Mike Shawaryn hadn’t put much thought into it. Finger pressure is instrumental in his success, both as a pitcher and as a musician, but how the two intertwine isn’t a subject he’d addressed. Not until I broached the subject this winter.

A 22-year-old right-hander out of the University of Maryland, Shawaryn is one of the top prospects in the Red Sox system (Baseball America has him No. 8; Eric Longenagen expects to rank him similarly when he puts together his forthcoming Red Sox list). Displaying a power arsenal, he fanned 169 batters in 134-and-two-thirds innings last year between low-A Greenville and high-A Salem.

When he’s not blowing away hitters, Shawaryn is playing the piano and the saxophone — and he’s a neophyte with neither. Boston’s pick in the fifth round of the 2016 draft has been tickling the ivories and blowing on a sax ever since his elementary school days in South Jersey.

Both instruments require dexterous fingers. Ditto pitching, where you’re gripping and releasing an object whose movement is influenced by the placement of digits on seams. Is there a direct correlation?

“I’ve never really thought about it like that, but the feel of the ball in your hand is obviously important,” Shawaryn said after first contemplating the idea. “Now, kind of connecting the dots, I’d say it’s the piano more so than the saxophone. The pressure you put on the keys determines the sound of it, the shape of the music. That’s probably helped me develop a type of feel in my fingers for the seams on the ball — what fingers I need to put pressure on to influence the shape of a pitch.”

And then there are rhythm and tempo. Pitchers change speeds within an at bat, and musicians change speeds within a song. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, we learned about how Lars came to join the Sydney Blue Sox. Today, in the sixth of what is now planned as an eight-part series, the itinerant slugger-cum-wordsmith introduces us to Feathers, Tank, Chuckles, and Numbers. He also explains how his sightseeing plans went awry.

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Lars Anderson: “My ‘permanent’ living situation was still being sorted out when I arrived in Sydney. For the first two nights, I crashed at Tony’s high-rise apartment that he shares with his exceedingly cool wife, Katie. The apartment overlooks Parramatta, a groovy, multicultural neighborhood 30 minutes from the heart of Sydney. Tony is originally from Adelaide. Tony is also an assistant coach for the Australian national team, occupying that role for almost two decades. From what I’ve gathered, he’s a ‘who’s who’ in the baseball community here and seems to be garner nearly unanimous respect.

“When Tony isn’t managing in the ABL, he is a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates and is in charge of all players in the Pacific Rim. He spends his summers scouting in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Australia.

“In my limited time around him, I see why he has earned said respect: he’s been accommodating beyond reason with me off the field. On the field, he is even-keeled, honest, positive (yet stern and serious in the right moments), and he supports and defends his players. After a tough loss in Brisbane, we walked into the locker room to find that there was no postgame meal. Tony, frustrated with the loss and the way Brisbane had played host, walked outside and yelled, ‘Give us some fucking food! You kicked our ass on the field, you could at least throw us a bone off of it!’ The team erupted in laughter, and the bitter taste of defeat was lessened by his calculated antics. It was an uncanny bit of leadership.

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Health issues have thrown Patrick Murphy a curve. Toronto’s pick in the third round of the 2013 draft has had Tommy John surgery, thoracic outlet syndrome surgery, and a nerve moved in his elbow. As a result, he went into last season having amassed just 94.2 professional innings.

He more than doubled that total in 2017. Four years into what had been a frustrating career, the 22-year-old right-hander was finally able to cast aside his injury demons and demonstrate an ability to flummox opposing batters. Featuring a hook-heavy three-pitch mix, Murphy fashioned a 2.94 ERA with the Low-A Lansing Lugnuts, then finished up the year by making two starts for high-A Dunedin.

Late in the season, I asked the 6-foot-4 curveball specialist about the arduous path he’s taken to what now qualifies as promising prospect status.

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In the previous installment we learned how Lars ended up with the club-level Henley and Grange Rams, while Ryan Kalish landed with the Canberra Cavalry — the ABL team Anderson had journeyed Down Under to join. In Part 5, Lars makes the jump to Australia’s top league, where multiple teams wanted him but only after they could find room for an import on the roster. Would the former big leaguer wait on the Aces or the Bite, or was wearing his third color of Sox a better option?

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Lars Anderson: “Looking back at my career, I reckoned I had run the gamut of professional baseball experiences and transactions, from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. I’ve been drafted, called up, sent down, designated for assignment, claimed off waivers, traded, released, entered free agency, signed free-agent deals. I thought that I had done it all, but while Gary and Ryan were visiting me in Adelaide, I found myself in a unfamiliar world: I was a relatively hot free-agent commodity in the midst of a modest bidding war.

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Nick Gordon is one of the top prospects in the Twins system. Drafted fifth-overall by Minnesota in 2014, the lefty-swinging shortstop is coming off an age-21 season where he slashed .270/.341/.408 for Double-A Chattanooga. He’s also coming off the release of his first album, “I Do It All,” which dropped earlier this month.

“G-Cinco” started rapping when he was in middle school, but it was only recently that he began sharing his hip-hop stylings beyond his inner circle. Prompted by the urging of a close friend, the son of former all-star closer Tom “Flash” Gordon, and brother of 2015 NL batting champion Dee Gordon, decided the time had come to “let people hear this side of me.”

