Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - Mariners' Hitter and Pitcher of the Year

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

Hosts Ty Dane Gonzalez and Colby Patnode wrap up their season awards with the Mariners' 2021 hitter and pitcher of the year and also tell you why not to concern yourself with the amount of money Seattle spends this winter.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.BetOnline AGThere is only 1 place that has you covered and 1 place we trust. Betonline.ag! Sign up today for a free account at betonline.ag and use that promocode: LOCKEDON for your 50% welcome bonus. 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.

You are Locked-on Mariners, your daily Seattle Mariners podcast, part of the Locked-on Podcast Network, your team every day. Welcome to Locked-on Mariners, your home for Daily Seattle Mariner's News and Analysis. Thank you so much for making us your first listen of the day. We are free and available on all platforms, and we are brought to you today by Spotify Green Room. Download the Spotify Green Room app and find one of our locked-on rooms. Today is Friday, October 8th, 2021. Happy weekend.

I am your host, Tidey and Gonzalez. Join, as always, by my co-host, Colby Patnode. Follow us on Twitter at L-O-U-U-U-N-Rerner. You can follow me at Dane Gonzalez. That's D-A-N-Z-L-Z and Colby at C-P-E-P-A-T-1. Be sure to also check out our Patreon where we talk about the Mariners even more. Also get into some non-baseball talk.

twice a week. Visit patreon.com forward slash control of zone for more information on that. On today's episode of Lockdown, Mariners, we're wrapping up our season awards for the 2021 Mariners. Going to talk hitter of the year and pitcher of the year should be a fun one. Also going to talk more about Jerry DePoto's comments in his end of season press conference yesterday. If you like what you hear, give the show a follow or subscribe wherever you're listening to this week.

Greatly appreciate it. Colby, this offense, it was able to do enough for the most part, at least in 90 games to win 90 games. But overall, it was not super great. Only a few pretty consistent hitters in this lineup. The rest, you were just banking on one or two to pop every now and then. But let's talk hitter of the year. Who do you have as the best hitter on the Seattle Mariners for the 2021 season? Ty Prance, next topic.

Yes. It really is that cut and draw. It really, yeah, it's pretty simple, right? I mean, it's like, I know we're supposed to have, like, you know, we're supposed to talk over the candidates and we're supposed to like maybe tease some other, like, oh, I'm thinking of somebody like, I'm going to surprise you with this pick, but that would be stupid and a waste of everybody's time. It's Ty France.

Tai France is the best hitter. Yeah. Aside from the month of May where he was playing on like a. half fractured wrist. The dude was incredible. I think he hit like 280 every other month at least. Like September was his worst month and he was still hitting like 280 with a 340 on base. Like what are we talking about here?

It's easy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's very easy. I mean, the guy this year 291, 368, 445, 18 home runs, 73 RVI. He was a 3.5-1 player by Fangraph standards, 129 WRC. plus i saw a tweet earlier i'm going to try to bring this up now that i'm thinking about it let's right here for you type friends had a higher w rc plus then randy rosarena jd martinez jade marines jared

walsh salvador prez jose a brayu josh donaldson christ bryant nelson cruz michael brantley manny machado bo bachette yon mancata tim anderson uh pretty much everybody who would uh who would uh shock uh people yeah and by the way his w rc plus was one percent lower than zander bogarts and hose al tuve and only two percent lower than marcus simian so that's uh that's incredible man that's that's a list right there that's a list uh and i mean he was only two he was two points off of uh mooky bets as well yeah like that's uh tie france is a very good baseball player surprise surprise um and he added some defense on top of that at first base. I mean,

the guy is just all around very valuable for you right now. And yeah, you know, he didn't exactly get to that 300 benchmark. Got to 291. But this is a guy that I think is only getting started. I think you're going to see him hit over 300 quite a few times in his career.

Maybe even compete for a batting title at one point. The guy is just that good at hitting. And honestly, if he didn't get hurt, he may have competed for that batting title this year with how low, you know, batting averages were in general. He was just downright

awesome this year. Yeah, I think you're also going to see his home run total go up. He had 18 this year. He's more of a hitter than he is a, you know, a Hulkane, Luke Boyt type of 35 home run. First baseman. He's more of a, you know, use the whole field, doubles, that type of guy. But I still

think there's, I think he's going to have, oh, year or two where he hits 30. And you saw him, you know, go into these little runs where he was sitting for a lot of power. But I don't think he's ever going to sacrifice, you know, his contact and his, you know, line drive approach to hit more home runs. But sorry, I still think if we go through the league or after he goes through the league again, he's going to be able to hit, you know, 25, 30 home runs on a fairly regular basis. But, yeah, there's more power to come. And you talk about the batting title, you know, Yulee Gereal won it this year in the American League with a 319 batting average.

