Seattle Mariners struggling with identity crisis early in 2015
The Seattle Mariners are showing their fair share of blemishes early on in MLBs 2015 campaign. With preseason favoritism plentiful towards the M’s coming out of the AL West and making a push for a pennant, Seattle was supposed to get by on a sturdy rotation, crafty bullpen and the addition of an impactful right-handed bat to the lineup.
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So far, Nelson Cruz is more than holding up his end of the bargain with his boomstick that has set the mark for home runs across all of MLB and the bullpen is getting along rather nicely with a 3.26 ERA, but the rotation looks like a grotesque manifestation of something baseball fans in Colorado have grown accustom to over the years.
Felix Hernandez (2-0, 2.37) has looked like the ace he is and newcomer J.A. Happ (0-1, 2.70) is also finding success. Both of these story lines were forecast as such for the Mariners in 2015. What hasn’t been are the tribulations of Hisashi Iwakuma (0-1, 6.61), James Paxton (0-1, 5.40) and Taijuan Walker (0-2, 17.18).
Iwakuma appears to be headed down the dreaded road traveled by many former Japanese pitchers overworked in their primitive baseball years who begin experiencing prolonged bouts of dead-arm in their late 20s and 30s. The 34-year-old was excellent in his first two full years in the M’s rotation. Before 2012, from age 20 through 30, Iwakuma threw well over 1,500 innings in Nippon Professional Baseball.
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Only a few years earlier MLB witnessed what a demanding MLB workload on a Japanese pitcher can do once he’s asked to adapt to starting 32 or 33 games in a more heavily weighted regular season. In Japanese rotations, typical games started stats consisted of a mark somewhere in the mid-20s. Daisuke Matsuzaka warmed up to the western version of baseball in 2007 with the Red Sox before excelling in 2008. After that, combined with the over 1,400 innings he threw from age 18-25 in Japan, Dice-K fizzled out and recorded a 23-28 record with a 5.10 ERA from 2009-14, pitching his final inning as a Major Leaguer only days after his 33rd birthday.
In the past, Iwakuma always relied most on his four-seam fastball. Back in 2012, it was touching as high as 94 mph on the radar gun. This season, it has maxed out at 92.1 mph and it’s only April. He’s also thrown in less times than his sinker, split-fingered and slider.
On the other end of things, Walker looked primed to breakout this year after destroying his competition all spring long. Now, instead of looking like a future ace when the games have started to count, Walker looks like an over-matched Triple-A hurler who is being destroyed by his competition. Through two starts he is yet to record an out in the fifth inning of a ball game, has allowed 14 earned runs and walked six. If Walker turns in another clunker tonight against the Astros — a team very susceptible to striking out instead of taking free passes — there is a real chance the 22-year-old will get sent back down for another tour of duty in the minors.
While the rotation is struggling and the bullpen is for the most part pitching well, other wrinkles do exist. Their closer Fernando Rodney is off to a terrible start with a blown save, 12.46 ERA and a BAA of .389. From an offensive side of things, the M’s came dangerously close to tying a not-so-flattering record in yesterday’s loss that has existed since 1956 when the Yankees stranded 20 runners in one game. The Mariners left 17 men aboard in their 7-5 shortcoming against the Astros on Monday.
With the chief identity of this ball club a concern right now amidst the tight AL West standings, the Seattle Mariners need to take a hard look in the mirror and remember it was pitching in 2014 that saw them narrowly miss their first playoff berth since the 2001 season. Cruz’s addition to the lineup is a luxury, but he would have to hit three home runs per game right now to make a real difference in outcomes given the surplus of runs the pitching staff is surrendering these days.
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