Back in March, I wrote about Jac Caglianone’s entry into the 120 Club. Even during a spring training game, when the brawny Royal sent a line drive into the right field gap at 120.2 mph, it was news. Statcast has been measuring exit velocity since 2015, and one thing we’ve learned from the data is that batted balls don’t get hit that hard very often. In fact, I can tell you the exact frequency. Between spring training, the regular season, the playoffs and the All-Star Game, Statcast has registered an exit velocity for just under 1.45 million batted balls. Twenty-nine of those balls were hit at least 120 mph. That works out to 0.002% of batted balls. It’s not never, but it’s not all that far from never.
If you’re willing to include spring training, Caglianone became just the eighth person to join the club, out of 2,593 players who have registered an EV, which means this skill is limited to just 0.231% of the player population. Still, we’ve seen at least one ball hit 120 mph in the regular season in every year of the Statcast era. But with just 11 days left in the regular season, that streak looks like it’s about to be snapped. Read the rest of this entry »
Reacher needs our help. Reacher is in trouble, and only we baseball nerds can provide the assistance he needs. Wait, I should back up.
Reacher is the eponymous protagonist of the television show Reacher, based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. He’s an enormous former military policeman and current drifter who wanders across America maiming, torturing, and murdering people – but, like, in a good way. It’s another in a long line of entertainments based on the simple premise that it’s perfectly fine to enjoy watching somebody commit horrific acts of violence so long as they visit that violence on people who deserve it. It’s also a baseball show. Reacher likes baseball. Most of the characters like baseball. They tie themselves in knots wedging baseball into conversations where it absolutely does not belong, and for that I not only salute them. I want to help.
Trouble always finds Reacher. He visits Georgia to pay his respects to a legendary blues singer and stumbles onto the world’s largest counterfeiting operation. He visits Philadelphia to watch an unnamed Phillies pitcher who touches 105 mph and winds up entangled in a plot to auction off chemical weapons to the highest bidder. He visits Maine for lobster and just happens to run into a man he once marched to the edge of a cliff, shot in the head, and left for dead. (Just to clarify once more: In this world, the guy who got shot in the head and fell off the cliff is the bad guy; the shooter is the good guy.)
Because trouble always seems to find him, Reacher takes precautions. He stays off the grid. He travels by bus. He checks into fleabag motels under false names. And because he’s a baseball fan, he always uses the names of Yankees second basemen. We’re going to help him do a better job of that, because, well, he sucks at it. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in August, the baseball savants at Baseball Savant bestowed upon us nerds yet another helping of Statcast data, this time in the form of a first base receiving leaderboard. Mike Petriello and Tom Tango wrote explainers describing how the new metric works and what exactly it means. Want to know who’s the best at scooping the ball, or corralling bouncers, or jumping up and snaring high throws and then landing on the bag before the runner? Now you can learn that information without having to watch all that bothersome baseball.
In the simplest terms, receiving works like other Statcast metrics. Each throw to the first baseman has a catch probability, which then maps onto out expectancy. Say a throw has a catch probability of 75%. A first baseman who makes the play earns 25% of an out, while the first baseman who muffs it loses 75%. With this data, I can tell you that this season, Alec Burleson has been the best at this skill by a wide margin, while Bryce Harper has been the worst by the same amount. That last part’s not necessarily a surprise, considering that six weeks before the new metric dropped, I wrote an entire article detailing ways in which Harper needed to improve at the cold corner, and that four weeks after that, the Phillies moved Harper off the position altogether (maybe they should’ve tried some of my fixes).
Within his explainer, Petriello noted that, as is so often the case in the game we love, the numbers tell us that receiving is not quite as important as we might want it to be. In our hearts, scooping the ball is the soul of the first base position. If you can’t pick it, you don’t belong there. But in reality, opportunities to scoop the ball come so infrequently that its value is in no way commensurate with the premium we place upon it. Spencer Torkelson and Jonathan Aranda sit atop the scooportunity leaderboard with 18 apiece, which means that they don’t even see one per week. The next time you attend your Saturday night Moneyball singalong and you shout along with Ron Washington that first base is incredibly hard, feel free to voice your own addendum: “But it doesn’t matter much anyway.”
Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to keep away from this leaderboard. Tango and Petriello explained a whole lot, but I still found myself overflowing with questions that this new data can finally help us answer. Scoops and bouncers and wide throws may not be as important as I want them to be, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting. I have a bunch of article ideas about this topic, but today, we’re starting small. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who has heretofore been referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
This is the last entry in the Early Shift. Starting today, I’m back on paternity leave for four more weeks, so I’ll see you in September. Thank you for reading and for all of your lovely, supportive comments.
June 21
At 3:40 AM, Derek Jr. awakes, screaming. It is Father’s Day.
I’m going to have to stop keeping this journal. I hope I can jump back in with updates from time to time, but I haven’t been able to keep up since I returned to work. I can’t seem to get more than a few sentences down before something more pressing forces me to stop or before I exhaust my meager supply of focus. I wrote so many of these entries in the early hours of the morning, and I can’t keep doing that when I’ve got to get up just a few hours later and do good writing. I’m not sure how many of those previous entries were substantive enough to get published, so let me tell you what you may have missed over the past month or so.
Derek Jr. is 12 weeks old. She is healthy. She is enormous. Like all the babies in both my family and my wife’s, she has big, chunky cheeks. When she’s been outside napping in the stroller for an hour or two, they get so rosy that it feels like Mike Elias will pop up any second to inform us that she’s been drafted by the Orioles. Even if she weren’t enormous, though, she’d still seem enormous to us. One thing I’ve learned about babies is that they always feel so heavy. They’re always growing, which means every single time you pick them up, they’re a little bit heavier than they were the last time, which means you’re always, every day of their lives, surprised by how heavy they are.
Derek Jr. is happy. She is such a happy baby. She smiles at us all day long. She laughs. She wants to play. Honestly, it’s a problem sometimes. It’s hard to put her down to sleep, because as I rock her, she’s looking up at me and smiling. Just seeing my face gets her too excited to sleep. Not that this means I’m special. Once I do get her to sleep, she’ll wake up 30 minutes later and stay awake because she’s too busy smiling up at her friend the ceiling fan. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
June 5
It’s 3:00 PM, and I throw on yesterday’s highlights while giving Derek Jr. her third meal of the day. This is a bit of a luxury. She’ll soon be big enough to look around and see the TV while I’m feeding her. I should enjoy this opportunity while I can.
Two things stand out in the highlights. First, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Willson Contreras, and Ketel Marte all pulled home runs right down the line, but the three homers could not have been more different.
Contreras’s homer followed a classic archetype. Andrew Kittredge busted him with a fastball in on his hands, so Contreras got quick and short. He pulled his hands in and turned on the ball, launching it 402 feet and into the light standard atop the Green Monster. Marte’s homer looked familiar too, though we’re used to seeing it from left-handed batters, and he was batting righty. Tanner Scott attacked him with a fastball low and in, and Marte dropped his bat head on the ball, sent it over the bullpen, and finished with his hands up high for a walk-off homer. Crow-Armstrong followed a wilder path. He fell behind J.T. Ginn, 0-2, so Ginn tried to finish him off with a slider low and away. It wasn’t a terrible location, but Ginn no doubt hoped that it would get closer to the corner, probably even out of the zone away or low. Crow-Armstrong went out and got the ball, outside corner be damned, and hooked a low liner all the way over the right field fence. There was nothing textbook about it, but somehow the ball left the bat at 110 mph.
My takeaway is that there are a lot of ways to get the same thing done. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot anyway. My wife and I have our own very different ways of feeding, soothing, and putting Derek Jr. to sleep. We even hold her differently. We’ve read a million times that babies thrive on routine, especially when it comes to bedtime, but also, we’re different people whose brains and bodies work differently. I don’t really know how to square all of this. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday morning, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal did what he does best. He unleashed a major trade deadline scoop. As it was a full week after the deadline, though, Rosenthal’s scoop wasn’t about who got traded where for what. It wasn’t about how the trades came together. It was, in fact, the opposite of the breathless deadline reporting and transaction analysis that can so often encourage us to view ballplayers as commodities rather than human beings who have little control over where they live and work. Rosenthal wrote about the emotional and logistical toll of being traded.
