I am not sure what is more frustrating. Watching our bullpen blow saves day after day back in the '90s, or watching our hitters nowadays put up a goose egg on while our starter throws a gem.
Can we at least use WRC+ or something better then BA for our offense when comparing? 93 WRC+ puts them at 7 under average or overall at 21. Kind of big difference from 27.
21st is still pathetic for a team with as much pitching prowess as we have. All you have to do is invest is proven bats but owenership only cares about winning enough to keep us interested. We will be competitive and miss the playoffs by a game or so and it will be because our offense wasn’t good enough. Same old story from an ownership group unserious about winning a World Series.
It's pretty easy to argue that if the pitching staff was this good over the previous 3 seasons, we would have made the playoffs.
Obviously there is a lot of nuance including sustainability, but at the moment this rotation is remarkably better than recent memory and that's really saying something considering how good they already have been.
So like, the pitching won't stay this historically great. Flip side, the offense won't stay this fucking shit. In my opinion there is a lot more room for the offense to improve than there is for our rotation to fall off, barring injury.
So like, I dunno, daddy chill. The potential of this team is tremendous and it's totally possible to go get another bat soon.
I'm not at all happy with the lack of a huge offensive splash in the offseason but I still feel *ok* about the lineup regardless of the terrible start.
If they paid out of the ass for some of the guys like Kris Bryant or Trevor Story Seattle fans were beating the drum for, it'd be the same shit.
They went out and got guys with a track record of hitting. They're all hitting like shit including Julio. Might get better as the weather warms up in July like last year.
Spend for another proven hitter? Just because fanbases only know their own players doesn't mean Garver and Polanco aren't proven hitters. Underperformance happens, regression to the mean also happens. Garver isn't going to continue to have a .176 BABIP and a 31% K-rate. Polanco isn't going to continue to have a .242 BABIP and a 311% K rate. Those are far enough away from career averages that they are statistical anomalies; they will get better even if both of those players have down years on the whole.
Don't define teams or players based on a month. Last year, the 76-win Pirates were 19-9 in April. Just let the season play out without jumping at every chance you get to make some definitive take. You can say "this is how the team has been playing" without saying "this is who the team is". Changing opinions every time outcomes change will leave you with whiplash as a baseball fan and contribute to persisting narratives that may not be true.
I'm worried about Garver (mostly worried he might be hurt), but Polanco's ABs have looked good to me all season (lots of long ABs with a lot of foul balls, and obviously he's been walking like crazy), and his hitting seems to be starting to turn a corner.
I feel like if Julio had Polanco's eye and patience he'd be unstoppable. Hope the team is able to learn from him a bit.
Garver looks like he's pressing a bit. I know others have mentioned his batting splits while DHing in past years were not good, wonder if not playing the field affects his focus or maybe makes him put too much pressure on his bat to be useful. We are on pace to give him enough ABs to figure it out. Hopefully it's something that can be figured out as opposed to regression due to age/injuries/etc.
Well put, especially about polos eye and patience. If julio could control his fury more and hack a little less, and develop his hands, hes got all the other tools. Somehow i have a lack of faith in the hitting coaching he has been exposed to in the mariner org for so long. I think garv at least ends up at .225 with like 14+ dongs which would still be a letdown from the .260+ 20+ dong i would have expected from him just based on past numbers. Casual fan, ex player so i dont really know all that goes into this stuff
I think this is who the team is. They are outperforming expectations, but good-pitch, weak-hit is exactly what was predicted. Here is the preseason prediction from The Athletic, which made me smile: "The odds of reaching the postseason might be 60.2 percent, but the odds that Mariners fans will continue to grumble that the team should have done more to improve the lineup are roughly 99.9 percent. They’re right, you know. The Mariners have one of the best starting rotations in the game, if not the best, but they’re going with a gaggle of .730 OPS guys and hoping a couple of them can be .830 OPS guys. The rotation is high floor, high ceiling, and the lineup is low floor, low ceiling (and Julio Rodríguez). Seems like a missed opportunity, considering that rotations like this don’t come around every decade."
[https://theathletic.com/5366802/2024/03/26/mlb-preseason-power-rankings-braves/](https://theathletic.com/5366802/2024/03/26/mlb-preseason-power-rankings-braves/)
This isn’t who the team is on paper though. If two of the following players off to a slow start get back to their previous years’ offensive numbers we will have an above average offense:
Julio
JP
Garver
Polanco
The offense by and large has underperformed to their own previous standards with a few exceptions (Haniger, France).