So, yeah, a healthy tie france all year doesn't have that awful May. He's probably pretty darn close to that mark. He's on a nice little upward trend here. And, you know, the thing is, too, he had all this production without really being in a favorable position in the lineup for most of the year as well, one that doesn't really, you know, that didn't really take advantage of his biggest strengths. It pushed him down the lineup. He got, you know, the fourth most at-bats on the team for the most part, you know, in terms of lineup construction.

Let's see how it all played out in terms of the numbers real quick. I'm going to pull those up right now in terms of played appearances. Ty France, yeah, was fourth among Mariners' hitters in played appearances this year. Mitch Hanager led the team, 691, J. J. P. Crawford, 687, Cal Cesar 670, Ty France, 650. You got 37 less played appearances than J.P. Crawford. There's a pretty big issue with that. Yeah, it needs to, well, it needed to change.

And, you know, towards the end of the year, we saw him in the hitting second, which is probably where he should have been, you know, all along. But, yeah, I feel like that they're going to build a lineup around him that's going to allow him to do even more damage with the, uh, with the type of, uh, hitter that he is. Um, but yeah, it's, it's type of France. He's almost he's 9% better than the second guy on the list who's Mitch Hanager. Um, and Mitch Hanager was 11 points higher than the guy who was third on the

list in terms of WRC, WRC plus. Um, so yeah, really first place is tie France. It's not close. Second place is probably Mitch Hanager. I don't think it's close. And I mean, the real debate starts at third place. By WRC Plus, that was Jake Freely. I'm going to call it BS to that. It's probably Crawford, right? JP? Yeah, yeah, it's got to be J.P. Crawford.

And then Kyle Seeger after that. The thing with Seeger over, Terence. Seeger had 99 WRC Plus. Terence had a 101. Where is Terence? on this 101. Yeah. Turence hit 243,

299, 431. Seeger hit 212, 285, 438. Yeah. And the funny thing too, right? Everyone points to Cal Ceger's home runs, the 35 home runs, all the RBI that he drove in. Ty France had a higher slugging percentage

than Cal Cigar this year. 445 to 438. and of course had him for 30 points of WRC plus this year as well. Ty France led the team in WRC Plus and he only struck out 16.3% of the time. That is also the lowest strikeout rate of any regular Mariners hitter in that lineup as well. And on top of that, he's also walking 7.1% of the time. That's solid. you know, it's not fantastic, but

dude gets on base. He matched, funny enough, he matched his on base mark from 2020. Exactly. 368 in 2020 and 368 again. This year, the guy is just an overall great presence at the plate.

Whether, you know, he's a threat to go deep. He's a threat to foot one in the gap. He's a threat to just get on base and work walks and, you know, bring your pitch count up and just wear you out. He is just I mean you've got to be absolutely thrilled with everything that you saw from Thai France this year and the fact that he's only 27 years old has to be even more encouraging

because I mean the guy is only trending upwards so the guy is only figuring it out just now this was his first full season at the major league level he had played 69 games in 2019 nice and 43 games in 2020 and this year played 150 52 games. And again, you mentioned the wrist injury. He only missed 10 games from that. He, I mean, no one had a better year than Thai France on the Seattle Mariners this year. He's basically Yuley Gurriel. And, you know, that's where he is right now. And Mariner fans will tell you all about Yurie Grieel and how good of a hitter he is. So, yeah, that's where he's starting at. And again, you know, that's all he ever is.

That's a really good player. You're in good shape. But I think there's another, I think there's another step or two that he can take, particularly in the power department. So I would imagine, I don't want to say I'd be shocked if he never wins a batting title because, I mean, A, who cares and B, there's a lot of things that go into that. But he's going to be hovering around 300, you know, somewhere in the 280 to 300 range for the next five, six years.

