Seattle Sports Insider

Gaviglio at Nolasco

We REJECT the challenge. Because Nolasco IS no challenge.

Posted by

7/1/17

RICKY NOLASCO

Has been pitching cruddy. Think "Angels' version of He Who Must Not Be Named." He'll come at you -- only 2+ walks per game -- but you can come right back at him. 23 homers coughed up in 90 innings. We're guessing he usually suffers only one bad inning per start... make it count, boys.

SAM GAVIGLIO

It came out recently that Gaviglio had been a "Bad Actor" in the minor leagues. He also pitched in a dreary template, a 90 fastball / 83 slider two pitch template. The combination of the two explains the fact that he was not invited to major league camp.

But within dreary templates, you have outlier pitchers within that template. Doug Fister resided within a dreary template. Jamie Moyer did. Nick Vincent does. You still have to watch for guys who excel by dull means, and Gaviglio's been doing that.

Gaviglio is still in the bottom 5 of all pitchers for swing-and-miss rate ... BUT ... he is in the top 10 for strikes taken in the zone. (We used to call swinging strikes "fanning" and taken strikes "whiffing.") This split is highly unusual and it speaks to the fact that Gaviglio --- > throws hittable but unappetizing pitches.

Most of the time Gaviglio has GOOD command and scuffles to a 6 IP, 3-4 ER type start. Some of the time Gaviglio has GREAT command has breezes to a 7 IP, 1 ER type start. His long-term fortune is probably to serve as a #6, #7 starter, but until July 31* or Max Povse arrive, he's giving our 10-deep offense a great chance, a lot of the time.

ANDREW MOORE

Was kind of surprised to hear Dan Wilson gush as much as he did on TV. I had assumed that Jamie Moyer loves Moore because they both pitch in the Brains-Over-Brawn mold. But Wilson also thinks Moore could be "special," Dan-speak for a 100+ game winner, and he specified the unusual "preparation" that Moore uses.

In this respect, Moore reminds you a little bit of Trevor Bauer, the little saberdweeb pitcher :- ) who has 5 pitches and is always trying to make up a sixth pitch that will give him a .269 BABIP. Bauer is a little more "stuff" and a little less "command" than is Moore, though. I doubt Jamie Moyer would have sacrificed any of his command to get a little more stuff?

WILD CARD

Still a tight pack between Tampa at +2 and the M's at -1. (Zeus will show up for the Yankee play-in game, don' sweat it!) Still a pretty soft 12 games' worth of asphalt lying ahead, starting with A-HWMNBN tonight and proceeding through stops at KC, Oakland and the White Sox.

See you at the ballpark,

Jeff

....

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Sam Gaviglio

Comments

Funny how baseball game results often defy

All logical, statistical and thoughtful analysis. http://m.mariners.mlb.com/news/article/239939622/angels-righty-nolasco-s..., not-so-funny, really, as this Jekyll and Hyde season lurches from a 10-0 beatdown to an almost meek 0-4 follow-up. Extra-base hits galore along with stellar pitching followed by almost no offense and replacement-level pitching. It's the up-and-down offense that troubles me the most, but is probably the easiest to fix, I can only hope. Edgar to the rescue again, please. BTW just to clarify the upcoming KC and OAK games are at home before the ASG. We all knew that, right?

Ugh.

They waited too long for the bad inning; maybe it was scheduled to arrive in the 11th or something, I guess. Should have come out with a different mindset in that one.

HWMNBN for President!

Nolasco picks this game to pitch, arguably, the game of his career. Mindset, approach, something was missing from our boys in this game. Not enough mojo I suppose.

It's interesting you mention

It's interesting you mention this, SeattleNative, because yesterday I was wondering aloud to my son-in-law about this question:

Do other teams experience this phenomenon at the same rate as the Mariners? Of course they do experience it, but how frequently?

It seem the M's have had this happen an extraordinary number of times in most recent seasons. I wonder if any studies have been done that tally by team unexpectedly dominant starts by meatball pitchers. It would all depend, I'm sure, on how you define your terms. But such a study might assuage my concern that the M's have this happen way more than most teams.

It seems almost a weekly occurrance. Some guy comes in with an ERA of five or six and holds the M's to 2 or 3 hits, no runs or one run. (I exaggerate a bit, but you get the point.) And too often they are able to do it for seven innings, and a few times more than that.

Again, we know these things happen. The question is, are the Mariners the Kings of Meatball Pitcher Domination, or are they Run-Of-The-Mill in that department? If it turns out they are average, it would save me a lot of consternation.

Was thinking the same thing DaddyO

Of course when you lose too often to low-rated players, it means you're overperforming against high-rated players. In chess the cause is usually an underdeveloped sense of danger...

I had a chat with my wife that lead to this surprising decision:

I run the risk of being a dilatant the way my brain works and, with the trouble I have focusing on multiple things at once, failing to do anything productive.

Yet, with my professional skill for modular programming design, and the obvious need there is in my chosen field (atmospheric science) for people who fuse good math/programming skills with good database skills in ways that are reliable, she essentially ordered me to rebuild my baseball database and try again, this time attempting to incorporate modular programming design and coding best practices (well...after I suggested that, perhaps, I could make learning better coding skills more fun by working with baseball data, she was all over the idea).

I have some interest in questions like this.

Maybe this year I will get to a point where I can look at it.

Well, you always have...

a jumping-off place at SSI.com for visibility!

Fantastic Matt. I was hoping

Fantastic Matt. I was hoping you could chip in on the subject.

Honestly, with all the stats overkill in baseball these days, one subject area that is notably absent is the sophisticated comparison of how each team is treated by other teams, by the league, and by umpires. My guess is that a lot of this is VERY proprietary to team stat departments.

But I also surmise that "by umpires" part might be suppressed by the league itself because it might reveal some things they don't want revealed. Of particular interest to me is the relative fairness by umpire and by team of ball and strike calls. As a Mariners fan it wouldn't surprise me in the least if such stats would reveal certain pro- and anti- biases, though I completely understand that every fan base feels this way. That is why studies on the subject would be so fascinating/revealing. Such biases would be beyond the direct control of a team which suffered from them. We know the league has the data to produce such studies. What they don't have for reasons of their own is either the will or the intent to do so.

But a team's overall rate of meatball pitchers dominating them would indeed indicate some sort of fundamental weakness in the organization that is very much under their direct control.