Mariners 4, Blue Jays 0: Just The Two Runs All Weekend, Then

 

oh Vladdy

Despite possibly tipping his pitches (in that swings on his off-speed/breaking stuff were suspiciously few and far between), Trey Yesavage had a totally solid day: two earned runs (plus an unearned one, on account of Ernie Clement just having a strange season in the field so far) on three hits, two walks, and seven strikeouts is very much the kind of thing you'd want out of any start, right? And yet we remained sunk (nautical reference [Mariners]). Oh, these Blue Jays bats! What is to be done! To be fair, day-on-day, we increased our total number of hits from "one" to "three," and baserunners from "one" to "five," so we are trending in the right direction, a little? Vladdy, for his part, went one-for-three with a double and a walk, which you'll always take. How is his OBP still .348 despite the agreed-upon calamity of his first half? That's top fifty, and higher than four of his seven previous seasons. You really do miss the slugging when it isn't there, though; you really, really do (I'm sure Vladdy would be among the first to note this). On the absence of slugging, actually: remember how switch-hitting Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh hit sixty home runs last year, and put up a .948 OPS (it's so convenient that OPS scales perfectly to post-secondary percentage grades, and so you just glance at a .948 OPS and be like "ooh, A+")? This year his OPS is down almost four hundred points (oh no, that's a "D") on account of his slugging dropping nearly in half, and also on account of how his OBP is down by nearly a hundred, too. Vladdy's poor showing this year has him down to roughly a league-average hitter, whereas Raleigh's has his batting value at around two-thirds of league average (obviously the expectations are far, far different for catchers and first-basemen, though even accounting for that, by both bWAR and fWAR [which handles catchers better on account of framing data], Raleigh's value so far this year is lower than Vladdy's: -0.1/0.4 to 0.8/0.9). Tough times. 

Dropping two of the first three games on a nine-game west-coast road-trip is ungreat, I grant you, but would you believe that the Texas Rangers, whomst we presently pursue for the final Wild Card spot, also lost two this weekend? In fact their most recent two, much like ourselves? And that, despite sitting an increasingly shabby-seeming six games below .500, we are but three out of that Rangers-held spot? Could be worse! And it might be soon! Who knows! The Giants, though, who are next up for us, find themselves in a mess far exceeding our own, and so the hope here is that we can maybe grab a couple, especially with Gausman and Cease pitching the first and third games respectively. Who is pitching game two? It's a mystery! But probably Spencer Miles and Patrick Corbin in some bullpen-rich configuration that could be pretty interesting (to me). 

KS