Last night, the Royals finally won a baseball game. In doing so, they snapped a seven-game losing streak that very nearly burned up their 5.5-game cushion in the Wild Card standings. The only reason they’re still in position for the third spot this morning is that the Twins have lost five of their last six. Even so, the Royals did everything in their power to avoid getting the win last night. They stranded nine baserunners over the first four innings and squandered a brilliant start from Cole Ragans. They took a scoreless game into the 10th inning, and they scored (for the first time in 27 innings) only because the Nationals did everything short of driving the zombie runner around the bases in the bullpen cart. The Manfred Man scored when the Nationals threw the ball away in the top of the 10th. In the bottom of the inning, with a runner on third base and two outs, the Nationals did the Royals another favor, removing Nasim Nuñez, who has a .386 on-base percentage, in favor of Joey Gallo, whose OBP is more than 100 points lower. In the most Joey Gallo plate appearance of all time, the slugger was one pitch from walking, then 10 feet from wrapping the game-winning homer around the right field foul pole, before finally striking out.

Now that the Royals have finally won a game, it’s time to investigate what exactly went wrong. The numbers weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible either. During the streak, they ran an 88 wRC+, which ranked 20th over that period. Their 3.24 FIP was the second best in baseball, and their 3.79 ERA ranked 14th. They hit 10 more homers than they allowed and their strikeout differential was up above 40. No matter. Six of those seven losses were decided by either one or two runs. They just kept finding a way to lose, because they were cursed. At a certain point, that’s just the simplest explanation. In order for Kansas City to break its streak, the team required the good fortune of running into a Nationals team that had lost six of its last seven, had already clinched its fifth consecutive losing season, and played as if it badly wanted to throw away a ballgame. In other words, the only thing that saved the accursed Royals was running into a team that was somehow even more despised by the movers of the universe. After all, if there’s one thing the baseball gods love, it’s whatever fits neatly into a baseball writer’s pre-existing narrative.

What did the Royals do to anger the baseball gods so? That’s what we’re here to find out. The baseball gods can be hard to please and even harder to understand. They’re vindictive. They’re unpredictable. Sometimes they like bunting, and yet other times, not so much. So let’s focus on what we know. Clearly, this infraction occurred on September 14, the date of Kansas City’s last victory before the freefall. In order to figure out what went wrong, I went back and watched the game closely, taking detailed notes about any and all possible transgressions. Surely, one of these infractions had to be the reason for the skid.

First Inning

Well, here’s a gimme right off the bat. This team is literally called the Royals. They’ve got crowns all over their uniforms and their stadiums. Ever heard of hubris, Kansas City? You’re claiming the divine right of kings; no wonder the almighty wants to see you laid low. Maybe dial it down to the Kansas City Nobles. If you want to be extra safe, you could go with the Kansas City Miserable Wretches. Just like the rest of us, the baseball gods love an underdog.

As if that weren’t enough, the second batter of the game, Bobby Witt Jr. crushed a majestic home run. If this isn’t hubris, I don’t know what else to call it.

He’s flapping his wings like a bird. What do the Royals call this celebration, the Icarus Dance? All season long, Witt has been flying too close to the sun (which in this tortured metaphor is Aaron Judge, I guess), and now his wax wings have melted and he’s fallen into the ocean to be devoured by the Detroit Tigers. Like I said, this is just the simplest explanation.

Second Inning

This is the final pitch of the second inning. It’s a four-seamer to Yasmani Grandal that’s supposed to be on the outside corner but instead ends up low and inside. It’s a mistake, but it’s still a good location. Starter Michael Wacha marches off the mound, certain that it’s strike three. Grandal thinks it’s ball four, and he starts toward first base and winds up to toss his bat over toward the dugout. When he finds out he’s instead been called out on strikes, he shouts, “No, man,” followed by a 70-grade F-bomb. But watch catcher Freddy Fermin behind home plate. He winds up to throw the ball back to Wacha before realizing that it needs to go to the first baseman.

It’s not clear whether Fermin thought the pitch was a ball, didn’t realize that it was strike three, or didn’t realize that it was the third out. Either way, he’s tempting fate. There’s one player on the field who’s always supposed to know the situation, and it’s the catcher. If it’s enough to make old-school baseball men weep into their beer, it’s enough to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.

Third Inning

Nothing to see here. Just a normal popup, right? Take a closer look, and this time keep your eye on Wacha. He doesn’t shout, “Up!” He doesn’t even point toward the sky in order to help any fielders who somehow made it to the big leagues despite lacking the spatial awareness to remember which direction up is. He’s violating one of baseball’s iron-clad laws. It’s in the rulebook. It’s in the unwritten rules. I’m pretty sure it’s in the Constitution. When the batter hits a popup, the pitcher points up and yells, “Up!” It’s the only thing that keeps the sky from falling.

Two innings earlier, Wacha remembered to point when he induced a popup from the exact same hitter. What makes this omission even weirder is that Wacha is especially well-suited to this easiest of tasks. If you watch the play again, you’ll notice that he does raise his right hand pretty high. It’s part of his follow-through, and he does it after every pitch. All he needed to do was extend his index finger. There’s nobody in baseball for whom this effort could’ve be easier, and yet Wacha couldn’t be bothered. Three Finger Brown is rolling over in his grave.

Fourth Inning

Do the baseball gods hate bat flips? It’s hard to say. I’d like to think that they keep up with the times, and that while celebrating a home run was once the kind of trespass that could get you demoted to Paducah for the rest of your living days, the mysterious beings who balance the scales of hits and errors have learned to enjoy a nice bat flip just as much as the rest of us. But if they do hate bat flips, then the only thing they hate even more is a bat flip that comes on a routine flyout. So MJ Melendez just might be to blame for this whole thing.

Fifth Inning

Look, this one isn’t Kansas City’s fault. The team was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Adam Frazier is about to lead off the inning with a triple, but first he needs to take a warmup cut and get situated in the batter’s box and — oh. Oh no.

Apparently umpire Chad Fairchild needs to get situated too. The best part is what happens after Fairchild wraps up downstairs. Frazier steps back out of the batter’s box and heaves the world’s biggest sigh. It’s hard to blame him for needing a second to refocus after what he just witnessed.

Later in the inning, Kyle Isbel got hit in the shin by a pitch. Disobeying the rule shouted by every high school baseball player in American history, he leaned over to rub the spot where he got hit. Still, I think that offense pales in comparison to Fairchild’s. I know I feel cursed after watching it.

Sixth Inning

I noticed two things in the sixth. First, it turns out that Adam Frazier has his own hip issues. I don’t know if this is enough to anger the baseball gods. Maybe they’re into this sort of thing. Either way, it is my solemn duty to bring any and all pelvic gyrations to your attention.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not looping the same video over and over. These are different pitches in the same plate appearance, all in the sixth inning. Frazier really needs to keep that pelvis good and limber.

The second thing seemed much more likely to cause a curse. All game long, there were two Royals fans in the fancy seats behind home plate. (This is off topic, but in that section, the snacks that go for Armageddon prices in the rest of the stadium aren’t just free, they’re tossed to you by a vendor who walks around in a full Pirates uniform. Sometimes you’ll see him winding up to throw a water bottle and you’ll think for second that one of the perks of sitting in the fancy seats is being waited on by an actual big leaguer.) I had my eye on that pair the entire time. The fan on the left had some glorious facial hair and a cool vintage hat. (He also kept pouring the free water on his neck to beat the heat, and considering what those water bottles cost in the rest of the stadium, it was the most conspicuous consumption I’ve ever witnessed in my life.) The fan on the right was wearing ear buds the entire game and looking down constantly, either because he was checking his phone or because his left leg just happened to be really interesting.

In the bottom of the sixth, however, the best buddies switched seats. And just to make sure we all knew about it, ear buds guy waved directly at the camera.

Same seats, guys. Same seats! We’re trying to make the playoffs here.

Seventh Inning

Salvador Perez and Aaron Judge are the only current players in baseball who have attained the rank of captain. Judge doesn’t wear a C on his uniform because the Yankee pinstripes are sacrosanct and it would be a crime against nature to alter them in any way (unless it’s to add an enormous Nike swoosh). But look at Perez’s C when he comes up in the seventh. Where did they even find a C that small?

