Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - Mailbag: Is This Really What the Mariners' Offense Is Gonna Look Like This Year?

Starting point is 00:00:00 After a two and two opening weekend for the Mariners, it's time for our first mailbag Monday of the season. Colby, hit it. You are Locked-on Mariners. Your daily Seattle Mariners podcast. Part of the Locked-on Podcast Network, your team every day. Ahoy, sailors. It is Monday, April 1st, 2024. This is Tiding Gonzalez and Colby Patna for the Lockdown Merrers podcast brought to you by Fandul.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Make every moment more. New customers join today and you'll get $200. and bonus bets if your first bet at $5 and more wins. Visit fan duel.com slash locked on. That's L-C-K-D-O-N to get yourself started. Thank you so much for making us your first listen, subscribe, like, and turn on alerts if you're watching on YouTube or subscribe and leave a five-star review on your preferred

Starting point is 00:00:47 podcast platform if you like what you hear. And if you're part of the crew of rock with us every single day, let us know in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you. And if you want to hear from us even more, please consider signing up for our Patreon. You can now get a free seven-day trial to check out the show. The link is, well, our social accounts is in the description of this episode. This is Mailbag Monday, the show will we answer your Mariners questions. And we're going to start here with Relics, who wants to know we can talk about the anemic

Starting point is 00:01:13 offense all day. But I'm curious about what you guys think of Bryce Miller's splitter. Look to me to be at least a viable pitch, if not a potentially legitimate one. So Miller threw that splitter, I believe, 22 times yesterday against the Red Sox generated 10 swings, six whiffs on those 10 swings. What did you think about it, Colby? Broke it out pretty early. Two of his strikeouts on the first scene were off the split,

Starting point is 00:01:41 and one of them was actually even against a righty. So it's not a pitch that is only used to get out left-handed hitters, although that is the primary purpose of that pitch is to have a weapon against lefties. And obviously, like, you know, we kind of said what happened. Boston stacked a lot of lefties. in their lineup and and you know they've kind of tried to force miller uh to to beat the lefties and it was it was a bit of a mixed bag overall for bryce but the splitter was a very nice surprise and

Starting point is 00:02:10 it looked good you know there it was a very low spin rate pitch and that's what you want the splitter to be uh splitters and changeups you want lower spin rates uh and he was very good not quite lowing gilbert good but considering this was the first time throwing it in a live game and they can give them some slack there but uh yeah it looked like a viable pitch It looked like a pitch that should help him generate more whiffs, which is, you know, going to be helpful for Miller. But it's also a pitch that gives him a weapon of some kind against left-handed hitters. And we know that that is the area where Miller has the most improvement to make. And if he could just be, you know, average against lefties, he's going to be really good against righties.

Starting point is 00:02:53 And you're going to have a mid-rotation starter. So got to do it more than once, right? you just don't throw the splitter in one game and it'd be pretty good and be like, okay, that's just a pitch we trust now. You know, he's got to continue to throw it. We've got to see him actually like Logan Gilbert last year, right? It took a couple starts for us to be like, okay, this is a legitimate pitch. This isn't a one-off.

Starting point is 00:03:17 This isn't just, you know, a gimmick pitch. It is something that he will rely on. So I thought Miller's splitter was pretty good, really good location in the first inning, as well as some really good tumbling action and, you know, diving action at the same time. But I thought I was most impressed by the location of it. It was starting at the knees and disappearing below the zone perfectly right where it needed to be. So, you know, overall that Bryce yesterday was okay, made the one mistake on the 3-1 pitch that really hurt him. But I think it's a positive sign.

Starting point is 00:03:52 And, you know, also the slider wasn't half bad yesterday either. but the split definitely looks like a pitch that's going to pair well with his fastball. Again, he has to throw it more and consistently before it becomes an actual weapon that you can count on. But it's certainly off to a good start based off of the, what, 5 inning C3 yesterday? Not too shabby of an offering right now. Yeah, Aaron Goldsmith kind of talked about that high, low action that that creates with his, you know, fastball sitting on the top shelf and then that splitter starting at the bottom of the zone and then dipping out of it. And that's a slider, like you mentioned as well.

