You know the legend of Steve Dalkowski even if you don’t know his name. He’s the fireballer who can summon nearly unthinkable velocity, but has no idea where his pitch will go. His pitches strike terror into the heart of any batter who dares face him, but he’s a victim of that lack of control, both on and off the field, and it prevents him from taking full advantage of his considerable talent. That, in a nutshell, was Dalkowski, who spent nine years in the minor leagues (1957-65) putting up astronomical strikeout and walk totals, coming tantalizingly close to pitching in the majors only to get injured, then fading away due to alcoholism and spiraling downward even further. Dalkowski, who later sobered up but spent the past 26 years in an assisted living facility, died of the novel coronavirus in New Britain, Connecticut on April 19 at the age of 80.

Ron Shelton, who while playing in the Orioles’ system a few years after Dalkowski heard the tales of bus drivers and groundskeepers, used the pitcher as inspiration for the character Nuke LaLoosh in his 1988 movie, Bull Durham. In 2009, Shelton called him “the hardest thrower who ever lived.” Earl Weaver, who saw the likes of Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, and Sam McDowell, concurred, saying, “Dalko threw harder than all of ‘em.”

“It’s the gift from the gods — the arm, the power — that this little guy could throw it through a wall, literally, or back Ted Williams out of there,” wrote Shelton. “That is what haunts us. He had it all and didn’t know it. That’s why Steve Dalkowski stays in our minds. In his sport, he had the equivalent of Michelangelo’s gift but could never finish a painting.”

In 1970, Sports Illustrated’s Pat Jordan (himself a control-challenged former minor league pitcher) told the story of Williams stepping into the cage when Dalkowski was throwing batting practice:

After a few minutes Williams picked up a bat and stepped into the cage. Reporters and players moved quickly closer to see this classic confrontation. Williams took three level, disciplined practice swings, cocked his bat, and motioned with his head for Dalkowski to deliver the ball. Dalkowski went into his spare pump, his right leg rising a few inches off the ground, his left arm pulling back and then flicking out from the side of his body like an attacking cobra. The ball did not rip through the air like most fastballs, but seemed to appear suddenly and silently in the catcher’s glove. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were hunkered down under a stay-at-home order waiting for Major League Baseball to release its long-awaited report on the Red Sox’s illegal sign-stealing efforts, then we have good news for you: the wait is over. On Wednesday, the league announced the conclusions of its investigation and the punishments handed down by commissioner Rob Manfred. If you were expecting the discipline to be comparable to that received by the Astros in January, you may want to get back to binge-watching Tiger King, because according to the report, there simply isn’t a lot to see here.

In the case of the Astros, when Manfred issued his report on January 13, he found that the team illegally stole signs during the 2017 regular and postseason and into the 2018 regular season. He suspended president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season (both were fired by owner Jim Crane within hours), fined the team $5 million (the maximum allowed under MLB’s constitution), and stripped them of their first- and second-round picks in both this year’s and next year’s amateur drafts. When it came to disciplining the Red Sox, however, Manfred only found evidence that the illegal sign-stealing occurred during the 2018 regular season; suspended only J.T. Watkins, the team’s video replay system operator; stripped away only its second-round pick in this year’s draft; and did not fine the team. As with the Astros, no players were punished.

The baseball world waited 3 1/2 months for this? A previously unknown backroom employee has taken the fall for an entire organization while those above him escaped without punishment — it doesn’t get much more anticlimactic than that, nor does it make a whole lot of sense, given the need for intermediaries between the video room and the dugout. And it certainly isn’t a severe enough punishment to act as a deterrent. There isn’t a team among the 30 who wouldn’t trade a second-round draft pick and a single baseball operations employee for a world championship. Read the rest of this entry »

The question got my attention, no doubt because the man asking it was a friend who had tagged me among some esteemed company when he posted it to Twitter. “You can be transported to any baseball season in history,” wrote Jon Weisman, the longtime proprietor of Dodger Thoughts and the author of two books about the team’s history. “Once transported, you will not know what has happened — you will experience it all unfold in real time. Which season do you pick?”

Elsewhere within his series of tweets, Weisman laid out the dilemma at hand: “whether to relive a season you adored, or newly experience a season you would adore.”

In the midst of making dinner, I resisted the temptation to fire off a knee-jerk response. When hypothetical baseball time travel is involved, it’s important not to go off half-cocked, particularly when you can write about it.