It’s minuscule, and I mean that in the most literal possible sense: It’s a lowercase C. It’s honestly so small that it seems disrespectful. It’s so tiny. Did they just run out and buy it from a Michael’s? It looks like it’s just the copyright symbol for the swoosh. When Jason Varitek captained the Red Sox back in the 2000s, he wore an enormous C. It was actually the same size as the team name emblazoned across his chest.

That thing needed its own parking spot! Don’t tell me nobody in the Kansas City clubhouse was capable of finding a big chunky C for their big captain. They definitely have one, and you know how I know? Because it’s right there on the jersey! Just take that one. Problem solved. Curse broken. You’re welcome, Kansas ity.

Eighth Inning

Fermin singled to lead off the top of the eighth, at which point first base coach Damon Hollins helpfully gave him some tips about the new pitcher on the mound. Before he could do so, however, Hollins needed to consult his notes.

That’s right, Hollins apparently doesn’t use one of those cool little positioning cards that the players get. He just walks out onto the field every inning with several sheets of computer paper folded hot-dog style and flapping around in his back pocket. When the situation calls for it, he pulls them out and searches for the proper page like a best man about to give the world’s longest, sweatiest toast. How is it possible that Hollins has so many notes that it requires multiple pages? Has he never considered folding the pages a second time so that they fit comfortably into his pocket without threatening to fall out? This whole situation is an affront to any number of gods.

Ninth Inning

Look, I came into the ninth inning thinking that I’d round things off with a classic blunder; some egregious, old-school infraction tailor-made to anger the baseball gods. And I got one too. David Bednar walked leadoff batter Maikel Garcia, who promptly stole second and third, and then Isbel, who promptly stole second. The Royals had runners on second and third with no outs, and then they couldn’t manage to scratch out a single run. The next three batters went: strikeout, intentional walk, double play. If only they’d hit the ball the other way or executed a safety squeeze, the baseball gods would have squealed with delight and showered them with championships.

So that should’ve been the end, but before it all went down, I saw something even more egregious. I saw something much more petty and not at all relevant to the game of baseball. But it was also so bizarre and outré that I couldn’t go without mentioning it. Behold, Tommy Pham’s snake-skin belt buckle, complete with a miniature American flag. I had to see it and now you do too.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I have never seen with my own eyes an object that was more certainly cursed. Still, Pham wore this abomination last night, when the Royals finally failed into a win, so now this accursed accessory might just be team’s lucky charm.

It’s entirely possible, dear sir, that I simply misheard you given the permeating hubbub in this, our fair city’s modern-day Colosseum, but just a moment ago I was left with the odd impression that you might have pronounced me out. At the risk of contravening such an esteemed authority as yourself, I aver that I must have misheard you, owing to the fact it surely was clear to one and all that the only sensible course of action under a circumstance such as this one would be to adjudge the ball foul. The only fair call is a foul ball (if you’ll forgive the indulgence), but as I say, these ears love nothing so much as to play their little tricks on me from time to time, so if the issue at hand is a simple case of misapprehension, then simply say the word and off I’ll scurry. It would be my genuine pleasure to gather my lumber, as it were, and assume once more the ready position here in the right-hand rectangle, for I do adore a tussle. Read the rest of this entry »

I was writing from the heart. When the Nationals designated Victor Robles for assignment back in May, I wrote about what it was like to wait for him to make it to the big leagues; and then, once he arrived, to wait for him to turn into a star; and then, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to turn into a star, to wait for him to turn into a solid contributor; and then, as the likelihood of that outcome grew more and more faint, just to wait.

Fans reserve a special kind of affection for players like Robles. They don’t do it on purpose; it’s just how people tend to work. Superstars, with their reliable excellence, are easy to love. They’re big, warm Labrador retrievers with their tails waggling like Gary Sheffield’s bat as they wait impatiently for you to open the front door every night. They give you exactly what you want, and the love they inspire is beautiful and simple. When they move on to another organization, the loss you feel is deep, yes, but its edges are clearly defined because something pure has been taken from you.

When you’ve been watching and waiting and hoping for a player to figure things out for the better part of the decade, the feelings involved are a lot messier. Even if your love and your loss aren’t as profound, their edges are a lot more ragged. You’ve spent years pinballing between highs and lows, hopes and fears, anxiety and joy and despair, sometimes all at once. In other words, it’s a lot more like real life and real love. By the time a player like that moves on, you’ve invested way too much of your well-being in them to simply stop caring. It’s hard to imagine a single Nationals fan anywhere who wasn’t rooting for Robles to finally figure things out once the Mariners gave him the change of scenery he so clearly needed, who wasn’t truly happy to see him get off to a hot start in Seattle. But we all have our limits.

Back on August 6, over at Baseball Prospectus, Mikey Ajeto broke down all the mechanical adjustments that Robles has made since he joined Seattle. (Yes, the same Mikey Ajeto who writes exclusively about pitchers. Honestly, the biggest miracle that Robles has performed isn’t magically going supernova the moment that he turned the W on his hat upside down; it’s getting Ajeto to pay attention to a hitter for once.) He’s dropped his hands, ditched his leg kick, and added a scissor kick and a mini-squat before the pitch. Because Ajeto covered those more technical topics, I can continue to focus on the surface-level numbers. And you know what happened to the surface-level numbers after the publication of that article, which was entirely devoted to documenting Robles’s sudden improvement as the plate? They didn’t just keep getting better, they exploded.

I was wishing as hard as anyone for Robles to succeed with the Mariners, but I didn’t mean like this. I was thrilled to see him land a two-year extension worth a guaranteed $9.75 million, but he wasn’t supposed to instantly turn into the best player in baseball, like moving moving from a district named Washington to an actual state named Washington was all it took to break a powerful curse cast by some old Issaquah-based witch who fell into the Reflecting Pool during her mock trial team’s trip to DC in ninth grade and never got over the humiliation. And no, I’m not exaggerating. From June 5 to August 17, Robles turned his season around, running a 118 wRC+. Since August 18, Robles has literally been the best player in baseball: He’s put up a 230 wRC+ and accrued 1.8 WAR, more than whichever Cooperstown-bound MVP candidate you’d care to name. Sure, it’s fair to point out that he’s running a comically high .527 BABIP over that period, but his .386 xwOBA still ranks 19th among qualified players during that stretch. It’s starting to look like the simplest explanation for why Robles never lived up to his potential is that cherry blossoms are his personal kryptonite.

Somehow Robles left this ragged hole in the hearts of Nationals fans, but arrived in Seattle a gleaming superstar. The chaos has only reared its head lately. Robles is playing through a hip issue, and left his last two games due to different injuries: leg soreness on Sunday and a right hand contusion after getting hit by a pitch to lead off last night’s game, an 11-2 loss to the Yankees. Before Robles was removed against New York, his wildness on the basepaths finally caught up with the Mariners, with whom he’d previously gone 25-for-25 on stolen base attempts. He was caught stealing home in the bottom of the first inning, taking the bat out of Justin Turner’s hands with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 3-0 count.

I’m not saying all this is going to last, no matter how much Robles loves the Puget Sound. Since he arrived in Seattle, he’s run a 34.4% hard-hit rate and an 86.7-mph average exit velocity. The former is much better than Robles has put up in any previous season, but the latter isn’t and both are still well below league average. The real change is his barrel rate of 8.6%, which is miles above anything he’s accomplished in previous years. But keep in mind that we’re talking about just 13 barrels out of 151 balls in play, and neither his launch angle nor his GB/FB rate represents much of a departure from his career numbers. We’ve moved past any-batter-can-do-just-about-anything-over-60-plate-appearances territory, but we’re not all that far off either.

Robles has made some honest-to-goodness adjustments to his swing that have had an immediate, dramatic effect — frankly, the effect was so immediate and so dramatic that the Nationals should be looking closely at every single one of those adjustments and asking themselves what the Mariners saw that they didn’t — and we should probably adjust our priors going forward. But I haven’t seen anything (yet) to convince me that he’s going to keep running a BABIP above .500 from here on out. Further, Robles has been dealing with a hip issue in addition to the leg soreness (which is a separate ailment) and the hand injury that forced his early exit from the last two games. As someone who spent something like a quarter of my life rooting for Robles to finally put it all together, I sincerely hope his nagging injuries turn out to be no more than just that, and that when Robles finally does come down to earth, he finds a comfortable spot that’s situated well above sea level. But as long as he’s spending whole months with a wRC+ above 200, I reserve the right to be a little jealous.

