It’s a battle for the AL West cellar as the 17-25 Mariners host your 17-26 Athletics in a three-game series. The M’s started the season 11-6 but are a brutal 6-19 since then, coming home now off a four-game sweep by the Red Sox. Their offense has been meh, not helped by Mitch Haniger being out (probably until July) with an ankle injury; the pitching has just been El Stinko.
The pitching staff has generated just 1.1 WAR (29th) with an overall 4.26 ERA while giving up 56 homers, the most in baseball. The rotation has produced a 0.8 WAR with a 4.20 ERA, while an inconsistent bullpen has generated a 0.3 WAR (24th) with a 4.35 ERA (25th).
Few people outside of the clubhouse expected the 2021 Mariners to be good. Their eventual success was a pleasant surprise. It also led to expected and demanded success in 2022.
When stated expectations aren’t met, patience evaporates and change follows.
The A’s see a couple of veteran lefthanders, sandwiched around the Mariners’ #1 draft choice in 2019, a righthander making his fourth career start.
Monday at 6:40: Zach Logue vs. Marco Gonzales
Tuesday at 6:40: James Kaprielian vs. George Kirby
Wednesday at 1:10: Paul Blackburn vs. Robbie Ray
Our old pal Sergio Romo is back in the Mariners’ bullpen, having been activated a week or so ago after missing a month with a bad shoulder.
Only one Athletic in tonight’s starting lineup has a first name starting with a vowel, and only one has a last name starting with a vowel, and they’re both Elvis Andrus.
I get that Kotsay has to scrape the bottom of the bottom of the barrel to fill out his lineup. But it continues to amaze that we are still running out the journeyman catcher as our fifth-hitting first baseman, despite his having no discernible ability to either get on base or hit for any power.
I’m glad they’re giving Pache an extended chance to show he’s something more than AAAA, which is what we were asking for in spring training (and was the basis for complaints about the Lowrie and Vogt signings), but at some point a .421 OPS does go from discouraging to defeating.
But Vince keeps telling me he’s hitting the ball hard and getting unlucky.
Just a reminder that they were 90-72, but had a pythag of 76-86. It was reasonable to hope that continued development from Kelenic, Lewis, and Rodriguez would give them a bit of a boost (it hasn’t) but not exactly shocking that the magic hasn’t repeated.
Of course, some of that magic was going 11-0 in games decided by 1 or 2 runs against Oakland…
All those offseason acquisitions designed to put them into solid contention, though…Suarez, Winker, Ray. If they lose 2 out of 3 at home to the lowly A’s with what looks like an ugly loss today, tomorrow’s off day could be Bloody Thursday up there.
I don’t know enough about it to call a “fire the manager”, but “fire a couple coaches as sacrificial lambs” does sound about right at this point.
Panic trade a couple of their underperforming prospects? To us?
And the streak continues. This team can just get a hit.
Either the A’s offense or the Mariners’ pitching has to turn things around in this series. The other one, if they can’t pitch or hit against this opponent, oh man.
In either event, would it be “turning it around?”
A case of the resistable firce against the movable object.
hmm, does this count as offensive breakout?
And a pitching implosion.
It seems clear, well into the second game of the series, that Seattle’s pitching is a sight for sore eyes, but in true lousy team fashion the A’s own pitching may be reverting to its natural state at the same time.
Anaheim Mayor Resigns as F.B.I. Investigates Angel Stadium Deal
Remember when orange county declared bankruptcy?
And not just the moral kind!
Diana Moskovitz read the filings. According to cooperating witness “Todd,” who seems to have worn an FBI wire for weeks, during negotiations to sell the stadium and parking lots to Arte Moreno, Mayor Sidhu gave the Angels the city’s confidential appraisal and memos from the city’s outside legal counsel. MAyor Sidhu is then recorded three times cackling to Todd about all the campaign cash he’ll get from the Angels, the CHamber, and Disney, I have to assume while twirling the tips of his handlebar moustache.
TO be the mayor of Anaheim? they an assembly member?
