The Mariners are Finally Using Safeco Field Correctly

It’s no trade secret that playing to the strengths of your ballpark helps your chances to succeed. To gain an advantage, franchises can exploit, and even sometimes manipulate their home ballpark. If you run the Astros or Reds, who play baseball in a lunchbox, you can succeed by employing otherwise-flawed home-run hitters with little regard for who gets on base ahead of them. When you play half your games in an airplane hangar, however, stubbornly attempting to put the ball over 900 foot fences is foolish. A foolish strategy common of recent Mariners teams. A foolish strategy that wasn’t working.

M’s Team Stats	OBP	ML Rank	SLG Pct.	ML Rank	wOBA	ML Rank
2015	.311	22	.411	12	.313	17
2014	.300	27	.376	21	.299	25
2013	.306	26	.390	20	.307	20
2012	.296	30	.369	30	.291	30
2011	.292	30	.348	30	.283	30
2010	.298	30	.339	30	.285	30

If you have a weak stomach, do not view the last few rows.

The Mariners wrote the Greatest Hits on failing to get on base and, not surprisingly, struggled to win games during those seasons. For years and years, the Mariners tried succeeding with players like Logan Morrison, Michael Morse, and Mark Trumbo, desperately clinging to the home run as the heralded harbinger of scoring runs. Whether this was evidence of a failing regime by general manager Jack Zduriencik remains up for debate, but the front office had seen enough. Around the same time, a wayward GM separated cleanly from the Mariners division rival Angels was seeking asylum, armed with his own vision of building a team.

Strategy 1: Get on Base

Jerry Dipoto, presumably having read Moneyball, understood the value of getting baserunners, and how to get players on base.

“Command the Strike zone” Dipoto told Justin Myers and Gee Scott on their ESPN 710 Seattle radio segment. “From the top of the lineup to the bottom, we will command the strike zone”.

Dipoto began addressing the team’s glaring need for baserunners by signing catcher Chris Iannetta, who had played for Dipoto in Anaheim, and had posted OBP numbers over .350 in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Dipoto found further help by trading for Adam Lind (.350 OBP in 2015) and  signing free agent Norichika Aoki (.353 OBP in 2015, 6.4 K%).

None of these moves were meant to be earth-shattering, but each undoubtedly made the Mariners lineup better. With a solid core of Robinson Cano, Nelson Cruz, and Kyle Seager, Dipoto’s goal was to fill the remaining slots with valuable role players, each of whom is more than capable of getting on base.

Here is a table of several key Mariners offseason additions, with 2015 statistics, and 2016 ZIPS projections courtesy of Dan Szymborski. Note that season projections are often more conservative estimates, as they account for a certain level of player regression.

	OBP (2015, 2016)	wOBA (2015, 2016)	BB% (2015, 2016)	K% (2015, 2016)
Chris Iannetta	.293	.281	12.9	26.2
	.329	.306	14.0	25.8
Adam Lind	.360	.351	11.5	17.5
	.334	.315	10.1	19.5
Nori Aoki	.353	.326	7.7	6.4
	.332	.313	7.0	7.8

Strategy 2: Prevent runs, Create runs

Dipoto, addressing the fallbacks of that revolutionary A’s season, also understood the value of defense and speed. “We see ourselves as a run-prevention club. You can create a lot of advantage playing good defense. We also see our overall team defense as our biggest area in need of improvement.”

Dipoto went primarily after well-rounded players, but several moves in particular focused on defense and speed. In November, Dipoto traded closer Tom Wilhelmsen to Texas in exchange for Leonys Martin, a light-hitting center fielder with blazing speed. Martin didn’t quite play enough innings (334) in 2015 to qualify for the CF leaderboard, but his 15.4 Ultimate Zone Rating/150 would have ranked him 5^th best among MLB center fielders, just above Lorenzo Cain. Martin, by the FanGraphs arm strength statistic, also had the strongest arm of any center fielder in baseball.

In terms of speed, Martin is as fast as they come. He’s been consistently valuable on the basepaths, posting a 4.3 and 4.2 BRR in 2014 and 2013 respectively (BRR is Baseball Prospectus’s baserunning statistic, where 0 represents an average baserunner). Martin posted a lower total BRR in 2015 (1.5), mostly because his on-base percentage dropped 61 points from 2014, and he appeared at the plate 273 fewer times (generally it’s harder to be a valuable baserunner if you don’t get on base as often).

The second move was to acquire Boog Powell, young center field prospect, from Tampa Bay. Powell was part of a larger trade, wherein Seattle received starting pitcher Nate Karns and Powell, and sent Logan Morrison and shortstop Brad Miller to the Rays. We’ll talk about Karns in the last section, but Powell further embodies Dipoto’s vision of commanding the strike zone, getting on base, and playing defense.

Powell’s defensive statistics are less clear than Martin’s, since Powell has never stepped foot in the major leagues, but he’s consistently graded out in the minor leagues as a plus defender. Powell is 22, and serves as outfield depth should Martin fall down a well in center field.

It’s clear that Dipoto aggressively wanted to improve the outfield defense. In his wild spree of moves, he also made his infield defense better. In trading for Lind, he incrementally made first base a more well-defended position (Lind posted a 3.8 UZR in 2015, compared to Logan Morrison’s -2.9). Brad Miller was a plus defensive shortstop (1.1 UZR, 4.6 dWAR), but with the emergence of talented, young Ketel Marte (1.2 UZR, 2.8 dWAR in 310 fewer innings at SS), Dipoto knew he could afford to trade Miller.

