Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - Locked on Mariners Episode 2: Mariners lose to Rays, and what to expect from Yusei Kikuchi in the future

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

The Mariners dropped a heartbreaker to the Rays, 1-0, to move to 1-7 in the month of August. Host Andy Patton discusses Seattle's struggles with the Rays and takes some questions for Mariners Mailbag Monday, including a look at what's going on with left-hander Yusei Kikuchi, and a look at Seattle's financial situation as they gear up for a contention window in the early part of the next decade.Intro: Ain't Gonna Die Tonight - MacklemoreOutro: Hard Sun - Eddie Vedder 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.

Open up the doors on a We're playing the night Bring on the marshal pan And turn on the stadium lights All right, we got a little McLemore To kick this thing off. How y'all doing? I'm Andy Patton, and you're listening

to the Lockdown Mariners podcast, part of the Lockdown Podcast Network. I'm a beat reporter for the Seattle Seahawks and a former employee at the University of Washington and Seattle University, so I call myself Seattle's Sports Media's Utility Infielder. It's a rainy day here in Seattle,

and looks like the Mariners once again forgot to bring their bats against Ryan Yarborough and the Rays on Sunday. We're going to talk about that in our first segment, and coming up in our second segment, I'm going to introduce you to a new Monday tradition called Mariners Monday Mailbag. I have a few questions from Twitter followers that I'll address,

covering the state of the franchise financially, as well as a look under the hood at Japanese left-hander Yusay Kikuchi. It's a fate Mariners fans are used to, getting beat by former teammates. That's what frequently happens when they play the Tampa Bay Rays, who seem to house more former Seattle Mariners than any other team in the major leagues. The Reyes won 1-0 on Sunday,

completing a three-game sweep of Seattle and pushing them to a pitiful one-and-seven in the month of August. Ryan Yarbrough, who pitched in the Mariners minor league's system through 2016, did most of the damage against Seattle. He threw eight and two-thirds innings and was pulled with one-out remaining and only 99 pitches. Emilio Pagan, who also used to be on the Mariners,

finished the game out, giving the raise the complete game shutout with two former Mariners pitchers. While the damage on offense was done by the former face of the Major League Baseball, Eric Sogard, the Mariners were undone in Saturday's contest by former catcher Mike Zanino, who had a three-run, home run to give the raise a five-to-four victory. While it's probably just a coincidence that most of the damage this weekend was done by former Mariners, it is worth pointing out that Seattle and Tampa Bay have gotten real familiar with each other in the trading world over the last couple of years.

Off the top of my head, Mike Zanino, Malick Smith, Drew Smiley, Andrew Moore, Dinard Span, Nick Franklin, Brad Miller, are just a few of the names that have gone between Seattle and Tampa Bay just in the Jerry Depoto era of Seattle's history. Heck, that doesn't even include Guillory, who made a really nice catch in the ninth inning to help preserve Tampa Bay's 1-0 victory. Getting shut out is never fun, but the bright spot in this case. game was seeing how well Seattle's pitchers did. After the Mariners used an opener, right-hander Sam Tuwi Viola, we'll see if I can ever get that name right, the team turned to left-hander Wade LeBlanc, who had an outstanding outing. LeBlanc threw six innings, striking out three, walking none, and giving up just five hits and one earned run, the home run to Sogarde. LaBlock gave way to Brandon, Brennan, and Anthony Bass, and the team actually combined to throw nine innings without

walking anybody. Unfortunately, the Rays also managed to throw nine innings without walking anybody. It's one of about 10 games per season where neither team draws any walks. The Rays managed to out-hit the Mariners 6-3 to 3, however, leading to the victory. The Mariners only got hits from D. Gordon, Kyle Seeger, and Tom Murphy, three players who, if Jerry Depoto had his way, probably wouldn't still be on the roster anymore. Seeger is a veteran who's on a big contract and the team was known to be looking to move him before the trade deadline. D. Gordon probably would have got moved as well had he not been