I turned 50 years old in December. My storehouse of baseball memories goes back to 1978, the year I learned to read box scores. While a few years during college are faint — I didn’t see a lick of the 1990 World Series, though I do remember participating in some fantasy team-by-mail contest that year, seven years before joining my first online fantasy league — that’s a storehouse of 42 seasons worth of baseball, some of which I would consider reliving if given the chance, not just because of the World Series winners but the quality of the pennant races, with record-setters and Hall of Famers also figuring into the calculus. Read the rest of this entry »

2:05	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the first edition of my chat in 15 days. Scheduling issues have prevented me from sticking to my usual Monday time slot, so thanks for bearing with me.

2:07

Jay Jaffe: I didn’t publish anything today, but on Monday, I looked at the start of the Chinese Professional Baseball League season https://blogs.fangraphs.com/sorting-out-whos-hu-in-taiwanese-baseball-… and last Friday, I looked at the Korea Baseball Organization’s efforts to get its season underway https://blogs.fangraphs.com/half-a-world-away-the-korea-baseball-organ…

2:08	Jay Jaffe: It was great to get to see some live baseball in 2020, and I’m hopeful the powers that be will make arrangements to stream more of it so that baseball-starved overseas viewers can partake

2:11

Jay Jaffe: Thanks, and good question! In a league with just four teams, the prospects for a fantasy game would be somewhat limited, but I think the bigger issues are getting ahold of the statistical feeds to run a game, and to do so without losing anything in translation. There’s a potential for a lot of confusion with so many players sharing the same surnames — I counted seven Lins and three Chens in the starting lineups of the Monkeys and Guardians in the game I wrote about, and there are a couple different variants when it comes to transliterations of those names

Read the rest of this entry »

Hu? The name took me back, and even more than a decade later, accounted for a substantial percentage of what I knew about Taiwanese players in the professional ranks. Circa 2008, Chin-Lung Hu was considered a Top 100 prospect by both Baseball America (no. 55) and Baseball Prospectus (no. 32), and the third-best prospect on the Dodgers behind Clayton Kershaw, who panned out, and Andy LaRoche, who did not. I’d written about him a couple of times for the Baseball Prospectus annuals, noting that his acrobatic fielding conjured up comparisons to Omar Vizquel and forecast for future Gold Gloves as well as the bat speed to hit .300 at the major league level. A dozen years later, here he was, halfway around the globe and fresh off a milestone and a bit of history: his 1,000th hit in the Taiwan-based Chinese Professional Baseball League — due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the only professional baseball league currently playing its regular season, albeit to empty ballparks — and with the fewest games played (704) to reach that mark to boot.

Alas, I had actually missed the momentous knock, but caught up with it on Twitter a short while after via the Eleven Sports Taiwan account, which was streaming an English-language broadcast of Saturday’s game between the Rakuten Monkeys and the Fubon Guardians (Hu’s team). The Guardians had been on the short end of a 12-2 rout in the eighth inning when Hu, who had gone 0-for-4 in pursuit of hit number 1,000, singled just to the right of second base, plating a run.

NO.1000 HIT for #HuChinLung #???
He is a former @MLB @Dodgers player #Hu become the fastest to reach this goal in #CPBL history @fubonguardians pic.twitter.com/OEQczSBv31

— DAZN Taiwan (@DAZNTaiwan) April 18, 2020

An inning and maybe 45 minutes later — shortly after 9:30 AM in Brooklyn, where I had my 3 1/2-year-old daughter in my lap as we peered at a foreign but recognizable version of the national pastime — the announcers were still talking about Hu’s hit, because he was up again in what was now a 12-5 game. With men on first and second and two outs, he grounded into a potential game-ending double play, but the second baseman’s throw had pulled the shortstop well off the bag, and Hu beat the throw to first. The Guardians’ manager actually challenged the call via instant replay but was denied. The inning continued, and the game eventually ended 12-9, still a win for the undefeated (4-0) Monkeys.

