Jake

How many relievers do you think are still reliably effective 3 innings into an appearance? I'd love for Carson to be able to go 100 pitches but the Sox moved him to the bullpen presumably because they wanted to focus him on throwing 20 good pitches per day

Well it was a good day for Carson. I think he may be good enough to stay up here, although I doubt he will

predictable

The problem with the review here is you're making Carson throw the 3-1 pitch cold when he's ruled safe

Going 50% cutters is a good strategy for Carson, I'd say

Either way those up and in misses are a clue that he's running out of gas

I'm not sure why we kept going inside there when Carson kept missing in. If you really think inside is going to work you might as well have him aim for the outside edge.

Yeah I'm not mad at Moncada there. Once he saw that bat coming at him he just said screw it I've gotta get an out here

Getting Snell out after 6 innings feels like a real accomplishment

That guy finally got a good hack at it but that 83-ish breaking ball is tight

I'm open-minded and could see it going a different way but I see a younger Bartolo Colon in Lopez. When he has his good heater he might be best off just attacking with it and hoping to generate soft contact. Needs to have enough command to at least be wild in the zone for that to work though. It's odd that Fulmer gets hit so hard on his fastball when he has a high spin rate and good release point that makes his perceived velocity better than the measured velocity. Just goes to show that sometimes you just have to go out and play the games.

Crazy that Montas only has a little more than a year of service time with 100 innings across 4 years and 3 seasons under his belt. I'm guessing someone lucked out with him getting hurt just after a demotion.

Woah now, the Big Hurt was a clearly superior hitter compared to Cabrera. He had a better peak and was more consistently great. But it is true that Eloy is more similar to Cabrera than Thomas

There does seem to be something weird going on with him

Imagine how we would be melting down about the manager if our team made as many dumb mistakes as this Mariners team has been

Not hard to see how Eloy could end up with some high batting averages

Seemed like last time out Nate started to find his offspeed stuff after they hit him hard

Side note about spin rates. Was surprised Jace Fry leads the pack on the Sox. His cutter, which somehow has more spin than his fastball, had >2600rpm and had a 50% whiff rate last year.

Was up by about 70rpm in his first start

Ricky pulling the plug at the right time today

I should add that I think this is much different for hitters. In their case I think it's common for guys to get into a bad state of mind that hurts their production

I've been very anti-Palka from the get-go because of his defense but I'm very surprised by how much he's struggled at the plate so far. And it's not like he's been hitting rockets all over the place and having them caught.

If he's opening up it's going to throw off his timing and it wouldn't be surprising at all to see him missing along the path from high and inside to low and away (to a righty)

It's hard to get into a guy's head and it's not like you can make a clean separation of mind and body, but I apply a high level of scrutiny to claims that a guy would be good if not for being a head case. Maybe a guy just isn't good or is having a legitimate problem and fixing it is not a matter of just thinking differently

There we go