on the injured list. While it's nice to have him back, his value to the team probably would have been considerably better as a package for prospects instead of as a second basement on a team that's not going anywhere playoff-wise, unfortunately. Tom Murphy's another player that the Mariners could have tried the deal at the trade deadline, but unfortunately either weren't able to find any takers or didn't find any deals to their liking. So while it's encouraging in a way to see those three players still getting hits for the Mariners, it's discouraging to see nobody else managed to pull anything together, especially against Ryan Yarbrough and the race. As difficult as it can be to watch this Mariners team, help is on the way. Looking at the lineup that hit on Sunday against the

raise, the only people who really figure to be in the future of this team are J.P. Crawford, who went 0 for 4, potentially Malick Smith, who led off, played center field and also went 0 for 4. Maybe Domingo Santana continues to be with the team long term, although he's already kind of getting a lot closer to 30 than he is to 20, so not sure that he's going to stick around much beyond this year. The starting outfield besides Malik-Smith was Tim Lopes and Dylan Moore, and you got to hope that by the time 2021 or 2020-2 rolls around that those two guys are playing somewhere else if they're playing at all. Dan Vogelbach didn't start this game and he went 0-for-1 as a pinch hitter, but he figures to be a part of the team's future as well. Coming up next, we will discuss the Mariners financial situation, whether they're going to be willing to spend big money in 2021 in order to compete, and we'll take a look at the struggles of Yusei Kikuchi and what we can expect from him going forward. For now, I'm going to answer some questions in the

first Mariners Monday mailbag segment. All right, the first question in my Mariners Monday mailbag, which tries saying that five times fast, comes from Twitter user H.E. Denson 18. He asks, What do you think of you say Kakuchi's struggles this year? Do you think he can be anything close to the pitcher we thought we were getting this off-season? Well, the answer is maybe. Right now, Kakuchi is clearly nowhere close to the pitcher. Mariners fans thought they were getting this off-season. He currently sports a 5.34 ERA with a 588 FIP, a 5.14 X-FIP, and a 5.12 Sierra.

He has a 1.48 whip. He's got a four and eight record, and he's not really striking anybody out. He's got a 6.73Ks per 9. He's walking about three guys per 9, which is okay, probably more than people expected. He was kind of coming in. It's expected to be a high command guy. Nobody really expected him to be a big strikeout guy, but it's still pretty unnerving to see him striking out less than 7 per 9.

But the biggest concern by far, not only in the stats, but if you've watched him pitch, you know this is a problem, his home runs. He's giving up a staggering 2.12 home runs per nine innings. Even in the juiced ball era, that is really, really bad news. For Kikuchi in general, I think if you take a deeper look at kind of what's going on here, we got a pitcher who he has a really nice slider, and that's about it. His fastball is pretty pedestrian. If you were to look on baseball savant, they have a stat called fastball spin rate,

which is something that the Astros have heavily utilized to their advantage. They like to acquire pitchers and help them get more spin on their fastballs, which is obviously helped them be successful. And Kikuchi's fastball spin rate is in the 19th percentile in Major League Baseball. His velocity is only in the 44th percentile, so we're talking about a guy who doesn't throw exceptionally hard and is not getting a lot of movement on his fastball. That's not a great recipe for success, even if his other stuff is good. And his slider is good. Pitcher list has a stat called a money pitch, and a money pitch is if your fastball has a, or if your pitch has a a 40% or higher O swing rate, which in O swing rate is the percentage of times the batter

swings at a pitch outside of the strike zone. So if a pitch is over 40% in that metric, if it's over 40% in zone rate, which is just the percentage of time the pitch is in the strike zone, and then if it has a swinging strike rate of over 15%. If a pitch meets all three of those credentials, it's considered a money pitch. And Kikuchi's slider is there. It's got a 43.6% O swing rate, a 42.5% zone rate and a 15.8% swinging strike rate. That's good. And that's a very, very good pitch right

there. If you watch them pitch, you can see that it's a pitch that's a pitch that's a pitch that's a pitch that's, he's got that going for him. And I think that alone makes him, I don't want to just write him off yet because he's got this pitch that has really had a lot of success this year. But the problem is nine of his home runs have been hit off that pitch. He's thrown it 518 times this year. He's thrown it to 165 in 165 at Bats. And nine of them. ended with a home run. That's not good. So, you know, and you could try to blame the balls. You could try to blame, you know, whatever you want to blame, but, you know, you can't have what's considered a really good pitch that's giving up home runs at the rate that it is. Now, his fastball's given up

