It was a minor swap made earlier this month, but Ernesto Frieri has already been a major contributor to the Angels’ bullpen. Since being acquired from the Padres for Alexi Amarista and Donn Roach more than three weeks ago, the 26-year-old right-hander has thrown 11 hitless innings for the Halos. With Jordan Walden stumbling out of the gate, Frieri has quickly assumed right-handed relief ace work while Scott Downs handles things from the left side.
Based on Game Score, Kerry Wood’s 20 strikeout game against the Astros on May 6th, 1998 is the best-pitched nine-inning game in Major League history. The 105 score is better than every perfect game and four points better than any other game period. He was 41 days shy of his 21st birthday and it was his fifth big league start.
Wood, now 34, is set to announce his retirement from baseball today according to ESPN Chicago’s Bruce Levine. Among pitchers who have thrown at least 1,000 career innings, his career 10.31 K/9 is the best in history by a right-handed pitcher and the second best all-time behind Randy Johnson (10.61 K/9). His 20 strikeouts against Houston remains the National League single-game record, and five days later he struck out 13 Diamondbacks to set the all-time record for strikeouts in consecutive starts (33).
In many ways, Wood is the embodiment of everything that can happen with young pitchers. He dominated, he walked a ton of guys, he got hurt, he dominated again, got hurt again, shifted to the bullpen, and then got hurt yet again. Unlike Mark Prior, Wood was hurt long before Dusty Baker came to Chicago’s north side and starting running arms through the shredder. He had Tommy John surgery in 1999 and shoulder inflammation in 2001, but still managed to rack up 17.2 WAR before his career really flew off the rails in 2004.
The laundry list of injuries includes labrum and rotator cuff surgery, five separate DL stints for non-surgical shoulder problems, knee surgery, back problems, blisters, an oblique strain, and triceps issues in addition to the elbow reconstruction. Wood spent 16 different stints on the disabled list during his 14-year career, including a bout with shoulder inflammation this season that appears to have contributed to his decision to retire. Frankly, it’s surprising he didn’t call it a career sooner given all the physical problems.
In an age when the term “electric stuff” gets slapped on every kid with a mid-90s fastball, none have lived up to the moniker like Wood. His fastball would legitimately sit in the mid-to-upper-90s early in his career and that curveball … it was just a thing of beauty. Batters swung and missed at his offerings a whopping 12.3% of the time since the data starting being recorded in 2002, a testament to how nasty he was. Wood topped the 200 IP plateau only twice (2002 and 2003) but he had four different seasons of 3+ WAR, including another at 2.7. He started, he closed, and he setup between injuries for the Cubs, the Indians, the Yankees, and then the Cubs again.
It’s almost impossible to find someone who wasn’t a fan of Kerry Wood. He was never an underdog in the sense that he lacked talent — he had talent to spare, if anything — but he was an underdog in that his body did everything it could to sabotage his greatness. Wood was one of the most exciting pitchers of his generation, fitting the Texas fireballer stereotype to a tee. Paul Sullivan of The Chicago Tribune says he’ll announce the decision following this afternoon’s game, and chances are Wood will make his final appearance as a player in relief and walk off the field to a standing ovation. After all he’s been through, Kerry will leave the game of baseball on his own terms and that’s awesome.
After a year away from the game and a handful of minor league tune-up starts, Andy Pettitte officially returned to the Yankees on Sunday. His pitching line was nothing to write home about — 6.1 IP, 7 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 3 BB, 2 K — and he ultimately took the loss against the light-hitting Mariners. All four runs came on a pair of two-run homers, including a line drive shot by Justin Smoak that probably doesn’t leave many non-Yankee Stadium stadiums (video).
