The selling teams didn’t have a lot of huge trade pieces to offer. This won’t change by November.
About an hour before the trade deadline, an intrepid member of the SB Nation social team came into the baseball room and asked us for the three biggest names to be moved that day. The goal was to put the names into a social graphic. This led to a mini-debate about whether Ian Kinsler was the third-biggest name or if that honor belonged to Wilson Ramos. The second-biggest name was Brian Dozier, of course. Even if you extended the parameters to include Manny Machado and all of the other July trades, a list of the three most exciting players still might include Dozier, J.A. Happ, or Brad Hand.
The social graphic never got made. The first rule of connecting with the kids on social media is “Yeah, they probably aren’t going to care about Brian Dozier.” Not until he’s riding an ostrich in a funny Instagram video or something. No, this was a deadline filled with aluminum foil and Ziploc bags instead of $90 prime ribs — a functional, practical deadline filled with household items to round out the pantry. It was a busy deadline, but we learned that busy isn’t always synonymous with thrilling.
Machado and Chris Archer are a fine duo, but they can’t compete with Sonny Gray, Justin Verlander, Jose Quintana, Yu Darvish, and J.D. Martinez. Where were the blockbuster trades this deadline? Is this a trend? A blip? My imagination?
I’m guessing blip. First, let’s list the selling teams this offseason:
Rays
Blue Jays
Orioles
Twins
Tigers
White Sox
Royals
Angels
Rangers
Marlins
Mets
Reds
Padres
That’s 13 teams, or nearly half the league. Now let’s whittle that list down to the teams that seemingly were surprised by this development. That is, let’s look for the teams that weren’t actively in a full rebuild or close to it this offseason:
Rays
Blue Jays
Orioles
Twins
Royals
Angels
Rangers
Mets
The other teams had already made their rebuilding moves. The Marlins traded their historically unique outfield. The White Sox performed an All-Starectomy on their rotation last year, and the Tigers finally parted with one of the greatest pitchers in franchise history. Their booths at the flea market were empty, for the most part. The real haggling was done months or years before.
To get a truly exciting deadline, the teams in that second bullet-pointed list were going to need to step up and unload the players who made them believe they had some sort of chance.
The Rays did that by trading Archer, even if they’re attempting to move sideways instead of fully committing to a rebuild. The Jays half-did this by trading J.A. Happ, Seunghwan Oh, and Roberto Osuna, but anyone else who could have melted the deadline (Josh Donaldson, Marcus Stroman) was either hurt or horrible this season, sometimes both.
The Orioles did their part. The Twins were expecting to contend with a young roster, and they’ll probably have a similar plan next year, which meant they were only going to unload the pending free agents. The Royals would have loved to trade a bunch of good players, but their problem appears to be a roster that’s mostly devoid of good players.
The best parts of the Angels are the players who justify their existence and shouldn’t be traded. The only veteran players with value on the Rangers were Cole Hamels, Adrian Beltre, and Shin-soo Choo, but only Hamels was a logistical fit for another team, which meant the team held on to nearly everyone else.
The Mets are unique and forever compelling in their own special way, and I love them for it.
So that’s the story of the baker’s dozen sellers at the deadline and why there weren’t a lot of blockbuster deals. There just weren’t a lot of blockbuster deals to be made, not unless the Rangers played some fourth-dimensional chess and traded away players like Joey Gallo. Not unless the Royals suddenly said, “Just kidding. We have a lot of good players. We were just hiding them to mess with you.” Not unless the Mets finally gave up on the idea of contending on the back of a super-rotation again.
That conclusion might or might not interest you. There’s a corollary to it, though, that will surely interest you, and it goes like this:
This all means that the offseason is going to be complete crap when it comes to trades.
There were 13 sellers, which means there were 17 buyers or stand-patters. Those 17 teams either believe in themselves right now, or they believe that they can come back and contend next year. The Pirates and Giants might be on shakier ground with that assumption than the Astros and Dodgers, but in order for them to be sellers this offseason, the next two months would have to be a miserable black hole that tears the fabric of space and time.
If the offseason trade market depends on those 13 teams, then, take another spin through their rosters and see what they still have left to offer.
The Angels could, uh, offer Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, in theory. They might — might — decline to do so and look to add to their roster instead. The Marlins will probably deal J.T. Realmuto, and the Reds will at least consider dealing Raisel Iglesias and Scooter Gennett. The White Sox can offer Jose Abreu, still.
The Mets. Our enjoyment of trades this offseason depends entirely on the Mets.
Mays help us all.
This is what happens in a league filled with haves and hoping-to-have-in-three-years. Once the fire sales happen, young and underpaid players sprout out of the freshly tilled soil, and they’re not going anywhere. Now that the active-if-underwhelming deadline is over, it sure looks like most teams are close to their purest, inevitable form. There are still a couple of All-Stars making post-arbitration money on bad teams. But there sure aren’t a lot of them, and it’s going to kill the trade market this winter.
Luckily the free agent market should be fun. That “should” is doing an awful lot of work, though, because there are no guarantees that last year’s austerity will end just because the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants wriggled under the luxury tax. Teams will still worry about long-term contracts and compensatory draft picks. The market might be just as miserable after the big stars sign.
Maybe not. Maybe we’ll have a wonderland of free agents signing nine-figure contracts, and the Winter Meetings will be absolutely bananas. One thing I’m pretty sure of, though, is that the bananas won’t come from trades. Our only hope is for some of those semi-contending teams to fall into that black hole. It sounds ghoulish, but if you’re a fan of trades, it’s our only hope.
Maybe they’re not easy steps, but you should still follow them.
In 2014, the A’s sent five players to the All-Star Game and carried a 7-3 lead into the eighth inning of the American League All-Star Game. They went to the bathroom, and everything was on fire when they came out, including the cat. They were 68-94 the next year, and 69-93 the year after that. They had flown too close to the sun on wings made of Brett Lawrie, and they were doomed for the next several years.
In 2018, the A’s might be the most exciting team in baseball.
A lot can happen in four seasons, we know that. Consider that the teams that did make it to the ALCS in 2014 might not combine for 100 wins this year. Still, it’s always remarkable to see a team completely reverse their record in a single offseason, especially when they don’t spend a lot of money to get there.
It’s time, in your best David Byrne voice, to wonder, well, how did we get here? It wasn’t just by letting the days go by. The A’s built a contender with roughly 828 trades and signings, and when they win, they do it in a way that makes other owners jealous. They’re having their low-payroll cake and eating it too, and if you want your team to follow suit, here are some lessons for you:
Trade your closer, dummy
This is a simple truism, and it’s not like the A’s invented it. The Royals traded Kelvin Herrera early in the trade season this year, and the Rangers followed suit with Keona Kela shortly after.
When the A’s did it, though, Sean Doolittle was both under contract for several years at below-market prices and a fan favorite. It’s very, very tempting to keep a reliever like that, even if there are shiny prospects being offered. The low cost will make a team think it’s the kind of luxury they deserve. They need to treat themselves.
Instead the A’s took Doolittle and turned him into one of the best pitching prospects in baseball and — more on Blake Treinen in a minute — their new closer. They’re as good in the present, and they’re better equipped for the future. How does a team feel confident enough to do this? Well, you just have to ...
Trust your people
The smart people whispering in your ear, that is. This A’s team wasn’t built by Brad Pitt during a three-act arc. There’s a team of smart people working to improve every baseball team, and the people making decisions have to believe that their smart people are smarter than the other smart people. Blake Treinen is a great example.
Personally, I call him Tri-Nen because he’s like three Robb Nens stapled together, ha ha, is this thing on?
The A’s took a freakish, high-velocity sinker and trusted that their smart people could work with it. They did. They did the same with the dinger-mashing potential of Mark Canha, the patient foundation of Nick Martini, and the dinger-mashing reality of Khris Davis. They said, yes, this [unique skill] is something to build on. We just have to make sure our smart people build on it. Which they did.
We’re a decade into everyone misunderstanding Moneyball, but here’s the purest proof that it wasn’t just about stats. No one looking at Treinen’s K/BB was giddy about him. No one looking just at Davis’ OBP was convinced he was the answer.
And when one of those smart people says, “Signing Jonathan Lucroy is a good idea,” you listen to them, too. Because maybe they’re right. If they aren’t, well, hope that the other good ideas from the smart people paid off.
If the trade-your-closer thing is old hat, if that’s the playbook that every bad team is expected to follow, then try this one: Always sign a fifth-starter with a high ceiling.
Sometimes this is a good idea because you can always trade the starter at the deadline. Get a couple good months and see if a contending team will bite. But in the A’s case, this was a good idea because prodigal son Trevor Cahill is helping them win baseball games exactly when they need to.
There are different kinds of fifth starters and minor-league free agents, but an overwhelming majority have a scouting report that reads something like ...
Has a solid arm. Will keep you in ballgames for the most part. Doesn’t throw that hard, but knows how to pitch.
These are the scouting reports that should interest teams that are already contending, especially if they have young pitchers who are ready to break through. A team like the A’s, coming off a dismal season, needs someone with a higher ceiling than that. Here, pick one of the minor-league free agent archetypes:
A pitcher with a freaky sinker and intermittent effectiveness whose biggest problem has been health
A high-velocity monster who misses bats when he’s in the zone ... which isn’t often enough
A lefty with great minor-league numbers but stuff that won’t translate to the majors unless his command greatly improves
A proven veteran who would have secured a hefty contract if he were healthy, but who bounced around because of injuries
Bartolo Colon
There are others, but the A’s went with the first one, taking a chance on Cahill’s wonder-sinker. In a season with a lot of uncertainty in their rotation, the risk paid off.
Another way to title this section is “Get lucky as hell,” but that unfairly dismisses some of the skill involved. There were 24 teams that passed on Matt Chapman. You can give a pass to the Phillies, who drafted Aaron Nola, and at least a couple other teams who are still happy with their selection, but the idea that a third baseman with this kind of spidey-sense and power could slip that far is absurd. He’s just about the perfect two-way player, and he’s helping the A’s win more baseball games than Alex Jackson is helping the Mariners.
A less fatalistic way to explain this is “Draft better than the other teams,” which is another obvious truism. My favorite part of Moneyball was the part with Matt Cain. Still, the A’s jumped on Chapman, just like they jumped on Chad Pinder, long after other teams had passed. The A’s are improbably built on a blockchain of transactions and micro-transactions and trades and subtrades, but they still used the draft better than a lot of teams. Chapman is proof of that, even if there sure are a lot of misses around him.
There’s more to the A’s than all this. They had to do their due diligence when trading Ben Zobrist at the trade deadline (Sean Manaea). They had to scramble and pick up a fifth starter on the fly (Edwin Jackson). They had to spend a teensy bit of money (Yusmeiro Petit, Lucroy, Cahill), and they had to have the depth to help weather the storms created by the shots that didn’t go in the goal (Lucroy, Matt Joyce, Jake Smolinski, Brett Anderson, Santiago Casilla, Chris Hatcher, look, they can’t hit on every wild idea).
Add it up, and they have a surprise contender. Your team could, too, if they would follow these rules. The A’s were a non-entity last year, and now they’re challenging the powerhouse Astros, who needed years and years of tippy-top draft picks to get here. All it takes is [wavesarms] all that. Your team should do all that.
Just know that it doesn’t always have to work, but it sure looks like it’s working this time. And, boy, is it fun to watch.
In this week’s Grant Land, we’ve got Daniel Murphy’s Revenge, Rickey Henderson and the Fonz, and Carlos Goméz’ Theater.
The All-Star break was just here, and already seems like too much baseball has happened since then. The A’s are ahead of the Mariners and threatening the Yankees? Rougned Odor’s on-base percentage is a cool 100 points higher than last year? There’s an article on MLB.com titled “It’s time to admit Daniel Palka is an elite power hitter”? Guess I need to sigh deeply and Google this Danny Polko while admitting I’m bad at my job.
Apparently, it’s time for me to spend more time trying to learn about baseball, even though THAT’S WHAT I ALREADY DO FOR SEVERAL HOURS EVERY DAY.
It’s frustrating. On the other hand, my quest is your gain. Every week, I take a spin around the sport and look for the stupid and beautiful. Come find the stupid and beautiful baseball with me. We’ll start by studying a baseball thing in a section I like to call ...
Let us study this baseball thing
We used to start with “Baseball Is Good,” but that turned out to be dumb and limiting. Plus, I’m restless. Anyway, let’s talk about the Mets losing 25-4 before we get to anything else.
The Mets have scored two runs or fewer in 39 games this year. The Nationals scored three runs or more in six of the eight innings in which they batted in this game. Michael Taylor was 3-for-4 in this game, with two runs scored and two walks, and he finished with a Win Probability Added of -0.033. Anthony Rendon was 3-for-6 with a walk and four RBI, and his WPA was -0.023. This isn’t suggesting that WPA is a silly, useless stat. It’s suggesting that the Nationals hit the ball so damned hard, they broke a perfectly fine, functional stat.
But while it’s always funny to study position players getting blown up, especially if they’re unlikable, I’m not that interested in Jose Reyes pitching. I’m getting tired of position players pitching. I’m the guy who had a first-press edition of Reckoning on vinyl who turns off MTV when “Losing My Religion” comes on. It’s going to take a lot for me to be as interested about position players pitching again.
Instead, give me players who obliterate their former teams out of spite. Give me Daniel Murphy disemboweling the Mets, like he did in this game with four RBI, three hits, and two homers.
It was kind of an off night for him against the Mets, if we’re being honest.
Murphy was a good-not-great player for parts of seven seasons with the Mets. He was turning 31, and he played a position (second base) that was traditionally filled with players who aged poorly. After a bonkers NLCS, he fared poorly in the World Series, and the Mets made a seemingly smart baseball decision to let him go. Big money to a second baseman on the other side of an aging curve? These are the fan favorites smart teams walk away from.
Then Murphy turned into Rod Carew, and he’s hit .390/.448/.714 in 172 plate appearances against the Mets, and it never stops being funny. They did the right thing! There was sound logic behind their decision instead of weird, Wilpon-flecked wish-knowledge! And yet Murphy murders them every time.
Consider ...
In the 44 games Murphy has played against the Mets, he has more than twice as many games with two hits or more than he has hitless games.
He has more games with two RBI or more than he does games without an RBI.
He has more games with four RBI or more against the Mets than all Mets second basemen have against every other baseball team combined.
It’s a mess, but, well, so are the Mets. Their miserable season this year has nothing to do with a complete collapse of their pitching staff, so this game was a fluke, and it’s probably a fluke that Murphy murders them dead. Stop picking on them.
On the other hand, if they want us to stop picking on them, they should stop being so funny.
Baseball is good, actually
ICYMI: This is what a dream coming true looks like.
You might think that I’m including this tweet as a way to show the emotion of a minor leaguer finally getting the call to the majors, and that’s part of it. It’s a sweet moment, and you rarely get to see it in the middle of a game.
Mostly, though, I’m including this to write this paragraph:
A man named Stubby Clapp was wearing pajamas, and he went out to the mound of dirt and hugged another person wearing pajamas. The person was happy, and as he left the mound of dirt, other people in pajamas swatted him on the butt.
This is what this clip will look like to archeologists and historians in 600 years. There will be no context, but somehow they’ll know that Stubby Clapp was Stubby Clapp, and they’ll have to reconstruct what was happening based on limited evidence. My guess is they’ll think it’s a community-theater play.
Which it kind of is, I guess.
The unwritten rules of ... faking your own death?
If you’re on Apple News, Google AMP, or MySpace Pro, you’ll need to watch the video here. It’s funny because it’s different, and different is entirely true to the character that Carlos Gomez has constructed. Different is good. Baseball needs more different. Baseball needs more funny.
My guess is that Carlos Rodón wasn’t amused. He puts his hands on his hips, and then he brings his glove to his mouth and says something. We can only guess.
Ah, Carlos, back at it again with another whimsical jape! Always the farceur. Bravo, sir! Bravo.
No, Rodón was at least partially annoyed at first. And to be fair, in the heat of competition, anything out of the ordinary like this in response to one of your direct screw-ups is unwelcome. It’s human nature.
“It was pretty funny,” Rodon said. “Gomez is a good character and ballplayer. Just liven it up a little.”
There will be no baseballs thrown at butts for this infraction, which is almost a shame. But because there was no punishment, I would like to see this more often. Like, a lot more often. I’d also like to see a player load himself up with packets of stage blood that would explode on contact, so the hit-by-pitch makes it look like an alien is trying to chew through his ribs from the inside.
Let this be a reminder that I was not blessed with physical talent for a reason, and even though it seems unfair, it’s probably for the best.
This is a picture of the Fonz with Rickey Henderson
I loved both of these pictures so very much. Don’t make me choose.
Photo by Scott Taetsch/Getty Images
That’s Juan Soto speeding to third, and the photographer has ... turned up his exposure with more ... uh, you know, aperture, and ... okay, fine, the only camera I’ve ever used is on my phone. All I know is that the picture looks cool, and the alternating reds and whites of the crowd give off a faint flag vibe, which pairs nicely with the stars-and-stripes theme of the Nationals logo. Just a gorgeous picture of one of baseball’s brightest young stars.
Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
As a softball coach, I have to point out that the silhouette is confusing because it looks like a pitcher about to fire her glove at 60 mph, but maybe my brain is broken.
But can it compete with this incredible shot, which captures a great catch from Ramon Laureano in his major league debut? Dunno, the context of Laureano being a fine prospect making his debut might swing the vote, but on the other hand, the abstract quality of the Soto picture appeals to me. I can’t choose.
The important thing is that I didn’t just settle for a silly picture that could be turned into a stupid meme for cheap, disposable laughs
A Stupid Meme for Cheap, Disposable Laughs
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
Hrmm, well, let’s just ...
The best part about cargo shorts is all the extra stuff you can put in them.
Putting all five full-sized pictures in here would melt data plans, but I think it works perfectly well as a pentaptych. Panel one is desire, panel two is achievement, panel three is consequence, panel four is confirmation, and panel five is the all-too-human desire for recognition. This story is all of us, except the people who don’t succeed at anything.
If you’re wondering why Maeda is willing to crash into walls while shagging batting practice, take a look at his contract. Dude could take the field in a shirt that reads “TOMMY LASORDA SMELLS JUST LIKE HE LOOKS,” and the Dodgers would just have to take it. He’s not paid enough to care, just like he’s not paid enough to avoid crashing into walls during batting practice,
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to send a homemade shirt to Kenta Maeda ...
What Shohei Did
At this point, I’m tempted to turn this into “What Jose Ramirez did” or “What Juan Soto did,” because those players are turning in legendary seasons. The idea was that Shohei Ohtani was going to have a legendary season just because he was both pitching and hitting, and that we should track it zealously every week.
Then Ohtani came down with a case of bum wing. It happens, but now we’re stuck detailing the exploits of dude hitting as well as, say, Daniel Descalso or Gregory Polanco while playing for a team that’s out of postseason contention. Which isn’t that exciting.
And then our hero does stuff like this:
He’s still an enormous 23-year-old who runs like a track star and can hit baseballs like this. It is still worth keeping track of him, for he is still a gift.
Just ... you know, if you want to pitch in a blowout, Shohei, that’s cool, too.
This Week in McGwire/Sosa
McGwire 21 AB this week 345 AB for the season
1 HR this week 45 HR for the season
.143/.240/.286 this week .287/.463/.713 for the seas
Sosa 27 AB this week 431 AB for the season
4 HR this week 42 HR for the season
.259/.333/.704 this week .306/.371/.638 for the season
Finally, a slump for McGwire! HOW DOES MORTALITY FEEL, JERK? But, really, going back through the archives of this column, I’m not seeing a lot of weekly slumps. That’s perhaps an underrated component to the McGwire/Sosa chase — the consistency. To hit 60 dingers or more requires a steady pace that I’m not sure that we’ve ever truly appreciated.
This is true for both players. But in this week, Sosa became a true contender.
Kids, take it from ol’ Grant: ‘98 was just about the most fun that you could ever have in a baseball season. And when Sosa surged to 42, it was absolutely electric. He was catching McGwire. There was a race. There was a race.
