The Cardinals are only second in the NL Central right now, but they’ve been having some fun lately. On back-to-back Sundays, they sent elder statesmen (and likely future Hall of Famers) to the mound to close out lopsided games — first Albert Pujols against the Giants and then Yadier Molina against the Pirates. What’s more, the Cardinals were on top in both of those games by double-digit scores, placing the pair in a rare subset within the annals of position players pitching.

That’s not the only interesting recent development when it comes to those accidental moundsmen. But as it’s been awhile since I last delved into the topic, it’s a good place to start.

So let’s set the wayback machine to May 15, the night that the Cardinals faced the Giants in St. Louis for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast. With lefty Carlos Rodón on the mound for San Francisco, the 42-year-old Pujols, who returned to the nest this spring after a decade-long run with the Angels and, briefly, the Dodgers, was in the lineup. Though righties are still a problem, he’s ably served as a platoon designated hitter against southpaws; to date he’s hit .227/.329/.439 (125 wRC+). On this night, Pujols and company went to town on Rodón, scoring nine runs over the first four frames, with eight of them charged to the starter, and the veteran slugger collecting a double and an RBI single within that onslaught. The Cardinals kept scoring, adding two runs apiece in the fifth, sixth, and seventh; by the end of the eighth, they led 15–2. Read the rest of this entry »

Summarizing the life’s work of Roger Angell — who lived for 101 years and covered baseball for 56 of them, doing it better than anyone has — was such a daunting task that I knew even before I started writing my tribute that I would need a little help from my friends. So I asked a small handful writers and editors within easy reach to share a few of their favorite Angell pieces with me and our readers.

Some of these pieces were cited within my tribute and mentioned multiple times within my informal polling, so as the responses came in, I nudged others for some deeper cuts, and limited myself to those as well. Many if not most of these pieces are behind the New Yorker’s paywall, but you could do worse than subscribe. Nearly all of them are collected in the seminal volumes that introduced so many of us to Angell’s work, namely The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), and Season Ticket (1988), with a few collected within the anthologies Once More Around the Park (1991) and Game Time (2003), and his final book, This Old Man: All in Pieces (2015).

The roster of contributors, alphabetically (with links to some additional Angell-related content): Lindsey Adler, staff writer for The Athletic; Alex Belth, founder of Bronx Banter and The Stacks Reader; Joe Bonomo, author of No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing; Jason Fry, blogger at Faith and Fear in Flushing; Ben Lindbergh, senior editor at The Ringer and Effectively Wild co-host; Meg Rowley, FanGraphs managing editor and Effectively Wild co-host; Susan Slusser, San Francisco Chronicle Giants beat writer and past BBWAA president; Emma Span, enterprise editor at The Athletic; and John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball. Thank you to all of these folks for their timely submissions. Read the rest of this entry »

Judging by the tributes that poured forth on the occasion of his death at the grand age of 101 years old on Friday, there’s a solid chance that Roger Angell — a man who bore first-hand witness to Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, and Mike Trout — was your favorite baseball writer’s favorite baseball writer, even though he was never a full-time baseball scribe at all. Unburdened by the daily deadlines of the beat reporter, the competition for scoops among the national writers, or (to use his term) the weight of objectivity, Angell instead mused at length in the pages of the New Yorker in a capacity that served as a sidelight to his longtime role as a fiction writer and editor. Though his frame of reference stretched so far back that he spotted Ruth walking around Manhattan as a child, and spoke of Napoleon Lajoie with his father, he didn’t take up writing about baseball until age 40. He reported, but with a twist: “I’m reporting about myself, as a fan as well as a baseball writer,” as he told Salon’s Steve Kettman in 2000.

