IGT 07/21 -- Mets at Mariners

[Frayed Knot]

The problem last night was more plain old shitty hitting than anything else.
I mean nine hits is OK, but all were singles (and some pretty cheap ones among them) and by managing to pull off the old 'one per inning' oddity--exactly one hit in each inning but never more than one--most of those runners never advanced beyond 1st base.

[Edgy MD]

TransMonk wrote: I agree with JCL.

And Johnny C. Johnson is right about Howard Johnson being right!

I was highly distressed about Josh Edigin's explanation of "That's the way I fall off the mound."

No matter what your motion, every pitcher is responsible for getting his back foot forward to square his hips and bring his body and into fielding position. If you can't do it, and you're late, and the ball gets by you a little and you've got to do some weird move like pivot on your back foot and turn your back to the hitter on a tapper, that's just not an option. A ball hit that softly and you still can't get into position? Because only being able to field balls hit to the third-base side of the rubber, because that's just the way you fall, is not acceptable.

That's the sort of execution failure you risk when you come to depend on AAAA types on your roster, but it's also the type of execution failures Terry and his staff have to answer for. How strange that Terry came to the team with a rep of a heartles and stern taskmaster, and he has actually come to seem ineffectual in this regard.

And yeah, this post speaks more to the night before last, but still. Advancing stray runners is execution, too.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Edgy MD wrote: That's the sort of execution failure you risk when you come to depend on AAAA types on your roster, but it's also the type of execution failures Terry and his staff have to answer for.

One could reasonably expect the opposite, besides-- that the one thing that AAAA types can certainly get right is execution-- couldn't one?

[Edgy MD]

I don't think so.

There's a philosophy in baseball that the difference between the Major Leaguer and the guy who does fine in the minors but can't crack the bigs isn't one of of physical talent but of the discipline to execute. (This assumes that DtE isn't in itself a physical talent, but perhaps a mental/emotional one.) The notion goes that while there are supremely gifted MLBers who eclipse everybody else in talent, the majority simply do things "right" 99% of the time, while the AAAA-er does things right 90% of the time.

Now, a philosophy is just a philosophy, but it gets spouted a lot, as arbitrary as those numbers may seem. Suffice to say that two Mets pitchers looked uncomfortably out of place fielding balls on a big league mound.