Spoonerism of the week
I own 2,054 Rick Leach cards, give or take. If you want more baseball card takes, they’re waiting for you, but I guarantee you that my mom dropped of thousands of Rick Leach cards the day I moved into my house. The entire box might be Rick Leach cards. It would be like the start of a Dan Brown novel, but danged if it isn’t possible.
I would have appreciated these cards if, at some point, a kid who was thoroughly into his or her copy of Runny Babbit leaned over and whispered, “Lick Reach.”
It would have made me giggle, and not just because it sounds like a stat ESPN would cover during the 2018 Porn Combine. It just sings, dammit.
Lick Reach, private investigator.
Or ...
My mom wants me to go out with someone a little more respectable, and a little ... less Lick Reach.
Or ...
Heyyyyy, it’s the Licker! What’s up, Lick Man?
There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to a Lick Reach. My only regret is that he isn’t playing today. Because, yes, baseball needs more 61-year-olds playing at full strength, who are named Lick Reach, more or less.
Chris Herrmann is still at large. And he’s coming for you.
Chris Herrmann is a backup catcher who was previously known for having a name filled with double “r”s, double “n”s, and an “m,” which meant it was possible to get him confused with Chris Hernrram, Chris Herrnnam, and Chris Hemmarm, at least in print. But now he has a different claim to fame: He’s coming for your beans.
In the ninth inning of Tuesday’s game, Herrmann hit a foul ball that almost guaranteed that Cameron Maybin, Jr. wouldn’t participate in the 2040 All-Star Game in London on account of never being born.
But after careful research ...
... it looks like it got Maybin on the hip. Which is good! I, for one, am happy about that development. Because it would be ghoulish and weird to root for a direct hit, ha ha, and I am definitely not either of those things.
On the very next pitch, though, Herrmann made sure his reign of terror and nausea was not done.
Taken separately, the first one would rank a 0 on the BEANS™ score because it didn’t qualify, and the second one would be a 4, because it hit the ground first. Together, though? That’s a cool 7, just for the unlikelihood alone. The odds were against this ever happening, and it’s absolutely chilling to think about.
I said, it’s absolutely chilling to think about.
I SAID, IT’S ABSOLUTELY CHILLING TO THINK AB
Okay, fine, it’s a little funny. But only because nobody was hurt.
On the pitch after that last foul ball, do you know what Herrmann did? Laced a double off the left-field wall. That’s right: He wasn’t going to stop until he’d hit his second two-bagger of the at-bat.
Herrmann was determined to pound a couple of doubles, alright. He almost pounded three of them in one at-bat, which would have been a record. We should all be wary of Chris Herrmann, who is like a T-100, but for beans. He’s coming for you and everyone you love.
Hat-tip to the multiple people who tweeted, emailed, direct messaged, and texted me. Your commitment to the cause is appreciated.
From Yuniesky Betancourt to Ruben Rivera, here are the players who are still playing at a high level somewhere in the world.
Carlos Zambrano has made six starts for the Leones de Yucatan of the Mexican League this year. There are a lot of words below this, but none of them are as important as the ones in that sentence. Somewhere, on this continent, Zambrano is living the alternate reality we deserve, the one where pitchers don’t float away when they’re 31 because the human body hates baseball. He could have been another CC Sabathia, dang it.
Also, Zambrano’s six starts haven’t been very good, but it’s important that you know that he’s still pitching.
This post is a roundup of players like Zambrano, former major leaguers who are playing somewhere other than Canada or the United States, except there’s one major difference: These players are thriving.
Are there any Eric Thameses or Miles Mikolases here? Probably not, but I’m not going to rule it out. At the very least, it’s worth taking a look at the players who are having awesome seasons in a different country, such as ...
What he’s doing: .382/.404/.579 for the Guerreros de Oaxaca of the Mexican League
The 36-year-old is a career -2-win player who somehow played 1,156 games in the majors, who ended his career by hitting .212/.240/.355 in 409 plate appearances with the Brewers in 2013. The funniest part was that he started that season by hitting dinger after dinger, with eight in his first 30 games and putting up a .846 OPS that actually led to at least one column about how he was enjoying a career renaissance. Instead, he hit .195/.220/.298 over his final 313 plate appearances, and major league teams stopped calling.
He’s raking in Mexico now. That is, simply, a gorgeous, yunieskian batting line, with a gap between his average and OBP that wouldn’t fit a sheet of paper. It’s beautiful.
What he’s doing: 2.78 ERA, 145 IP, 33 BB, 140 K for the Doosan Bears of the KBO
Lindblom was a second-round pick by the Dodgers, and he was one of those projectable arms that frustrated whatever organization he was in while tantalizing everyone else. That led to him being shuffled around, first in a trade for Shane Victorino, then in a trade for Michael Young, and finally in a deal for Michael Choice.
After a solid season in Korea, Lindblom signed a minor-league deal with the Pirates before the 2017 season, and after 37 solid Triple-A innings, he pitched in four games in the majors before getting designated for assignment. He went back to Korea, where he’s currently the best pitcher in the league.
What he’s doing: .328/.417/.582 with 23 HR for the Samsung Lions of the KBO
Beta Rhys Hoskins is demolishing the KBO for the second straight season, hitting for average and power. He recently hit three dingers in one game against the Kia Tigers and is one of the better hitters in the league.
Does he have a chance to be the next Eric Thames? Maaaaaybe, but it’s worth noting that Thames had a cool 200 point OPS advantage — 300 points in his best year — than even Ruf’s near 1.000 mark. There’s chance we’ll see Ruf again, but also keep in mind that he’s already 32 somehow. That makes me feel older than my daughter beating me in Mario Kart.
What he’s doing: .441/.484/.525 for the Leones de Yucatan of the Mexican League
This is cheating because the Mexican League is split into two seasons, so that slash line is just for his last 132 plate appearances. And it’s very much worth noting that the Mexican League is like a thought experiment where almost every normal ballpark is replaced with Coors Field. But are you not entertained? Everth Cabrera, who was released after hitting for a .533 OPS in Triple-A last year, is absolutely raking for the Yucatan Lions.
Reminder that Cabrera once led the National League with 44 stolen bases and made the All-Star team the next year. I could still see him on a bench in the future, even if that absurd line is almost certainly a fluke. He’s only 31, after all.
What he’s doing: .316/.392/.510 for the Chunichi Dragons of the Japan Central League
Here’s my pick for Most Likely To Return To The Majors for a few reasons. The first is that he’s still just 29. The second is that he was already close to a major league hitter, with a 95 OPS+ in his final MLB season the lowest of his last three years.
It’s the third reason that stands out for me, though: He’s changed his game in Japan. In 385 plate appearances this year, he’s taken 35 walks and struck out just 44 times. That’s not the hacker we remember, and he’s been rewarded with that gaudy batting average. Does that mean he can thrive in the majors right now? Not necessarily, but he’s sure checking off all the boxes that you would want to see from a player with unmistakeable natural talent who used to swing first and ask questions later.
What he’s doing: 2.55 ERA in eight starts for the Chunichi Dragons of the Japan Central League
Look the stats aren’t actually that impressive once you get past the ERA, as his strikeout-to-walk ratio isn’t pretty, but I just wanted to let you know that Dice-K is still pitching and getting outs.
This also allows me to remind you of his pitching motion, just in case you had forgotten:
Wait for it. Waaaaait for it.
Intermission — the former major leaguers who have been kicking butt in Japan for several years now
What he’s doing: 3.54 ERA, 119.1 IP, 33 BB, 108 K for the Hanshin Tigers of the Japan Central League
Just a reminder that Messenger has been like the Corey Kluber of Japan for years, and that the numbers up there represent a down season. The 36-year-old has pitched at a high level for nine seasons now, and he definitely had/has the talent to be an effective starter in the majors. He’d rather be an ace where he’s comfortable than a guy on a show-me contract like Miles Mikolas, apparently, and I can respect the hell out of that.
What he’s doing: .275/.381/.540 with 26 HR for the Yakult Swallows of the Japan Central League
Just a reminder that Balentien is a star in Japan, even if his numbers aren’t as absurd as they were in 2013, when he posted an ultra-rare Luggage-Lock Combination OPS of 1.234.
Not kidding about that star part:
Hmmm, stay in a place with the best food in the world where you rake and star in beer commercials with a weird version of “Smoke on the Water” in the background, or fight for a bench job with the Rangers in spring training. What a brutal decision. Tick tock, tick tock.
What he’s doing: .312/.335/.568 with 17 HR for the Yokohama Bay Stars of the Japan Central League
Just a reminder that Lopez is still punishing the NPB. And also a reminder that he made the All-Star Game when he was just 22, and put up a .297/.322/.443 line in Seattle when he was just 24, so maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised.
Unlike Balentien, though, this is Lopez’s best season in Japan, and it’s fair to suggest that his average-dependent OBP isn’t the most stable of stats. If he came back to MLB, he would probably be latter-day Jose Lopez, which wasn’t a lot of fun.
Still, look at him rake against high-level competition. That is a lot of fun.
What he’s doing: .331/.417/.648 with 35 HR for the SK Wyverns of the KBO
I know very little about Romak, but I can’t ignore that kind of season. He’s putting Ruf to shame, and it’s coming just a season after hitting 11 homers for the Padres’ Triple-A team in 95 at-bats, which seems good.
Alas, though, he’s already 32, which lowers the odds of him going full Eric Thames on us. He sure is having a heckuva season, though.
What he’s doing: .327/.390/.622 with 25 HR for the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO
Hoying played in 74 games for the Rangers before going over, so he certainly qualifies as a “former major leaguer,” but unlike a lot of the players on this list, he didn’t have a history of dominating the minors. His absolutely highest OPS in Triple-A was .842, and his average OPS was .773, so I don’t know where this is coming from, either. The quality gap between those two leagues just isn’t that great.
He’s just 29, so he could make a return if he keeps hitting like this. Besides, he can also pitch.
What he’s doing: 1.55 ERA, 29.0 IP, 5 BB, 29 K for the Toros de Tijuana of the Mexican League
It turns out that the 2007 MLB Draft was kind of a dog, so unless Madison Bumgarner was the next player on the Pirates’ draft board, it’s hard to get too grumpy about a missed pick. Still, if you’re a Pirates fan who likes to wallow in a pool of regret, here’s a rubber ducky of a name to float on top.
The Mexican League, again, is a hitter’s paradise. The average hitting line is .294/.364/.436, and the average ERA is 5.05. While Tijuana doesn’t have the kind of elevation that causes problems for the pitchers on other teams, it’s still easy to be impressed at that small-sample performance in the ML.
Moskos was just okay in his last stint in Triple-A, so there probably isn’t a comeback that’s imminent, but I’m a sucker for former top draft picks grinding out a career, so I’m rooting for him.
What he’s doing: .316/.412/.456 for the Yakult Swallows of the Japan Central League
He can probably put that slash line up when he’s 44, so I’m not pretending to be surprised. I’m including him as an excuse to link back to one of my personal favorite articles on this website.
What he’s doing: .283/.473/.478 for the Pericos de Puebla of the Mexican League
How could this not be Daric Barton’s line in the Mexican League? I don’t even think the scorekeeper keeps stats on him. Just goes to the restroom before every plate appearance and pencils in a walk or a hit 47 percent of the time. It’s beautiful.
What he’s doing: .256/.407/.406 for the Acereros de Monclova of the Mexican League.
Finally, we get to the best one. Ruben Rivera is 44. He’s still playing. And he’s still helping his team win. Hell yes.
This is a down season for him, actually, as Rivera spent much of his late 30s putting up an OPS over 1.000 in the Mexican League. Still, there is another Julio Franco out there right now, and his name is Ruben Rivera. Let us all hope that he plays until he’s 53.
He hit against Dennis Eckersley when he was pitching for the A’s, you know.
Will any of these players make it back? If we’re lucky, Rivera will, and he’ll play for the Marlins.
DEREK JETER: What the ...
DEREK JETER: My fountain pen was just here.
But the odds are long for all of them. The point, though, isn’t to wonder if they’re all coming back to Major League Baseball. The point is that they’re all still playing somewhere, and they’re kicking some serious butt. Thank you.
Also, it’s a smart baseball move, but let’s wallow for a little bit.
There could be a fourth act. Bartolo Colon is on his sixth, after all. We’ve seen it before: The ace fireballer molts and becomes a cagey veteran, and we all get to appreciate him in a different way. This could be the path that Felix Hernandez takes, now that he’s in the bullpen.
There probably won’t be a fourth act.
This timeline is too familiar. There’s a gradual decline in velocity and overall quality of stuff, and then there’s a canyon. At the bottom of the canyon are alligators with opposable thumbs and dolphin brains, and they’re quicker than they have a right to be. Hernandez fell into that canyon last year and hid in the bushes for as long as he could, but the gators got him. The gators will always win. Baseball is like an old Atari game where the only objective is to stay alive long enough to rack up the highest score, and when you’re out of lives, there isn’t an option to continue. Everyone runs out of lives. It’s built into the game.
Don’t make me embed a video of Nolan Ryan throwing out a first pitch.
We know this instinctively — that one day, Juan Soto will amble out to the mound for a pregame ceremony, fat and old, as Nationals fans stand and scream — but it’s all so very abstract until there’s a moment to pin it on. Like the Mariners deciding that they have five starting pitchers who are better than Felix Hernandez and everyone nodding in agreement. There were times when there weren’t five starting pitchers on the planet who were better, and that’s being extremely generous, and now the Mariners 25-man roster will have five.
With Hernandez, the sunrise-sunset feeling is more acute, if only because he was the embodiment of youth. He was a teenager doing things that teenagers shouldn’t do:
And when you have a teenager making grown-ass men with families look bad, it’s easy to assume that it will last forever. For years, the tagline for Lookout Landing was “Felix is ours and you can’t have him.” Even though Jeff Sullivan didn’t realize those are two independent clauses that needed a comma, the sentiment was powerful. This was a reason to watch baseball. This was, maybe, the only reason to watch Mariners baseball, and you know what? It was enough. It was more than enough.
I don’t think winning the World Series is the point.
It really isn’t. The point of baseball is to get excited every fifth day for someone like Hernandez. It’s to get excited before every game because you aren’t sure what (Juan Soto/Mike Trout/Max Scherzer/Matt Chapman/Bartolo Colon) is going to do next. It’s to make every single danged Felix Hernandez start the World Series and react accordingly. Come out with the signs and the props and the shirts and realize that, in this very specific way, the Mariners have it better than just about every baseball fan in the world. Every sports fan in the world.
If you consider all the team sports in the world, ask yourself how many of those teams could claim a talent as precocious and dazzling as Felix was in his prime? Probably some dude who couldn’t even touch the ball in his chosen sport, sure. A basketball player or two at the time, yeah. Football doesn’t lend itself to youth, so they’re eliminated. A cricket player, maybe.
You get the idea. Having someone dominate at the age that Hernandez did, sustainably and without calamitous injuries, is rare in a way that isn’t just baseball-rare. It was sports-rare. And it was going to last forever.
Yet here we are, in the year 2018, where Hernandez is 32 and a net negative on the Mariners’ roster. He’s two days older than Corey Kluber, two years younger than Max Scherzer, both of whom are pitchers carrying the burden of their entire franchises on their right shoulders, but it was the eternal youth of Hernandez that gave out first. If you’re worried about the 1,070 major league innings he threw before turning 25, that’s completely fair. Just know that the decline was coming eventually. It comes for everyone.
This one is just a smidgen crueler than most because of the timing. After years and years of languishing on a team frittering away his best years, Hernandez was finally on a contender again. And he couldn’t contribute. He could only push the Mariners further away from the postseason, just like the Mariners were adept at pushing Hernandez away further away from 200 career wins by scoring -1 runs in all of his starts. The timing wasn’t perfect. It rarely is.
This isn’t the end, necessarily. Oh, buddy, no. There will be a time for a post-mortem, but this isn’t it. Consider that when Fernando Rodney was Hernandez’s age, he had thrown 254 innings in the majors with a 4.25 ERA, which isn’t good for a reliever. Consider that Joe Blanton — who, as a starter, wasn’t even qualified to play Felix Hernandez in a community theater production — eked out two years as a viable late-inning relief option. There could be a fourth act, and it could come in the bullpen, with the velocity playing up and the offspeed stuff being as nasty as we remember it.
But as of right now, for the first time since 2005, for the first time since Yusniesky Betancourt was the shortstop of the future and Adrian Beltre was an underperforming 26-year-old with an uncertain future, the Mariners are better off with Felix Hernandez not starting games for them.
If that doesn’t make you feel something, you haven’t been paying close attention. It’s the right move. It’s an overdue move. But it’s also a move that gets me right in the heart section of my body. Felix Hernandez isn’t going to start games for the Mariners, and we’re supposed to be okay with that?
We’re supposed to be okay with that. It’s the bargain. It’s the bargain that comes for us all eventually.
That doesn’t mean we have to be okay with with that. I hate this with every fiber of my being, and you should too, even if it’s the correct move.
Now that Mike Scioscia has given in, the Colorado Rockies are the last holdout against the wave of position players pitching.
Francisco Arcia spent the last decade grinding in the minor leagues before finally getting the call to the majors, and when he made it up, he hit two home runs and drove in 10 runs in his first two games. Tony Gwynn never drove in six runs in a single game; Francisco Arcia did it in his second game in the majors. The odds are excellent that this is what Arcia will always be remembered for.
At least, that’s how the normies will remember him. As a nerd, I’m obligated to remember him for something else. More specifically, as a nerd who has specialized in the position-player-pitching genre over the last several years, Arcia means more to me. For he pitched for the Angels on Sunday, and Mike Scioscia’s team was the last holdout against the position-player-pitching scourge. Now he’s infected. Everyone is infected. It’s over.
This post from four years ago seems quaint. It’s a list of the last position players to pitch for every team, and it included five teams — five! — that hadn’t had a position player pitch for them in the new millennium. Also, look at how excited about the topic I was! So young, so naïve.
One of the holdouts were the Angels, who hadn’t let a position player pitch since Chili Davis in 1993. With Arcia’s scoreless outing, we need to update the list.
This was almost a boring list, but there was one surprise at the top:
The last position player to pitch for each team, as of August 12th, 2018
More than two-thirds of the teams in Major League Baseball have used a position player to pitch since June 13th, which means we’re almost out of mystery and excitement. This is probably the last position-player-pitching article I’ll write for the next few years, unless there’s a development that isn’t, “Boy, there sure are a lot of position players pitching still.”
There is one holdout, though, and that’s the Colorado Rockies. This is amazing, considering that they play in Coors Field, which seems like a likely setting for a team to get blown out. And, indeed, the Rockies have lost by 10 runs or more in 22 different games at Coors Field since Todd Zeile came into pitch. Any one of those games would have been a good spot to use a position player.
Except, 10 runs at Coors Field isn’t the same as 10 runs at AT&T Park. There would be hell to pay if a Rockies manager used a position player to pitch down by 10 runs, only to score 10 runs themselves after the position player pitched poorly. The Rockies feel like they’re never out of a game at Coors, and they’re not wrong. They’ve used a position player to pitch just twice in their history, and one of those happened in a magical game in which the Rockies didn’t have a choice.
This doesn’t explain the 22 losses by 10 runs or more by the Rockies on the road, though. They really weren’t in those games, and they probably should have used a position player to pitch in at least one of them. Perhaps there’s an organizational edict against it.
That list gives you a good sense of the position-player-pitching scourge, because you can see that nearly half the teams in baseball have used one since the All-Star break, and that seems like it was a week ago. We already knew that more position players are pitching than ever before, but the change is still stunning. There were 41 instances of a position player pitching from 1950 to 1979. There have been 53 this season alone, and we still have nearly two more months to go.
It’s not that fun anymore. Here is an incomplete list of the only times I wish to be alerted to a position player pitching now:
I’ll keep adding to that list as I see fit, but, please, don’t wake me for another Erik Kratz outing. Those used to be fun, but now they’re too popular.
[takes long drag off a clove]
I like position players pitching, but only their first two EPs.
