After pitching his way back from the outskirts of oblivion last year, Trevor Rosenthal fared relatively well via free agency, landing a one-year, $11 million deal from the A’s. Unfortunately, he has yet to take the mound for the team, and now it appears that it could be awhile before he does, even in a best-case scenario. On Thursday, Rosenthal underwent surgery to alleviate thoracic outlet syndrome, a loss that hardly helps an A’s pitching staff that’s off to a rough start this season.

The 30-year-old Rosenthal spent 2020 with the Royals and Padres, notching 11 saves while tossing 23.2 innings with a 1.90 ERA and 2.22 FIP; both his 41.8% strikeout rate and 33.0% strikeout-walk differential ranked sixth in the majors among relievers with at least 20 innings. He made an impressive rebound from a rough 2 1/2-year stretch that began with late-2017 Tommy John surgery that cost him the last quarter of that season and all of ’18; when he returned, he struggled greatly with his control, walking 26 batters in 15.1 innings while being rocked for a 13.50 ERA, and getting released in mid-season by both the Nationals and Tigers.

Rosenthal agreed to a deal with the A’s on February 18, making him the last reliever from among our Top 50 Free Agents (where he was 36th) to find work. Among free agent relievers, only the pitcher he was expected to replace, Liam Hendriks, received a contract with a higher average annual value, and only Hendriks, Blake Treinen, Trevor May, and Pedro Báez received larger guarantees. Though slowed by a groin strain in early March, Rosenthal appeared to be on track to open the season with the A’s until a bout of shoulder inflammation led to his placement on the injured list on April 1. Read the rest of this entry »

2:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first official chat of the 2021 regular season.

2:02

Jay Jaffe: I’m pleased to report that I’m freshly vaccinated with my second shot, but I have to admit that while I wasn’t feeling any negative effects when I set this chat in motion about 90 minutes ago, the mere act of going to pick up my lunch seems to have set off some wobbly legs and general fatigue. Gonna try to power through this for as long as I can, but you might want to have the bullpen ready.

2:03

Jay Jaffe: I was up late playing beat-the-clock to finish this piece on Fernando Valenzuela and the 40th anniversary of Fernandomania before my symptoms kicked in https://blogs.fangraphs.com/remembering-fernandomania-40-years-later/. Remarkably, in 20 years of writing about baseball, I had never written more than a few hundred words at a time on one of my all-time favorite players.

2:03	Jay Jaffe: anyway, on with the show

2:04	Jay Jaffe: Mike Petriello @mike_petriello Me: Man, I wonder if Mike Trout’s 288 wRC+ in the first week is notable for him, that number is insane! Mike Trout: ha, you fool, you stupid infantile fool fangraphs.com/leaders/splits… 9 Apr 2021

Read the rest of this entry »

The mystery pitcher began appearing in my morning box scores during the second half of September 1980. Sometimes he was Valenzuela, others Valenzla, but every time I looked, he had zeroes next to his name. I couldn’t find him in my baseball card set, my Street & Smith’s Official Yearbook 1980, or my Complete Handbook of Baseball 1980. All I knew was that suddenly he was one of the Dodgers’ most reliable relievers, a rookie thrown into the fire of a three-way NL West race between the Dodgers, Astros, and Reds.

What I didn’t know was that just over six months later, everybody who was anybody would know the name Fernando Valenzuela and the trail of zeroes he left in his wake. Fernandomania was coming.

Forty years ago, on April 9, 1981, a portly 20-year-old rookie southpaw from Mexico — listed at 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, but generally presumed to be at least 20 pounds heavier — began a run that set the baseball world on its ear. Over the course of his first eight major league starts, including an emergency turn on Opening Day in place of the injured Jerry Reuss, Valenzuela would go undefeated while throwing seven complete games, five of them via shutout. Despite speaking barely a word of English, he became an instant celebrity on the strength of a bashful smile and impeccable command of his screwball, delivered with a distinctive motion that included a skyward gaze at the peak of his windup.

Some wondered if the pitch or even the pitcher was heaven-sent — a gift, perhaps, from the Big Dodger in the Sky. This 11-year-old had no doubt, particularly when Valenzuela went on to help the Dodgers win the World Series later during that strike-torn year.

By the time Fernandomania took hold, I was an avid third-generation Dodgers fan whose daily business began with the Salt Lake Tribune’s sports page, and specifically its box scores. I had learned to read the magical morsels of microscopic type in the summer of 1978, as the Dodgers came from behind to win their second straight NL West title and claim their second straight pennant as well, before losing to the Yankees in the World Series, again. Valenzuela’s late-1980 run out of the bullpen — 17.2 innings pitched, two runs allowed, both unearned, 16 strikeouts, and a 2-0 record with a save — whetted my appetite for more of this mysterious Mexican lefty.

That run wasn’t quite enough to help the Dodgers win the NL West in 1980. The team lost eight of its first 12 games after he arrived, which made mop-up opportunities plentiful, but even so, the Dodgers trailed the Astros by just two games as of September 26, with eight still to play. They won six, including three must-win games against Houston on the final weekend of the season, all by a single run to force a tiebreaker game. While Valenzuela would have been an inspired choice to start, he’d worked two innings the day before. Manager Tommy Lasorda instead tabbed Free Agent Flop Dave Goltz (I swear that became his legal name, though official sources disagree), who got shellacked. By the time I rushed home from school to watch, Valenzuela was pitching, albeit on the short end of a 7-1 score. Wait ’til next year.

I wasn’t alone in my readiness for More Fernando. Though he had jumped to the majors straight from Double-A San Antonio — thereby forgoing the horrors of high-altitude Albuquerque and the other hitters’ havens of the Pacific Coast League (including Salt Lake City) — Valenzuela was featured alongside second baseman Jack Perconte and catcher Mike Scioscia on the 1981 Topps Dodgers Future Stars card, which came out in the spring; the upstart Fleer company, issuing its first set in decades, even gave the rookie a card of his own. Sports Illustrated’s Steve Wulf had sketched out Valenzuela’s back story over the course of 2,500 words in the March 23, 1981 issue of the magazine:

The Natural is supposed to be a blue-eyed boy who teethed on a 36-ounce Louisville Slugger. He should run like the wind and throw boysenberries through brick. He should come from California.

