David Ross was 38 years old and still strapping on the tools of ignorance when he was featured here at FanGraphs in February 2016. The title of the piece was David Ross: Future Big League Manager, and as many in the industry had suggested it would, that supposition soon came to fruition. The longtime catcher is currently embarking on what will be his fourth season at the helm of the Chicago Cubs. I recently asked Ross how he approaches the job philosophically now that he’s firmly in the trenches.

“My style — the way I approach being a manager — is leadership and direction, but I’m also still a player at heart,” Ross told me. “I understand what these guys are going through, competing for jobs and different roles. Communicating through that as a former player, someone who experienced it, I can relate to them. I try to keep a player’s mindset as part of my decision-making.”

Jed Hoyer was the club’s General Manager when the Cubs hired Ross following the 2019 season. I asked the now President of Baseball Operations about the process that informed that decision. Read the rest of this entry »

However you feel about the World Baseball Classic, there’s no getting around the fact that the Mets were dealt a stunning blow when Edwin Díaz sustained a freak right knee injury on Wednesday night while celebrating Puerto Rico’s victory over the Dominican Republic. On Thursday afternoon, general manager Billy Eppler announced that Díaz had suffered a full thickness tear of his patellar tendon and would undergo surgery later in the day. The timeline for returning from such injuries is around eight months according to Eppler, making it likely (though not completely certain) that Díaz would miss the whole season.

That’s a gut punch, particularly as the Mets and anyone who roots for them no doubt harbored dreams of the soon-to-be-29-year-old closer nailing down the final outs of the World Series. The injury comes just three days after the team confirmed that lefty starter José Quintana will be out until at least July as he recovers from bone graft surgery to repair a stress fracture and remove a benign lesion from the fifth rib on his left side. Three other relievers on the depth chart sustained significant injuries this week as well, with Brooks Raley straining his left hamstring while working out with Team USA in the WBC, Bryce Montes de Oca diagnosed with a stress reaction in his right elbow, and Sam Coonrod suffering a high-grade lat strain. The Mets have had better weeks, to say the least.

Eppler noted that some athletes have returned from patellar tendon surgeries in six months, but that they’re exceptions. I was only able to find a few recent examples of major league pitchers undergoing patellar tendon repairs, and they fit a six-to-nine-month range:

• Angels righty Garrett Richards suffered a complete tear of his left patellar tendon while covering first base on August 20, 2014, and underwent surgery two days later. He made his 2015 season debut on April 19, about two weeks after Opening Day and about eight months after surgery, and went on to set career highs with 32 starts and 207.1 innings that year.
• Royals lefty Matt Strahm tore his left patellar tendon on July 1, 2017 and underwent surgery on July 14. He returned to the mound in the minors on April 7, 2018, about nine months later, and was back in the majors a month after that, making 41 appearances totaling 61.1 innings. In late October 2020 while a member of the Padres, Strahm underwent patellar tendon surgery on his right knee, then returned to the mound in the minors on July 24, 2021 (nine months later), and to the majors on August 3, though he made just six appearances before being sidelined by inflammation. He recovered to make 50 appearances totaling 44.2 innings for the Red Sox in 2022.
• Phillies righty Zach Eflin underwent surgeries to repair both patellar tendons in 2016, with the right one first on August 19. He returned to the mound in the minors on April 6, 2017, and was in the majors 12 days later — again about eight months — though he struggled with his performance and was sent to the minors, where he was hampered by elbow and shoulder strains. Four years later and much more established at the major league level, he underwent another surgery to repair his right patellar tendon on September 10, 2021 and was back on a major league mound for the Phillies’ third game of the season last April 8, about seven months later.

That’s an average of about eight months to return to competitive pitching, but all of those timelines are at least somewhat confounded by the offseason, with surgeries taking place in the July-to-September range and leaving no possibility of a six-month return even if the player were to heal quickly. Richards was the only one whose injury was reported as a full tear, like that of Díaz, and in comparing the two, the distinction of whether the injury is on the same side as the throwing arm probably matters; a pitcher’s back leg (same side) drives velocity, but the stress on the front leg (opposite side) for a pitcher’s stride is hardly trivial both for purposes of controlling pitches and in not overtaxing the arm.