Starting point is 00:04:27 He threw a couple of really good sliders, a couple of really good backdoor sliders yesterday as well against lefties. Next question to hear from Dakota. Why can't we get to more three ball counts? Seems like a lack of consistency player to player. Granted, it's only four games. They got into quite a few three ball counts over the weekend. They got here, I actually have the numbers here. They had 33 wall counts in this series, which was 12 out of 30 teams.

Starting point is 00:04:55 the problem is converting those three ball counts into something positive they were bottom three in w rc plus they were bottom four in on base percentage yeah only six walks yeah uh to go along with the 45 strikeouts 46 strikeouts whatever it ended up being not going to play it that that's not going to play. Also, I don't think we, I don't recall, we have a question about this or not, but the bad Bap luck, it's a little bit overblown. There were certainly some, you know, bad, bad beats. But, you know, there were a couple of balls that were like, oh, that's a home run in July.

Starting point is 00:05:43 And it's like, probably not. Like, I just think we overuse that idea. like oh in the summer that'll be out and it's like maybe polanco's uh polanco might have had two of them yeah polanco's the one yesterday they they showed on the broadcast like the win heavily impacted that right um and then like the i think it was the second was it game two polanco had a high fly ball and it just like it took o'neill right to the warning track maybe in the summer that goes out but he hit that ball straight up in the air like that was like a 45 degree launch angle so Tough to say.

Starting point is 00:06:20 But I do think the BAP-P-P stuff was a little bit overblown. They just didn't have a lot of good at-bats this week. And I mentioned this on the CTZ post-game show for our patrons yesterday. Like how many innings? They played 38 in the third innings, I think, the Mariners' offense did. How many of those innings and in how many of those innings did they have two good at bats in the same inning? Four or five? I mean, and even you want to take that a step further back, like how many of those innings do they have one good played appearance, one good at bat?

Starting point is 00:06:56 Yeah. 10 to 12, like not many. Not many. Not many. So, yeah. The whole offense needs to be better. Look, I don't want to take anything away from the Red Sox pitching staff. Like Nick Povetta was really good.

Starting point is 00:07:08 Cutter Crawford was really good. I thought Garrett Whitlock was pretty good yesterday as well. But the mayor is absolutely do need to be better in those situations. situations. And look, the fact of the matter is we're going to get to this in a second. So I don't want to spoil too much about that. But like, if you were throwing anything but a fastball to them, you have a pretty good shot against this offense right now. So they have to get it together on that front. So again, we're going to talk about that a little bit more here in just a moment. But first, a reminder of this episode of the Lockdown Marries podcast is brought to you by Fandwell and LinkedIn.

Starting point is 00:07:41 The sports calendar is loaded and Fandul is making it even more exciting to get in on the action because right now new customers get $200 in bonus bets with any winning $5 bet. That's $200 you can use to bet on the tourney, MLB, NBA, NHL, and so much more. Visit fanduel.com slash locked on. That's LOCD-O-N and make your first bet a big win. FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook. Are you struggling to close deals? B-2-B selling is tougher than ever, and that's why I want to tell you about LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Starting point is 00:08:16 LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales intelligence platform that helps professionals effectively prospect and engage high-value customers, drive higher revenue, and increase sales performance. Sales Navigator helps you target the right buyers, surface key signals such as job changes or which accounts you should prioritize, and shows you hidden allies so you can find those buyers that are most likely to convert. Fueled by LinkedIn's one billion member platform, Sales Navigator gives you the most up-to-date, first. party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter. Right now, you can try LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get a 60-day free trial at LinkedIn.com slash locked on. That's L-O-C-K-D-O-N. That is LinkedIn.com slash locked on for a 60-day free trial. Let LinkedIn sales navigator help you sell like a superstar today. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash locked on and get started. And you're listening. to the Lockdown Marreras podcast. Thank you again for making us your first listen here on the first

Starting point is 00:09:22 mailbag Monday of the regular season. And just a reminder that Locked on has launched the first ever national sports 24-7 streaming channel on YouTube and Amazon Fire TV and the free Fire TV channels app. Locked-on Sports Today is here for you 24-7 covering the top sports stories of the day with the local experts of Locked-on, plus our national shows covering every league. Find Lockdown Sports Today now available on fire TV channels app. So let's get back into your questions here. Coach Kay Wright wants to know, will the mayor see any fastballs the rest of the year?