The Dodgers have one this year, only he’s El Natural. His name is Fernando Valenzuela, and with apologies to the 150 citizens of Etchohuaquila, Mexico, he comes from nowhere. His ancestry is Mayan Indian, and he speaks just enough English to order a beer. He is a left-handed pitcher, and his body is more reminiscent of former Dodger left-hander Tommy Lasorda than it is of former Dodger left-hander Sandy Koufax. His future is more Koufax, though, than Lasorda.

…In the short time he spent with LA., he captured the heart of the Mexican community that surrounds Dodger Stadium, and it is no coincidence that he graces the back cover of the Dodgers’ 1981 media guide.

As Wulf explained, Valenzuela, the youngest of 12 children had been discovered as a 17-year-old by superscout Mike Brito (he of the omnipresent Panama hat and radar gun). The Dodgers paid the Puebla club of the Mexican League $120,000 for the rights to Valenzuela, who received $20,000 of that sum. Puebla owner Jaime Avella honored a commitment to give the Dodgers first crack at Valenzuela despite the Yankees offering $150,000.

After an impressive three-start initiation with A-level Lodi, the Dodgers sent Valenzuela to the Arizona Instructional League, where Bobby Castillo — a Brito discovery who had washed out as an infielder in the Royals’ organization but had dominated the Mexican League in 1976 and ’77 before being signed by the Dodgers — taught the young lefty the screwball. Castillo had picked up tips both from major league reliever Enrique Romo and the greatest screwballer of all time, Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell, who counseled his protege to throw both a fast screwball and a slow one.

Valenzuela proved to be a quick study, more than holding his own as a 19-year-old at San Antonio; he was called up to Los Angeles after going 7-0 with a 0.87 ERA and 78 strikeouts in his final 62 innings, a Texas League dry run for the coming streak. Even as a virtually unknown reliever, he drew increasingly loud ovations upon entered games, particularly because he was just the second native Mexican to pitch for the Dodgers since their move to Los Angeles — significant given the franchise’s original sin of evicting nearly 2,000 Mexican-American families from the Chavez Ravine barrio in the service of building Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962.

With the Dodgers letting staff stalwart Don Sutton depart in free agency after the 1980 season, the pump was primed for the team to produce a third straight NL Rookie of the Year to follow Rick Sutcliffe (1979) and Steve Howe (1980). Expected to battle Sutcliffe — who had struggled the year before — for the fifth starter job behind Reuss, Burt Hooton, Bob Welch and Goltz, he essentially beat out the the last of those, but it wasn’t until Reuss suffered a calf strain that he got the Opening Day assignment. Facing the Astros (coincidentally enough) in front of 50,511 fans at Dodger Stadium, he spun a five-hit shutout, striking out five over the course of 106 pitches. Five days later at Candlestick Park, he held the Giants to four hits and one run while striking out 10 in another complete game.

It must have been around the point when Valenzuela followed up with a five-hit, 10-strikeout shutout of the Padres in San Diego on April 18 — on three days of rest, for some reason — that I was moved to action. In the days before recycling was a city-wide thing, my parents kept stacks of Tribunes in the garage, either to tie up and drop at a local recycling facility or else to use in the fireplace that winter. It was through such a stack that I had once retraced the arc of the 1978 NL West race as the Dodgers overcame the Giants in mid-August. This time, I went back and clipped the box scores from Valenzuela’s previous starts, taping them to a sheet of notebook paper in a three-ring binder. On another sheet, I kept a running stat line that helped me to calculate his minuscule ERA (they didn’t put those in the box scores of yesteryear, kids).

I’m honestly not sure how much Valenzuela I actually saw on TV during his run, though he was much easier to find later in the season. In Salt Lake City, we were limited to the games on national networks; I was fanatical about watching NBC’s Game of the Week on Saturdays, and ABC usually had games on Sunday or Monday, but at best only a few of the starts from his great run lined up with those offerings. Box scores, game stories, weekly Sports Illustrateds, baseball cards, the occasional broadcast of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett that my father somehow conjured up — those and my active imagination filled in the gaps.

Valenzuela made his next start on three days of rest as well, this time against the Astros and Sutton in Houston. He scuffled early, but helped to erase a leadoff double by Terry Puhl by running Puhl down himself on a sacrifice bunt attempt, and with runners on second and third struck out both Jose Cruz and Mike Ivie to end the first inning. After walking two in the second, he induced Sutton to ground into an inning-ending double play. With the game still scoreless, Pedro Guerrero led off the top of the fifth inning with a double and took third on a Scioscia fly ball. One out later, Valenzuela drove him in with a single to left field — his second hit of the night — that proved to be the game’s only run. Valenzuela ended up scattering seven hits and five walks while striking out 11.

Within 24 hours of that win, the Dodgers had sold out all of the reserved seats for Valenzuela’s next start in Dodger Stadium — an unprecedented occurrence, as team vice president Fred Claire told Sports Illustrated. The word “Fernandomania” made its debut in print across the top of a Scott Ostler column in the April 27 edition of the Los Angeles Times; within, the Dodgers’ Spanish language broadcaster Jaime Jarrín, who was doubling as Valenzuela’s interpreter, said, “I’ve been doing Dodger games for 24 years and I’ve never seen this kind of reaction to a ballplayer.” So many people questioned Valenzuela’s age that the Los Angeles Times printed a copy of his birth certificate.

In front of 49,478 fans for just his second home start of the streak, Valenzuela again worked out of early trouble, stranding seven baserunners over the first four frames. For his second start in a row, he drove in the game’s first run, this time keying a four-run fourth-inning rally. He scattered seven hits and four walks while striking out “only” seven, and went 3-for-4, raising his batting average to .438. Fernandomania, indeed.

