Dan Vogelbach & The Poll Heard 'Round the World

I have two confessions to make.

The first is going to be unpopular: the Mariner Muse is still not convinced by Dan Vogelbach. Well, at least, I'm not (yet). I maintain that it's a fluke that the man who has been mistaken for Chris Farley has suddenly surged into a Ners cult hero, a twitter sex symbol, and a train leading this weird, confusing, runaway train that was supposed to be a rebuild team called the Mariners.

The second might even be less popular: the Mariner Muse claims responsibility for Vogelbach’s recent success.

Allow me to start with take number one. When the Ners traded for Vogey back in June of 2016, I wasn’t pumped in the slightest. I got why we were getting rid of Mike Montgomery, and I understood our want for a left-handed hitting first baseman (Dae Ho was our current; Danny Valencia followed), but I was also sure that we could have swapped one more person and landed Jorge Soler. In short, I wasn’t excited about Dan Vogelbach. He had just dipped below 300 pounds and could swing it—but had proven nothing in the bigs. Vogelbach struck me as a AAAA player, up there with the Mike Wilsons and Mike Carps of Nerdom. Bucky Jacobsen 2019.

2017 proved me correct. Vogelbach killed it in Tacoma then got into a few games in the top squad and went 6-31 (.214). 2018 proved me even more correct: Vogelbach mashed in Tacoma and constantly got call-ups to swap in and out for a struggling Ryon Healy—but through 37 games and 102 plate appearances, he did even worse than the year before, hitting .204. The Danatee did crush a simply mammoth home run that made even Nelson Cruz lose his mind, but this was just a tease; beyond this at-bat, he looked utterly lost at the plate. He could turn around a fastball, but throw him a curve and he was Pedro Cerano. It was quickly becoming reality that Dan Vogelbach was not a good baseball player.

2019 began, and I stayed hardened to this thought. As the first few games fell through the cracks and Vogelbach put together some less-than-ideal plate appearances on March 31 against Boston, I texted the Muse's co-editor (a longtime Vogeliever), saying simply: “Vogey sucks.”

This sparked a heated debate that we then took to twitter to settle via a poll that bluntly asked whether or not the public thought Dan Vogelbach was good or not. We followed the poll like electron results, shit-talking the other when the “bads” surged ahead of the “goods” and vice versa. After 24 hours and 50-something votes, the public had narrowly declared Dan Vogelbach to be bad. I celebrated.

Since this very moment, Dan Vogelbach has hit .523 with 10 RBI and 6 dingers, two of which were game-winning. He has become the genie of Twitter, the Dionysus of the Ners party, and the darling of a surging Mariners. MLB TV compared him to John Kruk; ESPN's Jeff Passan called him "encyclopedic" for the analytical way he's been approaching at-bats. Mariners fans are happy that Kyle Seager is hurt because it’s giving “Vogelunit” some room to breathe.

The evidence is clear: the Mariner Muse is fully responsible for Dan Vogelbach’s 2019 success. Somewhere in the ether of the internet that twitter poll reached him, and he realized that he needed to swing the votes back in his favor or his chance was over. So you’re welcome, fans.

Yet while all of this is certainly turning my head (and my heart) in the direction of "maybe Dan Vogelbach is actually good?" I’m still not (yet) completely convinced by it all. His plate approach is incredibly disciplined now, his contact rate is wonderfully improved, and my god his work ethic is apparently up there with the best...but like this Mariners team in general, I do not think that it’s sustainable in the slightest. Pitchers, like teams, adapt to things that are working well, and only seasoned vets (or elite talent) are able to emerge from small sample sizes and re-adapt to these adaptions. And I hate to say that neither Vogelbach nor anyone on this current team is either of these. Soon, teams will start to pitch to Dionysus Dan with nothing but inside heat and change-ups down (he’s crushing curve balls away and high fastballs), and this wild ride will come to an end.

…that is, unless Danny (and the Ners) keep this surge up against the Astros. If this happens, I'll be re-writing this entire article, and will happily buy my ticket to hop on board the Vogelbus.

#Opinion