http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ge-fullcount071009&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

Mariners making smart moves

By Gordon Edes, Yahoo! Sports July 10

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Magglio, deconstructed: The mini-vacation he got hasn’t helped. Cutting his hair made some money for charity and produced one home run, but Magglio Ordonez(notes) comes into the final weekend before the break still unable to shake the slump that has plagued him all season. In some ways, it’s gotten worse: Ordonez has two home runs since Tigers manager Jim Leyland sat him down in mid-June, but in 13 games since, he is batting just .196. The Tigers are now platooning him in right with Clete Thomas(notes), and it’s still not out of the question that GM Dave Dombrowski will release him.

We asked our man, Ari Kaplan, the Caltech-trained statistical analyst who consults for a number of big league clubs and has a website, ariball.com, to take a closer look at Maggs. Here are his key observations:

Ordonez has big holes in his swing out of the strike zone. Swinging at 18 low pitches out of the zone and 19 high pitches that were balls, Ordonez has no hits. Cutters have been especially cruel to him; he has swung at a dozen cutters, put only two in play, and has no hits. He still rakes changeups – 19 percent of his hits come off the change, but pitchers are now throwing him half as many changes as they were earlier in the season, while amping up the number of fastballs, from 50 percent to 65 percent. Can anyone say long swing (my words, not Ari’s)? Kaplan also notes that Ordonez, never a fast runner, has gone from first to third on a single on just one of 18 chances this season., and from second to home on only four of 14 chances. And since he’s hitting groundballs 61 percent of the time, that lack of speed becomes even more obvious.

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