My appetite had been whetted, to say the least. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no joy in Mudville or anywhere else in the United States as far as the 2020 baseball season goes, but halfway around the globe, the story is very different. The Chinese Professional Baseball League regular season got underway on April 11 in Taiwan, and the Korea Baseball Organization is poised to resume its exhibition season in South Korea on April 21, also without fans in attendance, with an eye towards beginning its regular season in early May. The twist is that both leagues are playing to empty ballparks due to prohibitions against large gatherings as a means of combating the spread of the novel coronavirus. But where Major League Baseball is staring down the very real possibility that its entire season could be wiped out due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both foreign leagues have been able to reopen thanks to their respective countries’ success in containing the outbreak, even if it’s not quite business as usual. Now, through the magic of streaming video, and possibly television, they’re poised to become the center of the baseball world.

Already, the five-team CPBL has begun streaming games on Twitter (in English, via Eleven Sports) and YouTube. For about $35, one can subscribe to CPBL TV (here’s a step-by-step guide in case you’re intimidated by the language barrier). The 10-team KBO began streaming intrasquad exhibitions on YouTube on March 23 — a Lotte Giants intrasquad game featuring former major leaguers Dan Straily and Adrian Sampson starting for the opposing teams — after its exhibition season was postponed. Naver, one of their internet portals, will stream KBO games domestically but right now no agreement for overseas has been announced, though ESPN has approached the league about airing games in the U.S.

Earlier this week, in an effort to give myself a crash course in the KBO — beyond its epic bat flips, of course — and then share it with our audience, I conducted email interviews with three team employees, two of whom will be familiar to FanGraphs readers. Both Josh Herzenberg and Sung Min Kim wrote for this site as recently as last year and now work for the Lotte Giants. Herzenberg, who spent time in the Dodgers’ amateur scouting and player development departments before contributing to FanGraphs, was hired this past winter to be the team’s pitching coordinator and quality control coach, while Kim, a South Korea native who grew up in the States, graduated from the University of Maryland in 2015, and wrote for River Avenue Blues, VICE Sports, the Washington Post, and FanGraphs before being hired into the Giants’ R&D department last fall; while at FanGraphs, he documented the experiences of foreign-born KBO playersas well as the fan culture, the de-juiced baseball, and more. The third participant was Aaron Tassano, an Arizona-based international scout for the Samsung Lions who lived in South Korea for about eight years and previously worked for the Cubs, Rays, and Astros. All three were generous with their time in answering my questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, April 15, is Jackie Robinson Day, though with MLB’s season postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the celebration has taken on a different form. So has my observation, albeit not quite by choice.

As a writer who grew up a third-generation Dodgers fan and who has lived in Brooklyn for the past 12 1/2 years, I’ve generally greeted the day as an opportunity not just to acknowledge Robinson’s bravery and the pivotal moment of integration but to further our understanding of the man and the context that surrounded his career. That effort now extends to my own 3 1/2-year-old daughter, Robin (her name is not a coincidence). She already owns a Robinson shirsey (her second one, actually) and both my wife — Emma Span, managing editor of The Athletic’s MLB vertical — and I have made efforts to tell her a version of his story that she can understand.

In late February, we visited Robin’s preschool and gave a presentation on the basics of baseball as part of a “Family Traditions” series during which we touched upon Robinson. As it turned out, learning about him dovetailed with the class’s recent learning about Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and other civil rights heroes, and as a result, a picture of Robinson was soon posted to the wall alongside them. Read the rest of this entry »

Picking up where we left off in my series on the impact of missed time on Hall of Fame candidates, we turn to the active pitchers whose shots at Cooperstown might be harmed most due to the loss of a significant chunk or even the entirety of the 2020 season. In Part 1, I noted that whether we’re talking about the effects of military service during World War II and the Korean War or the strike-shortened 1981, ’94 and ’95 seasons, it appears that fewer pitchers were harmed in their bids than was the case for position players. Even so, lost time can prevent hurlers from reaching the major milestones — most notably 200, 250, or 300 wins, and 3,000 strikeouts — that so often form the hooks for their candidacies, and right now, there exists a cohort of starting pitchers whose electoral resumés are coming into focus.

As with the position players, I’ll focus on that group rather than younger hotshots who not only have more time to make up ground but also, inevitably, will probably face some kind of injury-driven challenge along the way (hello, Chris Sale). I’ll spare a thought for a trio of closers as well. As with the other pieces in this series, all WAR totals refer to the Baseball-Reference version. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout is going to be fine. Yes, for all kinds of reasons it would be a complete and total bummer if the 2020 season never gets started due to the the current pandemic, but Trout would hardly be the first elite player in his prime to miss at least a full year due to reasons far beyond his control. Ted Williams, Willie Mays, and Joe DiMaggio were just a few of the dozens of major leaguers who lost entire seasons due to military service, but given their elite performances throughout their careers, their absences didn’t cost them when they became eligible for election to the Hall of Fame.

