The energy is back

I think.

You know what’s great? Classic baseball stuff. We’re not gonna swear in the second sentence. But god I love classic baseball…stuff.

For one, curtain calls. I don’t know how Mitch Haniger didn’t receive one when he homered on Opening Day. That was special. Hell, I don’t know how Justin Turner didn’t receive one on Friday. Seattle, maybe we could be a little better there.

But you can’t say Seattle doesn’t know ball. You can try, I guess. But you can’t say Seattle doesn’t love ball. We appreciate it. We think we know it. But I know we love it.

On Friday night, as Randy Arozarena stepped to the plate, it was on display. Its warmth felt in a moment of pure baseball romanticism, everyone rising to a calm ovation serving as acknowledgement.

It was an acknowledgement that, hey, you’re our dude now. We love you. And as long as you keep playing the way you play, we’ll keep on loving you. This year, next year and the one after that.

Welcome home.

This dude loved it. Or it looked like he loved it.

How could you not?

I saw and QT’d this from Tommy as I was watching the game—and watching Randy keep giving thumbs up to fans saying hey.

It’s hard not to watch this ball club and think “Hell, I don’t know, maybe this could work alright.”

The type of thought that’s going to follow is going to make me sound pretty old but I am not that old—and I use it to illustrate something I’ve come to understand and appreciate watching the game through the lens of analytical baseball bloggeroti discourse. Or whatever.

There’s a lot of stuff in this game that’s denigrated because it is immeasurable. It’s important to understand, by both its proponents and detractors, why the softer side of the game is devalued.

Stuff like, for example, trading for a fiery right fielder who gives the rest of your team a swift kick in the pants and delivers value beyond his linearly additional production—we don’t talk as much about that. We don’t talk about it because it isn’t quantifiable, and because it isn’t quantifiable it isn’t predictive, and because it isn’t predictive, there is no clear value.

You can’t bank on Randy Arozarena or someone of his ilk to provide just the spark to ignite what felt like some pretty damp kindling.

But he could.

I thought about that as he doubled to left on Saturday, did his usual pose—which is too damn cool—and then gestured to the crowd and dugout to get it going. Mitch had the bomb, yeah, but Randy started that four-run rally.

There’s a bit of a different energy at the ballpark. There’s more energy at the ballpark.

I wasn’t there on Saturday night, but I was there on Friday and it was as much fun as I’ve ever had at a Mariners game.

Let me tell you, when Raley hit that ball to right—and you’re thinking, this is gone, right? for sure, right? yeah—and it floated up and up and up before plopping into the first row of the third deck, like a seagull gentling landing on the roof arches, I thought I might have a stroke.

I jumped up, my whole body felt light and I thought, oh Jesus, this isn’t something bad, right? But nah, just pure, old-fashioned euphoria.

And then, the next inning, Justin Turner hit a grand slam for his first Mariners home run. My body was slightly more ready. Still some light headedess, but no visions of every double butterburger I’ve ever eaten racing through my head.

Going back to Luke Raley though, imagine his situation. This is a guy who, many times this season, probably found himself in position where he thought he had to be the guy that night. Someone had to, because they needed someone—shit, just one guy would be a start—to step up with the big knock. And sometimes he did. Sometimes he didn’t.

But here he was on Friday, in front of a big crowd, sandwiched in the lineup between Randy Arozarena and Justin Turner. That’s gotta be a nice shift.

The idea of “lineup protection” is largely a myth but, in a sport where the sequencing of events play such a large role in outcomes, there has to be stuff we’re missing.

I think often about a piece from Ken Arneson in 2014 titled “10 Things I Believe About Baseball Without Evidence.” The post ping-ponged around the baseball analytics community quite a bit, with mostly praise from everyone.

For context, this is the season the A’s traded Yoenis Cespedes for Jon Lester, went in the tank and then flamed out of the Postseason in the Wild Card Game against the Royals.

I recommend reading the entire piece but I think most about the following part, truncated to exclude A’s-specific anecdotes:

Belief Without Evidence #9: A lineup without holes scores runs exponentially, not linearly

This is probably the easiest of my hypotheses to disprove. But I have the gut feeling that one guy who is an automatic out in the middle of a lineup can take a rally that might score five runs and drop that rally down to 0 or 1 runs[…]

Almost every team has a hole in the lineup at any given time, someone who is slumping for whatever reason. So for most teams, run scoring appears to be linear. But in those rare cases when everyone is clicking at the same time, their run scoring graph turns like a hockey stick and shoots upward…

The Mariners lineup, still, is not without holes. This is not the 1927 Yankees or even the early-season 2014 Athletics.

But I would still agree with Arneson’s evidence-less hypothesis and expand it to say “Improving a lineup increases run output exponentially, not linearly.”

Eliminating holes is awesome, I agree. It’s one of the biggest and most-overlooked parts of roster-building, just not having absolute garbage-water players. Still, there is immense value—exponential value—in taking those lineup spots away from horrendous bats and giving them to your solid bats and then taking the spots occupied by solid bats and giving them to good ones.

I know—der. Obviously.

All I’m saying is, if it feels to you that things are just different, that maybe there’s something a little bigger than tossing legit good player Randy Arozarena, shockingly competent hitter Victor Robles and the AARP version of Justin Turner into the lineup and having it go from a D- to C-.

We’ve seen more. I hope we continue to see more.

I’m headed back to the ballpark tonight—right after I take Grinnell out, and I can’t wait to be there. Honestly, including tonight, I may get to another five games on this homestand.

These are the stretches it’s all about. Baseball, but life too.

Maybe it all works how all the smart people think it works—that the Mariners got better by X when they should’ve gotten better by Y. I’d mostly agree.

I will still hope there’s more. I’ll hope the 2024 Mariners aren’t adding X, but multiplying by it.

And if that’s the case, if the ingredients combust, I hope it doesn’t kill me.

Go M’s.