This is Alexis Brudnicki’s fifth piece as part of her March residency at FanGraphs. Alexis is the Director of Baseball Information for the Great Lake Canadians, an elite amateur baseball program in London, Ontario, Canada. She has written for various publications including Baseball America, Canadian Baseball Network, Sportsnet, The Hardball Times, and Prep Baseball report. She won a 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She can also be found on Twitter (@baseballexis). She’ll be contributing here this month.

This is also the third installment of a three-part series exploring whether the Australian Baseball League is in the midst of their own juiced ball and bat controversy. In this installment, league officials and the equipment manufacturers respond. You can find Part 1 and Part 2 here.

The Response

Increasingly aware of the way the numbers were adding up throughout the season, the Australian Baseball League’s general manager, Ben Foster, understands the natural inclination for players, fans, and others to draw their own conclusions about what led to the spike in home runs and the offense on a whole.

“One of the great entitlements for sports fans is their right to speculate and to try and figure out why something as unpredictable as sport always surprises us,” Foster said. “As a fan myself, I love to speculate on things like, ‘Will this player or that player have a great year?’ Or, ‘Why did he go to the bullpen in that situation?’ So I do think it is natural for people to speculate about every aspect of the game when they see unexpected results.”

But the league’s GM does not believe that the numbers point to any one thing in particular. Acknowledging that equipment might have been a part of the equation, he does suspect that the standard of baseballs used during the recent season were of superior quality to those used previously.

“I cannot rule out that equipment played a part, too,” Foster said. “But I think it’s an oversimplification of just the baseballs. In conversations I had with players and coaches, many commented on the improved quality of the bats we supplied this season.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alexis Brudnicki’s fourth piece as part of her March residency at FanGraphs. Alexis is the Director of Baseball Information for the Great Lake Canadians, an elite amateur baseball program in London, Ontario, Canada. She has written for various publications including Baseball America, Canadian Baseball Network, Sportsnet, The Hardball Times, and Prep Baseball report. She won a 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She can also be found on Twitter (@baseballexis). She’ll be contributing here this month.

This is also the second installment of a three-part series exploring whether the Australian Baseball League is in the midst of their own juiced-ball and bat controversy. In this installment, the pitchers respond. You can find Part 1 here.

The Pitchers

For some, the conversation started early.

In the opening weekend of the 2017/18 Australian Baseball League season, 111 runs were scored and 30 home runs were hit. In just 11 games. More than half of those home runs were hit at Melbourne Ballpark, home to the Aces, who hosted the Perth Heat for four contests.

“I noticed a difference in the league in Round 1,” said Josh Tols, a current Phillies farmhand and southpaw for the Aces with five seasons in the ABL under his belt. “There was an abnormal number of home runs hit at Altona in our opening series against Perth. Typically, with the wind at our field, the ball doesn’t get out all that much. Just looking at the home-run numbers after Round 1, you kind of had a feeling it was going to be a long year for the pitchers.”

Other hurlers didn’t begin to notice a difference until a little later.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alexis Brudnicki’s third piece as part of her March residency at FanGraphs. Alexis is the Director of Baseball Information for the Great Lake Canadians, an elite amateur baseball program in London, Ontario, Canada. She has written for various publications including Baseball America, Canadian Baseball Network, Sportsnet, The Hardball Times, and Prep Baseball report. She won a 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She can also be found on Twitter (@baseballexis). She’ll be contributing here this month.

Juiced or not juiced?

While the question has become a persistent topic of conversation in Major League Baseball of late, similar rumblings about the state of the baseball have begun to pick up steam across the world.

After the six teams in the Australian Baseball League combined for 171 home runs over 119 total regular-season games during the 2016-2017 season, those same squads hit 379 long balls in the same number of matchups during the most recent winter.

A comparison of the offensive stats of the 2016-17 season to the 2017-18 season highlights the shift:

And the pitching stats diverge similarly:

Power numbers went way up, offensive numbers increased in every statistical category across the league, and pitching stats were abysmal, with more runs scored per game than ever before. It was a significant enough difference to inspire the players and fans to speculate on the causes.

The obvious answer in Australia was that the equipment was different. Though there has been speculation about modifications to the baseballs in MLB, the Aussie league’s transition to a new equipment provider — moving from Rawlings balls and SAM BAT sticks to bats and balls from Brett Sports — removes any need to speculate.

Or does it?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alexis Brudnicki’s second piece as part of her March residency at FanGraphs. Alexis is the Director of Baseball Information for the Great Lake Canadians, an elite amateur baseball program in London, Ontario, Canada. She has written for various publications including Baseball America, Canadian Baseball Network, Sportsnet, The Hardball Times, and Prep Baseball report. She won a 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She can also be found on Twitter (@baseballexis). She’ll be contributing here this month.

This is also the second installment of a two-part series exploring the lives of baseball players after their playing careers are over. You can find Part 1 here.

The Scout and the Coach

Rene Tosoni and Pete Orr shared the World Baseball Classic clubhouse with Chris Leroux, learning of his impending stint on reality television as they were about to embark on new careers of their own.