I know, right? Politicians are weird. At least Mohammed Nuru got expensive shit and trips and a second home constructed. Sidhu asked for election ads.
Logue does not seem inclined to do the bullpen any favors tonight.
The BB –> HR sequence is not serving him or the team well.
At least he mixed it up a bit with single –> HR on the last one.
Isn’t nick allen on the team?
No.
You sure, he’s pretty small.
Hear me out, we go with a nothing-but-bloops offense, 1-9 all guys who couldn’t go yard in a little league park, just flair after dying quail after seeing eye single, and we start the baserunners on every single pitch. Exciting and within our means.
FSU I’m game. Anything interesting. Let’s give them all the green light every pitch. Billy Ball on steroids. Just be interesting.
With about 20% of precincts reporting, Mariners pitching suck appears to be leading A’s offensive suck by a decent margin.
out
Yeah that was a wish challenge.
Dear A’s, its sergio romo, don’t swing with fewer than 2 strikes
that was on jed
My radio is broken, I thought for a minute Ken said lou was coming in
Bringing in Lou with the bases loaded is a choice.
A mad genius choice, apparently.
Bob III is in the dugout muttering, “no whammies no whammies no whammies-STOP!”
I am so excited to find out what happened after I wake up tomorrow
I really did think the Mariners’ bullpen was going to turn that into a loose, oily stool of a loss but it wasn’t quite to be.
You and the Warriors starting 5.
Steering well clear of spoilers, but Better Call Saul, wow.
Indeed.
I was reminded by the brief mention of Chuck in that final scene that, while the cartel stuff is fun, what really sticks with me from this show is those first three seasons. So it was just perfect today, to see perennial dim bulb Drew Magary write, about movies and shows he gave up on:
The worlds colliding aspect (as last night) is what really sets “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad” apart from so many other shows about “crime shit.” But even without that, the story of the McGill brothers, without connection to anything else, would have been a great short series in its own right.
Absolutely, I remember being skeptical when the Better Call Saul spinoff was announced, and while on the whole it hasn’t surpassed Breaking Bad (the best TV drama ever), the depth of character interplay is just sublime. Chuck and Jimmy are probably the deepest relationship in either series. So good.
I still like Drew, read all his columns and am regularly amused, but his recommendations on film TV and music are just blah.
It’s backed up in the “things Mrs. N won’t watch with me” queue, but you just promoted it a couple rungs.
Nice of Henry Kissinger to pop up with a trademark immoral take to remind us he still inhabits this earth somehow.
I remember last year someone got dragged online for publicly wishing Kissinger death, and my reaction was hell yeah me too buddy, I will actively celebrate when that malignant being finally leaves this earth.
I still can’t believe there’s a tree honoring him in the Tilden park peace grove. That’s fked up.
The latest massacre of a classroom full of children made me suddenly recall getting in a very frustrating argument on here almost 10 years ago, after Sandy Hook. I remember being almost shaking with anger as I typed my comments, though they don’t really read that way. Anyway, things have only gotten worse since then. Just the price of the American Dream of shooting your way out of some imaginary situation for too many people.
I’m with Kerr.
Holy shit that thread.
And these, from 2012:
It’s pointless to challenge these kinds of arguments or suppositions anymore, as their progenitors and their adherents have come to the conclusion that it is they and they alone who decide what reality is, regardless of the facts of situations and the forces at work to define those situations.
and:
Are you positing that conservatism is not only a rejection of sovereignty of government, but also a rejection of objective consensus reality as well?
nobody and Kay live together now.
I’m not even clicking through, because I remember getting similarly angry at a gun discussion here at least once, and don’t really have any desire to relive it.
Yeah, I just skimmed it. IIRC Tutu lived in Mariposa and man, the Sierra foothills are full of Trumpist anti-government right wingers.
There’s a pretty decent chance, probably better than 50/50, that we will vote NRA puppet, Trump booster and general empty suit Adam Laxalt, the bastard child of Pete Domenici, into the Senate as part of the Red Wave…but still almost 6 months until November so there’s hope yet.