I have very little doubt about that, assuming he stays healthy, which, you know, so far so good. Yeah, yeah, off to a great start in his young career right now. And, you know, only one way to go, but up for him, I believe. So we're going to continue the awards at the end of the show by doing our pitcher of the year. But before that, we're going to talk about Jerry DePoto's comments at his end of season press conference. First, want to remind you this episode of Lockdown Mariners, is brought to you by Bilt Bar. Don't you hate it when you're out and about hunger strikes, but the only convenient options are

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You only have 4 to 5 grams of sugar and 45 grams net carbs and all the flavors are amazing, tasty, and most importantly, healthy. Go to Bilt.com and use promo code Locked 15 and you'll get 15% off your order. That's LOC, KED 15% off your order at Bilt.com. You're listening to Locked on Mariners. Thank you again for making us your first listen of the day. every day. We are free and available on all platforms. We will talk about our pitcher of the year later on in the show. But right now we're going to talk Jerry DePoto's comments in his end-the-season press conference. He talked a lot about the off-season reflected back on the 2021 team. We already talked about what he said about Kyle Seeger on Mike Salk show yesterday and a little bit about what he talked about in the press conference as well.

but we're going to get into some of the like the payroll stuff that he talked about because he did he was asked about payroll and that's been a huge topic here obviously you know last year he had said that he expected to be able to spend some money and then it turned out that you know nothing officially came out he never confirmed nor deny this nor would he uh but um you know we we had heard rumblings and it seemed pretty clear just judging by the mariner's actions uh speaking louder than words that uh john stan the owner of the Mariners kind of pulled the rug out from underneath Jerry and didn't allow him the the payroll flexibility that he thought he was going to have and so now you know fans of course have been concerned about that happening again this year of course you know last year we had heard that john stanton's plan was basically let's see how 2021 plays out and then based on that will determine whether or not to spend well the mariner's just won 90 games so you pretty much you have other choice but to spend. There's no other way to sell it to this fan base to the players than to invest further into this team and asked outright about whether he was going to get a

significant uptick and payroll. Jerry DePoto responded simply, yes. So Colby, I know some fans out there are a little concerned about what that can mean since he didn't specifically get into the numbers. There's been memes about like, oh, it's only $5 million. or $10 million or $15 million extra. You and I expect that that number is going to be pretty higher than that. Obviously, not going to probably not going to go up all the way to the mark that they set at when they had Canoe, Cruz, Seeger, Iwacoma, Felix on the books. But we feel pretty confident that they're going to spend some decent amount of money this offseason, right? Oh, yeah.

You know, it seems worth clarifying. I believe somebody asked a clarifying question on this. They asked if Depoto was going to have significantly more money than this year's payroll. And this year's payroll ended at about 80 to 85 million when all was said and done. And Jerry said yes to that. But we have to remember that right now, Seattle, only has $32 million on the books guaranteed right now. So what that means is after ARB and after, you know,

arbitration and paying all the minimum guys or whatever, you're, you're only at about $55-ish million. So to add significant payroll to this year's payroll, which was 85, to even get back to that, they need to spend $30 million. Jerry says they're going to add significantly to that.

now we don't know what that number is, but let's assume it's at least, I mean, 30 million. Does that seem fair? You and I for our off-season plan that we do every year, you and I have kind of set our benchmark to 130 million. That's kind of our limit. So I think that's probably where they get to in terms of overall payroll by the end of the off-season at most. Right. So you're looking at like roughly 100 million. And that's that's before you have to pay, you know, Jared Kellnick is $600,000. And that's before you pay Mitch Hanigar, his, you know, what, at $6 million, whatever, he gets an arbitration.

But yeah, it's, it's going to be pretty significant. You know, there's not, there's not really a player that's going to be off limits in terms of, you know, oh, well, we just, we just can't afford to do. that like it was in 2018. But you still have to be smart with that. You know, you can't just say, oh, I have $100 million. I'm just going to go give $40 million of it to Marcus Simeon because I really want him. It's like, well, you just outpaid the market by $15 million. You can overpay a little bit, but you can't just keep overpaying for guys. So you have to be careful with that. So it's going to be interesting to see how Mariner fans react. We'll probably never know exactly how much they have to spend because Jerry's not going to come out and say it. Neither is John Stanton.

