The first plate appearance of Game 2 in the Wild Card Series between the Brewers and the Dodgers went like this: a high fastball from Clayton Kershaw, coming in at 92.7 mph. A slider, fouled off by Avisaíl García. Then another slider — a swing and a miss. And then another slider, the best of all of them, for the strikeout.

That first plate appearance set the tone for the rest of the night. Though the 3-0 final score may suggest a close game, in reality, it didn’t feel all that close. Kershaw utterly dominated the Brewers, who, as the broadcast frequently noted, end their season never having cleared the .500 mark. Through eight scoreless innings of work, he struck out 13, allowing just three hits and a walk. It was one of the best postseason performances of his career, and it propels the Dodgers into the NLDS.

For the first four innings of the game, Kershaw and Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff — who hit a first-inning home run off Kershaw in the NLCS two years ago — matched each other blow-for-blow. Kershaw struck out two in the top of the first; Woodruff struck out two in the bottom. Kershaw retired the Brewers in order in the top of the second; Woodruff did the same to the Dodgers in the bottom half of the inning, adding two more strikeouts. In the top of the third, Kershaw pitched around a leadoff single, retiring the next three batters; in the bottom of the third, Woodruff, too, pitched around a single, again striking out two. And in the fourth, both halves of the inning saw all three batters retired, with both pitchers recording two more strikeouts.

Everything was working for Kershaw, whose fastball averaged 91.8 mph over the course of his start. His slider, which he threw 48% of the time, was particularly devastating: It generated 32 swings on 45 pitches, with 20 of those swings being whiffs. Of his eventual 13 strikeouts, 10 were on the slider; nine of those 10 were swinging strikeouts. Woodruff, for his part, also had his pitches working for the first four innings, generating strikeouts on his changeup, slider, and, most often, his fastball, which averaged 96.9 mph. Read the rest of this entry »

In a perfect world for the San Diego Padres — or even a still-imperfect, slightly better world — Dinelson Lamet would have been on the mound in Game 1 of their Wild Card Series against the Cardinals. In that better world, Mike Clevinger would have been waiting in the wings for a Game 2. But that’s not the world that the Padres got. Instead, Lamet and Clevinger, both injured, were left off the series roster; Chris Paddack was the hastily-announced starter for the series opener. And without their two best pitchers, the Padres find themselves already staring down elimination after a grueling 7-4 loss in Game 1 that took nearly four hours and saw each team use more than six pitchers.

From the first batter of the game, the Cardinals lineup — which ranked 19th in wRC+ and is coming off one of the most brutal stretches of non-stop baseball that we’ve ever seen — was all over Paddack. It’s been a tough sophomore season for the 24-year-old, largely due to the ineffectiveness of his fastball: What was, in his rookie season, a strength of his repertoire has been a weakness in 2020, with decreased movement and poor command resulting in a lot of hard contact. Paddack was one of baseball’s hardest-hit pitchers this year, and today the damage against him started almost immediately. After a leadoff popup off the bat of Kolten Wong, five consecutive hits — single, home run, double, single, double — put the Cardinals ahead 3-0. A sacrifice fly made the score 4-0 before Kwang Hyun Kim had faced a single batter. Three out of those five hits had exit velocities above 100 mph, including the home run crushed off the bat of Paul Goldschmidt. Read the rest of this entry »

The comments will tell you that the victory is worthless. The division was bad. The Diamondbacks, the team they overtook, the team they just beat to win the title — bad. These guys, I mean, how long has it been since these guys won anything, since they got anywhere? Three years, four? Twenty? There are few fans in the dark stadium seats to see this victory, dappled in weird midday light.

But the young closer, so dominant this season, retires the final batter, quick and easy, the final score set at 7-6. And then they, the visitors, pour out of the dugout, the fans who have traveled to see this happen beaming above them — running, hugging, jumping, all happiness gravitating around that spot on the field where the closer stands, even as the scowls come from the other dugout, the home team exiting, heads down and deflated.

You have to slow it down, all the spinning celebration, to see him: the pitcher, one of the first blurry figures over the dugout fence, sprinting at full speed, there a moment and then gone into the grey-blue heart of the celebration. He is the best player on this team. He is the best pitcher in baseball. Right now, though, he is not a singular figure. You can make him out, but you have to squint. He is absorbed in the dynamism of joy.

