The injury bug is biting all too often these days, and this week, it has taken a chunk out of Mike Trout’s season. Off to one of the best starts of his career, the 29-year-old center fielder strained his right calf in Monday night’s game, an injury that will sideline him for six to eight weeks — potentially the longest outage of his career — greatly reducing both the chances that the Angels will make the playoffs and that Trout will claim his fourth MVP award.

As if we needed more proof that the universe is a random and uncaring place, Trout suffered the injury doing something that turned out to be entirely routine and inconsequential: running the bases on a two-out popup by Jared Walsh. The play took place at the end of the first inning of the Angels’ game against Cleveland, after Trout had walked and taken second base on a wild pitch. You can see from the overhead video that by the time he reached third base, he was visibly limping:

Trout left the game, underwent an MRI on Tuesday, and was diagnosed with a Grade 2 calf strain. “I thought I got hit by a line drive,” he told reporters in describing his injury. “And then I got to the bag and then I said, ‘Man, something’s not right.’ And then I felt a pop and then I went down to the tunnel, made sure it wasn’t my Achilles, so I mean, I guess if there’s any positive coming out of it, it’s that it wasn’t my Achilles because that’s what scared me when it first happened. It was just a freak thing.” Read the rest of this entry »

At a time when they’re already without ace Jacob deGrom and two of their top hitters, and still trying to dig out of a team-wide early-season slump that led to the dismissal of their hitting coaches, the Mets lost two more regulars to the Injured List on Sunday. Facing the Rays in St. Petersburg, both Michael Conforto and Jeff McNeil left after suffering hamstring injuries in the first inning, the kind of calamity that seems as though it could befall only the Mets. The team received no respite, because in Monday’s game, starting pitcher Taijuan Walker departed after three innings due to tightness in his left side, and then Kevin Pillar was hit in the face by a fastball, suffering a bloodied and broken nose and perhaps more. An Injured List that’s already at an even dozen threatens to continue to grow.

McNeil, who had previously departed last Tuesday’s game against the Orioles due to what was termed “body cramps” after trying to stretch a single into a double, legged out an infield single to lead off Sunday’s game, and was erased on an inning-ending double play. As he was the designated hitter, his spot didn’t come up again until the third inning, at which time he was pinch-hit for by Patrick Mazeika. He departed with what the team initially described as “left hamstring tightness.”

That double play ball came off the bat of Conforto, who was visibly limping and grabbing his right hamstring by the time he crossed first base. You can see that in the video, as well as McNeil getting no further than halfway to second by the time Brandon Lowe’s throw reached Ji-Man Choi:

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It’s always a strange thing to see an all-time great donning an unfamiliar uniform at the tail end of his career. Even if the sights of Willie Mays in Mets pinstripes or Hank Aaron wearing a Brewers pullover — to say nothing of Babe Ruth as a Brave — predate your time as a viewer, they probably produce a double-take. Examples such as Ken Griffey Jr. in White Sox garb, Mike Piazza in A’s green and gold (or Padres blue and sand), or Randy Johnson in Giants black and orange might be more recent, but those sights are no less alien. Which brings us to Albert Pujols of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The 41-year-old Pujols, a future Hall of Famer who is one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs, was designated for assignment by the Angels last week. Not surprisingly, given that he was hitting just .198/.250/.372 while still due the bulk of this year’s $30 million salary, he cleared waivers, thus sticking the Angels for the lion’s share of that amount. After clearing waivers, he reportedly drew interest from three or four teams, but while it was easy to spitball a few possible destinations — the Cardinals given his status as franchise icon, the Reds because they’d just lost Joey Votto to a broken thumb, the White Sox because they’re managed by Tony La Russa, the Marlins because they could use an attendance bump — nobody saw the Dodgers as contenders for his services. Yet on Saturday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times‘ Jorge Castillo reported that the defending champions had signed Pujols to a major league deal for the remainder of the season. They’ll pay him the minimum salary while the Angels pick up the rest of the tab.