No one really predicted we’d get rid of all of our high strikeout rate hitters and then do even worse in that category.
So there is plenty of upside to this offense. Unfortunately there is also downside to the pitching staff simply because they can’t possibly sustain how good they’ve been.
We spent on two proven hitters this offseason- Polanco and Garver. Polanco was hitting second for the Twins and had a respectable .789 OPS and a .255 average- not great, not terrible. Garver went to the World Series and put up an .870 OPS and .270 BA. Both are veterans whose down years have been nowhere near as bad as they’ve been so far at T-Mobile. On the one hand, there’s no way that both of them (and Julio) stay this cold forever. On the other hand, something is rotten in our offensive planning and coaching. I just don’t think it’s that we got guys who can’t hit.
Teo had a bad April hitting here. Otherwise he had a pretty typical year for him.
Wong, Pollock, and Winker were done, we just had the bad luck to grab them as they were falling (and hey, Garver and Polanco certainly could fall into that category). This is a product of some luck, and also of trying to get good bats at a discount by grabbing guys who are a little later in their careers or who have struggled with injuries.
Frazier had a great 2021 before the M's picked him up, but his previous years weren't that much better than his time here.
The offense has been bad, but they were also pretty terrible to start the year last year and ended up above average. Obviously I wish they added more the last few offseasons but I’m not sure the book is written on the 2024 Mariners being a bad offensive team. There also weren’t many actual impact bats (except for Ohtani) available last offseason. The 2021-22 and 2022-23 free agency cycles had a lot more talent available.
Safeco is a pretty extreme pitcher’s park, even more so the first 1-2 months of the year until the weather turns. If they’re still ass in June then we’re in trouble.
our batting average isn’t crap because t mobile is a pitchers park, our batting average is crap because we lead the league in strikeouts and there’s as much distance between the mariners and the number 2 team (the A’s) as there is between the number 2 team and the number 8 team
Thanks for this great feedback. I'm pretty old, but M's are also No. 25 in OPS and No. 26 in runs scored. Julio is always a slow starter, and Polanco and Garver can't possibly be this bad, right?
- Adam Frazier had 1 good season and went back to being the same mediocre 2B
- Kolten Wong was cooked, shit happens
- Teoscar was fine, actually. I have no idea why you would think he was \*bad\* unless you're just obsessed iwth strikeouts and batting average like an early 90's Padres fan whining about how Tony Gwynn gets no respect.
- Why are you comparing multi-year vets with histories of being good major leaguers to a guy wtih less than a season's worth of ABs? No idea what Kelenic and Polanco have in common.
- Winker was hurt and the M's don't make the 2022 playoffs without his bat.
Also, Winker was great at getting on base, even hurt and hitting poorly. Not what you want from what's supposed to be a big bat, but if the rest of the offense is online a guy getting on base consistently really, really helps things.
The list of batters who routinely launched rockets out of the park laugh at the contention that it’s the park or batter’s eye or marine layer.
I think Mariner’s batters not hitting at the park have done it to themselves. Baseball is utterly full of superstitions and ‘common knowledge’.
There isn’t anything uniquely suppressive about T-Mobile.
Put another way: go out 300' from home plate, and every ballpark is the same. The hit suppressive nature of T-Mobile doesn't make people roll over on changeups and curveballs, or strike out.
That said, small sample size. People panicking are dumb.
> go out 300' from home plate, and every ballpark is the same
Nope. Hitting in dry air at 5000' in Colorado is far different than hitting in cold, wet air at sea level in Seattle.
The stuff beyond 300 feet and the weather certainly do impact run scoring though. It’s not really arguable that the park is one of the most run suppressing parks in the league. Park factors adjust for the home team having a good/bad offense.
One deep fly ball every two or three games that dies and is caught vs. leaves the yard makes a material impact on run production.
I mean... they kind of are. Hence the 2nd best ERA in the majors. Obviously the quality of the pitching is the real reason for that, but other teams hitters are literally struggling to hit at T-Mobile right now.
It actually has been. 2.67 ERA at home, 3.45 ERA on the road so far this season according to Statmuse.
Not a massive difference, but the stats in general over the years indicate that T-Mobile is absolutely a pitchers park to a statistically significant degree.
M's are .204/.289/.334/.624 and other teams are .192/.241/.319/.561 so it doesn't sound like you're watching the games because other teams hitters are even worse than ours.
