I know what you’re thinking — the most recent World Series won’t have the same wild tactical decisions that were so common in the early 90s. You’re right! That’s true! What am I going to do, though — leave this series unfinished? Not likely. Today, we’re looking to the recent past.

2017

First things first: you can’t bring up this World Series without mentioning the Astros’ sign stealing scandal. I don’t think it had any effect on their tactics, so this is the only time I’ll address it — but yes, before you head down to the comments to let me know about it, I’m aware.

Lineup-wise, both of these teams knew how to set things up. Alex Bregman batted second for the Astros, with Justin Turner filling that role for the Dodgers. They were each arguably the best hitter on their team — modern lineup construction in action.

Both managers used appropriately short leashes on their pitchers. The Astros’ could have been even shorter — they let Dallas Keuchel face the top of the righty-stacked Dodgers lineup a third time in Game 1, and Turner punished him with a two-run homer. Clayton Kershaw went a similar length — one fewer pitch, one more out, and the same number of batters faced — but escaped with only one run allowed. That was the game — Turner’s home run provided the margin of victory.

Both teams went further in Game 2 — Rich Hill faced only 18 batters and Justin Verlander faced 21. Verlander’s last three batters nearly cost the Astros the game — like Keuchel before him, he gave up a two-run shot to the Dodgers’ number two hitter the third time through — Corey Seager this time. With Hill providing only four innings of work, the Dodgers needed a two-inning save from Kenley Jansen — reasonable with an off day to follow. Unfortunately for them, Jansen coughed up two runs, and after two extra innings, the series was tied. Read the rest of this entry »

The top of the seventh, and the Cardinals lead the Marlins7-6. Hard-earned, after getting out ahead early, 3-0, before ceding six runs, unable to muster a response; they were saving it all for the top of the sixth, when they got them all back — and another for insurance. Not enough insurance, though, not when you’re still trying to win — still, even though there is nothing tomorrow. Nothing the day after that, and nothing the day after that, either.

They’ve been holding up the signs: SAVE OUR SPORT. OWNER$ WIN, PLAYER$ WIN, FANS LOSE. The Cards send a pinch-hitter to the plate to lead it off: Gerald Young, in his 16th game with the big-league club. He is 29 years old. This will be the final game of his major league career.

***

Gerald Young — born in Honduras, raised in California — was signed by the Mets the same day as Doc Gooden. Gooden was the fifth pick overall in the 1982 draft; Young was drafted in the fifth round. Both were selected out of high school. Unlike Gooden, though, Young never ended up playing a single game for the Mets. His three-year career in their system was distinguished only by its anonymity. After the 1984 season, the Mets sent him and two Players to be Named Later to the Astros in exchange for Ray Knight, who had requested a trade.

In the Astros’ minor-league system, no longer a teenager, Young improved steadily. Every year, he advanced a level. His OPS climbed. He stole 54 bases in Double-A. His work in the outfield began to draw notice, too.

Young began the 1987 season in Tucson with the Triple-A Toros, the youngest player on the team’s roster, “scared and nervous” to make the jump to Triple-A. He quickly became the PCL’s stolen-base leader while hitting better than he ever had before. He thrived under the mentorship of Eric Bullock, then a veteran of the Houston farm, five years his senior. An “ooh-and-aah” player, the Arizona Daily Star called him: a thrill-seeker who loved the tension of the chase more than anything else, a dazzling young man with a bright smile and a twinkle in his eye. Read the rest of this entry »

Kendall Graveman has lived and died by his sinker since breaking into the big leagues in 2014. (He’s also spent a lot of time in injured-list purgatory, but that’s another story.) The 29-year-old right-hander has thrown his signature pitch nearly 60 percent of the time over 446 career innings, all but a handful of them with the Oakland A’s. Graveman is now with the Seattle Mariners, who inked him to a free agent contract last November.