In a vacuum, the move was something of a head scratcher, but the Dodgers are amid an incessant wave of injuries that on the offensive side had already claimed center fielder Cody Bellinger, superutilityman Zach McKinstry, and infielder Edwin Ríos, and kept growing over the weekend. On Friday, left fielder AJ Pollock reaggravated a left hamstring injury that had limited him to three plate appearances in a week, and on Saturday, just hours after the Pujols news broke, so too did the fifth metacarpal in Corey Seager’s right hand, via a pitch from the Marlins’ Ross Detwiler. Given all the moving parts among the Dodgers’ multiposition players, the injury opens up a lane for Pujols to get some playing time, but whether he can improve upon his meager production to date is another story. Read the rest of this entry »

2:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my Friday chat. It’s a gorgeous day here in Brooklyn, and I’ve already treated myself to tacos al fresco so my mood is more chipper than Larry Jones. Today I’ve got a piece on the very different COVID-19 outbreaks of the Padres and Yankees, https://blogs.fangraphs.com/even-amid-vaccinations-outbreaks-on-padres…

2:03

Jay Jaffe: Earlier this week, I wrote about Max Scherzer’s pursuit of 3,000 strikeouts, and who might be next https://blogs.fangraphs.com/max-scherzer-and-the-coming-wave-of-3000-s… The scourge of the runner-on-second extra innings rule https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-runner-on-second-in-extras-rule-has-wo… And yet another Byron Buxton injury https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-twins-lose-byron-buxton-again-but-thei…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: Anywho, let’s get the show on the road…

2:05

Jay Jaffe: The difference, as I noted in today’s piece, is that the vast majority of the Padres (and also the Yankees) are vaccinated and thus there’s far less fear of a team-wide outbreak, whereas that wasn’t the case even for the Nationals in April. It’s actually a bit messed up when you think about the possibility of *dis*incentivizing vaccinations, but that’s not to say that the league wouldn’t have nudged the Padres to play if they were really lagging behind

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The Padres already had to endure life without Fernando Tatis Jr. for one stretch this season due to his left shoulder subluxation, and now they’re without him again. On Tuesday, the 22-year-old shortstop tested positive for COVID-19 and landed on the Injured List. He quickly gained company when right fielder Wil Myers also tested positive, while three other Padres — first baseman Eric Hosmer, outfielder Jorge Mateo, and superutilityman Jurickson Profar — were sidelined via MLB’s contact tracing protocols. The absences have left San Diego significantly shorthanded and highlighted the potential competitive disadvantage that a team can face while dealing with an outbreak.

The Padres aren’t the only team in the midst of a COVID-19 cluster, either. On Tuesday, about an hour before Tatis’ positive test became public, news of an outbreak among the Yankees’ coaching staff broke as well. While Padres manager Jayce Tingler declined to say whether any of his sidelined players have been vaccinated, their status will become apparent depending upon how quickly they’re allowed to return (more on which below). Meanwhile, the Yankees’ group — now up to eight, including third base coach Phil Nevin, first base coach Reggie Willits, pitching coach Matt Blake, and shortstop Gleyber Torres, plus four unnamed members of the team’s traveling staff — are known to have been fully vaccinated. In fact, the Yankees were among the majors’ first teams to reach the 85% vaccination threshold that allowed them to relax certain health and safety protocols. But less than a week after MLB announced that more than 83% of all Tier 1 individuals (players, managers, coaches, athletic trainers and support personnel) had been partially or fully vaccinated, and that it had gone a week without a single positive test from its major league camps (and just one positive from a staffer at an alternate site), the Padres and Yankees offered rude reminders of COVID-19’s lingering presence.

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Last Saturday in the Bronx, Max Scherzer showed off the dominant form that has earned him three Cy Young awards and seven All-Star selections. Admittedly, he wasn’t exactly facing Murderer’s Row, but against a Yankees team that had recently righted itself with a 7-1 tear, he struck out 10 out of the first 14 batters he faced, finishing with 14 strikeout in 7.1 innings, that while allowing just two hits, one walk, and one run.

The Nationals wound up losing that game in 11 innings, but nonetheless, the outing was the latest example of the 36-year-old righty in vintage form. The 14 strikeouts was the most by a visitor in the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009, and the most by any opponent in any iteration of Yankee Stadium since Pedro Martinez’s ultra-dominant one-hit performance against the defending champions in 1999:

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If it feels as though you’re seeing more extra-innings games than usual this year, it’s not just your imagination. Nor is it your confirmation bias — assuming, that is, that you’re not a fan of the new-fangled rule that starts every inning after the ninth with a runner on second and thus regard every instance of such games as a seed between the teeth. Not only are more games going past nine innings this year than last, but the rate of extra-innings games is higher than it’s been in more than half a century. Unfortunately, with scoring at its lowest level since 2015, we’re probably in for more of the same over the remainder of this season.

The extra-innings rule, which was introduced in the minor leagues for the 2018 season and had previously been used in international play, was adopted last year as part of the COVID-19 health and safety protocols. The goal was to end extra-innings games more quickly, thereby reducing players’ time in proximity to each other and their risk of spreading COVID-19, as well as reducing their amount of wear and tear via marathon games. The hope was that the rule would add some excitement as well as a layer of strategy by creating an immediate level of urgency given the automatic placement of a runner in scoring position.

