Of the many haunted residences in New Orleans, one in particular comes with a very specific warning: Don’t walk under the gallery. (As a brief architectural aside, a gallery is like a balcony, but it’s held up by posts or columns that go all the way to the ground, as opposed to L-shaped supports attached to the side of the building. The posts allow galleries to extend farther out from the building, typically spanning the sidewalk below. Having a gallery rather than a balcony was, and to some extent still is, seen as a status symbol in New Orleans.) This home sits in the French Quarter, and without getting too far into it because the details are pretty horrific, and this article is ostensibly about the Phillies’ signing free agent reliever Brad Keller to a two-year $22 million contract, the place is said to be haunted by the torture victims of an exceedingly cruel socialite who owned the mansion in the early 1830s.

The spirits who linger remain very unhappy (deservedly so!), and they seem especially offended by the thrill-seekers looking to exploit their suffering in the hope of experiencing some sort of supernatural activity. Many who have sought to prove themselves unbothered by the notion of tangling with a few disgruntled ghosts have marched proudly down the sidewalk under the mansion’s gallery. They did not just find themselves temporarily spooked by a burst of cold air or the smell of rotting flesh. Rather, they found themselves cursed with long-term bouts of bad luck and, for years after the fact, continued to report disturbing encounters with other worldly forces.

Now, is this story exaggerated and sensationalized by the ghost tour industrial complex that exists in New Orleans? Probably. But nevertheless, as a former ghost tour attendee, I’m left wondering if at some point early in his career Dave Dombrowski wandered through a heavily haunted bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals had themselves a productive weekend. The kind where you re-organize the garage and get your meal prep done for the week before the Sunday Scaries set in. On Friday, news broke that the team was finalizing a deal to extend third baseman Maikel Garcia. The contract spans five years, including all four of Garcia’s arbitration-eligible seasons, with a guaranteed value of $57.5 million that could reach $85 million with options and escalators. He will make $4 million in 2026, $7 million in 2027, $10 million in 2028, $13 million in 2029, and $19 million in 2030, and the team holds a $21 million club option for 2031, with a $3.2 million buyout. Then, following the news of the Garcia signing, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on Saturday that the Brewers were sending outfielder Isaac Collins and right-handed reliever Nick Mears to the Royals in exchange for left-handed reliever Angel Zerpa. We’ll get into a more detailed discussion of both moves in a minute, but first let’s put this in the larger context of the Royals as an organization.

A lot of sitcoms have that one oddball character that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the cast. The person that requires viewers to suspend their disbelief, because in real life, there’s no way the other main characters would associate with this weirdo. Your Phoebes, your Kramers, your Kimmy Gibblers, etc. These characters are a part of the main cast or have regularly recurring roles, and though they frequently find themselves integrated into the show’s primary conflicts, they’re typically situated off to the side doing their own thing. Writers insist on including these characters because they provide interesting narrative texture to group dynamics. In real life, we tend to gravitate toward like-minded people with common interests, which is great for forming meaningful connections but makes for boring TV.

Fortunately, MLB teams behave more like TV characters than real life besties, which makes for better entertainment. And with 30 teams, the league doesn’t limit itself to just one Phoebe. Several squads are singing about fetid felines and boycotting Pottery Barn, and among them we have the Royals. Kansas City has never seemed tempted to jump on the latest trends in roster construction or follow the crowd as it attempts to implement whatever the “new Moneyball” is at any given point in time. No, the Royals tend to stay true to themselves, even if that means zigging while everyone else zags or using unorthodox tactics to make sure everyone in the organization stays focused on baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The Women’s Pro Baseball League held its inaugural draft on Thursday night. For many of the players who heard their names called, getting to play professional baseball is a dream they’ve carried since childhood, one they knew might never come true. Play won’t get underway until next August, but with the WPBL draft now in the history books, the dreams of 120 women are meaningfully closer to being realized.

Thursday night’s draft was the culmination of a busy few months for the new league. Since I last wrote about the WPBL in January, the league has announced key logistical information, such as the number of teams that will play during its first season, where those teams will play, and how much the teams will pay the players, and has also provided an update on the WPBL’s media and broadcast strategy. But despite all the new intel on how the league will be run, a few key components are still unknown. So before recapping the draft and the open tryout that determined the pool of draft-eligible players, let’s get up to date on what we do and don’t know about the WPBL so far.