Also I’m listening to the Mariners radio broadcast on MLB.com tonight and am getting some IP-targeted Laxalt ads about “Joe Biden’s agenda to destroy the Second Amendment” which seem notably ill-timed.
Loosely related: those IP-targeted ads have popped up in the last couple of weeks, and in addition to being annoying and repetitive, they seem to be breaking the streaming experience fairly often. I also really liked listening to local ads. It’s a bummer.
More related: One depressing part of the firearms death spiral is that every one of these tragedies seems to instantly pop “they’re coming for my guns” to the top of conservatives’ emotional/political agenda (see, e.g., that 2012 thread). So maybe it isn’t ill-timed at all.
That’s cool! I miss those two.
Some of Kay’s comments are prescient
I’m not sure there’s a more potent indictment of the American political system than mass shootings. Kerr’s right, 90% of us want universal background checks. But perversely, in fact gun legislation is going the opposite direction, with universal open carry now alowed in more than half of US states…this idea was advocated by only the lunatic fringe as recently as 10 years ago. Our primaries are structured to reward the outrageous, our legislative districts are drawn as largely one-party fiefdoms, so state legislatures can pass successively more repressive legislation. Meanwhile the federal courts retreat from even the barest willingness to value objective liberty.
I don’t see this country emerging from this death spiral. I don’t want my kids to have kids. I don’t think I can bear it.
I also have trouble seeing how this works. We’ve had a fundamentally broken political system since Aaron Burr, but it took us about 150 years to notice, then another 50 to fully weaponize it. But, now we have. And I cannot see a path back that doesn’t include crazy people stopping being crazy. If that’s the hope, though, things look damn bleak.
Crazy people aren’t going to stop being crazy, but they can still be beaten and re-marginalized, even under our effed up constitution as currently misinterpreted. It will take time, and work, and political courage, and a lot more of this shit will happen in the interim, but I just don’t accept that we can’t diverge from this bad path
“Political courage” coming from where exactly?
I think, and have for a while, that two countries with quite different constitutions is becoming much more plausible. There doesn’t have to be a civil war, it can be done peacefully and the resulting countries can maintain a strong defensive alliance. Significant progress toward this end seems plausible within my lifetime with realization in the second half of the century.
Not from the Republican party, that’s for sure.
I do think elected Democrats are more united on this issue than ever before. That’s partly because of there being fewer elected Democrats, unfortunately. No point in trying to moderate on this stuff to win a senate seat in Arkansas. But there also aren’t that many Democrat electeds who have reason to be afraid of the NRA any more. The NRA is a republican operation now. And there are more Democrats for whom this is a top of mind issue, often sadly because of massacres in their communities (Chris Murphy, Beto O’Rourke). The courage will have to come in things like dumping the filibuster rule, which we are so close, but also so far, from achieving.
The filibuster will be dead in a millisecond if Republicans win back the Senate and the presidency. Unfortunately that may be 2025. Which makes it all the more shameful that Democrats didn’t do it last year.
The best hope seems to be demographic change flipping a state like Texas. Occasionally I hear someone claim that could happen sooner than most people think, but I don’t know if that’s actually realistic. Probably not.
The thing I try to keep in mind is that things don’t get continuously worse or continuously better politically. They go in waves of progress and backlash to that progress. Even in a time of great conservatism in this country like the 80s and early 90s, we passed important gun control legislation. Yes, the gun lobby and their associated nuts have gotten more extreme since then, but that also makes them more prone to being marginalized under the right conditions.
And as you allude to, our backward ass federal system with winner-take-all implications at the state level can alter courses significantly when tipping points are reached in key places.
The problem is that I think things have fundamentally changed, inasmuch as it is now routine to expect any bill without support of the majority of the house, 60% of the senate, and White House is DOA. And, for anything important, that only happens if one party has AT LEAST that much power. Which I don’t see the Democrats having any time soon, because of the disproportionate representation of sparsely-populated red states. (and yes, I know we had almost two years of that not so long ago, but that relied upon a number of flukes I don’t see repeating).