The rule did what it was supposed to do last year in terms of shortening games, at least as measured by innings. Extra-inning games — and here I’m excluding the ones attached to seven-inning doubleheader games — averaged 10.42 innings in 2020, down from 11.26 in ’19 and 11.17 in ’18. The percentage of games going past 11 innings dropped to 0.7%, down from 2.3% in 2019 and 2.8% in ’18. Only two games lasted into the 13th inning, compared to 37 in 2019 and 39 in ’18.

As for “excitement,” that’s subjective, but the rule gained a surprising amount of acceptance within the game once people saw it in action. In November, Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark told Sportico’s Barry Bloom that the players were interested in continuing with the rule in order to cut down the stress on pitchers’ arms and position players’ legs, and commissioner Rob Manfred loved it, of course, crowing, “It was obviously adopted as a health and safety rule so games wouldn’t go on too long. But I just think it had appeal even to some traditional members of the media.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins have won the AL Central in each of the past two seasons, but their chances for running their streak to three in a row have taken some major hits. Not only have they stumbled out of the gate with a 12-20 record, but now they’ve lost Byron Buxton, potentially for several weeks, due to a Grade 2 hip strain. Adding insult to injury, at this writing the team owns the dubious distinction of the largest drop in their Playoff Odds since Opening Day.

The 27-year-old Buxton was injured during Thursday’s 4-3 loss to the Rangers. He pulled up hurt while running out a groundball in the ninth inning, but he may have injured himself before that. In the top of the seventh inning, he crashed into the outfield wall and then tumbled to the ground in an unsuccessful attempt to rob Jonah Heim of a home run:

In the bottom of the seventh, he didn’t run hard to first base on a groundout (I made a GIF because the video’s not embeddable, but here you can hear Twins play-by-play announcer Dick Bremer noting, “Buxton does not run hard out of the box”):

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The news was as abrupt as a mid-afternoon tweet, and yet long overdue: On Thursday, the Angels designated Albert Pujols for assignment. The 41-year-old Pujols is a no-doubt Hall of Famer, one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs. But he’s now a month into his fifth season of sub-replacement level production, an impediment to improving a team that needs all the help it can get to overcome a league-worst defense as it scrambles to return to the playoffs for the first time since 2014.

Mired in a 7-for-43 slump on a 13–17 team, Pujols is hitting just .198/.250/.372 with five homers and a 75 wRC+ in 92 plate appearances and making $30 million in the final season of the 10-year, $240 million deal that he signed following a remarkable 11-year run with the Cardinals. With his body unable to withstand a litany of leg and foot injuries — hamstrings, knees, plantar fasciitis — his megadeal provided little bang for the buck. Where he made nine All-Star teams and won three MVP awards as well as the NL Rookie of the Year award in St. Louis while helping the Cardinals to three pennants and two championships, he never approached such levels in Anaheim. As an Angel, he made just one All-Star team, finished no higher than 17th in the MVP voting, and was swept out of his lone playoff appearance.

This isn’t a move that the Angels have taken lightly, and it owes plenty to the pressures on new general manager Perry Minasian, who was hired last November, as well as the development of Jared Walsh and the continued health and presence of Shohei Ohtani. Walsh, a first baseman who has taken over most of the duties in right field since Dexter Fowler suffered a season-ending ACL tear on April 9, has hit for a 166 wRC+ in 222 PA since the start of last season. Ohtani, who this year has been available to serve as the designated hitter on days before and after his starts (which the Angels were reluctant to let him do previously), has hit for a 169 wRC+ with a major league-high 10 homers in 118 PA.

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2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and Happy Bartolo Colon Home Run Day to you all!

2:01	Jay Jaffe: It’s the fifth anniversary of this magnificent shot https://www.mlb.com/video/colon-s-first-career-homer-c669896583

2:02

Jay Jaffe: which, as I explained in this Twitter thread, holds special significance at Casa Jaffe-Span Jay Jaffe @jay_jaffe Happy Bartolo Home Run Day to those celebrating. It’s an important holiday at Casa Jaffe-Span. When he homered, Emma was 6 months pregnant with our daughter, whose “nom de womb” became Bartola (1/x) Benjamin Hoffman@BenHoffmanNYT If I had been at this game, the urge to circle the bases with him like they did with Henry Aaron would have been overwhelming 7 May 2021

2:03	Jay Jaffe: My piece on the Angels’ DFA of Albert Pujols just went up a short time ago https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-angels-finally-bite-the-bullet-by-cutt…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: It follows a piece I did just yesterday on how bad their defense has been https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-angels-rotation-woes-have-a-lot-to-do-…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: Anyway, on with the show!

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