The multi-talented youngster is well aware that mixing music and sports can make for a tricky balance, particularly in terms of image. But he doesn’t anticipate any issues. Not only does Gordon consider himself “a baseball player first,” he’s “never been one to lead a lifestyle that isn’t appropriate,” nor does he feel a need to “go out there and rap about things I don’t do.”

What he does do — along with rapping base hits — is “sit down and listen to beats, and write.” As for which he considers more important when crafting a song, the beat or the lyrics, that’s largely a matter of inspiration within the creative process. Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous installment, we learned that Ryan Kalish — Anderson’s friend and former teammate in the Red Sox and Cubs organizations — would be coming to Australia to play in the ABL. In Part 4, we’re regaled with stories about what happened upon his arrival, including how Anderson’s benevolence impacted where each of them would be playing “The baseball.”

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Lars Anderson: “While I still was on a beach in Cambodia, the Canberra Calvary contacted me with an offer for both myself and Ryan Kalish to play for them for the upcoming ABL season. Ryan had initially planned on playing in the Puerto Rican winter league, but Hurricane Maria put an end to that — the Caribbean league was forced to cancel the first two months of their season, leaving Ryan jobless. Having been sidelined for the past 20 months recovering from a major knee surgery, he was itching to play and realistically needed a job to prove to major-league teams that he is, in fact, healthy.

“We were both stoked. The thought of sharing the field again was something I’d previously thought was as likely as sharing a coffee with a Mormon, and the prospect of it all was quite frankly awesome. But, once again, the ABL’s import rules thwarted my plans. Canberra’s coach informed me via email that there was only one spot left, so Ryan and I would not be sharing the field, at least not on the same team.

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The moderator, MLBNetwork’s Jon Morosi, suggested slyly at one point that if any of the panelists cared to consummate a trade, the event could be paused in order for them to do so. He then proposed that maybe “Miami could spin Christian Yelich to the Rockies.”

Amid appreciative laughter from the audience, the question “What would it take?” rang out. Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill, sitting immediately to Morosi’s left, responded with a smile: “Back up the truck.”

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Held this past Monday at the Harvard Club of Boston, the “MLB Executive Panel Q&A” was organized by the Friends of Harvard Baseball and the Harvard Varsity Club. Along with Hill, the panelists included Colorado Rockies VP/general manager Jeff Bridich, Oakland A’s general manager David Forst, Boston Red Sox VP of player development Ben Crockett, and Peter Woodfork, a senior VP of baseball operations in the commissioner’s office. All are former members of the Harvard baseball team, while Morosi, a self-described “slap-hitting second baseman on a team of slap-hitting second basemen” — played on the junior varsity.

Not everything said on Monday night was on the record, but several of the stories that were shared can be repeated to the population at large. Along with the aforementioned exchange, here are some of them.

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Last week, in Part 2, we learned about one of Lars’s colorful teammates with the Henley and Grange Rams. Today, we get reintroduced to Birdman Bats cofounder Gary Malec — previously featured in the Lars Anderson Discovers Japan series — and hear about a visit to a tattoo parlor that prompted an ink artist to say, “So, you lost a bet, did ya?” We also get a story about the cosmic jest and excruciating mental math that comes with the International Date Line.

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Lars Anderson: “The 2017 Birdman World Tour/Strategic Universal Takeover continued down under, rolling through Adelaide with a visit from the boss himself, Gary Malec. Since Gary was the catalyst for both myself and our bats being in Australia, it was only fitting that he’d check on the seeds he’d sown.  

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Earlier this week, I chatted wth Red Sox manager Alex Cora about the relative value of contact skills versus hunting pitches that you can drive. Not surprisingly, the 2017 American League batting champion’s name came up.

“People might be surprised by this, but Jose Altuve isn’t afraid to make adjustments even when he’s getting his hits,” said Cora, who was Houston’s bench coach last year. “When Jose is really, really, really good — because he’s good, always — his strike zone shrinks. He doesn’t chase his hits. Sometimes he’s getting his hits because he’s unreal with his hand-eye coordination — he gets hits on pitches that others don’t — but when he looks for good pitches he’s even better.”

Cora was a contact hitter during his playing days, and looking back, he wishes he’d have been more selective. Not only that, he wouldn’t have minded swinging and missing more often than he did.

“I had a conversation with Carlos Delgado about that,” Cora told me. “When you commit to swinging the bat — I’m talking about me — it often doesn’t matter where it is, you end up putting the ball in play. It’s better to swing hard and miss than it is to make soft contact for a 4-3.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we ran Part 1 of what is planned to be a six-part series chronicling Lars Anderson’s experiences in Australia. As was the case last summer with Japan’s Kochi Fighting Dogs, Anderson is enjoying a different brand of baseball, and culture, than he did as a member of the Red Sox, Cubs, and Dodgers organizations.

In the second installment, Lars introduces us to a colorful member of the Henley and Grange Rams, and explains what happened after he cleared a fence while acclimating to velocity he hasn’t seen since the Clinton administration.

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Lars Anderson: “My personal favorite player on the Rams is 39-year-old Wayne Ough (pronounced ‘Oh’). An Australian national who spends his summers managing in the German professional league, Wayne arrived a couple weeks after me. ‘You’re going to love him, mate,’ our manager Russell told me before I met him. He was right. Wayne embodies the role of journeyman ballplayer with that certain lack of grace only obtained through years spent in dugouts with underdeveloped man-children.

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