Tom House and Dusty Baker go way back. They were Atlanta Braves teammates from 1971-1975, and before that they roomed together in the minor leagues. Their bond remains as strong as ever. Just last week the Houston Astros manager tapped into the renowned pitching guru’s expertise — albeit for reasons you might not expect. Baker consulted with House because his second baseman was battling a serious case of the yips.

“We kind of have this troubleshooting thing,” divulged House, who is often referred to as the father of modern pitching mechanics. “When Dusty runs across something he’s not quite sure about, or if I have a question about something that I don’t have access to… we’ve maintained a pretty solid communication relationship since way back when.”

What’s shared between the old friends follows the Vegas Rule, but while anything Jose Altuve specific would thus remain in-house, an overview of the phenomenon qualifies as fair game. I asked what causes a player to suddenly not be able to throw a baseball with any degree of accuracy.

“It’s when the conscious mind and the subconscious mind have a disconnect,” explained House, who has a Ph.D. in sports psychology. “Basically, it’s what they call a double-bind — you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Your brain won’t allow your arm to throw properly, because it doesn’t want to suffer the consequences of throwing the ball. It happens with catchers all the time. Steve Sax is famous because he couldn’t throw from second base. With golf, it’s putting the ball into the hole.”

Interestingly, an attack of the yips — or, as House prefers to call them “the creature” — rarely inflicts duffers. Read the rest of this entry »

The likelihood of Patrick Murphy reaching the big leagues was far from certain when I wrote about the then-22-year-old right-hander in February 2018. He’d pitched well the previous season, but that was in Low-A, and his injury history included thoracic outlet syndrome and multiple elbow procedures. Question marks abounded, and Murphy merited a mere honorable mention our Blue Jays Top Prospects list.

His future remained murky when I wrote about him nine months later on the heels a promotion to Toronto’s 40-man roster. Murphy was again coming off a good year — this time in High-A — but there was nonetheless still a lot to prove. He entered 2019 ranked No. 26 on our Blue Jays list, his FV an uninspiring 35+.

Then came a speed bump that necessitated a mechanical change. Midway through the 2019 season, Murphy was told that his delivery was illegal. More on that in a moment.

Fast forward to last month: Seven years after the Blue Jays selected him in the third round of the 2013 draft out of a Chandler, Arizona high school, Murphy made his major league debut. It came against the Philadelphia Phillies, and one of the first batters he faced was a close friend. Read the rest of this entry »

Everett Scott holds the Red Sox franchise record for games played at shortstop. A part of three World Series-winning clubs in Boston, he manned the position in 1,093 regular-season games from 1914-1921. Right behind Scott are Rick Burleson (1,004), Nomar Garciaparra (956), Freddy Parent (909), and Xander Bogaerts (908).

The last of those names stands out, and not just because he’s current. It also stands out because myriad prospect prognosticators didn’t expect him to stick at the position. To some it was barely even a question. I was once told by a name-you’d-recognize prospect guru — in a condescending manner, no less — that “Xander Bogaerts will never play shortstop in the major leagues.”

He was wrong. Moreover, had this been a normal 162-game season — and assuming Bogaerts had stayed healthy — the 28-year-old native of Aruba would already be within 100 games of Scott’s total. As it is, he’s in line to eclipse the century-old record by the midway point of the 2022 season.

Called up in August 2013, Bogaerts did play nine of his first 17 big-league games as a third baseman — the position he was earmarked for by his doubters. But that was circumstance as opposed to choreography. With Stephen Drew etched in at short, and Will Middlebrooks scuffling at the hot corner, the Red Sox were looking for a way to slot their top-rated prospect into the lineup.

According to Bogaerts, a permanent switch was never in the plans. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Wilken was the club’s scouting director when the Chicago Cubs drafted DJ LeMahieu out of LSU in 2009. Wilken was still ensconced in that position two years later when he had a memorable exchange with the second-rounder. It took place in Knoxville, where LeMahieu — a product of Brother Rice High School in metro Detroit —was playing with the Double-A Tennessee Smokies.

