After more than a century of a deistic laissez-faire attitude toward the sport, Major League Baseball made a remarkable announcement on Friday: Next year, for the first time, baseball will have a clock. The introduction of a pitch clock at the highest level of the game is merely one gourd in a cornucopia of rule changes approved late last week by the league’s competition committee, but it could revolutionize the sport. You can find the full list here, but rather than delve into the minutiae, I want to give a brief précis of the most important highlights and deliver a remarkable conclusion. Read the rest of this entry »
Unionizing a workplace isn’t as simple as buying a bullhorn and stamping out some buttons, though both are obviously essential steps in the process. It requires huge amounts of organizing effort, cajoling, and, unfortunately, paperwork.
Last week, the MLBPA announced that it had sent out authorization cards to thousands of minor league players; if a majority of players give the union consent to negotiate on their behalf, federal labor law will require MLB to negotiate collectively with those players over pay and working conditions. Tuesday, the MLBPA announced that a majority of minor league players had signed and returned those cards, and sent a letter to the league asking for recognition.
The hardest thing to do in sports is hit a baseball, but following the internecine contours of collective bargaining procedure has to be up there on the list. So let’s trace out the next few steps in a process that will likely take months, if not years, to complete. And since minor league ballplayers are merely one of many groups undertaking high-profile unionization efforts these days, knowing how this works might help you impress people the next time, say, the Starbucks union comes up at a party. (I need to start going to cooler parties.) Read the rest of this entry »
I, for one, am not a fan of the breakout of the “sweeper” in recent years. It’s not because I don’t enjoy frisbee-ish pitches that seem to pull out a map, ask for directions, and take a sharp turn on their way from the mound to home. A big part of my job is making GIFs of fun pitches, so I obviously love that part. Personally, I just don’t like the annoyance involved in classifying them.
To give you an example, I decided to do some research on sweeping sliders, or whirlies if you’re into weird nomenclature. In fact, that’s what this article is about. On my way to doing so, however, I had to spend some time getting obnoxiously technical. First, I downloaded all the sliders that right-handed pitchers have thrown this year. I separated them by movement profile, then started asking questions.
I asked a few people, “Does this scatter plot look like it separates out sweepers and non-sweepers to you?” It kind of did, and it also kind of didn’t. Are pitches that have 30% more horizontal break than vertical break sweepers? What about 50%? What about pitches that break a foot horizontally but move six inches downward? I sent several variations of that chart trying to nail it down, but nothing felt quite right – I’ll spare you having to look at the mess I ended up with. Read the rest of this entry »
Since I’m an obnoxiously determined Devil’s advocate, one of my favorite uses of data is tackling conventional wisdom. For example, one such bit of wisdom that always bugs me is when pundits insist that the best teams are the ones that win close games. In fact, the opposite is true. The most predictive run differential comes in blowouts — the good teams are the ones that are more likely to humiliate their opponents, not squeeze out a close one. This time of year, you start to see a lot of analysis asserting that X team is definitely blessed or doomed come playoff time because of some randomly chosen factor Y. We could do a column a day on these and still have dozens of unwritten pieces by the time the actual playoffs roll around, but let’s focus on a few specific ones, concentrating on who good teams beat rather than how many games they win.
First off, do regular season head-to-head records matter in the playoffs? Since the start of divisional play in 1969, teams that face each other in the playoffs have frequently met in the regular season. Interleague play added eventual World Series matchups to the regular season, and starting in 2023, every playoff matchup will have already occurred during the regular season. Given the sample size of playoff series, if we construct a simple model of series winning percentage that only consists of a team’s regular season winning percentage and its winning percentage in head-to-head matchups, the model horribly inaccurate, with an r-squared of 0.0886 and a mean absolute error of 275 points of winning percentage.
But including head-to-head winning percentage doesn’t really even have a marginal influence on the coin flip; without the head-to-head matchups, the model’s MAE increases to 276 points of winning percentage. Now, a head-to-head record may imply something about a team’s overall strength that isn’t captured in its overall record, but rather than pick up a small sample implication, we can use strength of schedule directly, which does help the model a tiny bit (playoff series are always going to be very uncertain unless we move to best-of-75 series or something wacky). Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a spray chart of Manny Machado’s groundballs this year:
And here’s a heat map of all of the grounders he’s hit in his career:
Oh, hi there. Don’t worry, you haven’t inadvertently stepped into a list of every player’s batted ball tendencies. Part of writing is building a sense of mystery. I’m just setting you up for a payoff later on. Whoops, gave that one away too easily! In any case, let’s move on. Read the rest of this entry »
Shane Bieber isn’t a prototypical modern-day pitcher. Unlike many of his peers who are on the mound pumping gas, the 27-year-old Cleveland Guardians right-hander succeeds by slicing and dicing, carving up the opposition with an array of well-placed offerings. Bieber’s heater is averaging just 91.3 mph on the season, and even in his higher-velocity 2020 Cy Young Award year, he was anything but a radar gun darling. From the time he entered pro ball in 2016 as a fourth-round pick out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Bieber has been a technician, not a flamethrower.