The streak, which to this point had helped the Dodgers to a sizzling 14-3 start, led Sports Illustrated to revisit Valenzuela, this time with Jim Kaplan writing about “The Epidemic of Fernando Fever” for its May 4 edition. Within, Kaplan described Valenzuela’s delivery:

Delivered with a high-kicking motion that brings to mind Juan Marichal, Valenzuela’s scroogie tails away from right-handed hitters. When righties crowd the plate to get a better shot at it, Valenzuela jams them with an inside fastball he perfected under the tutelage of Pitching Coach Ron Perranoski. But like most outstanding pitchers, Valenzuela relies as much on carefully nurtured skills as raw ability. “He can hit either corner with his fastball, throw the scroogie at two different speeds and come in with a fine curve,” says Perranoski.

Elsewhere, Kaplan noted that Valenzuela threw his screwball 60% to 70% of the time, but wasn’t afraid to shake off Scioscia and mix up his pitches. Delving into the cultural phenomenon and Valenzuela’s connection to the large Hispanic community in the region, Kaplan also noted the prevalence of stereotypes in the media coverage of the rookie pitcher:

Because Valenzuela speaks through interpreters and discloses little about himself, some English-speaking reporters have described him in one-dimensional terms. Some would have their readers believe that his English vocabulary is limited to yes, no, television, food and six-pack. “He struts around the mound like a Mexican general,” wrote one reporter. Other comments have included “Valenzuela’s nickname should be Pauncho” and “Maybe he’ll overdose on burritos and beer.” Typifying this sort of coverage was a cartoon in the Herald Examiner that pictured Valenzuela as a matador fighting a bull labeled “National League hitters.” Mexican-Americans and Spanish-speaking reporters have objected to this treatment of Valenzuela, justifiably claiming that it smacks of stereotyping; Valenzuela’s friends protest merely that the real Fernando isn’t being captured.

The increased attention from the media led Valenzuela to complain to agent Antonio De Marco that he didn’t have enough time to take batting practice, shag fly balls, or otherwise prepare for his starts, so when the Dodgers embarked upon their first East Coast road trip of the season, they laid down new ground rules: one press conference his first day in town, another after he pitched, but no more than that.

Fernandomania traveled north of the border to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, where 46,405 fans — more than the total for the day before and the day after — watched Valenzuela take on the Expos. Opposite Bill Gullickson, he didn’t allow a ball out of the infield until the sixth inning, and carried a shutout into the eighth, running his scoreless streak to 36 innings, but gave up three singles and a game-tying run. He stayed in the game, which remained tied through nine innings. Lasorda lifted him for pinch-hitter Reggie Smith in the top of the 10th; Smith’s one-out single off Gullickson brought in the first of five runs, giving Valenzuela his sixth straight victory.

In New York, Valenzuela encountered a media circus of more than 100 people in the Shea Stadium Diamond Club, including SI’s Kaplan, checking in again for what would become the magazine’s May 18 cover story. Facing the Mets in front of 39,848 fans, he was again wobbly in the early innings as he failed to locate his screwball. He escaped bases-loaded jams in the first two innings and stranded two in the third, but he got things under control, and finished with an 11-strikeout shutout and a 1-0 victory. According to Kaplan, he had thrown 137 pitches, a career high.

“Like a crafty fish, Valenzuela had allowed the Mets a good chase (five walks, seven hits) but no catch,” wrote Kaplan. “And like frustrated fishermen, the Mets had nothing to show for their efforts but exasperation.”

Valenzuela and the Dodgers returned home to face the Expos on May 14. In front of 53,906 fans, he held the Expos to three hits, but two of them were solo homers. A third-inning shot by Chris Speier was not only the first that Valenzuela had surrendered in the majors but the first time that he had fallen behind on the scoreboard all season. An eighth-inning homer by Andre Dawson tied the score at 2-2. Minutes after that happened, Guerrero led off the ninth with a solo homer off Steve Ratzer, making Valenzuela a winner yet again.

With victories in the first eight starts of his career, Valenzuela had matched a feat last accomplished by Red Sox right-hander Dave “Boo” Ferriss in 1945. With no Baseball-Reference Play Index in those days, the writers who had frequently invoked Ferriss’ name during Valenzuela’s run likely didn’t know that the precocious lefty had matched the feat of an even bigger name in baseball history — or that both had been far outdone:

Valenzuela graced the cover of Sports Illustrated’s May 18 issue with the headline “Unreal!” A year later, after taking a class in BASIC, I would teach myself how to program high-resolution graphics on our family’s Apple II+ by tracing over this cover with graph paper and painstakingly typing in the coordinates. Two decades and change later, with my own copy of the magazine long gone, I would purchase a replacement on eBay.

“Will the Bubble Ever Burst?” asked the headline of Kaplan’s story, accompanying a photo of the phenom blowing a bubble while sitting on the Dodgers’ bench. The bubble burst, in fact, on May 18 — the cover jinx strikes again — when Valenzuela, working on three days of rest, was roughed up for four runs in seven innings by the Phillies, the defending champions. That not only ended my box score clipping but began a three-start skid during which Valenzuela yielded 16 runs (15 earned) in 18.2 innings, ballooning his ERA to 1.89; in the last of those starts, on May 28 in Atlanta, he was chased during a seven-run fourth inning.

Valenzuela righted the ship with a two-run, 11-strikeout complete game against the Braves on June 1 (yet another start on three days of rest), then alternated bad and good starts. Between those two outings, he accepted an invitation from President Ronald Reagan to attend a state luncheon at the White House honoring Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo. Now that was unreal.

Valenzuela’s last start fell on June 11, the final day before the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike over the issue of free agent compensation, meaning what a team losing a player to another team was entitled to, an issue that the players believed was an attempt to undermine players’ new-found rights. It was the fifth work stoppage in MLBPA history but the first midseason player strike, and it was a doozy, lasting 50 days.

Valenzuela was 9-4 with a 2.45 ERA at the time. The Dodgers, who had led the NL West by as much as 6 1/2 games in late May before losing nine out of 14, were 36-21, half a game ahead of the Reds in the NL West race. The strike was a bummer, but living in a city with a Triple-A team, and visiting my grandparents in a city with a Low-A club — Walla Walla, Washington, where I saw Tony Gwynn, previously known to me as an all-Western Athletic Conference point guard, start his professional career — I wasn’t starved for baseball.