Before I started researching this article, I assumed that Cal Raleigh had been an All-Star before. I was wrong. Raleigh is in just his third full season as a big leaguer, but he’s spent all of that time as one of the best catchers in baseball, so I was surprised to find out that the last time he won an award of any kind was 2019, when he was named the California League’s Rookie of the Year as a member of the Modesto Nuts. Now that I know, I feel even stronger about the premise of this article, so please forgive me for stating it so baldly: Cal Raleigh is a star, and it’s about time we all acknowledged it.

Raleigh has turned on the afterburners over his last nine games entering Wednesday, slashing .314/.390/.629 with three home runs for a 187 wRC+. With that, he pushed his WAR to 4.3, tying his total from the 2023 season. According to WAR, he was the sixth-best catcher in baseball in 2022, the fourth best in ’23, and he’s now the second best in ’24. Unless my pattern recognition skills have fallen off since elementary school, next year he’ll have to find a way to be number zero.

Here’s what Kevin Goldstein wrote in June 2021, just a bit over a month before Raleigh made his big league debut:

Teams were almost universally enamored with Raleigh’s bat in the 2018 draft, but the Florida State product fell to the third round because most had big concerns about his ability to stay at catcher, projecting a quick move to first base, where the pressure on the player to hit increases exponentially. The Mariners decided to at least try to keep him behind the plate, and to the player’s credit, Raleigh has put an incredible amount of work into his defense, and suddenly looks like an average defensive catcher.

As it turned out, Raleigh struggled mightily at the plate during his 43-game rookie stint with the Mariners, but his defense graded out great. In that short sample, both FRV and DRP rated his framing highly, and DRS would hop on board the following season. This year, in an uncommon bit of perfect harmony, all three of those advanced defensive metrics agree that Raleigh is having his best season ever behind the plate. DRP says he’s saved 17.5 runs, DRS has him at 17, and FRV at 13, all of which are good enough to rate him the best defensive catcher in the American League and second best in the game, behind Patrick Bailey.

Raleigh has paired that defensive excellence with the classic profile of a power hitter. He strikes out too much, but when he does make contact, look out. That’s not to say that he’s out of control: This year, he’s been especially aggressive on pitches over the heart of the plate, so despite his elevated chase rate, he ranks in the 80th percentile in Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric, which measures selective aggression. Opposing pitchers, hopeful that they can induce a chase and terrified of what might happen if they hit the zone, are throwing Raleigh a lot of balls, and he’s running a career-high 10.8% walk rate despite striking out nearly 30% of the time.

Even with the higher walk total, Raleigh’s profile still depends much more on power than his on-base ability. First, as befits a catcher nicknamed Big Dumper, he doesn’t beat out too many hits, which drives down his batting average. More important is the way Raleigh swings. He doesn’t just have the profile of a classic power hitter; he’s got the elevate-and-celebrate profile of today’s power hitters. He specializes in barrels, hitting the ball hard and lifting it like few others. His 53% fly ball rate is second among qualified players, and for the third season in a row, he’s in the 94th percentile or better in pulled fly ball rate. If you take a quick glance at his spray chart, you’ll see home runs to all fields, and you’ll think, “What a balanced batted ball profile.” And then you’ll remember that he’s a switch-hitter. Raleigh is looking to lift the ball and yank it from both sides of the plate. His 30 homers are tied for 12th in baseball, but his 25 pulled homers are good for third. On the left is a spray chart that shows all of Raleigh’s career homers to the pull side and straightaway. On the right is a chart that shows his opposite field home runs.

This year, Raleigh’s 30 homers lead all catchers. He led all catchers with 30 last season too, and despite appearing in just 119 games and playing through a broken thumb and a torn ligament in his catching hand for more than a month, he also led all catchers with 27 in 2022. Only eight players have ever put up three 27-homer seasons while catching at least half the time. Here’s the list of players who have done it three times in a row: Lance Parrish, Mike Piazza, Johnny Bench, and Cal Raleigh. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s one eight-time All-Star, two inner-circle Hall of Famers, and Cal Raleigh, who again has never had a full season when he didn’t hit at least 27 homers. Among catchers with at least a thousand career plate appearances, Raleigh’s .227 ISO ranks fifth all-time, and his 144 ISO+ ranks 13th.

Put all that together, and Raleigh combines first-rate defense with a homer-heavy 109 career wRC+ (115 over the last three seasons). That’s a pretty compelling package, and it’s made Raleigh the second-best catcher in baseball no matter what timeframe you look at.

Our entire database shows 278 four-win seasons from 106 different catchers. Along with Raleigh, I counted just 20 who had put up three in a row, and the list once again reads like a who’s who of Hall of Famers, along with more recent framing standouts.

I’m not trying to say that Raleigh is destined for the Hall of Fame. I’m just trying to demonstrate that what he’s been doing doesn’t happen all that often, especially right out of the gate. From the moment he became a full-time starter, Raleigh has been one of the best catchers in baseball, and despite playing through injury at times, he’s been hands-down the most consistent. There’s no guarantee that this will continue. It’s hard to stay on top defensively, especially because catching techniques have changed radically in the last few years. Look at J.T. Realmuto, who was one of the league’s premier defenders for years, and then suddenly saw his framing fall off out of nowhere last season. It also looks more and more likely that the ABS system will be coming soon in some form to erase at least part of a catcher’s framing value. If nothing else, that just means that we should appreciate Raleigh’s current greatness all the more. He belongs in any conversation about the greatest catchers in the game right now, and it’s time he had the hardware to prove it.

The last time Luis Arraez struck out was August 10, a full month ago. He struck out the day before that as well. As of Tuesday morning, Arraez has played in 42 of the Padres’ 46 games during the second half of the season, and he has struck out exactly twice. No other qualified player has struck out fewer than 15 times since the All-Star break. Please take a moment to think about that. It means that the player with the second-fewest strikeouts has struck out 7 1/2 times more than Arraez. Nearly 75% of qualified players have struck out at least 30 times. Arraez, once again, has done so twice. Here’s what that looks like in a graph. Each bar represents a qualified player and Arraez is the tiny green one all the way to the right. I’ve added a dashed line to give you a sense of how far below everyone else he is.

Arraez currently has 26 strikeouts over the entire season. If he can stay below 30, he would be just the ninth qualified player in this century to accomplish the feat, and the first since Jeff Keppinger did so in 2008. Even if you do count 2020, despite the fact that Arraez has made 340 more plate appearances (and counting) than any player in that season, he currently has fewer strikeouts than all but five of the 142 qualified players. Here’s a chart of the whole 2024 season, just for good measure. Read the rest of this entry »

When you write about sabermetrics, the word jump is your best friend. There are only so many ways to explain that a number got bigger from one period of time to the next, and the word increase carries a vanishingly small amount of sex appeal. On the other hand, jump is an action verb that can lend some verve to, say, a dry passage about Jurickson Profar’s expected weighted on-base average, just to pick one completely random example off the top of my head:

Today is the rare day when we actually get to use the word jump to talk about a jump, because on Tuesday, when Rangers third baseman Josh Smith hit a towering chopper to first base, he didn’t just jump — he jumped.

In the bottom of the eighth, Yankees pitcher Tommy Kahnle dotted a changeup on the corner of the zone, and Smith rolled over it with an awkward swing that sent the ball right into the ground. It bounced up toward the roof and came down headed almost directly for the bag, where the waiting DJ LeMahieu lost it in the lights. The ball hit him in the glove, then bounced right into the base path, whereupon both Smith and Kahnle, who had heretofore been drifting nonchalantly toward the base, instantly shifted into top gear. Kahnle made a sliding play to barehand the ball, but the slide took him into the basepath. In a daring display of both initiative and inertia, Smith managed to hurdle the turtling pitcher and step on the base without breaking stride:

It was a remarkable play, and after my eighth or ninth viewing, I started to notice the little things. Actually, that’s not true. First, I noticed one extremely big thing. Check out Josh Smith’s quadriceps muscle:

Good Lord. That quad needs its own post office. The next time somebody tells you that all baseball players are slow and out of shape, show them this picture and take a few steps back so that they have space to react. No wonder Smith was able to leap over Kahnle without breaking stride. I’m surprised he came back down to earth.