It’s hard to argue with the results. Over the past four seasons, Bieber is 36-19 with a 3.04 ERA and a 2.99 FIP in 513 innings. Despite a reputation for having nothing-to-write-home-about stuff, he’s fanned 641 batters while allowing just 427 hits. In 20 starts this year, Bieber has a 3.39 ERA and a 2.96 FIP, tied for ninth-best in the junior circuit.
Bieber discussed the art and science of pitching when the Guardians visited Fenway Park in the final week of July.
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David Laurila: At a time where a lot of guys are trying to overpower hitters, you’re viewed as a “pitcher.” With that in mind, where did you learn to pitch?
Shane Bieber: “I feel like I’ve been ‘pitching’ from a young age. My parents were involved — my dad was super involved — but the guy who taught me the most about pitching was Ben Siff. He was my travel ball coach for nine or 10 years, starting when I was nine years old. I’m still really close with him. Read the rest of this entry »
“They can’t all be ‘Ice Skating with Jackie Robinson‘” is a phrase often spoken in the downtown Brooklyn abode I share with my wife and daughter. In a marriage between two baseball media professionals, one a writer who was born into a lineage of Dodgers fans and the other an editor who spends her days seeking, weighing the merits of, and polishing stories for publication, it’s a line that has taken on a multilayered meaning.
The story itself is one told by Vin Scully, who called Dodgers games for 67 years, from 1950 — when Dem Bums were in Brooklyn, the perennial underdogs in a three-team city — through 2016, when they were nearing the six-decade mark of their move to Los Angeles. In it, Scully recalls the time he and baseball’s ultimate barrier-breaker raced on ice skates at a resort in the Catskill Mountains, despite the fact that Robinson, a California native who had starred in four sports at UCLA, had never been on skates; Scully, a New York native, had plenty of experience. “There aren’t very many people who can say, ‘I raced Jackie Robinson on ice,'” he concluded.
In the Jaffe-Span household, Scully’s story — which he told again and again over the years, adding details, including the fact that the baby with whom Rachel Robinson was pregnant was Sharon Robinson — serves as a reminder that that not every story can be the cream of the crop; that we should strive to bring our own work up to our highest standards while accepting that not all stories are created equal; and that the ritual of sharing stories elevates them, creating a community of their audience and a continuity over the years.
Vin Scully ice skating with Jackie Robinson. Vin was really a part of history pic.twitter.com/Gpg0JoHw0u
Scully called games for the first six of the Dodgers’ seven championships, and seasons in which Dodgers players won nine MVP awards, 12 Cy Youngs, and 15 Rookies of the Year. He covered 25 future Hall of Famers including those inducted as executives and managers during his tenure. With the exception of Robinson and perhaps Sandy Koufax, Scully looms larger in the franchise’s history than any of them. The Hall of Fame recognized him with the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters in 1982; remarkably, Scully worked longer after winning the award than before.
Scully died on Tuesday, August 2, at the age of 94. In the aftermath of a day when baseball’s biggest trade in deadline history — the deal that sent Juan Soto to the Padres in exchange for six players — went down, the news of the beloved and iconic broadcaster’s death spread throughout the baseball world. On social media, seemingly everybody wanted to pay tribute to Scully, sharing his best calls, their own experiences with watching and listening to him through uncounted Dodgers and national broadcasts, and their encounters with the gracious and humble gentleman who in redefining his profession touched millions upon millions of people.
What follows here is an updated version of my own Scully story, first told at Sports Illustrated’s website back on September 30, 2016, as he headed into the final days of his illustrious career. I was lucky enough to listen to Scully for 37 years, intermittently in my youth but with increasing frequency over his final decade on the air thanks to cable television and MLB.tv. In our household, checking in on a Scully game three time zones away was itself a ritual, and I cherished the continuity it brought with my youth. I retell this in the spirit of “Ice Skating with Jackie Robinson” — this is the best I’ve got to offer, and I can’t think of any better way to pay tribute to the man who meant so much to me, part of a line of four generations of Jaffes who have pulled up a chair to hear him call a game.
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On Aug. 10, 1979, the Jaffe family of Salt Lake City piled into our maroon-and-faux-wood-panel Chevy Caprice station wagon for a road trip to California. As dusk hit somewhere near the western Nevada border, my father tuned the radio dial and magically summoned a Dodgers game, called by a friendly-sounding voice: Vin Scully, who in those days alternated innings with partner Jerry Doggett.