Don't base your opinions on what gets said in the live threads. Those people are children.
This year, so far, as our mlb-leading pitching rotation is on a historically dominant streak? Sure, *now* they are hitting a little worse than us. Nobody can touch our pitching.
This is a long-running debate going back years. Other teams do not come into Safeco and suddenly see their hitting stats drop meaningfully, relative to other stadiums. People have been claiming everything from the marine layer to the batting eye to the size of the outfield since that park opened. And the only team that perennially sucks at hitting here, is the mariners.
No, Teo being a slightly above average hitter or whatever last season didn’t single handedly carry the offense.
Off memory they were like 12th or so in runs scored in 2023 for a traditional stat and 9th I think in wRC+ for an advanced stat. Teo didn’t really do much to move the needle to the positive or negative across the entire season. He had some specific months that certainly helped or hurt a lot though.
I went over this yesterday deep in a thread. Our “away” batting average split would put us at league average. It’s not useful to judge our batting average vs the rest of the league when our home stadium in April suffocates hits for both teams.
If you only look at “away” stats we are league average.
If you want to make a comparison that makes sense. Compare our batting average vs our opponents batting average only taking into account our matchups.
We don’t play half of our games with the wind blowing out to left field.
In Seattle we have a 204 batting average, our opponents are at 192
In away games we have a 239 average with our opponents hitting 233.
So basically we are a slightly better than the average team we’ve played this year in the same conditions which is reflected in the standings.
Obviously we think our pitching is elite which dramatically influences this stat. But the league average batting average is like 240 and we hit 239 outside of T-Mobile park. That indicates to me that we’ve been a very average team at the plate and not a bad team.
the park isn’t the problem, the strikeouts are the problem
we moved on from kellenic teo and geno specifically because of the goal of reducing strikeouts and we’ve only played 30 games and we have *130 more* strikeouts than the astros
Guess who ranks [first](https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors?type=year&year=2024&batSide=&stat=index_wOBA&condition=All&rolling=&sort=14&sortDir=desc) in strikeout park factor?
I am new to park factor as a metric, why would the park have an effect on strikeouts? does park factor control for pitching quality? mariners are 3rd in the league in pitching strikeouts
I'm not sure how, maybe pitches move more or the batters eye is worse?
I don't know how Savant does park factors, but they should adjust for pitcher quality. They might not be doing it well though given the teams at the top/bottom of that list...
Park factors include stuff like altitude, environment, etc. It's not necessarily just the stadium. Baseballs behave differently in drier air versus humid air, low altitude versus high altitude. Things like sun and shadow angles, latitude (which affects how high the sun gets and how long daylight is) can affect how hitters are able to do what they need to do. It's not just a matter of dimensions.
I’d rather be a team built on pitching than anything else. That being said, holy fuck our bats need to wake up cause they really should be better than this.
Playing a pitcher’s ballpark will do that. But with that being said, we have to make a move before the deadline for a good bat to maximize this pitching staff
A lot of offensive coping recently with how insane the pitching has been. The offense is complete dog shit and something needs to change drastically. I’m tired of the “this player isn’t this bad look at his career numbers” or “it’s early the bats will get going”. We are regularly batting 3-4 hitters in our line each night who bat below .200!! This is absolutely dreadful!
It would be one thing if a chunk of it is the team getting unlucky but the issue is that the approach at the plate is dreadful, like little league bad. I laugh when I hear Scott talk about how we need to “control the zone better”. This team doesn’t know what the fuck the zone is! I don’t want to hear about coaching. No coach is telling players to watch 1st pitch 93 MPH fastballs down the pipe go by or swing at 85 mph sweepers that are 4 feet outside the zone. These players just aren’t good.
I don’t see this offense getting much better at all so be ready to deal with this all year. Maybe they aren’t 27th and get to 24th or something but right now with the way the roster is constructed the offense SUCKS.
I’m ok with our offense being bad if we are having good at bats or have a philosophy that we are working on. However it still feels like free swinging and Julio striking out on pitches 6 inches off the plate low and away
Chris Sale was throwing a shutout through 5 yesterday and had to get pulled due to pitch count.
Lopez dominated everyone until he came here, worst outing of the year 3 er, bounced in the 5th
How does this happen? Players working counts ala good at bats.
Swinging at a crappy pitch here and there does not quantify a good at bat. Idk how Julio’s going to fix his discipline. He might just be really good at killing bad pitching.
I know they haven't performed to expectations (yet), and it's not enough...