And I didn’t resent the players. I had already read Jim Bouton’s Ball Four once or twice, and while the four-letter words and the stories of Mickey Mantle were of greater interest at that point, I knew who Marvin Miller was and understood his and the union’s role in attempting to level the playing field against the owners and their constant shenanigans. Ball Four made it abundantly clear even to a pre-teen that baseball executives were doing more screwing than Mantle.

Play finally resumed with the All-Star Game on August 9. Valenzuela got the starting nod and worked a scoreless inning, surrendering singles to Rod Carew (who was soon caught stealing) and Willie Randolph, then getting George Brett and Dave Winfield to ground out.

His second half wasn’t as sensational as the first, but he picked up steam in late August, allowing seven runs across a six-start, 52-inning stretch. He struck out a season-high 12 against the Cardinals on August 22, threw four-hit shutouts against the Cubs on August 27 and then the Cardinals on September 6, separated by a 10-inning, one-run outing against the Pirates on September 1. He spun his eighth shutout of the year, a three-hitter against the Braves on September 17. Strike or no, that gave him a share of the record for a rookie, matching dead-ball era pitchers Russ Ford (1910) and Reb Russell (1913).

Thanks to that late run, Valenzuela finished the regular season 13-7 with a 2.48 ERA (seventh in the NL). His 25 starts, 11 complete games, 192.1 innings and 180 strikeouts — in just over two-thirds of a season, remember — all led the league. WAR hadn’t been invented yet, of course, but whether by FanGraphs’ reckoning (4.9 fWAR) or that of Baseball-Reference (4.8 bWAR), Valenzuela ranked second to Steve Carlton, though his offense (.250/.262/.281) either pulled him into a tie with the future Hall of Famer (5.3 fWAR) or narrowed the gap (5.3 bWAR to 5.5). Via another stat that hadn’t been invented, K+% (adjusted strikeout rate), Valenzuela’s 184 mark led the league, though it took a back seat to the rookie record held by Herb Score (222) and would soon be surpassed by fireballing Mets phenom Dwight Gooden (212 in 1984).

The Dodgers did not play particularly well after the strike, going 27-26, but they didn’t have to, because the powers that be agreed upon a split-season format in which the teams that led their divisions at the time of the strike would qualify for a best-of-five series to be played against the division leaders from the second half; the winner of those series would advance to the best-of-five League Championship Series. With second baseman Davey Lopes struggling and injured, the Dodgers used the second half to take a long look at Steve Sax; Lopes, a pending free agent, would depart after the season, breaking up the Longest Running Infield, which included first baseman Steve Garvey, shortstop Bill Russell, and third baseman Ron Cey and which had been together since mid-1973, anchoring three pennant winners.

The split-season format was controversial, because in the cases of both NL divisions, the teams with the best overall records, the Cardinals (59-43) and Reds (66-42), failed to qualify for the postseason. Then again, the first half-winning teams might have played with greater urgency had they not been assured of a playoff berth.

For the first Division Series, the Dodgers faced off against — who else? – the Astros, with Valenzuela getting the nod against Nolan Ryan, who had no-hit them on September 26, surpassing Koufax with his record-breaking fifth no-no. While center fielder Ken Landreaux broke up Ryan’s no-hit bid with one out in the first inning of this one, the Dodgers managed just a lone walk against him over the next five frames. The game remained scoreless until the bottom of the sixth, when the Astros scratched out a two-out rally on singles by Puhl and Tony Scott sandwiching a walk by Phil Garner. Garvey countered with a solo homer in the next frame, but that would be the Dodgers’ only other hit on the night. With the score tied in the ninth, Valenzuela was pulled for pinch-hitter Jay Johnstone to no avail, and the Astros won in the bottom of the frame on Alan Ashby’s two-out, two-run homer off Dave Stewart.

In the parched run environment of the Astrodome, the Astros walked off in Game 2 as well via a 1-0 win in 11 innings, pushing the Dodgers’ season to the brink. With the series shifting to Los Angeles, they won Game 3, 6-1, and Valenzuela returned on three days of rest (his sixth time of doing so that year), this time matched up against Vern Ruhle. The 20-year-old rookie was stifling, retiring the first 13 hitters he faced before Cesar Cedeno singled and then was caught stealing. A fifth-inning solo homer by Guerrero and an insurance run in the seventh gave Valenzuela all the cushion he needed; he yielded just four hits and a walk, though the Astros broke through for a run with two outs in the ninth. The Dodgers would win the rubber game behind a five-hit shutout by Reuss, advancing them to the NLCS against the Expos.

With the series starting in L.A., the Dodgers took the opener behind Hooton, but Valenzuela, again on short rest, was touched for three runs in six innings in Game 2 while his teammates were shut out by Ray Burris, who allowed just five hits. The Expos won Game 3 back in Montreal, but the Dodgers, again on the brink of elimination, countered with a Game 4 win, rallying for six runs in the eighth and ninth to break open a 1-1 game.

Valenzuela returned for Game 5, which was delayed a day by snow and cold weather in Montreal, affording both him (and Burris) a full four days of rest for a change.

The Expos struck first, when rookie speedster Tim Raines hit a leadoff double, took third on a sacrifice bunt when Raines beat Valenzuela’s throw, and scored on a double play grounder by Dawson. Valenzuela himself drove in the game-tying run in the fifth via an RBI groundout after singles by Rick Monday and Guerrero and a wild pitch. The 1-1 deadlock held until the ninth inning, when staff ace Steve Rogers came on in relief after Burris was lifted for a pinch-hitter. With two outs and nobody on, Monday hit a sinker that didn’t sink until it had cleared the center field wall, giving the Dodgers the lead.

With Valenzuela having thrown “only” 96 pitches through eight, Lasorda sent him back out for the ninth. He quickly retired the first two hitters, then labored, walking both Gary Carter and Larry Parrish on a total of 13 pitches. Lasorda gave his lefty the hook in favor of Welch, who needed just one pitch to retire Jerry White and send the Dodgers back to the World Series.