I was nine at the time, nestled in the back of the station wagon. The previous summer, I’d become absorbed in baseball’s day-to-day flow for the first time, learning to read box scores, batting averages and division standings. My team, handed down from my father — who supplied a felt souvenir pennant for the bedroom I shared with my younger brother — was the Dodgers, and thanks to my collection of baseball cards, I could recite their batting order from memory: Lopes-Russell-Smith-Garvey-Cey-Baker-Monday-Yeager-pitcher.
My father’s own allegiance had been inherited from his father Bernard Jaffe, born in Brooklyn in 1908. Though he had greater access to Giants games at the Polo Grounds through a season ticket-holding friend, Bernie — a good enough ballplayer in his own right to (allegedly) have been offered a professional contract — fell for Dem Bums sometime in the late 1920s or early ’30s after seeing good-hit/no-field rightfielder Babe Herman get bonked on the head by a fly ball. Even after departing Brooklyn — first for the University of Maryland, then overseas to earn his medical degree (and to witness Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, foreshadowing his support of Robinson), and finally to Walla Walla, Washington, more than a decade ahead of the Dodgers’ migration — he passed on his love to his sons and grandsons.
Vincent Edward Scully was born in the Bronx on November 29, 1927, the son of Irish immigrants. His father, Vincent Aloysius Scully, was a silk salesman at an upscale clothing store who died of pneumonia when his son was four years old. After her husband’s death, mother Bridget Scully took her young son to Ireland to spend time with family. “My mother told me later that when we came back, I had a brogue you could cut with a knife,” Scully recalled in 2006.
With money tight at the Scully household, Bridget rented out two spare bedrooms, usually to merchant sailors. She eventually remarried one of them, an English sailor named Allan Reeve. The family moved to the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and Reeve worked as a doorman at an apartment on Central Park West. “To me, he was Dad,” said Scully. “I never thought of him as a stepdad. I had an ache because I never knew my father, and it was washed away by my dad.”
When he was eight years old, Scully discovered his love of baseball. From his 2020 retelling:
“I went by a laundry and in the window they had the line score of a World Series game. The Giants had lost to the Yankees that day, October the 2nd, 1936, by the score of 18-4. Well, when I saw the Giants having lost by such a heavy score, the little boy that I was, I felt so sorry for them and I became a rabid baseball fan, and especially for the Giants.
“And from October the 2nd, 1936, I had my life dedicated to baseball.”
The young Scully’s favorite player was Giants slugger Mel Ott; later, as a lefty-swinging outfielder at Fordham Prep and then Fordham University, he emulated the future Hall of Famer’s signature style, lifting his right leg before swinging.
Building upon his love of listening to college football broadcasts as a youth, when he was fascinated by the noise of the crowd, Scully pursued broadcasting for Fordham’s WFUV radio station, covering basketball, football and, in his senior year, baseball, having quit the team as a player. After graduating in 1949 and working at the CBS affiliate WTOP in Washington, D.C., Scully met Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber, who was additionally in charge of sports for CBS Radio. Barber assigned Scully to broadcast a college football game from Fenway Park in place of Ernie Harwell; with no room in the press box, he had to do it from the right field roof, which he did in the rain and snow without complaint. Barber’s satisfaction with his work led to Scully being assigned the Harvard-Yale game the following week. When Harwell left the Dodgers broadcast team after the 1949 season to join that of the Giants, the Dodgers hired Scully to be their third announcer behind Barber and Connie Desmond. The rest, as they say, is history.
The first memory of Scully that my father (Richard Jaffe, born in 1941) has dates to the 1953 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees, the first of nearly two dozen called by Scully either on television or radio. In those days, the World Series was generally called by the announcers of the participating teams; Barber, the senior Dodgers broadcaster, had shared play-by-play duties with Yankees voice Mel Allen the year before. As the story goes, to do the 1953 Series, Barber wanted a higher fee from sponsor Gillette, but Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley refused to support him and put forth the 25-year-old Scully instead. In doing so, he became the youngest person ever to broadcast a World Series game, a mark that still stands. The Dodgers lost the 1953 series in seven games but beat the Yankees in seven in ’55. The Jaffes gathered around the radio to hear Scully and Allen call Brooklyn’s 2–0 win behind Johnny Podres‘ eight-hit shutout.
