You can see, if you want, the teenager who signed with the Minnesota Twins in 2016: a second-round pick from Salem High School in Georgia, leaving an offer from the University of Kentucky to make a go of it in the minors. You can see, in fact, his pre-draft workout for the Twins. It’s right here on YouTube, with a modest thousand views: not the best quality, not the best angle, but he’s there, swinging away, his face turned away from the camera. The video was uploaded by John Baddoo, his dad, whose channel features just one other video — again, starring his son Akil, this time going up to bat in Puerto Rico. From behind the dugout in the sparsely-populated stands — so far that, at first, it’s unclear who is being filmed — the phone camera slowly focuses on Akil as he takes his warm-up swings. Its shaky zoom follows him to the plate. When he puts the ball in play, the video ends abruptly. We don’t know what happened to that ball, whether it was a hit or an out, but it doesn’t matter: We saw his patience, his swing. When this video was uploaded in 2015, he was only 17 years old.

Now, Akil Baddoo is 22. He is, as of last week, a major leaguer. And his debut week has been unlike any other. He made his first appearance on Sunday. His parents were there at Comerica Park, watching, just as they had been when their son was in high school. And on the very first pitch Baddoo saw in the majors, he homered.

That, in itself, is some incredible magic — of all the players who’ve debuted in the major leagues, a number that is currently approaching 20,000, only 31 have done what Baddoo did — seen one pitch and sent it out of the ballpark. But it didn’t stop there. The next day, Baddoo hit another home run: a grand slam, in fact. Read the rest of this entry »

What unfolded in the bottom of the sixth at Coors Field on Friday night was melodrama of the highest tier. There was the astonishingly rapid unraveling of Trevor Bauer‘s no-hitter: a walk, a homer, a walk, a homer — within 10 minutes, what had been a dominant performance was utterly spoiled. Then came David Price’s first on-field appearance with the Dodgers, his first pitching appearance since 2019 — and within 10 more minutes, the Rockies had hit another two long balls. What had been an unassailable 10-0 lead became, out of nowhere, an entirely assailable 10-6 lead.

As Price pitched, a grey blur darted across the backstop. “Did you see the cat?” my brother texted me — and I hadn’t seen it. A moment of inattention was enough to miss it. But it didn’t matter, because, in a matter of minutes, the cat bolted onto the field. The baseball game had been one thing; quickly, without warning, it had become another. And now, it had stopped. The field was transformed into a venue for people to watch the cat.

The cat was an ominous figure, a fluffy gray shadow, its teeth bared in fear as it loped over the infield dirt. It stopped, eventually, in the outfield, where it assumed a defensive resting position. For a moment it sat there, panting, while the thousands of people surround it roared, willing it onward to whatever escapade might lie ahead. The cat was very frightened, as one might well expect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s rankings, and Dan Szymborski examined the state of the league’s first basemen. Today, we turn our attention to second and third basemen, starting with the denizens of the keystone.

Second base is always a great time here at Positional Power Rankings Inc., an opportunity for us to answer the age-old question: If contact hitters were different, how different would they be? The answer is, of course, quite different, which is why we must rank them. Some, like the players at the top of this list, are contact hitters whose skills expand beyond that limited scope, taking them to critical plate appearances in the postseason, to pennants and championships. Some, with their abilities dwindling over time, are forced to adopt a different style of hitting. Some have never been successful big-leaguers; some are decade-long veterans. Some are young and on the rise; others are old, and sort of on the rise anyway. But they all occupy second base, and these are their rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

I invite you to look at the image below. Please, go ahead.

That’s Jordan Hicks on the mound — you know, “strike one at 104” Jordan Hicks. At the plate is Mets utilityman Luis Guillorme. Hicks, on Sunday, was making his first appearance on the mound since undergoing Tommy John surgery in mid-2019. Guillorme played an extremely solid 30 games for the Mets in 2020 and is 5-for-15 this spring.

