Mariners 6, Angels 5
In a turn of events that will surprise absolutely no one, the Mariners won Friday night to remain two games back in the AL Wild Card race.
Former Marlins pitchers Steve Cishek and newcomer AJ Ramos worked three innings, with the former allowing his usual fare of two inherited runners to score. However, the majority of the postgame discussion will be centered around Scott Servais and his ninth inning decisions.
With a one-run lead in the ninth and one out, Servais chose to intentionally walk Shohei Ohtani, who is chasing the HR crown. It was Ohtani’s second IBB of the game, fourth overall. He’s racking up some crazy walk records.
After Phil Gosselin doubled, Servais put Jared Walsh on base to load the bags with one out. Jack Mayfield struck out and José Rojas grounded out, and it was another depressing end to an Angels game.
Tomorrow? Maybe?
Drafting in hindsight is sure fun. I wonder why more teams don’t do it?
😀
oh yeah…now I see Jose Iglesias is hitting .372 for Boston with a decent slugging pct, too. Ha..ha…
I thought I’d look when I saw our lineup for today, with Walsh behind Stassi and Rengifo playing again.
Free the Plumber!
How do you know they didn’t ask about him, Hmmmmm? Maybe they didn’t offer enough for him. Maybe several contenders called us. Maybe the Doyers wanted him, they are horrible defensively and they don’t care about his supposed weak glove. It’s not like we are going to give the Plumber away for free!
Set the Plumber free like they did Britney Spears!
Ok – on ‘the OF we deserve’? Aren’t you oversimplifying what happened? We had 2 starting OF go down to injuries (Trout, Fowler). We did sign some others (like Eaton), but, with the team fading down the stretch (due to injuries (Rendon, Canning), and pitching woes (Bundy, Quintana, Heaney) we played ‘in house’ AAA players to audition them until our OF heirs apparent (Adell, Marsh) were ready.
Adell and Marsh seem to be the real deal (even with Adell injured), so we have our OF moving forward, at a reasonable cost (no need for FA OF like the Navapile or Upton). That is good, right?
Having some of our young players (no matter how badly the farm is rated) step up and take spots is the only way we are going to compete. So, I hope we keep finding players like Calhoun (in the past) and Walsh (or even Fletcher) who come from lower rounds to compete at a high level.
This sense is too common. Your take lacks grit and fire.
I generally agree. I do see some bright spots and potential. I REALLY like this Marsh kid a lot.
However, after 7 years of essentially the same story you have just told, the idea that it will now be successful is a bit tough to swallow.
Here’s the thing with this sad sack stuff. Either the team is suddenly going to sign every good player, have a 260M payroll, and win 100 games or we are going to go through a period of time where “this same old thing” gets talked about. Generally, as a team moves from mediocre to good, people will look at what’s happening and try to discern what could work moving forward.
The only way to avoid this is to be a Yankees/Dodgers/Lakers fan and just always buy solutions…. and even then you’ll eventually run into these “maybe this will work” situations.
This is why I have been, abnormally for this site, patient with GMs other than Reagins. Reagins had absolutely no plan and that bugs me. The other guys, even Eppler, did. I could see what Eppler was trying to do. I could see that it was going to take more than nine months for it to work. So I was OK with watching the attempt for a few seasons, seeing what might work, seeing what wasn’t, and then being pretty comfortable letting him go when it was obvious his plan wasn’t gonna hatch. Now we gotta do the same with Perry.
Most GMs who just plop down in their office and win 95 are just cruising on the last GM’s work, the rest have to blow time “raising the floor”. What WILL totally piss me off is if the FO sees that Epplers “draft athletes” plan failed mostly because the athletes didn’t develop enough fast enough and they don’t then address the problem and try harder to develop their farm. That type of same old story sucks.
Yes – patience is required for sure.moving up from mediocre is tough and takes time – harder still with injuries and in a Division with tough teams that enjoy nothing more than beating up on Southern Cal. So overall – I agree with your assessment and even my own frustration with the last 7 seasons is tempered to some extent by the realization that we enjoyed an amazing run from 2002-2014 (with a few exceptions) and that baseball is cyclical.
I am a patient fan as is evidenced by my staying a rabid fan from 1971-2001 with only 3 noteworthy seasons. That’s 3 playoff seasons and no Championships in 30 years. In the 12 years from 2002-2014 there were 7 playoff appearances and a Championship. So many of the folks on this site were spoiled and are impatient little children.