With the luxuries of looser deadlines, greater space, and the ability to depart from sportswriting conventions, Angell filed eloquent and erudite essays a handful of times every season, writing about the year’s winners and losers, its superstars and promising newcomers, its sunsetting old-timers, and its zeitgeist as experienced from his vantage as a privileged outsider. Over the course of six decades that took him from man-in-the-seats dispatches to deep explorations of the game’s intricacies with its master craftsmen, he assembled a body of work — primarily collected in The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988), and Game Time (2003) but continuing as late as his 2015 collection, This Old Man: All in Pieces — that is unrivaled, revered, and beloved.

“I wanted to concentrate not just on the events down on the field but on their reception and results,” wrote Angell in the introduction to The Summer Game. “I wanted to pick up the feel of the game as it happened to the people around me. Right from the start, I was terribly lucky, because my first year or two in the seats behind first or third coincided with the birth and grotesque early sufferings of the Mets, which turned out to be the greatest fan story of all.” Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to today’s chat!

2:02	Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a piece up today on the Blue Jays infield’s underachievement this season https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-blue-jays-infield-has-yet-to-soar/. And I had a piece about Mookie Betts heating up a couple days ago https://blogs.fangraphs.com/mookie-betts-is-mostly-fine/

2:04

Jay Jaffe: I’ve also got a 5 1/2 year old who just came home from school with a fever after getting Not Enough Sleep last night — thankfully everybody in the household has tested negative in the past 24 hours, which is a start — but we’re going to see how long I can push this chat without interruptions. Please bear with me.

2:07

Jay Jaffe: They should probably give him a break from closing games until he starts pitching better; he’s allowed a run in each of his past four outings. I haven’t looked at his numbers closely, but I do wonder about whether his release point is off, which is something i noted in connection with last year’s struggles https://blogs.fangraphs.com/aroldis-chapmans-nosedive-is-dragging-the-…

Read the rest of this entry »

At 20-18, the Blue Jays are already eight games back in a division that they were projected to win. While they don’t lack for reasons as to why they’ve yet to take full flight, an infield that has yet to live up to high expectations is a significant factor. On the left side, Matt Chapman hasn’t found his footing since arriving from Oakland, and Bo Bichette has been in a replacement-level funk. Cavan Biggio, who was expected to platoon at second base after being bumped off third by Chapman’s arrival, has not only lost his job to Santiago Espinal (who’s been very good) but on Monday was optioned to Triple-A Buffalo after coming off the COVID-19 injured list. Even Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has yet to replicate last year’s MVP-caliber form.

Guerrero is hitting .284/.368/.470 for a 142 wRC+, which while down 24 points from last year’s AL-leading mark, is still plenty potent. Even for a team that has just three other regulars with a wRC+ of 100 or better — namely center fielder George Springer (139), catcher/DH Alejandro Kirk (100), and Espinal (125) — he’s far from the Blue Jays’ biggest problem, and in the interest of keeping this article short of a novella, we’ll save any analysis of him for another day. On the other hand, Bichette (.242/.283/.363, 86 wRC+) and Chapman (.185/.272/.362, 84 wRC+), while not the offense’s least productive regulars — Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (74 wRC+), Teoscar Hernández (61), and Raimel Tapia (53 wRC+) have been worse — were expected to rank among the majors’ best at their respective positions; the former was sixth among shortstops in our preseason positional power rankings series, the latter seventh. Read the rest of this entry »

When Mookie Betts scuffled through the first couple weeks of the 2022 season, the Dodgers and their fans had cause for concern. The 29-year-old right fielder was coming off the worst season of his eight-year major league career, one in which he was beset by injuries. With well over $300 million still coming his way over the next two decades (a good chunk of which is deferred), this seemed like an inopportune time for him to demonstrate that he was already well into his decline.

One four-week (and counting) hot streak later, it appears that reports of Betts’ demise have been greatly exaggerated. His overall numbers don’t jump off the page due to his slow start, but in this year’s difficult offensive environment, his .263/.354/.482 line is good for a 141 wRC+, which ranks 14th in the NL, and his 1.6 WAR is tied for sixth. He’s been particularly hot lately, hitting .360/.429/.840 with three doubles and three homers over his past six games.