At least the Angels are on the list. Now we have the Rockies to look forward to. After that, though, we have Yankees, who last used a position player three years ago, and that doesn’t qualify for a drought. It’ll be over. It’ll be the end of position-player-pitching droughts.
Bless the Rays for using more pitchers in the field, then. This is my new jam, and I implore other teams to start doing this more. It’s only fair. Baseball has lost the fresh, exciting feeling that comes with position players pitching. They owe us something new.
Dropped third strikes, walk-off grand slams, and the magic of Shohei Ohtani
Baseball, right? So weird. Lots of silly plays and long home runs. It’s just the best. Who’s with me?
I was told to make this opening part shorter, and I have to say, that was good suggestion. At some point, AC/DC stopped in the middle of a half-finished eight-minute prog-rock suite and realized that a better blueprint for every song they would write was already encoded in the band’s name. That’s me, but with “baseball is weird and silly and home runs and cool catches are cool.”
The Wisconsin Timber Rattlers are a Brewers affiliate in the Midwest League, and they’re best known for being the team that made me realize that spoonerisms could be applied to teams, too*. However, they’re now known for winning a baseball game in the absolute dumbest way possible:
With two strikes and two outs, the Burlington Bees’ pitcher threw a pitch that was so nasty, it made the opposing hitter look like an idiot. Which is the goal. It’s the point of baseball if you’re a pitcher, give or take. Use deception to make the other player take a foolish swing.
Baseball is a simple game in which pitchers are supposed to make hitters look like idiots, but there’s a little known by-law that states they can’t make hitters look too idiotic. For if the pitch bounces and the catcher doesn’t complete the play, the runner can reach first base safely. It’s the worst rule in sports.
It’s extremely funny in this case because I’m not invested in either team, but it’s still the worst rule in sports.
What would this look like in basketball?
Harden, down the lane, lays it up and BLOCKED, IT’S BLOCKED, REJECTED BY wait ... hold on ... it appears that the blocked shot hit the free throw line. Oh, my, the block hit right on the free throw line, and Harden is heading to the line for free throws. Wow, that’s a break for the Rockets.
Just the dumbest rule. Now gimme football.
Garoppolo takes the snap, looks upfield, and he’s TAKEN DOWN IN THE BACKFIELD BY WATT. The blitz was on and .. hold up ... and, uh oh, it seems like Watt’s left pinkie just grazed D.J .Reader’s helmet on the way down. Oh, no, what a turn of events. Instead of 4th-and-16, the Niners will get an automatic first down once this is overturned on replay. You can’t touch a teammate’s helmet on a sack, folks.
This isn’t to say that the Timber Rattlers wouldn’t have won the game by playing better baseball. The pitcher could have covered home. The catcher could have eaten the ball instead of trying to make a miracle play. The runners on base were probably there for a reason, and that reason probably had to do with the pitcher(s) screwing up.
But the weird-ass rule that allows a batter to reach first after performing exponentially worse than he wanted to is still the worst.
ALEX TREBEK: If you make this inventor a martini, make sure you cotton to his demands to use gin ... not vodka.
CONTESTANT: Who is Eli Barkley?
ALEX TREBEK: No, I’m sorry. Unless ... yes, you did accidentally reference a lesser-known Sesame Street character, so you get double money for that clue. Those are the rules. For some reason.
If I am commissioner, this is the first rule to go.
At the same time, that play is still extremely funny, and I’m going to go watch it again.
* Rimber Tattlers
Baseball is good, actually
Unless you’re a Nationals fan, in which case you’re not amused by David Bote’s ultimate grand slam. But for the rest of us — except, I guess, Cardinals fans, Brewers fans, and anyone who doesn’t like seeing Joe Maddon happy — it’s fun and good to watch a team hit a grand slam while trailing by three in the bottom of the ninth.
At this point, Bote’s grand slam is a baseball-news cycle behind us. It looked like this, if you haven’t seen it:
But it’s still worth talking about ninth-inning grand slams down by three runs. I’m fer ‘em. Unless they happen against my team, in which case I’m definitely aginn ‘em. There weren’t a lot of opposite-field singles in my backyard daydreams.
GRANT (age 7): It’s the BOTTOM OF THE NINTH, bases loaded, two outs, down by three runs. Up comes Grant, their last hope. He takes two quick strikes and then ...
GRANT (age 7): [tosses ball in air]
GRANT (age 7): [sticks elbow out]
GRANT (age 7): It hit him! It hit him! And the line keeps moving! They’re one run closer, and the crowd is going wild.
GRANT (age 7): [fake crowd noise]
Hell, no. In my backyard, it was always a grand slam with three runs down, two outs and two strikes. And it’s not just kids who have this daydream, either. If your team is down by three runs heading into the ninth, you’re thinking it too. Grand slam. It’s so simple. Get three runners on base, hit the ball over the fence. You’ve seen your team get three runners on base this season, unless you’re a Royals fan. You’ve seen your team hit the ball over the fence.
You’ve seen a raccoon before. You’ve seen your neighbor’s porch before. So it wouldn’t be that unusual to see a raccoon on your neighbor’s porch. It’s just a combination of two completely normal things.
A grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, down by three, is completely normal. And yet it’s so incredibly freaking rare. For all of the blessed moments Giants fans have experienced over the years — from Willie Mays to Barry Bonds to three championships to the home run they’ve hit this year — older Giants fans still talk about this Milt May home run, and that wasn’t even at home. There still hasn’t been a grand slam down by three in the bottom of the ninth in San Francisco history, much less a perfect backyard version with two outs and two strikes.
But everyone still keeps daydreaming. The reason that it’s the best backyard daydream in sports is that it’s the perfect combination of likely and unlikely. There you are ... it’s the bottom of the ninth ... two outs ...
Anyway, the idea of different songs for different situations is definitely inspired, and more batters should do this. Heck, relievers should do it. Start an inning from scratch, I want my regular closer’s music. Come in to clean up a mess? I want the Cramps. If I’m trying to get a lefty out, maybe put on that song where Hank Williams threatens Stalin with tanks.
This ... this might be Ohtani’s greatest contribution to the sport, after all. At least, if he’s not going to be a two-way player anym...
Shohei Ohtani is slated to throw a bullpen on Saturday, per Mike Scioscia.
BAH GAWD, THAT’S OHTANI’S MUSIC. AT LEAST, IT’S ONE PART OF HIS MUSIC. THE PITCHING MUSIC. WAIT, LET ME START OVER.
BAH GAWD, THAT’S OHTANI’S PITCHING MUSIC.
This season wasn’t the Ohtani-fest that we were all hoping for, but it sure could have been worse.
The unwritten rules of shaming your friend in front of his home crowd
If you’re reading on Google AMP, Apple News, or the HGTV Baseball For The Home app, you can see the video here. It’s of Felix Hernandez humiliating his good friend, Adrian Beltre, and then laughing at his humiliation.
I spent a lot of last week getting maudlin about Hernandez’s demotion, and this clip also reminds me that we’re careening toward a Beltré-less future. We deserve a decade more of this, at least.
ANYWAY, to the larger point: This is very much against the unwritten rules. Not the part where the pitcher laughs at the batter. If they weren’t good friends, it would be against the unwritten rules, but their relationship makes it OK.
No, the unwritten rules are very clear in this instance: Don’t have fun. At least, don’t let on that you’re having fun. Certainly don’t look like you’re having fun with your sworn enemy. That part is actually in the written rules:
4.06 No Fraternization
Players of opposing teams shall not fraternize at any time while in uniform.
Sharing a giggle sure seems like fraternization to me. And if it’s not, it’s unusual enough to qualify for those unwritten rules.
Here’s the most important part of that video, though: It makes me smile. It probably makes you smile. It’s human, it’s relatable, it’s funny as heck. Baseball doesn’t need this every inning, but a little more would only help.
Bless these two silly warriors. Even if we don’t get that decade, at least we’ll have moments like this.
Baseball picture of the week
Adam Engel had himself a freakish, flukish, phenomenal week. He robbed three home runs in just one week, and it’s worth remembering that some center fielders can go their entire careers without getting one. It’s a mix of skill, timing, and opportunity, and I can’t remember anything like this happening before.
They made for good pictures, of course. The best part was they kept getting better as the week progressed, too.
The first robbery wasn’t captured by either of the two sources in the SB Nation photo tool. I could take a screenshot, but then that’s not really a proper picture, is it?
The second one was captured, and it was a fine shot:
Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
The terrified-but-enthralled kid watches as the ball nestles safely in the glove. For my money, the best picture was just a few seconds after:
Photo by Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images
Ryan LaMarre is in the process of being raptured as fans everywhere go bananas. Such a good picture. And it gets better the more you zoom in.
Everyone’s talking about how to market Mike Trout this, and how to market Mike Trout that, but the real answer is to have kids watch center fielders rob home runs. That’s the coolest possible thing, and it can convert even the biggest baseball skeptic.
Do you think that kid will ever forget Adam Engel? No way. That might be a top-three moment in his young life. The ice cream might make it top-two.
And yet that picture might be tied with the final robbery, which serenely captures the moment before the catch.
Photo by David Banks/Getty Images
I can’t choose between them, but the good news is that I don’t have to. They’re all pictures of the week. And bless Adam Engel for being absolutely ridiculous.
When the baseball is good. I mean, really, really good.
This week in McGwire/Sosa
McGwire 15 AB this week 360 AB for the season
1 HR this week 46 HR for the season
.267/.542/.600 this week .286/.467/.708 for the season
Sosa 22 AB this week 453 AB for the season
2 HR this week 44 for the season
.364/.483/.636 this week .309/.378/.638 for the season
Both are still on pace to break Roger Maris’ record at this point, but there’s a little bit of a slowdown. And even though I know what happens, I’m starting to get a little worried. Maybe we imagined the whole thing?
Spoonerism of the week
In which we introduce an immutable law of spoonerisms: Almost every spoonerism with the name “Bubba” is funny by definition. There have been eight Bubbas to play in the majors. They all have world-class spoonerisms.
Bubba Trammell
I’d like one Tubba Brammell, please, extra brammell sauce.
Mubba Borton, who fought with the Gungans at Naboo.
Bubba Church
Chubba Burch. Although I think the original name might be even better.
Bubba Harris, Bubba Carpenter, Bubba Floyd
Hubba Barris, Cubba Barpenter, Flubba Boyd. Bubba is an inherently funny name, and guess what? That leads to inherently funny spoonerisms. I can’t pick just one. Right when I think Cubba Barpenter has the lead, Flubba Boyd is right next to it.
Ronald Acuña was hit by a pitch because he’s too good, so here are pictures of José Ureña spitting.
Ronald Acuña, Jr. is incredibly good at the game of baseball. Just monumentally, ridiculously good, and he came into Wednesday night’s game with something like eight homers in his last seven at-bats. And that made José Ureña hit him with a baseball for some dumb reason.
Which means that Ureña is in the news. Which means people are searching for him. Which means I have to come up with an angle. Think, dammit, think. Find something.
Except I have an ace in the hole: It turns out that Ureña loves spitting. It also turns out that Getty photographers are very interested in this spitting. So I’m going to post a bunch of pictures of him spitting, mostly because I’ve been holding this in for a couple months, and this is the perfect opportunity to get this off my chest.
Ureña likes to spit while wearing his home jersey.
Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
He likes to spit in his alternate jersey.
Photo by Rob Foldy/Getty Images
He likes to spit in his road jersey.
Miami Marlins via Getty Images
He likes to spit when his back is to the camera.
Photo by Eric Espada/Getty Images
He likes to spit when he’s giving the camera a profile.
Photo by Rob Foldy/Miami Marlins via Getty Images
Folks, what I’m telling you is that José Ureña likes to spit, and I feel that if people are googling “José Ureña” and “Ronald Acuña, Jr.,” they should get a result that’s just a bunch of pictures of Ureña spitting. It seems appropriate.
Sometimes Ureña spits really big.
Photo by Rob Foldy/Miami Marlins via Getty Images
And then he likes to walk through it.
Photo by Mark Brown/Getty Images
All things considered, this could have been much worse:
Photo by Eric Espada/Getty Images
So those are the facts. José Ureña is in the news, and because I want to get this post all over Google news, now you have pictures of him spitting. Use this power wisely.
In which we bemoan the art of the baseball fight and suggest a new rule about bat flips to make the sport better.
We do this every week, you know. It gets dumber and dumber as the season progresses, and there’s no turning back now. Welcome to a look back at the silly baseball that was, the third week of August, 2018.
It’s at this point that I must remind you that if you do not share this stupid content with people who appreciate it, I’m going to give up and write “How to Watch the Little League World Series: Time, Channel, Date” posts because those are absolutely crushing these posts, and I just want to be on the right side of history.
Anyway, forgive me. It’s that time of the week again, and we need to study some baseball things in a section I call ...
Let us study this baseball thing
Alternate headline: These unwritten rules are going to be the death of us.
In response, Bumgarner walked toward third base, chuckling. He was a living version of the I’m-not-mad-actually-I’m-laughing meme, and the next two matchups between the two were uneventful. I was proud of Bumgarner for being a grown-up. Don’t take offense. Don’t stare him down. Just laugh at the guy.
Please note that the Dodgers’ organist played the theme from Friends between pitches, and that is probably the most important piece of information in this whole column.
Cut to the next game, when Puig did this:
Puig slapped his bat again, and Nick Hundley said something between, “Dude, you’re embarrassing yourself,” and “I will murder your neighbors and plant the evidence in your house if you do that again.” This led to a fracas.
Here’s what I would tell one of the 9-year-olds I coach if she did that after striking out.
You probably shouldn’t do that. It makes you look silly.
Sure, it was just Puig showing his emotions, but try to apply it to real life. Pretend you’re defending a guy at the gym who misses a shot and says, “Ugh, and I totally burned my defender, too!”
You would roll your eyes. If he did it twice, you might even say something like, “Maybe you should just make the shot then.”
Back to the bat slap. Here’s what I would tell one of the 9-year-olds on the opposing team if she did that:
[complete and total silence because, buddy, it’s not my job to coach her, and, really, what do I care?]
Now, what’s the difference between 9-year-olds and Yasiel Puig? Puig has had an additional 18 years to learn that this sort of thing makes him look silly, but he just can’t help himself. Fine. Whatever. Roll your eyes.
What’s the difference between 9-year-olds and Nick Hundley? Hundley has had an additional 25 years to learn that, buddy, it’s not your job to coach him, and, really, what do you care? Nobody in the everloving hell should care if Puig thinks he just missed a pitch and wants to tell the world. Tell your pitcher to make better pitches. Get him out.
So I award six dingus points to both players. Then I award Puig a millionty dingus points for trying to slap a dude in a catcher’s mask. If you watch the video above, watch his hand after the slap (about 2:20). It didn’t feel good.
However, here’s the kicker: Dereck Rodriguez— one of the best parts of the Giants’ mediocre season and an ultra-dark horse candidate for Rookie of the Year — was hurt during the melee. He pulled a hamstring and had to go on the DL. After the game, there were people talking about how the Giants needed this fight to “light a fire under them,” and how it was actually a good thing. Instead, they lost one of their best pitchers, and they were immediately swept in Cincinnati, a series that effectively ended their season.
So what have we learned? Baseball fights are stupid. So incredibly stupid. There is no reason for almost every baseball fight. Jose Ureña probably should have a baseball thrown at his butt, sure, but even then, I’d be too scared that the pitcher delivering the unwritten justice would miss and cause a serious injury. Not worth it. Just shame him for the rest of eternity.
There is no good reason to have a baseball fight that escalates behind chirping. Players get hurt. Careers get ruined. Who cares that some dude got mad in front of you? Who cares that some dude is telling you not to get mad in front of him?
Baseball fights are just the dumbest shit.
This one was especially dumb.
HUNDLEY: MOM, HE SLAPPED HIS BAT AGAIN.
PUIG: SO WHAT? I SHOULD HAVE KILLED THAT PITCH AND YOU KNOW.
HUNDLEY: HE’S STILL SAYING IT, MOM.
PUIG: STOP BEING A TATTLETALE, NICK.
Last week we covered the dumbest rule in sports, but I didn’t think we’d have to cover the dumbest shit imaginable the very next week. Grow up and stop getting your teammates hurt, you idiots.
It would appear that another minor league team is having fans vote on a new name
At some point, I’m going to have to sue. There’s just no getting around this. All of these teams are using my Minor League Team Name Generator, and these are proprietary names. Four of the five proposed names are actually possible with the generator.
While the generator only deals with city names and is unequipped to deal with a team name that starts with “North Alabama,” it does have Huntsville and Madison. So I was able to get the Madison Trash Chimps and Huntsville Beef Ants, which is close enough.
People ask me how long it takes to write this weekly column, and I tell them the same thing every time. “About nine hours if I start screwing around with the Minor League Team Name Generator in the middle.” These damned things are like kettle corn, and you can’t stop at just one.
Fullerton Farm Turtles
Durham Crater Pugs
Dayton Moat Ants
Please send help
Louisville Tinder Cougars
oh my stars that sounds dirty
Columbus Sun Possums
Fayetteville Bayou Turkeys
Please, please, help me
North Alabama Trash Pandas
Some of these are just completely unrealistic and not even funny, like that last one. Why can’t I stop?
The unwritten rules of an umpire catching a bat that was flipped by the hitter
There’s nothing to study here. It was just instinct on the part of the umpire. A bat was gently falling to the earth, and Manny Gonzalez thought, ah, I will remove this from my field of vision while I make sure the home run went fair.
If a catcher can catch a hitter’s bat before it hits the ground, it’s an automatic out.
Think about it. It wouldn’t eliminate the bat flip entirely; it would require powerful bat flips that made sure the bat was out of the catcher’s reach. It would lead to catchers contorting their bodies in unholy positions after contact, as they desperately try to overturn their pitcher’s mistake. There would be the dawning realization from the hitter that they didn’t get the bat far away enough to prevent the catcher from making a play.
Home run, elation, momentary lapse, abject horror.
And, really, how many bats could a catcher get to in a year? A couple? After the rule was implemented, maybe one?
Worth it. And better than the dropped-third-strike rule. Vote for me in the commissioner primaries, which are probably a real thing that I should look into. Hitters should be out if a catcher can keep their bat from hitting the ground.
You know I’m right.
Baseball picture of the week
Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images
Nothing big, just Miguel Sano flying over a railing to dropkick the man who kidnapped his wife. While, uh, Al Davis watches? Look, I don’t have the full screenplay in my hands, so we have to guess at a lot of what’s happening here, but this sure looks like Sano is delivering a death kick because of vengeance.
Alas, the actual play wasn’t that cool. It was a fine play, but the still picture obscures that there was a person-sized gap between the railing and fan, and it also allows the observer to assume that Sano was traveling at 70 mph before jumping, which he most certainly wasn’t.
Still, it’s the picture of the week because it allows to believe and imagine all sorts of beautiful, wondrous things. I can respect that.
These two players are peers who compete directly against each other in the same athletic event
Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
n/t
The new teaser trailer for the upcoming Trevor Hoffman movie is WILD
Photo by Denis Poroy/Getty Images
See, the director was trying to represent the duality of Hoffman, from the idealized representation (the “statue”) to a vision of a condescending, jeering version of himself in the peanut gallery. The sun represents heaven — i.e. the “ultimate save” — and the whole composition really gives you an idea of just how many different directions Hoffman is being pulled.
Changed Up will premiere at Cannes in 2019.
This Week in McGwire/Sosa
McGwire 19 AB this week 379 AB for the season
1 HR this week 47 HR for the season
.316/.533/.526 this week .288/.471/.699 for the season
Sosa 25 AB this week 478 AB for the season
3 HR this week 47 for the season
.400/.500/.800 this week .314/.384/.646 for the season
Tied. It’s the middle of August, and both players are tied and on pace to break Roger Maris’ home run record. I really, truly can’t express enough just how bananas the country was going at this point.
A reminder that Sosa had eight home runs toward the end of May. He looked like he could be an All-Star, no more. In the next 74 games, he would hit 39 homers. That’s an 86-homer pace over nearly a third of a season.
Also, in 1998, the internet was a place where you argued on newsgroups about if the U.S.S Enterprise could take down a Star Destroyer. It was a beautiful time. Musicians didn’t have to choose between rap or heavy metal. The video games didn’t have so many danged buttons.
