With the World Baseball Classic in progress this week, now feels like a good time to steal an idea from another sport. In baseball, the international game is a bit vestigial. There has never been a consistent international best-on-best tournament on par with the FIFA World Cup or Olympic ice hockey, in which players desire success with the national team as much as they would success with their club teams.

Baseball hasn’t had that; the Olympics, taking place as they do within the MLB regular season, never featured best-on-best competition. And that’s when the Olympic program includes baseball to begin with. The World Baseball Classic hasn’t been around long enough to gain the kind of legitimacy the World Cup has, and it’s administered in part by Major League Baseball.

The biggest obstacle to a serious international game in baseball is pitcher usage. Pitcher workloads are so tightly monitored, few players and even fewer teams are willing to loan out a fragile and valuable arm to a tournament that’s widely viewed as an exhibition. The second-biggest obstacle is the lack of a powerful independent governing body for the sport; for most of the history of baseball, MLB has been its driving force. Even as various major leagues popped up around the world and the sport flourished at the amateur level, baseball has been centralized in the way hockey, soccer, and basketball never were, and the WBSC isn’t powerful enough to dictate a truly independent prestigious international competition. Read the rest of this entry »

Full disclosure, right up top: I’m rooting for Brett Baty to win the Mets’ starting third base job out of spring training. There are many reasons: First, all things being equal I’d prefer to see a young player get playing time rather than a veteran. Playing the kids shows an open-mindedness on the team’s part, as well as a level of faith in young players that allows them to go out on the field with a sense of freedom rather than a fear of failure. It’s forward-looking, which is an important consideration even for a club as well-resourced as the Mets.

But second, I’m a baseball writer who communicates mostly in puns, and to people like me, Baty is a divine blessing. As a general rule, baseball doesn’t do unit-based nicknames as much as hockey or even football, which is a pity. While other sports are rolling out the Legion of Doom or That 70s Line or Gang Green, baseball — a sport with an unparalleled literary and folkloric tradition, I might add — is resting on the laurels of the $100,000 Infield. It’s been more than 30 years since the Nasty Boys, for God’s sake.

So if the Mets end up having an infield of three multi-time All-Stars between the ages of 28 and 30, plus a rookie third baseman, we’re calling it the Three Men and a Baty infield. Agreed? Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, veteran left-hander Brad Hand agreed to a one-year, $2 million contract with the Colorado Rockies, according to Ken Rosenthal. That poor man. This being the offseason of creative contract structures, Hand will receive an additional $1 million if he starts the regular season on the major league roster or IL, and $500,000 of that $2 million guarantee comes in the form of a buyout of a $7 million club option for 2024. In other words, the Rockies are spending $2 million to find out if Hand is completely cooked, but if he’s not they can keep him in the fold for two seasons at a pretty reasonable rate.

Hand was last seen pitching in the colors of Colorado’s sometime postseason nemesis, the Philadelphia Phillies. There, Hand filled what one might call the 2019 Fernando Rodney role. In that scenario, a manager only has a couple relievers he trusts in the postseason, but more innings than he can fill using those arms alone. Enter a veteran — Rodney for the 2019 Nats, Hand for last year’s Phillies — whose stuff isn’t what it used to be but whose experience and guile might allow him to steal a medium-leverage inning or two. In the NLDS against the Braves, that worked quite well. The following series against the Padres, not so much.

That’s because Hand is no longer the elite high-volume reliever he was in San Diego and Cleveland in the late 2010s. If he were, he wouldn’t be signing for $2 million in March. So the question is — as is ever the case with this team — what do the Rockies see in Hand? Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s take a look at the AL Central. (Audience turns away like a child in a high chair trying to avoid being fed creamed peas.) No, I’m serious. I don’t think the division is going to be good — quite the opposite, in fact. Teams like the Diamondbacks or Orioles, likely cursed to be no-hopers this year by the vicissitudes of geography, would be quite competitive in the AL Central.

But within that mediocrity comes unpredictability. We project the entire division to be covered by a spread of just 12 wins, the lowest total for any division. The top three teams are separated by just three projected wins, and each has its own particular idiosyncrasies that turn the division race into a truly intriguing game of rock, paper, scissors. This year’s AL Central race is like the 2006 action thriller Smokin’ Aces: Is it good? Not as such. But is it fun, with a loaded cast? Absolutely. Read the rest of this entry »

When I filed my story about LSU’s two-way star Paul Skenes on Monday evening, I thought, “Well, I probably won’t have to think or write about another pitching prospect whose career was complicated by military obligations for at least another 72 hours!”

