Kirby Yates had all but closed the door on the NL East, but he couldn’t quite get the latch to click. Tasked with preserving a 4–1 lead on the road against the Phillies, Yates set down Alec Bohm and Bryson Stott without much undue fuss, but Brandon Marsh just would not go away.

Yates has two punches to throw: a hard-fading four-seam fastball, and a splitter that drops out of the air like a goose that’s run into a power line. Down 2–0 to Marsh, he threw one blow after another: fastball up, splitter down. Marsh kept parrying the ball away — five foul balls in a row. Finally, the 36-year-old righthander ground the ball into his mitt and initiated the herky-jerky delivery that once made him one of the best relief pitchers in baseball, stabbing his arm down behind his right leg before bringing it up and around as he leapt forward off the rubber. Another splitter — and finally, Marsh swung over this one.

The kings of the NL East are celebrating in Philly ? pic.twitter.com/uol9pb0Upt

— Bally Sports: Braves (@BravesOnBally) September 14, 2023

Yates picked up the save. The Braves, for the sixth year in a row, were NL East champions. Read the rest of this entry »

With the season the Atlanta Braves are having, there isn’t that much spotlight to go around. Ronald Acuña Jr. is rewriting the record book, Matt Olson has an outside shot at 60 home runs, and beyond that Atlanta literally has an above-average starter at every position on the field:

And because these guys never seem to get hurt or take a day off, there hasn’t been a story about an unsung hero picking up the slack when a star goes down. So Michael Harris II, a 22-year-old center fielder with a plus-plus glove and a 115 wRC+, goes under the radar a little. Read the rest of this entry »

If I were an image-conscious billionaire with a disappointing baseball team on my books and unlimited financial resources, David Stearns is one of the first people I’d call to run it. The Mets won 101 games in 2022, and while 2023 represents a monumental step back for the franchise, this team still has tons of talent both in the majors and high minors. It’s also better-funded than any other team in the league.

So with Stearns due to join the Mets as president of baseball operations, we get a talented, rich team being run by one of the top executives in the sport. I don’t know if it will work, because nothing with the Mets is straightforward, but I see no obvious better idea. Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed last week’s Buntpalooza, you’re going to love this, because I’m making up new stats again.

Let’s start with Rickey Henderson. You probably know that in 1982, Rickey set a still-unchallenged single-season record of 130 stolen bases. Which is a lot. Of course it’s a lot; this was the highest-volume season by the best basestealer who ever lived. I just referred to him as “Rickey,” because he was so great he can go by his first name on first reference, like “LeBron” or “Tiger” or “Weird Al.”

Nevertheless, I worry that we don’t appreciate how extremely a lot 130 stolen bases is in one season. One way to look at it is in distance; 172 stolen base attempts (Rickey also got caught a league-high 42 times that year), at 90 feet each, constitutes almost three miles of ground covered. The man ran the best part of a 5K in stolen base attempts alone. Read the rest of this entry »

One of baseball’s delightful postseason traditions is the introduction of new characters to the national consciousness. During the regular season, the focus is spread out over as many as 15 mostly meaningless games a night. When the calendar turns to October, there is one game going on at a time, maybe two, and each pitch is of colossal importance. Following regular-season baseball is fishing with a net; following postseason baseball is fishing with a sniper rifle.

So every October, we meet players previously unknown or little-considered. We put faces to names and visual recognition to stat lines. And like clockwork, some rookie middle reliever from a non-glamor franchise (usually but not always the Rays) will come out in the eighth inning of a game against the Astros or Dodgers and cut through three straight All-Stars like a hot wire through Styrofoam.

If you care about spoiling key postseason narratives, you should stop reading. If not, you’ll want to learn about Abner Uribe. Read the rest of this entry »

In Tuesday’s missive on league-wide bunt tendencies, I ran out of time and space before I could single out some of this season’s standout individual bunters for special attention. As in every collection of ballplayers, there are a few outliers who skew the sample. To continue the metaphor that a bunt is baseball’s mid-range jump shot, these are your LaMarcus Aldridges. Read the rest of this entry »

In August, the Phillies hit 59 home runs, which is the highest total for a month in franchise history and tied for the third-highest total in any single month by any team in history. It was a remarkable performance, but perhaps not a particularly surprising one given how this roster was constructed; by design, Rob Thomson’s charges are large, strong, and (of late) increasingly shirtless. They were born to mash.