15 home runs, which is just egregiously bad. He's also got a 30 to 24 strikeout to walk ratio with his fastball. So it's clearly not not doing him a lot of favors right now. So yeah, so you got, You got a guy who is ERA is bad. The peripherals support him being bad. He's not striking out a lot of guys. He's walking too many guys and he's giving up a lot of home runs. It's hard to see a whole lot of promise going forward. He's also 27 years old.

Excuse me, he's 28 years old. He turned 28 just last month. So you got a 28-year-old pitcher who doesn't throw exceptionally hard. He's got one really good pitch and he gives up a whole lot of home runs. I'm not super confident. I guess to answer the second part of the question, the question said, is he going to be the guy that we wanted him to be? It depends what you were expecting. You know, I think a lot of people had really, really high expectations.

You know, they're thinking of Dice K. Matsuzaka, I'm a Sehiro Tanaka, Udarvish, even Hisashi Iwakuma. And I didn't expect him to be those guys. Him coming in, I thought, okay, he's a guy who could maybe be a big league number three, number four type guy, you know, a guy who fills in at the back of the rotation. You know, I never thought that he would be as good as Iwakuma or certainly not as some guy who could be a guy who could. Anaka and Matsuzaka were in their prime. So even from my perspective, being that number three four starter, I think he can probably get there consistently. I mean, he's not right now.

I mean, you're not going to have a pitcher with a 5.3 ERA and a 1.5 whip. You don't even want that at the back end of your rotation when you're contending. I do think he's better than this. I don't think he's the kind of guy who's frequently going to give up more than two home runs per nine. I mean, that's really high. I think he's going to figure this out. He's going to make some adjustments, whether he needs to start locating his fastball.

in different parts of the strike zone, whether he needs to attack with a slider first. I know the recipe for success for a lot of left-handed pitchers, and Blake Snell was the best example of this last year, is guys who attack high with their four-seem fastball and then bring their breaking stuff low and out of the zone. If Kikuchi can start doing a little bit more of that, we might see a guy who's a little bit more successful. But the problem is you have to be very, very pinpoint accurate with that.

If you watch Blake Snell, when he locates his fastball up in the zone, he either misses too high or is right at the top. of that zone because if you bring that fastball and you miss a little bit too low right in the heart of the plate especially for a guy like kakuchi who doesn't throw all that hard and doesn't have a lot of movement i mean you guys have been watching this year you've seen what happened it's not good it's not a good result so i think we're looking at a guy who could probably become that number three four starter so if that's what you thought you were getting this off season the answer is yes i think he can get there but if you were hoping for a number one or a number two or even a a a guy to have a similar

a career at Iwakuma, I'm just not sure that he's got it. And I'm not sure that the Mariners were hoping for that. I know that they wanted, obviously, you're hoping for somebody to come in and dominate right away. But I think that they knew what they were getting with him was, okay, this is a guy who's going to fill in in the middle of our rotation for a couple years. And if he does really well, maybe he'll be a part of our future teams that we're hoping to contend in 2021 and beyond. But I think more than anything, it was kind of just, hey, here's a guy who can fill in for a couple of years, who can, you know, hopefully get some outs for while we're, got a lot of young guys on the team and while we're kind of trying to rebuild the minor

league system and kind of get through that that time of the franchise and then when we're ready to go again when we got our studs when Logan Gilbert's up and and all that then maybe Kikuchi's a guy who's kind of on his way out by then so yeah I don't know I think he's he's got some talent there's some stuff there there's some some intrigue but it hasn't been put together well this year and it really I think it's going to be it's going to be it's going to be a But I think he could settle in at least as a middle of the rotation starter for a couple of years. But that's about the max that I would give him. I don't think that you're going to see anything a whole lot better than that.