If one looks around at the Mariners in the field, Robinson Cano and Nelson Cruz are currently the only remaining defensive liabilities, and Cruz might not see much right-field time this year. Kyle Seager is a plus defender, Aoki is capable in left, and Seth Smith improved his defense dramatically last season. The team re-signed Franklin Guitierrez (3.4 UZR, 1.9 dWAR) to split Right Field with Smith and Cruz. At the catcher position, both Iannetta and Mike Zunino are among the 10 best pitch framers in baseball, saving an aggregate 26.8 runs in 2015.

The Mariners were the 5^th worst defensive team in 2015, but that looks likely to improve in 2016.

Strategy 3: Taking advantage of Dinger-hitting tendencies

When you play baseball in an extreme pitcher-friendly park, in a sea-level city whose summer nights are cool and humid, home runs are a rare commodity. The Mariners understand they won’t win by hitting home runs, but they also understand that the same difficulty exists for opposing teams. Thus, the Mariners can fill their starting rotation with pitchers with higher than average fly-ball rates. Here are the totals from Mariners starters in 2015. WARP is Baseball Prospectus’s cumulative wins above replacement player statistic.

	IP	FB %	GB%	BABIP	WARP
Felix Hernandez	201.2	26.9	56.2	.288	3.3
Taijuan Walker	169.2	39.0	38.6	.291	1.8
Hisashi Iwakuma	129.2	31.1	50.3	.271	2.5
James Paxton	67.0	34.4	48.3	.289	0.0
Roenis Elias	115.1	36.4	44.2	.280	0.9

Normally we’d expect a higher GB rate to correlate with a higher BABIP, since it’s more likely for ground balls to find holes and become hits than it is for fly balls. Felix has the highest GB rate of that table, and still maintained a better-than-average BABIP. That’s because he’s Felix Hernandez, and he’s better than you. Iwakuma, 34, also posted a ground-ball rate of 50%, and he’s never posted a BABIP above .287. After 2000 balls in play, a pitchers BABIP will normalize, and Iwakuma is quickly approaching that. Walker has the highest FB rate, so it’s probably good that he pitches where he does.

Before you even get beyond the innings pitched column, however, it’s clear the Mariners were thin on reliable starting pitching depth in 2015. Out of the players above, only Hernandez and Walker eclipsed 130 innings, only those two and Iwakuma provided any sort of positive contribution, and Roenis Elias is now on the Red Sox.  So the offseason began, and Dipoto got to work.

Earlier we mentioned Boog Powell becoming a Mariner, but he came over as secondary piece that landed the team starting pitcher Nate Karns from Tampa Bay. Karns had a quasi-breakout season in 2015, posting a 3.67 ERA and 3.90 xFIP in 147.2 innings pitched (xFIP is a Fielding Independent Pitching statistic that takes fly-ball rate into account). This was the first full season for the 27-year-old Karns, who also had a 36.5% fly-ball rate in 2015. Of those fly balls, 12.5% went for home runs, an above-average rate for a starting pitcher. While Tropicana Field is not an especially friendly ballpark for hitters, every other park in the AL East dramatically favors home runs, and Karns’s HR rate was likely hurt by pitching frequently at parks like Yankee Stadium and Camden Yards.

Karns should be aided by the expansive parks of the American League West, where more fly balls will become outs. If Karns matches, or even exceeds his peripherals in 2016, while maintaining his high fly-ball rate (fly-ball rate normalizes after 70 fly balls, a total Karns exceeded long ago), he should lower his home-run rate, and his BABIP. Karns also has room for regression, as HR/FB doesn’t normalize until after about 500 IP.

There is a question of Karns’s durability, having only one major-league season with over 100 innings pitched, but no such question exists with Dipoto’s next trade target. A month after grabbing Karns, Dipoto traded Elias and closer Carson Smith to Boston for Wade Miley, one of the most consistently durable left-handed starters in the game. Smith was a bright spot in a bad Mariners bullpen, so Dipoto had to give up some value to acquire Miley, but the GM took that risk to bolster a shaky rotation. Miley has pitched more than 190 innings in four consecutive seasons: 2015 in Boston, and the previous three in Arizona. All of those years have featured FIPs below 4, and improvements across many categories in 2015, lowering his home run/9 rate by .24 despite pitching in the AL East. It’s no stretch of the imagination for Miley to improve even further in 2016, playing in front of an overhauled Mariners defense.

Miley and Karns, 2015 Statistics

Name	IP	FB%	GB%	BABIP	WARP
Nate Karns	147	36.5	41.9	.285	1.6
Wade Miley	193.2	30.5	48.8	.307	2.5

You start to see how exploiting these park advantages becomes mutually beneficial. A speedy outfield defense will turn more of Nate Karns’ fly balls into outs, and a more solid infield defense will help turn Miley’s ground-ball hits into outs as well. On the offensive side, players who don’t strike out will put the ball in play more often, and the increased speed of the lineup will turn more of those balls in play into hits, increasing the number of baserunners. If, with all of these improvements, we still believe in Nelson Cruz’s power, Kyle Seager’s upward trajectory, and continued King Felix domination, we believe in Mariners success.