Betts may have created some unrealistic expectations after being acquired by the Dodgers in a protracted five-player blockbuster in February 2020. He proceeded to ink a 12-year, $365 million deal in July, then help his new team win its first championship in 32 years — and his second in three. In the pandemic-shortened campaign, he hit .292/.366/.562 for a 147 wRC+, his highest mark aside from his 2018 AL MVP-winning campaign (185). His 2.9 WAR placed third in the league, he finished second in the NL MVP voting, and he put on a tour de force during the postseason, showing off his skills at the plate, on the bases, and in the field on a nightly basis, right up through the World Series-clinching Game 6 in which he set up the tying run with a scorching double that was just the Dodgers’ second hit of the night, sped home with the go-ahead run on an infield grounder, and added an insurance run via a late homer. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year’s National League West race was a doozy, with the 107-win Giants outpacing the 106-win Dodgers, but this year’s race is shaping up to be an interesting one for a different reason. Through Sunday, all five teams owned winning percentages of .500 or better, though Monday’s loss by the Rockies (17-18), part of a 1-7 skid, upset that arrangement. Even so, it’s an impressively strong division headed by the Dodgers (22-12), with the Padres (22-13) and Giants (21-14) close behind, and the Diamondbacks (18-18) and Rockies playing quite respectably, and much improved over last season.

The biggest surprise of the bunch is the Diamondbacks, who just last year tied the Orioles for the majors’ worst record at 52-110 and finished a honkin’ 55 games out of first place. The team did not have a high-impact offseason; the only free agents the Diamondbacks signed to major league deals were starter Zach Davies and relievers Mark Melancon and Ian Kennedy, with Melancon’s two-year deal the only one stretching beyond 2022. They weren’t exactly big players in the trade market, either, with Sergio Alcántara and Jordan Luplow representing their highest-profile acquisitions. That pair has combined for 103 plate appearances and 0.1 WAR, and Alcántara was DFA’d and lost to the Padres via waivers earlier this month. Read the rest of this entry »

It was weird, it was wild, it was perhaps a bit irresponsible, and it was certainly bittersweet. On Sunday in Pittsburgh, Reds rookie Hunter Greene was dominant, setting a career high for strikeouts and combining with reliever Art Warren to hold the Pirates hitless for the entire afternoon. Yet when it was all said and done, Cincinnati — which had won six out of its last nine after starting the season 3–22 — found a new way to lose, 1–0. Greene and Warren didn’t even get credit for an official no-hitter, combined or otherwise.

The game’s only run scored in the bottom of the eighth inning. After Greene issued a pair of one-out walks to Rodolfo Castro and Michael Perez to push his pitch count to 118 — oh, we’ll get to that — manager David Bell pulled him in favor of Warren, who walked Ben Gamel, then induced a chopper by Ke’Bryan Hayes. Second baseman Alejo Lopez briefly bobbled the ball, and while he still threw to shortstop Matt Reynolds in time to force Gamel, Reynolds’ throw to first base was too late to complete the double play.

The Reds themselves managed just four hits against starter José Quintana and relievers Chris Stratton and David Bednar, the last of whom set down the side 1-2-3 in the ninth. Thus they joined a short and dubious list, becoming just the fifth team to hold their opponents hitless for eight innings but lose because they were nonetheless outscored. Such efforts used to be considered no-hitters, but in 1991, MLB’s Committee for Statistical Accuracy tightened the official definition of the feat, ruling that those falling short of nine innings would not receive such a designation. That put the Reds in this company:

The most infamous of such games is that of Hawkins, who allowed four eighth-inning runs via a combination of three errors and two walks, all with two outs; he did walk five overall, so his outing was kind of a mess to begin with. Greene and Warren combined to walk six, but they were the only one of the five teams above to lose after eight hitless innings without being charged with an error as well. Congrats on discovering that new way to lose, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

Robinson Canó will get to write another chapter to his major league career. Cut loose by the Mets earlier this month amid a roster crunch, the twice-suspended 39-year-old second baseman is reportedly on the verge of signing with the Padres. While he may not have much left in the tank, there’s very little risk involved in giving him a look, and if nothing else, San Diego could use some help for its bench.