There’s a lot of that going around these days. The day after the deadline, Jacob Calvin Meyer of the Baltimore Sun reported that Adley Rutschman, Colton Cowser, Ryan Mountcastle, and Gunnar Henderson had been at the theater, about to see the new Spider-Man movie, when Rutschman found out he’d been traded to the Red Sox. “It was pretty emotional,” Cowser said. The foursome decided against watching the movie, which was probably for the best, as it’s about a talented young man with a powerful swing whose best friends have forgotten about him entirely after a move to Boston. Rosenthal’s article was about the team the Orioles faced the very next day.
On Sunday, August 2, the Angels broke a five-game losing streak with a win over the Brewers, then flew down to Baltimore. Monday, the day of the deadline, was an off day for both the Orioles and the Angels. Roughly a dozen Angels, plus assorted coaches and staffers spent the day in Vineland, New Jersey, playing a round of golf at Trout National – The Reserve. At Mike Trout’s golf course, they had what would no doubt have been a delightful day of fun in the sun if not for the fact that every couple holes, storm clouds showed up in the form of interim GM John Mozeliak, who was calling up another player to inform him that he’d been traded away. Oh, and there were literal storms too, so reliever Ryan Zeferjahn got his call while everybody was packed in a hut to stay out of the rain.
Those are just the Cliff’s Notes. You should read the whole article, and I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s wild, and Rosenthal managed as well as anybody could have to report the facts and avoid editorializing without downplaying the over-the-top absurdity of the situation. Instead, what I’m going to do here is answer some of the more pressing, sillier questions raised by the story. It’s a sad story, but it’s also deliciously awkward. It’s absurdist comedy of the highest order. A third of the players who made the trip to Millville found out on the golf course that they’d been traded, because Trout planned a team-bonding event for the exact time when the team’s bonds would be dissolved with hydrochloric acid. Let’s get into it.
Mike Trout has a golf course?
No. Mike Trout doesn’t just have a golf course. In April, he opened a world-class, invitation-only golf club two miles from where he grew up. It cost $100 million. Tiger Woods designed it. It’s got a state-of-the-art training center, a lighted par-3 course named The Bullpen, and a 30,000-square-foot putting area. It’s got a spa, a barber shop, a bowling alley, a 2,500-bottle wine cellar, and a fitness center designed by Trout. It’s got a clubhouse named The Clubhouse. It’s got five-star accommodations that include two lodges, five cottages, and at least one hut. It’s got two comfort stations. One of them is called The Dugout, and it’s designed to look like a major league dugout (without the sunflower seeds, presumably). It’s got a freaking helipad.
It’s important to set the scene, but this is actually the least fun part of the story. As much as Millville loves Mike Trout, it does not love his 288-acre Shangri-La. Just a few weeks ago, Patrick Lanni of NJ.com wrote a deeply reported story highlighting the disconnect involved in building such a thing in Cumberland County, “widely considered New Jersey’s poorest county, with the state’s highest poverty rate, lowest median household income and an 8% unemployment rate.” Trout hasn’t necessarily gone out of his way to integrate Trout National – The Reserve into the community either. “It’s pure golf,” he told Golf.com. “You don’t see any houses.”
To be clear, the golf course is situated right next to many houses. You don’t see them because Trout National is surrounded by a stone wall that stands 15 feet tall. It’s built on an old silica salt mine and onetime farmland, but that wasn’t quite enough space. The developers also bought up at least 15 single-family homes for their land. Many neighbors now have a giant wall bordering their backyards. Some residents who refused to sell found their properties walled in on three sides. The Old Vineland Tavern sticks out like a sore thumb, but luckily Danny’s Pizza Pizzazz across the street is safe.
Google Maps
One resident told Lanni, “I’ve heard from the city council that everything is going to be so good for the community…. The club is its own thing. You go there, and you stay there. You don’t go to downtown Millville.” It’s hard to imagine the golfers arriving and departing by helicopter are going to spend all that much time outside walls of the compound, except maybe to duck into Danny’s for a pizza (and some pizzazz).