***

It took a few days longer than it did last year. But they are at home, the towering curves of the stands filled with people, all of them standing. The pitch — the ball, grounded into the infield — the twirl, the spin, the out recorded just in time, even though the stakes are so low, the score is 9-1, the celebration only waiting to happen. And the camera knows to focus on him this time, the first out of the dugout again. Like a kid: a broad, open-mouthed smile as the fireworks burst, as the foundations shake and the lights flash and everything spills into everything, all motion, all joy. He puts on his hat and grins for the cameras.

Read the rest of this entry »

The smoke is everywhere. It is in everything. It is inescapable. Closing the windows can’t keep it out completely. No air purifier will absorb all of the particles of ash. It has been days now since I stepped outside without feeling it immediately: the heaviness, the scratching in my throat and my lungs and my eyes. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m healthy, and I’m indoors, and though the air here is full of the aftermath of fires, those fires are far away to the south, where the wind is blowing in from. There, the fires are still burning. They burn more by the hour. Thousands of people have been displaced, forced to take refuge in fairgrounds left empty by the pandemic, the fates of their homes and their livelihoods unknown. Thousands more still have to work in this state of uncertainty, with the air around them full of danger. Dozens are missing; dozens have been killed. The skies have gone deep red, then disappeared entirely. And this, we are told, is what we have to look forward to in the summers of the future: More burning. More toxic air. More displacement. More death.

Through it all, they keep playing baseball.

***

The image looks like it’s been doctored, like someone has run a bad filter over it. Everything has a blurry red-gray haze: the players, the cardboard fans, the grass. More than 790,000 acres of land in the state of Washington has been consumed by fire. In Seattle, though, the Mariners are, unexpectedly, in the midst of a playoff push. They are scheduled to play a double-header. The amount of fine particulate matter in the air measures over 200 micrograms per cubic meter. The roof being closed doesn’t help.

Almost a month ago, when the fires started burning, MLB clarified their position on the cancellation of games due to air quality. There is precedent for such a thing happening. Northwestern minor league teams have done it in recent years; so have teams in the Australian Baseball League. But as far as major league teams go, MLB has decided on a hands-off approach, leaving the decision of whether or not to play with team ownership. There has been much discussion of air-quality-related postponement over the past month; there has yet to be an actual postponement. Not when the skies above Oracle Park were thick with an eerie orange haze, not when ash blanketed the cars parked outside the Oakland Coliseum. And not in Seattle, where the Air Quality Index stayed firmly in the Unhealthy range throughout Monday. In Vancouver, Canada Post canceled all deliveries. It was unsafe, they said, to make postal workers walk around in this environment. Read the rest of this entry »

It was the second game of the Twins-Cardinals doubleheader on Tuesday. The Cardinals had lost the first game, but were now already ahead 5-2 in the bottom of the third. The bases were loaded, and Caleb Thielbar, newly into the game, was facing catcher Matt Wieters with two out.

Thielbar quickly got ahead of Wieters, who had been hit by a pitch in his first plate appearance: a 90 mph fastball in the middle of the zone, a 68 mph curveball on the outside corner that Wieters just barely managed to foul off, and it was 0-2, advantage Thielbar. The 0-2 pitch, another fastball in the middle of the zone, was again fouled off by Wieters, sailing off into the right-field stands. No matter. Throw him a better one this time, right? Wieters took a little stroll, adjusting his gloves — maybe taking a breath, maybe pondering what Thielbar might have in store for him on the next pitch. He walked back into the box, cocked the bat, stared out to the mound. Almost the exact same pitch — almost the exact same result. This, it seemed, would be a battle. Another stroll for Wieters: inhale, exhale, the bat held out in front of his face.

This time, Thielbar changed things up — a curveball at the knees. Again, Wieters fouled it off, and again, he stepped away, out of the box, and took a breath. He was, with each pitch, just trying to stay alive, and to stay alive took all of his effort. He had to steal the breaths when he could. Because with each pitch that he fouled off, every successful attempt at fending off the onslaught, Wieters was prolonging the time he would have to spend fighting. The price of staying alive was that the struggle would not end.

