Thursday, August 1, 2013

Is this year’s Mariner team actually built for the playoffs?

While the chances of the Mariners making the playoffs this year are slim to none, I got to wondering what if they actually did make it. I think most people would think that this team is not good enough to do anything in the playoffs anyway. But I actually think this year’s team would be quite dangerous in the playoffs.
In my opinion what makes a strong playoff team doesn’t necessarily make a strong regular season team. Back in 2001 when the Mariners were winning at a historic pace I was cautioning people that the M’s were not going to make it to the World Series that year. My quote during that year was “The Mariners are built for the marathon, not the sprint.” For the sake of simplicity, I believe there are 3 basic elements that makes a strong playoff team. That is: two strong starting pitchers, power hitting and a strong bullpen. The Mariners in 2001 had 2 of those elements. They had the power and they had the strong bullpen but not the two strong starting pitchers. Yes they had five good starting pitchers: Freddy Garcia, Jaime Moyer, Aaron Sele, Paul Abbott and John Halama, which was great for the regular season but none of them, would be considered a dominant starting pitcher like Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling for the 2001 Diamond Backs, Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling for the 2004 Red Sox and Matt Cain and Tim Lincicum for the 2010 Giants to name a few.   
I think this year’s Mariner team has two of the elements needed to be a World Series contender. They have the two strong starting pitchers at the top of their rotation in Felix Hernandez and Hisashi Iwakuma. Can you imagine facing King Felix 3 times in a 7 game series?  And Iwakuma has been as tough as anyone in baseball this year. Not to mention that these are two veteran pitchers who I think would be able to handle the big stage. The second element this year’s Mariner team possesses is power in their lineup. The Mariners are one of the top homerun hitting teams in baseball. The pitchers in the playoffs are too good for an offense to be able to string together 3 or 4 hits in a row to score runs. If you look at playoff baseball, so many times the runs are scored via home runs. The pitchers are only going to make a few mistakes during a game so the hitters better do some damage with those mistakes if they want to win. I have always believed this and I was happy to hear Buck Showalter of the Baltimore Orioles basically say the same thing in last year’s playoffs.
While I believe this year’s Mariner team possesses two of the three basic elements to win in the playoffs, they do lack in the third element. And that is a strong bullpen. Which is kind of ironic since this was supposed to be one of their strengths this year. While the bullpen hasn’t been terrible it is not playoff caliber. But if you look at a lot of the teams that are going to make the playoffs this year, their bullpens aren’t the best either. Just about every team looks to bolster their bullpens before the playoffs begin. If the Mariners were closer to making the playoffs this year they could try to bolster their bullpen like everyone else and if they did get in, I really believe they would be a dangerous team. A team that not too many teams would want to face.
* Footnote: Baseball is over 100 years old. I am sure there are examples of winning World Series teams that didn’t have two strong starting pitchers or didn’t hit for power or didn’t have a strong bullpen. Any sabermatrician can manipulate numbers to get any desired outcome. If you need numbers to back everything you are saying, you can visit the numerous saber metric based sites. Or become an accountant.
Sometimes though, you can form an opinion by actually watching the games.