That night in the station wagon in 1979, Scully and Doggett painted a vivid portrait of the players and the action on the field, which included a parade of Dodgers runs against the archrival Giants, including six in the second inning, keyed by centerfielder Derrell Thomas’ grand slam. In the fifth, rookie Mickey Hatcher hit his first big league homer. In the ninth, staked to a 9–0 lead, Don Sutton wrapped up a five-hit shutout, the 50th of his major league career. By that point, I was under a quilt in near-total darkness, but I imagined I could see the frizzy-haired Sutton smiling as he was congratulated by his familiar-faced teammates — my 1979 Topps Dodgers set ($3 via an address in the back of The Sporting News) come to life. Thus began my 37-year relationship with the golden voice of Scully.
Growing up in Salt Lake City meant that Dodgers games on TV were limited to national broadcasts via NBC’s Game of the Week, ABC’s Monday Night Baseball, and the postseason, but occasionally I’d commandeer the family’s old Panasonic radio and replicate my father’s signature touch, finding Scully’s voice cutting through the static at the left end of the AM dial. So it was on Friday night, October 1, 1982, as Rick Monday’s grand slam backed Jerry Reuss’ three-hit shutout in a 4–0 victory over the Giants (again) to keep the Dodgers alive in a three-team NL West race, one game behind the Braves. The next day, the Dodgers eliminated the Giants via a 15–2 rout; the day after, a three-run homer by the Giants’ Joe Morgan provided the coup de gràce to the Dodgers. So it goes.
“Parrish, needless to say, is not superstitious. He wears No. 13. We have a reason for bringing that up, because we’re in the business of telling you what’s going on here, and not getting cute and superstitious. So the big story, really, with Detroit leading 4–0, is the fact that Jack Morris has not allowed a hit, and it’s going to start to build.” — Vin Scully, April 7, 1984
From 1975 to ’82, Scully not only did Dodgers games, but he also did golf, tennis and NFL games for CBS Sports, most famously calling the ’82 NFC Championship game in which the 49ers’ Dwight Clark hauled in “The Catch” to defeat the Cowboys. After that, Scully left CBS for NBC, where he joined the nationally televised Game of the Week broadcasts, paired with Joe Garagiola, who shifted to color commentary after doing play-by-play with Tony Kubek for so many years.
On the first Saturday of the 1984 season, I watched the pair call a game from Chicago’s Comiskey Park, pitting the reigning AL West champion White Sox against the hot-starting Tigers, who would win 35 of their first 40 games and breeze first to the AL East flag and eventually a World Series victory over the Padres. Nobody knew any of that yet, but that day, Tigers starter Jack Morris dominated the Sox, holding them hitless despite six walks. In the sixth inning, Scully famously laid down the law regarding the custom of not mentioning the no-hitter, one that every broadcaster who tiptoes around the subject would do well to remember, as they’ll never work as many as he did (as many as 21, though sources vary as to the exact count).
In fact, in the recording and transcript of Scully’s call of the ninth inning of Koufax’s perfect game in 1965, he begins by telling listeners, “Three times in his sensational career has Sandy Koufax walked out to the mound to pitch a fateful ninth where he turned in a no-hitter. But tonight, September the 9th, nineteen hundred and sixty-five, he made the toughest walk of his career, I’m sure, because through eight innings he has pitched a perfect game.”
Morris’s gem was the only one Scully called for a national audience besides Don Larsen’s 1956 World Series perfect game alongside Mel Allen. Scully called three perfect games in all: those of Larsen, Koufax, and the Expos’ Dennis Martinezagainst the Dodgers in 1991.
“High drive into deep left field, McReynolds watching, would you believe? A grand slam for Tim Raines! That has to be one of the most incredible stories of the year in any sport, the first day back.” — May 2, 1987
From the time he burst on the major league scene during the strike-shortened 1981 season — where he and the Expos ultimately ran into Fernando Valenzuela and the Dodgers, who had a date with the Yankees to avenge their ’77 and ’78 World Series losses — Tim Raines stood out as one of my favorite ballplayers thanks to his dazzling speed, and I gained a fuller appreciation of his skills via the Bill James Baseball Abstract annuals. Raines became a free agent after the 1986 season, but even at the height of his game, he got nothing but low-ball contract offers amid baseball’s collusion scandal. The rules allowed Raines to re-sign with the Expos, but he was ineligible to play until May.
Without benefit of spring training or a minor league stint, Raines stepped into the lineup on May 2, turning a Game of the Week against the Mets at Shea Stadium into the greatest comeback special since Elvis Presley’s. And of course, Scully had the call as Raines went 4-for-5, bookended by a first-inning triple off David Cone and a 10th-inning, game-winning grand slam off Jesse Orosco. Over the course of covering Raines’s Hall of Fame case 10 times, watching Scully’s call of that homer never got old.