The World Series! Against the Yankees! As a kid who desperately wanted to witness the Dodgers winning a championship against their historic rivals, I could only imagine how the players — so many of whom were on the 1977 and ’78 teams that had lost those two Fall Classics — must have felt. But I understood this, felt it in my bones: Fernando was the equalizer, and the Dodgers, who had just won five straight elimination games, were the team of destiny.

The Yankees appeared to have other ideas. Even with Reggie Jackson missing the first two games due to a leg injury suffered while running the bases in the ALCS, the team took the first two games in the Bronx, with Ron Guidry and ex-Dodger Tommy John shutting down the Dodgers’ offense, aided by third baseman Graig Nettles reprising his defensive acrobatics from the 1978 World Series. My certainty about the Dodgers and destiny was shaken.

Valenzuela was not, though by this point, with 223 regular- and postseason innings under his belt, and with just three days of rest, he wasn’t sharp. Nonetheless, he gutted out the start of a lifetime, drawing upon a seemingly endless wellspring of calm as he kept the Yankees at bay in front of 56,236 fans, a Dodger Stadium record that would fall the next night. He worked around two first-inning walks with a double play ball off the bat of Lou Piniella, after which the Dodgers staked him to a lead thanks to a three-run homer by Cey off Dave Righetti, the Yankees’ own rookie lefty phenom. Bob Watson led off the Yankees’ second with a solo homer, and a Rick Cerone double and a Larry Milbourne single cut the lead to 3-2. With Valenzuela having retired just three out of eight batters, Lasorda ordered Goltz to warm up. Righetti’s sacrifice bunt moved the tying run into scoring position, and Valenzuela then walked Randolph for the second time, but Lasorda showed his faith in his prodigy, who retired Jerry Mumphrey on a comebacker.

But Valenzuela’s troubles continued, as Cerone mashed a two-out, two-run homer in the third to give the Yankees a 4-3 lead. From Jason Turbow, in an excerpt of his book on the Dodgers’ 1981 season, They Bled Blue:

To buy himself some time, the manager trudged slowly to the mound. By this point, Goltz was loose, and Valenzuela figured that he was done for. Why else would Lasorda come out rather than send pitching coach Ron Perranoski? The answer was that Lasorda wanted to see for himself just what his pitcher had left. No detail in particular fueled the manager’s decision, but something about Valenzuela’s demeanor convinced him. Instead of yanking Fernando, Lasorda gave him a pep talk. “If you don’t give up another run,” he said in Spanish, according to ESPN, “we’re going to win this ballgame.” Si no te rindes otra carrera, vamos a ganar este juego.

Valenzuela stared at his manager and responded in English: “Are you sure?”

Lasorda must have gotten a few more gray hairs when the next two batters reached base, but Valenzuela escaped by striking out Righetti with his 72nd pitch; to that point he had allowed 10 baserunners. He wasn’t done pitching out of jams — indeed, he wouldn’t throw a clean inning until the seventh — but the Dodgers took the lead on a two-run rally in the fifth against relievers George Frazier (who would be charged with three losses in the series) and Rudy May. Righetti had failed to retire either of the two batters he faced after hitting for himself in what turned out to be a pivotal blunder by manager Bob Lemon. An added benefit of removing the Yankees’ southpaw was that Lasorda could replace righty-swinging catcher Steve Yeager, who had caught Valenzuela just twice all season, with the lefty-swinging Scioscia, his regular batterymate.

The Yankees didn’t go quietly; Valenzuela needed a double play off the bat of Bobby Murcer after putting the first two men on base in the eighth. With his pitch count past 130, and with the left-handed Howe and the right-handed Stewart getting loose in the bullpen, he retired Mumphrey, Winfield, and Piniella in order in the ninth, striking out Sweet Lou swinging at a fastball.

The final tally: 147 pitches according to Baseball-Reference, nine hits, seven walks (tying Guidry’s World Series record, set in Game 3 of the 1978 matchup against the Dodgers when the Yankees were down two games to none), and six strikeouts. His 41 batters faced was one short of the World Series record set by the Orioles’ Mike Flanagan in the 1979 opener.

It wasn’t pretty, but Valenzuela got the job done, and turned the World Series. The Dodgers won Games 4 and 5 by one run apiece, then blew out the Yankees in the Bronx in Game 6 to claim their first championship since 1965, and the first of my lifetime. Valenzuela, lined up for a potential Game 7, could finally rest his arm.

As a fan, I was on cloud nine. Valenzuela had quickly become my favorite player, not that I held the likes of Cey, Lopes, Guerrero and Smith in any less esteem; for their offensive heroics, Cey and Guerrero shared co-MVP honors with Yeager. Great players all, but they lacked the special something of Fernando.

A couple of weeks after the World Series ended, Valenzuela not only beat out Raines for NL Rookie of the Year honors, he became the first rookie to win a Cy Young award, edging Tom Seaver for that honor. The heavy workload that the young lefty so willingly carried that season did not break him. On the contrary, Valenzuela continued to excel, posting a 3.04 ERA (116 ERA+) over the next five seasons while averaging 269 innings per year, making the NL All-Star team in each of those seasons. His 31.9 fWAR from 1981-86 outdid all other pitchers by over six wins; his 27.1 bWAR ranked second only to Dave Stieb (33.6). He finished third in the Cy Young voting in 1982, and second in ’86. Not until 1988 did he finally land on the Disabled List due to a stretched anterior capsule, breaking a streak of 255 consecutive starts. That he missed the Dodgers’ unlikely championship run was bittersweet, but it was Orel Hershiser’s turn to shine.

The spring after that championship, won while I was a freshman in college, my family arranged to have me meet them for my spring break in Orlando, Florida, close enough to get to Dodgertown for four games. Only then did I get to see my favorite player pitch in person. By that point, he was basically a league-average hurler, though he still had some highlights in his arm, including a 1990 no-hitter and an unlikely renaissance with the Padres in 1996, after he passed through the hands of three other teams. He didn’t compile strong enough numbers to make it to the Hall of Fame — oh, if ever there were a case to mount, I’d be all over it — but his heroics were the apex of my childhood fandom.

