The Chicago White Sox really ought to be praying to whatever deity is currently tormenting them with plagues of locusts and pestilence, and thanking her that even more conspicuous travesties against baseball are occurring in St. Louis and Oakland.

A couple weeks ago, Jay Jaffe wrote about the terrible goings-on over in Chicago in general terms. I would’ve titled that piece “And I Looked, and Behold a Pale Hose: and His Name that Sat on Him Was Death, and Hell Followed With Him.” Jay opted for the more direct “The White Sox Are Utterly Terrible,” which they were then and are now.

Their failures this season have been so complete that it’d be unfair to blame any one player or coach, and at any rate that’s not the purpose of this post. That purpose: to examine a player once viewed as a unique talent, for whom things have gone badly off the rails. Michael Kopech is in the rotation full-time — a rarity in his Bright Eyes concept album of a career — but things are not going well. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have any sense at all, you probably deactivated your Facebook account years ago, and thus liberated yourself from knowing intimate details about your distant relatives, schoolmates, and old co-workers. In this situation, it’s nevertheless helpful if your partner, or a close friend, remains plugged in. All the more so if they’re an inveterate gossip. Because even if you don’t want the fire hose of information, a little splash of water every now and then is refreshing.

Your second cousin once removed? Getting divorced for the third time, and getting really into NFTs about a year too late. The girl you asked (unsuccessfully) to junior prom? Just won a local Emmy for her work as a TV meteorologist. Booger from the sales department at your first job out of college? Newly ordained as a deacon at his church. Good for you, Booger.

As we go through life, we accumulate people according to time and context. A very small percentage of those stick and become lifelong friends; most drift away when circumstances change. Even people who are vitally important at one time — even roommates, romantic partners, confidants — float away sooner or later, to be replaced by some other person more suitable to the new social context. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox signed Orix Buffaloes star Masataka Yoshida over the winter, suffice it to say I was intrigued. In his walk year, in the second-best league in the world, he hit .336/.449/.559 with 21 home runs and 82 walks against just 42 strikeouts. In the 20 months leading up to his competitive debut in MLB, he had made two NPB All-Star teams and won a batting title, a Japan Series, an Olympic gold medal, and a WBC title. In the latter event, he went 9-for-22 with two home runs and struck out just once.

I don’t pretend to know much about what goes on in NPB, but everything I’d heard about Yoshida was exciting: Here was this ultra-high contact hitter who idolized Bryce Harper and posted basically peak Juan Soto numbers against the toughest pitching you’ll find outside MLB. Moreover, no baseball player’s name is more fun to say in an Australian accent, if you care about that sort of thing.

Whenever a star player comes over from Japan, there’s a natural excitement. North American baseball is so saturated with information that it’s a refreshing change when a fully formed top-level pro appears from another league — all the more so because every newcomer presents the opportunity to learn. American baseball pedagogy is as open-minded now as it’s ever been, but it still imposes an orthodoxy. Athletes are molded to fit an ideal; if not intentionally, then they mold themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

An increase in stolen bases wasn’t the primary aim of MLB’s offseason rule changes, but it was expected to be a happy side effect of new timing rules and bigger bases. Baseball fans will argue about just about anything, but stolen bases enjoy near-universal popularity. They’re exciting to watch, and they reward athleticism and initiative. The only drawback: They’re risky. And the new rules would mitigate that risk.

Over the first weekend of the season, the Orioles brought forth a new golden age of basestealing in the span of two days. In 10 attempts, they stole 10 bases off the Red Sox, and they did so without coming particularly close to getting thrown out.

“We just knew we needed to do a better job with the run game after that series,” Red Sox catcher Connor Wong says. “You can’t let guys run all over you and get into scoring position all the time.” Read the rest of this entry »

On July 16, 2013, Tom Seaver threw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game at Citi Field in New York. It was an unforgettable moment in isolation, but the context thickened the atmosphere to mugginess with implication.

Warming up in the bullpen was Matt Harvey, a 24-year-old from Connecticut who’d been chosen to start the game for the National League. Ten days shy of a year in the majors, Harvey had become one of the most effective, and most-discussed, pitchers in the sport. From the day of his debut until the day of his All-Star start, he was fifth among qualified starters in WAR, third in K%, and sixth in ERA-.