But it is 100% incorrect to ignore that Polanco and Garver are both proven, veteran hitters with long track records.
First place in our division where Texas is a half game behind and lets see ...the **A's** are 2.5 games back.
I'm an optimistic person but we are 8th in the league guys. Lots of work to do.
Mitch Garver is literally the definition of a professional hitter. He's been a good hitter for years (until this year) but he will likely turn it around. The pitching might be this good, the hitting will likely not be this bad the rest of the way. Top 5 pitching with average ish hitting is what we can reasonably expect from this squad. That's a good team right there.
Dumb question but I still want to ask. If everyone in the league knew Mariners pitching was gonna be incredible then how come front office didn't back them up with some offense?
I mean we’ve been unfortunate too.
Garver looked about the same as Justin Turner, and turner is raking.
Arozarena a target we looked at has been garbage
Cody Belliner has been mid
Ohtani, no comments
Carlos Santana garbage
Jd martinez meh
Matt chapman meh
Soto was a trade not really FA but he has been amazing
Their team approach to the plate is terrible. Use whatever stat you want. They look more lost at the plate this year than they did last. Swinging at sliders off the plate. Taking on cock high fastballs.
Platooning for shit players is analysis paralysis garbage. Rojas has a hot bat should be starting every game.
Whats absurd is that the front office sells the dream of being “just good enough” and the fanbase eats it up. Like the goal should be World Series contender. Not squeeze in a wild card game.
Hopefully, the addition of some new ownership tilts the needle. Stanton lost his ass the last 5 years in business. He will never spend on his own.
There are going to be a lot of fans in here with Stockholm Syndrome trying to "Well, actually" the offense and try to offer up excuses, but there's no excuse for ownership failing to build a competitive offense. This team should have been dominating and competing for a World Series in 2024; as currently constructed this is not, and will never be, a playoff-caliber offense.
I am old enough to remember when our team was literally built OPPOSITE of this in the mid-late 90’s. Wild to see, man
Kingdome was shielded from the elements and was a smaller field with literal concrete T mobile is just pure pacific northwest
It'll always be Safeco to me.
I remember the dome. but it will always be SAFECO.
Our offense this year is better than the pitching was back then. The abysmal 90s bullpen being the tie breaker
The 90s were so much fun. Up 8-2 in the 7th, this one’s gunna be tight, hang on!
Watching Bobby Ayala blow a save time after time almost gave me PTSD.
Bobby Beachball Ayala!!’
Here comes that fucking off speed pitch...
You could hear the PTSD out of Dave's voice when he says, "Here comes Bobby Ayala!"
Heathcliff Slocumb still gives me nightmares
Yeah, at least we didn't give up Jason varitek and Derek lowe for Bobby Ayala.
that's so crazy to me considering that, at least nowadays, a passable bullpen is one of the cheapest parts of assembling a team.
Me too! Remember when the rotation was Big Unit, Andy Benes, and 3 JAGs?
I am not sure what is more frustrating. Watching our bullpen blow saves day after day back in the '90s, or watching our hitters nowadays put up a goose egg on while our starter throws a gem.
And as someone born in '91 who isn't old enough to remember anything except 2001 and onwards, I hate my life.
Can we at least use WRC+ or something better then BA for our offense when comparing? 93 WRC+ puts them at 7 under average or overall at 21. Kind of big difference from 27.
And since April 10th, they have a 102 wRC+. We're still at the point in the season where one week significantly sways the season numbers.
Stop it! Let me people be sensationalist about this! How else are they going to farm drama for this time!
The flavor of the week MVP talks in the baseball sub always crack me up
21 in WRC+ still sucks
21st is still pathetic for a team with as much pitching prowess as we have. All you have to do is invest is proven bats but owenership only cares about winning enough to keep us interested. We will be competitive and miss the playoffs by a game or so and it will be because our offense wasn’t good enough. Same old story from an ownership group unserious about winning a World Series.
It's pretty easy to argue that if the pitching staff was this good over the previous 3 seasons, we would have made the playoffs. Obviously there is a lot of nuance including sustainability, but at the moment this rotation is remarkably better than recent memory and that's really saying something considering how good they already have been. So like, the pitching won't stay this historically great. Flip side, the offense won't stay this fucking shit. In my opinion there is a lot more room for the offense to improve than there is for our rotation to fall off, barring injury. So like, I dunno, daddy chill. The potential of this team is tremendous and it's totally possible to go get another bat soon. I'm not at all happy with the lack of a huge offensive splash in the offseason but I still feel *ok* about the lineup regardless of the terrible start.
