So far this season, my OOTP Brewers updates have followed a familiar cadence. Every Monday or Tuesday, I write about some new disaster for the team. Josh Lindblom is out for the year, maybe, or Lorenzo Cain isn’t hitting. Maybe the Mets put up six trillion runs on us, or Luis Urías broke his foot rehabbing his broken hand. You get the idea — these articles has been a struggle to keep a team on the field, serialized.

This week is going to be about whatever the opposite of that is. The Brewers have played six games since my last update. They’ve won all six, taking them to 23-18 on the year. The contributions have come from everywhere — the team allowed only 15 runs in those six games while scoring 32. Josh Hader faced 20 batters and struck out 12. This is the Brewers team the Milwaukee brass hoped for in the offseason; pitching lines that look like this:

Oh yeah — Corey Knebel is back. The above game was his first one back in the majors, but he looked fine during his rehab assignment as well. In the meantime, we’ve added Tony Cingrani on a minor league contract, and after a few tune-up appearances, he’ll be ready to bolster the big league bullpen whenever needed. Mystery man Sam Pierron is still going back and forth with me about money, but between Knebel and Cingrani, the reinforcements have arrived. Read the rest of this entry »

Evan White was playing in his first full professional season when I interviewed him 24 months ago. I went on to write that White “not only bats right and throws left, he’s a first baseman whose athleticism and offensive skill set are more akin to that of a center fielder.” My esteemed colleague Eric Longenhagen had recently called the University of Kentucky product “perhaps the 2017 draft’s most unique player.”

Two years later, White is No. 4 on our Mariners Top Prospects list, and No. 64 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list. Moreover, he’s projected to begin the season — assuming there is a season — in Seattle’s starting lineup. If so, he’ll have leapfrogged Triple-A. White spent last year at Double-A Arkansas where he slashed .293/.350/.488, with 18 home runs in 400 plate appearances.

The introduction to the 2018 interview also included the line, “Last June’s 17th overall pick doesn’t project to hit for much power.” As evidenced by the aforementioned output, that’s now looking to be untrue. White’s swing is proving to be more lethal than expected — this despite his not having retooled it toward that end.

“I’m just continuing to learn, continuing to grow,” White told me prior to spring training’s being shut down. “My approach is the same — it’s to stay middle of the field — but my timing is more consistent. If I’m late, I’ve got to rush, and when I’m rushing I’m not making as good decisions because I’m not seeing the ball as well.”

Seeing the ball has never been much of an issue. Along with possessing solid bat-to-ball skills, the Columbus, Ohio native strives to be a selective hitter. That’s not by chance. As noted in the earlier piece, White has a strong appreciation for what Joey Votto brings to the table in Cincinnati. Read the rest of this entry »

“I would tell you very quickly it was scaled down to, ‘It’s either July 26 or it’s 2021,” said Tim Mead, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in discussing the institution’s decision to postpone this year’s Induction Weekend due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. “There’s a standard and the quality associated with that ceremony and the Induction Weekend, and we weren’t going to trim any of it for any reason just to make sure it happens.”

I spoke to Mead on Sunday, May 3, four days after the Hall officially announced that there would be no induction ceremony this year and 370 days after he was announced as the seventh president in the institution’s history. In the days before and since, I also spoke to Cooperstown’s past and present mayors as well as a couple of local small business owners for whom the cancellation is just the latest of several blows suffered amid a shutdown that threatens to wipe out the entire tourist season.

The Hall itself has been closed since March 15, and the streets of the town of around 1,800 are deserted, that despite relatively few residents in the town and its surrounding areas falling ill from the virus. The underlying rural/urban tensions caused by the shutdown are playing out all over the country right now, but there may be no place where the contrast is as stark as this idyllic and storied village, which annually draws half a million visitors from all across the U.S., and even internationally, for its baseball-related attractions.

What Mead conveyed in our conversation is the Hall’s sense of responsibility in announcing its decision just shy of three months ahead of the actual weekend. The handwriting on the wall is clear enough, particularly given the complex logistics that underly the celebration. At a time when public health officials are mandating social distancing measures and strongly advising against gatherings of even a handful of people, the thought of tens of thousands of people traveling long distances, convening, and then returning to their communities — potentially furthering the spread of the coronavirus or fueling the second wave of an outbreak — is a nonstarter. Read the rest of this entry »

With so much uncertainty surrounding the “when” and “if” of a 2020 MLB season, it’s not surprising to see a constant progression of new plans. What it comes down to is that there’s no obvious one-size-fits-all solution that maximizes player and staff safety, baseball quality, the number of baseball games, and league revenue simultaneously. It’s only in such an odd year that things like playing in spring training parks, Arizona/Florida leagues, neutral playoffs, fanless games, and Thanksgiving baseball actually seem plausible rather than falling in the category of whimsical skylarkings.