This past March, I approached the Mississippi State product in Mariners camp for an overdue discussion about his sinker. It had been nearly five years since we’d talked pitching. That back-and-forth focused mostly on his cutter, with a glimpse at his approach and TrackMan usage sprinkled in for good measure. We only briefly touched on the pitch that got him to the big leagues. The time had come to rectify that earlier omission.

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David Laurila: When did you first learn to throw a sinker?

Kendall Graveman: “There’s a coach back home who used to work at Central Alabama Community College, and he came over and was teaching the pitching aspect at a camp I was attending. This was in the small town of Alexander City, and I was probably 12 years old at the time.

“A two-seamer was kind of a different — it’s something I‘d never seen — but I was able to pick the ball up and make a move. Ever since then, I’ve been able to manipulate it. Going through high school, I was a groundball pitcher — I was the same guy I am now — and didn’t strike out a lot of guys. Over the years I’ve been able to develop that pitch more, and have been able to create early contact, soft contact, and groundballs.”

Laurila: How does one go about manipulating a sinker? Read the rest of this entry »

The OOTP Brewers’ season has reached a classic lull in activity. The early rush of figuring out which parts on the team fit and which needed to be replaced has hit pause; the starting rotation has stabilized, injured hitters are returning, and a few trades shored up the team’s weakest points. The draft, the next big event on the calendar, has passed as well, and all of our draft picks look likely to sign. With more than a month remaining before the trade deadline, we’ve hit a bit of a transaction dead zone.

Games are still being played during this period, of course. On that front, the team is chugging merrily along; after taking two out of three games from the Reds, we stand at 41-30, three games ahead of a surprising Pittsburgh team:

Our run differential continues to creep in the right direction, even after starting in the basement. Christian Yelich and Brock Holt are still mashing; Yelich sits at 4.9 WAR despite missing the last series with a mild shoulder strain (seriously mild — he suffered it while throwing the ball and will be back to full strength by tomorrow). Holt is still crushing, despite legitimate questions about how real his start was; he had a 122 wRC+ in April, peaked at 163 in May, and is sitting at a totally acceptable 112 for June.

Those are the boring facts of the situation: the team’s doing well, and there’s not much reason for us to tinker with it. Honestly, though, that’s boring. We aren’t running the Brewers so that we can clap politely from the GM’s excellent seats while we watch the team motor through the NL Central. We’re here to leave our mark, at least a little bit; we don’t need to finish the year with our five best players gone and Gleyber Torres playing second base, or anything like that, but it would be nice to make a change or two. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2001, HBO Films aired a made-for-television movie called 61*, about the 1961 race between Yankees sluggers Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris as they attempted to topple the hallowed single-season home run record held by Babe Ruth. The movie opened with footage of Mark McGwire hitting his 60th home run in 1998, as actors playing Maris’ sons paged through a scrapbook their mother kept of their late father’s accomplishments. Soon enough, the movie delved into a dramatization of the 1961 race, with a script that reflected upon the question offered by 61*’s tagline: “Why did America have room in its heart for only one hero?”

Nineteen years later, Long Gone Summer, an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary that premiered on Sunday night, looks back at that 1998 race between McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and the brief stretch when the baseball world carried the two rival sluggers in its collective heart as the pair challenged a record that had stood for nearly four decades. While subsequent allegations about both players’ use of performance-enhancing drugs have dulled the luster of their achievements and astronomical home run totals — 70 for McGwire, 66 for Sosa — director A.J. Schnack’s movie is far less interested in scolding anyone than it is in reliving the excitement of the race and the mutual respect and camaraderie of the two rivals. That’s not to say that the topic of PED usage goes unaddressed, but it does take a back seat to what was, at the time, a feel-good story in a sport that was still recovering from the impact of the 1994 season-ending players’ strike.