But he wasn’t just effective; he was electric. He overpowered hitters with his upper-90s velocity and cruel breaking pitches. And he was doing it in a Mets ecosystem that, after several years of being squished by division rivals, cried out desperately for… actually, it just cried out desperately in general. Harvey wasn’t just branded a future Cy Young winner, but the next great New York baseball star. Seaver was genuinely handing the ball to his heir presumptive. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, the University of Alabama abruptly fired head baseball coach Brad Bohannon for his involvement in a pair of suspicious bets involving the Crimson Tide’s game against LSU last Friday. That night, a bettor at the sportsbook at Great American Ball Park — home of the Reds — placed two suspiciously large bets on LSU to win, large enough to draw the attention of U.S. Integrity, the company retained by the Ohio Casino Control Commission and the Southeastern Conference to monitor sports wagering in the state’s casinos.

On Monday, the OCCC instructed Ohio bookmakers to take Crimson Tide games off the board. Regulators in other states followed suit, as have several major online sportsbooks. And in the wake of Bohannon’s firing three days later, ESPN reporter David Purdum revealed that surveillance cameras within the sportsbook had recorded the suspicious bettor communicating with Bohannon at the time he was placing the bets in question. Read the rest of this entry »

Things aren’t going well in Oakland at the moment. Ownership, after years of quiet quitting, is up and moving the team. (Or maybe not, if owner John Fisher and his confederates turn out to be worse at lobbying than they are at pest control.) That leaves a last-place club to play out the string in front of “SELL THE TEAM” banners, probably for multiple years to come. The most obvious simile for this situation would be something along the lines of “like the waning days of a loveless marriage,” but that would be an insult to loveless marriages.

Still, a few dozen unfortunates are obliged to put on the storied green and gold colors of the Athletics and perform baseball six days a week. And they’re trying, albeit not too successfully, to win. It could happen! All the time we see a team made up mostly of youngsters, or with a payroll out of the mid-90s, get hit by lightning and make a run at the playoffs. Frequently that has even been the A’s in recent years.

Unfortunately, this year’s Athletics probably needed five or six different lightning strikes to turn their 100-loss roster into a contender. One break the A’s needed — following on the team’s biggest offseason move — involved outfielder Esteury Ruiz. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday evening, Zac Gallen will take the mound in Arlington with zeroes on his mind and history at his fingertips. You see, South Jersey’s second-best ballplayer is on a bit of a heater: 28 consecutive scoreless innings pitched, including zero runs allowed in his past four starts.

Now, I can tell some of you are already scrolling back up to the top of this page to check the date on the post. It’s the same feeling you get when you lose track of where you were on your backlog of DVR’d Law & Order reruns. “I feel like I’ve seen this one already. Did I actually watch it or did I doze off on the couch? Is that Lance Reddick?”

Run a show for 20-plus seasons and you’ll recycle a plot point or two. No, you’re not losing your mind: Zac Gallen is on a second extended scoreless innings streak in a matter of just nine months. Last fall, he strung together 44.1 scoreless innings, and now he’s at it again. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates, you might have heard, are in first place at the end of April. Not only that, they’ve played like a first-place team and then some, outscoring opponents by 48 runs in 29 games. Heading into Sunday, their pitching staff had the second-best ERA and FIP in the National League. Their offense had posted the second-best wRC+ in the NL as well; based on the first month of the season, the only thing fluky about them has been the names on the backs of their jerseys. Maybe they’ll cool off, maybe they won’t, but full credit to them for an exceptional first month of the season.

So why am I singling out David Bednar?

Heading into the season, Bednar was one of the few Pirates who it was safe to assume would be good. Carlos Santana and Andrew McCutchen are big names, but they’re getting up there in years. Bryan Reynolds would be good, most likely, but perhaps not in Pirates colors. But Bednar is a rock. He was an All-Star last year, for God’s sake. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the most important thing for a pitcher to do? That’s right, don’t leave the ball up in the zone for Aaron Judge. The second-most important thing for a pitcher to do is throw strikes. Throw strikes to get ahead in the count, throw strikes to challenge hitters, throw strikes to force action early in the count and keep your pitch count down… pitchers talk about throwing strikes the way health nuts talk about kale. It’s good for you. How? Let me count the ways.

Except, nobody actually throws strikes. Last season, 347 pitchers threw at least 50 innings in the majors; nobody threw more than 58.5% of their pitches in the strike zone. Devin Williams, one of the best in the business, worked inside the zone just 42.4% of the time. “It’s good to throw strikes,” then, is something to be taken seriously but not literally.

Seattle Mariners right-hander George Kirby is a greater adherent of the zone than most. Last season, he broke a big league record by throwing 24 consecutive strikes to start a game. This year, he’s working in the zone more than any other pitcher with at least 20 innings under their belt. It was not always thus. Read the rest of this entry »