If this is the first you’re hearing of the WPBL, here’s a quick primer. It’s a professional baseball league for women, the first of its kind since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which ran from 1943 to 1954. The WPBL was co-founded in October of 2024 by Justine Siegal — who is best known for founding Baseball For All, “[A] girls baseball nonprofit that builds gender equity by creating opportunities for girls to play, coach, and lead in the sport” — and Keith Stein, a businessman, lawyer, and member of the ownership group for a semiprofessional men’s baseball team in Toronto. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fall Classic has traveled near and far, but wherever they are, the Dodgers have relied heavily on Yoshinobu Yamamoto to lead the team to victory, and on Friday night he delivered once again. Following a three-game swing in Los Angeles, the World Series returned to Toronto for Game 6. And though back in their home and native land, the Blue Jays fell to the Dodgers 3-1, meaning Canada’s team will face L.A. in a decisive Game 7 on Saturday night.

The faster we’re fallin’, we’re stoppin’ and stallin’,
We’re runnin’ in circles again.
Just as things were lookin’ up, you said it wasn’t good enough,
But still, we’re tryin’ one more time.

Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman had the first seven batters he faced looking like they might be in over their heads. His splitter was working exactly as intended — presenting as a center-cut fastball, then diving in too deep for the hitter to make contact — and leading to a ton of swing-and-miss. As he worked deeper in the game, Gausman mixed in his slider more, which earned him some quick outs on weak contact. For the most part, he cruised through his six innings and 93 pitches. For the most part. Read the rest of this entry »

I am not a Mariners fan. I have never been a Mariners fan. I have no intention of becoming a Mariners fan. But the first major league game I ever attended was, in fact, a Mariners game. Here’s what I remember from that game: It took place on July 30, 1998 in the Kingdome. It lasted 17 innings and stretched into the following day. We were sitting on metal bleachers, pretty high up. I knew that some of the big names on the Mariners that year were Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson and Jay Buhner. I spent most, if not all, of the game reading a book because I absolutely did not care about baseball. That’s it. I know that isn’t much, so here’s some photo proof that I was actually there:

I’m the nine-year-old girl on the left and the only one not wearing Mariners gear. Again, I have never been a Mariners fan. The kid next to me is Roger, my 13-year-old brother (yes, that oversized manchild was really only 13, I triple-checked the math). He was the reason we were at the game and the reason I could name a whopping four Mariners. Read the rest of this entry »

SEATTLE — There’s an age-old question among pitching philosophers. Should an approach focus more on the pitcher’s strengths or the hitter’s weaknesses? In my experience, pitchers do not ask themselves this question, though. They almost always prefer to pitch to their own strengths. They might tweak their strategy if a hitter has an obvious and exploitable weakness that they feel comfortable attacking, but mostly they’d rather stick to what they do best.

But what happens when what a pitcher does best aligns perfectly with what his opponent does best? When it’s not just that he’s ignoring the hitter’s weakness, but that he’s also pitching to the hitter’s strength? Game 3 of the ALCS between the Mariners and the Blue Jays gave us a data point to consider when answering that question. Toronto walked away with a 13-4 victory in Seattle to cut the Mariners’ series lead to 2-1, and did so by sticking to its strengths in the batter’s box. Read the rest of this entry »

SEATTLE — On a per-game basis during the regular season, the Mariners and Tigers both scored and allowed roughly the same number of runs — 4.70 and 4.28, respectively. Through the first four games of the best-of-five ALDS, each team eked out a one-run win and each team triumphed in something of a laugher. Both teams won one game at home and one game on the road, and both teams relied extensively on their bullpens. Heading into Game 5 on Friday night in Seattle, it was clear one team was going to need to do something to distinguish itself. These teams entered the night locked in a dead heat, having played matching hands for much of the series and needing a new strategy, something different to get an edge and break the stalemate, and even then, it required 15 innings and four hours and 58 minutes to do that. When it was all over, the Mariners had outlasted the Tigers, 3-2, on a walk-off single by Jorge Polanco to advance to the American League Championship Series for the first time in 24 years.