It may sound like the name of a fish stick company that went bankrupt in 1989, but Trout National has staked its brand on exclusivity and opulence. Its website doesn’t feature all that much copy, but whoever wrote it raided the thesaurus for “curated,” “luxurious,” “luxury,” “private,” “upscale,” “masterfully crafted,” “refined,” “secluded,” “custom,” “high-end,” and “luxury” one more time. Rosenthal didn’t provide any details about the hut where Zeferjahn found out he’d been traded, but I think we can safely assume it’s one of the fancier huts ever constructed.
Another Vineland resident told Lanni, “I think everyone understands that none of us will ever see inside of those walls.” Doing so would take quite an investment. Membership is limited to 227 people, a nod to Trout’s uniform number, 27. Mike’s brother Tyler told Golf.com that membership will be composed of athletes, young business professionals, and entrepreneurs. The fees aren’t public, but comparable ultra-exclusive courses have reported initiation fees in the vicinity of half a million dollars, along with annual membership fees around $200,000. And the place is literally called The Reserve; you know, as in an area that people are kept out of.
Mike Trout and his partners bought out more than a dozen people in his hometown in order to build a five-star golf paradise that no one in his hometown will ever be able to see. He surrounded it with a 15-foot wall so that none of his customers, 227 of the richest people on the planet, would be subjected to the sight of his hometown. You don’t have to be a resident of Millville to be offended by this kind of excess.
This is the setting for the day’s events. This is Trout’s fantastical chocolate factory, and much like Willy Wonka, his visitors kept getting whisked away one by one throughout the day. I’m sure you have more questions.
Oh yeah, when exactly did all the trades go down?
I’m so glad you asked. Not only can we timestamp the day’s events based on when the trades broke, but Rosenthal also told us what hole everyone was on when they got traded. Let’s update our scorecard, shall we?
First Hole: Brent Suter to the Braves
Suter got the first call right before everyone teed off. Some players were still warming up on a putting green; some were at the first tee box. ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news at 11:26 AM. As Passan said on Effectively Wild last year, he never breaks trade news until he’s sure the players involved have already been informed, so Mozeliak must have called Suter to deliver the news a bit beforehand. “Can I finish the round?” Suter asked. “Can I golf?” Mozeliak said yes, which makes him sound very magnanimous until you realize that he was no longer Suter’s boss.
Seventh Hole: Jo Adell to the Guardians Jon Heyman broke this news at 12:19 PM. “I was in shock,” Adell said. He finished out the front nine, then left. I honestly don’t know where Adell went or how he got there. I can’t imagine he went all the way back to Baltimore. The Guardians were at home at the time, so maybe he called an Uber for the 45-minute ride to Philadelphia, then caught a flight to Cleveland.
Hole Indeterminate: Reid Detmers to the Cubs (Not Real)
So an incorrect report had Detmers going to the Cubs around 2:45 PM. That rumor made it to Detmers, but his foursome, which included Trout, quickly gathered that it was inaccurate. “I think it was good he was golfing,” said Trout. “It took his mind off it.” Detmers, however, told MLB.com that even after confirming with his agent that no trade had taken place, he didn’t feel safe until 30 minutes after the trade deadline. Based on the timing, we can assume Detmers was somewhere around the 10th hole.
Twelfth or 13th Hole: Ryan Zeferjahn to the Cubs (For Real)
At 3:46 PM, Passan broke the news that Zeferjahn really would be traded to the Cubs. As you know, when Zeferjahn got the call, he was gathered in a hut with all his teammates to avoid the rain. He had no privacy. On the bright side, all his teammates who had played in Chicago were able to brief him about his new organization.
Nineteenth Hole: Kirby Yates to the Pirates
This was the buzzer-beater move of the day. It came just as everyone had finished up the round and was getting ready to leave. Rosenthal broke it himself (along with colleague Will Sammon) at 6:00 PM. “I didn’t think I had a chance,” Yates told Rosenthal. “I did not think there was a market for a 39-year-old throwing 90 mph.” In the final ironic twist of the day, the Pirates were about to kick off a series against the Brewers, so Yates had to fly right back to Milwaukee. He ended up making three straight appearances against the Brewers.