The games Canada played against Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Team USA were Orr’s swan song. The squad’s starting second baseman finished his playing career the previous season after 16 years. He spent parts of eight of those in the majors with the Braves, Nationals, and Phillies. He stayed in shape for a year after his career came to an end with the aim of helping his country’s squad in Miami.

As for Tosoni, he wasn’t sure where the season might take him after Canada’s run at the Classic came to a quick finish. The outfielder had played the previous season — his 10th in professional baseball — in the independent Atlantic League with the Sugar Land Skeeters and had an offer to return. The former Twins outfielder had just spent the entire offseason looking for a coaching job, reaching out to all 30 affiliated clubs, hearing nothing.

In the midst of their playing careers, neither Tosoni nor Orr had given much thought to life after baseball. Tosoni felt that his focus on the game led him to stay on the field as long as he did, and Orr knew that someday he would have to face his future, but both hoped that day would just never come.

“When I was still playing, I didn’t know what I was going to do after baseball,” Orr said. “It was something I kind of feared. I knew it was coming, but I just wanted to keep playing. Then once family and kids got involved, I started to really think about it, and I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do. It is a little scary, but you take it as another challenge.

“I was fortunate. I had a year after I stopped playing; a full year to kind of let it all sink in that I wasn’t a baseball player anymore, so that helped me. Now that I’m on the other side of it, I know I’m going to miss it for the rest of my life, but I’m okay with that, and I think it’s a good thing that I’m going to miss it. I don’t mind.”

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alexis Brudnicki’s first piece as part of her March residency at FanGraphs. Alexis is the Director of Baseball Information for the Great Lake Canadians, an elite amateur baseball program in London, Ontario, Canada. She has written for various publications including Baseball America, Canadian Baseball Network, Sportsnet, The Hardball Times, and Prep Baseball report. She won a 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She can also be found on Twitter (@baseballexis). She’ll be contributing here this month.

Baseball has a life of its own.

When players are immersed in that life, most often they’re focused on the task at hand, the path ahead, and the game they love. There are some who think beyond the season, or their current contract, and try to make plans for a future without the game. The truth is, though, it can be really hard to think about a life beyond the only one players have ever known.

According to a 10-year-old study from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the average Major League Baseball career lasts 5.6 years, with one in five position players lasting only a single season in the majors. The study also indicated that, at every point of a player’s career, the chance of it ending entirely is at least 11%.

Baseball’s average career length is also the longest among the four major sports, with the average NFL career lasting 3.5 years, an NBA career 4.8 years, and the NHL next-longest at 5.5, according to information obtained by the RAM Financial group a decade ago.

Major League Baseball originally established its College Scholarship Program in the 1960s, and last year made changes during collective bargaining to what is currently called the Continuing Education Program, “to help baseball players prepare for life after baseball.” The alteration to the program represents an attempt to move away from for-profit schools and to allow players to continue education at institutions with more successful graduation rates.

Steve Tolleson is a ballplayer-turned-wealth advisor for Parallel Financial, who got his start in the money game in college. His final research project en route to obtaining his degree revolved around studying professional athletes and what happens to their money both while playing and after leaving the game.

“Most athletes feel like they’re great at their profession, so they’re probably great at managing their life outside of their profession,” Tolleson said. “Those are a lot of the athletes who fall into trouble…

“It’s a special brotherhood we’re all in, and we get a bad rep for managing money and managing lifestyles. It’s the reality. If you have a 25-year-old making $5 million a year, they live in a way they shouldn’t live. It’s not for everybody because some people are going to do what they want to do no matter what you do or no matter how you scare them, but the guys we work with are very much understanding of what life after baseball has to look like.”

Tolleson — whose professional career spanned 12 years, with stretches of four of those in the majors — had an early glimpse of the financial world during college, but the infielder took a real interest in it, and his future, following an extended trip back to Triple-A after some time and success in the big leagues.

“I honestly started getting more serious about it in 2012,” he said. “I played pretty much the full year in the big leagues with Baltimore, I was designated [for assignment], I played with the White Sox, had a great year in Triple-A, and was never given the chance to play in the big leagues for whatever reason that was. That offseason really led me to start thinking, what’s next?”

But what does life after baseball really look like? After years of focusing on throwing a ball or wielding a bat, how do players adapt to preparing for the second stage of life and everything it entails? Some players are ready, some use their baseball network to remain in the game in another capacity, and some find options just fall into their laps. Others, no doubt, just fade from our view.

In this two-part series, several former players discuss how they prepared for civilian life and the challenges they’ve faced since leaving the game. This first part features two players who left the game for a different kind of show business. Meet the entertainers.

…

Chris Leroux has always lived his life in six-month spurts.

After being drafted out of high school in Mississauga, Ontario, he actually began his professional career after attending Winthrop University, a seventh-round pick of the Florida Marlins in 2005. The right-hander played in the big leagues for the Marlins, Pirates, and Yankees during his 11-year career, also spending time in Japan and splitting winters between the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, before calling it quits and becoming the titular bachelor on The Bachelor Canada last year.

Read the rest of this entry »