“I said, ‘Hey, DJ, you stay inside the ball extremely well [but] you’re six-foot-five and don’t really let your swing out,” Wilken related to me recently. “You’re from Michigan; were you a fan of Derek Jeter? Do you stay inside the ball because he does that?’ He said, ‘No, I like Derek Jeter, but when you live in a northern state you have a tendency to stay with your swing because 95% of your BP is inside, in a cage. Had I lived in a sunbelt state, I might have started to let my swing out.’”

I asked the longtime scout — now a special assistant with the Arizona Diamondbacks — why a lack of outdoor reps might have that result.

“If you’re in a cage — and I’ve seen many cage batting practices — hitters kind of stay within their swing,” responded Wilken, who in 2016 was inducted into the Professional Baseball Scouts Hall of Fame. “LeMahieu hits a lot of balls up the middle and to the right side — every once in awhile he’ll pull a ball — but as he was describing to me, it’s a lot different inside. You don’t get to see the results of letting your swing out, so you don’t really turn on balls. Outside, you can see some of that power. Hitting a ball to left field and seeing it go a pretty good ways… that’s taken away when you’re in a cage.” Read the rest of this entry »

This time there wasn’t much offense. On the heels of a Game 1 that finished 9-5, the Atlanta Braves took a commanding two-games-to-none lead in the NLDS by pushing past the Miami Marlins by a score of 2-0. Ian Anderson and four relievers combined for the shutout, with a pair of solo home runs providing just enough run-support for a suddenly-stellar pitching staff.

What scoring there was came early. Dansby Swanson took Pablo López deep in the second inning with what was his second home run in his last two at-bats. In Game 1, the 26-year-old shortstop — given name James Dansby Swanson — had homered his final time up to cap a six-run Atlanta seventh.

Travis d’Arnaud, who’d preceded Swanson’s Game 1 blast with one of his own, then went yard against López in the fourth. Seven plate appearances into the NLDS, 31-year-old backstop — given name Travis E. d’Arnaud — now had a single, a double, and a pair of walks to go along with his two dingers.

Anderson wasn’t giving up anything. A suddenly-feeble Marlins lineup managed just three hits off him in five-and-two thirds innings — a near copy-cat of his no-runs-on-two-hits, six-inning performance last week in the Wild Card round. Read the rest of this entry »

By and large, today’s NLDS Game 1 between the Braves and Marlins followed a predictable script. Atlanta came in having lost just once all year with Max Fried on the mound, and while the southpaw wasn’t sharp, he held the fort long enough for his homer-happy teammates to take control. Rallying behind long balls by Travis d’Arnaud and Dansby Swanson — and buoyed by the usual strong bullpen effort — the Braves prevailed by a score of 9-5.

The top of the first didn’t portend what was to follow. Fried’s first inning comprised just 11 pitches — it would have been eight had third baseman Austin Riley not committed a two-out throwing error — and all of them were strikes. A repeat of last week’s pitch-efficient, cruise-control effort versus the Cincinnati Reds looked to be in the works.

Looks can be deceiving, though Miami’s starter didn’t exactly string together goose eggs either. Two pitches into Sandy Alcantara’s outing, Atlanta led 1-0. Reminding everyone that he’s one of baseball’s best players, Ronald Acuña Jr. deposited an outside fastball into the right-field seats at Houston’s Minute Maid Park. (Hello bubble.) The tale of the tape was 428, the bat flip was just juicy enough, and Alcantara was anything but happy. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Rojas has come a long way since signing with the Cincinnati Reds out of Venezuela in 2005. Six years removed from being acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers, the 31-year-old shortstop is the heart and soul of a Miami Marlins team that is playing in October for the first time since 2003. A plus defender, Rojas is coming off a season where he slashed .304/.392/.496 and put up a 142 wRC+.

His off-the-field presence is every bit as impactful as what he provides between the white lines. Equal parts engaging and cerebral, Rojas isn’t just a leader in the clubhouse — he’s the Marlins’ player representative. That respect is well-earned, and it’s also a subject well-worth addressing. This interview, which took place at the end of September, focuses on precisely that.