Even allowing for the fact that relievers require less buildup than starters, it does seem very difficult to make an in-season return from such a surgery. If one simply ponders the math of a theoretical best-case scenario, six months would put Díaz in mid-September, leaving time for a late-season tuneup before the playoffs; seven months would land him mid-playoffs if the Mets do get that far.

Any way you slice this, it sucks, particularly for Díaz, who’s coming off an incredible season in which he made his second All-Star team, won the NL’s Trevor Hoffman Award as the league’s top reliever — thus completing the set he began when he won the AL’s Mariano Rivera Award in 2018 — and had his entrance music (Blasterjaxx & Timmy Trumpet’s “Narco”) become a viral sensation. Statistically, he led all relievers who threw at least 50 innings with a 0.90 FIP, 1.69 xERA, 50.2% strikeout rate, 42.6% K-BB%, and 3.0 WAR; his 1.31 ERA ranked fourth among those qualifiers, and his 32 saves (in 35 attempts) ranked fourth in the NL. The day after the World Series ended, he agreed to a record-setting five-year, $102 million deal to remain a Met. It was a very good year.

You don’t easily replace a player like that even given a full offseason and a spend-happy owner, but teams with playoff aspirations deal with closer changes on the fly. Think of Rafael Soriano saving 42 games for the Yankees after Rivera tore his ACL in early 2012, Koji Uehara converting 23 straight save chances with a 0.36 ERA for the Red Sox after Joel Hanrahan and Andrew Bailey needed surgeries in ’13, or Wade Davis replacing the injured Greg Holland for the Royals in mid-’15 and closing out the Division Series, Championship Series, and World Series in October. Stuff happens, and teams deal with it; nobody wins without having several good relievers anyway, and GMs do build their rosters with contingencies in mind.

As to how the Mets will cover the ninth inning, via SNY’s Andy Martino, the team views 37-year-old righty David Robertson and Raley, a 34-year-old lefty, as its top options to match up in save situations. Robertson has saved 157 games in his 13-year major league career, including 20 last year for the Cubs and Phillies. In doing so, he posted a 2.40 ERA and 3.58 FIP with a 30.3% strikeout rate in 63.2 innings, a respectable showing given that he had been limited to 19 games from 2019 to ’21 due to a flexor strain, Tommy John surgery, and a commitment to Team USA for the Olympics (he saved two games and won a silver medal). Raley has just nine career saves, but six of them came last season with the Rays, for whom he put up a 2.68 ERA and 2.74 FIP with a 27.9% strikeout rate in 53.2 innings. Since returning from a five-year stint (2015–19) with the KBO’s Lotte Giants, he’s held lefties to a .213 wOBA, but righties have hit him for a .308 wOBA; last year, the splits were .214 and .247, respectively. Raley’s hamstring strain is reportedly low-grade, and he’s expected to return to action in a few days.

Setup man Adam Ottavino, a 37-year-old righty, has 33 career saves as well, with a high of 11 in 2021 with the Red Sox. Last year while setting up Díaz, he pitched to a 2.05 ERA and 2.85 FIP with a 30.6% strikeout rate in 65.2 innings, saving three games. The Mets may prefer to keep him in that setup role, however.

The free-agent market does have experienced closers still on the shelves such as Archie Bradley, Zack Britton, Ken Giles, and Corey Knebel, but each is there for a reason. Bradley suffered a forearm strain in late September last year, ending what was already an injury-marred season in which he threw just 18.2 innings in the majors for the Angels. Knebel saved 12 games for the Phillies with a 3.43 ERA and 4.46 FIP in 44.2 innings but suffered a shoulder capsule tear. Giles totaled just 4.1 innings last year and a mere eight over the last three years due to Tommy John surgery, other elbow problems, a middle finger sprain, and shoulder tightness. He threw a couple of February showcases that have failed to lead to a signing but has another scheduled for Friday. At best, any of them would be a project, not an immediate replacement.