The biggest thing I noticed, though, was how differently the players on the field reacted based on their proximity to the play. Perspective changes everything, and the closer a player was to the play, the more concern they exhibited. I’ll show you what I mean. Here’s Kahnle’s body language in the split second when Smith was right over his head:

This is what fear looks like. Less than a second ago, this extremely muscly man was going all out for a baseball. Now he’s trying to set the world record for fastest assumption of the fetal position. No pitcher has ever been so thoroughly posterized. Smith is literally making the Jumpman logo on top of Kahnle’s head. Kids all over the country should be hanging this on their bedroom doors:

Speaking as someone who has taken the business end of a baseball cleat to the face before, I’m not trying to make fun of Kahnle’s reaction. When you find yourself helpless on the ground beneath a stampeding Josh Smith, cowering in fear is the appropriate course of action.

That was the person at the epicenter. Now let’s take one step back. Here’s the next-closest person to the play, DJ LeMahieu. He wasn’t in as much immediate danger as Kahnle. As such, he never quite looked like he was fearing for his life, but the first baseman went on his own roller coaster ride, and it’s fun to watch the video both forwards and backwards. That way, you can watch LeMahieu go back and forth between concern for his teammate’s safety and concern for his own:

You don’t have to be an awkward person to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what your hands should be doing, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t be officially recognized as awkward without spending an inordinate amount of time wondering what your hands should be doing. Those of us in the club will recognize that LeMahieu is putting on a master class of manual expression. First, he reacts to his error by bringing his hands to his chest, a move so classic that it’s literally the defining gesture of the guilt-ridden Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter. Next, he reacts to Kahnle’s close call by reaching toward him. It’s what you do when you want to help, but you’re too far away to actually do anything. I personally find myself doing it from across the room any time my tiny nephew wobbles down the stairs without any regard for his own life. Lastly, if you slow the video to just the right speed, there’s a moment where it looks like LeMahieu is afraid that Smith is going to land directly on top of him, and he raises his hands as if to catch the plummeting third baseman. With nothing more than a first baseman’s mitt and one free hand, LeMahieu tells a compelling tale.

But travel just a few yards farther away and the play carried much less immediacy. Over at second base, Gleyber Torres crept toward first base, but he didn’t seem particularly concerned. Maybe it didn’t look quite as scary from his angle, or maybe he just had more pressing matters to attend to:

You know what? That’s a fun shot, what with Kahnle all blurred from the do or die dive and LeMahieu oozing concern, but let’s actually zoom in a little closer so we get a better look at Torres:

Yeah, that’s much better. Torres was definitely paying attention to the play, but he wasn’t so locked in that he couldn’t do a little multitasking. What makes this shot even better is that at the moment it appeared on the Rangers broadcast, color commentator Dave Valle was in the middle of a sentence that went, “…does a pretty nice job of grabbing this barehanded.” No, I’m not making that up. I’ve zoomed in on Torres, but otherwise the clip below is completely unedited:

Indeed he does, Dave. Indeed he does. Torres is paying attention to the play, but he’s also far enough from the action that he doesn’t look particularly concerned and he isn’t willing to forego his own comfort. Let’s close out by checking in on the people farthest from the action. Here’s how the New York outfielders reacted as Kahnle was risking his life:

Sorry, did I say “reacted?” I meant to say “stood there like statues.” Not one of them moved a muscle. Based on their complete disinterest, I can only assume that if you’ve spent as much of your life in the outfield as Alex Verdugo, Aaron Judge, and Juan Soto have, when you see a weakly hit ball to the infield, you instantly recognize it as a chance to take a 15-second standing nap and power down completely. This was a thrilling play, but all three of them look like they’ve been waiting in line at the post office for so long that when they finally get called up to the window, they’re not even going to remember why they were there in the first place.

Keep in mind that LeMahieu dropped this ball. Soto probably should have been backing up first base. Not only that, but this was an extremely dangerous play. Even if you assume that they don’t care at all about Tommy Kahnle as a human being, the guy has a 2.00 ERA over 42 appearances this season. He’s absolutely crucial to the team’s World Series hopes, and Smith came about eight inches from kicking his head clear off his body. Maybe it’s just because of how quickly the play developed, but not one of the Yankee outfielders was moved enough to so much as lean forward slightly.

Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but distance really does make everything seem smaller. If you’re LeMahieu, you’re terrified that Josh Smith and his gargantuan quads are about to grind your pitcher into a pulp right in front of your eyes. If you’re Aaron Judge all the way out in center field, that’s just a tiny problem for all those tiny people in the distance.

You might be a bit surprised to learn just how rare 3-0 counts are. As of Tuesday morning, there had been 155,045 plate appearances in the 2024 season, and just 5,852 of them, or 3.8%, had gone 3-0. That means that each team should expect to see a 3-0 count just 1.4 times per game. That’s a whole lot fewer than I expected. Because of that scarcity, if somebody comes to you with statistics about a batter’s splits in 3-0 counts, you can probably discount them as a small sample size aberration. That’s all the more true when you consider that, ignoring intentional walks, 3-0 counts turn into walks roughly 60% of the time (which in turns means that they account for roughly 29% of all walks). Once the batter gets ahead 3-0, there are very few actual at-bats taking place. So you don’t have to take this seriously if you don’t want to, but once he reaches a 3-0 count, Aaron Judge is putting together the greatest season in recorded history. I know that’s not exactly a shocking lede – Aaron Judge is good at something; film at eleven – but it’s fun, so hear me out.

In this case, recorded history starts in 1988. That’s the earliest year that Stathead lets you pull count-based splits. Those splits are slightly muddied by the fact that as far as Stathead is concerned, 3-0 counts include intentional walks. (That’s understandable, since until very recently, intentional walks still required pitchers to throw four actual balls. Still, it definitely skews the numbers; it doesn’t make a ton of sense to include PAs where the batter never saw a competitive pitch in count splits.) This season, Judge has been walked intentionally 18 times, but four of those passes only happened once the pitcher had fallen behind 3-0, so we’ll leave them and strip out the other 14.

That leaves Judge with 43 PAs that went to a 3-0 count, second in baseball behind Juan Soto, who has 54 (which also gives the Yankees far more 3-0 counts than any other team in baseball). In those PAs, Judge has walked 35 times, for a walk rate of 81.4%. That’s how terrifying Aaron Judge is: Even though he ranks second in this split by PAs, pitchers are so disinclined to throw him a strike that he’s tied for 75th in ABs. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Major League Baseball released the first drip of its bat tracking data this spring, I’ve been keeping an eye on a particular leaderboard. I don’t know if anybody else cares much about it, but I’ve been fascinated by the fast swing leaderboard. I haven’t been tracking it religiously; I’ve just been checking in every couple of weeks. Also, I haven’t been looking at it the way you’re supposed to. I’m only interested the bottom of the list. I suppose that makes it not so much a leaderboard as a trailerboard, but I don’t care. I’m interested in it because there’s an honest-to-goodness horse race going on there.

A fast swing is one where the barrel of the bat is traveling at least 75 mph when it strikes or comes closest to the ball. That number was chosen, per Mike Petriello, “because that’s the line where, on a per-swing basis, a swing goes from negative run value for a hitter to average, on its way to positive.” All things being equal, it’s better to swing hard. On an individual player basis, here’s the correlation between fast-swing rate and wRC+. Roughly speaking, five percentage points of fast-swing rate is worth three extra points of wRC+:

Here’s something that may surprise you: Fast-swing rate (R = .48) has a stronger correlation to wRC+ than average bat speed does (R = .41). I assume that this is the case for the same reason that 90th-percentile exit velocity is a more useful stat than average exit velocity. You’re ignoring a big chunk of less useful information and focusing on the swings that can result in real damage. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great things about sports is they let you witness the very limits of human capabilities. If you watch for long enough, you’ll see those limits get pushed even further. Usually it happens in increments so small and slow as to be all but imperceptible, but every once in a while someone comes along and stretches them right in front of your eyes. Never in his wildest dreams could James Naismith have imagined that a person like Victor Wembanyana was capable of existing, let alone of splashing threes and slashing to the hoop like a guard. If he had, he would have nailed his peach baskets a whole lot higher than 10 feet.