What is happening in this picture? Look at Guillorme’s feet — his right ankle rolled, his left heel lifting off the ground, his arms flinging the bat desperately through the air. Yadier Molina extends his arm, holding his glove in place. Look at the scorebug — the 1-2 count. This could very well have been a picture of Hicks striking out Guillorme.

Except it wasn’t. Guillorme got his bat on it, somehow — not the heat Hicks is best known for, but a slider at 86 — launching the ball somewhere into the leftward distance. It was the 10th pitch of the plate appearance, the eighth he’d seen with two strikes. Molina and the umpire watched it sail away. Hicks’ next pitch, at 99, nearly took Guillorme’s head off. The count was now even, and the plate appearance was still only halfway done. Read the rest of this entry »

Given their disdain for our society, our laws, and our little entertainments, it makes sense that geese are not as common a visitor to professional ballparks as, say, cats. Geese prefer to create their own domains in areas less enclosed and busied by human activities, like golf courses and public green spaces. References to geese on baseball fields in old newspaper records are hard to find — perhaps because of the perceived non-newsworthiness of such incidents, perhaps because of the number of baseball players and ballparks with “Goose” in their names. But, every so often, a goose does appear on a field where major league baseball is being played. It happened just this week, in fact, at Sunday’s game between the Cubs and the Diamondbacks: a lone Canada goose in the grass at Salt River Fields, emanating hostility. It lurked behind Rafael Ortega, its eerily long neck extended outward, ready to strike anyone who might interfere with its presence there, its ego puffed up by the violence with which it had preserved its claim over the territory. Slo-mo footage showed how this goose had chased off another goose that landed on the field, clamping its screaming beak on the interloping goose’s back, tearing out a painful-looking number of feathers before the other goose was able to make its escape.

Naturally, coverage of the carnage tended toward shock at the goose’s willingness to fight for its claim to a spot in the outfield, and its unwillingness to leave said spot. The video above is titled “Goose invades baseball field!”; other headlines include “A goose took over [the] outfield,” “Angry goose wanders onto field,” and “A**hole Goose Won’t Get Out of Center Field.” While the level of intention ascribed to the goose differs, what can be agreed upon is that center field was not where the goose — and, by extension, any goose — is supposed to be. Read the rest of this entry »

This season, for the first time since the Toronto Blue Jays played their inaugural games in 1977, there will not be a dedicated radio broadcast of their games. Instead of a radio team broadcasting the game, the audio from television broadcasts will be simulcast to radio listeners. Rogers, the Canadian telecom giant that owns both the Blue Jays and the networks they are broadcast on, has made assurances that this is merely a safety measure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is unclear what the plans are for the future of the Blue Jays on the radio. Longtime broadcaster Mike Wilner was laid off this winter, and there has been no replacement announced; even apart from the loss of a Jays radio broadcast, the AM sports radio landscape in Canada has taken significant blows recently, with Bell Media, another telecom giant, unceremoniously taking a number of local stations off the air last month. Should this season prove to Rogers that having a dedicated radio broadcast is an expense not worth carrying into the future, Blue Jays baseball on the radio could prove to be another one of the casualties of the pandemic.

It’s been almost a century since the first major league baseball game was broadcast over the radio: an early-August game between the Pirates and the Phillies in 1921. Despite resistance from both traditional print media and team ownership, the popularity of such broadcasts took off, sparking a conflict that would fundamentally change the revenue structure of major league baseball. In his book Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio, James R. Walker writes about the forces that changed the attitudes of baseball higher-ups towards the broadcasting of baseball on the radio. Declining attendance was at first, and stubbornly, blamed on radio broadcasting, leading team ownership to call for bans on such broadcasts. But with the growing influence and financial power of advertising in broadcasting and the realization that radio was a boon to developing geographically-displaced fandom (especially in the western United States, where many people lived far from a major-league team), fewer and fewer teams held out against the practice.