We have to go back, Kate.
We have to go back.
Spoonerism of the Week
I found this screenshot in my files five days ago, and the only time I’ve been able to stop saying “Bunk Congalton” is when I was saying “Cunk Bongalton.” So, here, you do something with this.
Also, everyone knows that the Enterprise engaged that Star Destroyer when they were orbiting Cuelph in the Ganada System.
Pat Burrell is being written out of fake history. We can’t let this happen.
The top-grossing movie in the world last week was The MEG, which is a movie about a prehistoric shark-dinosaur monster. I wasn’t planning on seeing The MEG in theaters, but I was going to catch the Criterion Collection blu-ray. It’s doing very well in the United States, and it’s doing extremely well internationally, which means there will be a sequel. Possibly two sequels.
If we are incredibly, incredibly lucky there will be a third sequel. And we have work to do if it’s going to be as great as it deserves to be.
Atti turns off the television. “Grandma says I get to go home soon. She says she’ll take me to see Pat Burrell break the record.”
“Cool.” He points to a piece of toast. “You eating that?”
WAIT, FUCK YOUR TOAST. GET BACK TO THE PART WHERE PAT BURRELL IS ABOUT TO BREAK A RECORD.
The idea of Burrell breaking the record is inspired. He was already 27 years old and had just 127 home runs when the book was written in 2004. That’s 127 more home runs than I’ve hit, but the point stands. He would have needed to average about 48 home runs in every season until he was 40 just to get to Hank Aaron’s mark, which wasn’t the record he was chasing in the book. He was chasing Bonds, who made it to 759. We’re talking about something close to a 50-homer pace for more than a decade.
To which I say this: Hell, yes.
If you’re going to write a book about a prehistoric sharkosaur, don’t bother asking a nerd what’s likely to happen. Dump a whole bunch of screw-it into the pot and make Pat the Bat the greatest hitter in baseball history. I respect this so much.
The whole point of having a hitter chase history is that he does it in San Francisco, where the home run can land in the water. In MEGALODON-INFESTED WATERS. You can see the foundation that author Steve Alten was trying to lay. He wanted people in the water, anticipating hope from above and receiving DEATH FROM BELOW.
Here’s a scene with a divorced couple arguing about who gets to take the boat to McCovey Cove.
“Shut up! Since when do you give a damn about fishing?”
“I don’t. We’re going to Pac Bell to see the Giants.”
“You mean, you’re trying to catch Pat Burrell’s home run ball.”
“They say it’ll be worth three and five million.” Spencer says, eyeballing Ronald’s equipment. “Apparently, you’re after the same prize.”
“You’re damn right, and when I get that ball, the two of you get nothing. Now get off my boat!”
This has the potential to be an arthouse flick, if you think about it. A couple and an ex-husband, each involved in a quixotic race to catch a right-handed homer that lands in the San Francisco Bay, even though there has has absolutely never been a right-handed homer that has landed in the water there. It’s basically Waiting for Godot, but with the potential to be a creepy, Hitchcockian thriller.
Maybe Ronald knows that right-handed hitters can’t hit a homer into the water, but he’s taking the opportunity to hit the new boyfriend with an oar and push his unconscious body off the boat.
However, this semantic baseball quibble is addressed:
Twenty-seven percent of Burrell’s home runs at Pac Bell have been hit over the right-field bleachers, thirty-four percent of those being mammoth shots that have made it into the bay. With the odds of catching Burrell’s record-breaking home run several hundred times better than hitting the California lottery, nearly everyone in the Bay Area with a watercraft is converging on McCovey Cove
I’m starting to think ...
...
...
...
...
...
...
... the MEG franchise isn’t based entirely on science.
Either that, or the real world is trash.
Going with a combination of the two and moving on. When Burrell comes to the plate in the first inning, Spencer is busy having sex with Ronald’s ex-wife in the still-disputed boat, which is a perfect homage to Burrell. Nothing could possibly set the scene better.
Alas, that at-bat was not the one that broke the record. It was a flyout to deep center, which caused someone to throw a dummy ball into the water. Our own Jon Bois was quoted anonymously in this section:
“Hey, it was a fake out, a dork ball! Knock it off, it wasn’t even a homer!”
In the fourth inning, Burrell makes some magic.
“And there’s a long fly ball to deep right field ... Perry Meth is way back ... he’s at the warning track ... and that ball is outta here! A two-run monster shot for Pat Burrell, who has just become baseball’s all-time leading home run leader! Wow.”
PERRY METH
Who among us didn’t want to be baseball’s all-time leading home run leader when we were children?
At the risk of continually being the nerd complaining about Itchy’s magic rib-xylophone, I’m pretty sure Perry Meth wouldn’t need to go back to the warning track on a ball hit into the water.
PERRY METH
After Burrell hits the home run, the ball lands in the water, and in a wild scrum for it, Spencer’s ex-wife and her boyfriend start biting him and pulling him into the water. Just as Spencer escapes drowning, the Megalodon eats six people, including the ex-wife and her boyfriend.
The final paragraph of the chapter is absolutely beautiful.
They race down the aisle heading for the parking lot, leaving behind the shrieking crowd and the thundering helicopters and the home run music still blasting from a thousand speakers, and the stunned commissioner of Major League Baseball, who stands in horror in his skybox seat, wondering whether he should call the game an inning before it becomes official.
This is a scene that is so integral to the plot that there’s almost no reason to think it would be changed for the movie. If there’s a fourth MEG movie, it will require a home-run chase at AT&T Park.
Except, friends, I come with bad news. Our dreams of Pat the Bat becoming the all-time leading home run leader on the silver screen are in jeopardy. In the paperback version of MEG: Primal Waters, Pat Burrell is gone, replaced by Ryan Howard.
Which is also cool and funny, sure. But, still. He’s not Pat the Bat.
Perhaps the change stemmed from when the author attempted to give a signed copy of the book to Burrell, who refused it. That led Alten to tear out the signature and re-gift the book to Jim Thome, which is exactly what any of us would have done. It’s also possible that, offended at the slight, any of us would have made the switch to Howard.
Still, our demands are these:
Pat Burrell needs to be a huge part of the fourth MEG movie sequel.
He needs to be batting while Spencer’s ex-wife is having sex on his boat, as an homage to the Tao of Pat.
The commissioner should have a line where he says something like, “Do we have to cancel the game? It’s not even official yet!”, and he needs to look like Rob Manfred.
The right fielder going back on the ball needs to have “METH” on his jersey, even though Giants home jerseys don’t have player names on the back.
Pat Burrell should play himself
There should be a scene where a shirtless Pat Burrell is fighting a Megalodon with a scimitar or katana. Whether he survives or not is up to the director, but he probably survives.
If these demands are not met, we reserve the right to boycott this movie, which may or may not be made in the next four to 10 years, assuming civilization has not collapsed.
We are a simple people, with simple demands. The success of the first MEG movie suggests there will be sequels. If the franchise should get to the fourth installment, Pat Burrell absolutely must be a part of it.
“Once again, if you’re just joining us, fans at tonight’s game between the Phils and Giants witnessed history when Pat Burrell broke Barry Bonds’s all-time record for home runs, only to see play stopped when the once-captive Megalodon shark known as Angel brutally attacked boaters in McCovey —”
Mac turns the radio off. “Not a sighting in eighteen years, now we’ve got Megalodons coming out the ying-yang.”
This is not negotiable. There are Megalodons coming out the ying-yang, and the only person who can stop them is Pat Burrell. Thank you for your support.
In this week’s trip around dumb baseball, we have pitchers walking pitchers and important memes.
Hello, baseball friends. Did you know that a position player didn’t pitch last week? And did you know we’re in the middle of the longest position-player-pitching drought since the end of May?
Did you know that the last position player who pitched an inning before that May drought began was Kendrys Morales?
That’s right. The same Morales who hit a home run in seven straight games last week.
Makes you think.
...
Actually, I was kind of hoping you would find what’s interesting about that connection and email me.
Are you ready for some incredibly dumb baseball? Because we’ll start with the dumbest baseball thing of the week and work our way up from there:
Let us study this baseball thing
Over the weekend, the Pirates and Brewers wore uniforms that looked like this:
Quit screwing with the television set, Pa. You don’t know what those dials do, so I don’t know why you would fiddle with those dials, so SIT DOWN.
This was the dumbest Pirates-related thing over the last week. I’m absolutely convinced that the pitcher is wearing overalls or a jumpsuit in that screenshot, and I will not be swayed by alternate angles. This is the dumbest baseball thing of the season, Pirates-related or not.
But if you’re looking for the second-dumbest Pirates-related thing of this season, please turn your attention to how they lost on Friday.
Fifteen innings
A blown lead in the 15th
The three runners that scored were all walked
The winning run was a reliever who walked to load the bases with two outs
lol
Clay Holmes walked Jordan Lyles, a pitcher with a .123 career batting average and .353 OPS, to load the bases with two outs. The baseball gods immediately filed an injunction, and a grand jury unanimously agreed that the pitcher who took the walk needed to score a winning run. It was the dumbest baseball thing possible, and I’m torn between absolutely loving it and feeling bad for everyone involved.
The only other pitchers to walk an opposing pitcher with the lead in extra innings with two outs?
Sandy Koufax.
What I’m trying to tell you is that you should buy Clay Holmes stock.
He’s basically Sandy Koufax.
Our question today is a simple but important one: Is walking a pitcher with the lead in extra innings the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a baseball player? I’m talking within the realm of normal baseball. We can’t include extremely specific scenarios, like a puppy coming up behind a first baseman, jumping up to bite his bottom, and hanging there like a baby crocodile as the first baseman runs around screaming and waving his hands above his head. That would be more embarrassing than a pitcher walking another pitcher with the lead and two outs in extra innings.
No, we’re talking just regular baseball plays. They can be rare, but they have to involve normal parts of the game.
Regular errors? Happen all the time. A meltdown of errors on a national stage, like Dan Uggla in the All-Star Game? Getting close, but then you could just infinity-plus-one the errors to make your scenario more and more ridiculous, which seems like cheating.
My theory is this: What Holmes did is the second-most embarrassing thing that can happen on a baseball diamond. The first is one of these:
I would argue that the off the head part is a little too rare and specific to count as the winner, so we’ll go with “any time an outfielder helps a home run over the fence.” That’s followed by “pitcher walks another pitcher to lose the game.” After that is probably “fielder settles under a fly ball, and his pants fall down to reveal that he’s wearing boxer shorts with hearts on them.”
Unless that’s too specific.
Fine, then I’ll go with tripping as you leave the dugout as the third-most embarrassing. But walking the pitcher is up there. Walking the pitcher and losing the game because of it? Oh, man, is that up there. It’s closer to allowing a home run off your head than you think.
Pudge Rodriguez couldn’t catch a foul ball with his bare hands, which totally absolves me, Darrell
Pudge Rodriguez is the guy with his back toward the camera, and not only does he miss it, Darrell, but he seems to miss it entirely, with his hands far apart as if he were expecting a punt. This is because it’s mentally hard to move from passive spectator to active participant, especially when the physical task required is something you were never asked to do in the actual sport of baseball, Darrell. If I were wearing a glove and it clanked out, sure, roast me. But then you would have roasted me for wearing a glove to a baseball game. There’s no winning for me, here.
So keep telling the story at parties just to embarrass me, Darrell. Keep telling yourself that if you were in my seat, you would totally have went home with a souvenir. But here’s a Gold Glove winner — thirteen danged times over — whiffing on a ball with his bare hands.
And Pudge probably wasn’t even four beers in.
It’s hard to catch a baseball with your bare hands from 100 feet in the air when you aren’t expecting it, Darrell.
Please stop roasting me.
When you’re playing an early set at Donington and Max Cavalera unexpectedly joins your band for a song
Just a reminder that there are a lot of players with long hair in the majors, but none of them make it work as classically or as organically as Dereck Rodriguez.
My only request is that if he has his dad’s hairline, that he keeps the long hair in back. Baseball needs more skullets.
The Oakland A’s will have a series of pneumatic tubes to get you to your seat at their new ballpark
The Oakland A’s have hired the cutting-edge Danish architectural firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), to lead the design process for a new ballpark and surrounding development.
The firm, which describes its design approach as “pragmatic utopian,” will oversee planning for two possible sites
Alright, now, if “pragmatic utopian” is a well-known and clearly defined way to describe a specific type of architecture, like “neoclassical art,” don’t tell me. Let me wear my idiocy like a bathrobe. But what I’m seeing here are two words.
Pragmatic, as in practical. Sensible. Useful in ordinary circumstances.
Utopian, as in the ultimate ideal. Perfect. Without flaws.
Pragmatic utopian = Pneumatic tubes that will take you directly from the entrance to your seat. Foomp.
Is it dangerous? No, this is the future. Is it for everybody, even those with motion sickness? Probably not, but the tubes are self-cleaning. Is it pragmatic? Boy, is it. Is it utopian? And how!
Originally this section was going to include edible seats, which seemed both pragmatic and utopian, but then i realized you would be eating something that had touched someone else’s butt, which is decidedly not utopian.
Anyway, after careful consideration, it appears as if my utopian ballpark would be designed by Willy Wonka, which doesn’t seem pragmatic. This is why the A’s hire professionals, people. And I can’t wait to see what they come up with. Other than the pneumatic tubes.
Picture of the week
This is Ronald Acuña, Jr. hitting a home run against the Marlins:
Photo by Eric Espada/Getty Images
It’s not as iconic as Jose Bautista’s bat flip, no. The stakes were lower, and the circumstances were different. Still, you have the emotion of a player who just did something that had to have felt INCREDIBLY SATISFYING, but it’s a controlled, measured emotion. If I hit a long leadoff home run against the same team that plunked me for no good reason and started a kerfuffle when I was 20? I would have pretended the bat was a rifle and walked with it over my shoulder like a Buckingham Palace guard all the way around the bases.
Not Acuña, talented beyond his years and comfortable in his own skin. Head down, the beginnings of an unrealized smirk, and a utilitarian flip, as if to say, “I won’t be needing this anymore. My job here is done.”
It’s a picture that tells you a lot. That Acuña can hit dingers. That he can control his emotions. That he’s kind of a badass. All of this is true. And all Don Mattingly can do in the background is say, dang, there goes one of the most exciting baseball players we’ll ever see.
Photo by Abbie Parr/Getty ImagesPhoto by Abbie Parr/Getty Images
Second, my meme idea. This is for when you have an unpopular opinion and lose your confidence when called out on it. Like so:
See? You think you’re being an edgy contrarian, but when you’re called out on it, you know you’re being a little silly.
I actually believe one of these opinions, and I’m not telling which one.
Of course, it’s easy to overdo it, so respect the simplicity of the meme.
Keep it simple, stupid. And enjoy this blank because I’ve finally created the meme that everyone is going to be using. I did it, mom.
This is what you call ........................... Servais journalism.
This Week in McGwire/Sosa
McGwire 25 AB this week 404 AB for the season
6 HR this week 53 HR for the season
.400/.531/1.200 this week .295/.475/.730 for the season
Sosa 28 AB this week 506 AB for the season
4 HR this week 51 for the season
.250/.276/.679 this week .310/.379/.648 for the season
DINGERS. WE HAVE FRESH, HOT DINGERS.
McGwire hit two home runs in a game against Sosa and the Cubs, and then he hit one in both games of a doubleheader against the Mets. McGwire ended the week on pace for 70 home runs, and Sosa ended the week on pace for 66.
On-pace stats work, everyone. They’re scientific, and we should use them all the time.
At this point, the world is delirious with McGwire-Sosa fever, and it’s just the best. There was just about a dinger every day, and the world seemed so danged alive.
You’ll understand in the great Ronald Acuña/Seth Beer chase of ‘23.
A man sitting alone on a bench in a Greyhound station. He’s crying. Sobbing. You approach him, concerned and a little scared, to ask him what’s wrong.
He looks up, eyes raw, tears streaming down his face, and he extends his pointer finger to touch your nose.
“Boop,” he says. Then he resumes his sobbing, which is somehow louder than before.
You turn around to see if this is some sort of prank, but when you turn back, the man is gone. Now you’re wondering if he ever existed in the first place. You wonder if you’ve gone mad. You dream about the incident for years.
Years later, you see a link to a subreddit dedicated to the urban legend of the Cryin’ Booper. You don’t click the link.
You just look out the window and stare into the rain.
Four years ago, these two teams met in the ALCS. What happened?
On Oct. 10, 2014, in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, the Royals had the bases loaded and no outs in the top of the ninth inning. The score was tied, 5-5, Zach Britton had thrown 10 straight balls, and the world was on fire. The Camden Yards crowd was 47,124 strong, and roughly 47,124 of them wanted to throw up.
Orioles manager Buck Showalter left Britton in, and on a 3-2 pitch, Eric Hosmer grounded into a forceout at home. A pitching change and seven pitches later, a double play ended the inning. The threat was over. The crowd was as delirious and loud as any in baseball that year.
It was still raucous in the bottom of the ninth, with the Orioles having a chance to walk off, except Wade Davis was at the peak of his powers. The untouchable Royals setup man struck out the side on 11 pitches, with each strikeout coming on a swing and a miss.
The buzz turned into a murmur, and it would all end shortly after, but everyone there and everyone watching at home was thinking the same thing: What a baseball game. What an incredible baseball game.
What a beautiful, perfect baseball game these Royals and Orioles are playing right now.
The Royals and Orioles are playing a series this weekend, and there’s a strong chance that an outfielder will swallow a rosin bag on a pickoff attempt. There won’t be anyone on base at the time, but the inning will end when the batter swings at the pickoff attempt.
The Royals and Orioles weren’t always historically awful. There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, that they were merelyawful.
For years and years, one right after the other, both teams were reliably bad. The mechanical precision was almost admirable. From 1998 to 2011, the Royals and Orioles combined for three third-place finishes, 15 fourth-place finishes, 10 last-place finishes, and exactly one season over .500. The average record of the two teams during those 14 seasons was 69-93. They were bad. Predictably bad. Over and over again.
And then they weren’t. There was a moment when both of them were beautiful, glistening dragonflies. The Royals and Orioles weren’t just watchable — they were fearsome, talented teams playing each other for the chance to go to the World Series. It was as if both teams were a part of the same inspirational movement, pulling themselves out of the muck and the mire and screaming, “No! We have had enough! We will not be your punchlines anymore!” The montage was filled with dudes in suits mumbling different things in a draft war room, and it wasn’t very exciting, but the results were unexpectedly thrilling.
That was 1,415 rotations on Earth’s axis ago, which is approximately 41 years in baseball time. Now we’re in a brand new era. The Royals and Orioles aren’t just bad; they’re as bad as they’ve ever been. They’re as bad as anyone has ever been.
This is the search for how this happened. How can two teams meet in the ALCS, at the top of professional baseball, then just four years later be on a collision course for 220 losses? How can two teams climb a perilous mountain for more than a decade, reach the summit, and then tumble down almost immediately? How, how, how?
According to SB Nation’s research, between 2014 and 2018, the Royals and Orioles each made a series of transactions that made their respective rosters substantially worse.
Alright, yes. Technically, that’s what happened.
But the details, man. The details. Consider that neither team was willing to embark upon one of the major rebuilding efforts that were so trendy. Both teams puttered around and added veterans here and veterans there, while never trading their younger, more valuable players. They kept trying to add. They kept thinking they were contenders, and sometimes they were right. Kind of.
Let’s start with the offseason after the 2014 campaign. Both teams almost reached the summit. Both teams fell just short. Their respective fan bases were energized like they hadn’t been in two decades. They had stars and fan favorites on the roster, and everyone inside and outside the building was hungry. There was never a better offseason to pounce.
The Royals pounced.
The Orioles napped.
The Orioles looked at their roster after making it all the way to the American League Danged Championship Series, slapped Travis Snider on it, and called it a winter.
If you think I’m exaggerating, here’s every acquisition they made between the end of the postseason and Opening Day, 2015:
If you add up the rWAR, you get zero on the nose. Not 0.1, not 0.2. Zero. The Orioles made a flurry of transactions, but they might as well have taken the whole offseason off. It was all replacement level anyway.