Starting point is 00:09:56 Not until they learn how to hit some spend. Yeah. I mean, of course, they'll see fast balls. But, you know, if you're only going to get one,

Starting point is 00:10:08 two fast balls and at bat, you better hit the ones you get, especially if you're going to be tragically bad against breaking stuff. You know, it's really easy to look at, last year, be like,

Starting point is 00:10:20 well, they didn't hit spin all last year and they didn't in this series either. So clearly that hasn't changed. They can't hit curb balls and breaking balls. But we talked about this, this winter when they made these changes that a lot of these guys they brought in are actually pretty good traditionally against sliders and curb balls. So it's not something like they just ignored that and they never tried to fix it.

Starting point is 00:10:40 They brought in guys who are better than the guys they replaced at specifically the slider. Right. This winter. It's four games in. Right. And one of the things that people don't tend to realize is that the spin you see in Arizona, not equivalent to the spin you see, you know, in the big, in colder climates. Arizona's dry, right?

Starting point is 00:11:06 And the ball doesn't spin as much in Arizona as it does other places. So it's not like they were seeing, you know, 3,000 RPM curveballs every day in Arizona. So this could just be, you know, again, just kind of adjusting and, and, getting back into things. But yeah, obviously, that's going to be the game plan against, you know, the Mariners for a while, is throw them as many breaking balls as you feasibly can and they'll get themselves out. They'll swing it right through it. But just because they struggled with it last year and they struggled with it this weekend

Starting point is 00:11:38 doesn't mean it's something that they're going to struggle with all year because, again, we went through this, you know, Rayleigh, Polanco, like these guys are better at hitting, breaking stuff, than the guys they're replacing. So it's really frustrating. Sure. But it's just four games. So before we decide that they can't hit breaking stuff and that's going to be a problem all year,

Starting point is 00:12:02 can we give them six weeks at least before we start panicking about this? I think some of it is just give credit where credit is due to the Red Sox rotation and just the pitching staff in general. And some of it is just, hey, it wasn't your series. Yeah, I just. I'm just I'm not to the point where it's like oh well how do you beat the mirrors you just throw them purple balls like no right we got to wait a couple weeks before we see if that's true or not look at the end of the day though like we've talked about over the course of the off season the great

Starting point is 00:12:29 equalizer here for the mirrors in terms of winning games and making up for some of their issues on offenses that pitching stuff right having a george kirby having a logan gilbert but that also kind of gets eliminated when you make every single pitcher look like George Kirby, Logan Gilbert, etc. On the box score. Let's get into this next question here from D. Panky. Obviously, it's a tiny sample, but would you agree that France and Hanager

Starting point is 00:12:53 heading the ball to the opposite field consistently has been arguably the most encouraging sign so far this season? Yeah, you know, Hanneger's always been able to go to the opposite field that's always been in his bag, and he's always been able to hit with power to the opposite field, even in T-Mobile Park. And we know how difficult that is for right-handed hitters to do.

Starting point is 00:13:12 So yeah, that's, you know, always been part of it. France, at times he looked like last year's type or 2020 type France, where, you know, just ground ball through the right side, soft liner into center field. Like at times you do that, there were times where he was, he was swinging hard. And he was trying to, you know, pull everything. And so it was kind of a hit or miss weekend for France. He did have a lot of hard hit balls. Now, that's not necessarily a sign of anything because France traditionally. doesn't hit the ball that hard.

Starting point is 00:13:45 He's, you know, he's a guy who doesn't have, you know, obvious spray chart issues. So you kind of have to play him straight up and he just finds the hole, right? He's a hit collector is what Thai France is when he's going well. But the fact that he did have a lot of hard hit balls this weekend, the fact that, yeah, a good number of his hits were up the middle and the other way. I do think those are both relatively positive signs. But again, it's four games. Like, it's really tough to look at this and say, like, oh, Ty,

Starting point is 00:14:12 is back or Mitch Hanigur's going to play 150 games. Like this is this is way too early to make any, uh, you know, declarations like this, but, uh, yeah, I think obviously they were able to collect hits to right field. It's not a bad thing, you know, uh, is it, is a huge sign or is it something to, to, you know, hang your hat on for, you know, you're hoping for Ty France rebound this year. No, I wouldn't go that far, but it's, it's too early. That applies to both, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:44 negatives. All directions. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I know nobody wants to hear that. They think it's a cop out, but it really is,

Starting point is 00:14:51 guys. It is so early. It's so early. We're not even like. You want the truth, right? Like that's ultimately like what we, you know, we don't want to BS you here.