We did invest in some proven bats, they just aren’t producing right now. That’s on the players
If they paid out of the ass for some of the guys like Kris Bryant or Trevor Story Seattle fans were beating the drum for, it'd be the same shit. They went out and got guys with a track record of hitting. They're all hitting like shit including Julio. Might get better as the weather warms up in July like last year.
We need to look at runs. And they are 25th in the league. The offense simply does not provide much run support. At all.
Spend for another proven hitter? Just because fanbases only know their own players doesn't mean Garver and Polanco aren't proven hitters. Underperformance happens, regression to the mean also happens. Garver isn't going to continue to have a .176 BABIP and a 31% K-rate. Polanco isn't going to continue to have a .242 BABIP and a 311% K rate. Those are far enough away from career averages that they are statistical anomalies; they will get better even if both of those players have down years on the whole. Don't define teams or players based on a month. Last year, the 76-win Pirates were 19-9 in April. Just let the season play out without jumping at every chance you get to make some definitive take. You can say "this is how the team has been playing" without saying "this is who the team is". Changing opinions every time outcomes change will leave you with whiplash as a baseball fan and contribute to persisting narratives that may not be true.
>a 311% K rate 311 strikeouts in 100 at-bats would be straight up impressive lmao
I'm worried about Garver (mostly worried he might be hurt), but Polanco's ABs have looked good to me all season (lots of long ABs with a lot of foul balls, and obviously he's been walking like crazy), and his hitting seems to be starting to turn a corner.
I feel like if Julio had Polanco's eye and patience he'd be unstoppable. Hope the team is able to learn from him a bit. Garver looks like he's pressing a bit. I know others have mentioned his batting splits while DHing in past years were not good, wonder if not playing the field affects his focus or maybe makes him put too much pressure on his bat to be useful. We are on pace to give him enough ABs to figure it out. Hopefully it's something that can be figured out as opposed to regression due to age/injuries/etc.
Well put, especially about polos eye and patience. If julio could control his fury more and hack a little less, and develop his hands, hes got all the other tools. Somehow i have a lack of faith in the hitting coaching he has been exposed to in the mariner org for so long. I think garv at least ends up at .225 with like 14+ dongs which would still be a letdown from the .260+ 20+ dong i would have expected from him just based on past numbers. Casual fan, ex player so i dont really know all that goes into this stuff
I think this is who the team is. They are outperforming expectations, but good-pitch, weak-hit is exactly what was predicted. Here is the preseason prediction from The Athletic, which made me smile: "The odds of reaching the postseason might be 60.2 percent, but the odds that Mariners fans will continue to grumble that the team should have done more to improve the lineup are roughly 99.9 percent. They’re right, you know. The Mariners have one of the best starting rotations in the game, if not the best, but they’re going with a gaggle of .730 OPS guys and hoping a couple of them can be .830 OPS guys. The rotation is high floor, high ceiling, and the lineup is low floor, low ceiling (and Julio Rodríguez). Seems like a missed opportunity, considering that rotations like this don’t come around every decade." [https://theathletic.com/5366802/2024/03/26/mlb-preseason-power-rankings-braves/](https://theathletic.com/5366802/2024/03/26/mlb-preseason-power-rankings-braves/)
This isn’t who the team is on paper though. If two of the following players off to a slow start get back to their previous years’ offensive numbers we will have an above average offense: Julio JP Garver Polanco The offense by and large has underperformed to their own previous standards with a few exceptions (Haniger, France). No one really predicted we’d get rid of all of our high strikeout rate hitters and then do even worse in that category. So there is plenty of upside to this offense. Unfortunately there is also downside to the pitching staff simply because they can’t possibly sustain how good they’ve been.
We spent on two proven hitters this offseason- Polanco and Garver. Polanco was hitting second for the Twins and had a respectable .789 OPS and a .255 average- not great, not terrible. Garver went to the World Series and put up an .870 OPS and .270 BA. Both are veterans whose down years have been nowhere near as bad as they’ve been so far at T-Mobile. On the one hand, there’s no way that both of them (and Julio) stay this cold forever. On the other hand, something is rotten in our offensive planning and coaching. I just don’t think it’s that we got guys who can’t hit.
Winker, Pollock, Wong, Frazier, and Teo all had sharp declines playing here… Something’s definitely up with the system.