Next up, we had two questions that I'm going to combine. Mikey Yeyetto, PL, on Twitter, asked, we've been trying to save and acquire money. It's a clear motivation for our trades. Do you think ownership is pocketing it? What are we angling for? Meanwhile, at Cornelius 13 asked, are the Mariners going to have monetary power and backing from

ownership to realistically commit to winning in 2021 through 2024. So I decided to lump these two questions together to try to provide more of an overall evaluation of Seattle's financial situation from the top down. First of all, the trades that I believe Mikey is referring to are the two kind of post, post July 31st, quote unquote, trades that the Mariners made. First, they sold AAA catcher Jose Lobitone to the Dodgers, and then they sent center fielder Ian Miller, who was also in AAA over to the twins. Now, they didn't get a whole lot of money in either of these trades,

so I don't think that these trades were made primarily to try to get a whole lot of income back. I think it was more of the team had depth at those positions. They maybe wanted to give some prospects a chance to play in those spots instead. Ian Miller is a guy that I know a lot of Mariners fans really liked. He'd been in the system for a long time. He'd been playing pretty well. He had a really nice glove. He wasn't much of a hitter.

But I think the Mariners just really wanted to, you know, Braden Bishops coming back from a rehab stand. And I think he was going to start filling in in AAA Tacoma anyway. And I think the team just thought, you know what? This is a kid who can maybe get a shot somewhere else. The twins are not only contending. The twins are almost locked in for a playoff spot. I think they're going to be playing October baseball this year.

And if Miller gets a chance to be, you know, even if he's just a defensive center field or a pinch runner, he didn't have a clear cut opening for the Mariners here. You know, Malick Smith is only 24. Braden Bishop still around. And I think they just thought, well, you know, this is a kid who's just not going to get much of a chance here. I think we want to just move on from him and let him get a chance somewhere else. I know a lot of people don't want to think that front offices are philanthropic in that way, that they want to help out some of their players.

And I think for the most part, you know, a team's primary goal is to do whatever is going to help the team win games and make money. And so a lot of times giving away a player for very little in return just to help the player out isn't something that it's not happening all that often. I'm not going to pretend that it's, you know, all teams do this all the time because they care and love their players. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. But I think this was a situation where they recouped a little bit of money and they were able to clear up a roster spot, which I think was kind of the primary thing,

is just give a kid a chance of AAA, and in this case, give Bishop a chance to kind of come back from his injury. And more importantly, just let Miller play, you know, let him play somewhere else. So Lobitone, I think, kind of a similar thing. They just didn't need him. You know, they had, they have Omar Narvias and Tom Murphy in the major leagues. And I think they just, if they need a third catcher, they'll grab somebody younger.

I don't think that Lobitone is a guy that really factored into their future at all, and the Dodgers needed some catching depth, and they just thought, hey, here, we'll take a little bit of money back, and we'll give you this guy. And so those two trades don't, to me, say really a whole lot about what the Mariners are doing. You could obviously look at the Rowiness Aaliyah's trade and the Hunter Strickland trade. Those were trades to acquire prospect capital. They got back some decent arms from the Washington Nationals. So I think in that regard, it was a little bit about saving money,

but the Mariners didn't make a whole lot of trades at the deadline this year to try to get a bunch of money off of the books. And I think part of that is because they couldn't. I think they wanted to. Dee Gordon really didn't do the Mariners a lot of favors at the time that he got hurt. I think the team was really hoping they could move him. He's got a big contract, and I'm not sure they were going to move him anyway. He's been playing okay this year, but he hasn't been great, and I don't think a lot of teams really wanted to take on his contract for the second half of the year,

unless the Mariners were willing to pay a pretty considerable chunk of it, which they would have had to do. I mean, they did that with Mike Leak. You know, they've done that in the past where they've taken on big parts of contracts just in order to move players. And I think they wanted to do that with Dee Gordon. They probably wanted to do that with Ryan Healy. They may have been looking to do that with Mitch Hanager,

although his contract's not nearly as big, but it's something I think that had he not been hurt, they might have considered. Felix certainly, you know, his contract's way too big for the Mariners to move, but the team definitely has a lot of contracts, a lot more big contracts than most teams that are at this stage of their rebuild do. So I guess to answer the question, I've kind of been dancing around it.