Oneil Cruz was a Lilliputian 6-foot-3 when he signed with the Dodgers as a 16-year-old shortstop in 2015. Despite adding another four inches to his frame, he managed to hang onto that position by his fingernails for nine more years, attempting valiantly to blow the doors off our preconceptions about what a shortstop could look like. He did his level best to make up for every errant throw with a rocket from deep in the hole, every routine grounder that clanked off his glove with a circus catch in the no-man’s land behind third base. Sadly, our preconceptions have outlasted his onslaught. The Pirates have finally decided that they no longer desire the distinction of fielding the tallest regular shortstop in the history of the game.

On Monday – just eight days after general manager Ben Cherington told reporters, “All I can tell you right now is he is our shortstop,” – manager Derek Shelton announced that Cruz would be transitioning to center field. “I think as of right now, we’re looking at him as a center fielder,” Shelton said. “It’s something we’ve been talking about. It’s not something that we took lightly. He’s an unbelievable athlete. We feel it’s probably the best position for him and for the Pirates.” Cherington told reporters that Cruz was disappointed about the move, but handled it professionally. On Tuesday, Cruz walked the same line with the media, saying through an interpreter, “I see it this way: I’m going to be playing in the middle of the diamond still, [but] in the outfield, and all I have to do is just erase it from my mind that I was a shortstop and do my best out there as a center fielder.” Either Cruz is truly broken up about moving off the position he’s played his entire life or he just watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

It’s not as if the Pirates are clearing room for some young shortstop who’s bucking for a promotion. In fact, when Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice updated the Pirates’ top prospects list, only one shortstop was above Single-A: the 35th-ranked Tsung-Che Cheng, who’s currently at Double-A with a 35+ future value. The Pirates are choosing to leave a real hole at shortstop going forward, and generally speaking, it’s harder to fill a hole at shortstop than in center.

Aside from six spring training innings in 2021, Cruz had never played center. His official outfield experience consisted of 81 innings in left field, 80 of them in the minors. Cruz spent two days as a designated hitter while he got a crash course on the new position. He was the first player out of the clubhouse on Tuesday, shagging fly balls in center before the game.

Oneil Cruz gets some work out in center field at PNC Park: pic.twitter.com/FW2gEs0EBa

— Danny Demilio (@Demilio22) August 27, 2024

On Wednesday, there he was in center field, and as the saying goes, the ball finds you. Ian Happ laced the first pitch of the game into the left field gap for a double, forcing Cruz to glide to his right and cut it off. In all, the Cubs hit nine balls to center, the second most the Pirates have allowed all season. When Cruz made his first catch, on a towering fly ball off the bat of Cody Bellinger, he jokingly signaled to the dugout that he wanted to keep it as a souvenir.

In a development that will not surprise you at all, Cruz also committed an error, though it’s hard to blame him for this one. With Nico Hoerner on second in the top of the second inning, Pete Crow-Armstrong sent a line drive single into center. Cruz charged and fielded it on a hop, then unleashed a 103.3-mph throw home. The ball came in just a few feet up the third base line and bounced roughly 12 feet in front of the plate, giving catcher Yasmani Grandal a pretty friendly hop. However, Hoerner was running hard all the way and the throw wasn’t quite in time. Grandal made a desperate attempt to catch it and apply a sweeping tag all in one motion, and when he failed, the ball squirted past him, allowing Crow-Armstrong to advance to third.

That was Cruz’s second throw of the game, and it was the second-fastest throw any outfielder has made over the entire 2024 season. It was exactly kind of play that made the idea of Cruz as a center fielder so enticing, and he executed it flawlessly. Of course it ended up as an error. Chalk it up to the morbid humor of the baseball gods.

It makes sense to let Cruz get his feet wet over the last month of the season. In order to make it happen, the Pirates recently placed Michael A. Taylor, an excellent center fielder who is having arguably the best defensive season of his career, on waivers. The plan is to play the versatile Isiah Kiner-Falefa at short once second baseman Nick Gonzales returns from the IL. At TribLive, Tim Benz advanced the hypothesis that the Pirates really plan on moving Cruz to right field, and are simply starting him out at the premier outfield position now in order to cushion the blow. “Then,” he wrote, “when it’s clear that’s not working out after a few bumpy weeks during meaningless September games… down in the wind and sun of Bradenton next spring, they’ll broach the topic of moving him over to right field.”

Cruz has now made 25 errors this season, second most in baseball, and his .939 fielding percentage is the worst among all qualified players. If you’ve watched Cruz play, you’ve seen a whole lot of throwing errors, especially when he’s moving to his left, but you’ve also seen a lot of dropped popups. Rather than getting into position, he has a tendency to drift with the ball, then he’ll misplay it because he ends up fielding it at an odd angle, finds himself on a collision course with the neighbor whose territory he has unknowingly entered, or both.

Watching such plays, it’s hard to come away thinking that Cruz needs to be playing in the outfield. Benz takes that concern a step further, writing:

The issues that are present with Cruz at shortstop will just manifest themselves in different ways in the outfield. Instead of loading up to break the Statcast numbers with a 100 mph throw from shortstop that sails wide of the first baseman, he’ll throw one 100 mph from the outfield that misses a cutoff man.

Instead of running out to left field and banging into [Bryan] Reynolds from the infield dirt, he’ll come screaming in from the outfield on a pop-up and crash into Nick Gonzales behind second base.

Instead of rushing a double-play attempt at second base and having the ball go off his glove, he’ll boot a grounder rolling into the outfield as he is attempting to scoop and throw on the run.

If the Pirates could properly coach Cruz, they’d coach him to be better at his natural position. Now, we are supposed to expect that he is going to be morphed into a capable outfielder at the most difficult spot in the middle of his career?

While the point Benz makes is a reasonable one, it’s worth remembering that at this point in his career, Cruz is still just 25. I do think it’s more likely that he’ll be fine in center, and possibly even great. Quite simply, there’s more margin for error in the outfield. He’ll take some bad routes and make some bad reads, but he’ll be able to make the most of his speed, and as we saw on Wednesday, when he has the chance to come in on the ball and put all his weight into a throw, he’ll no doubt put up the kind of radar gun readings that get the Statcast team all hot and bothered. That said, I’m not as interested about who Cruz will be as an outfielder. I care more about who he was as a shortstop.

This isn’t strictly on topic, but let me tell you a secret: Giancarlo Stanton might lead the league in bat speed and fast swing rate, but no player has taken more swings at or above 85 mph than Cruz. When I looked closely at the bat tracking data, accounting for factors like height, pitch type, and swing length, I came away with the impression that Cruz could swing harder if he wanted to; that having the second-fastest average bat speed in all of baseball was the result of a conscious decision to throttle back his aggression some. My point is that calling Oneil Cruz a gifted athlete is a bit like calling an aircraft carrier a big boat. You’re technically right, but you’re still leaving your listener woefully unprepared for the reality of the situation. To some extent, he needs to be seen to be believed.

Watching the 6-foot-7 Cruz straighten up to his full height and unleash a laser from deep in the hole was a transcendent experience, but it wasn’t the most fun part of watching him man the six. The most fun part was simply sitting there and seeing him creep toward the plate before the pitch, so much bigger – not just taller, but bigger – than all the other enormous professional athletes on the field that it felt like your eyes weren’t focusing correctly, like someone painted a perfect photorealistic painting but forgot how foreshortening is supposed to work.

Even his errors, of which there were many, served at least in part to emphasize his gifts. Regardless of what I wrote about his problems with popups, it requires an absurd amount of speed and confidence to end up far enough into left field to have a chance at this ball in the first place. His long strides make it seem like there’s nothing he can’t reach, because the dimensions of the field were set in place long before anyone had contemplated the possibility of Oneil Cruz playing shortstop.

More than a few of his throwing errors were the result of throwing the ball so hard that the first baseman simply didn’t have enough time to catch the ball. There’s no way to check this, but Cruz was almost certainly the most frequent victim of what MLB.com’s Film Room calls “missed catch errors.” His low throws came so quickly that the first baseman didn’t have time to figure out the right angle for a scoop. Here he is handcuffing Connor Joe on a ball in the dirt.