If you had Jonathan Lucroy driving in the first runs of the Nationals’ 2021 season, take your ticket to the window and claim your winnings. Due to a COVID-19 outbreak that forced the team to sideline nine players, the 34-year-old backstop, who was unemployed as of last week, suddenly became Max Scherzer’s batterymate for the Nationals’ season opener against the Braves. Things didn’t go well at the outset, but in his first major league plate appearance in about a year and a half, Lucroy helped the Nationals’ ace dig out of an early 3-0 hole with a two-run double.

In their first game in front of fans since winning the 2019 World Series — albeit just 4,801 fans, with Nationals Park only allowed to be filled to about 12% capacity — the Nationals completed a dramatic comeback via Juan Soto’s walk-off single in the ninth for a belated Opening Day win under very strange circumstances.

The situation was the culmination of a sequence of events that served to remind Major League Baseball that yes, there’s still a pandemic going on. Despite just 25 players out of a total of more than 2,000 testing positive for COVID-19 either on intake or during spring training, MLB made it exactly zero days into the regular season before having to deal with its first outbreak. The marquee Opening Day matchup between Scherzer and the Met’s Jacob deGrom was postponed after the test of a Washington player from Monday, the final day of spring training, came back positive. The remainder of the three-game series was scrubbed once the total number of positives climbed to four, with nine other players quarantined following contact tracing. Read the rest of this entry »

While José Berríos and Corbin Burnes were rightly grabbing everyone’s attention for their dueling no-hit bids on Saturday evening, Byron Buxton played the hero on the offensive side, producing the game’s first hit and first run via his seventh-inning solo homer. It was Buxton’s second game in a row with a homer, as he went yard on Opening Day as well, and even though he left Sunday’s game before he run his streak to third in a row — thankfully, not an injury, merely a “non-COVID related illness” — his start once again kindled hopes that the speedy center fielder can put together a full season worthy of his talents.

First, the pretty pictures. If you haven’t seen Buxton’s Opening Day home run off the Brewers’ Eric Yardley, it was a sight to behold, a towering shot that caromed off the American Family Field scoreboard:

The projected distance on that 111.4 mph blast was 456 feet, a career high that outdistanced his June 5, 2019 homer off Cleveland’s Tyler Olson by two feet. And once again, here’s Buxton’s homer off Burnes, which had a projected distance of 411 feet:

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For fans of dominant pitching, Saturday evening’s Twins-Brewers contest set a high bar for the season. At American Family Field (ugh), Minnesota’s José Berríos and Milwaukee’s Corbin Burnes both turned in electrifying performances, each pitching six complete innings of no-hit ball and reaching double digits in strikeouts. At one point, the pair combined to strike out 10 batters in a row. Burnes carried his no-hit bid deeper into the game, getting one out in the seventh before serving up a solo homer to Byron Buxton and departing. Berríos, meanwhile, became the latest pitcher to be removed with his no-hitter intact. Twins reliever Tyler Duffey finally gave up a hit to Omar Narváez in the eighth, but Minnesota held on to win 2-0.

The two 26-year-old righties offered contrasting styles for their dominance. Berríos, the more established of the pair, averaged 95.3 mph with his four-seam fastball and went as high as 96.9 mph, but racked up strikeouts largely by getting hitters to chase low curveballs. Burnes, the harder thrower and the better hurler last year — his 2.4 WAR tied for sixth among all starters — overpowered hitters with a befuddling cutter that averaged 96.3 mph (3.2 mph faster than last season, when only Dustin May outdid him) and reached 97.9 mph. He paired that with a sinker that averaged 98.0 mph and maxed out at 98.8.

The tone for the matchup was set on the first batter of the game. Burnes, whose 36.7% strikeout rate last year was the majors’ fourth-highest among pitchers with at least 50 innings, struck out Twins leadoff hitter Luis Arraez swinging at a 97.6 mph cutter in the middle of the zone — no small matter given how tough he is to punch out. Last year, Arraez had the majors’ fourth-lowest swinging-strike rate among batters with at least 100 PA last year (3.5%) and the third-lowest strikeout rate (9.1%).

That was the only batter Burnes struck out in a 10-pitch first. Berríos notched his first strikeout by getting Christian Yelich to chase a low curveball to close the first inning, which started the two pitchers’ streak. Burnes returned to strike out Max Kepler, Miguel Sanó, and Jake Cave in the second, with Berríos doing the same to Keston Hiura, Jackie Bradley Jr., and Lorenzo Cain. Then Burnes mowed down Ryan Jeffers, Andrelton Simmons, and Berríos himself, batting under National League rules. The stretch of 10 straight strikeouts finally came to an end when Narváez, who would do double duty in his spoiler role, grounded to third base to start the third inning.

Berríos went on to strike out the side (Kolten Wong, Travis Shaw, and Yelich again) in the fourth. No batter reached base for either side until the fifth inning, when Burnes hit Cave and Berríos hit Hiura in their respective halves. Still, neither team had a hit (or a walk) through six innings, with a 103-mph third-inning flyout by Orlando Arcia to the deepest part of center field the only batted ball with an expected batting average higher than .240 (it was .790). Here’s the highlight reel from the first six innings:

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The first-pitch temperature for Opening Day in Detroit was a frosty 32 degrees, and what’s more, snow was falling. Amid those decidedly baseball-unfriendly conditions, the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera launched the first home run of the 2021 season, and off reigning AL Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, to boot. It was a sight to behold, yet it wasn’t easy to see. Launched off Cabrera’s bat at 101.8 mph, the ball caromed off the railing atop the outfield wall and back towards the field of play. Given the limited visibility, Cabrera didn’t believe he had homered, and slid into second before realizing the ball had gone out.

The two-run shot not only helped power Detroit to a 3-2 win over Cleveland, it was the opening salvo in what has the potential to be a milestone-laden season for the slugger, who tuns 38 on April 18. That was Cabrera’s 488th career homer, and his 350th as a Tiger; it was also his 2,867th hit. For as modest as his preseason projections are — I’ll get to the full lines, but 21 homers and 139 hits are the numbers to start with — he projects not only to become the seventh player to attain those twin milestones but the first to reach both in the same season:

Mind you, Cabrera doesn’t have much margin for error with the hit count if he’s going to do it this year while puttering along at the .261/.332/.418 clip from our Depth Charts projections, which take the average of his separate Steamer and ZiPS projections. Opening Day is a time for optimism, however, and in this case that optimism resides in the fact that until Thursday, he hadn’t hit an Opening Day homer since 2009. The reality, on the other hand, is that even when he’s homered early in the other seasons of what we might call his wilderness years — such as in the third game of 2018 and the second game of last season — his production was meager.