I was one of more than three dozen people interviewed for Long Gone Summer, nearly all of whom were otherwise connected to the race as players, coaches, managers, executives, club employees, family members, broadcasters, or print media; to my eye, Effectively Wild’s Ben Lindbergh and MLB.com’s Jennifer Langosch were the only other participants besides myself who were outsiders at the time. It was a unique opportunity, and while my time onscreen was limited, I’m glad that the final product — which I only viewed for the first time late last week — turned out well while taking a lighter tack than we’ve seen over the past two decades. It’s not hard to find people, inside baseball or beyond, willing to rebuke McGwire, Sosa, and MLB itself for the game’s drug problem, as the annual Hall of Fame voting reminds us. Schnack, a native of Edwardsville, Illinois — about half an hour from St. Louis — and an award-winning documentarian whose previous credits include films covering They Might Be Giants and Kurt Cobain, chose a different route. In doing so, he secured the cooperation of both McGwire and Sosa, both of whom offer a generous share of recollections and introspection regarding that season 22 years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Tuesday, the Major League Baseball Players Association offered a quick response to an owner proposal to resume the 2020 season that was fundamentally no better than MLB’s first offer. The players reduced the number of games they proposed to play from 114 to 89, offered expanded playoffs for the next two seasons, and made concessions on service time for players who opt out of the season. The offer looked like a step toward compromise. On Friday, MLB responded with an offer similar to its previous two offers. In response, the players have opted to stop negotiating against themselves, and have asked Rob Manfred to set the schedule and decide how many games the owners want to have this season.

The new offer was staged differently than owners’ the previous attempt, but the foundation of it presented the same reductions the owners have been attempting to pass on to the players since it became clear the season can’t be played with fans in attendance. MLB proposed a 72-game season with 70% pro-rated pay, amounting to $1.268 billion in game salaries. If the postseason, which was to be expanded, were completed, the players would receive another 10% of their pro-rated pay — around $181 million plus a $50 million bonus pool — essentially maxing out at $1.5 billion. Let’s compare the three offers made by MLB to the likely a 54-game season with full pro-rated pay as stipulated by the March agreement:

Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Moskos was drafted fourth-overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2007. It was a dream come true for the Clemson University product, who went into that June day not knowing what to expect. Some teams viewed him as a starter, others saw him as a reliever, and he hadn’t been at his best in the ACC tournament. The uncertainty led to, in his own words, “a lot of stressful emotions.”

He thought his most-likely destination was Colorado. The Rockies (who ended up taking Casey Weathers) had the eighth pick and were reportedly looking for a close-to-ready college reliever who could conceivably contribute down the stretch. The Pirates more or less came out of the blue. While they’d shown interest, Moskos hadn’t receive a phone call prior to the pick being announced, nor had his advisor/agent.

Moskos isn’t in denial of what Pittsburgh probably had in mind.

“Given the way things played out, I have to assume they didn’t see me as someone would cause a financial concern,” said Moskos. “That’s something that steered their draft around that time: they looked more in the bargain-hunting bin than they did at the highest-profile guys. Whatever fault you want to put to that, they didn’t see me a signability issue.”

Moskos, whom Baseball America had projected to go eighth-overall, inked a $2.475M contract and set forth on a professional career that went anything but smoothly. Hampered by injuries and an inconsistent breaking ball, he ended up playing just one big-league season. In 2011, the southpaw came out of the Pirates bullpen 31 times and logged a 2.96 ERA over 24-and-a-third innings. Then his elbow started barking. Read the rest of this entry »

It fell several steps short of a rally, but it was the closest Hanwha had gotten to one in weeks. Down 5-0 against the Doosan Bears in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Eagles finally showed life with a pair of singles, the second of which resulted in an error in left that allowed the first to score. A wild pitch, a walk, and a fielder’s choice later, the Eagles had a second run. The tying run was in the on-deck circle, and one of the KBO’s most volatile bullpens was about to use its fifth reliever. Sometimes, this is how the improbable happens. But Hanwha was in the process of defying a much different set of odds — one that is far less fun than prying victory from the jaws of defeat.