Can we call the Orioles apathetic if their commitment to apathy takes an extreme level of effort? What a paradox. The Orioles absolutely had to try very hard to come up with an offseason that underwhelming. Delmon Young is on the above list, but he was re-signed, if that helps you appreciate the inactivity even more.
In 2014, the Orioles had the 15th-highest payroll in Major League Baseball. In 2015, with newly entitled fans who had sipped from the bejeweled goblet of success and begged for more, they pushed that payroll all the way to 17th.
Compare that offseason to the one that the Royals enjoyed:
The Royals added about nine wins above replacement to their roster. Considering that the Orioles finished 81-81 and neither wild card team above them won more than 87 games, you can see how they might have been better off with a few extra wins.
That apathy wasn’t just an offseason thing, either. During the season, the Royals made trades that helped improve their roster, adding Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist at the deadline, even though they were eight games up in the AL Central.
The Orioles were a game away from the second wild card spot at the deadline, and all they did was trade for Gerardo Parra (who was, to be fair, having a fine season). He became the team’s biggest transaction for the entire season.
The Royals won the World Series.
The Orioles did not. And it really didn’t seem like they were interested in the chance.
If I ended right there, that section would have been a corker of a column to drop before the 2016 season. The Royals tried. The Orioles did not. So simple.
But we’re here in the future, where we know that the Royals and Orioles are still trapped in the same mess, even though the Royals tried and briefly succeeded to not be the Orioles. So something must have happened in Kansas City, too.
It’s easy and predictable to blame both teams’ problems on money. After all, Kansas City is one of the smallest markets in baseball, and Baltimore wasn’t a behemoth even before the Expos moved 35 miles away. The Royals couldn’t afford to keep all of their fan favorites, and when the Orioles made the mistake of committing to Chris Davis, they limited what they could do with their roster for years.
But money doesn’t explain why these teams are so bad.
Here, pretend the Royals spent this offseason. Pretend they kept all of their free agents from last season. Eric Hosmer and Lorenzo Cain are back for a cool $175 million (hometown discount). And because those two are back, the Royals don’t bother trading Mike Moustakas or Kelvin Herrera at the deadline. Because they’re contending, see, in this little alternate reality.
Are current AL Central leaders Cleveland Indians scared in this alternate reality? Oh, buddy, they are not. Let’s say that replacing the merry-go-round of yuck in center field with Cain gives the Royals a cool ten wins. Give them another four for Hosmer replacing Lucas Duda, even if that’s wildly optimistic, and slap on a few more for improved morale and the continued employment of Moustakas and Herrera.
Let’s say all that happens: The Royals are still about a dozen games under .500, give or take. Not only are they still out of contention, but they’re saddled with onerous contracts that will hurt their ability to reinforce the team when they are contending.
Photo by Jon Durr/Getty Images
The Orioles are a slightly different story. They could have used some well-targeted spending coming off that ALCS, but we also can’t assume they wouldn’t have ended up with, say, Pablo Sandoval and James Shields if they went on a spending spree. But there was a way to turn that 81-81 season into a wild card berth.
Focus on this year’s team, though. Give the Orioles two of the top free agents in each of the last four offseasons. Pretend that Jeff Bezos bought the team and didn’t say something dumb about space being the only way to spend his billions. Pretend they have twice the payroll of the second-most expensive team after this wild spree.
Are they scaring the Yankees and Red Sox this season? Oh, buddy, they are not. The Orioles are still a mess in this scenario, and now they’re saddled with the silliest contracts imaginable.
So fault the Orioles for not spending when their window was open. Fault them for spending on Alex Cobb when the window was closed. Dumb birds have a way of flying into closed windows, after all. But don’t pin all of their problems on an unwillingness to be a top-five spender. Don’t pin most of their problems on that. This goes for the Royals, too. Or any team, really.
The Royals and Orioles might be small-market teams (or act like it), but that’s not even close to a primary factor in their march toward a billionty losses.
The best way to explain the decline and fall of the Royals and Orioles is by reverse-engineering how they contended in the first place. The Royals built a lineup with Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, and Alex Gordon, all of whom came in the draft. They augmented that with Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar, both of whom came when Zack Greinke — another draft success — was traded away. The easiest and most accurate way to explain the Royals’ renaissance is simply by pointing to the draft. They had a run of success that most teams don’t see for decades. The Padres are still waiting for something like it after 50 seasons.
The current Royals haven’t had have anything close to a run like that since. Whit Merrifield is the only current contributor who was drafted since Hosmer was selected in 2008. Other players are still contributing somewhere (Wil Myers in San Diego, Sean Manaea in Oakland), but the post-Hosmer draftscape has been startling dry. The Royals this season are historically bad instead of regular bad because they’ve received almost zero help from their drafts.
If you’re feeling overly generous, you can explain the lack of recent draft success away as bad luck. If you’re feeling rightfully cynical, you can look back at how the Royals built their championship team and realize something disturbing: All of those good players were picked near the top of the first round, and it’s possible that they were so talented, they were Royals-proof.
That isn’t to take away the Royals’ successful development — some of it painfully methodical — of Gordon, Moustakas, and Hosmer. In a different organization, perhaps they don’t succeed in the same fashion. Still, Gordon was a second-overall pick, as was Moustakas. Hosmer was a third-overall pick. If you trace Cain and Escobar back to Greinke, the most successful Royals draft pick since George Brett, you’ll note that he was selected sixth. The Royals needed to pick in the top of the first round to find success because they sure weren’t getting a lot of help from their second-, third-, or 10th-round picks.
And if the Royals had whiffed on those high first-round picks, like they did with Bubba Starling, Christian Colon, Kyle Zimmer, and Hunter Dozier? That’s the kind of thing that can lead to 100 losses by the second week of September, apparently. It might be unfair to suggest that Gordon, Moustakas, and Hosmer were a mirage, players so talented they succeeded despite the Royals and not because of them.
It might be totally accurate, though.
It’s possible that the Royals made several deft selections thanks to a mixture of providence and baseball acumen, and built a championship team because their blueprint was better than the rest of baseball’s.
It’s also possible the Royals stumbled on talented players even they couldn’t screw up.
The Orioles are in a similar developmental rut, but the reasons for their original success is much harder to explain in a sentence. They made shrewd trades for Chris Davis, Adam Jones, and Chris Tillman. They were aggressive and creative in their search for starting pitching, swooping up Wei-Yin Chen and polishing the imperfections of Miguel Gonzalez and Steve Pearce. They had a steady pipeline of valuable relievers. They picked their spots to spend, and it would occasionally work out. And, yes, they also drafted Manny Machado, which was probably the biggest move of all.
The Orioles since then have ... not done any of this. With Machado, Gausman, Zach Britton, and Jonathan Schoop gone, the most valuable homegrown player on the current roster might be Trey Mancini, who is currently rocking a -0.9 WAR. Unless it’s Caleb Joseph, the part-time catcher with a .588 OPS. Unless it’s Dylan Bundy, who has a very real chance to allow as many home runs this year as he had allowed in his career coming into the season.
Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images
Drafting has been a miserable failure since Machado, yes, but there’s also the strange case of the Orioles and the international market. The Orioles approach the international market as if owner Peter Angelos was told by a fortune teller that he would be murdered by a prospect from a different country. They had exactly one international free agent on their major league roster this year, Jonathan Schoop, but he was traded away in July. They aren’t just less active in these markets than other teams; they’re aggressively and strategically inactive, often trading away international bonus money so they can’t sign players.
During the 2018 international signing period, the Orioles signed exactly two players, which tied them with the Braves for the fewest in baseball. The distinction, here, is that the Braves are in a timeout, put there by MLB for being naughty. In other words, the Orioles’ international market activity is reflective of a team that’s being punished, except no one is actually punishing them.
They’ve been doing this for years and years. The Blue Jays signed 53 international players in 2016; the Orioles signed five. The argument is apparently that money not spent on the international market is money that can be allocated to the major league roster.
Which is another way of saying that the Orioles traded 214 different prospects for Alex Cobb, give or take.
It didn’t work.
The Royals and Orioles have been absolutely elite at not developing players, albeit for different reasons. If a team decides to stay in the middle of the payroll pack, they absolutely must develop fresh players. It’s how baseball is built. This is where these two teams have failed the most, and it’s why they’re accidentally chasing the 1962 Mets.
There is also the matter of creativity. As in, neither the Royals nor Orioles have any.
The Oakland A’s are contending for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list three players to prove a point: Matt Chapman, Chad Pinder, and Matt Olson. That trio, all taken late in the first or second round, could have been included in the last section as proof that it’s possible to get franchise cornerstones and low-key contributors after the top five picks of the draft. But the A’s are in this position for another reason: Those are the only homegrown players contributing to their success this year.
Normally, having just three homegrown players on a 25-man roster would be a problem. The A’s, though, have been a frantic, twitching mass of transactions. If they aren’t exchanging veterans for underpaid players, they’re sniffing around the undervalued and unwanted. It didn’t take draft smarts or money to get Khris Davis. Someone with a vision figured out a way to weaponize Blake Treinen and his Newton-disproving sinker. The fliers they took on cheap starting pitchers on one-year deals are paying off.
This isn’t to say “be like the A’s” because I’m not entirely convinced the A’s can be like the A’s next year. Instead the point is, “do something that resembles anything.” The Royals were creative after winning the pennant, but they later got lazy and slapped a very expensive Ian Kennedy onto their roster because they went to the starting-pitcher store and didn’t want to leave empty handed. Their solution as they approached the contract apocalypse with Moustakas, Hosmer, and Cain was to overpay a sprinkling of free agents and hope it all worked out. It did not.
The Orioles are a shame because they used to be creative. They were willing to take chances on dinged up players and polish them. They weren’t active at all in Latin America, but they took chances in Asia and Australia that other teams weren’t. Either they’ve stopped taking those chances, or they are unable to execute them now. I’m not sure which one would be worse news.
The best way to describe the Orioles’ lack of creativity is to note that they let Wade Miley, Chris Tillman, and Ubaldo Jimenez start a combined 76 games for them last year, with a combined ERA of 6.57. Gee willikers, it sure is a sorry state of affairs, but there was nothing they could do but keep running them out there. Wish they could do something, but their hands were tied.
One of their solutions in the offseason was to sign Andrew Cashner, which was remarkably uncreative. It was like Peter Angelos said, in a fit of exasperation, “Isn’t there anyone cheap with a good ERA?” and didn’t listen to anything the front office said after that.
A team can survive if they whiff on a few drafts or free agents or international signing periods. But they’ll have to be creative. The Royals and Orioles couldn’t create their own Justin Turners from what was left in the bargain bin, and they couldn’t draft Eric Hosmers or Manny Machados because they didn’t have top-five draft picks anymore. Their solution was to find the most sincere and uncommercial pumpkin patch and wait all night for the Great Pumpkin.
It didn’t show up.
Also, it’s important to remember that, sometimes, shit just happens. When you’re gunning for historically awful, it sort of has to. Chris Davis is having one of the worst seasons in baseball history, which isn’t something that anyone should have predicted. Alex Gordon’s complete collapse was instant and unpredictable, even after accounting for age-related decline. One of the best stories of the Royals’ season, Jorge Soler, is on the DL with a broken foot. The only relievers the Orioles have who aren’t unfathomably awful are on the 60-day DL, which is pretty impressive if you think about it.
This is what separates the 2018 Orioles from the 2008 Orioles. This is what makes the Royals worse than all of the spectacularly untalented teams from the pre-Hosmer era. Both teams are rolling snake eyes after snake eyes, even though they’re supposed to be playing a game of cards. They would have been ghastly without the worst-case scenarios. But, here, have some worst-case scenarios, just because.
If you’re going to suck, you might as well chase history. That’s what I always say.
It’s also what the Royals and Orioles say, and I can respect that.
What we can learn from these two teams, then, are three universal truths about baseball.
1. Mid-market teams absolutely must develop a steady stream of prospects
The Royals and Orioles have developed almost no one. It’s not that they’re not developing stars; it’s that they’re not developing fringe starters.
They could maybe fake a half-interesting team like the Giants with a couple of minor farm successes and silly short-term moves, but only if they committed to a top-five payroll. That wouldn’t help anybody but the agents.
And I’m not sure if I need the “mid-market” designation, here. Teams like the Red Sox and Yankees needed to spit out prospects, one after the other, so that they could spend big-market money to supplement them. Even without spending any money, though, those two teams would have been fun to watch.
2. If those teams aren’t going to develop good players themselves, they’ll need to be creative and take these prospects from other teams
The Royals and Orioles might be on this path following some white-flag trades this July. We won’t know for a couple years, though. They sure didn’t get creative and attempt to pillage other teams before this.
3. If neither of these options are available, try not to fall into the pit filled with scorpions and millipedes
I regret to inform you that the Royals and Orioles have fallen into the pit filled with scorpions and millipedes.
If there’s good news, it’s that both teams will lead off the MLB Draft next year and probably the year after that. This will get the Royals back on that Hosmer-Gordon-Moustakas plan, and the Orioles might find their next Machado. Heck, the Orioles even acquired international-signing money on purpose this deadline. They might have convinced ownership that there are occasionally good players that come out of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, wild as that might sound.*
For now, though, we have two of the worst baseball teams the sport has seen in a generation, possibly even worse than the 2011-2013 Astros. That specific comparison might fill you with hope, and it’s a fun one for teams looking at a total and painful rebuild. The difference is that the New Astros were built by a front office that was entirely different from the Bad Astros’ front office. There are no guarantees the front offices will be different for either the Royals or Orioles.
Here are two teams meeting in the American League Championship Series, with a pennant on the line. Here they are four years later, playing like two of the worst expansion teams of all time. It took utter neglect when it came to player development. It took a dull, contented, almost apathetic approach to roster-building. And it took more than a pinch of lousy luck.
It takes a special kind of failure to fall from the top of the sport to these depths in a few short years. The worst part might be that both fan bases are absolutely aware that this doesn’t have to end after a simple, quick three-year rebuilding plan. Both fan bases are well aware that baseball purgatory is real and awful, and they’re both aware that it can last for more than a decade.
They were just in the ALCS a few minutes ago, I swear. They were just in the ALCS, and it was great, you gotta believe me ...
Everything stops until we get an answer about the Brady Feigl situation. Unless you’re talking about the Angels’ retro uniforms, which are perfect.
Welcome to This Week In Dumb Baseball, which is a better name for a weekly column about dumb baseball than Grant Land is, but we’re not here to talk about the past. Maybe a rebranding is in our future.
Rest assured, though, there will alwaysbe dumb baseball to cover in this spot. Baseball is overflowing with dumb baseball. Like sap from a maple, we have to collect it, or it will go to waste.
Sometimes, though, the baseball isn’t dumb. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Our first section is a case in point, so ...
Luis Urias is just 21, so he hasn’t exactly been waiting since the ‘60s for his major league debut, but it’s still one of the seminal moments of any ballplayer’s life. It’s the realization of a dream that’s been years and years and years in the making. Urias worked hard to get there, and he jogged out to the field for the first time, adrenaline zipping through his body, as he tried not to look up at the second deck and get dizzy.
The first pitch comes in as he gets into his ready position, and it’s a strike. He relaxes a bit and refocuses. The second pitch is thrown, and he gets into his ready position again.
A player who is unable to concentrate in these circumstances is one who might not make it out of A-ball. We talk a lot about the five tools, but there are more than that, and the sixth is something of an implied tool that every major leaguer has by definition. It’s the ability to compartmentalize your brain in a way that allows you to function in moments of extreme excitement and/or stress.
Don’t sleep on just how beautiful Urias’s play was, either. It was full extension on a hard-hit ball, with no margin for error, and ...
Which one of these players is Brady Feigl? Trick question: they are both named Brady Feigl. One is in the Rangers system, and the other is in the A's system. pic.twitter.com/nCIufSkpdQ
... and, uh ... that’s weird, wonder how that tweet snuck in there ... anyway, Urias dives and makes the first play of his major league career, and it happens to be one of the most brilliant plays he might make all ....
... now just hold on a second, that tweet can’t be right, can it? It would still be a thing if there were a John Anderson playing professional baseball and a John Anderson playing professional basketball and they even remotely looked similar. It would also still be a thing if there were two players who looked this similar, even if their names were different. But you’re telling me that these two players, with what should be unique names, play the same position in the same sport and also happen to look ...
Sorry, I’m sorry. No, we have to celebrate Urias, one of the Padres’ top prospects and a reason you just might be paying attention to them as soon as next year. It’s possible that this play will make for an incredible anecdote in the book about his career, after all, a perfect start to ...
... wait, wait, wait, alright, let’s use science to figure this out. Brady Feigl A was born in 1990, when the first name “Brady” was the 315th-most popular baby name in the United States. Brady Feigl B was born in 1995, when his first name was the 188th-most popular name. There have been just four Bradys in the major leagues, for example. So right off the bat, we have a freak coincident.
But then there’s the last name. According to this website, Feigl is the 105,814th most-common surname in the world, and just 4,492 people have this name, with most of them in Europe. Just one Feigl should exist among every 1,084,839 Americans, which means just the odds of there being two unrelated Feigls in professional alone should be statistically unlikely.
Dammit, no, back to Urias and the Padres, and, wait, then you start talking about the odds it takes to become a professional baseball player in the first place. How many kids are drafted, and how big is the potential pool of amateur baseball players? We’re talking one in 10,000, right?
They have to be related, even if they’re just distant cousins. This is the only solution. Then you would eliminate some of the statistical noise because if they share genes, then it’s not that freaky that they look alike or each share a similar athletic talent. That would explain a great deal of this, to be honest.
We have to convince them to take one of those DNA tests.
By court order, if necessary.
That was a great play or whatever, but now I can’t sleep.
We need to arrest both of them until this gets settled.
The unwritten rules of screaming at no one in particular
Lynn screams, “Fork’s to you, muddling forger!” or something roughly equivalent after striking out Daniel Palka in the first inning, but it’s hard to imagine that he was expressly upset at Palka. Consider that ...
Palka is a rookie who had faced Lynn just five times before, so there couldn’t have been a history between them
Especially considering that the only hit Palka had was an infield single, so there wasn’t the chance of a rogue bat flip.
It was the first inning, which lessens the chances of some sort of jawing between them.
There was no chicanery during the at-bat, no arguing that a strike should have been a ball, or anything else that would have upset a pitcher.
One Brady was from Missouri, and one was from Maryland, which doesn’t have to mean anything, but it’s not like they were living close enough to be aware of each other, so this is as much of a surprise to them as it is to us
So our question is this: Is Lance Lynn breaking an unwritten rule by screaming obscenities at the sky? To answer it, we need to know who the “you” is in the epithet. Is it directed toward the umpire for calling two borderline pitches a strike? Is it directed at the hitter, who is Lynn’s natural enemy just for existing? Is it, like, directed toward God, man? Or is it just something that came from the top of his head, instinctively?
If it’s the latter, it’s probably not breaking an unwritten rule. It’s just a chemical reaction that leads to an especially spicy catch phrase, no more. Eventually it will get Lynn into trouble, and he should consider replacing it with something like, “Now that’s a spicy fastball!.”
But if it’s any of the others, I’m going to say it’s breaking an unwritten rule, and possibly a couple of written ones. You probably shouldn’t scream “blank you, motherblanker” to an umpire or an opponent, and you certainly shouldn’t scream that and replace the “blanks” with naughty words.
For violating this unwritten rule, I sentence Lynn to 20 jumping jacks. Also, I’ve decided that the new punishment for unwritten-rule violations is to do jumping jacks on the field before the start of an inning, and the idea that baseballs need to be thrown intentionally at batters is hereby eliminated.
Show me where the flaw in that plan is, and we can have a civil discussion, but guess what? There is no flaw.
The abridged version is that Astudillo is a multi-positional marvel who is primarily a catcher, nearly impossible to walk or strike out, and of a mirthful and jolly countenance that the internet seems to enjoy more than anything else in the sport. There are baseball players named, like, Brandon Dallard who will come and go without doing a single memorable thing, and they’ll need to carry a baseball card in their wallet just to prove to their parents that they really did make the majors. And then there is a player like Astudillo, who is already a cult hero.