“In the year of the improbable, the impossible has happened!” — Oct. 15, 1988
In the fall of 1988, I left Salt Lake City for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the overwhelming nature of college life soon made baseball a secondary concern. From the East Coast, West Coast scores were hard to come by, particularly if you no longer had a newspaper delivered to your door daily. I missed all but a few notices of Orel Hershiser’s 59-inning scoreless streak, and once the playoffs began, my first attempt to watch the NLCS went amiss as the Mets fan with one of the few TVs in our freshman unit couldn’t cope with the threat of her team being toppled by the upstart Dodgers, who had lost 10 of the 11 regular-season meetings between the two teams. Fortunately, I struck up an unlikely bond with a pair of oversized football players who owned the largest color TV on our floor, and they made no complaint when Game 4 — highlighted by Mike Scioscia’s game-tying ninth-inning homer off Dwight Gooden and Hershiser’s 12th-inning save in place of suspended closer Jay Howell — pushed toward 1 AM.
The NLCS was on ABC, and the ALCS between the A’s and Red Sox (which I had to forgo, lest I risk flunking my first wave of tests) was on CBS, but the World Series was on NBC, with Scully at the mic. My hosts didn’t have a strong rooting interest in the series, so I’m grateful they withstood my barrage of whoops, hollers and high-fives in the wake of the gimpy Kirk Gibson’s famous pinch-homer off Dennis Eckersley, which set the stage for the Dodgers’ five-game upset victory over Oakland. By now, Scully’s call is the stuff of legend, considered not just the pinnacle of his career — more famous than his calls of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run and Bill Buckner’s 1986 World Series error — but one of the greatest home run calls of all time.
“Sure, I’ll wait a minute.” — March 1989
On the heels of the Dodgers’ championship, my parents hatched a plan for my spring break, flying me down to meet them and my younger brother in Orlando, where after a couple of days at Epcot and Universal Studios, we would attend four straight games at Holman Stadium, the Dodgers’ spring training home in Vero Beach, Florida.
En route to the concession stand before one ballgame, I crossed paths with Scully himself, decked out in a cream-colored golf sweater. I asked for an autograph, then realized I had just a scrap of paper and no pen. Seeing how flustered I was, he agreed to wait while I fetched one from my mother, who was on her way to the restroom. Somehow, I not only got the pen, but Vin waited in place, and signed what might have been a golf scorecard or a ticket stub. I’ve long since lost that piece of paper — inevitable while moving half a dozen times in four years — and I never met Scully again despite being becoming a credentialed reporter, but I’ve never forgotten the man’s small gesture of patience and humanity toward a star-struck 19-year-old.
“And another drive into high right-center, at the wall … believe it or not, four consecutive home runs and the Dodgers have tied it up again!… They’re coming back in, the people in the parking lot have decided they better come back.” — Sept. 18, 2006
Three years after moving to New York City in 1995, I became part of a partial season ticket group for Yankees games, getting my fill of championship-caliber baseball on the local front while the Dodgers’ postseason dreams sputtered on the opposite coast. But starting in 2003, I began buying the MLB Extra Innings cable package (and later MLB.tv), checking in on Scully and company with increasing frequency. One of the greatest regular-season games I’ve ever watched, and my favorite of those called by him, was the epic finale of a four-game series that had seen the Dodgers slip from 1.5 games ahead of the Padres in the NL West race to half a game back following three straight losses. The Padres jumped all over starter Brad Penny for four first-inning runs, but by the third inning, the Dodgers clawed back to a tie against Jake Peavy, who unraveled after a first-inning confrontation with Dodgers first base coach Mariano Duncan.
The Padres pulled ahead late, carrying a 9–5 lead into the bottom of the ninth. In the non-save situation, manager Bruce Bochy called upon not Trevor Hoffman but Jon Adkins, who immediately served up back-to-back solo homers to Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew. As Adkins departed, Scully dropped a Dylan Thomas reference after Drew’s homer: “What is that line? Do not go gentle into that good night. Well, the Dodgers have decided they are not gonna go into that good night without howling and kicking.”
On came Hoffman, at that point three saves shy of Lee Smith’s all-time record of 478. Russell Martin launched his first pitch into left-center for another homer, and the camera cut to Martin’s jazz musician father, high-fiving everyone within reach in the stands. “The Dodgers are still a buck short,” Scully lamented, moments before Marlon Anderson connected with Hoffman’s next offering — the first time a team had hit four consecutive homers since the Twins did it in 1964, and Anderson’s second homer and fifth hit of the game.