That saId, Trout is getting older and the window of winning with the GOAT on the team is shrinking. Also – unless they are going to pay another huge contract, the window on another generational player (Ohtani) is shrinking. The result is a feeling of urgency which impacts my being patient. I have never felt that feeling before with any other Angel player. Even Salmon, Glaus, Erstad and Anderson never inspired a feeling like time was compressing and opportunity fleeting.
I will add that there have been a number of obvious gaffes – many of them going back to Reagins – which have affected my patience. And the recent purposeful unraveling of scouting, player development and strength and conditioning (not to mention the minor league fiasco) leave me feeling like the Angel ship is rudderless.
I would feel much better if there was a true Angel Baseball Organization rather than a GM and a bunch of marketing folks who like to believe they know baseball. But thats not going to happen because of Arte – and hey he is the owner and it’s his money so he gets what he wants.
Despite feeling like time is short, I do see some things about which I’m excited. Marsh, Walsh and Adell are young major leaguers with significant potential. Suarez, Barria, Detmers and even Canning look like a decent back end to the rotation. If they can sign Iglesias – the team will have a semi-long term solution at closer. So things are definitely improved with a raised floor.
The problem is the Trout/Ohtani window. To me, if I were GM, I would feel a definite pressure to win now. I know that I, as a fan, feel that pressure.
It doesn’t sound like a good move to essentially pay 14M (a year? for the five years that Adell’s pre-arb would be?) for someone’s prospect. Play Adell, keep the OF intact, and buy top-end pitching instead?
67M is the entire payroll of the Mariners.
Old news. This has been the reality since Rendon was signed.
I don’t understand how we, as a group, can hopelessly bitch about how bad this team is going to be starting in January 2021 and still be THIS emotional about this team being this bad on September 25th.
I’m still leaning towards the metaphysical Coast to Coast radio theory that we get the team we deserve here at CtPG. I sure would enjoy beating the Mariners’ ass with our scrub club, but I wasn’t expecting it. I knew we had crap pitching back in April. So I knew the team wasn’t winning 90 and I’m not pooping out emotional theories about tanking and Perry not signing 50 players to cover 25 roster spots and Trout and Rendon leaving the team because of boo f***ing hoo.
Marsh, Gosselin and Mayfield all continue to look useful. We still have an actual not crap catcher. Even after today’s beating Suarez has a WHIP under 1.3 and an ERA+ at 120. Rengifo may have punched his own ticket tonight, rejoice, now we have to pay for a shortstop. We stood up to a much better and healthier team and didn’t get blown out, and we’ve done that a lot this year. We lost. Cry me a river. If this team ever actually fields a healthy line up let’s see how games like this go.
Jon F***in Lester is leading a team to the playoffs right now. Things aren’t as hopeless as some of you need them to be. Looks like we have a solid bench set, a good catcher, a solid back end of the rotation and a couple pen arms coming out of this lean period. Guys will heal, they’ll cut a bunch of dead weight, probably sign some guys and we’ll probably not be as banged up next year….
….unless my “blog posters manifesting the power of an Indian burial ground” theory is actually true, in which case we are never going to win until this generation of sad sacks dies, like the Israelites in the desert. WS dynasty 2046 – 52.
Hah! Some ghost in there hates tendons.
Uh. So many games this year could have been wins with a couple slightly better players….
Congrats to the Mariners for staying in the race and to remain tied with…(checks standings) the 4th place team in the AL East. Congrats. (Golf clap)
Let’s commend Perry for releasing our SS so he could go “Playoffs” with Boston and we get Renny. Everyone loves Renny except me, Has no head for the game, can’t hit, can’t field and can’t throw so other than that he should be a starting SS even if he can’t play 2B either.
On a team with no depth and no prospects, it was a mind boggling move.
Well there is that.
I mean if Perry was going to get rid of him, how about a trade at the deadline. Could have gotten something for him.
No. No we couldn’t.
Well even a bag of balls would have been better than nuttin
Btw – small sample size but over 14 games with the RedSox, Iglesias is batting .378 with something around a 1058 OPS.
Sure we could, Red Sox had a COVID strain hit them hard and their farm was not ready to fill in. Easy move.
I certainly do NOT love Renny
Does anyone here actually love Rengifo, at least over last couple of years? He seems to have much more basic talent than he’s shown at the Bigs, but, at least as far as execution goes, there seem to be a few gears loose in most aspects of his game.
He’s a league average player at best. A guy who will be around zero WAR in his best seasons and negative WAR in his average seasons. He does not belong on an MLB team that wants to compete. He might belong in a team that wants to save money on position players.
Aybar 2.0?
In 2017 we had a guy at 3rd, Yunel Escobar. The guy could hit. At times like a mutha.