How wrong I was. On Wednesday afternoon, momentous news filtered up from Florida, and not the kind of news that normally filters up from Florida: Noah Song, late of the Red Sox and the U.S. Navy, is bound for Phillies camp. Read the rest of this entry »

Yu Darvish’s six-year, $108 million extension with the Padres looks innocuous enough. Darvish is absolutely essential to the Padres’ success, and he’s now one of those rare MLB players who’s signed multiple $100 million deals, despite not having reached free agency the first time until his age-31 season.

If anyone can pitch until he’s 42, it’s Darvish, the man who’s got more pitches than can fit in Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. This extension actually has me looking forward to watching Darvish once he gets into his latter-day Zack Greinke era. No, the interesting thing about this contract is not who’s getting paid, who’s doing the paying, or how much money is set to change hands. It’s when. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t really see the first pitch of LSU’s season. I was watching on TV, but the ball just sort of teleported from Paul Skenes’ right hand to Brady Neal’s glove. Maybe it was a trick of the lighting or a glitch in the stream. Or maybe it’s the fact that the enormous 20-year-old decided to start off his season with a 99 mph fastball.

Skenes looks like what he is: the Friday night starter for the no. 1 team in the country and a likely first-round draft pick. Not only is he one of the country’s top pitching prospects, but he can handle the bat as well, hitting .367/.453/.669 with 24 homers in 100 combined games over his first two collegiate seasons. He’s not what basketball types like to call a unicorn. Most college seasons feature some elite two-way player, a Brendan McKay or a Danny Hultzen or the like, trying to pitch and slug a blue-blood program to the national title and himself into the top 10 picks in the draft.

What makes Skenes unusual is how recently he started seriously considering baseball a real career opportunity. At 6-foot-6 and 247 pounds, he might look like he was born to throw 99 mph for a living. But this time last year, he was committed to quite a different vocation. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s a clear no. 1 biggest college baseball program in the country, I’m not going to offer my opinion on what it is. Not because I don’t have an opinion on the subject, but because sharing it — no matter what answer you give — tends to invite dozens of message board posters to find out where you live and hide spiders in your car.

Regardless of who’s no. 1, LSU — in terms of tradition, program success, resources, developmental track record, and fan support — has to be up there.

In 2022, former Arizona and Nevada head coach Jay Johnson took over for the recently retired Paul Manieri, who’d made five College World Series in his 15 seasons in Baton Rouge, and won the 2009 national championship. Results in Johnson’s first year were in the neighborhood of what Manieri accomplished in his final few seasons: The Tigers went 40-22 (17-13 in SEC play) before falling to Southern Mississippi in a regional final. Whether that’s viewed as a failure, a minor disappointment, or a step in the right direction, one thing is for absolute certain: It’s not where LSU wants to be. Read the rest of this entry »

They say you should never go to the grocery store hungry. If you do, you could end up like the Padres: A cart full of shortstops, eye-catching extensions for key players like Yu Darvish and Robert Suarez, and even a couple fun veteran DH types from the end caps to snack on during the drive home. Then you get home, unload the car, and realize you forgot something essential like bread, or coffee, or the entire back half of a starting rotation.

So you have to go back to the store and pick up a Michael Wacha before spring training:

Wacha agreement with Padres has complex structure that could earn him more than $24M over four years, sources tell @TheAthletic. Deal includes player and team options that protect both Wacha’s upside and downside while lowering his AAV for luxury-tax purposes. Pending physical.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 15, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

For the past two weeks, the American sports landscape has been held in the thrall of the Super Bowl. It’s secular American Christmas. The event so indelibly planted in our cultural consciousness advertisers get around the trademark by calling it “the Big Game,” and everyone knows what they mean. The Chiefs and the Eagles (Go Birds!) testing their mettle for 60 minutes on the largest stage our country has to offer (interrupted periodically by commercials and musical interludes).

No, I haven’t suffered some kind of episode and forgotten that this site is devoted entirely to a different sport. Because, you see, if you watch the Super Bowl you’ll get to see some baseball players: Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and Eagles receiver A.J. Brown.

Mahomes affinity for baseball is well known, given that he is 1) one of the most famous athletes in the country 2) a minority owner of the Kansas City Royals and 3) the son and namesake of an 11-year major league veteran. In fact, two of the Chiefs’ three quarterbacks are sons of 11-year big league veterans; third-stringer Shane Buechele is the son of former Rangers and Cubs third baseman Steve. (Unfortunately, I don’t know what Chad Henne’s father’s profession is.) Read the rest of this entry »