Starting point is 00:14:59 We don't want to make these big, bold proclamations four games into the season and about one way or the other. To me, to me, like, the it's really early thing. It doesn't go away until about a third. third of the way through the season.

Starting point is 00:15:14 Yeah. Like, so 54 games, like, can you give them two months? And then we kind of see, like, shoot, you know, if we were, you know, going to make assumptions based off of the first few weeks of the season, Jared Kellnick was the American League MVP last year. Right. So, you know, and Julio was a bust. He was a league average bat at best.

Starting point is 00:15:37 So it's just one of those things where, like, again, feels like a cop out, but we are weeks and weeks away from looking at this and being like, okay, this is clearly something to watch. This is like not even something you can really like fix, right? Like Luke Rayleigh can look like this for three weeks or whatever and we're still going to be like, okay. So now it's something to watch, but it's not something to make a drastic change with. You know what I mean? Like you're not going to DFA Luke Rayleigh after three weeks, but now you're going to look at it and go like,

Starting point is 00:16:07 okay, well, now we can kind of start to make adjustments. but even after that, it's going to take at least another three weeks before you kind of see if those adjustments take hold or not. So yeah, this is kind of the worst part of the year because we want answers off of these, you know, we want answers and we want results at the same time. But it's like, it just doesn't work that way. Like we got 158 of these bad boys left to go. You know, it just, you got to wait. You got to be patient. And that's kind of one of the sucky things about baseball is that you can't really tell anything positive or negative off of.

Starting point is 00:16:41 four out of 162 opportunities. Again, it's just the information gathering period. Yeah. It's all it is, right? Obviously, the results do matter. And as we've learned in past years, watching this specific Mariners franchise, like it does show up at the end of the day. You know, the wins and losses, even the month of April. But really, what matters most here is just kind of figuring out what works, what doesn't,

Starting point is 00:17:09 what things you'll have to adjust. just for and all that. So yeah. You're not going to learn anything if you're constantly making changes this early in the year. Yeah. Yep. All right. So we got a couple more questions before we get out of here in just a moment.

Starting point is 00:17:26 But first, a reminder of this episode of the Lockdown Mirror's podcast is brought to you by Amazon Fire TV. Fire TV is your destination for sports from live games to highlights to in-depth analysis. Fire TV offers amazing viewing experiences with smart TVs as well as the Fire TV stick that you can plug into your existing TV that provides access to millions of movies and TV episodes as well as free and live TV. Whether it's opening weekend for baseball or the college basketball tournament, you're going to want to have a fire TV as soon as possible. Fire TV also recently created fire TV channels to deliver a constant supply of the latest

Starting point is 00:18:03 videos from your favorite sports brands all for free. That includes all of us here at Locked On and most of the big pro leagues in college conferences as well. Fire TV channels let you dive into all the game analysis, highlights some more to keep up to date on all the latest in the world of sports from March Madness, NBA, MLB, and lots more. Not to mention great news, entertainment, gaming, travel, and cooking videos as well. Check out Fire TV channels on Fire TV and Alexa devices. And if you haven't checked out Fire TV channels, you should.

Starting point is 00:18:34 Trust me on this. To learn more, visit Amazon.com slash Locked on Fire TV. And you're listening to the Lockdown Merritt's podcast. Thank you again for making us your first listen on the first mailbag Monday of the regular season. Got a couple more questions here before we get out of here. Sean wants to know Colby seemed to be on a different page than the Mariners on how much Hanager would and should play. Could Colby talk a little bit about that? There's a wear and terror factor here.

Starting point is 00:19:01 And that's really the big thing here is that, you know, if Hanager gets hurt, he's going to get hurt. Fine. There's really not a ton you can do to protect him. but you can't protect him from the wear and tear stuff on the, you know, 32, 33-year-old body. You can do some things like that, like giving him a day off, not asking him to play three or four days in a row. My thing with Hanager is I think he can be really helpful to this Mariner team. I think he can't produce, but he can't produce from the IL. He can't produce when he's got a bum knee and, you know, he can't really run or anything like that.

