expected because, you know, of course they are.

the Mets even after the off season that they had but they're at the time of this recording they're 22 and 11 but Thursday night they are playing so that could be 23 and 11 that could be 22 and 12 who knows but they are at the top of the NLEs so I believe they just won so okay so they're going to be 23 and 11 I believe they just beat the nationals 4 to 1. Interesting note edwin diaz did pitch the 9th and he did throw 20 plus pitches um so maybe that makes him one of it probably not unavailable for Friday night's game but maybe Saturday. So just something to keep in mind there. And again, we don't, it's also worth noting that it's funny.

The Mets batted ball data suggests that their offense shouldn't be scoring as many runs as they happen. So maybe that's some regression to a mean there is coming. But yeah, Marco is going to have to be pretty sharp. It's, it's interesting. I wouldn't say that this lineup is like unbelievably stacked. Like it's not like there's like three elites like, you know, hitters in it. But for one through nine,

it is just filled with quality hitters. So Marco's going to have to be on top of it. He's going to have to have that changeup working against the left, against the righties. And he's going to have to get that cutter in off the plate and get some swings on it. That's really his only shot. Yeah. So for the Mets, you know, Dom Smith kind of.

struggling right now 192 3241 but aside from him they're they're hitting pretty well Jeff McNeil 330 395 456 151 WRC plus Brandon Nemo has the same exact WRC plus he's slash 86 402 439 Pete Alonza 287 355 525 Francisco Lundore kind of a slow start for him but he still has a WRC plus of 114 that's a 238 317 405 slash line for him Eduardo Escobar, 216, 32, 32nd, 3262, Starling Marte, and then his first year with the Mets, 262, 313, 37, Markana, 291, 360, 342. A lot of these guys, we talked about this winner for the Mariners, and they ended up going to

New York. Mark Kana, of course, rabbit stew, you know, anyone, anyone remember that? Fun time, the hour or the night that Mark Kano was a Seattle Mariner, and the Mariners fans head cannon, if you will. It was, yeah, a lot of these guys, you know, Eduardo Escobar was another guy that you and I talked about quite a bit for the Mariners as well. Jeff McNeil was a,

I would consider him a star of fan fiction Friday. And those episodes that we did, he showed up quite a bit in there, you know, because there were some reports. So the Mets were pretty much done with him. But he's been great for them this year. He's been absolutely fantastic after having us year last year. So yeah, this is going to be a difficult team to face off against. It's not a great matchup for the Mariners. If they can just walk away from the series with one game in tow, one

one win in tow. I think that's pretty good success for them. And if they can somehow get two or somehow sweep, which I mean, let's calm down here, folks. But like if they can somehow walk out of city field with two wins, I mean, that's massive. That, you know, that would give them. a significant confidence boost. Yeah, just find a way to avoid a disaster road trip. Yeah. It's 10 games, right? Yeah.

10 games. Yeah, it's four in Boston. Right, okay. So, yeah. Boston not playing very well right now, by the way. So maybe the Mariners catch a break there, but, you know, the Mariners aren't playing well either. So, yeah, just find a way to avoid the disaster two and eight road trip. you get four and six or even five and five just kind of

maybe you're not building momentum but maybe you're not losing it either you're just stay in the course right then that that's going to be pretty big and then the schedule does start to soften up as we get towards the end of May and then into June a little bit so yeah just kind of the goal for this 10 game road trip is to avoid disaster and hey you know maybe you go six and four something like that and you can start to feel good about yourself and you'll still be a couple games below

500 but you'll have some momentum you'll have gone through a very difficult stretch in your schedule one of the hardest road trips that you're going to make this year and have gone you know five and five and six and four and you can feel pretty good about that so just just avoid the disaster trip and a good way to do that would be to take a couple from the Mets here and then you know just see what you get but you just you have to avoid sweeps on this road trip and if they do that they should be in pretty good shape. All right. So on Saturday, George Kirby is making his second career major league start in a very tough environment. We're going to be talking about that in just a moment. But real quick, a reminder of this episode of Lockdown Mariners is brought to you by Built Bar.

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It is free and available wherever you get your podcast just like us. So George Kirby had a major league debut that no other Mariners pitcher has ever had. against the Tampa Bay raise on Sunday. Now he's looking for an encore performance against the Mets at City Field, which is going to be pretty difficult for all the reasons that we laid out in the first segment of this show. Colby, what are you expecting to see from Kirby in this one? Yeah, I'm going to think I'm thinking the Mets are going to be pretty aggressive on the fastball.