That picture up there is of Astudillo’s first home run, and it captures an awful lot of the fun involved. After not smiling around the bases — and baseball players trying not to smile after their first home run is one of the purest moments on any baseball field — he lets the smile fly in the dugout, and the picture captures the sense of wonder in his eyes and the pure enjoyment in his face.
If there were no Willians Astudillo, we would not have to invent him. He would just not exist, and our lives would be that much more drab. But he does exist, and he tends to make baseball more fun. Here’s a picture capturing that, and it’s glorious.
Rate this retro uniform
Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
I really, really have to be careful here. I don’t want to be reactionary or hyperbolic. Let’s study this like something hanging in a museum and walk around it, lips pursed, hand to our chin.
...
Yeah, I have to go with A+. I know that this might be rank nostalgia, and there are subconscious forces working behind the scenes to make me appreciate these uniforms more than someone who didn’t grow up with them, but I can’t shake the idea that these are perfect.
The Orioles were swept, by the way. They were swept, and Royals fans are at least a little annoyed that it will probably cost them the first-overall pick next June. That’s all just so perfect.
What Shohei Did
He pitched, dang it. He pitched and he FREAKED US ALL OUT.
A pitcher with a partial ligament tear who doesn’t Tommy John, coming back sooner than expected and then throwing nearly 10 MPH slower than normal?
Yes. Yes, I would, Kent.
All was well, though. All was well. Relatively speaking.
Mike Scioscia said Ohtani’s back stiffened up and his finger was a little sore from bare-handing the comebacker. That led to decline in velo. He said his elbow is fine. #Angels
Not great. But not the apocalypse, either. For good measure, Ohtani also drove in a couple runs, and it’s probably a good sign that he’s pitching for a team that isn’t in contention, and he remains the most watchable player in sports.
On the other hand, stop freaking us out. I can’t take much more of this.
I never thought I would write a sentence like that, but, here, let me explain myself:
If he’s not hurt, that means he’s lollygagging. Nobody likes a lollygagger. And this would be 80-grade lollygagging. Even the announcers wondered if Ramos was just flat-out unable to run there.
Unless he’s just that slow. This would be even worse than the 80-grade lollygagging. A player running first-to-third at sub-Molina speeds would be much, much more concerning. This would be almost untenable speed — the kind that would get Ramos thrown out on a ground-ball single to center.
So I’ll stick with the header. I hope Ramos has a wonky hamstring or something, and he’s just nursing it. He’ll get better, and you won’t see this again.
It is, by far, the best possible scenario. I hope you understand. I’m not trying to be a jerk.
This week in McGwire/Sosa
McGwire 23 AB this week 427 AB for the season
2 HR this week 55 HR for the season
.261/.414/.609 this week .293/.472/.724 for the season
Sosa 30 AB this week 540 AB for the season
4 HR this week 55 for the season
.333/.394/.767 this week .313/.381/.654 for the season
Sosa and McGwire are both on pace for 69 homers, which is incredibly nice. Pitchers are scared to come inside to them because they don’t want to be the dingus who ruined everything. It’s almost certainly going to be the year that Roger Maris’ home run record falls.
But what if it isn’t?
What if it isn’t?
Again, I’ll have to remind you that the fate of the world rested on this.
Spoonerism of the week
This one is a reader submission, and I would like to thank Justin for reaching out. It’s a beautiful spoonerism.
Ah, a player from my own backyard, I can definitely appreciate this. If you’re a spooner-literalist, the correct adaptation is Gumpsie Preen, and it’s incredibly fun to say. Just rolls off the tongue. Your daughter has six out of the seven Gumpsie Preen books in her library, and she won’t be satisfied until you buy her the last one. Go on. Don’t wait for a sale. Encourage her love for reading.
But if you want to be a little more daring and take an additional consonant, Grumpsie Peen is next level. Take the Grumpsie Peen Challenge and say it out loud.
Grumpsie Peen.
Anyway, the point is that I always welcome your submissions, and also that I’m almost disappointed that my fascination with there being two Jeffs D’Amico and two Steves Ontiveros is ruined because there are two Bradys Feigl, and they look exactly alike. Once we have them in custody, we should get more answers, though.
Nobody cared that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were using, right up until they did.
If you were there, you remember. If you weren’t, you have no idea. But baseball will never experience anything like the Great Home Run Chase of 1998 again, and in order to get context for the relatively banal decision to use performance-enhancing drugs, you have to remember just how bananas it all was.
On Sept. 21, 1998, there were three different stories about Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire at the top of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger’s sports page. The paper is published in Mississippi’s capital, about 400 miles away from the closest Major League Baseball team, but there was still room for a syndicated column about Sosa and McGwire, an Associated Press recap of Sammy Sosa’s night, and an Associated Press recap of Mark McGwire’s night at the top of the page.
In the middle of the page, there was news about an Ole Miss offensive lineman suffering a season-ending injury. Toward the bottom, there was a little something about Cal Ripken missing his first game since 1982.
It’s 1998, explained in one sports page.
People born after McGwire and Sosa might think they’ve experienced an entire nation in the grips of baseball mania, whether it was with the Cubs or Red Sox winning the World Series, or the two separate Barry Bonds record chases, but they’ve never lived through an editor at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger deciding that a huge update on Ole Miss football was roughly the fourth- or fifth-most important story of the day. McGwire-Sosa Mania was something that turned the end of Ripken’s streak into something that needed to be buried at the bottom of the front page.
The Home Run Chase of ‘98 was something that made tollbooth operators hold up traffic because they needed to ask someone wearing a Cardinals hat if anything happened. It was responsible for Sunday sermons that weaved biblical narratives together with the home run chase. It was why barbers and hairstylists held court about baseball all day, and it was why taxi drivers spent 10 hours a day on McGwire-Sosa small talk, only to wake up the next morning and happily do the same thing for another 10 hours.
It was a shared moment in time for millions, a beautifully raw nerve ending that kept getting hit, kept releasing endorphins, kept thrilling an entire hemisphere. It was tremendous fun, even if it didn’t age perfectly.
It’s OK to profess your love for it while rolling your eyes just a little bit at the thought of you getting so sucked in. It was basically Top Gun, but spread out over six months, and it was as awesome as it was silly.
And, hell yeah, writers were into it.
When everyone is that excited about something, any threat to that excitement is seen as an existential threat. The scolds come around to tinkle on your parade because that’s just what they do, man, and the only appropriate response is to push back and aggressively not care.
McGwire was taking a substance that built muscle mass. Everybody was aware of it, and he kept the bottle of pills in plain sight. The side effects of this substance weren’t understood very well, but nobody cared.
Nobody cared.
The substance was androstenedione, and it was legal then. It’s illegal now, but that’s not the point; McGwire was willing to take something that made him stronger and hit more home runs, even though the side effects weren’t well known. Turns out the side effects included shrunken testicles and an increased risk of heart attack or stroke, but it wasn’t anabolic steroids, sportswriters around the country shouted in unison, as if most of the people exclaiming that could really explain the difference. As if anyone wanted to take the time to elucidate why the supplement didn’t cross the ethical line that steroids did. Or even think about it at all.
Nobody cared. Not while the dingers were flying.
This is not an attempt to argue in favor of performance-enhancing drugs. This is not another performative exercise in that anarchic brand the cool kids love, where we pretend that steroids are rad and everyone should take them. It’s also not an excuse to go full Helen Lovejoy and scream about the bad men hurting our babies.
This is where we figure out how McGwire and Sosa went from international heroes to villains. It seems like a linear narrative now — player succeeds, player gets caught cheating, player slinks off in ignominy — but that’s just not how it happened. Nobody cared about what McGwire or Sosa put into their bodies until everyone decided, en masse, that they did care. After that, it was a mad scramble to revise history.
With apologies to George Orwell, Baseball Oceania was at war with Steroids Eastasia; Baseball Oceania had always been at war with Steroids Eastasia.
What in the hell happened?
Murray Chass became one of the leading anti-PED voices of the post-BALCO era, and he was vigilant enough about the cause that a player’s back acne was entered into evidence against his Hall of Fame case. After the Mitchell Report, after Bonds fatigue, this brand of skepticism and anger was the mainstream position when it came to performance-enhancing drugs. If it isn’t the current default stance of the typical baseball fan, it’s mighty close.
A McGwire record, for example, could be tarnished because some people think it is wrong that he takes testosterone-producing pills.
...
In past years, some of the game’s best players were said to have played their careers on amphetamines. So no bluenose asterisk, please, for a McGwire home run record.
That was in reference to the buzz created by an Associated Press writer, Steve Wilstein, who wrote a story about McGwire’s use of androstenedione. The supplement was openly displayed in McGwire’s locker, even though it was a substance that was banned by the International Olympic Committee, and the column riled up the baseball world. Just not in the way that you might remember.
From Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe:
No wonder ballplayers loathe the media. Mark McGwire is stalking one of baseball’s most cherished records — until now the feel-good story of the baseball summer — and suddenly he’s engaged in a tabloid-driven controversy that’s painting him as a cheater and a bad role model.
It’s unfair.
Shaughnessy would actually use the word “steroid” to describe andro later in the column, though he would take the effort to point out it wasn’t exactly an anabolic steroid.
Steve Bisheff of the Orange County Register was just as direct:
Roger Maris’ home run record, should McGwire break it, will not be tainted. McGwire is doing nothing wrong. He isn’t breaking any rules. He isn’t even stretching them.
In every paper, there was a hot take. The Sporting News published an editorial that started with this paragraph:
If Mark McGwire’s use of androstenedione isn’t much ado about nothing, then certainly it is much ado about little.
And it ended with this one:
Were we not trying to find a story that, in this case, just wasn’t there?
That’s not to say there weren’t dissenters. Wallace Matthews of the New York Post ended his anti-steroid column with this inspiring spicy take:
As the most famous ballplayer of his era, McGwire has the power to educate those people, if not stop them. Many of those people are children. He owes them the truth. Anything less would be the thing McGwire hates most in the world.
Child abuse.
But those sentiments were very much in the minority. The majority was very, very clear in their belief that dingers were more interesting than supplements.
Really, what are supplements? Just some stuff that you use in your fitness routine, surely. They were no different than Rocky downing a raw egg and running up the courthouse steps. Sure, the supplements might have had potential side effects, but raw eggs can give you salmonella. You can get a heart attack from running up steps. It’s not like you want the government to protect you from eggs or steps.
That wasn’t the official position of the federal government, but it was close. Supplements were considered more of a food-like substance at the time, thanks to Orrin Hatch and a whole lot of industry lobbying. The world is trying to kill all of us and it will eventually succeed, so, in the meantime, there’s no shame in getting stronger through science. Please buy some science and ingest it; it’s probably fine.
As long as andro wasn’t steroids, the columnists posited, it was acceptable. Even as scientists gave quotes like, “The body recognizes that (androstenedione) is a steroid hormone and converts it,” to the Chicago Tribune (Aug. 26, 1998), the vast majority of writers were more than OK with with the supplements. They weren’t steroids. They were legal, after all. There’s no way that something legal could be harmful.
McGwire was captivating the world, and he was openly taking a substance that built muscle mass. The side effects of this substance weren’t understood very well, nobody cared, and most people were mad at the writer who made us think about it.
(Don’t worry about Sosa, though. In that original Wilstein article, it was made clear that Sosa was big on ginseng, not andro. The correct answer was “ginseng”.)
In this context, in this environment, why would a baseball player make a distinction between the pills the Olympics had banned and the steroids the Olympics had banned? Why would a baseball player change anything he was doing? Nobody cared, and most people were mad at the writer who made us think about it, so why wouldn’t these guys take the help that gets you on the cover of the danged TV Guide?
Ten years later, both players were villains who were out of baseball. Twenty years later, they’re a cautionary tale at the fringes of baseball’s sanitized history. The Cubs like to pretend Sosa doesn’t exist.
Back then, nobody made a cogent argument about what were steroids and what weren’t, and what was OK. Since then, we’ve had plenty of surface-level pearl clutching — a Wilstein op-ed titled “Ban McGwire from baseball” is a perfect representation of the genre — but they all relied on platitudes about why all PEDs are bad. You don’t know the exact lyrics, but you can hum along: Cheating;sanctity of the game;what about the kids?;not what this sport is about. I love it when they play the hits.
For years, I’ve struggled with the phrase “begs the question” and its correct usage. I knew that it didn’t just mean “raises a question,” but I didn’t really understand the correct way to use the phrase, so I’ve mostly avoided using it. Didn’t want to look silly.
Except I understand it now. It took the default arguments about performance-enhancing drugs to get it.
They’re cheating.
Why?
It’s an unfair advantage.
Why?
You’re begging the question when you declare PEDs to be cheating and move on. Why would that be cheating?
It’s not natural.
It’s not natural for a human being to ingest substantially more calories than they need for the purposes of bulking up. Forcing 8,000 calories into your system every day to build muscle mass isn’t good for you.
Why is it cheating to ingest a substance that helps you build muscle? Sure, there might be side effects, but that’s the problem of the guy taking it, not mine.
See, I’m getting it! Just begging the question all over the place. But the larger point is that saying something is illegal doesn’t tell us why that would be considered cheating.
Because, idiot, it’s an issue of workplace ethics. A player shouldn’t have to risk his health to compete with a peer who is willing to risk his health for an unnatural advantage. Employees should never have to ingest potentially harmful substances to keep their job.
Oh.
Yeah, that’s the correct answer.
Performance-enhancing drugs that cause harmful side effects should not be allowed in baseball. I agree.
This isn’t because better baseball through chemistry is inherently wrong, though. It’s because it’s an issue of workplace ethics. A player shouldn’t have to risk his health to compete with a peer who is willing to risk his health. Employees should never have to ingest potentially harmful substances to keep their jobs or advance in their careers.
This wasn’t the conversation people were having back in 1998, though. Heck, it’s not the conversation people are having today.
The goal of this article isn’t to convince you that steroids are cool and fun, it’s to put the context back in the 1998 home run chase. Back then, everyone just assumed that the big dudes were big because of whatever, and it was mostly fine. Almost no one discussing the topic would have been able to make a logical argument of why andro was inherently more ethical than anabolic steroids, because that would have been an extremely difficult argument to make. Everyone knew that it wasn’t exactly push-ups that made the 34-year-old McGwire look like a creature from the deep recesses of an unfriendly Earth. Nobody cared, and most people were mad at the writer who made us think about it.
I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth repeating: In 1999, I went to spring training with a buddy. Before a game started, Barry Bonds sauntered by us, and he looked like a comic book character. Specifically, one drawn by Rob Liefeld. It was noticeable, unavoidable, and entirely amusing. My friend turned to me and said, “Looks like somebody wants that McGwire-Sosa attention.” Because we both knew. And we didn’t care.
It was reasonable for Bonds in 1999 to think that nobody cared. Just like it was reasonable for McGwire and Sosa to think that nobody cared. The feeling of nobody-cares was strong enough for McGwire to keep a bottle of androstenedione on display in his locker. Sure, it raised testosterone levels, and the long-term effects were unknown (and extremely undesirable, as it turns out), but that was fine.
By the mid-1990s, creatine was as ubiquitous in major league clubhouses as tobacco. Several teams, including the Oakland A’s and St. Louis Cardinals, purchased creatine for their players. During the leary days of the Arizona Diamondbacks, an expansion team launched in 1998, the team supplied creatine and protein powder to its players.
Creatine is still legal, and it’s still allowed in baseball. But according to the Mayo Clinic, using it might come with a cost:
Muscle cramping
Nausea
Diarrhea
Dizziness
Gastrointestinal pain
Dehydration
Weight gain
Water retention
Heat intolerance
Fever
This brings us back to the original question of why performance-enhancing drugs aren’t cool. It’s because individuals have the right to compete and succeed without risking gastrointestinal pain and diarrhea.
This isn’t to imply that creatine is perfectly analogous to anabolic steroids. It’s just to point out that the culture of baseball suggested that a few side effects were fine if you wanted to get stronger. And once you get there, the leap from the side effects of creatine to the poorly understood side effects of steroids wasn’t a large one, especially considering that the steroid side effects were often long-term concerns that were hard to notice at first. It also reinforced the idea that if a player wasn’t taking the stuff, it was his loss.
It wasn’t just that teams didn’t care about players sucking up creatine and andro. Former A’s manager Tony La Russa was absolutely, 100 percent clear that Jose Canseco was taking anabolic steroids. From Bryant, again:
La Russa knew Canseco was using steroids because Canseco had told him so.
The manager didn’t go to the general manager, who would have been obligated to go to the commissioner. The manager did nothing.
[whoops how did that get in there, ha ha, must be a bug with the CMS, one minute ...]
There’s no way that La Russa was the only manager who was aware of what his players were taking. Consider this USA Today feature from 1997 on Padres third baseman Ken Caminiti:
Ken Caminiti calls it his goody bag.
Oh, boy.
Caminiti unzips the bag and reveals bottles and zip-locked bags of pills, vitamins and nutritional supplements. He opens one packet and shoves a handful of capsules into his mouth viking-style, all but swallowing the plastic.
The nobody-cares were strong enough to make Caminiti open up to a national reporter. No, the article didn’t suggest that Caminiti was also taking steroids (he was, keep reading), but considering what was completely out in the open, it isn’t a stretch to assume there was more just beneath the surface, and that it wasn’t the most guarded secret in the clubhouse.
It’s at this point that I’m realizing that my “nobody cares” thesis has a flaw: Baseball cared. Baseball loved it.
In the post-strike rubble, baseball was desperate. A national television deal with CBS ended up being a disaster, and attendance was down. If you think the baseball-is-dying chatter is strong now, you can’t imagine how loud it was after the strike. The sport made it through the miserable ‘70s, a decade filled with unimaginably low crowds, and rebounded in the next decade with the help of the baseball card boom and stars like Dwight Gooden, Don Mattingly, and Rickey Henderson. There were still problems with the sport, but the trend was a promising one.
Until 1994 and the strike, that is. Baseball needed a way to manufacture interest, and they needed it fast. Big, muscly dudes hitting taters would do the trick.
If you think Tony La Russa could be well aware that these big, muscly dudes were using anabolic steroids, but the league didn’t know, you’re very trusting.
If you think that the league would have shut down all of the shenanigans if they did know, you’re very new to all of this. Baseball, life, capitalism, all of it.
The suits loved it. They certainly weren’t having conversations about the ethics of it all, especially when the real ethical victims were the players on the fringes of a 25-man roster who decided not to take PEDs. Those were the people who lost out on life-changing money and pensions. When good players like McGwire and Sosa took PEDs, they became great, sure, but they weren’t forcing people out of a job. They were just giving the public more of what they wanted. Which was dingers.
Incredibly impressive dingers.
Taters that made people gasp and send electronic mail to their friends.
Home runs that made people watch and attend.
Home runs that made people buy stuff like this:
Imagine a button, a big, red button, sitting in the middle of a conference table in 1998. Around the table are 30 chairs, each occupied by the controlling owner of a Major League Baseball team. You announce that by hitting the red button, steroids are out of baseball forever. Push it, and they were never even there. The decision would affect the home run chase, sure. Might even dampen the spirits of the fans. We wouldn’t really know what would happen. But there would be no more steroids. All it would take is one of them to hit the button.
No one would hit the button. Twenty years later, the button would still be there, untouched, with every team in baseball scared to see what would have happened if steroids were retroactively eliminated. Baseball might not have died after the strike, but without the home run chase, it wouldn’t have become the media monolith that it currently is.
The button will remain undisturbed until the end of time.
What changed, then? How did we go from a culture of willful ignorance and blissful acceptance to the idea that PEDs were a threat to a national institution?
It starts with Sosa and McGwire themselves. The chase was so thrilling because of the shared belief that we would never see anything like it again. Then the next season Sosa hit 63 homers, and McGwire hit 65. It wasn’t an unexciting chase, but there was definitely a sense that something was very different. In the season that Bonds broke McGwire’s record, Sosa hit 64 home runs. Award yourself a gold star if you remember that, because I sure didn’t. Sosa had three seasons with 60 homers or more, and he led the league in none of them. America was experiencing dinger fatigue.