After the Padres scored a run in the top of the 10th, Kenny Lofton worked a walk off Rudy Seanez to begin the bottom of the frame. “Ball four! And the Dodgers have a rabbit as the tying run,” said Scully. Up came a banged-up Nomar Garciaparra, back in the lineup for the first time since suffering a minor quad strain. It wasn’t quite Gibson caliber, but on a 3–1 pitch, Nomar connected. “And a high fly ball to leftfield, it is away, out and gone! The Dodgers win it 11 to 10. Oh-ho-ho, unbelievable!”
Showing the signature restraint that had first impressed me with his Buckner call, Scully let video of the jubilant Dodgers tell the story for nearly a minute and a half, as Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” began to play to the ecstatic crowd. Finally, he cut back in. “I forgot to tell you: The Dodgers are in first place!” Another minute of crowd shots and stadium noise passed, un-Scullyed, before he finally signed off: “I think we’ve said enough from up here. Once again, the final score in 10 innings — believe it or not — Dodgers 11, Padres 10.”
“And there is one out to go, one miserable measly out. 0-and-2 … got him! He’s done it!… Clayton Kershaw pitches a no-hitter a career-high 15 strikeouts… Kershaw made six pitches in the ninth inning, you talk about getting it over in a hurry.” — June 18, 2014
The final leg of Scully’s remarkable career became inextricably intertwined with the rise and sustained excellence of the Dodgers’ latest ace. The first time Scully called a Kershaw appearance was likely the first time most of us — Vin included — saw the team’s 2006 first-round pick in action. On March 9, 2008, a 19-year-old Kershaw broke off a hellacious two-strike curveball to the Red Sox’ Sean Casey, and even an 81-year-old announcer who had just about seen it all gasped in wonder: “Ohhh, what a curveball! Holy mackerel! He just broke off Public Enemy No. 1. Look at this thing! It’s up there, it’s right there and Casey is history.”
Kershaw didn’t break camp with the Dodgers that year but debuted on May 25, an occasion I wrote about for FanGraphs in 2020. By 2009, when he struck out 185 in 171 innings, the 21-year-old southpaw’s starts had become appointment viewing, especially when called by Scully, which increasingly meant at Dodger Stadium as he whittled his schedule. Through the end of 2016, Kershaw owned a 71–29 record with a 1.99 ERA in 137 starts at home, virtually all called by Scully save for the occasional absence or a nationally televised game.
Scully called 14 Dodgers no-hitters: four by Koufax, two by Carl Erskine and one apiece by Sal Maglie, Bill Singer, Valenzuela, Reuss, Kevin Gross, Ramon Martinez, Hideo Nomo and finally Kershaw, whose trio of Cy Young awards harkens back to those of Koufax, reminding us of Scully’s perfection in calling Koufax’s perfecto. On Kershaw’s night of near-perfection, he didn’t walk a batter or allow a hit; the only one of the 28 Rockies batters to reach base did so on an error by Hanley Ramirez. Corey Dickerson, the final Colorado batter of the night, was the victim of Kershaw’s career-high 15th strikeout.
That game, the lone no-hitter called by Scully in the era of social media and MLB.tv, will live on in the archives available with a few clicks of a button to anybody with a subscription; it was the game I chose when our staff offered readers some viewing favorites during the bleak days of March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic put the world on hold.
As Kershaw said later, “I think the coolest thing is thirty, forty, whatever years from now, hopefully I’ll get some grandkids of my own and show them… what it was like to have Vin call a game and what he meant to it. That’s pretty special that I’ll always have that.” Thankfully, we’ll all have that game, and so many more, to pull up once again.
“It has been such an exciting, enjoyable, wonderful season—the big crowds in the ballpark, everybody is talking about the ballclub and I really respect, admire and love the management—so everything just fell into place…. As a baseball man, and someone who has always loved the game, the situation and the conditions are perfect.” — Aug. 23, 2013
For my money, the happiest day of the year would come on some seemingly random day in late summer, when Scully would announce that he had agreed to come back for one more season. On August 28, 2015, the Dodgers made a big show of the announcement, playing a video of ownership partner Magic Johnson introducing late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who silently revealed the news few words at a time via cue cards before Scully took a bow. The next day, however, Scully clarified by saying that in all likelihood, 2016 would be his final season.
That set the stage for a long goodbye, the tributes from all corners — other broadcasters, media (including Sports Illustrated, which put him on the cover of its May 16 issue), an endless parade of ballplayers visiting his booth to bid him farewell in person — arriving daily. Ever the professional, Scully gracefully accepted the accolades while attempting to focus on the action on the field, where the Dodgers overcame a slow start and a slew of injuries to take their fourth consecutive NL West title.