He generated so many swings and misses against the raise that probably shouldn't have happened just because of the fastball, again, Kirby's fastball wall, it is, obviously the velocity is great. It's not a pitch that has tremendous spin rates. It's not a pitch that has, you know, a great rise through the zone. It doesn't have incredible movement. It felt more like the rays were so cognizant of the slider that he was throwing that day that they were waiting for it to break and it didn't. And by then they were too late.

So my guess is that the Mets want to come out and they want to try and hunt the fastball pretty early. So it's going to be pretty important for Kirby. to go out there and establish a slider and even throw a few more changeups. He didn't really throw the change up that much. I think he's going to have to, particularly to guys like Lindor and McNeil and Brandon Nimmo, I think that change up is going to be a pretty big pitch for him. So he's got a pretty good one. It's majorly quality, but it's fringy.

But he's going to have to use that. And then obviously he's going to have to have his trademark control because you can't leave your fastball in the middle of the plate when you're, you know, it's when all you have is velocity, really. And thankfully, Kirby, you know, his calling card is, is that fastball control and command. So I think, I think the Mets are going to come out and try to hunt the fastball. I think they're going to be pretty aggressive with George Kirby. And we'll see how Kirby counterpunches or if maybe the fastball is just better than we think it is for an unknown reason. I mean, like I said, it's not a high spin rate, it's not a high movement pitch.

He doesn't have incredible extension like Logan Gilbert, but, you know, 13 whiffs on your fastball is 13 lifts on your fastball. That's a really impressive number. So we'll see. I think the mats are going to be pretty aggressive, which could help Kirby actually go deeper into this game, which would be nice. But, yeah, I think we're going to have to see more of the breaking stuff. And I think Kirby is a smart guy.

I think he understands how the league is going to start to attack his fastball. And I think he'll continue to make those adjustments along. But, yeah, the first inning or two, it's probably going to be my guess is that the Mets are going to go up there and they're going to swing at a lot of first pitches. So let's stare at a dream a little bit here. If he goes out there and he gives the Mariners five, six, seven scoreless or one run or whatever against this lineup, How are you feeling about George Kirby? Pretty good. I mean, to me, honestly, like, there's really not, like,

I don't know how many starts in a row which Kirby would need to string together for me to feel like, you know, oh, like, we definitely have a, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, a breakout star pitcher this year. Yeah. But I think what with Kirby is what I've said, on is that he's probably going to be on his worst nights. He's probably going to be like average Chris Flexen. And on his best nights, he could give you a number two type of performance.

I think he's going to be a solid number four this year with some upside. And if he does, you know, what he did against the raise a few of four, you know, or close to it, 80% of it, like five, six times in a row. Then maybe I started thinking of him as a number three right away. But yeah, it's, I feel pretty safe with what Kirby's going to do. do on an outing by outing basis. I don't think he's going to blow up a ton, maybe once or twice because every pitcher does. But just the fastball velocity and command that he has with that pitch makes it highly

unlikely that he's going to implode basically like Matt Brash did several times. So another good start would be great, but I'm not rushing to name him, you know, rookie of the year candidate after two starts. Yeah, for sure. And then on the flip side of that, they have Chris Bassett going for the, for the Mets. And the Mariners fared pretty well against Bassett last year. Yeah, 250, 338, 500 was their slash line in four games. Bassett had a 528 ERA going up against the Mariners last season.

So they did pretty well. Yeah, it was no Cole Irvin, but it was pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, Bassett, again, Kerr ball is going to be the big pitch there. I feel like the fast, I feel like the curveball is going to be an interesting pitch for Hulu. to see he hasn't really seen a curveball we've seen a lot of sliders but not a ton of curveball so I'm kind of interested to see how that looks how Julio's going to adjust to that

Bassett's got a good one but yeah it's going to be an interesting matchup for Julio this weekend might be the best three set of the best starting pitching he's seen in the series that makes sense and it'll be a good challenge for him because Julio's on fire right now he's one of the only guys we can say that about so I'm interested to see how he handles fast. It's curveball and the running fastball, Max Scherzer, in particular. It's almost as if someone who recommended putting Julio up in the lineup, maybe even in the first three slots of the lineup,

was actually pretty smart and pretty ahead of his time. Yeah, I mean, I believe that person said that it would help Jesse Winker, which, yeah, totally has. Yep. I never said, I never said that. I said that it would limit, it would limit the risk. of having Jesse Winker is struggling hitter at the top of your lineup and giving him more at bats. I said that it would.

