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.”

Aaron Judge has ascended to another plane of existence. On Wednesday, he hit his 300th career home run in his 955th career game, making him by far the fastest player to reach that milestone. He’s currently on pace for 57 homers and 11.3 WAR, and in the two weeks since I compared him to a seven-foot-tall god-child, he’s somehow gotten even better, raising his wRC+ from 212 to 219. All of this is to say that the occasion didn’t need any help in the drama department, but the White Sox couldn’t help themselves.

In the top of the eighth inning, down four runs with one out and Alex Verdugo on second, brand-new manager Grady Sizemore chose to intentionally walk Juan Soto in order to get to Judge. Let me say that again: The White Sox intentionally walked someone so that they could pitch to the guy with the best batting line since 2004 Barry Bonds – whom they were going to have to face anyway unless Verdugo somehow got doubled off second base – with two runners on base rather than one. And it worked, in the sense that Judge quickly freed the White Sox from having to play in a competitive baseball game. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite notching two wins over their last six games, the White Sox are flirting with history, and not the good kind. As of this morning, Chicago stands 63 games below .500, 42.5 games back in the AL Central, and on pace to finish 39-123. Out of compassion, I will refrain from reciting the record of the 1962 Mets, but the players from that team who are still with us are likely taking this time to get the champagne good and chilled. Hard as it may be to believe, the goal of this article is not to dunk on the White Sox. Instead, as we enter the home stretch of the season, I’d like to consider how they’ve affected the playoff picture.

The White Sox have played 25 of the other 29 teams in the league, and they have distributed to those fortunate franchises a net total of 63 victories in the same way that an elderly man on a park bench distributes bread to the legion of ravenous pigeons jockeying for position at his feet: indiscriminately. For a few weeks now, I’ve been wondering whether the landscape would look different if those 25 teams never had the good fortune of playing the White Sox. Whom have the White Sox helped or hurt the most? Read the rest of this entry »

If you know a Mets fan, you’re probably familiar with the speech. The speech starts like this: “Francisco Lindor is the most underrated player in baseball.” The pronunciation is really important here. You have to pronounce the so that it rhymes with he, and you have to put a big long pause between under and rated. Those are the rules. From that starting point, the speech generally continues for somewhere between 30 seconds and six hours, touching on offense, defense, MLB Network rankings, and at least two versions of WAR. I’ve never been all that sure whether the speech was necessarily true. Lindor’s greatness has always struck me as impossible to ignore. As one of the game’s premier defenders, according to both the advanced metrics and the eye test, he’s always on the highlight reels. He’s received MVP votes in six different seasons and won two Gold Gloves, one Platinum Glove, and three Silver Sluggers. He’s just 30 years old, and he’s already got the 25th-best JAWS score among all shortstops. He’s still adding to his seven-year peak, too. When I started writing this article yesterday, he ranked 26th.

But maybe I’m part of the problem. Maybe while I’ve been taking it for granted that everyone knows about Lindor’s greatness, other people have actually been taking Lindor’s greatness for granted. That would be uncool. As such, this is your annual reminder of just how great Francisco Lindor is. Because we’ve done this before, we’ll take a different tack and focus on things Lindor hasn’t done.

Be an Average Hitter

Lindor is now in his 10th big league season, and he’s never once put up a wRC+ below 101. We’ve seen Lindor have a down year at the plate, but even at his worst, he’s still been an above-average hitter. He graced the pages of FanGraphs for the first time in 2012 in an article with a title that fit perfectly with the auspiciousness of the moment: Midwest League Prospect Update. In it, Mike Newman called Lindor “A gold glove shortstop in the making,” but also wrote, “Lindor may wind up being a bit BABIP dependent.” As it turns out, even in 2021, when Lindor’s BABIP fell all the way to .248, seventh lowest among all qualified players, he managed to be an above-average hitter. I don’t bring that up to rag on Mike. If you remember the beginning of Lindor’s career, you know that although he hit throughout the minors, the hype around his glove was understandably louder. But the consistency is remarkable, especially from a switch-hitter. His career wRC+ is 126 from the right side and 115 from the left side. He’s only put up a below-average wRC+ from either side of the plate twice: He had a 94 wRC+ from the right side in 2016, and a 96 mark in ’21. According to our database, there have been 549 primary shortstops who made at least a thousand plate appearances in the AL and NL since 1903. Lindor’s career 119 wRC+ ranks 19th.

This season, Lindor’s 125 wRC+ puts him on pace for his fifth career season above 120. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, I wrote (and sang) about the electric debut of Edouard Julien, which featured excellent plate discipline and extreme platoon splits. The rookie second baseman ran a 136 wRC+ and put up 2.8 WAR in just 109 games, then hit even better in the postseason. Facing a steady diet of righties, Julien balanced out a precipitously high strikeout rate with an even better walk rate. He also balanced out roughly average raw power by hitting the ball hard consistently. This season, however, his strikeout rate has gone from high to untenable and his contact quality has taken a significant step back. Julien was sent down to Triple-A St. Paul to figure things out in June. Let’s take a look at what’s going on and how he might be able to fix it.