If we can’t legislate, some combination of the executive and judicial branches govern. The former is problematic as we now know the GOP couldn’t give a shit if that branch is populated with unqualified corruption magnates, which means that will periodically happen (in the best case). The judicial branch has become nakedly political on political cases, and is likely to further our problems.
I agree it’s quite bad. I just don’t agree that it will inevitably continue on that course. Killing the filibuster (which is not unthinkable, given its death on nominations and vocal support from most democratic senators) would solve the 60% in the senate problem instantly, for example.
The judicial situation is very bad. That takes a generational struggle to undo. The damage they have done on voting rights and gun laws alone in the last ~10 years is incalculable and will continue to be a problem.
Re the filibuster and Republicans, maybe, but maybe not. They didn’t do it with their narrow majority under Trump because McConnell and others recognized that w/r/t legislation, having it in place fundamentally helps conservatism. Removing it for the Supreme Court made a lot of sense, because it allowed them to lock in their radical majority for a generation. Removing it for legislation would just leave them powerless to block popular Democratic measures during their inevitable periods in the minority.
There is, however, a point in moderating to get re-elected to a Senate seat in Nevada. Catherine Cortez Masto has to tread very carefully on guns and has already “moderated” on Title 42.
She can’t be as strident about it as a senator from Connecticut can, but at this point I doubt a vote for any reasonably likely gun-control measure would cost her much at all in terms of reelection chances. The issue is already so polarized that it’s baked into her prospects because of the D next to her name.
Streak maintainer already in the books. Phew.
and a lead
That’s a better challenge than the net ball last night.
Luis barerra is adopting the elvis waive to the opposing manager
At least barerra got 6 pitches
I was remembering a stretch when the A’s absolutely owned the Mariners. 2004 through especially 2006. Man that was a long time ago. A lot of lousy years since.
In the 2010s, the A’s finished ahead of the Mariners 7 out of the 10 years, including making the playoffs 5 times to Seattle’s 0. How were we 10 games worse head-to-head?
Oh, right. Felix.
Yep. That special rule that he got to start 1-2 games every effing series against us.
Second call this game that shouldn’t have even needed a challenge.
Two overturns go our way, drink!
Jed!
this kid is at 90 pitches
Just got back and love to see Kap the 4 inning wonder
The first two hits could have been outs and the first one really should have been
Asking for 6 runs feels like a bit.
This looks like the series of 7-6, 8-7 and 9-8 losses. (In a series like that the final game is usually 9-1 rather than 9-8 though.)
Jed and Elvis homer in the same game, drink!
Aces Reverse Psychology FTW!
Sam Moll, man.
no way romo works out two days in a row
The Victory Cabbage is most delicious tonight.
We may never lose again!
What are the odds of 29 specific planes crashing?
Might need Nashville and Rochester to go down too.
Laureano was in the original lineup today but he’s out now, leaving the A’s with this potent 4-5-6 part of the lineup:
4. Bethancourt C
5. aaarrgghh Elvis SS
6. Brown vs. a lefty 1B
Andrus has been probably the fourth best hitter on the team (Lowrie, Pinder, Neuse) of anyone with at least 100 plate appearances. How sad is that.
How great does it feel though?!
One thing for sure, his trade value will never be
higherless low than it is at this moment.heh
Might have to send only one of our top prospects to get rid of him.
Would be so Fisher. “You’ll take on Andrus’ entire salary if we give you Langeliers?!”
Nobody in that group was going to break up the no-hitter, but fortunately Jed took care of that right away.
excellent reverse psychology
Seth has seen two pitches vs. Ray and has creamed both of them.
2nd and 3rd no outs, and no runs with Pache and Barrera both pathetically striking out on fastballs down the middle.
Yes the end was predictable, but both laying off close pitches was nice
I can’t see ever really believing in Blackburn, but he’s been a good soldier in the organization for quite a while and if the smoke and mirrors keep working for about 6 or 7 more starts to get him on to the All Star team, good for him.