You're totally fine with Jesse Winker hitting seventh behind a Eugenio Suarez right now. No, I am not, I am not fine with that. Literally what you just said, but okay, okay. That's word for word what you said. He should be hitting fifth at the lowest still, like, at minimum, but it probably should be four. I still like the idea of lead off, to be honest with you. Even with the way that he looks right now. Because it seems like now he's like pressing because of the bad luck.

He probably is. Yeah, he probably is. Part of that is I think, though, is that like I kind of want to get, because right now the mayors have like four good hitters. And I'm not going to drag us on because I know we got to get to the third segment here. But like the mayors right now have four good hitters and they're all hitting four in a row, which makes sense. But it's like, I mean, you got to break them up, but not.

You know what? You know what I'm trying to explain? Well, yeah. You want to. Adam Fraser hitting like third right now or something like that. Well, it'd be nice if you got later on in the lineup and you actually had someone that you could depend. Yeah, right. Yeah.

You're like, hey, look at that. You know, Winker actually hit a double. Like, wow, we didn't see that coming. And then you, then you, all right, who's going to have a shot to drive them in? Jared Kellnick, Cal Raleigh or Dillmore. Yeah. Yeah. It would be nice.

Yeah. I feel like, I feel like a. fix for that maybe would be putting JP in the lead off spot and then having Fraser hit like six and then who do you hit two three four five France that's a long way down yeah

yeah I got to see France and Julio and then it's like okay I mean Winker I guess and then Soros yes warra Swara Zora Zora should hit ahead of Frazier it just mostly I'm trying to

I'm trying to break up the strikeout guys as best as possible yeah you know I get it man um That being said, go trade for Ben Gamble. Problem solved. There you go. There you go. Problem alleviated.

I should say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Slightly. Slightly alleviated. Not at all fix or solved.

He's like 40% better than Jared Jal. No, no, no. I'm not saying that about Gamble. Lyer. Lier. I'm just saying that like even would Gamble and tell the Mariners are still in a rough spot offensively. Team Gamble unite.

Hey, by the way, you know who the Mariners should go trade for? I defended your take. in the comments of one of our YouTube videos the other day actually. Oh, nice. Well, that's because I'm smart. Only a dummy wouldn't want Ben Gamble on this team. That being said, while they're at it, go get Jake Bowers.

It's time to reunite the Bowers, Rangers. Exactly. I think that's what the Mariners are missing. I think that was the glue that held the 2021 Mariner's together. I'm just saying, when he showed up, when he showed up, where is he now? Cincinnati's still.

believe triple a is Cincinnati oh my god he can't make the he can't make the major league roster in Cincinnati right now that feels like it means more about that says more about the the Reds then because like you're so wrong Jake Frailey out there over Jake Bowers right now well right now in AAA he's slashing 146 321 268 with a 72 WRC plus but again counterpoint count counter argument he was a glue that held the 2021 Mariners altogether clearly. All right. So actually, this was a good way to segue

into our final topic of the day, which is Kyle Lewis. So we're going to be talking about him in just a moment because there is an update on him and actually maybe some hope that we could see him before the Mariners head home at the end of this road trip. But real quick, a reminder of this episode of Lockdown on Mariners

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Head to the website today or use your mobile device to learn more about the trends in action. Bet Online is where the game starts. So Jerry DePoto hopped on Seattle, 710 Seattle Sports on Thursday morning and talked about a plethora of things. We talked about some of his comments on yesterday's episodes, so be sure to check that out if he haven't already. But he also talked about Kyle Lewis, who is continuing to rehab down in Tacoma. And even when as far as to say, there is a chance that he could make his way back with the team before this road trip comes to an end.

But he did admit that it has been a little bit of a struggle for Lewis coming off of the days that he's played in the field. So let me ask you this. When he does make it back to the Major League roster, what kind of role do you envision for Kyle Lewis? Yeah, I think, again, the part of the statement, obviously, about playing in the field, he's kind of still struggling to bounce back from that. Not what you want to hear at all because you really want that DH spot to remain open, but right now there's really not a lot of better options to DH than to have as your primary DH than Kyle Lewis. I mean, Mitch Hanigur's not walking through that door.

So it's not ideal, but also it's not a huge deal. I still think Lewis is probably going to play in the outfield once or twice a week. But I think it's also possible that if Lewis plays in the outfield hypothetically, right, on Saturday, it means on Sunday he's off. He's not going to DH. And then Monday he would dh a couple days and then he'd be back in the field again. So we'll see. We're about a month, two months into Lewis's rehab.