Which isn’t to say that missing a full season, or even a significant chunk of one, in such fashion comes without cost. For the 28-year-old Trout, who already ranks fifth among center fielders in JAWS, major milestones could be at stake, though it’s far too early to suggest that a lost season will cost him a shot at 600 homers (as service in World War II and the Korean War did Williams) or even 700 (as the Korean War did Mays), or 3,000 hits, or whatever. For other players whose chances to reach Cooperstown are less secure, however, the loss of even a partial year could make a difference — at least temporarily — particularly if it leaves them short of certain plateaus.

That’s one of the take-home messages from my previous piece, which looked at the ways that time lost to military service during World War II and Korea, or to strikes in the 1981, ’94 and/or ’95 seasons, delayed or derailed certain players. Aided by additional chances in front of the voters, both with longer eligibility windows on BBWAA ballots and more frequent appearances on those of the Veterans Committee, it appears that the vast majority of borderline candidates who lost time to wars are in, leaving only a small handful of what-ifs. On the other hand, players who missed time due to strikes and fell short of notable hit and homer plateaus — not just 3,000 of the former or 500 of the latter, but also 2,000 or 2,500 hits, and 400 homers — have seen their chances take a hit. The much-derided 2019 election of Harold Baines, who fell short of 3,000 hits while missing time in all of the aforementioned strikes, suggests that voters have begun reckoning with that era’s impact on career totals, not that doing so will automatically make for strong selections; both Baines and Fred McGriff, who missed time in 1994-95, finished with 493 home runs, and could benefit similarly on the 2022 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, are well below the JAWS standards at their positions. Read the rest of this entry »

When Harold Baines was elected to the Hall of Fame via the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, the argument that he would have reached 3,000 hits had he not lost substantial parts of the 1981, ’94 and ’95 seasons to player strikes must have weighed heavily on the minds of voters. How else to explain the panel shocking the baseball world by tabbing a steady longtime DH who never led the league in a major offensive category and whose advanced statistics equated his career value to good-not-great players such as Paul O’Neill or Reggie Sanders? That time missed was a major talking point for Tony La Russa, who managed Baines in both Chicago and Oakland and was one of several key figures in the slugger’s career who not-so-coincidentally wound up on the committee. Baines finished 134 hits short of the milestone, while his teams fell 124 games short of playing out full schedules in those seasons (never mind the fact that he missed 59 games due in those three seasons due to injuries and off days). On this particular committee, he received the benefit of the doubt regarding what might have been.

Baines was neither the first player nor the last to gain such an advantage in front of Hall voters. As you might imagine, the topic has been on my mind as we confront this pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and I’m hardly alone. In chats, article comments, and on Twitter, readers have asked for my insights into what the current outage might mean with regards to the Hall hopes for active players. I’ve spent the past four years weeks ruminating on the matter, but for as tempting as it may be to dive headfirst into analyzing the outage’s impact on Zack Greinke, Yadier Molina, Mike Trout et al if the season is 100 games, or 80, or (gulp) zero, the more I think about it, the more I believe that it’s important to provide some historical perspective before going off half-cocked.

According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, at least 69 Hall of Famers — from Civil War veteran Morgan Bulkeley, the first president of the National League, to Ted Williams, who served in both World War II and the Korean War — served in the U.S. Armed Forces during wartime. Fifty-one of those men were elected for their major league playing careers, and six more for their careers in the Negro Leagues, the rest being executives, managers, and umpires. Some players, such as Yogi Berra, Larry Doby, Ralph Kiner, and Red Schoendienst, served before they ever reached the majors, and others, such as Christy Mathewson, did so afterwards, but many gave up prime seasons to wars. Williams missed all of the 1943-45 seasons and was limited to just 43 games in 1952-53. Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize, Pee Wee Reese, Phil Rizzuto, and Warren Spahn all missed the entire 1943-45 span as well, with Greenberg missing most of ’41 and half of ’45, too. Several other players missed one or two years. Read the rest of this entry »