The Eagles fell to Doosan 5-2 on Friday, giving them their 18th loss in a row, a stretch of futility with no end in sight and nearly no precedent. In the history of the Korean Baseball Organization, only the 1985 Sammi Superstars have lost as many games consecutively; one more loss would place Hanwha in a class by themselves. In over 150 years of Major League Baseball, an 18-game losing streak has happened just 22 times, with only two of those occurring in the last 40 seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

With most every other professional sport moving forward with a plan to resume play, baseball’s unsettled future sticks out like a sore thumb. Inevitably, battle lines have been drawn; the owners claim poverty and hardship, the players toe their pro-rata line while dangling various season lengths and inducements, and each side claims the other is intransigent and negotiating in bad faith (one side’s argument is much stronger than the other’s as far as that’s concerned).

One of the key arguments the owners have made is that their teams aren’t profit centers. It’s never couched in exactly those words, but that’s the primary gist of the argument. When Tom Ricketts spoke about the Cubs’ finances, he focused on a specific point: that the team isn’t hoarding cash.

“Most baseball owners don’t take money out of their team. They raise all the revenue they can from tickets and media rights, and they take out their expenses, and they give all the money left to their GM to spend,” he said, in regards to earlier comments by Scott Boras. Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt approached it from a different angle in discussing the team’s real estate expansion, saying “we don’t view (Ballpark Village) as a great profit opportunity.”

I find both of these quotes quite interesting, not for what they reveal, but rather for how precisely they are formulated. Ricketts focused on cash — dollars that flow from team coffers to owners’ bank accounts. DeWitt focused on the profitability of real estate ventures, profit being a notoriously nebulous concept.

Before going any further, I’ll note that both Ricketts and DeWitt are within their rights to posture heavily, or even lie in substance, with these statements. How productive that approach is (eh) and how well it sits with us (not very!) are questions worth considering, but they’re allowed. They’re not under oath, and they’re in no way required to open their books. Parties bluff and lie in negotiations all the time, and both of these statements are, at their core, negotiations with the players using the public as intermediary.

But let’s take them at their word. This seems to be the core issue the owners are asserting: they aren’t taking home any money from their teams, even in good times, so they can’t be expected to take a loss when times get tough. No cash when times are good, cash loss when there’s a recession; the math doesn’t add up. In almost every public statement, owners mention this exact sentiment. Read the rest of this entry »

“If you let that mad galoot step into the ball he’ll knock its cover off.”

That’s what Pat Tableau, the old manager, said of him — that’s the legend of Ed Delahanty. Six foot one, 190 pounds, who grew up in a boardinghouse in Cleveland, who had four brothers playing with him in the bigs and was the best of them all. It didn’t matter that he swung at anything, that he couldn’t resist a wild pitch. He reached for everything, his huge frame stretching over the plate, over the other batter’s box, “like a kid trying to pick the ripest cherries at the extreme end of the branch.” He tore off the infielders’ shoes. He broke ankles with line drives, the ball hurtling through the air as if “shot from a cannon.” And if he didn’t like the pitcher, he would complain. If he had a bad day, he would complain. He smoked cigars, and he chewed tobacco, and he drank, and if the circumstances of his team weren’t going his way, he would threaten to quit.

Big Ed couldn’t hold back. That was what made him great; that was what stopped him, he said, from being greater.

***

In his breakout season — 1892, four years after his debut — Delahanty finally earned the title of “a decent utility man.” His first four years in baseball were passable. But he decided he was done with that, with “not doing much brilliant work.” He slugged .495 in 1892, the best mark in the league. He kept climbing. The league’s best slugging percentage in 1893 was his again, but nearly a hundred points higher. He hit 19 dead-ball homers. He had the most total bases. In 1894, he did his slugging percentage one better, adding a .405 average into the mix. He was 25. Read the rest of this entry »