Edgar the emissary

07 Oct, 2024

Each legislative session has its own personality, but they tend to follow a similar pattern—days get long, bills die, trust dissipates, hygiene wanes. The weeks before Sine Die can be grueling and chaotic, and members are often, eh, grumpy as months of hard work are winnowed into, eh, less than they hoped to accomplish.

It was in these late days of session when Edgar arrived.

On April 1, 2019, the Washington State Senate bestowed Edgar Martinez with the greatest honor vested in them—a floor resolution.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, That the Washington State Senate honor and congratulate Edgar Martinez on being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and again thank him for his amazing career with the Seattle Mariners and for giving so much back to the team's fans and to the community.

The full resolution is quite amusing. It succinctly outlines Edgar’s journey from a child in Puerto Rico, to a “skinny” minor leaguer, to a Hall of Famer—all with the narrative flourish of a sports columnist. It touches on the double, the light bat, the street named after him, and his cantina at T-Mobile Park. The staffer who wrote it even tossed in a jab at the Yankees and Mariano Rivera.

This was at least Edgar’s third time being honored with a resolution. It appears the state Senate previously honored him in 2005, presumably marking his retirement. Congress honored him in 2017, perhaps in an attempt to boost his Hall of Fame candidacy.

Edgar sat politely at the rostrum while the clerk read the resolution in full, and he continued to sit as senators recounted tales of 1995 and the man they idolize. He absorbed the waves of admiration in an impressive display of patience (senators talk a lot).

And then it was lunch time, which I’ve learned to be the truest motivator of politics in Olympia. Edgar was allowed to leave, and the members followed, spilling out the main doors and into the rotunda, past lobbyists and activists who were equally shocked to see Edgar as they were to see lawmakers willingly forgo the private elevator. They asked for pictures and handshakes and stories until they had somewhere else to be.

The Edgar effect

Forced symmetry aside, it was in the late, discouraging days of the 2024 season when Edgar allowed the Mariners to be inspired by him.

I don’t need to remind you of the arc of the season, but here’s a visual summary.

I wrote several times early on that the Mariners offense was especially frustrating because they did so many things well. They worked counts, swung at good pitches, and made high quality contact.

Their greatest (and perhaps only) flaw was their inability to put the ball in play, especially in two-strike counts. They led the league in strikeout rate (27.7%) before Edgar arrived in late August, and they were on pace to set the all time single-season record for strikeouts for much of year.

But after Edgar arrived…

The horizontal dashed line at the very bottom is league average.

The Mariners strikeout rate dropped to roughly average at 23.7%—enough to stave off any “worst ever” records. Their overall whiff rate dropped a point from 28.4% before Edgar to 27.2% after. Perhaps more impressively, their whiff rate in two-strike counts dropped from 28.9% to 26.5%.

They were able to do this while maintaining high quality batted balls, which had disappeared in the weeks leading up to the coaching change.

Again, the Mariners didn’t need to change much or suddenly find some elite-level contact ability. They simply needed to stop whiffing at historic rates and just put the ball in play. And once that happened, they jumped from a 97 wRC+ team (18th) to a 125 wRC+ team (3rd) during the season’s final stretch.

Now, this is not necessarily a knock against Scott Servais and Jarret DeHart. As I pointed out last week, the Mariners ran into some bad luck in the early part of the summer that made the offense look much worse than it probably “deserved.” I also noted the 2023 Mariners saw a similarly timed and far greater late-season performance spike. And while it might not feel like it, the 2021 to 2023 Mariners were tied for the seventh best offense in MLB (albeit, with a 103 wRC+). Servais and DeHart certainly proved themselves capable of stewarding a decent offense, and they probably weren’t most (and certainly weren’t all) of the problem.

But I also don’t think they were going to be part of the solution, at least not in the five-plus weeks the Mariners had at the time to salvage the season. A column from The Seattle Times made it sound as if Servais and DeHart had some latitude over offensive strategy and game planning, which goes against the early post-firing narrative that painted the coaching staff as fully shackled by a top-down front office. And while they may have been undone by the lingering effects of Brant Brown’s “extreme” approach, the column also suggests there may have been some overlapping philosophies that weren’t quite cutting it.

I’m not here to say the Mariners were right to fire Servais and DeHart, or that it should have happened sooner, or that Edgar alone changed the trajectory of the Mariners offense. But sometimes the right voice at the right time can make all the difference.

Testimonials

So what was that voice saying?

J.P. Crawford told Shannon Drayer that Edgar offered simple advice that worked “better than anything else.”

“It’s just getting back to simplifying everything up,” he said. “I think collectively over the last couple of months we were going in with the plan that was way too complicated and these last couple of weeks we simplified everything just getting back to just trusting yourself, trusting your hands and just (a) see-ball-hit-ball type of mentality.”

Justin Turner agreed and described a mindset shift under Edgar that could explain the boost in performance with two strikes.

“It’s one thing (Martinez) has hit on multiple times since he’s been here is before you get to two strikes, it’s your at-bat and you have your approach and what you want to do, but once you get to two strikes, it’s the team’s at-bat,” Turner said. …

“So really just stressing on, ‘Hey, once you get two strikes, it’s about swallowing your pride, it’s about battling. It’s about not caring what you look like, but doing whatever you can to scratch and claw and find a way to put a ball in play and get on base.'”

Edgar himself told The Seattle Times he wants batters to not try too hard or think too much at the plate and instead focus on doing what’s right in the moment.

“The game today is so mechanical, you know,” he said. “There’s so much emphasis on mechanics that sometimes the hitters are thinking too much about mechanics when they should be focusing on the plan, on approach, and just to square the ball up, not where my hands are and all this stuff.”

Now, I’m somewhat hesitant to throw my full support behind this line of thinking. I certainly flinched at a few other quotes from Egar’s interview with The Seattle Times, particularly his stated preference for traditional stats like batting average and RBI. The fatal flaw of the Jack Zduriencik administration was abandoning evidenced-based decision making when things got difficult. And while I acknowledge that’s a bit of a leap, I’m always leery of anti-SABR talking points from a Mariners VIP.

I would be more concerned, however, if that sentiment was coming from a Mariners pitching coach. A pitcher’s goal with every pitch should be to get a whiff, and we can predict whiffs with some confidence from pitch type, velocity, spin, angle, and extension. Teams can use that information to advise their pitchers on how to grip a ball, how to move their body, how to sequence, etc. There’s a nice, neat, linear path from input to output that lends itself to rigorous analysis. Pitchers can be built, and data is a crucial part of building them.

But batting is less straightforward. It’s an amalgamation of approach, impact, and (crucially) in-game context. It’s some part reaction, some part aggression, and some part coercion. You can’t tell batters to simply “swing like this,” and it’s not practical to tell them “here are 250 ways to swing based on a dozen variables that you must solve in real time.” Batting development and instruction would seem to require some middle ground between the fact-based and the intangible—an instinct born from data.

That’s to say, I don’t know the exact, ideal role for a batting coach at the MLB level. But I do think Edgar is on to something that I hope continues with the next coach. Perhaps the most effective way to create high quality offense is to select for good batters, give them some general direction, and try to keep them confident and focused. The data is there, but it’s left in the background as a logical extension of context and ability.

Maybe the best advice is to keep it simple, stupid.

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