A better shortstop probably turns this into an easy play by charging in and fielding it on the short hop, but Cruz hangs back for a big, juicy hop because he knows he’s got a bazooka in his back pocket. Once that decision has been made, a good throw gets the runner, but only if you can throw the ball as hard as Cruz can. He only gets dinged for an error because he was able to get enough on the ball to beat the runner to the bag in the first place.

Then there was the time he threw the ball so hard that he knocked Rowdy Tellez’s glove clean off. The throw was undeniably high, but how often do you see a major league first baseman literally get his glove knocked off his hand?

Watching Cruz play shortstop was a gift, and one that was all the more precious because we knew all along that might be snatched away from us. His run was equal parts electrifying, exasperating, and improbable. While it’s not his natural position, Cruz will make much more sense as a center fielder. He’ll still make his share of incredible-for-both-good-reasons-and-bad plays, but he’ll no longer break your brain while he does so. For now, at least, the possibilities of baseball have shrunk.

“People underestimate the power of nostalgia. If baseball can use it to get people to care about that worthless sport, then I can use it to get my siblings to care about the farm. Nostalgia is truly one of the great human weaknesses – second only to the neck.”

– Dwight K. Schrute

On August 9, in the fourth inning of the Guardians-Twins game, Carlos Santana loosed a ferocious cut at a 3-2 splitter from Alex Cobb. As the bottom fell out of the pitch, Santana’s bat caught the very top of the ball, redirecting it almost straight down into the ground. With the runner on first base breaking for second, catcher Austin Hedges turned and rose from his crouch, leaving a clear path for the foul tip to bounce up off the dirt and, with a loud thud, directly into home plate umpire Jim Wolf. The concerned Hedges whipped around immediately.

HEDGES: Oh God, are you ok, Wolfie? Did that get you in the nuts?
WOLF: Neck.
HEDGES: Neck?!
WOLF: Neck.
HEDGES: God. Let me give you a second.
WOLF: Hmm. Adam’s apple.

As Minnesota trainer Nick Paparesta deftly pressed his fingertips to Wolf’s collarbone to check for a fracture, the play jarred something loose in my memory. I remembered a baseball card I had when I was a kid. It was a Steve Decker card, catcher for the Giants, and on the back it said that Decker had once been hit in the throat by a foul tip. Not only that, but the ball had gotten lodged there, requiring hospitalization. Being a child, it never occurred to me that the ball had been trapped in place by Decker’s mask. I thought that it had somehow hit his throat hard enough that it had just gotten stuck there. I remember it clearly because it was such a jarring thing to read on the back of a baseball card, right next to his batting average and his two career stolen bases. As it turns out, I am also remembering it incorrectly. I checked every single Steve Decker card on the Trading Card Database. No such card exists.

Figuring that I simply had the wrong name, I checked every other card from Giants catchers when I was a kid. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did learn from a 1991 Kirt Manwaring card (printed, for reasons passing understanding, by the electrical company PG&E) that July is the best time to go bargain hunting for a new refrigerator. Next, I tried searching online for articles about Decker getting hit in the throat. I didn’t find them; I was definitely wrong about the catcher in question. There is no indication that Decker ever got decked in the throat. What I did find was even more interesting. I found out that short of reading the back of every catcher’s baseball card from 1990 to ’98, I would probably never figure out whose card I actually had when I was a kid, because in order to find it, I would have to wade through an ocean of stories about the exposed throats of catchers and umpires. They were everywhere.

The most famous ball to the throat in the history of baseball happened during Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Pirates center fielder Bill Virdon hit a chopper to shortstop. Shaded up the middle in double-play position, Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek ranged to his right, but a high hop hit him directly in the throat. Kubek collapsed to the ground, and though he tried to remain in the game, he was taken to the hospital.

However, I was looking for something more specific. I was interested only in situations similar to what happened to Wolf: a pitch or a foul tip that bounces up off the ground and up into a throat. I didn’t think I would find many plays that met such narrow criteria, but I was very wrong. I found funny anecdotes about Hall of Famers and heartbreaking stories about children, starting last week and stretching all the way back to the 1860s.

When the 1989 World Series was disrupted by an earthquake, the A’s decamped to Arizona to practice against instructional league teams, and Terry Steinbach took a foul tip to the neck. During the 1984 Japan-U.S. College Baseball Championship Series, future superstar Will Clark fouled a pitch into the neck of Japanese catcher Shinji Hata. In 1953, Southern League umpire Vic Delmore swallowed his tongue after being hit in the throat. Luckily, pitcher Al Bennett had seen the exact same play happen six years earlier, and knew how to remove it. On Sunday, Giancarlo Stanton’s bat somehow broke off at the handle as he finished his follow-through, flying backward and catching umpire Nick Mahrley squarely in the side of the head. The terrifying freak play ended with Mahrley being carted off the field with a concussion. While it doesn’t meet our criteria, Stanton’s bizarre broken bat demonstrates just how dangerous things are for the people squatting or standing behind home plate. Although I had never seen it happen until a couple weeks ago, for as long as people have been playing baseball, the brave souls who do their work back there have been taking foul tips to the throat.

As I had only ever seen this particular play happen once, and had only even heard of it happening once before that, I was shocked by its ubiquity. I resolved to tame this unruly mass of stories and assemble a complete history, but I quickly had to scale back my ambitions. There were two reasons for this. The first was that as I read more and more of these accounts, my own throat started to ache. It took me a full day to realize that I wasn’t just experiencing sympathy pain. I had Covid, and I was laid up for more than a week. I didn’t have enough energy to write, but I did have enough to sit around with a laptop, combing through newspaper archives.

That brings us to the second reason: There were way too many stories. Although the vast majority of foul tips to the throat go unrecorded entirely, the official record still contains enough instances that I wouldn’t be able to make my way through them all without dedicating at least a few weeks to the task, and a complete history would be far too long to publish. Without coming close to exhausting the supply, I found well over a hundred. I also found a trove of great old black-and-white photographs dating back to the 1950s, and I’ve shared a handful of them on Twitter just for fun. I also assembled a supercut of the videos I was able to find. You’ll note that I intentionally cut away from each play pretty quickly, before the person who got hit has a chance to react. There’s a reason for this: These plays can be very dangerous, and some of the videos are difficult to watch.

Because I can’t publish a complete history of bouncing balls to the throat, this will necessarily be an anecdotal history. As such, you’ll be reading the most entertaining stories I found, but first I need to acknowledge some truly tragic ones. In 1961, 12-year-old Brumit Estes of Cocoa, Florida, died from a ruptured artery in his throat when a pitch took a strange bounce off home plate during a Little League game. A dutiful catcher, he pounced on the loose ball and threw it back to the pitcher, then collapsed suddenly. He was dead before first responders could arrive. On July 11, 1967, a foul tip damaged the windpipe of 13-year-old catcher Rickey Looper of Cleburne, Texas. Looper was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, but he died early the next morning.

The most recent instance happened just a few weeks ago in Worcester, Massachusetts. Umpire Korey Pontbriand took a foul ball to the throat in the second inning of a Little League game. Pontbriand didn’t experience much pain initially and kept umpiring, but he switched from home plate to field umpire when he lost the ability to talk. A few innings later, Dr. Jennifer LaFemina, an oncologist and the mother of the game’s starting pitcher, pulled Pontbriand off the field because he was stumbling. As LaFemina prepared to transfer him to the hospital, he went into cardiac arrest. “I fell directly backwards and lost complete consciousness,” Pontbriand told reporters. “I had no pulse, and I wasn’t breathing at all.” LaFemina and her assistant immediately began CPR, getting Pontbriand breathing again by the time first responders arrived. Pontbriand was intubated for two days and spent 11 days in the hospital. If you like, you can help him with his medical expenses. Pontbriand had only recently recovered from taking a foul ball to the same spot last year, and he’s already hoping to get back to umpiring soon.