Yes, I think the Mariners' ownership is pocketing some of this money that they're getting because they're trying to recoup some value on a lot of guys where, you know, the ownership's paying D. Gordon and Felix Hernandez is a lot of money. And they're not getting a whole lot out of them. You know, Gordon's playing okay.

Felix is not, and he's not playing it all right now. He's going to make a rehab start in every here, pretty soon and hopefully we'll see them up in the next couple of weeks. But I think this team is trying to recoup some of that money. And I think that the ownership is angling to do something with it, just not necessarily right away. So that kind of leads into the second question, which is kind of why I lump these two together about, you know, whether the ownership is going to be ready to spend that money in 2021, 2024, whenever, whenever that contention window is, which, yeah, I haven't seen any reason to not believe that the Mariners ownership is willing to go for

here. They, you know, a couple years ago when they wanted to go for it, they went out and signed Robinson Canoe to a monstrous contract. They signed Nelson Cruz to a big contract. I don't think this team is afraid to spend that money when they need to. I think Jerry DiPoto recognizes that, but right now he's like, okay, how can I get a group of guys that we can actually build around? Like, you know, when they brought in Robinson Canoe and Nelson Cruz, they had some guys,

sure, you know, Felix was still hadn't declined to the level that he has now, and Kyle Seeger was looking really solid. And they were like, yeah, let's go. This is the time for us to do it. And Jerry Depoto now said, okay, it's not. This is not the time anymore. You know, he moved on from Canoe. He let Cruz walk.

He's, you know, he's moved on from Gene Seguera and a couple of other guys because he's like, I want to clear this out, and then I want to have a group come up that's ready to compete. And this is the model that, I know everybody says this, but this is the model that the Astros and the Cubs kind of did. Everybody talks about, oh, they lost a bunch of games and they drafted really well. And that's true. They did.

And that's what the Mariners are hoping. is to draft well, acquire some prospects. You know, you might have a couple seasons where you lose a lot of games, but then when you get to that point where you're ready to really compete, then you go sign guys. These two teams, I mean, they went out and actually got talent elsewhere. They signed free. And a lot of times it was pitchers, obviously Justin Verlander, Garrett Cole.

Now they're doing it again was Zach Granky. You know, and I think the Mariners, in order for them to do this, they're going to have to recognize that when they get to that point, they need to spend some money. They can't just hope that, you know, they're double. A team, which is great right now, that can't be their entire 25-man roster in a couple years. They need to go get some veteran guys. They need to go find, so whether it's hitters or pit.

I think for the Mariners, it's probably going to be pitching. They do have some good pitching in their system, but not a ton and not enough. I think they'll need to go sign some guys who are, you know, maybe around age 30 in their early 30s who are studs, and hopefully they can get those guys in and get them pitching with a couple young guys and a young hitting corps with Kellanick and Shed Long and, Kyle Lewis and a lot of those guys and see if they can build that way. So I believe the Mariners ownership is going to go for it. I think that they, if not, it's kind of a question of them, what are they doing?

Like, why are we, you know, why are we rebuilding if we're not going to spend the money to actually go for it when the time comes? So maybe it's wishful thinking. Maybe I'm just hoping that they're going to go for it because that's what teams should do in that situation. Historically, the Mariners have done what I've called going kind of 85% for it, where they sign a few guys, they bring in a couple guys, and they just don't quite finish it.

A lot of times they never went out and got a first baseman. Those teams that were very good, you know, that almost made the playoffs, they had Logan Morrison or Justin Smoke or Adam Lind at first base instead of going out and signing somebody who could really make an impact at that position. And I hope that this time, because the Mariners never used to fully rebuild, they would either partially rebuild,

and then they would partially go for it. And they never kind of committed one way or the other, and that's why we had a lot of teams that won between 79 and 86 games, you know, and if you kind of only partially go for it or partially rebuild, you just end up right in the middle there. So now they're fully rebuilding, and the product on the field shows it, for better or worse. But for me, that means if they're going to fully rebuild, hopefully that means they fully commit when it's time to go. So like I said, maybe it's wishful thinking, but that's where I think the Mariners' heads are at right now. And I think they're looking, but I think they're looking at maybe a little bit sooner than people might realize.