Last week, I had the good fortune to be present at Citizens Bank Park as five of those 59 home runs took flight in a single evening, off the bats of five different Phillies. This was one of those close, muggy summer nights that define the mid-Atlantic summer; with a pleasant, gentle breeze blowing out to left field, the ball was roaring out of the park. It wasn’t just the Phillies; the Angels dingered three times themselves. Two of those came off the bat of Luis Rengifo, hardly a man whose public stomps and chants are included in the Home Run Derby every year.

But as the Phillies laid 12 runs on their opponents, the play that stuck in my mind was the opposite of a home run. In the sixth inning, the Phillies batted around and scored six runs to turn a 4–2 deficit into an 8–4 lead; one of those came on a squeeze bunt by Johan Rojas. It was a lovely push bunt by a speedy right-handed hitter, the baseball equivalent of spreading room temperature compound butter on a slice of crusty bread. “Man, we should see that more often,” I thought to myself. Read the rest of this entry »

About two months ago, the Los Angeles Angels were trying as hard as they could to cling onto the back of the AL Wild Card chase. If they could do that, they could maintain the faint hope of convincing Shohei Ohtani, their once-in-six-lifetimes superstar free-agent-to-be, that Orange County was a place where he could win for the rest of his career.

They threw everything at the wall — traded the top tier of their farm system for short-term pitching help, revamped their outfield, and spent a lottery pick on a college first baseman, seemingly with the express purpose of rushing him to the majors in time to help with the playoff push. How’d all that go? Awful, as you might expect. Mike Trout got hurt, Taylor Ward got hurt, then Trout got hurt again. Lucas Giolito allowed 28 runs in 32 2/3 innings in his six starts with the Angels.

This week, the Halos made the unprecedented and controversial decision to put their rentals on waivers, in a last-ditch attempt to get back under the luxury tax threshold so they can receive a higher draft pick as compensation for Ohtani leaving. All that sounds absolutely horrendous, doesn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs are in playoff contention at the end of August, and Kyle Hendricks is getting hitters out with a tasting menu of exquisitely located mid-80s funk. (Grabs nearest passerby) “The date! I need you to tell me the date!…God Almighty, my time machine works!”

For most of the late 2010s, Hendricks was not quite an ace but was a bankable no. 2 or no. 3 starter. Even in his relative youth, he never threw hard; the fastest pitch of Hendricks’ entire career was 93.1 mph, and he hasn’t even hit 91 since 2016. People who apparently never watched Greg Maddux loved to stamp a “next Greg Maddux” label on any bookish right-hander with great command, and of those, Hendricks probably came the closest to living up to the comparison. Read the rest of this entry »

The .300 hitter is dying, Ian Crouch wrote in The New Yorker in 2014. And Bradford Doolittle on ESPN.com in 2019. And Barry Svrluga in the Washington Post just last month. If the .300 hitter is dying, it’s dying the same way you and I are, a little bit each day. Maybe the .300 hitter is just sick.

Why do these stories keep getting written? Well, last week I was checking in on Luis Arraez (come on, dude, I thought you were going to make a serious run at .400!) and came to the startling realization that only nine qualified hitters are on pace to hit .300. Nine! I can’t imagine being a baseball writer, seeing that fact, and not being freaked out enough to write about it.

Baseball is a sport that got its tentacles into the American popular vernacular something like 100 years ago, dropping idioms like eggs. “Three strikes,” “home run,” “lost his fastball,” and dozens of others. “Batting 1.000” is probably a more popular phrase than “batting .300” or “hitting .300,” but the latter is still legible to people who think Christian Walker is what you call pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. Read the rest of this entry »