Canó hit just .195/.233/.268 in 43 plate appearances before being designated for assignment by the Mets on May 2, the day that rosters were reduced from 28 players to 26, and then released on May 8. They parted with Canó despite owing him $44.7 million on his contract over this year and next, the final portion of the 10-year, $240 million deal he signed with the Mariners in December 2013 (Seattle still has a $3.75 million installment to pay the Mets). The Padres will be paying him only the prorated portion of the $700,000 minimum salary, which is noteworthy given that they’re less than $1.2 million below the $230 million Competitive Balance Tax threshold, according to Roster Resource.

Canó was a very productive hitter as recently as two years ago, slashing .316/.352/.544 (142 wRC+) with 10 home runs in 182 PA during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. But on November 18 of that year, Major League Baseball suspended him for the entirety of the ’21 season following a positive test for Stanozolol, a performance-enhancing drug. Canó had already drawn an 80-game suspension in May 2018 after testing positive for the diuretic known as Lasix, hence the year-long ban. The two suspensions have carried a massive cost for the eight-time All-Star even beyond the roughly $36 million in lost salary, all but wiping out any hope that he would reach 3,000 hits (he has 2,632), surpass Jeff Kent’s record of 351 home runs as a second baseman (316 of his 335 have come in that capacity), and gain entry to the Hall of Fame, which would have been a lock given his milestones and no. 7 ranking in JAWS.

In his limited opportunities with the Mets this season, Canó showed little sign of hitting like the Canó of yore. He swung and missed on 15.9% of all pitches and struck out 25.6% of the time, rates that are both more than double his career marks. His chase rate was an astronomical 48.9%, over 14 points above his career mark, and his swing rate was 58.9%, over seven points above his career mark. I’ve played this song before — since swing rates stabilize before most other stats — but the pattern does suggest he was pressing, which is understandable given his long layoff and tenuous hold on a roster spot. Canó’s 85.4% average exit velocity, 6.7% barrel rate, and 40% hard-hit rate don’t suggest he was mashing the ball; his .359 xSLG is 91 points ahead of his actual mark, but there are more than 100 hitters with larger differentials in this offense-suppressed season, and his .264 xwOBA is still cringeworthy. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees swept the Blue Jays in a quick two-game series in the Bronx this week on the strength of the long ball. More specifically, they sandwiched a pair of shots into Yankee Stadium’s infamous short porch in right field around a towering, no-doubt walk-off homer by Aaron Judge on Monday night, with all three homers of the three-run variety. In a year where home run and scoring rates have plummeted, the Bronx Bombers are 22-8, off to their best start since 2003 in large part because they’ve handily outhomered their opponents — an achievement that owes something to their pitchers as well as their hitters.

In Tuesday night’s game, the Yankees trailed 3-0 in the bottom of the sixth inning but put two on base with one out to bring Giancarlo Stanton to the plate against Yimi Garcia. The righty left a slider to the slugger on the outer third of the plate, and Stanton poked it to right field. Tie ballgame.

This was not a standard Stanton special. While it sped off the bat at 105.1 mph, its 33 degree launch angle gave it an estimated distance of just 335 feet, still more than enough to get out when hit into the right field corner of Yankee Stadium, where the distance is just 314 feet at the foul pole. It was Stanton’s shortest home run since at least 2015, and according to the Statcast Home Run Tracker leaderboard would not have gone out at any other major league park (though the @would_it_dong Twitter account and its Dinger Machine web page — both of which automatically pull from Statcast data — calculated that Stanton’s drive would have been out at Target Field, which is 328 feet down the right field line, as well. Read the rest of this entry »