And we don't really need. It's not information we need to know. And it's not information that other ball clubs need to know. So we're probably never going to know the exact number. And we don't need to. But suffice to say, the Mariners are going to have lots of money to spend. And, you know, they're going to be able to be in the discussion for just about anybody who's interested in signing with them. My advice to to Mariners fans is to, you know, dream big, but also dream realistically.

because again this is a two-way street and convincing players takes a lot to sign and you know to sign and you know not every player is going to want to sign with you and that may not even have anything to do with your ball club it might just be the location it might just be the circumstance guys you know some guys want to just stay on the east coast some guys have a you know particular set of teams that they want to play with and obviously you know some of the big names like the max scherzer's all the older veterans are probably going to want to go to a Yankees to a Red Sox to the Padres to the Dodgers

and throwing exuberant amounts of money towards them to instead sign with you it's not the smart way to go about it. You can build a great team a team that is complimentary to what you have already built without

you know getting to a specific number you know I've used this example on our Patreon show that you know if you if you were to sign Marcus Simeon

or and trade for Jose Ramirez and again this is just really out there but think about the quality of player there you're getting two you know MVP candidates for $43 million and some prospects give or take you know

Simeon's probably going to make like 30 million AEV on his next contract Jose Ramirez is only do 13 million this this season so you would be trading for that and I mean look at the quality of player you're getting and I've seen people say

well why not just throw 40 million dollars at Max Scherzer well again one that doesn't even guarantee that you're going to get him and that's not even probably what he's going to end up getting he might push for that $45 million range that Trevor Bauer got

but and two you know why not get two perennial MVP candidates than an older starting pitcher. It's still really, really good, but you get what I'm saying? Don't just spend money for the sake of spending money.

It's just that's not the smart way to do business here. And the Mariners, it doesn't matter how much money they spend in the end. As long as they get really good players that compliment what they have already built, the rest does not matter. I know a lot of people out there,

a lot of Mariners fans out there are just like, well, they need to spend money. If they don't spend money, they're cheap. Well, they're going to spend money, but they're going to spend money the way that they want to. And if they don't exactly get to 130 or 140 million or whatever it is, doesn't matter as long as they build a great team. I feel like that's such a simple thing that doesn't even need to be explained, but has to be because of just where this fan base really is right now, mindset-wise, with just to put us comments and everything. Yeah, I've just seen some really silly takes online about they have to spend this exact dollar figure amount or I'm going to be mad.

It's okay. Yeah. This team is going to be better next season with all the flexibility that it has. With all the flexibility that Jerry Depoto has, baseball America's ranked this farm system the best in baseball. they have so many guys that they can potentially trade from from that and still be well off in the farm and also uh and also you know have plenty of money to play with as well as as as we've talked about so uh should be a fun off season like we've teased and we're going to be doing a lot of off season stuff we're going to be starting that next week should be a lot of fun uh but we're going to wrap up our season awards here with pitcher of the year in just a moment but real quick want to remind you this episode of lockdown mariners is brought to you by betonline.a g we're back in Better than ever. All eyes are on the gridiron as teams are back on to start another football season and as always, BetOnline is your

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All right. So our season awards are coming to an end now. Thank you again for making us your first listen of the day every day and following us as we do these season awards. If you have missed an episode or missed some of the season awards that we've done, we won't spoil those for you. go back and check out the last few episodes from this week. If you missed any, to hear our picks for those.

We did Surprise Player of the Year. We did Rookie of the Year. We did Defender of the Year. We did Play of the Year, Game of the Year, reliever of the Year. A lot of fun discussions on that. Go check that out on Locked on Mariner's wherever you get your podcast. So let's talk about Pitcher of the Year.

Obviously, this is going to be a starting pitcher. And there's a few options. we could talk about. I think the answer is ultimately pretty clear, just as it was with Thai France. But, you know, we have Marco Gonzalez who, who turned things around in the second half.

We have Tyler Anderson who came over and was very consistent for this team, aside from a couple starts against the Angels, of course. Usa Kikuchi, obviously had a great first half, made the all-star team, Logan Gilbert, you know, had some ups and downs, but started to figure things out towards the end there

and came up in some pretty, big ways. And then of course, Chris Flexen, who the team signed out of the KBO last year, had a brilliant season. Colby, who do you want to talk about here? Who's your pitcher of the year? Yeah. It's probably got to be Chris Flexen. The just overall consistency, you know, he didn't miss a start. He gave you a ton of innings. He was top 10 innings pitch this year. Just overall rock solid. Not too many big hiccups. Obviously, he had the horrendous start against the Padres early in the year.