And as the plate appearance continued, the struggle became more and more visible. Thielbar only threw three pitches outside the strike zone, all of them within the first nine pitches of what would end up being a 19-pitch at-bat. The rest Wieters had to foul off, the effort showing in his ever more laborious swings and grimaces, the length of his walks outside the zone, the depth of his deep breaths, and the tension in his stance as he returned to await, once again, a pitch that he would have to fight off. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a story from yesterday: At the beginning of July, Yoán Moncada tested positive for COVID-19. He didn’t know where or how he got the disease. He missed the beginning of the White Sox training camp, sitting at home, his sense of smell and taste — a tell-tale symptom — temporarily gone. When he was cleared to come to camp two weeks later, manager Rick Renteria said that he looked “like he hadn’t skipped a beat.” Moncada himself said that he was “glad to be back and be healthy,” though his days since the diagnosis had been “scary and a difficult time.”

And yesterday, three months after that frightening positive test, Moncada spoke to reporters about how the virus is still affecting him. He described it as a battle — to summon the energy that had, prior to getting COVID-19, been abundant; to simply make it through each day, to push through the “weird feeling” that has drained him of his strength. “But that’s just something I have to deal with,” he concluded, “and it is what it is. I have to find a way to get through it.”

***

Here’s another story from yesterday: Even before the pandemic, Minor League Baseball as we know it was in limbo. MLB’s plan to contract the minor leagues, moving them under the purview of the MLB head office and leaving dozens of franchises staring down an uncertain future, became public knowledge in the dying days of the 2019 season.

Our world has changed dramatically since last October. MLB’s plan hasn’t. If anything, the Office of the Commissioner has even more justification to squeeze the minors: The pandemic has dealt a death-blow to many minor-league teams, whose profits, unlike those of major-league teams, are largely tied to game day ticket and concession sales. And yesterday, an ESPN report detailed the confusion and bitterness around the impending fundamental changes coming to the minors. Some minor league owners have been lobbying lawmakers to step in, and team owners have continued to attempt negotiations with MLB. But the deal, it seems, is done, and most teams are just trying to be among those left standing when this is all over. “Minor League Baseball,” as the article says, “a tradition of languid summer nights at ballparks where families can afford to watch future stars, has been reduced to a paranoid game of ‘Survivor.'”

***

And here’s another story from yesterday: In an interview with ESPN, Manny Machado — resurgent and resplendent on the Padres team that has taken baseball by storm — talked a lot about fun, and he talked a lot about joy. Fun: the connecting line between his experience of baseball now, as a multi-millionaire professional, and his experience of baseball as a kid. Joy: the experience that Machado feels the Padres bringing to their fans, to the sport of baseball in general. Here’s what Machado had to say about fun:

At the end of the day, it’s about going out there and having fun. And when you’re having fun, baseball just comes naturally to you. … I’ve been doing this a long time, and honestly it’s the same game right now as when I was a kid. You gotta catch the ball, you gotta throw the ball, you gotta hit the ball. The baseball has obviously gotten better, the bats have gotten better, the gloves have gotten better, the technology has gotten a lot better. But it’s the same game. It’s the same game that we love to play.

You didn’t think about stats, you didn’t think about home runs, you didn’t think about any of that when you were young. You were thinking about just going out there and having fun and getting ready to go have pizza with a soda at the end of the game and playing with your friends. It’s the same game now. Obviously it’s at the highest level, but you just have to go out there and enjoy yourself. And with the group that we have here, every single day it goes back to that. We just wanna have fun. And when you play at ease like that, it maximizes your level.

And here’s what he had to say about joy:

Going to the ballpark every day, people are excited. And obviously it sucks that we don’t have fans in the stands, but we have a lot of media telling us what’s going on with social media, people cheering us on. We’re bringing so much joy to this game every single night that every time we step on that field, we just wanna go out there and have a good time no matter if we’re losing or we’re winning. We just wanna go out there and just play baseball and give fans something to cheer for.

This season, Machado said, with this team, is the most fun he’s had playing baseball in a long time.

***

These three stories, all of them published on the same day — this is the emotional experience of baseball in 2020, paranoia and relief and depression and elation, all transposed into the familiar key of nine (or sometimes seven) innings, three outs, three strikes, all roiling together. If you let yourself settle into it, half-close your eyes and focus on something else, you can almost forget the turmoil of the world outside the empty stadiums. That never lasts long. There is always something that makes you remember. Sometimes it’s unique to this year — players sick, games canceled; other times, the ill that’s exposed was there all along. Sports are products of the societies that create them, and the society major league baseball currently inhabits is far from healthy. Major league baseball breathes, but its breath is labored, its face a little grey. Any illness in dirty air becomes obvious.