Then there’s Bonds, who wasn’t beloved before the PEDs and was reviled afterward. He broke McGwire’s record just three years later, and while it was absolutely thrilling to watch, there was a sense that someone else would break the record three years after that, and three years after that, and three years after that.
This was how baseball was now, and it was a version of the game that was a photocopy of a photocopy several hundred times over, until it was completely unrecognizable.
Another tipping point was Tom Verducci’s cover story for Sports Illustrated in 2002. It moved the conversation from, “Yeah, they’re probably juicing” to, “Oh, yeah, they’re definitely juicing.” Ken Caminiti didn’t just admit to steroid use; he was unrepentantly proud of it. If there was a stool of plausible deniability, the last leg was ripped out from under it.
My favorite passage:
One former pitcher in the Detroit system even says, “Two coaches approached me and suggested I do steroids.”
That was the culture of baseball back then, but after McGwire and Sosa and Bonds, after the BALCO investigation and the Mitchell Report, fans snapped. Writers snapped. There was pushback. Nobody cares became everybody cares. Baseball was a sport with a numbers fetish, and suddenly the numbers looked skeezy, which made the whole sport look cheap.
This doesn’t change just how special 1998 was, how it felt, how it made this beautiful hellworld just a little more beautiful at the time. Because at the time, it felt pretty damned good. In the era of nobody-cares, McGwire and Sosa didn’t think they were gambling with their legacies. They didn’t think they were rolling dice, with a chance that NO COOPERSTOWN would show up after an unlucky roll. They were exploring the limits of an era in which teams bought jugs and jugs of supplements for their players. There were no rules, no testing, no stigmas. There was just a belief that chemical dingers were desirable now, and it wasn’t incorrect.
There were certainly no discussions about the ethics of it all, with an exploration of who was really harmed.
As to how to deal with all of this information, I dunno. That’s up to you. You can consider Roger Maris to still be the home run king, unless you penalize him for playing in an expansion season with a longer schedule. Consider J.D. Martinez to be the real home run champ if you want, I don’t care. You get to decide what’s the most impressive accomplishment.
Just don’t consider Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to be villains. Don’t consider them stains on baseball’s history. Don’t be the kid on the courthouse steps begging them to “Say it ain’t so.” They were products of a different, more lenient time. McGwire was literally Time Magazine’s “Hero of the Year”after admitting he was using a substance with unknown side effects to get stronger. You can understand how the person in that position keeps forging that same path ahead, right?
One of these days, there won’t be as many side effects. Getting stronger and recovering faster will have the same cost as, say, taking a couple of ibuprofen. Oh, there will be discussions. It will be messy, and baseball will screw it up at first. Don’t we want to see the best players on the field every day? Doesn’t it suck when players get hurt so often? Wouldn’t it be a delight to see players recover quickly, even late into the season?
Probably. Until then, we’re in this weird purgatory, between the traditional and the chemical, and we’re not sure what to make of the latter. Just know that it’s far, far too reductive to look back at McGwire and Sosa with disgust. At the time, they were the absolute best. They were transcendent. History has judged them, and I’m not sure if that’s entirely fair.
Performing-enhancing drugs probably weren’t a good idea, even if baseball was better off because of them. Try twisting that sentence around in your head for a while. It’s a messy one, and it’s entirely true. McGwire and Sosa saved baseball, and if you argued 20 years ago that they were trying to ruin it, you would have been mocked ruthlessly.
Look at the record-setting numbers with skepticism, but don’t look at them with disdain. It was a different culture in 1998, and two superstars decided to blaze their own trail. Dingers saved baseball. Dingers are the reason you’re here right now. Everybody loves dingers, even if nobody wanted to see how the dinger sausage was made back then. McGwire and Sosa were just giving the fans what they wanted, doing what the owners were thrilled to have them doing, building the sport up for decades to come.
That doesn’t make it right. But I’m not sure it was wrong, either. Everything seems simpler with the benefit of hindsight, but nothing was simpler than how it seemed at the time. People were excited about baseball like they never were before or since. Don’t you see? People were excited about baseball.
My guess is if baseball could inject the spinal fluid from kittens directly into human brains to get people excited about baseball like that again, they would. The writers would write, write, write, getting swept up in the excitement, and they would absolutely love it as much as the fans. When somebody spoke up about the kittens, there would be a week of hot takes and a final conclusion, but the buzz and excitement would rule until further notice.
Nobody would care. Until, one day, without warning, they would. It wouldn’t make it right, but it would be entirely understandable. You would have had to been there.
First, let’s get into some internal business. As of today, I’ve decided to change the name of this weekly column from “Grant Land” to “This Week in Dumb, Beautiful Baseball.” It was important to me to make sure the new name was also legally precarious, and I believe it is keeping that same spirit. However, the old name meant absolutely nothing to the uninitiated, and its primary appeal was that it was mildly amusing for exactly one day. [Editor’s Note: I laughed every week TBH.]
The new name at least gives you an idea of what to expect. And what you should expect is a whole bunch of dumb, beautiful baseball. Because, if we’re being honest, this sport is just so dumb and beautiful. They should have sent a poet and/or prop comic.
Luckily, I fancy myself a little bit of both. And we begin today with an appeal to ...
Let us study this baseball thing
The Orioles are not having a good season. Did you hear about this? Feels like something you should read about. You might think that a team like the 2018 Orioles is exactly whom you want your favorite team to play against.
Except that’s not always true. Let’s theorem this up:
The Playing a Historically Lousy Team Theorem
The amount of enjoyment received by watching your team beat up a historically awful team is inversely proportional to the amount of shame received by watching your team get beat up by a historically awful team.
The Marinerswere having a good season. Then someone opened the box that read, “WARNING: MARINERS. DO NOT OPEN.” and now there’s Mariners all over the place. It’s not entirely fair to pick on them, considering that they would be two games behind the Indians in the AL Central and leading the NL East or NL Central, but we’ve never worried about being entirely fair. The point is that they’re making interest payments on all of the unfortunate baseball they somehow avoided in the first part of the season.
And I can’t stop watching this play:
The Orioles really tried to screw up. I promise you. Jonathan Villar decided to test Denard Span’s arm — a very reasonable decision, mind you — and got caught in a TOOTBLAN situation. Fair enough. Just another humiliating play for the ol’ O’s.
Except Villar had a cosmic karma chip to cash in. For he was the victim of the Butt Slide.
I’ve watched the GIF of Shaq dunking on some dude and crotch-forcing him down to the ground about six thousand times. The Butt Slide will always be more humiliating to me. At what point did Villar realize he was heading for a butt? Doesn’t matter. Couldn’t stop his slide.
Anyway, the point is that as soon as that happened, Villar got one Turn My Base Running Into Another Person’s Humiliation card. He should have gotten four of them, but he definitely got at least one. He exchanged it for this play.
In retrospect, Dee Gordon should have ran down Villar, who is fast, but not faster than Gordon, especially after changing directions. There were two outs. Tagging Villar would have ended the inning.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. And at some point before or after this, Gordon got into a clubhouse fight with a teammate. Well, let’s cheer up by looking at a graph of the Mariners’ postseason odds by game:
It’s like a big ol’ pimple, but at least they’ll always have that swollen, infected peak. And they’ll always have the ignominy of beating the Orioles at their own game, which is beating themselves.
That is, there’s nothing better than beating a team at beating themselves, except for everything better, which is most things.
(I’ve spent more time looking at the Butt Slide in the last half-hour, if we’re being honest, but I still have no idea how Villar avoided that tag, and it will give me hope in every rundown for the next thirty years.)
A brief ranking of incredibly awesome and violent backswings
If you say “Butt Slide” into the mirror three times, Brandon Phillips appears. People forget this. As such, here’s a collection of incredibly awesome, violent backswings on well-hit baseballs, with one of them including Brandon Phillips.
Aesthetically, it’s the prettiest of the entries because of how far the ball went. But the fall didn’t have anything to do with how hard he hit the ball or how hard he swung. It was a cleat catching. It wasn’t a consequence of how hard he tried to hit the ball; it was a consequence of his feet getting tangled up.
That doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful. It just means that it’s not the best example of a violent backswing.
2. Bo Bichette
New Hampshire takes a 3-0 lead in the sixth! Bo Bichette rips a ground rule double to left, and Cavan Biggio follows with a two-run double later in the inning.
Bo Bichette’s backswing might be the absolute best I’ve ever seen. The only explanation I have is that the runner on second base knew that a breaking ball was coming, and he signaled as much to Bichette, who was absolutely salivating at the thought of a breaking ball thrown by a pitcher thinking, “Heh. He’ll never expect the ol’ 1-0 breaking ball.”
But it wasn’t a home run. So it cannot win. I’m terribly sorry.
1. Brandon Phillips, who is apparently on the Red Sox now
It’s not a violent backswing, per se, but the backswing definitely takes Phillips into the decision to lean back and appreciate just how much he clobbered the snot out of the baseball. When you play 17 years in the majors and then spend a couple months in Triple-A proving you still belong in the majors, this is the appropriate reaction to hitting a ball that hard.
Putting your head down and acting like it’s no big deal? Now that’s cocky. Realizing that entropy rules us all and absolutely digging the feeling of clobbering a baseball? That’s just being human. As such, we would like to award Brandon Phillips the Adrian Beltré Achievement Award for Comical Backswings.
May it not be your last.
A very related baseball picture of the week
Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Here is a picture of a normal home run. It has won the contest of “Baseball Picture of the Week” because it is completely normal.
Excuse for a Simpsons reference
These are the cleats that Bryce Harper wore on September 5 in honor of Roberto Clemente Day:
Photo by Patrick McDermott/Getty Images
There are few players who transcend team boundaries like Clemente, where it’s not only possible for someone on another team to celebrate him, but it’s completely indefensible to argue againstHarper’s right to wear them. It’s Roberto Clemente Day, and heck yes, anyone who wants to celebrate one of baseball’s greatest talents and humanitarians should be able to.
And yet ...
If Harper were playing the Pirates instead of the Cardinals, there’s a small part of me that would have wanted the Pirates to throw at Harper for breaking an unwritten rule. Something like this:
Is that petty? Oh, yeah. Is this a stretch of a Simpsons reference? Darn straight.
At the same time, it’s all that I could think about, and I’m very, very sad that Harper didn’t play against the Pirates just to make the parallels more applicable.
Javier Baez is electric, even when he’s doing absolutely nothing
I’m not entirely sure that I’ve seen a pitcher make a pickoff throw to a base when the runner had not taken a step off. I’ve seen runners who were exactly one step away from the base, sure, but never one where the runner is standing on first, staring at Jhoulys Chacin like he’s an idiot.
Certainly never two in a row.
Except the color announcer makes a good point. There is still utility to throwing the ball when a runner might be just about to take a single step off the bag. The last thing the runner is expecting would be a pickoff move, and maybe his head is down. Does that make it worth the risk of throwing it down the line and letting him scamper to third? Probably not, but I would very much enjoy the spectacle of a runner getting thrown out when he’s a step off the bag.
What I’m trying to say is that it might be smart to make a pickoff attempt when Jhoulys expect it.
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Trevor Williams should have been a hero, but he did a whole bunch of stuff wrong
What a great bare-handed play! Surely there could be no killjoy to find fault with this pure baseball moment.
Oh, damn straight there could. And I’m that killjoy. Here are three things Trevor Williams did to ruin his excellent play while on the air:
3. Dabbed My nine-year-old stopped dabbing several months ago. Dabbing with irony is fun now, sure, but at some point there won’t be enough irony in the world to save a dab. We’re close to that tipping point right now, I think.
2. Threw the ball into the safety netting behind the dugout This seems like an honest mistake from someone who played for two decades without dedicated safety netting behind the dugout. On the other hand, it makes Williams look extraordinarily incompetent, like he’s a clumsy French waiter.
Unless he was trolling, which would have been beautiful.
1. Referred to “runs” as “points” I’m extremely mad online about this. That was a professional major leaguer, in the middle of a breakout season, calling “runs” “points”. This is worse than Shoeless Joe and Pete Rose put together. You win a baseball game with runs. You win a weather balloon with points.
I’ll concede that it’s pretty cool to barehand a chopper while doing an in-game interview. It might be the only cool thing that’s possible with an in-game interview, and anything cooler is just a variant on the theme (e.g. catching a ball in your mouth like Snoopy.) Still, I’m going to have to give a C-minus to this whole experience.
“Points.”
Man.
What Shohei Did
Won Player of the Week after being told he needs Tommy John surgery? Seems like that’s going to be a harder record to break than Cal Ripken’s consecutive-games streak, and I really, really wish that I could mail an envelope back in time that reads “There’s a player who wins AL Player of the Week after being told he needs Tommy John surgery,” just to experience the mental gymnastics I would go through trying to resolve the paradox.
Turns out the answer is a big, tall dinger lad who doesn’t need elbow ligaments to hit baseballs far.
Not sure why he’s wearing that elbow pad. You’d think there’s at least a small chance that a HBP could knock the elbow ligament back in place.
[touches earpiece]
Ah, I’m getting word from the booth that’s not how the human body works, but we’ll just have to agree to disagree. At any rate, it’s kind of fun that Ohtani is walloping dingers, even though there’s a small part of me that wants him to get the surgery over with so that we can get our once-in-a-century double threat back.
Maybe there’s a medium part of me that wants that.
Possibly a Dan Vogelbach-sized part of me.
The dingers are fun, though.
This Week In McGwire/Sosa
This week in McGwire/Sosa? Are you kidding me? What a week in McGwire/Sosa. It was an entire week, after all.
First, read my piece on how we’re all misremembering the Home Run Chase, and how it’s easier to damn McGwire/Sosa with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, what they did was entirely reasonable.
Finally, watch this video about the pitchers who didn’t allow homers to either McGwire or Sosa, and then immediately race to the comments and complain about me not being Jon Bois:
It was a literal McGwire-Sosa week last week, that’s your week in McGwire-Sosa, dammit.
But I suppose you want your statistical update.
McGwire 18 AB this week 445 AB for the season
5 HR this week 60 HR for the season
.333/.455/1.167 this week .294/.471/.742 for the season
Sosa 23 AB this week 563 AB for the season
3 HR this week 58 for the season
.348/.348/.739 this week .314/.379/.657 for the season
It’s beautiful.
We’ve touched on it a little bit, but it’s worth isolating: Not only were these two monsters hitting dingers because of better living through chemistry, but they were able to sit on pitches over the middle of the plate and cover the outside edge better than almost any hitters in history.
That’s because just about every pitcher who faced them was thinking, “I’m not going to be the asshole that breaks his wrist and ends this chase.”
In August, Mark Clark faced McGwire several times. You might not remember Mark Clark, who was a serviceable pitcher for years. If he were the pitcher who broke Mark McGwire’s wrist with an inside fastball, though, he would have been “Mark Clark, the Asshole Who Broke America’s Heart” for the rest of his life. Better just to stretch the strike zone outside and see if the umpire will call it.
I don’t have data on this, but it feels true. It sure would explain why week after week, these guys keep raking.
Spoonerism of the week
Now, hold on. I’m not putting this because the spoonerism sounds like “pee on.” Instead, it’s an earnest appeal to the old-timey nickname and a study of missed chances. We all know about those nick names — “Vinegar Bend” Mizell, “Schoolboy” Rowe, “Walter” Johnson — and how fantastic they were, but I really think there was a missed chance with Peon. Kid comes up from the sticks, clearly from a family that didn’t have a ton of money, and he’s Peon Dagwood or Peon Jenkins. It would have been the kind of nickname that would have almost seemed like a proper first name after a while, and like “Albert Pujols,” you would stop thinking about how it sounded a little dirty.
There should have been a Peon in baseball, dang it.
Note that we’re inching ever closer to Matt Capps with every installment, so take what you can get. You’ve had fair warning.
How much is too much when we’re talking about bat flips? Starlin Rodriguez and the Barrie Baycats have given us a beautiful test case.
Oh, you like bat flips? Name their first three albums.
Yeah, I didn’t think so. You’re kind of a poser. You saw Jose Bautista’s bat flip on TRL, so you got a bat-flip shirt at Hot Topic, and now all you talk about with your friends is bat flips, like you’ve been doing it for years.
Well, you haven’t. And I’m here to tell you that bat flips aren’t cool anymore. They’re mainstream. They’re boring. And you’ll never catch me writing about the unwritten rules of a bat flip again. It would have to take an all-time bat flip in order to ...
Now that is a bat flip. But just calling it a bat flip does it a disservice. It’s one of the bigger bat flips we’ve seen, sure, but it’s almost definitely one of the greatest staredowns, too. Don’t sleep on the trot around the bases, which took about the same amount of time as a nonstop flight from JFK to Brussels. It’s all extremely petty and funny, and our job today is to see how egregiously this violates the unwritten rules.
Part 1 - The Bat Flip
It is impressive in height ...
... and it is impressive in distance.
If this were the only offense, it wouldn’t merit an entire investigation. This might have a little more distance than the Bautista bat flip, but it’s in the same general genre. It would get an 8 on a 1-to-10 scale, where a “1” is running around the bases like your dad, the Great Santini, is in the stands, ready to berate you in public, and a “10” is doing a hammer throw with four rotations that reaches the opposing team’s bullpen. Which someone should definitely do.
It was about as demonstrative as bat flips get, but it’s not something that should make the catcher tackle him before he steps on home plate.
Ah, but it wasn’t the bat flip that got me.
Part 2 — The staredown
Alright, so the official context here is that this homer gave the Barrie Baycats the lead in the Intercounty Baseball League championship. We all spent time in our backyard as a kid, pretending to hit the home run that wins the Jack and Lynne Dominico Cup (I was a Kitchener Panthers fan growing up, myself). Just running around the bases, making that fake crowd noise that kids make from the back of their throat, screaming, “He’s won the Jack and Lynne Dominico Cup! He’s won the Jack and Lynne Dominico Cup!” over and over again.
So you can understand the excitement.
But there has to be unofficial context, too. There absolutely has to be.
Starlin Rodriguez isn’t doing this because he’s happy. He’s doing this because something happened earlier in the game. It doesn’t matter if it’s a brushback pitch or a chirping pitcher; something happened. I have no proof of this, but I know it in my bones to be true. I’m ... I’m scared to Google it because I’m scared there’s going to be a quote that reads, “Nah, they’re cool. I was just excited,” which would ruin my whole premise, so I’m instead going to immediately pivot to one of my favorite unwritten-rule GIFs:
That’s Alfredo Despaigne, and it’s perfect. But I think Rodriguez has him beat. There’s a cool four seconds before he even makes a move toward first. That’s a cool 9 on the scale, and I’m pretty sure a 10 would mean that he’s still there right now, getting arrested by the sheriff’s office, so a 9 will have to do.
But that’s not even the most egregious part, somehow.
Part 3 - The trot
This home run trot is so petty. It’s absolutely inspirational. Rodriguez is running like he’s pulling the entire Molina family on a sled through a snowdrift, and I’m not even sure if it’s technically running. In competitive walking, the line between walking and running is both feet being in the air at the same time, and I’m not sure if that ever happens here. This is probably walking.
This is another 9, if only because the standards for a 10 are almost impossible to reach.
So this is an 8.66, which is a tremendous score, and Rodriguez should be proud.
But there’s another question: Should we celebrate this? I know we like to have fun on the internet and pretend like every bat flip is like the rowdy members of Chug-A-Lug House sticking it to the crusty old dean, but there is definitely a line that can be crossed. Would we laugh at someone scooting his butt on the ground the whole way around the bases, like an itchy labrador retriever? Probably, but we could also admit that it’s disrespectful in a way that makes a plurality of human beings uncomfortable.
If you don’t want to go reductio ad absurdum, you can ask yourself how long could a batter stand and watch before even you said, “OK, buddy. Let’s go”? Ten seconds? What about 15? What about a staredown that takes so long, the umpire throws the batter out of the game? We’re getting into the continuum fallacy, which goes something like this: You can lift a bag containing one grain of sand, so surely you can hold a bag with one more grain. And one more grain. And one more grain. Taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests you will be able to lift a ton of sand.