Indeed, over the past four seasons, Cabrera’s age-34 to age-37 campaigns, he hit just .267/.342/.406 for a 99 wRC+. Injuries played a part in that decline, particularly a pair of herniated discs that caused lingering pain throughout the 2017 season, and a ruptured left biceps tendon that ended his ’18 season — in which he’d gotten off to a strong start — after just 38 games. He did play 57 out of the Tigers’ 60 games last year, and his 102 wRC+ (.250/.329/.417) outdid both his 2017 and ’19 showings, as did his 0.3 WAR, but for a two-time MVP and 11-time All-Star making $31 million annually (before proration), that’s nothing to write home about.

If there was good news to be found in Cabrera’s 2020 numbers beyond his ability to DH nearly every day, it’s that he hit the ball hard. Leaving the small sample of 2018 aside, his 9.7% barrel rate matched his high for the past four season, while his 49.7% hard-hit rate was a high for that span, with the latter just a hair below his 50% in 2016, his last excellent season. Even given the fact that he’s hitting too many groundballs (1.33 GB/FB ratio, a bit better than his 1.41 from 2017-19), his .375 xwOBA placed in the 86th percentile. The problem is that given his first-percentile sprint speed — “slower than a Molina dragging a Molina with another Molina on his back” is the phrase that I have used for such measures — he managed just a .323 wOBA. His 52-point underperformance placed him in the second percentile from among the 252 players who faced at least 500 pitches last year, and this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon; his 33-point underperformance over the past four seasons (.354 xwOBA, .321 wOBA) placed him in the first percentile. Sticking to last year’s numbers, his expected batting average of .285 was 35 points higher than his actual one, and his expected slugging percentage of .514 was 97 points higher than his actual mark. If not for some combination of bad luck and bad wheels, he’d be even closer to the aforementioned milestones; based on his 35-point batting average underperformance over the past four seasons, he’d have another 46 hits even before accounting for injuries.

If Cabrera’s Depth Charts projection is underwhelming, his ZiPS projection is even more so. Dan Szymborski provided me with a percentile breakdown:

There’s quite a gap between that 50th percentile ZiPS projection and the one from Steamer (where he’s forecast for a .266/.343/.440 line) due to their different ways of weighing past performance. The eagle-eyed reader will also note that there’s a gap between the WAR associated with that 50th percentile and the ZiPS line on his player page (-0.4), owing to the fact that FanGraphs applies a heavier positional adjustment factor to DHs (-17.5 runs per year) than Baseball-Reference (-15 runs), and that the park factors may differ as well. Still, we’re talking about a player whose median projection is in the ballpark of replacement level, and expected to get worse over the next two seasons, though the same caveats apply to Cabrera’s three-year ZiPS projections, which on his player page forecast seasons of -0.9 WAR (2022) and -1.4 WAR (2023). You can mentally add maybe half a win to each of those figures but that’s just putting a bit of Chapstick on a pig, which won’t make it any prettier.

Most teams will curb the playing time of somebody whose production has fallen off to that degree — that is the concept of replacement level, after all — but as we’ve seen in relation to the Angels and Albert Pujols, the big contract of a future Hall of Famer can get in the way of things. As Dan noted last year, because of his contract, we’ve seen Pujols at his worst for longer than any other great hitter; he’s “produced” -0.6 fWAR over the course of 3,153 PA from his age-35 season onward, which takes a bit of the shine off his astounding totals of 662 home runs, 3,153 hits, and 80.9 JAWS, which ranks second among first baseman even with that arid stretch, behind only Lou Gehrig.

Sticking with fWAR for the moment, among Hall of Famers only Willie Keeler (1,291 PA, -0.8 WAR) and Jim Bottomley (1,146 PA, -1.2 WAR) have surpassed 1,000 PA from 35 onward while festering below replacement level. Based on that three-year ZiPS projection, Cabrera is a very real threat to join their company, as he’s managed only 0.6 WAR in 941 PA from his age-35 season onward. By Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, Cabrera has produced 0.4 WAR from age-35 onward, but even with that minimal production, his career WAR (69.3), peak WAR (44.8) and JAWS (57.0) are all solidly above the standards at first base (66.9/42.7/54.8), and with the pending milestones and already-acquired hardware, he figures to be a lock for Cooperstown.

Tangential to that subject, I often get asked in my FanGraphs chats a variant of the question of whether there are examples of players who have hung on too long and played their way out of a Hall berth. It’s a difficult question to answer, though we’ve certainly seen future Hall of Famers deliver sub-replacement level work as they’ve slogged past milestones. Craig Biggio‘s -2.1 WAR in 2007 as he surpassed 3,000 hits, comes to mind, and likewise Lou Brock‘s -2.0 WAR over his final three seasons as he surpassed both Ty Cobb’s career record for stolen bases (then believed to be 892, currently 897 at B-Ref) and the 3,000-hit mark. Wade Boggs had -0.3 WAR in 1999 as he went over the 3,000 line, and given time I’m sure I could come up with a few more.

Keeping with an age-35 season as the dividing line, here are the non-Hall of Famers with at least 500 PA from that point onward who have produced the lowest bWARs:

I don’t think we could say definitively that any of those players were derailed en route to enshrinement, though in his 1994 book The Politics of Glory, Bill James predicted that Parker, an MVP and two-time batting champion, would be elected by the BBWAA in 2003, and likewise for Murphy, a two-time MVP, in 2008. Then again, from that vantage he also had Pete Rose, Joe Carter, Jack McDowell, and Ruben Sierra — among others — eventually getting the nod.