The most workable option of that group is probably Britton, a 35-year-old lefty who pitched under Mets manager Buck Showalter with the Orioles from 2011 to ’18, making two All-Star teams and winning the 2016 Mariano Rivera Award. After undergoing September 2021 Tommy John surgery and bone chip removal — that in a season that also included a previous arthroscopic surgery on his elbow and a hamstring strain — he made just three appearances with the Yankees last year. Hopes for him to be part of the team’s postseason bullpen were dashed when he struggled with his control and was sidelined by a bout of shoulder fatigue. By coincidence, on Thursday he was scheduled to throw at least his third showcase session since January, and the Mets were expected to attend. Via MLB Trade Rumors, the Mets had previously focused on relievers with minor league options remaining, but with Díaz moving to the 60-day injured list and freeing up a spot on the 40-man roster, that’s less of an issue now.

Trading for a closer is another option, but at this point, the cost would be prohibitively high for a reliable one such as the Pirates’ David Bednar, a 2022 All-Star who won’t even be eligible for arbitration until after this season, or the Royals’ Scott Barlow, who has two years of club control remaining. On that note, Martino reported that last summer the Mets explored a possible trade for Alexis Díaz, Edwin’s 26-year-old brother and teammate on Puerto Rico’s WBC team (the sight of him sobbing over his brother’s injury on Wednesday night was heartbreaking). Last year as a rookie with the Reds, Díaz saved 10 games and notched a 1.84 ERA and 3.32 FIP in 63.2 innings, wit a 32.5% strikeout rate but 12.9% walk rate. Batters hit just .127, slugged .190, and whiffed on 31.1% of swings against his four-seamer, which averaged 95.7 mph with high spin; against his slider, they hit .133 and slugged .253, with a 45% whiff rate.

Díaz, though, has a full five years of control left, and the Reds have no reason not to ask for the sun, moon, and stars given the leverage they would have in revisiting a trade. Reds GM Nick Krall would probably lick his chops and ask for some combination of prospects Francisco Álvarez, Brett Baty, and Ronny Mauricio.

It’s far more likely that the Mets will sort through their internal options during the first half of the season and then start working on prying a late-inning reliever from a noncontender in July. With at least some part of Díaz’s $17.25 million salary covered by insurance (as is the case for all WBC participants), the Mets could, for example, absorb what remains of Daniel Bard’s $9.5 million salary (plus the same for 2024) when the Rockies inevitably look to cut costs.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is an impactful injury. Going by our Depth Charts, with Díaz the Mets bullpen ranked fourth in the majors with 3.7 projected WAR, and the closer accounted for 1.8 of that, nearly half:

Ouch. Overall, the team’s projected total WAR dropped them from 52.3 (fourth in the majors behind the Braves, Padres, and Yankees) to 50.7 (fifth, with the Blue Jays sneaking into fourth). New York’s Playoff Odds took a hit, too:

Double ouch. Even a six-point drop in winning percentage lowers the Mets’ odds of winning the NL East by nearly five percentage points, and likewise for making the playoffs, with their World Series odds knocked down a peg.

Every team, even championship ones, has to surmount injuries and other curveballs thrown its way. Losing Díaz stinks, and losing him in the manner that the Mets did even moreso (but I’m not listening to your death-to-the-WBC gripes). Even so, he’s not Francisco Lindor or Max Scherzer, and this $355 million roster can’t afford to fall apart over losing 60-some elite innings. The Mets must figure out how to win without Díaz while holding out hope that maybe — just maybe — they can stick around long enough for him to join them and fulfill that World Series dream.

Ian Anderson played a major part in the Braves’ success when they came within one win of a trip to the World Series in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and then won it all the following year. But after struggling for the first four months of the 2022 season, he was optioned to Triple-A Gwinnett and made just one appearance for Atlanta as it won the NL East but was upset by the Phillies in the Division Series. While Anderson had a shot to reclaim a rotation spot this spring, on Tuesday he was optioned once again, both due to his control problems and to other pitchers making stronger cases for the fifth starter role.

I wrote about Anderson’s demotion last August, but a recap is in order. The third pick of the 2016 draft burst upon the major league scene in late 2020, pitching to a 3.28 ERA and 3.80 FIP in 30 starts totaling 160.2 innings during the ’20 and ’21 regular seasons. He added some stellar postseason work in that span, going 4–0 with a 1.26 ERA in eight starts totaling 35.2 innings; he was kept on a short leash, most notably departing Game 3 of the 2021 World Series after throwing five no-hit innings.

Last year was a different story, as Anderson was lit up for a 5.00 ERA and 4.25 FIP in 111.2 innings across 22 starts. His FIP barely budged relative to 2021 (4.12), but his 1.42 runs per nine rise in ERA from that his previous mark of 3.58 ranked fifth in the majors among pitchers with at least 100 innings in both seasons. Meanwhile, his strikeout and walk rates continued a two-year trend of creeping in the wrong directions, with the former down to 19.7% and the latter up to 11.0%.

Exacerbating Anderson’s problems was a 54-point rise in BABIP, from .259 to .313, the majors’ fifth largest among the aforementioned qualifiers. He decreased his barrel rate from 9.5% to 6.2%, but that was offset by slight increases in his average exit velocity and hard-hit rate, not to mention his pull rate; his xERA went from from 4.27 to 4.37. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Kiri’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. She lives in the Pacific Northwest while contributing part-time to FanGraphs and working full-time as a data scientist. She spent five years working as an analyst for multiple MLB organizations.

By this point, you’ve undoubtedly consumed considerable content regarding the rule changes arriving in the majors for the upcoming season. You know all about the pitch clock dictating when hitters must ready themselves in the box and when pitchers must start their deliveries, as well as the wrinkle this introduces to pickoff attempts. You’ve also heard about the bigger bases and the limits on defensive shifting. Analysts have projected which players stand to be impacted most by the changes, while players who feel the changes make their jobs more difficult have voiced their concerns, and early spring training action has showcased the growing pains of adoption. With much of the existing commentary zooming in on the micro effects for particular players and game situations, let’s take some time to zoom out and ponder the macro effect on the game as a whole. More specifically, let’s ruminate on what makes a game or sport objectively appealing and how the rules — and subsequent changes to them — influence the appeal of a game.

At the most basic level, games are defined by rules dictating play. For those of us who struggle with authority, rules often feel restrictive. It’s no wonder, since rules come across as real haters, with all their “Don’t do this,” and “Don’t do that,” and “You can do this, but no, no, not like that.” That said, we needn’t have such an adversarial relationship with rules. In his book exploring the game of basketball, Nick Greene notes, “Games are peculiar. They are the only pursuit in which rules are used to facilitate fun.” To better understand the dynamic between rules and fun, Greene interviews a game design professor, Eric Zimmerman, who explains, “One of the paradoxes of game design is that the creativity of play is made possible by play’s opposite, which are rules. Rules are in essence constraints, but games don’t feel that way. […] When the rules are activated, what follows is fluid, unpredictable magic.” The rules of any game are finite, but the universe is infinite, implying that infinitely many possibilities exist in the space not covered by the defined rules. The fun in any game lies in the creativity used to explore the infinite space outside the boundaries set forth by the rules. Read the rest of this entry »

Every time a young star signs a contract extension, we all breathlessly mention the total guarantee. Did you hear Corbin Carroll is getting one hundred and ten million dollars? You could buy a pretty nice house with that, or several nice houses, or live comfortably for the rest of your life and set your kids up to succeed in the bargain. It’s natural to focus on something like that. It is, after all, the main part of the deal.

In almost every one of these extensions, there’s an additional feature: one or more years of team options tacked on to the end of the contract. Our collective analytical view of those tends to be more or less a shrug. “Oh, yeah, and two team options, so that’s nice,” we say, or “well, that makes sense.” I wouldn’t call our evaluations of these options particularly nuanced.

I don’t think that’s going to change on the whole, but the Carroll extension spurred me to at least delve a little deeper into the dollars and cents side of those team options. I’ve already done some work on opt outs from the player perspective, and conveniently enough, I can lift a lot of the mathematical methods from that treatment and use them to evaluate things from the team side. Read the rest of this entry »

MIAMI – You could hear the airhorns blocks away from LoanDepot Park, and the music, too: salsa, bachata, reggaeton, merengue — all blasting at artillery strike volume, echoing down the nearby residential streets lined with two-story pastel-colored houses and under the soft gray skies of a rainy Wednesday in south Florida. Small throngs of fans — women with their hair colored electric blue and cherry red, men with platinum blond dye jobs to mimic the stars of Team Rubio — became bigger clusters, all pooling around the stadium, taking over adjacent parking lots for impromptu tailgates. Everyone’s back bore the name of an icon of Caribbean baseball: CLEMENTE, GUERRERO, MARTINEZ, MACHADO, BÁEZ, SOTO, LINDOR. Tens of thousands of fans, some of whom had paid up to $400 per ticket on the secondary market just to get in the door, were here for the main event of Pool D in this World Baseball Classic: the win-or-go-home group stage finale between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

A clarification, first: It’s not accurate to call this event the World Baseball Classic — not here, at least, in Miami, where Latin American teams made up 80% of the pool’s members. (Team Israel probably picked up plenty of excellent Spanish slang in its week-long stay.) No, this was el Mundial, because all week, this hasn’t been a baseball tournament; it’s been a beisbol tournament. Every day featured a good-sized chunk of this city’s large Dominican and Puerto Rican populations setting up shop at the park and spending close to a dozen hours partying and dancing and playing panderetas and güiros and tamboras and those ubiquitous horns. Throughout the week, the west plaza of LoanDepot Park has functioned as a fanfest space, complete with a DJ on a giant stage and access to a team store stocked full of PR and DR shirts and a beer vendor seemingly every 10 feet. Long before each game every day and well past the final out each night, this is where Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Venezuelan fans (and a handful of Nicaraguans, supporting their country that had qualified for the WBC for the first time) met, laughed, crushed 20-ounce Heineken and Stella Artois cans, and celebrated together. This was their tournament, and Wednesday night’s heavyweight prize fight between Pool D’s superpowers was as close as they could get to their own Super Bowl. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I participated in a panel at the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix. It was a ton of fun, and I enjoyed getting a chance to nerd out about baseball with a bunch of like-minded people. The awards show wasn’t bad, either. I look forward to Michael Baumann and I making subtle references to it the rest of the year (or maybe just me; Baumann is less arrogant than I am).

The topic of my panel, where I was joined by Yahoo Sports’ Hannah Keyser and moderator Vince Gennaro, was players we love for the 2023 season. I love Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout most for the 2023 season, but more specifically, it was about players we love who aren’t widely regarded as superstars. I came prepared; I picked two hitters and two pitchers who fit the bill.

A panel isn’t the same as a presentation, and our discussion ranged widely around these and other players (Hannah loves Wander Franco and Hunter Greene, Vince loves Dylan Cease), but I thought I’d lay out my research here as well. If you’re a frequent reader, you probably already know how much I like these guys, but it never hurts to reiterate a point. Read the rest of this entry »

Trea Turner has transformed himself into one of the best hitters in baseball. Lacking projectable power when he was drafted 13th overall in 2014 — Kiley McDaniel cited his upside as 10-12 home runs with a .420 SLG the following winter — Turner proceeded to become far more than the slash-and-burn type that many envisioned. His past three seasons have been particularly impressive. Playing with the Washington Nationals and the Los Angeles Dodgers, he posted a sparkling .316/.364/.514 line with a 139 wRC+. Moreover, his right-handed stroke has produced 87 home runs over the last four non-COVID campaigns.

Turner — now with the Philadelphia Phillies after being signed to an 11-year, $300 million contract in December, and currently playing for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic — talked hitting prior to a recent spring training game.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite icebreaker questions: Do you view hitting as more of an art or more of a science?

Trea Turner: “I think it’s more of an art, but we’re trying to use science to quantify it. Sometimes guys have good swings, but then you go into a game and you can’t necessarily hit. The game is more of an art than a swing.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamondbacks left a huge hole in their outfield when they traded Daulton Varsho to Toronto a few days before Christmas. He was not only Arizona’s leader in position player WAR but also the top defensive outfielder in baseball in 2022, according to UZR and outs above average. He brought back a significant haul— an elite young catcher in Gabriel Moreno and a potent corner bat in Lourdes Gurriel Jr. — but left a significant hole to fill in the outfield. Will Diamondbacks pitchers suddenly suffer endless bloop hits and doubles to the gap in his absence?

“There have been times when I’ve been in center, Alek’s been in left, Corbin’s been in right, kind of mismatching all over,” says Jake McCarthy. “When there’s a ball in the gap or over someone’s head, you never assume it’s a hit.”

There’s plenty of competition for playing time among Diamondbacks outfielders this spring. But in an ideal world, Arizona will line up with McCarthy and the two teammates he mentioned — Corbin Carroll and Alek Thomas — to form the fastest outfield in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday night was special for Team Rubio. By falling to Venezuela on Sunday night, Puerto Rico had put themselves in a position with little room for error and faced a win-or go home scenario against the Dominican Republic on Wednesday night. Taking on Israel in its third game of Pool D play and with limited pitching depth, the team needed a nails performance from starter José De León. He didn’t disappoint, delivering for his people and providing a historic WBC performance. In a mercy rule win, Puerto Rico combined for eight perfect innings led by De León, who went 17 up and 17 down with 10 strikeouts.

After a top of the first inning that was over before you could blink, Team Rubio immediately got it going offensively. As Yonder Alonso said on the broadcast, “early and often” was the goal for this lineup after Puerto Rico almost rallied back from a big deficit against Venezuela the night before, bringing the tying run to the plate in the eighth inning after trailing 7–0 in the second. To carry that energy over, the top of Puerto Rico’s lineup had to set the table. Francisco Lindor and Enrique Hernández both made quick outs, but then chaos ensued, starting with a four-pitch walk by MJ Melendez. Emmanuel Rivera then scorched a ground ball at 106.1 mph into left field, setting up a run scoring opportunity for Javier Báez.

Báez had struggled mightily in the previous two games. He committed the error on Jose Altuve’s game-opening groundball, kick-starting Venezuela’s three-run first inning, and had spent his at-bats chasing breaking ball after breaking ball way out of the zone. Hitting fifth in the lineup, Báez was going to be relied on as a run creator. After taking a slider outside to start the at-bat, he did just that, sending a blistering line drive down the left field line that just landed fair to drive in Melendez and Rivera and give Puerto Rico a 2–0 lead:

Javier Báez and Team Puerto Rico strike first. ? #WorldBaseballClassic

(MLB x @TMobile) pic.twitter.com/IgoXKWwEnW

— MLB (@MLB) March 13, 2023

Right after that double, we got a taste of why Báez is called El Mago — The Magician — when he swiped third base on a 1–0 count with Eddie Rosario at the plate. Nobody makes an art form out of the swim slide better than Báez. Sit back and appreciate the near impossible:

SWIM MOVE ????

JAVY IS A MAGICIAN ?

?: WBC on FS1 pic.twitter.com/Kli53YL8IG

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) March 13, 2023

Nobody knows how he does it, but that’s why Báez has his nickname. Last WBC, we got him applying a sensational no-look tag on the heels of Yadier Molina’s perfect throw to nail Nelson Cruz attempting to swipe second; this year, we have another beautiful swim slide. Rosario didn’t let this it to waste, knocking in Báez with a 405-foot double off the base of the center field wall to give Puerto Rico a 3–0 lead.

That was more than enough for De León. In the top of the second, he induced four swinging strikes on his sinker, including three against Alex Dickerson. Israel’s hitters couldn’t handle the pitch all night: de León threw 44 sinkers in total and earned 15 called strikes and whiffs on it. As he churned through the lineup the first time through the order, he leaned on that sinker to do everything for him, both setting up and finishing off hitters with it. After the game, he credited Martín Maldonado’s pitch calling, noting that he didn’t shake off the veteran once the entire game. Maldonado had a plan to attack hitters with the sinker the first time through the order if De León could keep executing the pitch. And as the game progressed, he switched to more and more changeups and sliders to keep Israel’s hitters on their toes. All night, De León executed whatever Maldonado threw down for him.

In the bottom of the second, Hernández added to the onslaught with a double to score an additional two runs with no outs. Two batters later, Rivera punched a triple into the right-center gap to make it 6–0. The Diamondbacks third baseman has been solid so far as Puerto Rico’s unexpected cleanup hitter and at the hot corner. In the weeks leading up to the tournament, the expectation was that Jose Miranda and Carlos Correa would fill out Puerto Rico’s infield alongside Lindor and Báez. But with both Twins hitters bowing out of the tournament, Rivera was inserted into the starting lineup with the task of following the team’s three best hitters. So far, he has four hits in 11 at-bats with four RBI and two runs scored to go along with clean defense. Given a challenging opportunity, he has made the very most of it.

De León’s first big challenge came in the fourth, with the top of Israel’s lineup coming up a second time, led by their best hitters in Joc Pederson, Zack Gelof, and Matt Mervis. But he needed only eight pitches to breeze by them. Against Pederson, he switched up his sequencing and threw three consecutive changeups, with the third yielding a routine groundball to Neftali Soto at first. De León then caught Gelof trying to ambush a sinker and fooled him with the only cutter he threw all night. Looking to crush a high pitch, Mervis swung at two sinkers in the top third of the strike zone, then took a third that ran away and off the plate. That set him up perfectly for the changeup, and while Maldonado helped de León with a perfect frame of a pitch that may have been slightly off the low and outside corner, either way, it was perfectly executed and earned De León a called third strike from home plate umpire Ron Kulpa.

The top of fifth was just as easy as the previous inning, with De León needing just seven pitches to complete it. His offense didn’t go down as easily: Baéz led off the bottom half of the frame with a double; Joey Wagman entered the game in relief and intentionally walked Vimael Machín to get the favorable matchup against Maldonado, but he couldn’t find the zone with his curveball and ended up walking the veteran catcher as well, setting up a bases-loaded opportunity for Lindor. The Mets shortstop fell behind 0–2 but got a hanging curveball in his sweet spot and smacked it off the wall in right-center field, just missing a grand slam:

El Capitán clears the bases for Team Puerto Rico! #WorldBaseballClassic pic.twitter.com/LGgna4Vnd6

— World Baseball Classic (@WBCBaseball) March 14, 2023

Lindor’s triple cleared the bases, and as he cruised into third base, he rubbed his luxurious blonde hair while his teammates and fans basked in the moment.

Heading into the sixth up 9–0, de León was still under the WBC’s first-round maximum of 65 pitches, allowing him to return to the mound and continue his perfect game bid. He struck out both Spencer Horwitz and Ty Kelly looking before exiting, one pitch shy of the limit and the owner of the longest perfect game bid by a starter in WBC history. He was serenaded by a roaring Puerto Rican crowd as he exited the game:

The house was rocking for José De León and his perfect performance. #WorldBaseballClassic pic.twitter.com/O5O4RYnnmc

— World Baseball Classic (@WBCBaseball) March 14, 2023

As a former top prospect who has battled countless injuries, De León is still looking to find his place in MLB; maybe this outing will help him make the Twins, with whom he signed a minor league deal back in December and joined earlier this spring as a non-roster invitee. But even it doesn’t, he will have a life-long memory that not only means the world to him, but also to a tiny little island whose people eat, sleep, and breathe baseball. His quote after the game says it all:

“I’ve been through so many obstacles in my career, so many things. And to have a moment like this in front of my family, my people, wearing Puerto Rico across my chest makes it a hundred times more special. I’m still walking on cloud nine right now, so it’s a moment I’ll remember forever.”

After De León, Molina went with Yacksel Ríos to close the sixth, Edwin Díaz for the seventh, and Duane Underwood Jr. for the eighth and final inning. Those three pitchers were perfect as well and got one last bit of support from the offense, who closed out the 10–0 win with Hernandez’s single in the bottom of the eighth that scored Maldonado and invoked the mercy rule. It was the second no-hitter in WBC history — the first belongs to Shairon Martis, who threw it for the Netherlands in 2006 — and the only one in which zero runners reached base. And to many Puerto Ricans, myself included, this game means more than you can imagine. That performance by De León and the rest of the team will be spoken about in the Puerto Rican community for as long as baseball is played.

The Pool of Death has been as exciting as advertised so far. Venezuela will look to secure their spot at the top of the pool on Tuesday against Nicaragua; if they win and the Dominican Republic defeats Israel later that night, we will have an incredible rivalry matchup set for Wednesday between the DR and PR. The winner will move on, and the loser will go home. Buckle up, folks; we may have just seen a walk-off perfect game, but we’re just getting to the most thrilling part of the tournament.