But really, other than that, it's tough to remember a start where he was legitimately awful. Even when he didn't have his best stuff, he managed to work his way through the lineup a couple times every time out. It was just consistently solid, nothing spectacular. He finished the year as a three-win pitcher, which is pretty good. you know the 389 FIP 361ERA he was probably just the most consistent

from top to bottom he could make an argument for Logan Gilbert I just I feel like you know you got 60 more innings out of Flexen and Flexson if we were doing most exciting pitcher

I would go Gilbert but yeah I mean Gilbert had a better had a better FIP and X FIP than Chris Flexen despite having an ERA a full run higher. And for Gilbert to make seven fewer starts than Flexen

and still end up at 2.2 F.4 to Chris Flexens 3.0 is pretty impressive. But again, just from the start of the year to the end, Chris Flexen was your best pitcher. Probably tells you all you need to know about, you know, where the Mariners rotation sits, that Flexen was the best guy. But hey, you know, it is what it is. And he showed up and he produced right away.

And he was, you know, just from start to finish, he was the best pitcher in the Mariners rotation. It honestly couldn't have gone really any better in terms of Flexim's production, you know, getting him out of the KBO had struggled in his limited action in Major League Baseball and, you know, in the Mets organization. But comes over and, you know, obviously figured some things out in Korea. and the big knock on him this year was that he was you know better at home than he was away well towards the end of the season he kind of washed that away a little bit he was he finished pretty well on the road all things considered relative to his

ability of course a 452 on the road compared to a 335 FIP at home he had a 659K per 9 on the road just walked 2.3 guys printed 9. He, yeah, he was, he was pretty solid. Overall for flex in this year, you mentioned the earnings 179.2 innings pitch, 6.26 Ks per 9, obviously not going to strike out a ton of guys, two walks per nine. Interesting enough, you know, later on, the later that we got into the season, we started seeing the velocity tick up a bit. We saw him hitting 95 fairly consistently at times.

And that was pretty fun. 361 ERA overall and then the 389 FIP as well and you mentioned the 3F4 that he accumulated on the year. He and that was in 31 starts as well and this this is a team that had a lot of injuries in the rotation. There was a time where they were having to run bullpen days. They were having to do all that.

And flexin was that one constant throughout the year. And I just, for that reason, alone. I just can't imagine giving this award to anyone else. And like I said, you know, Gilbert, if we were doing most exciting pitcher, the answer would absolutely be Gilbert and, you know, even most talented pitcher, right? Because look, he's the guy that has all the strikeouts. You know, he can do all the things that you see from a lot of the top pitchers in this league. But there were some, you know, legitimate concerns there as well. Flex and or Gilbert rather was unable.

to, you know, really have a secondary or tertiary option in his repertoire, one that was consistent. It was a lot of the fastball, especially towards the end of the season. And of course, he made that work for him later on in the season. But, you know, hopefully you can see more growth. That's just, for me, with Gilbert, I feel like he was a little bit lucky because he just really had one pitch to throw. And obviously, it's a very good pitch that if he can locate it, especially at the top of the zone. but, yeah, Flexen was just more diverse in his repertoire and more consistent in general over the course of the year and really, you know, kept this thing afloat for them and was able to give them at least a chance to win every fifth day.

And that's something that you couldn't really rely upon with a lot of these guys for most of the year. So, yeah. Chris Flexon. Flexon. Yeah, Flexon went five or more innings in. all but three starts this year. So he went four innings against the Angels on April 30th, gave up three earned runs.

The disaster in San Diego, he went one and two-third, gave up eight earned runs. And then after that on May 21st, you have to go all the way down to July 27th, where he gave up seven earned runs and four innings. And then that was it, five innings or more in every single start.

just consistent really again two horrific starts thrown in there but other than that he was just consistently good a lot of five innings you know one earned

a lot of six innings three earned type of starts and it all at the end of the year comes out to a pretty good and successful season for Chris Flexon yep it was really fun to watch for him and this team was really fun to watch

and now we are pretty much officially saying buy to this team after completing these rewards. We're of course going to reflect back on them here and there throughout the off season, but we're going to be shifting our attention towards the offseason starting next week. So that's going to do it for today's show. Thank you so much for joining us here on Lockdown Mariners for Colby Fat Note. I'm Taday and Gonzalez. Be sure to give us a follow on Twitter at L0 underscore Mariners. You can follow me at Dane Gonzalez. That's Danez L-A-N-Z and Colby at C-P-E-E-E-N-1. You can also find all

that stuff in the description of this episode. Thank you again for making Lockdown Mariner's. Your first listen of the day. Every day will be back next week as we fully make our transition into off-season mode. But now make your second listen of the day, Lockdown MLB, where Paul Francis Sullivan, and please call him Sully brings you his unique perspective on the major league's president pass. It's free and available on all platforms.

Have yourself a beautiful baseball day and a beautiful baseball weekend. And we'll see you next week. Peace. Thank you.