While states re-opening for business seems like a dubious decision, often running counter to the advice of public health experts, it appears inevitable that many jurisdictions will resume much of their pre-COVID-19 economic activity, though with additional precautions and wariness of others. We’re far from being able to expect normal game conditions, with fans and hot dog vendors, but increasingly, there’s a push to play a large percentage, if not all of the season, in teams’ home parks.

With travel likely to be both more difficult and more perilous, CBS Sports’ RJ Anderson reported a proposal for a three-division alignment for the 2020 season. This would likely involve teams at least starting in just a few stadiums before an eventual move to their home cities depending on the course of the virus. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January, before all of this happened, I found myself wondering about baseball players who had simply disappeared. Players often fade from our memory, but thanks to the archival work of organizations like SABR and the Hall of Fame, and websites like Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet, rarely are they ever lost entirely. Baseball is comfortingly recurrent, comfortably concrete — to have a player go missing, their status unknown, struck me as likely to be a uniquely destabilizing and impactful event.

Of course, a lot of things have changed since January. We now find ourselves in a situation wherein Major League Baseball itself is suspended in a state of uncertainty, and many minor league teams are unsure whether they’ll continue to exist next year at all. I abandoned my search for the missing of baseball history in the face of the Astros cheating scandal, which at that point seemed much more pressing; now, when baseball is missing and we are missing baseball, it seems like the right time to pick it back up. 

Many of the stories that I found were comedies; some were tragedies. Some were political, some were trivial, and some were, ostensibly, romantic. All of them, I think, are worth exploring. Without baseball games to attend, now seems as good a time as any to reflect on our relationship with the sport, its stories, and the people who play it.

The story that follows is the earliest that I found, coming from late 1892 in St. Joseph, Missouri, the town that was once the jumping-off point for the Wild West, and that has hosted professional baseball since 1886. Read the rest of this entry »

The start of the KBO season this week has been a joyous occasion for me. The opening night broadcast reminded me of what I’d lost: the crack of the bat, the delightful feeling of not knowing what will happen next, and the thrill of a sudden defensive gem in an otherwise stately-paced game.

But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I’ve been vocal about my desire to see Dixon Machado play; shortstop defense is my favorite flavor of baseball, and he’s a wizard with the glove. The Lotte Giants weren’t scheduled for any English language games all week. Something had to give.

Luckily, if you’re willing to hunt around a bit, the English programming schedule is no barrier. The KBO broadcasts all of their games in Korean on Twitch, and so I set out to watch the Giants take on the KT Wiz and enjoy a game that was both very like what I know and utterly foreign.

My initial impression, after fast-forwarding through the pregame show, was one of emptiness:

But of course, that’s simply baseball’s new reality. I’d encountered it already in the opening broadcast, and in the time of COVID-19, it isn’t strange to see empty spaces designed to seat thousands. It was comforting, almost, a reminder that I wasn’t watching to see what was different. It’s all different. Life’s all different. I was watching to see what was the same, to see the central thread of baseball with different trappings. Read the rest of this entry »

Asher Wojciechowski has had a weird career. The 31-year-old Orioles right-hander has been with eight different organizations in 10 professional seasons. Moreover, this is his second stint with Baltimore in less than two years, with a pair of teams sandwiched in between. All told, Wojciechowski has worked 161 innings over 47 big-league appearances, with a 5.76 ERA and a 5.13 FIP.

He was a supplemental first-round pick in 2010. But while the Toronto Blue Jays liked the Citadel product enough to draft him 41st overall, they didn’t like him enough to let him be. The following spring, Wojciechowski was asked to change his identity.

“At the time, their philosophy was sinkers at the bottom of the zone, and sliders and cutters off of that,” Wojciechowski explained. “Everything was bottom of the zone or below. I’d never pitched like that. In college, I’d been a four-seam/slider guy, a swing-and-miss guy. The Blue Jays tried to turn me into a sinkerballer.”

That happened a month into the season. Following a bad outing, Wojciechowski was asked to sit down with his pitching coach and Toronto’s pitching coordinator.

“They were like, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about dropping your arm slot and having you throw two-seamers, start really sinking the ball,’” Wojciechowski recalled. “I figured, ‘All right, they did this with Roy Halladay and it worked tremendously with him; I guess they’re trying that with me, too.’ Being in my first [full] season of pro ball, I wasn’t going to say no.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I noted how in roughly eight seasons, Mike Trout had already put up one of the best 10-year WAR figures in baseball history. Trout’s remarkable run requires more superlatives than my brain can muster, so let’s just agree that Mike Trout is really, really good. WAR combines the offensive and defensive components of the game, but it should not be shocking that Trout’s offensive numbers alone are fantastic. His career batting line of .305/.419/.581 has produced a 172 wRC+ and over his eight-plus seasons in the majors, Trout has been 511 runs better on offense than the average player. While Trout’s 70-plus WAR thus far puts him in rare company over a 10-year period, putting up more than 500 runs above average is even rarer.