To understand how this play happens so frequently, we need to start at the beginning. The earliest foul tip to the throat that I was able to find probably happened in 1866. Not at all coincidentally, that was also the year Doug Allison, catching for the Masonic Club of Manayunk in Philadelphia, decided that instead of standing the usual 20 to 25 feet behind home plate, he would move right behind the batter. In a time before protective equipment of any kind, catching was already considered extremely dangerous. Allison’s move increased the danger, but because it made it easier for him to control the running game, catchers everywhere quickly followed suit. Allison’s future teammate, Hall of Famer George Wright, possessed the throat that would make history. He was a catcher for the New York Gothams when, as he later told a reporter, “One day a foul tip struck me in the throat and it hurt me so much that I never afterward was able to muster up sufficient courage to catch.” When Wright joined Allison on the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first ever professional baseball team, he did so as a shortstop. Because he switched positions in 1866, that’s the latest possible date that the fateful foul could have taken place.

A few years later, Allison became the first player to wear a glove. That innovation would take a while to catch on, but once catchers were so much closer to the action, the catcher’s mask followed quickly. According to Chuck Rosciam, author of “The Evolution of Catcher’s Equipment,” Fred Thayer was thought to have created the first mask by adapting a fencing mask for Harvard catcher Alexander Tyng. By the 1880s, masks were used widely, but more than a century before the debut of the Wu-Tang Clan, the neck was still woefully unprotected.

If the foul tip to the throat has a patron saint, there’s only one possible choice: Voiceless Tim O’Rourke. O’Rourke was catching in Lima, Ohio, in the 1880s, when a foul tip hit his Adam’s apple and “crushed back the cartilage into Tim’s throat,” leaving him unable to speak in much more than a whisper. When he made it to the major leagues, O’Rourke was primarily a third baseman and shortstop. By 1894, he was widely known as “The Voiceless Wonder.” After his playing days, O’Rourke would go on to work as a scout, and his son, Tim Jr., would sign with the A’s in 1929 (as a catcher, of course). O’Rourke’s other claim to fame is that he’s the owner of the two most wildly divergent headshots in the Baseball Reference database.

Mammalian necks long ago traded security for flexibility. We humans can turn and bend our heads in just about any direction, but that exquisite range of motion comes at a price (especially if you’re married to Lot or Orpheus). Without rigid bones to protect them, the extremely fragile contents of our necks are extremely exposed. The neck is home to four compartments. The vertebral compartment houses your vertebrae and spinal cord, and because it’s located toward the back of the neck, they’re less at risk from foul balls traveling straight upward. The visceral compartment, which houses the trachea (or windpipe), larynx, and pharynx, is right in the line of fire, protected by the thyroid cartilage of the larynx, also known as the Adam’s apple. The two vascular compartments on either side of the neck hold the vagus nerve, the carotid artery, and the jugular vein. The vagus nerve is an important part of your parasympathetic nervous system, and damaging it can have severe consequences. Damaging your carotid artery is also not ideal, since getting blood to your brain (and, more generally, keeping it inside your vascular system where it belongs) is a tried-and-true method for not dying. That’s a lot of precious cargo that doesn’t respond well to baseballs.

For this reason, catchers are taught to tuck their chins into their chest when blocking a ball in the dirt, explained Esteban Rivera, our resident catching expert. However, tucking the chin isn’t always possible. Esteban took a ball directly in the Adam’s apple while playing travel ball as a high schooler. “I went to block a ball in the dirt,” he told me, “but it nicked the edge of the plate and had a weird side bounce and caught me on a diagonal. I felt like [I was] choking and immediately started gasping for air.” For one thing, on a foul tip or an odd bounce, the ball doesn’t look like it’s on a trajectory to bounce straight upward until it’s too late to react. Even on pitches where a high bounce does seem like a possibility, for a competitive ballplayer, the instinct to block the ball can supersede the instinct for self-preservation. As for umpires, they’re usually leaning as far forward as possible in order to get a better view of the pitch, leaving their necks exposed.

Rosciam found that Spalding started manufacturing a mask with “ patented neck protection” as early as 1888, but the use of throat protectors wouldn’t become commonplace for nearly a century. Look up a picture of Yogi Berra or Johnny Bench in action, and you won’t see a throat protector. In 1971, Dr. Creighton J. Hale, a research physiologist who was also vice president and research director of Little League Baseball, patented a chest and throat protector that was immediately made mandatory for all Little Leaguers.

At the big league level, throat protectors needed a push before they were adopted. It came on September 6, 1976, when Dodgers catcher Steve Yeager suffered a freak accident in a game against the Padres. Teammate Bill Russell grounded out to third base, breaking his bat. A large shard flew directly toward Yeager in the on-deck circle, impaling him in the throat. Yeager was rushed to the hospital, where Padres team physician Dr. Paul Bauer performed emergency surgery to remove all of the shards of wood from his neck. Miraculously, the bat missed an artery by millimeters, and Yeager was back on the field less than three weeks later. Yeager worked with Dodgers trainer Bill Buhler to create a throat guard that hung from the bottom of the catcher’s mask, and the device became standard throughout the game.

Its spread was no doubt helped along in 1979. That year, I found no fewer than five separate incidents at the big league level, including a Steve Carlton curveball that bounced up into the throat of Tim McCarver. According to his memoir, McCarver spent two days in the hospital in Cincinnati due to a blood clot on his vocal cords, then had a steel throat protector welded onto the bottom of his mask. More recently, throat protection has been incorporated directly into the facemask. If you watch a game today and look at the catcher or the umpire, you’ll see that the metal cage extends a few inches below the jaw. Presumably for the sake of comfort, catchers rely on this rather than the hanging throat protector, while umpires often use both.

However, no throat protector is perfect. First of all, in the name of flexibility, plastic throat protectors usually dangle from the mask, leaving a space between the throat guard and the chest protector. They can stop or deflect balls that are fouled straight backward, but a ball on an upward trajectory can take advantage of that opening. Sometimes, the ball can even hit the chest protector and then roll upward into the throat. Here’s a play that happened in 2016. John Hirschbeck is wearing a dangling throat protector, but the ball travels right up behind it.

Here’s a side view from 2013. Rather than a dangling plastic throat protector, Carlos Ruiz uses a mask with an elongated cage, but even with the angle of this pitch – which is flatter than that of a foul tip – it’s unlikely that any kind of protector would have stopped it.

Another issue is that throat protectors aren’t wide enough to protect the entire neck. I imagine that this is a tradeoff made in the name of comfort and mobility, but they’re thin enough that they leave the sides of the neck exposed. Many of the plays I saw on video were balls that glanced off the side of the throat protector or missed it entirely.

Lastly, the force of the ball can detach the throat protector from the mask or even break it outright. In a 1990 article in the Bend, Oregon, Bulletin, Mike Wilson described a foul ball that hit his throat protector flush while umpiring. “The impact tore the protector from the mask and shoved it against my throat, pushing my Adam’s apple what felt like several inches backward,” he wrote. Pat Borders would go on to win World Series with the Blue Jays, but in 1987, he was a minor leaguer who had switched to catching as a last resort. “I just felt I was going to get released that year if I was still a third baseman, “ he told Tracy Ringolsby. “In the first inning of my first game there was a foul tip that broke my throat protector and got me in the Adam’s apple… A couple innings later I tore my (right) thumb nail off trying to make a throw. At that point I wondered, ‘What am I doing back here?’” Borders later took another foul ball to the throat, during spring training in 1990.

Protective equipment has by no means been perfected. It’s still evolving. Before the 2005 season, at an annual retreat for MLB umpires, a Wilson representative gave Ed Hickox a new mask with a throat guard that was angled forward, telling him that it would better disperse the force of a ball. When a ball hit the guard a few months later, rather than deflecting the ball, it temporarily trapped it and directed all of the force into Hickox’s jaw. He suffered a concussion and damaged a joint between the bones of his inner ear, resulting in some permanent hearing loss. Shockingly, it turned out that Wilson hadn’t tested this new design to make sure that it actually was safer, and Hickox successfully sued for damages. You likely remember the trend toward hockey-style masks that swept the league at the beginning of this century. More recently the Defender mask, which was invented by former minor league umpire Jason Klein, has spread through the league. The mask features Kevlar padding and two sets of metal cages separated by springs that dilute the force of the ball. Catcher Tyler Flowers is enough of a believer that he has invested in the company.

