Seattle Sports Insider

Echo Box: Marc-O

Matty likes his command pretty well. So does the 'Frame

Posted by

2/27/18

Quite the deluge of comments on Marc-O, every one of which was erudite and interesting. The 'Frame gets stuck, makes strange sounds, and smokes slightly trying to process them all at once...

Wishhiker sez,

I was just looking back to see effects and movement of previous slider usage and Brooks only really had useful 2014 data because he didn't use it much in MLB since then. Well he wasn't in MLB much since then until last year when he wasn't using it.

1 The Curve and Splitter are around 8-11 inch horizontal movement different from his other pitches.

2 In 2014 he used CB+SPL about 11.33% VS RHB, 26.59% VS LHB

3 In 2014 he gave up OPS of .827 VS RHB, .397 VS LHB

It's surely not that simple, although I'd bet there's something to it.

In short: his curve, and especially his split, were devastating. Due to their rolling-off-the table action. Dr's Diagnosis: we didn't see those pitches on Sunday. He had a power slider that F/X would probably have with slight rise. Marc-O already has 4 pitches he's using to excellent effect; no idea what the scenario would be if he added #5 and #6 with hellacious drop. Thanks for the research Wish.

Matty sez:

[No F/X at all, so hard to tell] But, watching him pitch, he reminded me of Jimmy Key. Which, I assure you, is quite encouraging.

Love the Key comparison! :- D Key had a 5:1+ Control ratio in a different era. He threw a solid-average fastball right into the mitt, mixed pitches, and was very aggressive about his strike zone. Maybe Jimmy Key is the idol towards which Marc-O is attempting to emulate.

Here's a fanblog putting Key #97 among all Yankees ever. A minor difference - Dr. D vaguely remembers Key as using a slightly more Wellsian bloopier slider, but even if that's right, Marc-O's slider on Sunday looked just about as impressive.

IIRC, Key gave up more-than-usual HR's in exchange for a ridiculous walk rate. If I remember right, Key was about the best lefty going, who lacked a plus fastball. Gonzales may be exactly the same kind of lefty. Here is Key's baseball card - his career ERA was 122 and he fired two back-to-back seasons for NYY going 18-6 and 17-4, getting of course a lot of luck and contextual help. But a typical year for Key would be maybe 15-9, 3.51 with a 120:50 CTL.

Nathan sez,

John Trupin at Lookout Landing came out with a great post a couple of weeks ago about Marco's arm-slot change.

https://www.lookoutlanding.com/2018/2/19/17025530/marco-gonzales-lowered...

TL;DR - Marco's arm slot change has unlocked a few extra MPH in all of his pitches at the expense of his impact change-up.

Muchas gracias for that link brotha. I agree with Trupin on 80% of it. The takeaway is that Marc-O used to short-arm the ball horribly, meaning that he didn't unbend his elbow at the back of his stroke. Indeed Marc-O's delivery now uses a much longer, more comfortable loop. Trupin's very fine article is convincing on that point.

Dr's Diagnosis: Of COURSE it strips velocity to short-arm the ball (which adds deception). For sure the added velocity is permanent. But. What about his new motion prevents his throwing a Moyer changeup? Changeups are a question of touch, less leg action, grip and feel, not arm slot.

Agree however, that it's looking like this version of the guy does not depend on a -12 MPH changeup. We'll follow.

Wishhiker sez,

I don't understand 2016 counting against his clock. IMO he should have an option left not that I think it should change retroactively.

Anybody?

.....

... in his TV interview, Marco said there came a point in September when he just decided to "let it rip." Lacking any F/X information, SSI sees a confident lefty who is hammering a located fastball and tormenting a pinpoint slider. The other stuff remains to be seen.

Felix is set back, Erasmo is certainly a question mark for Opening Day, and Gonzales is in there, hard #5 and climbing towards #3-4. Will take a while to understand the kid, which promises great fun all the way. Kid is a buy recommendation early on, no doubts there.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

There is a Miranda - Moore - Gordon article that I idiotically put under the "ALL" subdomain. Once there are comments on an article I can't do anything about the domain. But if you missed it, go check it out.

Enjoy,

Dr D

.....

Mojician - we'll ask about your suggestions, muy pronto. And the Shout Box generally - what was it you liked about the original version? That it was unattached to the articles?

Blog:

POTD

Tags:

Marco Gonzales

Comments

The option year rules

Are what they are currently. I'm just postulating that when Pitcher misses an entire year, if it counts as an option year that's often detrimental to both the team and the player.

Shout box not being attached to articles was good in that there was always continuity. The idea of having separate boxes for each is sound but hasn't yet worked properly. It doesn't even consistently load the right shout box for the post you load. And there's always comments that don't belong. Some of those might be explained that a different Klat site loaded the wrong shout chat. But they often seem to have a superficial relationship to sports. Every time someone talks about a sports bra, tennis bracelet, sporty car or whether/ how much they played or watched sports as a child (that one's particularly common) in any Klat shout it's either copied or redirected to an SSI shout box.