Which is absurd. At some point, one extra grain of sand is too much for you to lift. It sounds absurd, but it has to be true. And at some point, one split-second, one .001 mph slower on the trot, one extra inch on the bat flip is too much, even for you, cool and enlightened internet person.
This bat flip-staredown-trot combination is close. I want to love it, but we’re really staring into the abyss, here. This is probably Not Cool, even if you feel like a cop for thinking that way.
It’s sure fun to study and enjoy from here, though. It will be less fun when Rodriguez gets a baseball thrown at his butt, but so are the strange customs of the weirdos who play this sport. Until then, we’ll take all of the unwritten majesty you have to offer.
This Week in Dumb, Beautiful Baseball appreciates the hustle of Tyler Austin, but the what-ifs make us uncomfortable
There’s less than two weeks left in the regular season, and there are still so many questions. Will the Rockies win their first NL West title in team history? Will the Dodgers go from Game 7 of the World Series to missing the postseason entirely? Who will win the wild cards in the National League? And, uh ...
Three. There are three questions left.
Four if you think the Orioles have a chance to finish 69 games back in the AL East, which, according to Major League Baseball’s bylaws, would give them an automatic berth into the postseason.
Four. There are four questions left.
That means we had better appreciate all the dumb, beautiful baseball we have left. Do you know what happens in a couple weeks? We get mostly beautiful baseball, with a self-selecting bias against dumb baseball. Which is fine. It’s just a little jarring, that’s all.
But for this week, we’re not going to start with dumb baseball. We’re going to start with an appeal to ...
Let us study this baseball thing
I’d wager that at least half of the Twins fans tuning into a game know who Tyler Austin is. That’s just a complete guess, but you would be surprised at how many fans attend or watch a baseball game without knowing the same ins and outs as the nerds on the internet. They might have heard the name Tyler Austin and watched some of his plate appearances, but they can’t really tell you anything about him. It’s even baked into his name, which is almost intentionally dull.
I’d wager that at least half of the people watching this game had almost no interest in the outcome. Sure, it would be better if the home team won, but they’re at the ballpark mostly because that’s a fine way to spend a September afternoon. Whether the Twins or Royals win ... that’s kind of beside the point. There were hot dorgs and beers and sun and good times. Maybe there was a ballpark giveaway, too.
This is all to set up this play and wonder why someone like Austin would risk his life for a pop fly in a game that nobody cares about.
My knee-jerk answer: Because this is awesome, and we need to appreciate it more.
My contrarian, contemplative answer: Maybe we shouldn’t encourage this.
I lean more toward the first one, to be sure. To see someone play one way — and only one way — regardless of what the standings say? That’s inspiring. Truly inspiring.
On the other hand, here’s what Austin was feeling like before that play:
Austin’s back is still stiff. Has been bothering him off and on of late. #mntwins will “go slowly” with him, Molitor said.
And as far as entrants in the Tumbles Over A Dugout Railing genre go, this was 70-grade. This was a pure tumble over a railing, absolute anarchy. Austin had no idea the railing was coming, and, honestly, the speed of his pursuit is probably what allowed him to complete a full flip. A slower approach might have ended up with him on his neck, or something similarly awful.
Do we really want players in meaningless games playing with this kind of reckless abandon? And, if not, what does that say about meaningful games, which really, really don’t mean anything compared to a young man never being able to walk again? I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with Austin’s effort here, even though I’m incredibly appreciative and enamored of that effort now that I know that he’s (mostly) okay.
I’m not saying we have to answer this conundrum, but I’m just saying I’m conflicted, that’s all. I love watching the theater of Austin trying as hard as he can in a game between two dreadful teams, but I also know that I’ll feel guilty when something bad happens.
Mostly, though, I wanted to study this baseball thing because I’m very, very intrigued by the Twins’ assistant trainer.
I think he should go full mustache and be the hero we need him to be. The all-gray/fanny-pack/New Balance combo is already perfect, so he’s almost there. So close.
The unwritten rules of whatever in the hell this umpire is doing
There are conspiracy theories about this play, and they include umpires being mad at Frazier for the ol’ rope-a-dope that he pulled the other week:
The umpire in question, Tom Hallion, is in a little bit of a jackpot. Whatever the reason for an umpire blocking home plate on the winning run — cheeky, ironic, punitive, oblivious — it’s probably a bad reason. Umpires should not insert themselves into a moment like this.
What this section presupposes, though, is maybe they should?
Think about it. Umpires getting involved in the games like they were wrestling refs, inserting themselves in crucial moments, tackling players and tripping them, making sure that the narrative couldn’t move on until they personally approved. I’m not saying this should happen on every play.
Just a couple of them every year.
I mean, obviously, it’s not ideal, but Hallion turned a walk-off celebration between teams that nobody cares about, even in their home markets, into something that we’re discussion right now. And it’s kinda funny? It’s kinda funny! I think Hallion was trying to be kinda funny. I don’t think he was flexing and asserting his superiority.
He was just being kinda funny.
Good gravy, how I can appreciate that.
This probably isn’t something that baseball can codify — making umpires be kinda funny — but it is something we can appreciate. Long live the umpires who can be kinda funny on command, especially when it doesn’t affect the outcome of the game.
More of this, please.
This is a double
It was not supposed to be a double. Then circumstances changed. It was a bunt, and then it became a double.
What a dumb, beautiful game this is.
This is a double
It was not supposed to be a double. Then circumstances changed. It was a single from a pitcher, and then he hustled it into a double when Joc Pederson lollygagged in center field.
What a dumb, beautiful game this is.
This is a double
It was not supposed to be a double. Then circumstances changed. It wasn’t just that Willson Contreras thought he had a home run. It was that he thought he had a home run that was so special, so emasculating, that he had to effect disgust that the pitcher was even on the same field as him.
Javier Baez owns a timeshare in Jhoulys Chacin’s head, and if you’re nice enough, he’ll let you stay there for a week.
It’s nice. Full kitchen and everything.
Baseball picture of the week
The Minnesota Twins did their rookie hazing thing, and it was beautiful.
Photo by Ed Zurga/Getty Images
That is the spiritual heir to Bartolo Colon, Willians Astudillo, being as perfect and magical as he can be, leading a phalanx of man-horsies to victory.
Now, this isn’t just the picture of the week because it’s a player of some import in a silly costume, surrounded by teammates in silly costumes. It’s the picture of the week because of what it represents. Just recently veterans made their rookies dress up like (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ sexy ladies ♥ because it’s funny. You know. Them dressing up like women. Ha ha. Can you imagine? Women!
And when the vocal section of the internet complained about the inherent sexism that went along with making a 22-year-old man dress like a sexy French maid for the purposes of humiliating him, there were TONS of people willing to say things like, “THIS IS THE NANNIFICATION OF THE P**** STATE MOLLYCODDLING JERKS” because they couldn’t contemplate a world where a) people weren’t demeaned and b) it was better for everybody involved.
This new world forces players to be more creative. It’s better for everybody involved.
Did you see that the Giants didn’t make their hazing rookie specific? That a veteran — possibly chagrined by all the sucking — got the entire team to wear dumb sweaters?
Gee, while Madison Bumgarner wearing a FURBY SWEATSHIRT THAT CALLS HIM OUT ON HIS OWN HOTHEADEDNESS is cool, I’d much rather see pictures of Andrew Suarez dressed up as a sexy yoga teacher. Totally.
The old ways are better. Can we just go back to the old ways, everyone?
Ugh, can’t believe we have to settle for Madison Bumgarner dressed like a Furby, here in the future.
What Shohei Did
He sat there and remained unappreciated, that’s what he did.
It’s almost the end of the season, which means this unwieldy sucker is going on hiatus soon. So if we want to look at the spoonerisms of various MVPs in baseball history, now is the time.
We want to look at the spoonerisms of various MVPs in baseball history.
I don’t blame you. They’re dumb as hell.
Larry Barkin
People think he’s funny. A real estate investor who makes a lot of money.
Perry Tendleton
Graduated Kal Pappa Tam from Darnsley with a degree in business management.
Pave Darker
A direct order and full sentence.
Millie Ways
A sweet lass who dreams of the big city but knows her obligations at home will prevent her from realizing those dreams. Until a mysterious stranger comes into town.
Mackey Mintle
It’s just fun to say, and it’s also totally plausible.
There are a lot, from Rimmy Jollins to near-winner Male Durphy. Karmon Hillebrew is something with a 7.8% ABV that tastes like a mossy river rock but you pretend that you like on Untappd. Non Dewcombe is a way to dismiss one of your critics in a nasty Twitter debate. Those non-dewcombe weirdos always seem to miss the point.
However, we’ll have to take one of the hardest spoonerism constructs to work with — the “Mc” name — and turn it into gold.
Friends, I would like to introduce McGillie Wee.
It’s the only possible way to construct that spoonerism, and it’s perfect.
Plus Bartolo Colon has a new tattoo, and umpires won’t stop getting in the way.
The regular season is almost over. Soon, we’ll be in the postseason, which is a strange time when everyone is actually watching the same baseball games. There will be a shared conversation about baseball, and it’s always a jarring and welcome change. My curatorial services won’t be necessary, but the upside is that baseball will be more fun to follow.
Does this mean that if you’re reading this column, that baseball is less fun to follow, by definition?
It would appear so.
Look, man, I’m trying.
But just because the season is winding down, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t dumb, beautiful baseball. Because, friends, there most certainly was some of that. And we begin with the same plea, which is to ...
Let us study this baseball thing
Earlier in the season, I opined that the dropped-third-strike rule was the worst rule in sports. What I found out is that a lot of people out there truly, deeply care about the dropped-third-strike rule. Not only was this surprising to me, but it allowed me to create a watchlist that I plan on turning over to the authorities. You people are freaks, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.
However, I have a nit to pick with the second-worst rule in sports, which is ...
Rule 9.07(g)
The official scorer shall not score a stolen base when a runner advances solely because of the defensive team’s indifference to the runner’s advance. The official scorer shall score such a play as a fielder’s choice.
It’s an ambiguous rule that requires the scorer to determine intent, but that’s not the biggest problem with it. For the most part, it’s pretty easy to calls ‘em as you sees ‘em: When the infielders don’t bother to cover and the catcher doesn’t bother to throw, it’s pretty clearly a case of defensive indifference.
Here’s the thing, though: The defensively indifferent team doesn’t announce when they’re unconcerned with a runner swiping a base.
AY, BRANDON, Y’ALL CAN COME DOWN TO SECOND IF YOU WANT. WE ARE EXTREMELY INDIFFERENT OVER HERE.
The runner has to assume they’re not going to care. Because, in theory, there’s always a chance of humiliation.
It’s dumb and beautiful, and, well, that’s exactly the brand we’re going for here. And it’s proof that there isn’t anything known as “defensive indifference” from the runner’s perspective. The guy who doesn’t want to be thrown out while down by a bunch had better scoot. Which means that if he makes it, he should be credited for a stolen base. Especially if he’s on my fantasy team.
I hate that rule, but not enough to ever write about it again. Feels good to get it off my chest.
But I would like to focus on the baseball part of this baseball play. When Paul Goldschmidt was thrown out, the Diamondbacks were down 5-1 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Stealing second while losing by a bunch is an attempt to capitalize on an extremely specific situation that isn’t likely to happen: a force play in the field where an out at first is impossible, but a play at second is not. So while I get the strategy, when a runner steals second with two outs in the ninth inning, down 5-1, his team’s win expectancy moves from one percent to ... one percent. You had better be damned sure that the other team is indifferent.
My suggestion for the teams with a lead? Stop being so damned indifferent. Try to throw the runner out! Have fun! Throw it with your left arm if you want! The worst that can happen is that the run scores, but it can’t be that important of a run if you were indifferent in the first place.
The point is there’s a significantly higher than non-zero chance of ending the game right then and there. Every subsequent pitch increases the odds of calamity. A rally, an injury ... heck, letting the runner go to second uncontested might even affect the ERA of the pitcher, who could want shinier numbers for his arbitration hearing. Just try to make the baseball play, and maybe you’ll end the stupid game.
The odds are higher of ending the game than they are for the base stealer to help his team win. The only argument for it is that you want the pitcher to focus on the hitter and not get distracted, but I find that to be weak logic. Major league pitchers should know how to chew gum and walk at the same time, and they’ll be the first to tell you that.
Death to defensive indifference as a scoring decision.
Think about it. Umpires getting involved in the games like they were wrestling refs, inserting themselves in crucial moments, tackling players and tripping them, making sure that the narrative couldn’t move on until they personally approved. I’m not saying this should happen on every play.
Just a couple of them every year.
Literally seven hours later:
So the tying run in a game that will decide first place just scored on this "error" by Nolan Arenado... because Lance Barrett was in a place I've never ever seen an umpire in before. pic.twitter.com/h9z5Ootpee
I have definitely been on the radio or TV while absent-mindedly scrolling through Twitter and chuckling to myself when David Roth uses words like “torpid pile of soggy Mallomars” to describe an awful person, then realizing that “AHHHH I’M LIVE, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, I’M BACK, I’M PAYING ATTENTION,” so I’m no angel when it comes to doing my job.
Except Lance Barrett doesn’t have the built-in excuse of having a computer in front of him. He’s just sorta ... in the middle of everything, thinking about Handmaid’s Tale. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The rarity makes you appreciate how good umpires usually are at not doing this. If, one day, you find yourself watching a meaningless soccer, hockey, or football game, I suggest you watch the choreography of the referees. It is absolutely balletic, and it takes the fast-moving sports to appreciate it fully. Umpires have to figure out the choreography, too, but it’s a lot more subtle.
Anyway, to the larger point, I’m very pleased that umpires might be listening to me, but I’ll need a sign to make sure. If there’s a working umpire who wants to secretly let me know that they’re on board with my suggestion, please call a balk with nobody on base. It will seem weird to everyone there, but they’d all forget it after a few minutes.
I would know, though. And I would appreciate the confirmation.
Bartolo Colon is 45, and he got a badass new tattoo of St. Michael smiting a demon with the scales of justice, so I’ve decided that I’m not too washed to get one of Charlie Brown losing his socks on a line drive up the middle
I don’t have anything to add to the header, except a call for your love and support in this decision.
Baseball picture of the week
I try not to repeat the themes for this section. It’s not like I’ll ignore a beautiful picture of someone robbing a home run just because I lauded one earlier, but the bar will move higher for the next one.
This comes up now because I want you to know that I’m paying attention to this stuff. And believe me when I tell you that catchers who react to a home run like Ralph Wiggum getting rejected by Lisa on live TV is a sorely neglected genre.
David Richard-USA TODAY Sports
You don’t need to know where the baseball is. It is far, far away. A picture that can give you that much information about something that’s out of frame is, by definition, a quality picture.
I mean, I guess Kevan Smith might have been about to throw up and Jason Kipnis might have been looking as the grounds crew was chasing a raccoon out in right field, so it’s not proof that there is an ex-baseball about 450 feet away. But you have a good idea.
The only thing wrong with this picture is that I might like this one better:
This is such a fantastic photo. Ump taking off the mask. Catcher hunched in defeat. Crowd going crazy. Kipnis soaking in the moment.
The ump and the crowd are nice touches, and I go back and forth. Kipnis’ home run was a walk-off grand slam, so the extra context is pretty cool. But if pressed, I’m going for the isolated catcher and batter. Here is the face of victory; here is the face of defeat. Here is success; here is failure.
My contract stipulates that I add this GIF to any section that deals with the disappointment of a catcher.
I am so, so sorry, Reds fans. Just know that it’s my contract that’s to blame, not me. I wouldn’t just keep bringing something up that’s six years old, just to lay it on thick. This is the last time it will come up, I promise.
Excuse for a Simpsons Reference
What Shohei Did
Went 3-for-19
Did not hit a dinger
Postponed surgery for another week
Sang “Despacito” in front of the whole Angels team
One of the best surprises of the year is just how fun Ohtani is. He just so happens to play for a team that is always reminding us that superstars don’t have to be a gregarious ball of unending mirth and fun. Some of them just play baseball, and that’s fine. That’s the first part of the job description, and it’s probably one of the last, too.
But it’s always more fun to have a player who’s ... more fun. By all accounts, Ohtani is a fun, well-liked teammate who isn’t above surprising us with a serenade or two. It doesn’t hurt that he’s willing to go along with the occasional moment of clubhouse chicanery.
Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports
Now if he could, uh, just get that elbow fixed and let us have nice things, that would be swell. Until then, though, let’s appreciate that Ohtani has a personality, and we haven’t scratched the surface of it.
This week in McGwire/Sosa
McGwire 22 AB this week 487 AB for the season
3 HR this week 65 HR for the season
.364/.500/.864 this week .294/.468/.737 for the season
Sosa 31 AB this week 616 AB for the season
1 HR this week 61 for the season
.129/.156/.258 this week .305/.373/.642 for the season
One thing that’s easy to forget about the chase is that even after the record was broken, there was still a chance that Sosa would re-break it. That moment of delirium — what with McGwire having to go back and touch first base, and all — would have been immediately superseded by another home run, one that didn’t come with weighty anticipation and a predictable release. If Sosa had hit no. 65 before McGwire did, putting him in the lead and giving him the temporary record, there would have been a true sense of excitement, of course.
But it would have been a much different sense of excitement, one that came with more mystery than closure.
Sosa slumped and McGwire stayed as hot as ever, so it was a moot point. But I always wonder what would have happened if they leapfrogged each other for the final two weeks. Would it have been even more fun? Perhaps.
Spoonerism of the week
Last week, we focused on the best MVP spoonerisms. This week, we’re looking at the Cy Youngs, and, yes, I am aware of Catfish Hunter. Through your tweets, and through talks with Human Resources. His name shall not come up.
As you would expect, there are more than a couple solid runners-up. Kandy Soufax had three tracks in the Billboard Top 100, but was unfairly pigeonholed as “club music” and never broke out in the mainstream. D.A. Rickey isn’t going to let these hoodlums get away with their crimes. And I’m forever feeling bad for our dear, dear Rutcliffe, who is quite Sick. I fear he has a touch of dropsy.
However, with apologies to Follie Ringers and Larky Spyle, I’m going to have to go with Paylord Gerry, notorious crime boss. The people who crossed him and came out the other side with fewer fingers? They’re the lucky ones.
He would also spit on people. Like, a lot.
I don’t know why you would mess with Paylord Gerry.
The best Super Bowl commercial of the year was released in September.
I hate giving brands credit. Kingsford Charcoal made a commercial featuring Bartolo Colon, so they wanted to get social media talking about it, and they succeeded. Dammit. It’s absolutely beautiful on multiple levels, and I hate that I’m falling for it.
But, oh, sweet Bartolo, I will always fall for you.
The video thumbnail is of Colon carrying a pig he is going to cook and eat, so you know it’s going to be awesome. I prefer to pretend pork comes from a cave beneath the grocery store and not an animal you can teach to play fetch, so I can’t get too excited about this. But as an image it is powerful. What, you think Colon is grilling turkey sliders when he’s at home? No. Our hero is literally going whole hog. You could probably feed a couple families with the amount of meat you get off that thing.
The belly jiggle is both a) exploitative and b) deeply satisfying, and it’s the emotional center of this film. It shouldn’t define it, though. There’s too much going on to reduce this to a belly jiggle. For example, there is this image, which is definitely something you should put on the desktop of your mind.
Don’t bother putting it in a folder or a subfolder. Straight to the desktop. Maybe next to this one:
Colon licking barbecue sauce off his fingers is an image so pure, we demand the outtakes, for GIFs, votive candles, and maybe a shirt or two.
Damn you, brands. My only recourse is to tell you I have a new pellet grill and love it. Even then, that’s just pushing you to a different brand. The brands will always win.
In this case, though, maybe the brand deserves it.
Please note that if the World Series gets to a Game 7, there’s a non-zero chance I will be in the press box with an apron, a pillow under a red shirt, and a blue hat that reads “RIBS”.
Bless you, Bartolo. May you pitch until you’re 76 years old and even fluffier.
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