“I don’t even know where to begin to try to recap all the heroic efforts that went into today,” manager Dan Wilson said. “And 15 innings? I’ve got to say, I don’t know how the fans kept their energy going. It was unbelievably loud, even in the 15th inning. And this is a special place. T-Mobile Park is a special place, and they showed us that tonight. And just an incredible ballgame from top to bottom.”

Both starting pitchers were taking the mound for a second time in the series, and both brought a slightly different approach to Game 5 than what they put on tape in their prior starts. In Game 1, Seattle starter George Kirby threw his slider 31% of the time; it was the first pitch he threw to eight of the 22 batters he faced. In Game 5, Kirby went to his slider 50% of the time and threw it as the first pitch to 10 of the 18 batters he faced. After the game, he confirmed this was a conscious shift in strategy to show Detroit’s lineup something different from what it’d seen from him six days prior. “All those guys from top to bottom are probably looking for a heater to start,” Kirby said, “and just starting off with a slider, curveball, whatever it may be, just — if I kept them off balance a little bit, I was able to attack the zone a little bit more with my fastball.” By mixing in more sliders early in the count, he was able to maintain the effectiveness of his four-seamer despite the recent exposure. Though the slider-heavy approach meant Kirby racked up fewer strikeouts than usual, he finished his outing allowing just three hits and one earned run over five innings with six punchouts. Read the rest of this entry »

SEATTLE — “We didn’t steal one. We earned it.” Those were the first words spoken by Tigers manager A.J. Hinch following Game 1 of the ALDS at T-Mobile Park on Saturday night. Hinch took umbrage with a reporter’s characterization of a 3-2 victory that spanned 11 innings in a road ballpark as “stealing one.” Managers should bring that type of bravado to the press conference. Especially Hinch, who is tasked with imbuing confidence in a squad that has been dogged by tales of its epic collapse for over a month.

But with all due respect to Hinch, to describe any one-run, extra-inning game as one where either team definitively earned the win, or on the flip side deserved to lose, places all the emphasis on the final result and glosses over exactly how that result came to be. The Tigers got the win, and now they enjoy a 1-0 series lead with Tarik Skubal, the reigning (and presumptive) AL Cy Young award winner, taking the mound for them in Game 2. They get to bask in the glow of that advantage, and they absolutely should. But if Hinch gets to quibble with verbiage, so do I. Read the rest of this entry »

SEATTLE — Every year, pitchers and catchers report for spring training, and just as spring represents a reawakening in the natural world, spring training provides a reawakening for every team, a fresh start, full of renewed optimism. No matter the team, fans across the league allow themselves to dream a little, to believe that this year might be the one.

You could be my silver springs
Blue-green colors flashin’
I would be your only dream
Your shining autumn, ocean crashing.

But for 29 teams, the season will end in heartbreak. For some teams that heartbreak might come as early as June or July, for others in August or September, and a few will experience the agony of October sorrow. Over the last several years, the Seattle Mariners have unwittingly built a tradition of remaining very much in the playoff hunt until the final week of the regular season, only to miss the cut by a harrowingly thin margin. They did make the playoffs in 2022, ending a 20-year postseason drought, but they struggled to cross that threshold again. Instead, they fell into a familiar rhythm, playing hard until the very end, but then their season was over. Their time was up.

Time cast its spell on you, but you won’t forget me
I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me.

This season is different. The Mariners not only secured a place in the postseason, but they also won the AL West for the first time since 2001. In doing so, they eschewed the Wild Card Series and advanced directly to the best-of-five Division Series, which begins on Saturday against the Tigers in Seattle. And all it took was a little witchcraft. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that in order to thrive in stressful and uncertain times, the key is to focus on the things you control. And who are “they” exactly? Mostly people who traffic in self-help cliches on the internet. But cliches are cliches for a reason. They’re rooted in some measure of truth. And in a decisive Game 3 on Thursday, the NL Wild Card Series between the Cubs and Padres was ultimately decided by control — in nearly every sense of the word. The type of control that refers to whether a pitcher can find the strike zone, the type of control a manager exercises over bullpen usage, and the type of control exerted over batted ball outcomes when lockdown defense becomes a critical component of a team’s identity.

In a 3-1 Cubs victory over the Padres, neither team looked dominant, but Chicago dominated the variables within its control, while San Diego seemed to be pulling blocks from a Jenga tower on an inning-by-inning basis and hoping to stay upright until its offense could break through with a few runs. Read the rest of this entry »