We should start by making it clear that Julien’s season, while disappointing, has not been disastrous by any means. He has a 93 wRC+, including a much improved 98 wRC+ against left-handed pitching (though once again it’s an extremely small sample size). He’s also improved his defense, and as a result, he’s put up 0.8 WAR over his 63 games with Minnesota. Prorated out over a full 162-game season, he’s right around league average at 2.1 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Michael Baumann wrote about the enormous proportion of the Yankees’ offense that Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are responsible for. According to weighted runs created, those two sluggers have been responsible for just under 39% of the Bronx bombardment this season, a percentage that is unmatched not just in this cursed year of 2024, but in this entire cursed millennium. Today, I’d like to focus just on Judge. He’s having the best season of his career at the plate, which is a ludicrous thing to say about a player who hit 62 home runs just two years ago, and who, if not for an oddly situated concrete embankment in Dodger Stadium’s right field, might well have done so again last year. If we follow Baumann’s lead and look just at this century, the leaderboard for single-season wRC+ among qualified batters looks like this:

First of all, no, I didn’t make a mistake. As of Thursday morning, Judge was running a 212 wRC+, which makes him tied with a peak Barry Bonds season. Second of all, I lied just a moment ago. We don’t need to limit ourselves to the 2000s for the top six wRC+ marks to go to Bonds and Judge. If we start traveling back in time, the leaderboard looks exactly the same until we get all the way to 1957, when a couple of guys named Ted Williams (223) and Mickey Mantle (217) crash the party. Judge is hitting like an inner circle Hall of Famer, again. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe the Orioles just like shopping for pitchers in Florida. Days after Baltimore acquired Zach Eflin from Tampa Bay, Ken Rosenthal reported that the team has traded for Marlins left-handed starter Trevor Rogers in exchange for Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers. The Orioles have selected the contract of Terrin Vavra, who is running a 112 wRC+ with Triple-A Norfolk this season, to take Norby’s place on the big league roster. (Shortly after this article was filed, Jeff Passan reported that the Orioles have also acquired Eloy Jiménez from the White Sox, while C. Trent Rosecrans reported that Austin Slater is headed from the Reds to the land of Old Bay; Michael Baumann will write up those transactions shortly.)

On its face, this seems like either a great get for Miami, or a sign that the price for starting pitching is sky high. Last April, Rogers suffered a biceps strain that ended his season after just four starts. This season, he’s stayed healthy and thrown 105.1 innings, but the results haven’t exactly been there. Following his breakout rookie campaign in 2021, Rogers is 7-22 with a 4.92 ERA and 4.36 FIP. This season, those figures are 4.53 and 4.42. Read the rest of this entry »

Generally speaking, late Saturday night is not the time for rational decisions. Late Saturday night is when people make the kinds of decisions that they won’t even remember until halfway through their eggs on Sunday and whose logic they’ll struggle to puzzle out for years to come. But just before midnight on Saturday, Jeff Passan revealed that the Nationals and the Mets made a perfectly reasonable swap. The Mets, currently half a game ahead of the Diamondbacks for the final NL Wild Card spot, bolstered their outfield and added a much-needed left-handed bat by sending 24-year-old right-handed pitching prospect Tyler Stuart to the Nationals in exchange for half a season of the resurgent Jesse Winker. After putting up a dreadful -0.8 WAR in an injury-shortened 2023 campaign, Winker is running a 126 wRC+ and has put up 1.3 WAR, fourth-best among Washington’s position players. Winker also spent his early childhood in upstate New York and has been vocal about his appreciation for Mets fans.

Winker got into Sunday’s game with his new team, entering as a replacement and playing left field, though his ultimate destination might be in right. Winker hasn’t played more than 100 innings in right field since 2019, but with Starling Marte out since June 22 due to a knee injury, that seems like the most logical fit. The Mets are currently platooning Jeff McNeil and Tyrone Taylor out there. Against righties, Winker could allow McNeil to move second base, pushing Jose Iglesias, who started out red-hot but has just one hit over his past six games, back into a bench role. Read the rest of this entry »

“An egregious error of Umpire Hurst in construing the rules helped Boston to two runs and added to the confusion of the Orioles. In the fourth inning Boston had three men on bases and one out. Ryan came to the bat and scratched out a short fly over third base. Jennings ran for the ball, got under it and muffed it. According to Rule 45, Section 9, a batter is out ‘if he hits a fly ball that can be handled by an infielder while first base is occupied with only one out.’ Ryan should have been declared out whether the ball was muffed or not…

When seen at the club-house after the game he started in defense of his position by attempting a distinction between the outfield and infield, claiming that the ball was not hit to the infield, but when his attention was called to the wording of the rule, which does not state that the ball must be hit to the infield, but simply that it shall be such a ball as an infielder can handle, he abandoned that position, and argued that it was not a fly ball, but a line drive. He soon saw the absurdity of that argument, as a line drive which does not touch the ground is as much a fly ball as if it were hit 100 feet up into the air.”

– “Errors Lost the Game,” The Morning Herald, April 26, 1894

The graph below has been haunting me for weeks now. I made it, but there’s nothing unique about it. You can find an identical graph in this Alex Chamberlain piece, this Tom Tango blog post, or any number of other articles. It shows the batting average and wOBA for every batted ball, based on launch angle.

I cut off 20 degrees from either side, but you get the point. Worthless groundballs and popups are on the sides, and valuable line drives and fly balls make up a narrow sliver in the middle. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that we’ve been splitting batted balls into those same four categories for a very long time now. Moreover, one of those categories is suspect. If you’ve been reading FanGraphs for a while, you know that line drive rate is considered fluky rather than sticky. Only a handful of elite players – Luis Arraez, Freddie Freeman, maybe Steven Kwan – are capable of consistently putting up top-10 line drive rates. According to Baseball Savant, batters have a .639 wOBA on line drives this year. Hitting line drives is what every single batter is trying to do, and yet somehow what Russell Carleton wrote seven years ago still holds true: “There is some skill in hitting line drives, but it is hard to repeat, and how many line drives you hit seems to be unrelated to where you fall on the ground-ball/fly-ball spectrum.” I set out to find some new way to look at this old puzzle, figuring that with all of the tools as our disposal, there had to be a better way to slice this particular pie. I failed, but I came across some interesting things along the way, and that (I have decided after the fact) is what’s really important. Read the rest of this entry »