Starting point is 00:19:33 So I want to have Hanager available as often as possible. But in particular, I want Hanager to be available and still relatively healthy, not worn down in July, August, September when his big bat can play a huge difference in this pennant race. So playing him four days in a row right out of the shoot without a day off is a little bit concerning for me. It shows that, you know, there are two games in the right field also. I know he's a couple days, and I think mostly this is because Garber was out. I think that's why he played every game in this series. But to me, even if Garber is out, I don't want Mitch Hanager playing every game in a series.

Starting point is 00:20:15 I want, you know, those are days like get Urius a DH day if you have to. Like Hanager needs full days off throughout this year. I think if your game plan is to give him, you know, try and get him to play 120, 130 games, I think you're doing it wrong. if he can give it to you, right, fine. But like trying to extract that from him because you don't want to put Dom Kanzone out there against the lefty or you don't want to put Luke Rayleigh out there against the lefty or you don't want to give Euras a, you know, a DH day or something like, like that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Because the idea here is to have Hanager, like if you tell me Hanager is going to have 350 plate appearances and you could spread them out throughout the entire year and he never goes on the I. or he has 350, but he has them all before June 15th,

Starting point is 00:21:04 and then he goes out for the year, which one are you going to pick? You're going to spread them out because you want that potential impact bat in your lineup in July, August, and September, not more than you want them in April and May, but there's more impact the later you have. It's just nice to know that I have this guy coming off the bench or I have this guy that I get DH. This guy's got raw power. He's got, you know, really good, gives me a really good at bat.

Starting point is 00:21:29 He can use the whole feel. he can hit doubles. I want that guy in July, August, September. I don't want to burn him out in April, May, in June because I feel like I have to play him because Mitch Garber missed three days in a row.

Starting point is 00:21:43 Yeah. Tough. That's the way you built the team. You built a team with a couple guys who missed time. You know, they missed a lot of time in their career. And so you have to manage both of them. And you can't manage Mitch Garber

Starting point is 00:21:56 at the expense of Mitch Hanager. They're going to be days where neither of those guys can be in the lineup. Accept it. That's the way you, that's the way you built this team. So address that reality and, you know, understand that you're, you should live or you should pretty much bank on once out of every three or four days, neither of these two guys are going to be in lineup at the same time. You have to be okay with that. So, again, it's not a huge deal, uh, yet, but this is just something I don't want Hanigur to be playing, you know, 25 games a month. I want him to play

Starting point is 00:22:33 I think ideally 80 to 90 games total and you know if that means that he doesn't play a lot in May and June because you're trying to make sure he's around in August and September and October fine I'd rather do it that way

Starting point is 00:22:49 I'd rather have Hanager for the entire season than just you know Hanager for the first half and then he's so worn down that I don't get him I don't get anything from him in the second half last question here from Michael. Any idea why no cream jerseys on Sunday? Another issue with the wonder that is

Starting point is 00:23:06 fanatics? Uh, yes. Um, the Mariners confirmed yesterday on Twitter that it's just a supply issue. They haven't received their shipments of the Sunday creams yet. My question is, like, how did they have the city connects and the Northwest Greens in time? I don't know. It's not like the fanatics has to make like a billion different jersey combinations. It's so, weird. I don't, I don't, I really don't get how like that gets messed up every lack of efforts. Lack of caring. I think that's a better way of putting it as a lack of carrying like it. They're like, whatever. We'll have them at some point like deal with it. I think that's basically what it comes down to. All right. That is going to do it for our show. But before we get out of here, once again, a reminder that Lockdown has launched the first ever national sports 24-7 streaming channel on YouTube. But now it's also a

Starting point is 00:24:03 available on Amazon Fire TV and the free Fire TV channels app. Lockdown Sports Today is here for you 24-7 covering the top sports stories of the day with the local experts of Lockdown, plus our national shows covering every league. Find Lockdown Sports Today now available on the free Fire TV channels app. Thank you so much for joining us here on the Lockdown Marrists podcast for Kobe Pat. I'm Ty Dan Gonzalez. Be sure to give us a follow on Twitter at L-O-U-Norsors-You-can-Fallis. You can follow me at Ty Dane Gonzalez and Colby at CPAT 11.

Starting point is 00:24:32 that's CPAT 1-1. You can also find all that stuff in the description of this episode. Thank you again for making us your first. Listen and have yourself a beautiful baseball day. And we'll see you next time. Peace.

Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - Mailbag: Is This Really What the Mariners' Offense Is Gonna Look Like This Year?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.