I know it's officially only been like five or six days, five or six games, but he was playing a lot in extended. He was seeing a lot of live pitching. So the fact that he's still struggling on those days after he plays in the field, certainly not ideal. But, you know, you hope it's something that you can overcome. And right now it's not a huge deal because you can pretty easily accommodate. him being your full-time DH because

there are literally no better options on this roster right now. Yeah, and this is again, we set it on Wednesday's show, I'll say it again now, this is exactly why you should still make a trade to add to your outfield because you should not bank on everything going right for you.

And everything going right in this situation would be Kyle Lewis returning to full health and being able to contribute in the outfield. Because apparently the Mariners are not getting Mitch Hanager back until mid-July. And we talked about it on yesterday's episode and maybe it's happened by now. Again, we're recording this on Thursday that, you know, Jerry Kalnick should be sent down at this point.

But it's probably time for that. So the Mariners are pretty weak in the outfield right now. This is exactly why we said throughout this offseason, the Mariners do not have too many outfielders. He do not whatsoever. And we're seeing that play out in full force, unfortunately. You know, I was hoping that we would be wrong in that situation. But, yeah, you know, it's just that's the way that it's, that it's. gone and, you know, the same complaint that we had with putting so much stock into

Julio succeeding, which has worked out so far for the most part. And Kellnick's succeeding, which has not whatsoever, you know, and not really reinforcing the outfield whatsoever this offseason, aside from Maddie Winker, who's, you know, defensively speaking, not really an outfielder. But, you know, aside, you know, they need to stop. banking on everything going right for them right that's the that's the point of the message really is that it's um you just can't rely on on colo lewis to stay healthy and to be able to give you multiple games in the outfield every single week from here on out and be able to replace

mitch hanniger properly and do all these things because that's just that's not the way that it's probably going to go especially when you hear stuff like this from jerry to poto so it would make the most sense to go into the trade market and add someone, whether that's Bing Gamble, whether that, who knows, whoever it is, just add someone with some major league seasoning and some success at the plate. And that's absolutely vital right now

because you just, you cannot bank on Lewis being that guy for you. You can't right now. But it'll be nice to get him. Hopefully, you know, again, Jerry said that there is a possibility that he returns to the major league roster by the end of this road trip, maybe in Boston, maybe even in Toronto, who knows.

But they just can't rely on that to be, you know, the be-all-end-all for them, to be the change that they need right now, to be the spark to get things going here. So see how it goes. It's just not a great time right now for the Mariners from a roster construction standpoint. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons for that. There's a lot of stuff that we could go down here. and talk about, but really at the core of it and just talking about what's going on right now,

what the facts are. The Mariners need to find ways to safeguard themselves from some of these things and to put themselves in a better position to succeed. And hey, if they create a logjam down the road, so be it. That's a great problem to have. And that would be a much better problem to have than the problem that they currently have. And so, yeah. It'll be the first time they've ever had that problem in the depoto era. You don't have depth until you actually have depth. Warm bodies is not depth. So I feel like somebody, you know,

a reasonably smart fellow has said that quite often over the last four or five months. So maybe he was on to something. Maybe they were on to something. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we'll see. We'll see.

but yeah something has to be done there and again thankfully it does still sound like lewis is going to or that he has a shot to be with the team on this road trip i would still guess he joins the team when they get back home that'd be my guess but he should help but again we also need to be careful not to just expect Kyle lewis to come in and be like the savior of the mariner's offense no he's just another he's just another you know hopefully slightly above league average bat that just lengthens the lineup and pushes guys further down and gives you more options. So he should help a lot. But he is not the guy who's just going to show up and turn this team into an offensive juggernaut.

So keep that in mind. Yeah. And from a defensive standpoint, too, that may create some issues in terms of getting them into the lineup and getting your best hitters into the lineup constantly. So we'll see how they make it work. And if he's going to be able to go out in the field some. But yeah, again, just at the core of it, you got to get better from the outside at this point, it seems. But that's a discussion we'll probably have again sometime on next week's shows.

But that's going to do it for our show today and for our week's slate of lockdown Mariners. Thank you so much for joining us here on the lockdown Mariners podcast for Colby Patnode. I'm Taday Gonzalez. Be sure to give us a follow on Twitter at L0 underscore Mariners. You can follow me at Dane Gonzalez, G. and ZLZ and Colby at C-Pad 11, that's C-PAT-1-1. You can also find all that stuff in the description of this episode. And thank you again for making us your first listen to the day,

just like you do here every day. Now make your second list of the day, locked on MLB. That's where Paul Francis Sullivan, and please call him. Sully brings you his unique perspective on the major leagues president pass. It's free wherever you get your podcast just like us. So have yourself a beautiful baseball day and a beautiful baseball weekend, and we'll see you on Monday. Peace.