I’m down in Tacoma for a week or so house-sitting for a friend of mine, and I decided to take in last night’s Tacoma Rainiers game as long as I was here, especially as it was a Michael Pineda start and he’s right near his innings limit for 2010.

Unfortunately, Pineda showed that he is indeed right at his innings limit, and that there are nothing but good reasons to shut him down for the year, and to do it right now.

The Rainiers were facing the Portland Beavers last night, the AAA affiliate of the San Diego Padres, and they were playing to extend their lead in their division as Salt Lake had lost earlier in the day.  With the Beavers’ middling talent (mostly broken prospects of varying types), this looked like a start that Pineda could breeze through to finish his season on a high note.  Such a result was not to be, however, as the Rainiers would fall 17-12 in what can only be described as an absolute slugfest.

Pineda came out of the gate throwing gas.  His fastball was in it’s typical 94-96 range, occasionally touching 97 on the radar gun.  However, it was arrow-straight tonight with minimal command, and for most of his outing it was all Pineda threw.  He only threw four sliders in the first inning, and three of them were to the last batter of the inning.  He didn’t throw a single changeup until the third inning, and everything was flat and regularly up in the zone.  Frankly, he just looked tired out there, and looked like he was throwing more than he was pitching.

You could still see what makes Pineda such an attractive pitching prospect, however.  The velocity on all of his pitches was still there, and the near identical release points and velocity on his slider and changeup will make life very, very difficult for major league hitters if they try and sit on one of those pitches.  The fastball is a live pitch when Pineda is feeling right, and even when the Portland batters were sitting on it, he was still able to blow past them at times.

At 139 innings pitched after last night, Pineda is right up against the theorized 140 inning mark that the Mariners had him tabbed to get shut down at.  There were some whispers before the game that he might get one more start after this, but last night showed that his shut-down needs to happen now.  I had separate conversations with Ryan Divish of the Tacoma News Tribune and Chris Crawford of Prospect Insider, and both of them agreed completely with that viewpoint.

I also got to see Dan Cortes pitch last night late in the game in relief.  As one of the M’s top relief prospects, I was excited to see him come trotting out of the bullpen… but that excitement didn’t last long.  His fastball has legit velocity, with a number at or above 99 MPH, and none below 96.  That said, Cortes seemed to have very little sense of where it was going, and it flew as straight as straight fastballs come.  The Beavers hitters sat on it his whole outing, and they punished him time and again.  He only threw about three curveballs, which is a ratio that will really, really need to change if Cortes is going to find success at the major-league level.  The curve is good enough to keep hitters off-balance, but not if they can just ignore it to sit on the fastball like last night.

Last night was something of a power show by the Rainiers, drilling seven homers in their loss.  The wind was blowing out for much of the game, but I would say that only two of Tacoma’s homers were wind-aided, and two were actually hit into the teeth of the wind after it changed directions for awhile.  Greg Halman had one of the ones into the wind, drilling one low off the light tower in left field, and Brad Nelson had the other, just missing the same spot Halman hit.  Smoak pulled a ball way out to right field that bounced off the top of the hill out there leading up to Foss High School.

Mike Carp had two homers on the night, one of which was out thanks to the wind.  The other, however, was as legit as homers come.  He got all of a belt-high fastball, and with the aid of the wind at his back, drilled a ball off the fence… of the tennis courts of Foss High, a good 150 feet past the right-field wall and up a hill.  It was an impressive shot, to say the very least.

On a side note, I spent some time with Ryan Divish, Mike Curto, and John McGrath after the game last night, among others.  All three are great, great guys and if you ever have a chance to sit and talk with them, I recommend you not even wait a full heartbeat to do it.

Between the lack of good pitching and the wind, this was a really hard game to accurately scout, which is a shame because there’s some good talent on this Rainiers club right now.  This was most likely my last game covering them this season, but it was a fun year to watch them play all in all.  I’m very much looking forward to watching them play in their new digs in 2011 after Cheney Stadium gets renovated.