But he could not field. He was not ept. He was totally inept at 3rd. But he could hit.
So we ditched him. You have to field on the left side. I think they call that “fundamentals.”
Rengifo really can’t hit. And he can barely field.
And barely ain’t gonna cut it. Ever.
This season has been torture. Again.
You remind me of one of my ex-girlfriends. She also had this imaginary “everyone” that no one else could see who was always against her. Who the hell loves Rengifo?
Everyone says you are such a jerk for calling out Grandpa on his use of “everyone”!
The Angels, enough said. No, well then I will point out that I have called him Renny since we acquired him and when first brought up I saw that his fundamentals were poor at best.
He was 22 when we acquired him. How many players are cracking an MLB roster at 22? Don’t we think he might develop, just a bit?
Yes. For the Guardians. Then 2002 can post photos of him for years. The trouble is he may develop, but not on a timeline that works for the Angels needs. They have good SS prospects a couple years away. They need a SS now. Rengifo doesn’t look ready now but we (hopefully) won’t need him in 2024 when he may be a solid player. So I think the “idiots” in our FO wanted to see if he’d locked it in at AAA and could help next year or not.
I’m not sure, but I think he has options left? If so, our horrible FO will probably stash him in AAA for depth again since Jackson/Paris will be at lower levels but Rengifo’s chances of MLB glory will be greatly diminished.
Enough said? I can’t even tell what question this is an answer to. I was asking who here on CTPG loves Luis Rengifo? I mean sure, some folks tolerate giving him a look in the dregs of 2021, but love him as you declared “everyone” is doing?
But hey, you called him Renny this whole time. What that has to do with it, I don’t know, but cool.
Eh, Iglesias wasn’t lighting the world on fire at SS or with a bat. and this team, with the injuries, wasn’t going anywhere this season, so I’m fine with it. I’m actually pretty bullish on the future of The Angels after the draft this year, that was pitching, pitching, pitching. Some of those arms should pan out and they may have already drafted the next Scherzer/Koufax/Ryan. Perry may actually be steering this ship using modern GPS technology v. a sextant.
I did not like the release of Iglesias. I realize his defense was a notch below his norm but the guy hustled, was not useless at the plate and looked to be a good club house guy. What really was poor was that Perry cut him loose AFTER the 8/31 deadline. Based on the passion Joes brought, why couldn’t he done this just 3 lousy days earlier so he could have been playoff eligible. Dick move by Perry..
“a notch below his norm” is underselling how bad his defense was.
I highly doubt he was not on waivers, in the same fashion Quintana was. No one needed him until the Red Sox had a COVID outbreak.
By saying sparkling and Cishek in the same sentence you mean ….what? I’m trying to see the sarcasm. It must be there.
Perhaps its part of our new anti-doom platform. As in ‘despite the best efforts of Cishek the runners he inherited were successful in their home plate path’.
just wanted to tie the former Marlins together =) pay no attention
Coming up with ways to frame the same game over and over again becomes a little repetitive, haha
I have never seen a relief pitcher allow so many IR and it does not occur to the manger to continue setting him up to fail, that is repetitive.
I will make it clearer =)
When Rengifo threw wildly to home and the runner scored…in the 3rd?, Stassi gets the ball by the backstop and throws out France at 2nd: play of the game.
I know, I know: we lost again. I just look for stellar play when I see it. That throw by Stassi was badass.
The stiches that hold this team together are fraying with the AAA players and the fans. We all can name all the reasons, but with 8 games left it won’t change. The rest of the season there are still good races and the mystery will be the MVP of the AL and NL along with the CY’s.
Bring him back! (There, I said it, mostly a joke, but with a hint of seriousness.)
I’m with you, same sentiment.
This is so classic!
We are building up the Buttercup for the Mariners next weekend. Right? Right??????
No, we are still suffering from the curse of “Let’s not sweep the Mariners”
I think the M’s are for real. And their farm is badass. They are going to be good for a long while unfortunately.
they’re not real at all this year, but their farm is certainly impressive!
Well their pitching is certainly for real which means they are for real. Pitching wins playoff games and Championships.
good talent wins playoff games. they’re not making the playoffs. also, they don’t really have good pitching.
Hope you’re right but I wouldn’t bet against them. They have 5 of 8!left against the Angels!
Fangraphs definitely is. Just so hard to overtake not one but two teams with a week left. Plus Jays get the Orioles
Yah. Their pitching is almost exactly MLB average as far as I can tell. But it is a barometer. Our’s is a couple clicks below average, even with all the cannon fodder we’ve been throwing out there. Low and behold, the Mariners will just miss the playoffs and we are just missing that “just missed” level of finish.