Also it dredges up all previous shouts connected to any previous post with the same title (like the current "Readables"). It's kind of interesting reading old shouts and such but they're often nearly as off topic as sports bras.

From the shout box of "Quick Angels thread";

Mon 6:59pm: guestefoglagk38 Negan controls his subordinates by intimidation, reward and punishment. Brutal, foul-mouthed and possessing a twisted sense of humor, Negan carries a barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat named Lucille. While he can be psychopathically merciless, he is also (at least superficially) empathetic, and pragmatically spares those he sees as potentially useful, and is reasonable when people attempt to negotiate with him. Negan has a penchant for provocation and power games. The stronger the resistance to his will, the more he seems to enjoy the test of wills. He has a genuine disgust for the act of rape. Total psycho with a capital 'p

Yup, they said baseball so it must be pertinent to our chat. Hardly anyone here uses shouts anymore because of all these problems.

I'm waiting to see

about his Changeup. The point that not many can be effective with a change only 6-7 MPH under the heat is not as strong as saying nobody has ever done it. It bears watching, but also because he could manage a 1-3 MPH drop on the pitch and suddenly be in more normal parameters of variance. Either way it's all presumptive at this point. Marco is currently establishing a baseline, there's really not much previous to make declarations from.

Klat talked a big game but nothing has changed in over a year.

We had similar complaints about the shoutbox last Spring Training. The system only works if their software is intelligent enough to track shouts relevant to the current post and, even then, it only works if you've got a community that prefers shouts to posting comments. Neither of which is true here. And, as wish pointed out, the wrong shoutbox loads at least half the time, and the shouts are polluted with comments that are not from this community.

I, frankly, think Klat should recognize that each individual community leader (that would be you, Doc) should have the ability to adjust the experience his or her users get in the content of the site. They should be able to limit shouts to a whitelist of recognized community members or including a keyword (we call all shout beginning with #SSI, for example), and they should be able to choose whether they wanted shouts by subject or by post or just one box for their neighborhood.

And the shoutbox, as it stands now, doesn't do what we need it to do. We have your posts to control organized conversations on specific topics. We used the shoutbox to relay news and information or have a general discussion about the team or other group members or politics or whatever we are currently gabbing about that is 'off-topic' to any of the posts. I think Klat's basic model is flawed...they're creating a way to converse that humans don't tend to create for themselves, which is usually a bad sign. We don't tend to talk to each other by yelling into a room of thousands of strangers. We either (a) make statements into the void and hope they are passed on (Twitter model), (b) talk to our friends (facebook model), or (c) talk about specific topics (forum/blog post model), or (d) talk to our communities in smaller community meetings/parties/social gatherings (old shoutbox model).

There was a time

That shouts were often 80%+ of the commentary on the site. I think the change in shout box has actually stifled the conversations that used to be more active and fluid.

What Matt said

The shout box works best for game day trash talk or snippets of off topic conversation. Sometimes you have a thought that isn't quite post worthy or relevant to the post. When there is a shout box for each blog post, the shout box becomes redundant because the posting process is already better. Also, if possible, the shout box should be limited to SSI. After two years of shouts, nobody from the site has been tempted to join any other KLAT blog or had any meaningful conversation with any other KLAT blogger. Also, the other sites seem to be infested with spam and malware.

Thanks Doc and we don't mean to complain right at spring training. However, KLAT should do some spring cleaning.

Klat does a good job listening to me

I have a supervisor who reports to the Microsoft honcho who set up the company. He relays our wishes to the owner, who makes his own decisions as to what is most consistent with the patents he has in place.

If I'm not mistaken, it looks like they've already addressed the Illuminati clutter that we all hate. The Shout Box used to be mondo popular, I understand, but then we had few of these meaty discussions under the CMS comments - so, ironically, I prefer having the Shout Box down. But, of course, the user experience overrides my own preferences and I've periodically asked about a floating Shout Box; each time so far, the owner has preferred to push the attached Shout Boxes. Remember their overall idea is to get as universal an experience as possible -- in other words, that Shouts appear in the Singles sites and so forth.

Or something. I don't understand computer stuff :- )

.........

Once again I'll give thanks to Klat that they maintain a site for us, so no Wolfy needed, and it's free, so no PayPal button needed. Pretty big advantages, no? How many would be up for going back to the $9 per month at D-O-V? ;- )

What Matt said

Thanks Doc and we don't mean to complain right at spring training. However, KLAT should do some spring cleaning.

Is there some reason we don't just have an SSI Slack chat?

It's what the shout box WAS for, and we could log in and talk about whatever. No, it doesn't connect to this site but we can still quote it onto Klat and continue chats as posts on articles, or make articles from ideas that popped up in Slack.

This is a very hard medium to casually chat in, or to quickly discuss things. Just make a general chat and a gameday chat for SSI, send out the links, and get people talking again since this platform obviously doesn't want to make it any easier to do that.