There was, at the same time, a fundamental shift in what the purpose of such broadcasts was. As Walker writes, the World Series, from 1921 until 1933, was broadcast on the radio — not because it was lucrative to do so, but as a service to the country’s interested public. In 1934, though, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis sold the rights to the World Series broadcast to the Ford Motor Company. Within a few years, a federal judge would hand down a decision naming baseball broadcasts on the radio as the property of the teams involved, and New York, the last holdout of broadcast bans, embraced this new revenue stream. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani has already done it. There’s a video on YouTube you can watch if you want to — hundreds, actually, but I’m thinking of one in particular. Over 22 minutes long, and all of it beyond belief. There is the best pitcher in the league, with the diving splitter, with the fastball no one can catch up with; there is the best hitter, with his OPS over 1.000, launching baseballs with such power that they seem to disappear off the bat, flying over scoreboards, into streets, to the very furthest reaches of where you could imagine a human being could hit a baseball. And it is the same person, just one person, doing both of these things. You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it. But you can see it, right now. Back then, too, people saw it. Millions of people: watching from their homes, from bars, from the stands, where they held up signs, held their breath, waiting for the next feat to come.

This was in 2016. Ohtani was only 21 years old.

***

It’s hard to believe that the spring of 2018, when Ohtani played his first games with the Angels, was only three years ago. It seems like so much longer. Partially because so much happened so fast. One moment, it was the Ohtani Sweepstakes of 2017-18, with the number of teams being gradually narrowed, the reports trickling in, each fanbase eventually resigning themselves to his absence, except for the one that won out. There was a brief time of dreaming, all smiles and photoshoots, slotting his name into imaginary batting orders alongside Mike Trout — and then it was time for spring, when it didn’t matter and you didn’t have to worry about it, except it did, and you did, too. Those first few outings — the walks from the mound, the strikeouts at the plate — the crowing from fans who would have you believe they never wanted the guy in the first place, the reports from anonymous scouts saying it wouldn’t play, it couldn’t play, not here in the big leagues.

But it played. From the very beginning, it played — like it had been scripted. A solid, winning start — a home run, launched, with the bases nearly full — a high five to an imaginary line of teammates, and then the real celebration. A perfect game taken into the seventh inning. More trips around the bases. He’s already done it. Why not again? Why not now, with even more millions of people watching? Read the rest of this entry »

There is no video that I can find of the moment when, during Sunday’s inaugural spring training contest between the Phillies and the Tigers, the fans began to boo. One can imagine well enough what it might have sounded like, even in the absence of evidence: The bases were loaded, and the Phillies, despite using two pitchers who threw a combined 50 pitches, had failed to record a third out. In the interest of playing a complete game without anyone’s arm falling off, the inning was rolled, and the players left the field. And as they left, down came the boos.

What was the root of the booing? Phillies fans exercising their God-given right to boo their own players’ failures? Tigers fans, robbed of the opportunity to see a two-out grand slam in the very first inning of spring? I can’t imagine it was a wall of boos — not on the level of such concerted efforts as, say, when Rob Manfred presented the Commissioner’s Trophy last October, nor even comparable to the sound of a stadium of 22,000 on a pre-pandemic weeknight expressing their unhappiness at a throw to first. Fans, of course, can’t travel in the same way that they did last February, and the seats of the stadium in Lakeland can’t be packed, and there are reasons that one might think twice about loud, collective vocalizations in a public place. But, nonetheless, there they were, making their displeasure known.

