Game 4, White Sox at Mariners

Justus Sheffield vs. Carlos Rodón, 7:10pm

After a great series win against San Francisco, the M’s welcome in the first contending team they’ll face this year: the Chicago White Sox. The south siders made the playoffs last year before being bounced by the AL West champs from Oakland. It’s been a long, hard road back to contention for Chicago after going into a rebuild by trading away Chris Sale and Adam Eaton.

A key consideration in that rebuild was tonight’s starter, Carlos Rodon. The Sox drafted him #3 overall in 2014 out of NC State, where he’d come into his junior year as the prohibitive favorite to go #1 overall, but some up-and-down velocity readings dropped him a couple of places. He made his big league debut in 2015 and was pretty successful early on, including his first full season, where he dropped his slightly elevated walk rate and tossed 165+ IP.

Unfortunately, that total remains his career high, and after shoulder problems, bursitis, and then TJ surgery, he’s combined to throw less than 43 innings since 2018. He’s been working with a new, external coach to try and help him stay healthy, and in his very brief return last year, he touched 97-98 at times. But he struggled anyway, and with a career walk rate at about 10%, it couldn’t have come as a complete shock when the Sox non-tendered him this winter. He ultimately re-signed with the club on a one-year show-us-what-you’ve-got contract, and looked good enough this spring that he won his old job back and is once again in the middle of the Sox rotation.

That’s impressive given the Sox goals this year. After a first round exit last year, the Sox are clearly gunning for the World Series, trading for Lance Lynn to help the rotation and bolstering an already impressive bullpen with Liam Hendriks. Their first series of the year didn’t go according to script, though, as they lost 3 of 4 to an Angels team that looked fairly impressive on offense.

Rodón’s best pitch since college has been his slider. Even after over 2,500 of them in his big league career, batters are still *slugging* just .236 off of it. Despite good velocity, batters have not had similar problems with his fastball. He came up with a four-seam and sinker, but has moved away from the sinker over time. Not a huge surprise, as batters slugged .526 off of it. They’ve had slightly less success off of the four-seam, but fundamentally, Rodón wants to get ahead and then fire off some sliders. As you might expect, this plan has worked a lot better against lefties than it has against righties, and thus the M’s will trot out a slightly tweaked, righty-heavy line-up tonight with Sam Haggerty in CF and Taylor Trammell getting a night off.

Chris Flexen was great in his first game with Seattle. He sat at 94 with his fastball, and showed off a cutter than looked unhittable at times. It was just one game, it’s early, yadda yadda, but he showed the stuff of a legitimate rotation mainstay. If he can keep that up, his signing really is one of the steals of the offseason.

1: Haniger, RF
2: France, DH
3: Seager, 3B
4: White, 1B
5: Moore, 2B
6: Murphy, C
7: Fraley, LF
8: Haggerty, CF
9: Crawford, SS
SP: Sheffield

The M’s can’t go as righty-heavy as other teams without hurting their defense, and of course, they don’t have Kyle Lewis available right now. But it does make sense to have Trammell start on the bench, I think, and get as righty-heavy as is practicable.

Steven Goldman’s article on the debates around pace of play and three-true-outcome dominant baseball at BP is worth your time ($). It’s the latest in a series of articles on how baseball got into the predicament wherein it’s increasingly rare that plays involve fielders, and who’s to blame. “Analytics” have been blamed by many, but as Goldman puts it, there’s no way to unlearn what we’ve learned about anything from the wisdom of bunting a runner to 2nd to the value of stolen bases or even how to train pitchers.

It’s an important debate as the league mulls a variety of ways to increase balls in play, and at least in the early going, the ball does seem to be limiting HRs to a degree. But as important as it is, I felt a little weird about that whole debate this morning. Why? Because the story of last night was Shohei Ohtani doing Shohei Ohtani things. He hit 101 with his fastball, and his splitter was utterly ridiculous, eliciting swings on pitches that traveled 57 feet…and you couldn’t blame the hitters. Then, in the first, Ohtani (hitting 2nd!) launched a long, long HR. It was the most electrifying performance on the young season, and it was…all three true outcomes stuff. Ohtani tossed 4 2/3 IP (before coming out after a collision at the plate that the Angels swear wasn’t injurious in any way), walking *5* and striking out 7.

Perhaps no one is doing more to make baseball as viral or “cool” on social media than Rob Friedman, the Pitching Ninja. For years, he would make GIFs of the nastiest pitches in the game. At first, MLB banned him for it, but relented and essentially brought him into the fold. Every day, he tweets out a ton of GIFs and talks to pitchers about how they throw them. He’s become popular not only among online fans, but among pitchers themselves, who’ve learned grips from his interviews with their colleagues.

It’s awesome, and I love watching pitches like Devin Williams’ airbender that we haven’t gotten to see due to the pandemic and the general paucity of games between Seattle and the NL central. But it strikes me that we as fans are going nuts over the *exact* thing that is making the game so three-true-outcomes heavy. We can’t get enough of Shohei Ohtani’s 100 MPH fastball and 91 MPH splitter. We love dingers. We don’t actually want to return to 2014, even if we keep saying we do! Our heart simply isn’t in it!

And this year shows that trying to reduce the ratio of home runs to fly balls can have other consequences – the new ball does indeed seem to be reducing HR/FB, but strikeouts are up markedly in the early going, as pitchers have appreciated the more standardized seam height. The nuclear option here remains moving the mound back and giving hitters a bit more time. But as Driveline’s Kyle Boddy mentions, it’s not clear that even that would come without serious unintended consequences: he believes it would aid breaking ball movement (giving a curve more time to move, or a slider to slide), potentially increasing both walks AND strikeouts. We may be seeing a bit of that already in the early going, as the new ball has sent walks and K’s up in the first few games.

I think the interim solution may simply be to increase the size of the OF, meaning Seattle and other teams may need to abandon the new OF alignment and move the fences back where they were when the park opened. Same in Comerica, same in Citi Field, etc. The league freaked out when offense nosedived from 2010-2014, and teams like the M’s moved fences in. Then, the ball ushered in a HR era the likes of which we’d never seen before. Before we try and move the mound, and before the league tries to seriously deaden the ball, why not flip things back to 2011 or so and move the fences? I know, I know: it’s really expensive. But it seems a bit more in keeping with the balance between hitters and pitchers than endless changes with the ball, and it seems less likely to come with serious unintended consequences than moving the mound.