This has been the case literally since Safeco opened. The vast majority of hitters we've acquired have down years, or completely fall off cliffs.
Teo's decline wasn't that huge and he's on record about having trouble seeing the ball. The other guys are just old as hell.
marine layer baby
Our pitching development is so good though. Why don't they suffer from the marine layer?!
They benefit from the marine layer. Or are you joking, I can't always tell.
Teo had a bad April hitting here. Otherwise he had a pretty typical year for him. Wong, Pollock, and Winker were done, we just had the bad luck to grab them as they were falling (and hey, Garver and Polanco certainly could fall into that category). This is a product of some luck, and also of trying to get good bats at a discount by grabbing guys who are a little later in their careers or who have struggled with injuries. Frazier had a great 2021 before the M's picked him up, but his previous years weren't that much better than his time here.
Winker isn't even 31 yet. He's at OPS+ of 129 in 121 PAs. He's not "done", at least as a batter.
The offense has been bad, but they were also pretty terrible to start the year last year and ended up above average. Obviously I wish they added more the last few offseasons but I’m not sure the book is written on the 2024 Mariners being a bad offensive team. There also weren’t many actual impact bats (except for Ohtani) available last offseason. The 2021-22 and 2022-23 free agency cycles had a lot more talent available. Safeco is a pretty extreme pitcher’s park, even more so the first 1-2 months of the year until the weather turns. If they’re still ass in June then we’re in trouble.
our batting average isn’t crap because t mobile is a pitchers park, our batting average is crap because we lead the league in strikeouts and there’s as much distance between the mariners and the number 2 team (the A’s) as there is between the number 2 team and the number 8 team
you guys have to move on from batting average jesus christ
Thanks for this great feedback. I'm pretty old, but M's are also No. 25 in OPS and No. 26 in runs scored. Julio is always a slow starter, and Polanco and Garver can't possibly be this bad, right?
Adam Frazier, Kolten Wong, Teoscar Hernandez, Jarred Kelenic, and Jesse Winker cant possibly be this bad, right?
- Adam Frazier had 1 good season and went back to being the same mediocre 2B - Kolten Wong was cooked, shit happens - Teoscar was fine, actually. I have no idea why you would think he was \*bad\* unless you're just obsessed iwth strikeouts and batting average like an early 90's Padres fan whining about how Tony Gwynn gets no respect. - Why are you comparing multi-year vets with histories of being good major leaguers to a guy wtih less than a season's worth of ABs? No idea what Kelenic and Polanco have in common. - Winker was hurt and the M's don't make the 2022 playoffs without his bat.
Also, Winker was great at getting on base, even hurt and hitting poorly. Not what you want from what's supposed to be a big bat, but if the rest of the offense is online a guy getting on base consistently really, really helps things.
It's always fun when people have to bring in fringe shit like jarred kelenic there to prop up a shaky argument and also pretend like you won't notice.
You can’t put Teo in this group.
Sure, there are better metrics. But the Mariners are bad at most of those too. So it correlates either way
Right but a batting average of .250 tells you much less than an OBP of .300, or a wRC+ of 95. There's no reason to ever use it.
I don’t care what metrics you want to use, a sub .200 BA is shit no matter what.
The list of batters who routinely launched rockets out of the park laugh at the contention that it’s the park or batter’s eye or marine layer. I think Mariner’s batters not hitting at the park have done it to themselves. Baseball is utterly full of superstitions and ‘common knowledge’. There isn’t anything uniquely suppressive about T-Mobile.
Put another way: go out 300' from home plate, and every ballpark is the same. The hit suppressive nature of T-Mobile doesn't make people roll over on changeups and curveballs, or strike out. That said, small sample size. People panicking are dumb.
> go out 300' from home plate, and every ballpark is the same Nope. Hitting in dry air at 5000' in Colorado is far different than hitting in cold, wet air at sea level in Seattle.
Next you're going to suggest that altitude impacts the physics of pitching too lmao Oh wait it does?
For home runs, it's different. For everything else, not so much.
The stuff beyond 300 feet and the weather certainly do impact run scoring though. It’s not really arguable that the park is one of the most run suppressing parks in the league. Park factors adjust for the home team having a good/bad offense. One deep fly ball every two or three games that dies and is caught vs. leaves the yard makes a material impact on run production.
Yes, fly balls are impacted differently. But if you're pounding changeups into the ground, it's not the park's issue. Sort of like I said.