The opening hours of last year’s spring training, too, made headlines for their booing. This was the first on-field appearance of the Astros after their cheating scandal broke during the offseason, and, while there were efforts underway to plan an Opening Day booing that would go down in the history books, every opportunity was taken to demonstrate to the Astros that even their pre-season efforts were not in the least appreciated. Read the rest of this entry »

Under the low, blue-grey sky in Jupiter, the clouds rolling in low from the sea, the people crowd in the seats, white hats and dark sunglasses on, in the annual ritual of anticipation. The latest in inoffensive country-pop blaring over the speakers, the salty food spilling onto the ground — with handheld video cameras, grainy images criss-crossed by thick netting, they zoom in on the players they’re here to watch. The classic red of the jerseys is loud against the muted landscape; it makes someone like the aging slugger, whom the camera follows with interest, look even bigger and more imposing than he is. And he is, indeed, imposing, much as he has been for the last decade: the Rawlings Big Stick appearing, in his hands, to have all the heft of a piece of driftwood. He is 37 years old, with a right knee that’s gone under the knife; for now, he will not run the bases, nor take the field. He glowers, alone, waiting for his one turn at the plate.

In the rest of the dugout, the bustle: the big grins, pounding gloves. Last year, they lost the pennant. This year, they should make a run for it again. Squint and you’ll see the catcher, who, during last year’s chase, sliced his finger nearly off with a hunting knife — an injury he assures everyone will not affect his ability to throw this year. Watch carefully, and you might catch a glimpse of the prospect. He doesn’t look out of his depth: he is as solid as the slugger ever was, and his demeanor betrays no trepidation. He only has one professional season under his belt; when the slugger debuted almost 15 years ago, he was only a little kid. But he is here, and with a vacancy on the hot corner, he could make the team. It’s a long shot, of course; everyone says it’s a long shot. It was a long shot for a 20-year-old in his first professional season to climb all the way to Triple-A by year’s end, too, but he did it. The chance may be small — but there’s a chance.

The slugger swings — a long, belabored swing, well behind the pitch, and the umpire’s arm punches through the air. The inning is over. The music plays.

***

“He was like a rock,” the team doctor says. He is talking about the prospect. Before a game was even played this spring, when players were reporting and getting their physicals done, they were talking about the prospect. There is such an incongruity between the reality of this young man and what one expects out of a player only two years out of high school, and within that incongruity is space for endless imagining. How quickly he rose in only a year; how quickly might he rise given another? It is spring, and he is with the big-league club — a chance for fans to catch a glimpse, to stoke the fires of their imaginations, before he returns, presumably, to the minors. The games don’t count, but the visions they produce can endure through entire disappointing seasons. If the slugger continues to decline, if the catcher’s near-severed finger hampers him, if they can’t get anything out of third base — they can return, whenever they want, to the low clouds of a passing winter, to a promise of what could soon be. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a matter of great fanfare when, in June of 1951, Sick’s Capilano Stadium had its grand opening in Vancouver. Replacing the old Athletic Park, full-page spreads in local papers boasted of the stadium design (an exact replica of Sick’s Stadium in Seattle, which would briefly be the home of the Pilots); the electric scoreboard; the location, a green space underneath the hill known as Little Mountain, which was considered to be in the exact center of Vancouver; and the amenities for fans, which included hotplates for hot dogs and aspirin available for any headaches — “ideal for when the team is losing,” as the Vancouver Province noted.

The stadium was named for the team, the Vancouver Capilanos, who played in the Western International League. The league’s history, as was the case for most leagues in the Northwest, was chaotic, marked by false starts and stops. And, it turned out, the chaos would continue. The Western International League, in 1955, became the Northwest League; the Capilanos made way for a Pacific Coast League team, the Mounties, in 1956. When the Mounties folded after the 1967 season, having sustained losses of over $90,000 in their final year, Capilano Stadium spent a decade without a professional baseball team. When the PCL returned to Vancouver in 1978, in the form of the Canadians, the stadium was renamed in honor of local restaurateur Nat Bailey, who, as the story goes, got his start in the stands of the old Athletic Park, hocking peanuts and chocolates to fans, a megaphone projecting his voice up through the bleachers. And when the PCL left Vancouver again after 1999, the stadium — and the team that played in it — came full circle, beginning the new millennium as a part of the league that began, in 1922, as the Western International League. Read the rest of this entry »