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David Laurila: You went from a 16-year-old kid in Venezuela to not only a big-league shortstop, but also your team’s player rep. What was that path like for you?

Miguel Rojas: “It was a long road, man. You become a professional baseball player — that’s what you want to do — and you want to be a complete professional. You want to cover every area, and for me one of those areas was learning a new culture in the United States. It was learning the language and being able to have relationships with guys from different parts of the world. That’s something I focused my attention on, early in my career, when I was with the Reds.

“I had an opportunity to be with a great organization — the Reds — and after seven years with them I went to the Dodgers, who are another great organization. Then I got traded here. So my path kind of helped me to become the player, and person, that I am right now. It’s not just the baseball player, or the starting shortstop, that I always envisioned [myself] to be… I always wanted to be a starting shortstop, but all of a sudden I began earning the respect from my teammates, and from the people who run the organization. I think that’s because I put the time in to get to know the people that I work with.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s well-chronicled that the Twins have now lost 18 consecutive postseason games. What it isn’t is well-explained, and that’s for good reason. A streak this torturous is inexplicable. Getting swept in a short series is by no means uncommon, but having it happen repeatedly, at the worst possible time, is soul-crushingly rare.

Derek Falvey was asked about the failings when he met with the media following Wednesday’s elimination. Moreover, he was asked what can be done to reverse those fortunes in Octobers to come. Minnesota’s Chief Baseball Officer answered as best he could, but again, what’s beset his club is inexplicable.

I introduced that angle in a follow-up question near the end of Falvey’s session: Given the randomness of short series, is there truly anything that can be done to flip the postseason script? Are the Twins akin to the pre-2004 Red Sox in that they’ll only win once the Baseball Gods deem it time for them to win?

“I hear your perspective on trying to make sure we don’t overreact to some history,” responded Falvey. “We want to make sure that we assess this as objectively as we can… but I do think there is some reality that in a baseball season, over the course of two or three, or four or five games, things can go a little haywire on you — even if you feel you have a good foundation. Maybe if you played those games all over again, you might have a different result. I get that. That speaks to your question a little bit about randomness. Read the rest of this entry »

Our preview of the Braves-Reds series, which ran yesterday, closed with the following words:

“This one looks fun, and it should ultimately come down to which team pitches best.”

This afternoon’s Game 1 neither proved nor disproved that prediction. In a matchup of two National League Cy Young contenders, both pitching staffs flat out shoved. Trevor Bauer and Max Fried combined to go 14 2/3 scoreless — with 17 strikeouts and no walks, no less — and the relievers that followed them to the mound were every bit as good. In the end, Atlanta prevailed 1-0 on a walk-off single by Freddie Freeman off Amir Garrett in the 13th inning.

Both teams came out swinging. Three pitches into the game, the Reds had runners on the corners, courtesy of base knocks by Nick Senzel and Nick Castellanos. The aggression-fueled early scoring opportunity went for naught. Fried proceeded to record three outs on six pitches, with an Eugenio Suárez liner to short sandwiched between a pair of harmless ground balls. Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds are set to play each other in a three-game postseason series beginning on Wednesday. But before we break down that matchup, let’s start with how they got here.

The Braves were projected to go 33-27, and they finished just above that at 35-25. Meanwhile, the Reds were projected to go 31-29 and hit that mark exactly. Does that mean both teams saw their seasons — COVID-19 permutations excepted — pretty much go as expected? Not in the least.

The NL East champs persevered despite the decimation of a starting staff that was supposed to comprise some combination of Mike Foltynewicz, Max Fried, Cole Hamels, Felix Hernandez, Sean Newcomb, and Mike Soroka. Between injuries, ineffectiveness, and King Felix’s opt out, that sextet combined for just seven wins. All were credited to Fried, whose spotless record was augmented by a sparkling 2.25 ERA.

Fried will be joined in Atlanta’s opening-round rotation by youngsters Ian Anderson and Kyle Wright. The duo exudes potential — each is a former first-round pick — but to this point in time they’ve combined to make all of 18 big-league starts. It’s hard to imagine either having a particularly long leash in the days (and possibly weeks) to come. Read the rest of this entry »