Dating back to the start of 1900 season, 22 players have put up 128 10-year periods that resulted in a WAR at the end of that stretch of 70 or greater. During that same time period, only 16 players have combined to make 99 10-year periods over which the player was at least 500 runs above average on offense. In the last 50 years, only Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, Jeff Bagwell, and Frank Thomas have reached that mark. With two more solid seasons from Trout, only Bonds will have put up a better offensive decade than the one the Angels center fielder will finish in 2021. With even modest production, Trout is likely to be the major league leader in offensive runs above average for another half-dozen years on top of the two years he’s already produced.

Read the rest of this entry »

When we last left this series, the Marlins were running the Yankees out of the stadium and Craig Counsell was bunting up a storm. Baseball tactics continued to creep inexorably forward: lineups looked more modern, pitchers threw fewer innings, and platoon advantages were seized left and right. It wasn’t all seamless — the entire 2001 series was a study in strange decision-making — but things were looking up. Did that continue?

2004

As a Cardinals fan, this is a painful series for me. But it certainly wasn’t painful due to the Cardinals’ roster construction, which was excellent. Edgar Renteria was perhaps a weak leadoff hitter (88 wRC+ in 2004), but he ran a career .343 OBP and had been downright excellent in 2003 — the Cardinals were betting that 2004 was just a blip. Past that, it was a slew of fearsome hitters: Larry Walker batted second, Albert Pujols third, Scott Rolen fourth, and Jim Edmonds fifth.

On the Red Sox side, things weren’t quite as smooth. Orlando Cabrera was an under-qualified number two hitter. But the rest of the lineup followed sabermetric orthodoxy, and quite frankly, both of these teams were so stacked with good hitters that it’s hard to find much fault with the lineups.

In the second inning of Game 1, Edmonds even busted out a very modern contrivance; the bunt for a hit into a shifted infield. Reggie Sanders followed with a walk, always a potential outcome with a knuckleball pitcher on the mound. Then Tony Womack, of 2001 World Series fame, came to the plate — and bunted. This wasn’t some attempt to sneak a bunt by a still-sleeping Red Sox defense. Womack showed bunt on each of the four pitches of the at-bat, and the corner infielders were at a full charge as the pitch was thrown. Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people who cover Major League Baseball professionally, I am no expert when it comes to the Korea Baseball Organization. However, over the past six weeks — ever since that first flicker of hope glimpsed in the form of a Lotte Giants scrimmage streamed on YouTube, just as the nightmare of the COVID-19 pandemic was getting particularly heavy in New York City — I’ve learned a great deal about the league through conversations with MyKBO’s Dan Kurtz, FanGraphs alumni Josh Herzenberg and Sung Min Kim (both now Lotte Giants employees), and Samsung Lions international scout Aaron Tassano. I’ve read similar lines of inquiry from other baseball-starved scribes as well as English-speaking Korean journalists, dug through Baseball-Reference and Statiz, and delved into the work of my colleagues, particularly Ben Clemens’ two-part rundowns of the league’s foreign-born players, and Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for the league. Along with a similar crash course in Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League, it’s been a fun project that has helped take my mind off not only the delays and uncertainty regarding the 2020 MLB season but also the grim backdrop of the pandemic in this country.

Spurred by Monday’s news that ESPN will carry English-language broadcasts of one KBO game per day, all the way through the league’s postseason, what follows here is my attempt to digest my KBO crash course into a usable guide for those who are similarly dipping their toes into the league’s waters for the first time. I can’t claim this to be comprehensive, but whether you’re looking to pick a team to root for or simply trying to find a few players to focus upon as you watch live baseball, I hope that it’s helpful.

A few reminders: this is a 10-team league whose team names carry those of the corporations that own them, not the cities they call home; the season is 144 games long; ties are called after 12 innings (15 in the postseason) and don’t count in determining winning percentage; it’s a contact-centric league with lower strikeout and home run rates than MLB, the latter after a conscious effort to de-juice the ball in 2019; and each team is allowed three foreign players. The playoff system is a “step-ladder” where the regular season winner gets a bye all the way to the Korean Series, the fifth- and fourth-place teams square off in a Wild Card round, with the winner facing the third-place team in the best-of-five Semi-Playoffs, the winner of that series playing the second-place team in the best-of-five KBO Playoffs, and that winner facing the top team in the best-of-seven Korean Series. Read the rest of this entry »