Anecdotally, the 39-year-old Pettitte looked an awful lot like the previous versions of himself, just with quite a bit of rust. He threw a ton of moving fastballs — 23 two-seamers and 32 cutters out of 94 pitches (58.5%) — but had trouble getting the ball (particularly the cutter) in on right-handed batters…
Late last week the Yankees (and really all of baseball) got some bad news when Mariano Rivera tore his right ACL shagging fly balls before Thursday’s game. It’s been part of his pre-game routine throughout his entire professional career, but it wasn’t until now that he took a misstep and hurt himself seriously. Rivera did announce that he will return to pitch next year — “I am coming back. Write it down in big letters … I’m not going out like this,” he said on Friday — but the Yankees will still have to weather the storm without him this summer. Luckily for them, David Robertson and Rafael Soriano are more than adequate replacements in the late innings.
The injury and the shock factor that came with it — was this going to be end of his career? — spurred me on to dig up some interesting nuggets about the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history. We all know about the 608 career saves, but save totals alone do not do the man’s career justice. Without further delay, the Mariano Rivera fact sheet…
It took 21 team games and 72 plate appearances, but Giancarlo Stanton finally hit his first home run of the the season this past weekend. He drove an 0-2 fastball from left-hander Mike Zagurski out to dead center field, a 425-foot three-run shot. It raised Stanton’s season line to .246/.288/.348 and was just his fifth extra-base hit, well below both projections and expectations. There are a number of reasons for the 22-year-old’s power outage in the early going, but the most obvious one is staring us right in the face: his new ballpark.
With some help from Hit Tracker Online, here’s a look at the new Marlins Park with an overlay of the Sun Life Stadium outfield dimensions…
99.6%. That was the Red Sox’s win expectancy when Vicente Padilla struck out Andruw Jones to open the seventh inning on Saturday. Freddy Garcia did not make it out of the second inning and rookie southpaw Felix Doubront had handcuffed the Yankees’ lineup through six innings, surrendering only a solo homer to Mark Teixeira along the way. The game was all Boston with eight outs to go, and that’s when the national FOX broadcast cut away to the ninth inning of Phil Humber’s perfect game.
When the Twins signed 30-year-old right-hander Jared Burton to a minor league contract this winter, it was little more than a blip on the offseason radar. He managed to rack up 1.3 WAR in 161 relief innings for a Reds from 2007-2009 after being taken from the Athletics in the Rule 5 Draft, but hyperthyroidism and shoulder surgery limited him to just eight big league innings in 2010 and 2011. Relievers get hurt and drop off the baseball radar, it’s what they do.
Burton appears to have avoided that fate, at least for the time being. He had a strong Spring Training and made Minnesota’s bullpen with an assist to Scott Baker’s elbow injury. Through five innings across six appearances, he’s struck out six batters and walked zero. He did surrender two solo homers in his first game, so it’s going to take some time for him to work off that 5.40 ERA and 6.32 FIP. Burton has allowed just one baserunner (a single) since that first game.
Most teams have played ten games by now, and while we still are unable to draw anything meaningful out of players’ performances, we can still have a little fun with them. I’ve always been a fan of high-contact guys, especially players with better than average walk and strikeout rates. Guys who walk more than they whiff over a full season are my personal favorites.
With that in mind, let’s look at some players who haven’t done either yet this season, draw a walk or strikeout. We’ll begin with the five players with the most plate appearances who have yet to see a ball four in 2012…
Offensively competent catchers are perhaps the rarest commodity in baseball, and clubs tend to go to great lengths to make sure they can keep those guys long-term. The Indians and Carlos Santana agreed to a five-year contract extension yesterday, a deal that guarantees him $21 million and includes a $12 million club option for a sixth year. Jordan Bastian of MLB.com and Paul Hoynes of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer both deserve credit for breaking the news.
Santana, 26, was already under team control through 2016. The new extension kicks in immediately, so it covers his final two pre-arbitration years and all three years of arbitration-eligibility. The club option covers one year of free agency. The Indians gained cost certainty more than anything, though that club option is obviously very appealing. Santana only signed for $75,000 out of Dominican Republic in 2004, so he gets some serious long-term financial security.