This must have all been so weird.
Uh, yeah.
So… did Mike Trout not know when the trade deadline was?
Well, Trout planned the outing back in the spring. He saw a day off on the east coast on the schedule, and he went for it. It’s not surprising that he didn’t immediately realize it was the trade deadline. August 3 is unusually late, a result of the fact that August 1 fell on a Saturday and the deadline can’t be on a weekend. It probably wasn’t top of mind anyway. He couldn’t know that early on that the Angels — a team that despite being bad for years has never embarked upon the type of teardown we saw this season — would be selling at the deadline. Plus, he’s Mike Trout. He’s never had to worry about getting traded.
But he figured it out eventually, right?
Yes. Mike Trout learned that the trade deadline was on August 3 prior to the morning of August 3. In fact, Mozeliak briefed him on the team’s deadline strategy a few days beforehand.
Oh yeah! Trout was part of the trade deadline war room, right? Didn’t he know his teammates were going to get traded away?
Trout has said this report was blown out of proportion, but… yes. Mozeliak and Trout met a few weeks before the deadline and established that he wouldn’t be traded, Then, a few days before the deadline, he was invited into the war room. “People were blowing it up,” he told MLB.com. “It wasn’t what everybody’s saying. Basically, just going over everything. It wasn’t like I was telling him, ‘Oh, trade this guy, trade that guy.’ It was basically just a plan. It was just Mo trying to build a relationship with me in the couple weeks he’s been here. Just being transparent. I think that’s the biggest thing.”
All of this would seem fairly standard. Trout is the face of the franchise, and he’s under contract through 2030. It only makes sense to get him on board with the vision for the future of the team, especially before a teardown. But it gets weird when you factor the golf outing into the equation. By Trout’s own admission, Mozeliak told him the team’s plan for the deadline, which clearly involved trading everything that wasn’t nailed down. They went over everything – Trout’s own words – so at the very least, he had to have had an idea that some of his guests would cease to be his teammates.
So why didn’t he cancel?
That’s the hundred-million-dollar question, and only Mike Trout knows the answer. Rosenthal described the situation in hilariously deadpan language. “Trout came to realize, as he organized the outing, that it might be an unusual day. The group, he said, had an idea that trades were coming.” All the same, I can think of plenty of reasons that might have pushed to keep this particular tee time on the books.
If I’ve learned one thing about Mike Trout in researching this article, it’s that the dude really loves golf. When baseball was shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, he would finish his baseball workout, then go play 36 holes of golf, then hit the driving range or the putting green to work on his game.
Trout National took years to build, and I’m sure Trout is very, very proud of it. He was probably really excited to show all his buddies his opulent little city-state. He planned this whole trip, and he was reluctant to give it up.
Remember when I mentioned that Trout saw a day off on the schedule and he jumped on it? That’s a bigger deal than you might realize. Last year, the Angels didn’t have a single off day on the east coast. You can understand why he wanted to hold onto this one.
I don’t subscribe to this notion, but if you want to be really, really cynical, you could also posit that he viewed this little trip as a recruiting venture for prospective members.
I imagine that baseball works a little differently for Mike Trout than for most players. He’s never been traded. He’s never been at risk of being traded. Considering how terrible they’ve been during his tenure, the Angels have done a surprisingly small amount of selling at the deadline. I don’t want to accuse him of a lack of empathy or anything, but the toll of this particular part of the game may just be a bit harder for Trout to grasp than for players who have lived through it or who enjoy less job security.
In that same vein, I’m sure Trout didn’t pressure anybody into coming on the trip – José Soriano found out he’d been traded in his hotel in Baltimore because he’s not a golfer – but he also may not have realized how hard it would be for his teammates to turn down that invitation. That’s just human nature. He may not fully comprehend the amount of authority he has in the clubhouse simply by virtue of being Mike Trout.
Trout may well have figured that cancelling would have just traded one form of awkwardness for another. He couldn’t exactly go around the clubhouse telling everyone they were uninvited because the deadline was going to be a bloodbath. But it would have been really weird to cancel without giving some excuse. Everybody knew he’d been briefed on the team’s deadline plans. They probably would have figured it out.