I think their farm is impressive, but player development is tracked once you see progression at the major league level, something we don’t see a lot of since the Angels are ran by monkeys.
This actually makes me curious, which teams lead the league in home grown, or acquired in a trade before a guy was good, WAR? My guess is Rays/A’s but I don’t know.
But it’s interesting. I have always thought it would be nice to have tons of prospects, look at how the Padres bullied their way through the trade market last winter. But also, look at the Padres. They are the latest in a really long line of super rich farm systems that everyone hyped to high heaven but so far hasn’t produced all that much. Is it better to produce 10 top 100 prospects per year or a couple 4 WAR players per season?
For example, if 4/6 of our rotation (back end plus Ohtani) 3/4 of our outfield (Trout/Adell/Marsh), the right side of our IF and half an effective bullpen and bench are all home grown or cheaply acquired players but our farm is still ranked #26 does our actual pipeline, our ability to generate cheap WAR, really suck compared to teams with awesome farms like the Royals and Mariners?
I dunno.
I feel like Toronto recently has to lead, Oakland has some guys that have been around for a while now.
Live by the IBB, die by the IBB. We did it to Barely Bounds, so we gotta suck it up. Bitchers throwing down gloves and balls at the end of ballgames is unacceptable. I will ask Gorbachev5 how we should “retaliate.” Maybe cut the Mariners catering food supply tomorrow.
YES! Cut the food and Drink and make them get even madder.
Hopefully they are Maddon
Cut their food with…strychnine? Maybe we’d have a chance at our 8th win over the last 21 games.
Complain on a Tik Tok video. That’s how the kids do war these days. We’ll show those Mariners with our words said to total strangers!
Shohei 11 BB in 3 games, say Hi Bryce.
You keep Harpering on that one.
That’s very Bryce of you to notice.
i went to the orthodontist and had my bryces removed.
Yep I know as I had my Ohtanyist put my Bryces on. They hurt so much I think I’ll die, but I don’t enjoy the Harper music.
I went and had steamed bryce from Panda Express.
what was he so mad about?
He hasn’t got good pitches for 2-months.Comes up with the bases empty a lot. The lineup is swooning. Perry’s fault, did not protect his best hitter. Home run title is gone, MVP, hanging on.
I blame Trout and Rendon’s dumb injuries. The burial ground strikes again.
Re: Trout: I have some issues…wish I could afford a therapist. I find as the season went on – you know, eff it, I know we didn’t have pitching anyway, but still – the way Trout went out…I remember that play. It looked like less than nothing. And he misses basically 80% of the season ON THAT?
I have issues with him, like why hast thou forsaken us, Fatty? Etc.
And Rendon? Is he having hip replacement surgery already? Back by 2024, with Pujols’s current running speed? Meine Gott!
I feel your pain.
Yea, I was hoping one of you guys would step up and offer a therapeutic ear. Or eyes.
At least hide your sarcasm on this one, okay? I truly am in pain over the One we call Trout. And his perennial injuries.
No sarcasm. You pretty much exactly described how it felt for me.
Really interesting because I started feeling this way a little ways back and today felt it very strongly. I don’t know where the feeling comes from but I just have a nagging suspicion that there is something emotional built into what seems like an extraordinary amount of time for a relatively minor injury. I wonder if he was very upset by the team letting Pujol’s go? There’s just something that seems off. Again it’s just a feeling. I also would have liked to see him around the team more often. Or even hearing more from him. It’s just very strange for a guy making nearly half a billion dollars.
Yea, the money is insane, but I still believe very strongly he’s been aching for months to play again. He’s a true competitor. I’ve never gotten the feeling Trout has ever “dogged” it.
It’s just…WTF is it with his injuries? He’s built like a tank, but I get the feeling the slightest tweak will make him miss 6 weeks from here on out, to the rest of his career.
I looked at the pitching in March and thought, “Great: you lied to Trout: you DID NOT go out and get the best pitching you could find, so we’re effed AGAIN this year.”
Which turned out to be all-too-true.
But I love watching Trout play. And Ohtani came through for us all, in a major way. I don’t know how we’ll keep him. Bless Ohtani-san for showering us with his tremendous gifts this year!
The injuries…especially to Trout…really screwed us. Even with the horrid pitching, we could have been in this if Trout and Rendon hadn’t bailed on us. I truly believe that. Not saying we’d for sure make the playoffs, but it would have at least been interesting. As it was, I wrote off our chances around August 1st.
Had a small dash of hope at the AS break thinking Trout would come back and he and Ohtani could rake.
