A while back, I wrote about Angel Hernandez and his lawsuit against Major League Baseball. In said piece, I noted that “[p]layers in both the American and National League voted Hernandez one of the game’s three worst umpires. (In case you’re wondering, Joe West was worse in both leagues.)”
It’s time to talk about Country Joe West. West hasn’t sued anybody lately, but he did manage to get himself in a kerfuffle involving the Phillies, Austin Davis, and a piece of paper.
So as to prolong the suspense, it’s worth noting why West is considered a bad umpire. Unlike Angel Hernandez, his reputation isn’t necessarily for creative calls. In fact, back in 2007, The Hardball Times named him baseball’s most consistent umpire (though he called this balk on Tony Cingrani).
No, West is more known for his colorful personality. He was suspended for calling Adrian Beltre the “biggest complainer” in baseball. And he also likes staring matches. Like this staring match with Madison Bumgarner.
When the Yankees acquired Luke Voit from the Cardinals on July 29 in exchange for pitchers Giovanny Gallegos and Chasen Shreve, the deal seemed like little more than a footnote, an incremental upgrade of a contender’s organizational depth, sweetened by the inclusion of international bonus-pool money. