Previously on MLB:Drive to Survive, the first part of this three-part series on growing engagement with the sport via content beyond live games: we enumerated a few of the different types of supplementary media the league and teams might use to awaken interest in dormant fans and highlighted the potential benefits of doing so based on what has worked well for other sports. Since executing a game plan is just as important as the game plan itself, here in Part II, the conversation will shift to what makes supporting content effective.

For every individual, different aspects of sports resonate and keep them returning game after game. In a 2022 Ted Talk, Kate Fagan argued that the many things that give sports their gravity organize themselves into one of two categories: stakes and storylines. “This is what burns at the center of sports. In the Olympics, we have all agreed: a gold medal matters. Same with the World Cup. And now paired with these agreed-upon stakes, we also have even deeper storytelling. Which is how we end up teary-eyed after a three-and-a-half minute NBC vignette about a Romanian gymnast.”

Content designed to drive interest in a sport needs to tell a story and emphasize the stakes. Compelling stories contain developed and dynamic characters, several coats of conflict, and settings with character arcs of their own. Good stories are crafted with precision; they make us feel, contain universal truths, teach us things we didn’t know and didn’t realize we were missing. They meet us where we are. Read the rest of this entry »

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a force of nature. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball, and in a very obvious way: he scalds the baseball to all fields and hits a bunch of home runs. Last year was a down year, and he still left the yard 32 times. He perennially records some of the hardest-hit batted balls in the game. When you think about a prototypical first baseman, Guerrero’s combination of power and hit tool is probably what you’re picturing.

One of the impressive parts of Guerrero’s career has been his ability to limit strikeouts while still getting to his power. See, low strikeout rates aren’t an inherently great thing. If you don’t strike out very often but don’t do any damage when you put the ball in play, you’re not really making a good trade. Adam Frazier is a good example of this type of hitter. He struck out just 12.1% of the time last year, but posted an 81 wRC+ anyway because when he did make contact, it was generally weak. You can probably conjure a picture of this type of hitter on your favorite team. You love that they never give away an at-bat, but hate that they never take matters into their own hands and park one in the seats or smack one off the power alley wall.

Guerrero doesn’t suffer from that problem. He struck out just 16.4% of the time in 2022, but when he made contact, he wasn’t Fraziering it up out there. Let’s get that in numbers: in his career, Frazier is batting .317 with a .456 slugging percentage when he ends a plate appearance with a batted ball, good for a .327 wOBA. Guerrero is hitting .351 with a .616 slugging percentage, which works out to a .403 wOBA. One of these things is not like the other. That’s why low strikeout rates are great statistical markers for power hitters and yet broadly uninteresting in the population as a whole. What you do with those extra balls in play matters a ton, as Michael Baumann covered yesterday, and with far more Pitbull references than I could even think up. Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins and Pablo López agreed on Monday to a four-year contract extension worth $73.5 million, ensuring that the team’s newest starting pitcher will stay in the Twin Cities through the 2027 season. López has been dynamite in his first four starts for Minnesota, allowing only five total runs and holding the current league crown in strikeouts, edging out Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom.

It’s not a surprise to find out the Twins are big fans of López. Otherwise, they would not have traded three years of a cost-controlled Luis Arraez, who is coming off a batting average title, a Silver Slugger award, and an All-Star appearance, in order to acquire his services. The extension would have made sense on the day of the trade; it makes even more sense with the very real chance that López has found another gear. Read the rest of this entry »

“I can’t imagine this at all.”

That was my knee-jerk reaction to last week’s announcement that a Salt Lake City-based group had launched a bid for a Major League Baseball expansion team. Growing up in SLC from 1973–88, I learned to appreciate the area’s mix of minor and major league sports and accept its limitations. I’d already seen prospects on their way up and journeymen on their way down while attending several games of the Pacific Coast League’s Salt Lake Gulls and the Central Hockey League’s Salt Lake Golden Eagles by the time the NBA’s New Orleans Jazz sputtered into town in 1979, financially beleaguered and thin on talent. Frankly, that operation felt minor league itself.

The Jazz eventually grew into an NBA powerhouse, but even having lived and died with that team, and watched the city’s growth mostly from afar for the past three and a half decades (my parents do still reside there), I was not prepared to accept the notion that the city’s time had come for an MLB franchise. I fully understand why the average fan — who for years has been hearing about Portland, Nashville, Montreal and other potential sites — might not be either. But upon closer investigation, this skeptic is convinced the SLC bid is a real contender — though one major and almost unfathomable obstacle looms.

MLB has no imminent plans to expand, but that didn’t prevent a consortium called Big League Utah from announcing its intent to compete for a franchise once the league does decide it’s ready for a 31st and 32nd team. Last week, Big League Utah launched an eye-catching campaign in connection with the groundbreaking of a redevelopment that could include a new ballpark. In touting the state’s growth, economy, location, local enthusiasm for sports, and quality of life, the group calls Utah “a five-tool player” — and I have to admit, that’s a pretty catchy way of putting it. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Kwan and Myles Straw have extremely similar profiles. Both are small, speedy outfielders with great gloves. Kwan was a center fielder in both college and the minors, but Straw’s presence forced him over to left, and both took home Gold Gloves in 2022. On offense, they feature almost no pop, but they both survive through excellent bat-to-ball skills and plate discipline. They chase pitches outside the strike zone approximately never, and somehow they swing and miss even less often. You could practically snap their Baseball Savant sliders together like Legos.

Kwan’s is on the bottom and Straw’s is on top, but it doesn’t matter all that much; in most categories they’re nearly identical. That’s not to say that their performance is identical. Thanks largely to Kwan’s truly elite ability to avoid strikeouts and his lower groundball rate (plus a bit of batted ball luck), he put up a 124 wRC+ in 2022, nearly twice Straw’s. Still, the two Cleveland outfielders are very much playing the same game.

Crashing this scrappy little party after a May call-up was Oscar Gonzalez, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound right fielder with big power potential, no defense to speak of, and so little plate discipline that he finished the season just 0.4% shy of the worst chase rate humanly possible (also known as Javier Báez’s’s chase rate). He also absolutely towers over the 5-foot-9 Kwan and the 5-foot-10 Straw. Gonzalez looks like he could pick up the two Gold Glove winners and use them to play G.I. Joes. Read the rest of this entry »

The mighty Giancarlo Stanton has fallen once again. On Sunday afternoon, the 33-year-old was diagnosed with a Grade 2 strain in his left hamstring, according to Marly Rivera of ESPN. The Yankees placed him on the 10-day injured list, recalling top 100 prospect Oswald Peraza to take his place.

After he crushed a 110-mph double on Saturday afternoon, Stanton returned to the Yankees dugout while Aaron Hicks trotted out to second base. It wouldn’t be the first time the slow-moving slugger was replaced on the bases, so there wasn’t any reason to worry in the moment. Indeed, the DH walked off the field and was greeted with high fives in the dugout, where he remained to watch the game. As it turned out, however, Stanton had requested the pinch runner himself. He recognized the pain in his hamstring and knew immediately that something was wrong. Although Stanton didn’t show any outward signs of pain, it was certainly an awkward play. He thought he’d hit the ball over the fence and only realized he needed to run as he was rounding first.

While Stanton’s decision to prematurely marvel at his handiwork turned out to be a mistake, there’s no reason to blame his poor baserunning for his injury. The unfortunate truth is that Stanton’s legs – his left in particular – are quite injury-prone. He has spent time on the IL with various leg injuries in each of the past five seasons. In 2019, he sprained the PCL in his right knee and missed 72 games. The year after that, it was a left hamstring strain, much like the one he just suffered; he was out for five weeks. In 2021, he lost two weeks to a left quad strain, and last year, he missed 10 days with right ankle inflammation and another month with tendinitis in his left Achilles. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan O’Hoppe is a promising young hitter. No. 51 on our 2023 Top 100 Prospects list, the 23-year-old catcher is coming off a season during which he logged a 159 wRC+ and hit 26 home runs between a pair of Double-A stops. Dealt from the Phillies to the Angels in early August — Brandon Marsh went east to Philadelphia — O’Hoppe went on to make his big league debut with Los Angeles in late September. He saw action in five games and notched four hits in 14 get-your-feet-wet at-bats.

O’Hoppe broke camp as the Halo’s primary catcher this spring and has proceeded to slash .244/.300/.533 with four home runs and a 122 wRC+ over 50 plate appearances. He talked hitting prior to Sunday’s game at Fenway Park.

———

David Laurila: When and how did you learn to hit?

Logan O’Hoppe: “I’m still learning. I think it’s something that none of us have completely figured out. But yeah, just taking reps; I feel like that’s the best way to do it.” Read the rest of this entry »

For the purposes of researching this article, I went through Baseball Savant and watched several of Luis Arraez’s hits from the 2023 season. You can tell what kind of a heater he’s on by how the broadcast booth reacts when he gets a hit. Marlins play-by-play man Paul Severino, declaring that Arraez was in the midst of yet another multi-hit game, would chuckle as the ball touched outfield grass. On one occasion, Phillies announcer John Kruk muttered, “Jesus!” as Arraez dropped a triple down the right field line.

Arraez is so hot it’s entered the realm of the absurd. Through 15 games, he’s 24-for-51, mostly on singles that army crawl past bewildered infielders or fall softly in front of outfielders. As of Monday afternoon, he has yet to hit a ball with an exit velocity of 100 mph or greater. Ryan Mountcastle, who’s hitting .217 to Arraez’s .471, has 25 such batted balls.

The obvious thing to do in this situation would be to point out all the ways Arraez is getting lucky. He’s a fringy runner with a ninth-percentile (ninth-percentile!) hard-hit rate and a BABIP of .500, and so on and so forth. And ordinarily, I am the kind of relentless downer who goes around ruining other people’s good time. (Hope you enjoyed those wonderful shrimp tacos you had for lunch; the sea is full of microplastics and you’re going to die someday.) But I’m declaring Arraez’s hot start to be a negativity-free zone.

So let’s get to it. Is Arraez some kind of a wizard, or is he just getting lucky? The answer is yes. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland Athletics entered the season with low expectations. After completing their two-year fire sale by trading Sean Murphy to Atlanta for a package that was generally agreed to be quite light and adding minimal talent in free agency, the Opening Day ZiPS projections forecasted them to win just 69 games; their playoff odds were just 2.9%. Still, that total would have tied them with Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, while Colorado and Washington saved them from the honor of being projected for the league’s worst record. Two weeks later, the A’s sit at a miserable 3-13, below any of the other bottom feeders. While the team’s collective 94 wRC+ isn’t good by any means, it’s not the reason their run differential is 29 runs worse than anyone else’s. Instead, their pitching staff has been one of the worst in recent memory.

With 125 runs surrendered in 16 games, Oakland has pitched far worse than any other team in the league. The 29th-place White Sox are closer in runs allowed to the 12th-place Astros than they are to the last place A’s. The A’s 188 ERA- and 156 FIP- paint a similar picture. In fact, with a 7.60 ERA thus far, this Oakland squad has the third-worst staff ERA through 16 games of any team in the integration era, only outdone by the 1951 St. Louis Browns and the 1955 Kansas City A’s; those teams each went on to allow at least 5.7 runs per game across the entire season. A simple glance at each team’s 2023 strikeout and walk rates shows a clear gulf between Oakland and the field:

Many of these struggles have occurred in a handful of huge blowups, as the A’s have surrendered double digit runs in six games. On the second day of the season, fans excitedly watched the major league debut of Shintaro Fujinami, who showed flashes of both elite stuff and extreme wildness in NPB. After sitting down his first six batters and notching four strikeouts, Fujinami allowed eight baserunners, three via walk, while recording just one out before being lifted from the game. His second start also featured a blowup inning after cruising the first time through the order; he exited after 4.1 innings, with four walks and a hit batsman. On Saturday, in the A’s 15th game of the season, Fujinami recorded the team’s first quality start with six innings of one-run ball, but he still took the loss after coming out for a seventh inning and adding two more runs to his line. Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers announced on Sunday that pitcher Brandon Woodruff’s shoulder pain has been diagnosed as a mild subscapular strain, meaning a trip to the injured list was in order. But while the word “mild” appears, the result is anything but, as it’s almost certain that he will spend significantly more time on the IL than the minimum 15 days, and a trip to the 60-day IL may be in order.

Craig Counsell on Brandon Woodruff: pic.twitter.com/yg2ipI88pL

— Todd Rosiak (@Todd_Rosiak) April 15, 2023

The good news is that the team doesn’t believe, at this time, that surgery will be required. But in talking about the injury, Woodruff didn’t sound like a player who was particularly optimistic about a quick return.

“If this was something that happened midseason, All-Star break, right before or after that time, I would probably end up being done, to be honest, for the season.”

[…]

“I’m not going to rush this, I’m not going to come back too early just for the sake of coming back early,” Woodruff said. “That’s just not going to do anybody any good. I’m going to take my time, I’m going to listen to my body and trust the rehab process and just go through that, and hopefully come back at whatever point that is throughout the season and then try to finish up strong.”

The subscapularis is one of four muscles that make up the rotator cuff and is a stability muscle that is key to keeping the shoulder from being dislocated. It’s one of the muscles less likely to be injured, but the recovery time for pitchers has been significant. Corey Kluber missed three months in 2021, and Justin Dunn has been shut down since the start of spring training, though his case is complicated by the fact that his shoulder problems are more longstanding. In a small study of eight professional players in Japan with similar injuries, the five pitchers had a mean time of 81.5 days until return to play, with a significance variance among the players that wasn’t based on severity of the injury. Looking back at the players 21 months after their injury, none of the eight suffered a recurrent injury to the muscle. Read the rest of this entry »