Among the players above who escaped James’ cloudy crystal ball, Bando and Bell might have helped to flesh out the dearth of Hall of Fame third basemen had they stuck around longer. Williams felt like he had a shot as a pivotal player in the Yankees’ turn-of-the-millennium dynasty, at least until advanced fielding metrics — and perhaps his disinterest in anything besides starting in center field — squashed his hopes like a bug. Miñoso’s actual birthdate is unclear; B-Ref uses 1925, the youngest of the four apparent options according to various sources, which would have placed his debut at age 23 and meant that his age-35 season was still a productive one (2.0 WAR in 1961).

Mauer and Votto are of particular interest to statheads, as we fret over whether the general BBWAA electorate will appreciate their charms, statistical and otherwise, as much as we do. Mauer is seventh in JAWS among catchers and above all three standards (his seven peak seasons all took place while catching, it’s worth noting), while Votto, whose contract situation makes him an analogue to Cabrera and Pujols, albeit without the milestones, is 15th among first basemen, above the peak standard (46.9 vs. 42.7) and 0.9 shy in JAWS (53.9 vs. 54.8).

Of course, there’s nothing set in stone about 45.0 WAR, age-35 seasons, and 500 PA as cutoffs; my qualifications above notably omit both Tony Oliva (43.1 WAR through his age-34 season, -0.1 thereafter) and Dave Parker (40.5 WAR through his age-35 season, -0.4 thereafter), two other Era Committee candidate of note. This seems like a topic worthy of further exploration.

As for Cabrera, who’s making $31 million annually this year and each of the next two, the Tigers can only hope he’s about to find his way out of the doldrums. If they’re to turn the corner on their rebuilding effort, they may face the type of hard choice that the Angels have been unwilling to make when it comes to Pujols. In the meantime, until Spencer Torkelson arrives and the likes of Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal and Matt Manning carve their places (knock on wood), we can hope that Cabrera hits well enough to avoid such awkwardness.

Hope springs eternal on Opening Day, it is often said, and that may never be more true than in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic that stopped the world in its tracks and has thus far killed more than half a million people in the U.S. alone (and nearly three million worldwide) has not yet ended, but vaccinations are becoming more widely available, and the promise of some semblance of normalcy is on the horizon. In marked contrast to last season, major league baseball is starting on schedule, and with a limited number of actual paying customers in ballparks — too many in Texas, and none for at least the first two months in Toronto, but with most teams and their respective municipalities taking a fairly conservative approach. All told, the situation is definitely better than when the 2020 season belatedly kicked off just over eight months ago.

Beyond that, MLB planned to offer MAXIMUM BASEBALL on Opening Day, with all 30 teams set to play their first games of the season on the same day, with no night-before staggered starts and no holding some teams back for the next day. Alas, this potentially historic occasion was pre-empted first by the weather in Boston, as the Red Sox announced on Thursday morning that they’ve postponed their contest until Friday at 2:10 pm ET, and, after the initial publication of this article, by a COVID-related postponement of the evening’s Mets-Nationals contest (and Friday’s as well), yet another reminder of the difficulty of carrying out the season in the middle of a pandemic.

While it was not uncommon for teams to launch their seasons in unison during the pre-expansion era, when there were just 16 teams — it happened 18 times from 1910-56, according to the good folks at Baseball-Reference — it has happened only once since the first wave of expansion in 1961-62. More recently, it almost happened in 2018; while a full slate of 15 games was scheduled for Opening Day, two of those contests were postponed due to rain.

The only time it actually happened during the expansion era was in 1968, and under less-than-ideal circumstances. In the wake of the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., all of American sports observed a three-day moratorium, though baseball, led by ineffectual commissioner Spike Eckert, left the decision of whether to go ahead with the Opening Day games scheduled on April 8 and 9 up to individual teams. Protests and unrest, and then an uprising by players, led by the Pirates’ Roberto Clemente (one of an major league-high 11 Black players on the team) and the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, keyed the postponement of those games. Finally, on April 10, all 20 teams got underway. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday was a busy day in the world of the White Sox. Slugger Eloy Jiménez underwent surgery to repair a ruptured left pectoral tendon, an injury that could sideline him for most of the season and alter the balance of power in the AL Central along the way. In an attempt to help offset the loss of Jiménez and to allow for some potential lineup flexibility in the near term, the team signed free agent infielder Jake Lamb to a major league deal. What’s more, general manager Rick Hahn announced that top prospect Andrew Vaughn has made the Opening Day roster, and could open the season in left field.

The 24-year-old Jiménez, who last year bopped 14 homers while batting .296/.332/.559 (140 wRC+), was injured on March 24 when he caught his left arm on the outfield wall while trying to rob the A’s Sean Murphy of a home run:

Jiménez is expected to miss five or six months following surgery, a devastating blow considering that he was projected to clout 36 homers and provide 3.0 WAR as the team’s left fielder. Alas, it’s not even his first significant absence due to an injury suffered while playing defense. In his 2019 rookie season, he missed over three weeks due to a high right ankle sprain suffered while crashing into an outfield wall in an attempt to prevent a home run, and then another 10 days after colliding with center fielder Charles Tilson and suffering a right ulnar nerve contusion. Read the rest of this entry »

Four years ago, the Rangers viewed Rougned Odor as a foundational piece, signing him to a six-year, $49.5 million extension. By the time he arrived at spring training this year, he’d lost his starting second base job, the result of a string of bad seasons and adjustments that simply hadn’t taken. The 27-year-old instead competed for the third base job, but on Monday, the team — which is in the midst of a multiyear rebuild after going 22–38 last season — told him and the rest of the baseball world that he would not make their Opening Day roster and will be designated for assignment, effectively ending a 10-year run with the organization that signed him out of Venezuela in 2011.

Odor hit just .167/.209/.413 with 10 homers — but just nine singles — in 148 PA last year; his .157 BABIP was the majors’ third-lowest mark among hitters with at least 120 PA. His 60 wRC+ wasn’t a career low, but it was the third year out of the past four that he was below 80, and his -0.3 WAR marked his second season in that span that he was below replacement level, though his 0.3 WAR in 581 PA in 2019 was hardly more acceptable. His 1.6 WAR while playing second is the lowest among the 19 players who have received at least 1,000 PA at the position over the past four seasons.

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