But then — all of a sudden, there is life again. There are five grand slams, a no-hitter. Favorite players do well. Games are walked off. Success knocks, unexpected, and then arrives, crossing the doorstep with a flourish. There are smiles, even laughs. Having fun. And there are others, all the other people out there, feeling that same sharp jolt. Joy. 

You see it in the moments immediately following Lucas Giolito’s no-hitter, the achievement of a lifetime after so much struggle. He feels it, that surge in the heart. It is transcendent. He is overwhelmed by it. His teammates are overwhelmed by it. They throw their arms around each other.

And it is in that second that you remember the pandemic — the danger — remember that they aren’t supposed to be doing this, that they shouldn’t be this close — remember how long it’s been since you’ve been able to hug all your own loved ones, to even be near them — and the jolt becomes a gasp. Pain.

There is so much we have lost, and so much we may yet lose. And baseball, for all it may contain, can’t cancel those losses out.

***

In the drawer where I keep all my papers and old notebooks, beside the newspaper my brother brought me from Washington, D.C., the day after the Nationals won the World Series, there’s a crumpled package of photocopied sheets, poorly stapled, bent in eight different directions. I got the sheets from a counselor back in December. I can’t do anything, I told him: everything overwhelms me, everything is bad.  The counselor was sympathetic, but since I was not in obvious, imminent danger of harming myself or others, there was little he could offer me. So he offered me the sheets of paper — cognitive behavioral therapy homework, the kind I’ve seen so many times. I never did the homework. I had forgotten about it until I unearthed it yesterday. Searching for old notes, my eye immediately caught on the only bolded phrase on the page, confronting me almost like a threat: Fun is not an option. It is important!

Of all the various tenets of stress management that I’ve read over the years, this has always been one that I’ve reflexively discarded. Of course, fun is important, but what about everything else? What about taking care of the people around me? What about making enough money to eat, to pay for the roof over my head? The pandemic has made the collective experiences that I would search for fun in either rare or nonexistent. And it has made the important concerns, the ones that left so little time for fun, all the more urgent. Fun is not an option — but for many people, for most people, it has to be. Other things have to come first. We are trying to survive as best we can. It is so hard to see, sometimes, where there is room for fun. The clock is always ticking, and the fun, the joy — it’s all on stolen time.

***

But I steal it, still. From the grand slams and the walk-offs, the no-hitters and the blowouts — I steal the joy that the players carry, wherever I can find it. And the pandemic is still here, everywhere, every breath of air and every touch suspect. And the pain runs deep in every conversation with people I can’t see, in every news item detailing more murders, more overdoses, more fires burning, and the money is dwindling, and the jobs don’t call back, and even in the morning the sleep doesn’t come. What, in the face of a darkening future, could justify this theft?

But I steal that joy, the joy carried to me through the pixels and the fake noise. I cling to it before it dissipates, as it always does, its particles consumed by thicker, heavier air. It might be wrong. It might be foolish. But I always find myself waiting for the next chance to feel that sharp life in my chest. To know that, despite everything, there are places where joy can be found — even when it shouldn’t be there.

Before I say anything, take a look at this Raimel Tapia sac fly, which scored Matt Kemp in the bottom of the ninth at Coors Field last night.

It is incredible how the stakes of professional sports manage to be world-shakingly massive and completely meaningless at the very same time. At stake in any given baseball game is millions of dollars of investment, millions of hours of training, the hopes and dreams of millions of fans, the dedication of entire lifetimes. And yet, the only thing physically at stake is how, exactly, a small leather ball will travel through space: whether it will leave the stadium, or land in the catcher’s glove; whether it will be caught, or hit the grass; whether it will stay firm in the grip of a player’s hand, or slide through it, errant, to go off in some unintended direction. If these physical stakes were not so small, to fail when so much is riding on one’s ability to succeed would be, I imagine, unbearably devastating. But even the most horrible loss is reliably followed by another game — because they are, in the end, games.