Against that backdrop, I added a title of my own: first-time father. My wife, Emma Span, then Sports Illustrated‘s senior baseball editor and now The Athletic’s MLB enterprise editor, gave birth to our daughter Robin just before midnight on August 26, 2016. Robin wasn’t even an hour old when she heard Scully for the first time; as we caught our breaths in the wee hours following her birth, I pulled up the Dodgers-Cubs game on my iPhone, as much to provide Emma with the soothing familiarity of Scully’s voice as anything, though what could be better for a newborn to hear than the reassuring voice of a kindly grandfather of 16 and great-grandfather of three? Even before Robin’s birth, staying up late to listen to Scully had been an important staple of life with Emma, a ritual for two night owls. We even watched him call a Kershaw start the night before our wedding, April 18, 2015.
In her early weeks of life, Robin was exposed to several more hours of Scully. Sitting around with a newborn whose primary alternative to nursing, pooping, sleeping and crying is just being adorable while laying there in the arms of loved ones leaves plenty of time to watch baseball, and with the opportunities to listen to Vin dwindling, we checked in nearly every night the Dodgers were at home, no matter how lopsided the score. We stuck around through a 14–1 laugher over the Rockies, Kershaw’s final start at Dodger Stadium as called by Scully. It wasn’t nearly as stirring as the night before, with its hour-long pregame tribute, but who in their right mind would skip a Kershaw call, particularly given the team’s chance to clinch a division title?
“Swung on, a high fly ball to deep leftfield, the Dodger bench empties, can you believe it? A home run? And the Dodgers have clinched the division and will celebrate on schedule!” — Sept. 25, 2016
The Giants’ victory on that Saturday night over the Padres opposite the 14-1 rout prevented the Dodgers from clinching. As I had plans all over town with my family the next day, I couldn’t sit still for Scully’s final call from Dodger Stadium, instead catching bits and pieces throughout the afternoon. As fate would have it, I left our family dinner to head into Manhattan to tape a Fox Sports Extra TV spot; in doing so, I wound up at what was at that point one of the few wi-fi enabled subway stops in south Brooklyn. The readout on the platform told me that the next 4 train would arrive in eight minutes, which felt like an eternity until I pulled up MLB.tv on my iPhone, and found the Dodgers tied, 3–3, in the bottom of the 10th against the Rockies — the broadcast flowing smoothly despite the fact that I was underground. Between pitches, Scully even relayed the Padres-Giants play-by-play. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…” I thought to myself as Enrique Hernández took his hacks against Boone Logan before going down swinging.
Up came light-hitting, seldom-used Charlie Culberson, who hadn’t homered in any of his previous 57 plate appearances that season or at all in the big leagues since Aug. 14, 2014 (two days before my engagement to Emma). As Culberson had already collected two hits that day — basically his monthly allotment — it seemed silly even to contemplate one more, let alone expect it. But somebody forgot to tell the shortstop, who launched Logan’s second pitch, an outside fastball, over the left field fence to seal the deal.
Pandemonium ensued as Culberson rounded the bases; Scully let the moment breathe. I could barely believe my dumb luck in witnessing the moment under such unlikely circumstances — a positive turn on an emotional day that had begun with the tragic news of Jose Fernandez’s death. My train arrived just as the broadcast cut to a commercial, so it wasn’t until later that I watched the coda: Scully serenading the Dodger Stadium crowd with a recording of him signing “Wind Beneath My Wings,” with shots of him (and many a Dodgers fan) getting teary-eyed.
Once Scully announced his retirement, I tried to avoid being maudlin when considering the approaching void; someone had to. Instead, I considered my luck to enjoy him as a part of my life for more than three decades, watching game after game while feeling as though he were talking just to me, whether describing the action in detail or digressing on Socrates Brito and hemlock, or ice skating with Jackie Robinson, or the defiant significance of every player wearing Robinson’s No. 42.
On the occasion of his retirement and now his death, that appreciation of has deepened. As viewers and listeners, we were truly fortunate to have shared the latter stages of Scully’s career via social media and MLB.tv, just as Los Angelenos did via newfangled transistor radios when he and the Dodgers first arrived in 1958. In our increasingly fragmented and polarized public lives, Vin brought us together for a few hours to find common ground. That was certainly true on Tuesday night, when the Dodgers broke the news of his passing.
On the SportsNet LA broadcast, Joe Davis and Jessica Mendoza did a masterful job of paying tribute, sharing their stories and memories of Scully. In one of them Davis, who has done an admirable job as his successor, related his first encounter with Scully, shortly after being hired.
