Thursday Baseball

Seattle (Pineiro) @ Toronto (Prokopec)

Well the Mariners come from 5 runs down last night to keep their very good road record in tact they are now 15-3 on the road while the Blue Birds are in a miserable 2-8 slide in their last 10 games.

The Mariners send out young right hander Joel Pineiro who has looked shaky after coming out of the bullpen but has seemed to settle down in his last two starts in his last 12 innings he has surrendered just 4 earned runs while striking out 6 and only walking 2 and those two starts just happened to be against the Yankees and Red Sox two of the better teams in the league. He has one start in his young career against Toronto in 7 innings pitched against them he has an ERA of 1.29 and a WHIP of 0.714 in a Mariner win.

Toronto sends out Luke Prokopec who has just not looked like he is enjoying himself since coming over from the Dodgers and has to now face a red hot Mariners team that loves right handed pitchers. In 3 starts at home he is 0-3 with a very large ERA of 14.40 and an inflated WHIP of 2.900 with just 4 strikouts in 10 innings, this is his very first start against the Mariners.

The Mariners have had no trouble at all scoring especially on the road where they are averaging 7.4 runs a game while batting a very solid .322 as a team with an on base percentage of .424 while allowing their opponents a 4.8 runs a game average while batting .260 with an OBP of .360. The bullpen has an ERA of 3.64 and a WHIP of 1.314.

Toronto has had some trouble getting men across the plate only averaging 4.4 runs a game while batting just .238 as a team with an on base percentage of .326 while they are allowing the other team to score 7 runs a game while batting .300 with an OBP of .399 and the bullpen has been absolutely no help with an ERA of 5.28 and a WHIP of 1.717.

The home plate umpire Tim Timmons has a strike out to walk ratio of 2.41 so he likes to call strikes and this can only help the Mariners who are the much better hitting team with the better pitcher in my own opinion so I will lay the price against a pitcher that is lost and a team that just is not that good.

Playing Seattle -170