My personal feeling is Trout is a family guy in every sense of the word. He adores his son and we are still in a pandemic. Under such circumstances I’m not sure he was ever going to rush back to being on the road and away from his family. And mix in the Pujols thing and maybe he just needed to get his head straight.
He’s played in 89 games over his age 28 and 29 seasons. That’s missing 240 games in 2 regular seasons (I’m counting the Covid shortened season as still missing games). He is technically no longer in his prime.
Prior to the last 2 seasons he had missed about 130 games. Overall he has missed nearly 370 games over his career – thats 2,3 seasons out of 10. It averages 125 played games per year over his career. That’s not great.
I want to see him come back strong and motivated and in incredible shape. If he does that for 2022, I will only look forward not backwards.
I won’t bash Trout, not yet, although like all of us I’m super disappointed to see him miss so much time this year. I blame it on a calf tear being a serious injury. But I will bash Perry. He had to have known the calf muscle was torn at the trade deadline and Trout wasn’t playing again this year. And he wasted maybe the best trade chip in all of baseball in R Iglesias (also an expiring contract) and held onto him, doing nothing to improve the team. That is inexcusable in my book. I love this team and always have. I’ve loved watching all the kids come up and play, which has been the highlight of this year for me. Perry missed a golden opportunity to add talent to the program. Won’t be any tears she’s here when he’s let go.
I don’t know that we can assume that anyone knew that Trout wouldn’t be back. Yes, the calf tear is serious, and I think that was known (even if the term ‘strain’ gets taken as not as serious, as people are generally unaware of the medical terminology associated with the degrees of strain). But even Trout seemed like he was planning to return a while ago – but he wants to be 100% (and not risk reinjuring) and we want him 100%, and as time went on, with our playoff chances falling away, there is no urgency to rush him back. Don’t we all more or less agree rushing him back would have been bad?
Iglesias is also an interesting case. You assume we should have traded 3 months of Iglesias for something (what?). That really depends on whether we want him back. I think we do. He is more likely to sign if we keep him on the roster – and at worst we give him the QO, he turns it down, and we get our prospect anyway (best case, we resign him and have a closer moving forward, as we don’t have one on the roster).
Perry came in relatively late in the offseason – and had to hit the ground running. I don’t think we got all of the FA/players we hoped going into the season, and the injury bug has hit hard. But … he has been reactive, he has dealt players who historically we would have kept (like Heaney), cut players who were taking up spots for young, developing players (like Pujols), and has drafted in our big area of need. The pen has also been completely revamped, and now we have some pieces in the rotation (Sandoval, Suarez) and the pen (like Warren) that we can build around. I think he gets another year or two before we decide he has failed out of the box.
Can you imagine if Trout had come back in late July, in a season that was already toast, and torn his Achilles? He’d be out ALL of next year. Cheap Arte would have “rushed him back in a egomaniacal attempt to put butts in seats”. There would be weeping of blood and shrill demands to sell the team and theories that Ohtani will never sign here because he has seen the monster that lives in this castle and his mom is worried….
Basically the same bullshit, but with no Trout in 2022.
What has me concerned is Perry’s eye for talent. He had his chance on some talented FA arms and got arms that made our staff worse than last year. I’m ok with him hanging onto the prospects but he flat out failed bringing in arms to benefit the team. Along with players with high defensive acumen. Pitching and run prevention he decried at his presser…eeek.
Eh. Iglesias had high defensive acumen. And which obviously talented arms did he not pursue? Especially considering we pursued Bauer for a big chunk of the winter.
I think we would have got more for Iglesias than we did for Heaney, and I was pleasantly surprised to see what we got back for Heaney. I think we could have gotten an even better AA starter than Junk. I want to sign Iglesias in the off-season. I think it has zero bearing whether we kept him or traded him—same chances to sign the free agent. He hasn’t agreed to an extension, he obviously wants to test the FA market. And we won’t offer him a QO. He’s good, but not worth QO money. Even if he was, we don’t pay that to relievers. We don’t even pay that to starters…. Just frustrated is all. Even though we’ve been soft sellers the past several years, we’ve never had that trade chip and it feels like we squandered it.
Yeah, I don’t get hanging onto Iglesias. Reliever comparisons say he is the 3rd best closer in the business and his salary demand starts at $15M a season. Do we think the Angels would dump that kind of cash in a closer?
I think we should. If we don’t, we are shopping in a lower tier for a closer (as we don’t have anyone else on roster competing for that role), and our pen becomes shaky (again). We could get Robles back? The end of Sergio Romo’s career?