Dodgers’ broadcaster Joe Davis tells the story of how he accidentally ignored a phone call from Vin Scully shortly after he got the job as the Dodgers’ new play-by-play announcer in 2015. pic.twitter.com/d249OzgNID
Nearly six years after her birth and Scully’s retirement, my daughter hasn’t become a full-fledged baseball nut, but she’s played a few seasons of tee-ball and has become a huge fan of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, Mr. Met, and the Brooklyn Cyclones’ mascots Sandy the Seagull and Pee Wee, all while demonstrating some curiosity about the game and even some artistic flair. With two parents absorbed in the game for their professions, she’s also shown signs of rebelling against what we hold dear in favor of finding her own way, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Still, we do our best to explain the game, its rules and its important figures to her. That includes the remarkable Vin Scully, maestro of the microphone, and the way he connected three previous generations of Jaffes to the Dodgers and to baseball. “He’s the best announcer there ever was,” I explain, “and probably the best that ever will be.”
Here’s an example of why baseball is complicated. By a lot of measures, Hunter Greene and Spencer Strider are near-identical players. Both are righty pitchers who rely on their four-seam fastballs, for good reason; they’re producing some of the highest average fastball velocities we’ve ever seen from a starter, pushing the limits of what’s possible. They’re doing that as rookies, with Greene, 22, only a year younger than Strider. These are bright futures we’re talking about.
And yet, the on-field results couldn’t be any more different. As of this writing, Greene owns a 5.43 FIP in 85.1 innings, which is close to replacement level. Meanwhile, Strider has been thriving in the Braves’ rotation, with a 2.07 FIP in 46 innings so far as a full-time starter. Baseball is complicated, because even when two pitchers execute a similar blueprint, one can end up with better numbers than the other. With Strider and Greene, something isn’t adding up. Read the rest of this entry »
The Dodgers have been so good for so long that whatever numbers they put up seem to elicit a blasé response at best. Oh, their 116 wRC+ is good for third in the league? Ho-hum. It’s been that way for a while, and I wouldn’t blame you for not thinking about the Dodgers, or even refusing to. You’d like someone else to seize the throne; after all, baseball is at its best with several contending teams, not select superpowers.
But let me implore you to consider the Dodgers again. The mere fact that they’re great isn’t interesting; it’s how they’re great that is. While the pitching is playing a crucial role, I’m going to focus solely on the hitting, because that’s where this team stands out.
To lay some groundwork: Over at Baseball Savant, there’s a tool called Swing/Take runs, which shows the run value players accrue on pitches in each zone. The distinction goes beyond simple balls and strikes; down-the-middle strikes, for example, correspond to the “Heart” zone, and borderline strikes correspond to the “Shadow” zone.
We can look at these run values by team, too. Quick: what do stellar offenses do against down-the-middle pitches? Crush them, that’s what. To wit, the Yankees have accrued a league-leading 26 runs against such pitches. It makes sense; the Yankees make sense. The Dodgers, however, do not make sense:
It’s not just a quirk from this season: A vast majority of players, and thus teams, are regularly in the red when they swing against seemingly easy pitches. The Yankees are actually an outlier in that regard, and it’s part of why they’ve been successful. But the Dodgers aren’t merely missing out on down-the-middle pitches. Nay, they’re atrocious against them. On the graph, they’re in the same neighborhood as the Nationals, who own the league’s 22nd-best offense by wRC+, and the Athletics, who own the very worst. This is… strange. Read the rest of this entry »
As you’re probably aware, Apple TV+ has stepped onto the baseball broadcasting scene this year, airing two games every Friday. They’re stylistically different from your average baseball broadcast, even at a glance. The colors look different, more muted to my eyes than the average broadcast. The score bugs are sleek, the fonts understated. The announcers are mostly new faces. And most interestingly, to me at least, the broadcast displays probabilities on nearly every pitch.
As a big old math nerd, I love probabilities. They appeal to something that feels almost elemental. Every time I watch a baseball game, I wonder how likely the next hitter up is to get a hit – or to reach base, or strike out, or drive in a run. It’s not so much that I want to know the future – probabilities can’t tell you that – but I would like to know whether the outcome I’m hoping for is an uphill battle or a near-certainty, and how the ongoing struggle of pitcher against hitter changes that.
The Apple TV+ broadcasts gets those probability numbers from nVenue, a tech startup that got its start in an NBC tech accelerator. According to an interview with CEO Kelly Pracht in SportTechie, the machine learning algorithm at the heart of nVenue’s product considers 120 inputs from the field of play in making each prediction.
Machine learning, if you weren’t aware, is a fancy way of saying “regressions.” It’s more than that, of course, but at its core, machine learning takes sample data and “learns” how to make predictions from that data. Those predictions can then be applied to new, out-of-sample events. Variations in initial conditions produce different predictions, which is why you can think of it as an advanced form of regression analysis; at its most basic, changes in some set of independent variables are used to predict a response variable (or variables). Read the rest of this entry »