In recent years, the advent of one-knee-down catching has made it possible for balls to bounce off the leg of the catcher and up into the umpire’s throat. In fact, that brings us back where we started, with Austin Hedges. I’m not sure why he seemed so shocked when Wolf said he’d been hit in the neck. Hedges was involved in a similar play just last September, when a Jonathan Hernández fastball ricocheted off Ramón Laureano’s bat, then the dirt, and then Hedges’ shinguard, sending it straight up behind the mask and the dangling throat protector of umpire Roberto Ortiz.

On the call for the Guardians, Matt Underwood got right to the heart of the matter: “Runners go, 3-2 pitch, and ow!” When a ball boy brought out a bottle of water for Ortiz, third base umpire Rob Drake intercepted it and unscrewed the cap for Ortiz. I recognized the gesture. It’s what you do when a loved one is going through something difficult and you’re completely powerless to help. You latch onto any nice gesture that comes to mind in order to fight off your insignificance in the face of actual problems. I can’t heal your bruised larynx, but I can make it roughly one percent easier for you to drink this water.

Up in the broadcast booth, there was dead air to fill. “He may want a beer,” opined color commentator Rick Manning. Underwood did his best to roll with the suggestion. “Well, it is almost three o’clock on a Sunday,” he said. From field level, sideline reporter Andre Knott saw his opportunity to chime in: “Did somebody say beer?”

The lighthearted tone of the broadcast continued a tradition that stretches back to the beginnings of the sport. I found plenty of pun-filled headlines and stories about catchers swallowing or almost swallowing their tobacco.

Even a story about Michael Showalter, who in 1919 really did pass out because a foul tip caused his gum to get stuck in his windpipe, was told with a humorous slant. According to the Carlisle Evening Herald, Showalter wasn’t just chewing gum, he was “lustily masticating a large wad.” After Patrick “Irish” Padden got hit during a 1937 game in the Canadian-American League, the Ottawa Citizen relayed the tale with exquisite sensitivity: “Umpire Paddon [sic] behind the plate got hit in the Adam’s apple with the ball and, after making an attempt to stay in the game, just slithered to the ground and was carried out. The very next ball crowned a spectator who also lost interest in the proceedings.”

During an 1892 game in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the Miner’s Journal turned a foul tip to the throat into a fun tale about a promising alternative medical treatment:

Catcher Young was hit on his Adam’s apple by a foul and nearly swooned in the sixth. Young fell motionless upon the ground, and was being bathed with water when Pitcher Ruckel ran up to the grand stand and asked a gentleman “for some of that.” A flask of whiskey came from the pocket of the person addressed, and after Young had taken a swallow of the fluid, he immediately got upon his feet. A large lump formed upon his neck, but he pluckily took his position.

When Frank Chance sent a foul tip right into the throat of catcher Larry McLean in June 1908, the Chicago Tribune reported, “It sounded like hitting a green watermelon with a mallet… Sympathetic members of both teams surrounded the dying man. Some of them stood him on his legs and feet, but others were more considerate.” [Editor’s Note: McClean was not actually dead.]

On May 11, 1957, Roberto Clemente fouled a pitch into the throat of Phillies catcher Stan Lopata (who would manage to go 2-for-4 with a three-run homer that day). The next day, a picture of umpire Jocko Conlon bending over to check on Lopata was syndicated all over the country with the header, “UMPS ARE HUMAN.” Conlan’s humanity was no doubt enhanced by the fact that he could empathize with Lopata. He’d taken a ball to the throat five years earlier.

This is a fluky play, and some players and umpires have been particularly unlucky. Last month, DJ LeMahieu became the only player I could find to get hit in the throat by a foul ball while batting rather than catching or umpiring. Slow motion replays showed a shock wave rippling out across his skin from the point of impact.

In 1953, umpire Len Roberts took two foul balls to the neck, one in the Texas League and one in the National League. The two blows left him prone to losing his voice. Umpire Manny Gonzalez took fouls to the throat in 2013 and ’17. So far as I can tell, Yankees legend Thurman Munson also took foul tips to the throat in back-to-back seasons. The first came on October 5, 1977, in the first game of the ALCS between the Yankees and the Royals. Munson stayed in the game and went on to put up an .890 OPS in the World Series. The second came on June 10, 1978. According to the Toledo Blade, Munson also got hit in the Adam’s apple by an errant throw from Reggie Jackson the next season.

”I was catching Bob Gibson at St. Louis in 1961 and took a foul tip right in the Adam’s apple, “ Gene Oliver told the Quad City Times in 1983. “You know how hard Gibson threw, and when the ball comes off the bat like that it comes at you twice as fast. I just walked around the field for awhile then got back behind the plate. On the very next pitch, I caught another foul tip in the Adam’s apple. Two on two straight pitches. I couldn’t swallow; I felt like my vocal cords were paralyzed. I walked straight off the field into the dugout and into the dressing room.”

During the 1968 season, Pirates catcher Jerry May was hit in the throat by foul tips on four separate occasions. That didn’t stop Charley Feeney of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from telling the story with a bit more panache and a bit less compassion:

“May caught with all sorts of aches, bruises and cracked fingers last season…

He was hit in the throat half-dozen times [sic] in the space of two weeks in July. Once he collapsed as he was about to give the pitcher a signal for a curve ball.

The “black-out” lasted 30 seconds. Medication restored Jerry May. He kept catching. He stopped hitting, but he kept catching.”

What does it feel like to be hit in the throat by a ball? “It’s not much fun,” said Erik Kratz during a 2005 interview. “You lose your voice, you can’t breathe, can’t swallow.” Said Jeff Newman in 1979,”I couldn’t breathe there for a second. I felt for my Adam’s apple and couldn’t find it.” Dioner Navarro got hit during a Rays-Marlins game in 2007. “All I remember was that it was hard for me to breathe,” he said later. “It was one of those situations where I needed to calm down, but I couldn’t… It was a scary moment.”

John Stearns took a foul to the throat while catching for the Mets in May 1980. Teammate Lee Mazzilli rushed to his side to check on Stearns. “I keep hearing bells, like a telephone ringing somewhere,” the catcher told him. “Don’t answer it,” said Mazzilli.

J.T. Realmuto got hit on the right side of his neck this April. “I got dizzy right away and then a headache behind my right eyeball,” he told reporters. “It was only on the right side.” The headache didn’t go away until Realmuto woke up the next morning, but he played and got two hits that day. “I went down and couldn’t breathe and almost swallowed my tongue,” Pirates catcher Hank Foiles told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1958. Cubs catcher Earl Averill, the son of the Hall of Fame outfielder, was knocked unconscious by a foul tip in 1960, and didn’t mince words afterward: “I thought I was a goner!”

In 1979, Derryl Cousins admitted to reporters that the fear affected him the next time he was behind the plate. He missed some calls, sparking arguments with batters. “Nobody was trying to show me up,” he said. “For the first three innings last night, I was flinching. Heck, I know I blew the [John] Mayberry call. The ball was only this far off the ground.” In 1988, youth umpire Brian McCleney confessed that he was most disturbed by the attention. “I opened my eyes and it seemed like the whole crowd was around me,” he told the Star-News. Although he had difficulty both breathing and talking, he said, “To me, the most embarrassing part was being taken off the field on a stretcher.”

Russell Martin got hit in both 2011 and ’12. “Any time you get hit in the neck,” he said, “you panic for a second.” However, maybe the most impressive thing I saw during all of my research was the matter-of-fact way Martin dealt with the second ball. He didn’t even spit out his gum after getting hit. He looked for all the world like any other guy from the Bronx waiting for the D train to come.

In all the stories I read, nearly every catcher or umpire who didn’t end up in the hospital (and some who did) stayed in the game. It’s a level of toughness inconceivable to most of us, and inadvisable for all of us. “It took the breath from me and kind of felt like I had a golf ball in my throat for a little bit,” Austin Romine said on July 30, 2017. “It was hard to get some air for a little while. It calmed down, and I just kept playing.”

Romine had taken a similar ball to the throat a year earlier, but this was the scariest of all the plays I saw. He went straight to the ground clutching his throat and stayed there. Later in the game, Romine get hit on the head by a backswing. After that, he was batting and took a Steve Cishek fastball straight to the hand. Only the final injury was enough to knock him out of the game. Despite the rough day, he summed up the attitude of so many of the people I read about over the last few weeks: “It’s part of the job and you’ve just got to roll with it.”