That reliable continuity in the face of constant failure can be very reassuring for a normal, non-famous-athlete person. Life, to paraphrase a very unwise man, is literally all we have. And though the stakes of the average person’s everyday activities, taken in the context of the world at large, aren’t very high, they are, in another sense, everything. My small, sad everyday failures are just as small and sad and arbitrary as a ball falling from a glove onto a grass field — but because my life is composed entirely of the everyday and the insignificant, even these failures can seem insurmountable. Yet every day, I watch people who have much more to lose than I do somehow rebound from their inevitable failures to play again, and again, and again. Often, I wonder how they do it. Read the rest of this entry »

Until a few hours ago, the Cubs had been relying on the grace of Kyle Ryan as their sole bullpen left-hander. Lo, that is no longer the case: Per reports from Jon Heyman, the Cubs have acquired Andrew Chafin from the Diamondbacks for a PTBNL or cash considerations, and Josh Osich from the Red Sox for a PTBNL.

Chafin has been a consistently useful pitcher over the course of his career, accruing 4.0 WAR over six seasons prior to this one. Though he sports an ugly 8.10 ERA in 2020, his more reasonable 3.88 FIP suggests that there has been some amount of bad luck affecting him over his very small sample of work — he has, after all, only thrown 6 2/3 innings so far this season. Though he’s walked more batters than is usual for him, his 30.3% strikeout rate is consistent with his career numbers. The same is true of the velocities on his three pitches. And aside from a disastrous appearance on July 29, when he failed to record an out and allowed three runs on a homer and a double, Chafin really hasn’t been all that bad.

Chafin has been on the Injured List since August 19 with a left finger sprain. According to Heyman, the D-backs will pay Chafin’s salary down to the minimum, hoping for a “low-level prospect” to come back to Arizona should Chafin make a quick return from his injury, which is clearly what the Cubs expect. When Chafin does come back, he should certainly be an improvement over Ryan. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like every year there’s another incident in major league baseball that spurs renewed media and public interest in the game’s unwritten rules. In 2018, there was Ronald Acuña Jr. being injured by a José Ureña beanball; in 2019, there was Brad Keller throwing at Tim Anderson after a bat flip (and Anderson’s ensuing suspension). As the 2020 season began, I wondered whether a strange, truncated year under the shadow of a pandemic would allow for the annual unwritten rules controversy to arise. Two weeks ago, I got my answer in the dustup around Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 3-0 grand slam.

The Tatis incident seemed to draw more online attention than past unwritten rules controversies — a glance at Google Trends would appear to confirm that feeling. It also seemed to draw essentially universal disdain. Usually, there will be at least a few public holdouts against unwritten rules violations like bat flips, often citing “respect” — for “the game,” or for the pitcher victimized by the home run — as a reason why baseball should continue to hold onto its unspoken traditions. But in the case of Tatis, the violation perceived by Chris Woodward and Ian Gibaut was so patently ridiculous that almost no one joined them in saying it was wrong. Former and current players, media commentators — all were pretty much united in support for Tatis and scorn for the people trying to make him apologize. MLB itself handed down suspensions to Woodward and Gibaut for Gibaut throwing behind Manny Machado in response, making this particular unwritten rules scandal feel like it could be a turning point in the yearly discourse merry-go-round.

Watching everything unfold, though, I found myself wondering about the history of these incidents — not the unwritten rules themselves, but the public fascination with them. When did baseball writers start trying to document the unwritten rules, to name them as such? What kinds of violations of these rules have historically sparked interest, and how can the controversies of the past illuminate our present discussions?

As I dug into the newspaper archives, I found that the ways in which the unwritten rules of baseball were discussed shifted in interesting ways over time. So this history will be divided into three parts. What follows is a survey of the earliest days of baseball’s unwritten rules — from the late 19th century into the first decade of the 20th.

***

Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t confirm that this is true — sadly, Statcast doesn’t track “balls lost in the light.” But so far this season, it’s seemed to me like more catchable fly balls have disappeared into the sky than is usual for a 30-day period of major league baseball. Surveying the range of fly balls and popups with an xBA of less than .100 that didn’t result in outs, the earliest lost ball I can find is from July 27, when the Blue Jays’ Derek Fisher sent a fly ball into the right-field sunshine. Adam Eaton thought he could see it. Victor Robles, from his vantage point in center, knew that he couldn’t. And as Robles desperately sprinted over, Eaton tried even more desperately to correct his positioning. He leaped backward, the ball spinning away off his glove. His recovery attempt had only made things worse.

The next day, in the evening shadows of Cincinnati, Shogo Akiyama, standing in the sun and trying to shield his eyes, completely lost track of a fly ball off the bat of Jason Kipnis.

Read the rest of this entry »