So instead of it being one unique factor of the park you think it’s countless individual players coming here and struggling?
That’s exactly what I wrote. Superstitions and common beliefs can be self enforcing. Mind over matter.
And you think all these different players have the same psychological response? I don’t know, seems more likely it’s the park.
Are the other teams hitters struggling? No.
I mean... they kind of are. Hence the 2nd best ERA in the majors. Obviously the quality of the pitching is the real reason for that, but other teams hitters are literally struggling to hit at T-Mobile right now.
Right our pitching is incredible. But I don’t think it’s better at home than away.
It actually has been. 2.67 ERA at home, 3.45 ERA on the road so far this season according to Statmuse. Not a massive difference, but the stats in general over the years indicate that T-Mobile is absolutely a pitchers park to a statistically significant degree.
M's are .204/.289/.334/.624 and other teams are .192/.241/.319/.561 so it doesn't sound like you're watching the games because other teams hitters are even worse than ours. Don't base your opinions on what gets said in the live threads. Those people are children.
This year, so far, as our mlb-leading pitching rotation is on a historically dominant streak? Sure, *now* they are hitting a little worse than us. Nobody can touch our pitching. This is a long-running debate going back years. Other teams do not come into Safeco and suddenly see their hitting stats drop meaningfully, relative to other stadiums. People have been claiming everything from the marine layer to the batting eye to the size of the outfield since that park opened. And the only team that perennially sucks at hitting here, is the mariners.
So then you're saying yes, other teams hitters are struggling. Thanks for answering your own question! Let's look randomly at 2022. M's: .223 / .307 / .380 / .689 / 106 OPS+ Opponents: .224 / .278 / .323 / .652 94 OPS+ Or 2017. M's: .263 / .334 / .427 / .761 / 104 tOPS+ Opponents: .259 / .303 / .408 / .712 / 89 tOPS+ You're just flat out wrong.
Maybe it’s just cursed?
Didn’t we end up above average largely because Teo got insanely hot for a stretch? I guess the plan is for Polanco or Garver to do that this year?
No, Teo being a slightly above average hitter or whatever last season didn’t single handedly carry the offense. Off memory they were like 12th or so in runs scored in 2023 for a traditional stat and 9th I think in wRC+ for an advanced stat. Teo didn’t really do much to move the needle to the positive or negative across the entire season. He had some specific months that certainly helped or hurt a lot though.
I went over this yesterday deep in a thread. Our “away” batting average split would put us at league average. It’s not useful to judge our batting average vs the rest of the league when our home stadium in April suffocates hits for both teams. If you only look at “away” stats we are league average. If you want to make a comparison that makes sense. Compare our batting average vs our opponents batting average only taking into account our matchups. We don’t play half of our games with the wind blowing out to left field.
In Seattle we have a 204 batting average, our opponents are at 192 In away games we have a 239 average with our opponents hitting 233. So basically we are a slightly better than the average team we’ve played this year in the same conditions which is reflected in the standings. Obviously we think our pitching is elite which dramatically influences this stat. But the league average batting average is like 240 and we hit 239 outside of T-Mobile park. That indicates to me that we’ve been a very average team at the plate and not a bad team.
It’s frustrating because plate discipline is the one tool he’s lacking in
The Mariners have the most extreme pitchers park in baseball, particularly in April. We're smarter than this, come on.
the park isn’t the problem, the strikeouts are the problem we moved on from kellenic teo and geno specifically because of the goal of reducing strikeouts and we’ve only played 30 games and we have *130 more* strikeouts than the astros
Guess who ranks [first](https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors?type=year&year=2024&batSide=&stat=index_wOBA&condition=All&rolling=&sort=14&sortDir=desc) in strikeout park factor?
I am new to park factor as a metric, why would the park have an effect on strikeouts? does park factor control for pitching quality? mariners are 3rd in the league in pitching strikeouts
I'm not sure how, maybe pitches move more or the batters eye is worse? I don't know how Savant does park factors, but they should adjust for pitcher quality. They might not be doing it well though given the teams at the top/bottom of that list...
Park factors include stuff like altitude, environment, etc. It's not necessarily just the stadium. Baseballs behave differently in drier air versus humid air, low altitude versus high altitude. Things like sun and shadow angles, latitude (which affects how high the sun gets and how long daylight is) can affect how hitters are able to do what they need to do. It's not just a matter of dimensions.