Oh, Sheldon. Gotta put that one in play.
Jed. That was not good.
Hitting with RISP is not looking like the A’s thing today (I have 0-for-7 with one “productive out” from Barrera that resulted in another zero).
Whoever is chris townsend today is confusing me. His voice sounds like a corporate video voice over.
Still better
Townsend is in the TV studio today. That’s a *click* for me as soon as this ends.
Glad I didn’t click right away, so I heard Stew say he used to call the 7-8-9 hitters “piss ants.”
I don’t why it still catches me off guard how little Robbie Ray’s trousers leave to the imagination.
We can only imagine him getting a vaccine
A lot of walks today by Blackburn. But he got royally screwed on that one to Winker leading off the sixth. Had him struck out on a perfect 1-2 pitch called a ball.
And now Winker complains after taking a clear strike three from Puk. Count your blessings, dude.
Huh, Vince is doing some television PxP tomorrow and maybe over the weekend. I don’t recall him ever doing that with the A’s. Glen has a child graduating.
The reality is, I bet he’s pretty good at it.
I have always thought that was Vince’s true destiny. It does depend on how well he interacts with Braden.
That was always my hope
Kuiper has been horrible this year, not just guy-I-never-liked bad, but poor calls, misunderstood rulings, and seeming to just plain not see the ball well. I know it’s been a tough few years for the Kuiper family, I hope he’s OK.
Lou for Rodriguez..just how we would write it up?
That was old school nasty Lou on the put away pitch.
It was. I miss Sweet Lou.
The radio crew noted that the last time Elvis hit homers in back-to-back games was against Oakland in 2019.
Also, previewing the upcoming Rangers series, Ken referred to their offense as “foundering.”
That’s a bad luck TOOTBLAN. But add it to the list anyway.
6 outs seems like a lot
Can Zackson get 1?
2!
Would have liked another inning for Puk.
uhg
Cant have nice things like a multi run lead.
Bethancourt sucks, man.
Suarez’s hair is next level bad.
Well, being old I have learned to shut my mouth about what I might possibly perceive as cringeworthy hair styles/colors, piercings, tattoos etc.
Barrera is not bad.
No complaints
So much better to have him around rather than FKing Bolt.
I get worried every week when I hear Bolt nearing rehab assignment.
Both are out of options and I’d certainly think and hope Bolt is the one who gets DFA’d after his rehab.
Agreed but they seem to have an irrational love for him. Related-saw Billy Mac has hit a couple of HRs for Vegas, so Im sure that dream isnt dead..
Starting next week there will be a limit of 13 pitchers, so we will have room for one extra position player.
Of course, I would rather that be Nick Allen, or Langeliers, or really just about anyone else.
Apparently they are still making this shit up as they go
With the three-batter rule I don’t think the number of pitchers on the roster matters.
An extra pitcher makes it easier to get away with the way they are babying Puk.
Fourth place!
unbelievable.
Amazing things are possible with a stringbean closer
LOL
The earliest comments about Doolittle on FK appear to be debating the merits of him vs. Barton as the A’s first baseman of the future. I think I’ll take mikeA up on his offer.
Security must have maxed out their minutes on the team cell plan.
Backpack full of kraut!
he lives 3 blocks from bart, where is he biking?
It’s like a half mile each way from BART plaza to Championgship Plaza.
Jordan Poole looks great tonight
Not sure if tonight is a curb stomp W’s win or a string-us-along then win by 6 W’s win. But I feel great about the win part.
So far so good
The Warriors just keep sending waves, Looney and Wiggins and Poole and Klay, even Moody or Kuminga. Bjelica would be a top rotation guy for Dallas or most others. Doesn’t even matter if Steph isn’t scoring. Incredibly demoralizing for an opponent, I have to imagine.
Yep. If Klay is on, we are unstoppable. If Curry is on, we are unstoppable. If they are both off, AND you can shut down Looney’s OREBS, you have a shot. If you can do that, and keep Wiggins under 17, you win by 55.
He’s gonna be CHAMPIONSHIP