Maybe he just thought spending the day golfing with your buddies would be a better way to deal with the stress of getting traded than moping around Baltimore and waiting for your phone to ring (though he’d have probably felt differently if he had known about Bergers cookies, the Baltimore delicacy that can turn any rough day around). “I guess if you’re going to get news like that,” Mozeliak told Rosenthal, “you might as well be having fun.”
Now that it’s over, does Trout wish he’d just cancelled the whole thing and organized a team outing to go see the new Spider-Man movie?
We’ll never know for sure, but my guess is no. Rosenthal came as close as he could to asking this question without being rude. Asked whether the day went as he had envisioned it, Trout said, “It was just different. We were all enjoying a round of golf. It was different, for sure.”
Can we back up and talk logistics for a second? Is Millville even convenient to get to?
Millville is extremely convenient to get to. From Philadelphia.
From Baltimore, not so much. Assuming there’s no traffic whatsoever, it’s a two-hour drive away from Baltimore. The team flew from Milwaukee to Baltimore, then roughly a dozen players hopped on a bus bound for New Jersey. Several coaches and staffers arrived on their own bus in the morning. I’ve run all the numbers here, and this was a hectic day for the Angels.
Here’s the most optimistic timeline I can possibly imagine. Sunday’s game in Milwaukee ended at 2:45 PM Central. Let’s say everybody really hustled in the shower and the bus left the ballpark at 3:15. It’s a 15-minute drive to the airport, and we’ll assume no traffic (not even airport traffic) and just 15 minutes to get the plane loaded and the wheels up. The flight from Milwaukee is an hour and 55 minutes long, and you lose an hour to time zones. We’ll give everybody another five minutes to get off the plane and on the bus, and then it’s a two-hour bus ride to Millville (again assuming no traffic whatsoever). That would put everyone in Millville at 8:45 PM Eastern at the very earliest. In reality, I’d bet they arrived closer to 11 or 12. This timeline doesn’t even account for the fact that they presumably ate dinner at some point.
Then they had a full day of golf, starting around 11:00 AM and wrapping up a bit before 6:00 PM, which means they didn’t get back into Baltimore until 8 at the earliest.
So where did everybody spend the night? At the golf club?
No. Rosenthal reported that the dozen or so players “stayed overnight at Trout’s home.”
Must be a pretty big home.
Yeah, Trout’s New Jersey home is a house in the same way that the White House is a house. It’s a custom-built mansion that took a year to design and more than two years to construct. Nobody was sleeping on a futon.
Something’s been bothering me for a while now.
I’m pretty sure I know where you’re going with this.
It’s the rain.
Yeah.
It rained in the middle of Mike Trout’s big day and everybody was stuck in a hut. Did Mike Trout fail to check the weather report?
I feel confident that Mike Trout knew it was going to rain. In fact, I feel confident that Mike Trout spent most of Sunday and Monday talking about the chance of precipitation to anybody who would listen and several people who weren’t listening. Surely, this was his big chance to call off the event without raising suspicion or hurting any feelings. “Sorry, guys, can’t do the big golf day. It’s going to rain in Millville. Next year for sure, though.” Easy-peasy. He must have just really, really wanted to do it.
Did the Angels get to finish their round of golf, or did the rain ruin it?
It sounds like they finished, but this has got to be the funniest part of the whole situation. Even Mike Trout’s one true love, the weather, was in on the plot to ruin his big day.
So this doesn’t sound like a very restful day off. Did the Angels win the next day?
Randy Arozarena is leading the Seattle Mariners with 3.2 WAR. He’s on pace for a career-high 4.5 WAR. He’s running a 138 wRC+, his best mark since the summer of 2020, when a steady diet of chicken, rice, and pushups turned him into the kid who only hit homers. He was an All-Star. But some of Arozarena’s underlying numbers are confusing. He’s on pace for 20 home runs, his standard year-end total. If you’ll forgive a digression, Arozarena has ended up with 20 homers in three of his five full seasons, which ties him for third on the all-time 20-homer-season leaderboard, behind only Bobby Abreu (five) and Harold Baines (four). But Arozarena’s bat speed is down by a huge margin, as is his launch angle. How is he going yard just as often while swinging softer and running a career-high groundball rate? Let’s try to figure out what’s going on here.