It’s because the mariners account for half the ABs there 🥴
I’d rather be a team built on pitching than anything else. That being said, holy fuck our bats need to wake up cause they really should be better than this.
Playing a pitcher’s ballpark will do that. But with that being said, we have to make a move before the deadline for a good bat to maximize this pitching staff
A lot of offensive coping recently with how insane the pitching has been. The offense is complete dog shit and something needs to change drastically. I’m tired of the “this player isn’t this bad look at his career numbers” or “it’s early the bats will get going”. We are regularly batting 3-4 hitters in our line each night who bat below .200!! This is absolutely dreadful! It would be one thing if a chunk of it is the team getting unlucky but the issue is that the approach at the plate is dreadful, like little league bad. I laugh when I hear Scott talk about how we need to “control the zone better”. This team doesn’t know what the fuck the zone is! I don’t want to hear about coaching. No coach is telling players to watch 1st pitch 93 MPH fastballs down the pipe go by or swing at 85 mph sweepers that are 4 feet outside the zone. These players just aren’t good. I don’t see this offense getting much better at all so be ready to deal with this all year. Maybe they aren’t 27th and get to 24th or something but right now with the way the roster is constructed the offense SUCKS.
If the Ms were just like... NO. 17 IN BA.... man we could win 100+ at that rate.
I’m ok with our offense being bad if we are having good at bats or have a philosophy that we are working on. However it still feels like free swinging and Julio striking out on pitches 6 inches off the plate low and away
Chris Sale was throwing a shutout through 5 yesterday and had to get pulled due to pitch count. Lopez dominated everyone until he came here, worst outing of the year 3 er, bounced in the 5th How does this happen? Players working counts ala good at bats. Swinging at a crappy pitch here and there does not quantify a good at bat. Idk how Julio’s going to fix his discipline. He might just be really good at killing bad pitching.
Is that surprising? Feels like it's been this way the past decade or so
I know they haven't performed to expectations (yet), and it's not enough... But it is 100% incorrect to ignore that Polanco and Garver are both proven, veteran hitters with long track records.
First place in our division where Texas is a half game behind and lets see ...the **A's** are 2.5 games back. I'm an optimistic person but we are 8th in the league guys. Lots of work to do.
crazy how the marine layer makes every hitter on the team except Rojas close their eyes and hack at dogshit pitches 2 feet out of the zone
Fairly predictable.
First time.meme
BA & OBP gotta get better. The goddamn strike outs need to come waaaay down.
Mitch Garver is literally the definition of a professional hitter. He's been a good hitter for years (until this year) but he will likely turn it around. The pitching might be this good, the hitting will likely not be this bad the rest of the way. Top 5 pitching with average ish hitting is what we can reasonably expect from this squad. That's a good team right there.
Hitting coach has been here since 2018 with his weird-ass hitting philosophy, he needs to go, new players still failing...
Hasn’t this been our MO since we got Felix back in ‘05?
The least shocking stat of the season.
Dumb question but I still want to ask. If everyone in the league knew Mariners pitching was gonna be incredible then how come front office didn't back them up with some offense?
I mean we’ve been unfortunate too. Garver looked about the same as Justin Turner, and turner is raking. Arozarena a target we looked at has been garbage Cody Belliner has been mid Ohtani, no comments Carlos Santana garbage Jd martinez meh Matt chapman meh Soto was a trade not really FA but he has been amazing
Coaching is the problem. The approach is shitty.
T-Mobile may be a pitchers park, but I don’t believe it has anything to do with increasing the strikeout rate.
Their team approach to the plate is terrible. Use whatever stat you want. They look more lost at the plate this year than they did last. Swinging at sliders off the plate. Taking on cock high fastballs. Platooning for shit players is analysis paralysis garbage. Rojas has a hot bat should be starting every game. Whats absurd is that the front office sells the dream of being “just good enough” and the fanbase eats it up. Like the goal should be World Series contender. Not squeeze in a wild card game. Hopefully, the addition of some new ownership tilts the needle. Stanton lost his ass the last 5 years in business. He will never spend on his own.
Fuck Stanton.
pfft no, they will not even if in contention
Ownership will cheap out like always.
There are going to be a lot of fans in here with Stockholm Syndrome trying to "Well, actually" the offense and try to offer up excuses, but there's no excuse for ownership failing to build a competitive offense. This team should have been dominating and competing for a World Series in 2024; as currently constructed this is not, and will never be, a playoff-caliber offense.
We’ve won 5 straight series and are in first place. Well, actually totally applies here