So that'll do it for your Mariners Mailbag Monday. We'll be back answering more fan questions next week. So my third and final segment for the day is going to be a little happy birthday days for former and current Seattle Mariners. I'm going to do this every single day where we're just going to talk about all the former current Seattle Mariners players and people affiliated with the franchise who are celebrating a birthday that day. So I'm really excited to get to start this on August 12th, not because of the two players whose birthday it is, because neither of them were exceptionally memorable Mariners, but because it would have been the 100th birthday for Fred Hutchinson.

So Fred Hutchinson never played for the Mariners, but he was bored in Seattle. He went to Franklin High School and played briefly at the University of Washington before making his professional debut for the Seattle Rainiers. For those who have not read, Pitchers of Beer, which is an outstanding book about the history of the Seattle Rainiers, they were a Pacific Coast League minor league franchise in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, kind of whole era. Babe Ruth played at that park at one point. I believe Ted Williams

played there. They had a lot of famous people who played at this park, which is located. It's actually, there's a Lowe's there now. It's on Rainier Avenue in South Seattle. But Hutch was probably one of the most famous or notable people to play on that team. He played for them for one season in 1938. He was an 18-year-old kid. He'd just come out of his brief, brief time in college with the University of Washington. He played in, he's excuse me, he started 34 games for the Seattle Rainiers. He threw 290 innings. He went a blistering 25 and 7 with a 2.48 ERA.

He was absolute money in his one season with the Seattle Rainiers. That was enough to get him plenty of attention for the major leagues. He ended up catching on with the Detroit Tigers. He struggled with them for a little bit. Then he went off to war and served our country for a couple years in the 1940s. He came back as a 26-year-old in 1946 and was really, really good for the Tigers for the rest of the decade. He ended up playing with the Tigers from 1946 to 1953. He racked up an 18-win season and the 17-win seasons. He was an absolute

stud. But that's probably not why most of you know the name Fred Hutchinson. As you may know, Hutchinson ended up becoming a manager and unfortunately passed away in 1964 with cancer. And in order to kind of remember him, there was a research center started for him called the Fred Hutchinson Research Center, and that still exists today. It's one of the most well-known cancer research institutes in the United States. In fact, John Lester, who he had cancer about 10 or 11 years ago, I think, and he ended up getting some of his treatment done at the Fred Hutch Research Center. So it's still in the game of baseball today.

So happy 100th birthday to Fred Hutchinson. Sorry you're not around for us anymore, but your influence lives on well beyond your playing and managing career. We'll get to the couple less exciting ones now. Ryan Weber, happy 29th birthday to him. Weber played in one game for the Mariners in 2017. He was with the team in AAA for most of the year, but he had some injury issues. He threw three and two-thirds innings, gave up one run, did not record a walk or a strikeout

in his one appearance with the Mariners back in 2017. He is currently on the Boston Red Sox and has thrown 30 innings of 420 ball for Boston. And then the other birthday is former 1995 second-round pick, Shane. Monahan. Some of you might remember him. He was very highly touted prospect and never really panned out. He appeared in 78 games for the Mariners, 62 in 1998 and 16 in 1999. He had four home runs with 28 RBI, stole one base, got caught stealing twice. He had a 235 batting average, a 261 on base percentage, so not a whole lot to like about that. Mariners have a history of struggling with first and second round picks, especially position players. And Monaghan was just another another example.

of that so it would have been a would have been a really nice player to have developed with some of those early 2000s teams not that they needed a lot of help but still still not too fun to see a guy's struggle who gets picked that high so either way happy 45th birthday of Shane Monaghan sorry that this wasn't a more glowing review of your time with the Mariners the Mariners are off today but we're gonna preview their upcoming series against the Tigers in Detroit a team that they manhandled just a few weeks ago at T-Mobile Park hopefully this can get them out of their one-and-seven streak to start off the month and kind of get them going in the right track.

Once again, I'm Andy Patton. You can find me online at Andy Patton, SEA on Twitter. You can find the Lockdown Mariners podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, just about anywhere that you could find your podcasts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.