I always like to start with plate discipline, and that’s certainly a logical jumping off point, because the biggest change in Arozarena’s profile is in the strikeout column. He’s running a 20.7% strikeout rate this season. That’s an enormous six-point drop from last year, and it’s more than three points below his previous low. In fact, if you look at things from a certain angle, that drop is the entire reason that Arozarena is putting up his best season ever. If you ignore walks and strikeouts and just look at balls in play, Arozarena’s wOBAcon and xwOBAcon are nearly identical both to the numbers he put up last year and to his career averages:
Arozarena is getting the same results as ever when he puts the ball in play. Now, I know that he’s getting to those results in a different way, and we’re going to dive into those differences soon, but in that sense, the entirety of his wRC+ boost has come from the fact that he’s striking so much less. So let’s talk about why he’s striking out less. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 30
“There’s no weekend.” I remember thinking that night after night in the early going, as I held Derek Jr. in my arms while everyone else slept. There’s no weekend. In baseball, they talk about the grind of a long season. Even the off days are rarely actual days off because there’s so much travel involved. Everyone’s banged up. Everyone’s fighting to get proper nutrition and enough sleep. I don’t know if it’s true, but I remember reading somewhere that ballplayers consider a day game followed by a night game essentially a day off, just because they finally get an evening to themselves. Anyway, that’s what I used to think in the dark in the wee hours of the morning, feeling new aches in my arms or my neck or my back or all three. There is no weekend. There is no day off. Saturday has come and gone, and I’m up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. Sunday will come, and I’ll again be up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 26
We’re trying to decide whether Derek Jr. is ready to move up from size two diapers to size three. I mention that we’ve still got a couple size one diapers left in the diaper bag. Maybe it’s not too late to use them up so they don’t go to waste. “Those size one diapers,” replies my wife, whose gorgeous, haunting debut novel comes out next fall, “would not fit one of her butt cheeks.”
May 27
Similarities Between My Daughter and Professional Baseball Players:
They’re disturbingly young.
They love spending time at the park.
They’re incapable of keeping their saliva in their mouths where it belongs.
They have shockingly thick forearms.
They frequently dirty their uniforms.
They’re constantly besieged by photographers.
They have a carefully monitored nutrition regimen.
I thought I’d left this life behind. I thought my We Tried tracking days were behind me. I spent the past week covering trades that happened. Real trades, where one player (or two players, or three players, or a theoretical pile of international bonus pool money) moved from one team to another in exchange for one other player (or two other players, or, well, you get it). But just when I thought I was out, the Brewers pulled me back in. Of all teams, the Brewers! I started tracking We Trieds following the 2024 season, and over two offseasons, Milwaukee put up two goose eggs. The Brewers never gave me a single We Tried to track. Now they’ve had such a dramatic We Tried that they’re dragging me kicking and screaming out of We Tried retirement. What a world. Oh, and the Red Sox roped me back in too, because of course they did. But let’s start in Milwaukee.
As you might have learned from Michael Baumann, the Brewers were considered a real contender to land Tarik Skubal. That alone does not a We Tried make, but on Tuesday, MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy spilled all sorts of beans about their ace chase. McCalvy talked to “multiple club officials” and found the Brewers uncharacteristically forthcoming. He learned that although top overall prospect Jesús Made was off limits, the Brewers offered shortstop Luis Peña, whom we have ranked 26th overall on our updated Top 100 Prospects list, and two other position player prospects. One of those other prospects was also a Top 100 talent, which, depending on whose top 100 you’re talking about, could mean Brady Ebel, Jett Williams, Josh Adamczewski, or Luis Lara (though probably not Lara, as the Brewers signed him to an extension in June). That’s quite a lot of specifics.
A friend sent this article to me within an hour of its publication. It hits all the We Tried hallmarks. It lays out the offer the Brewers made, speculates on the players included and the players the Dodgers would have liked them to include. As I read on, I couldn’t help myself. I knew I’d have to get back in the game. Read the rest of this entry »
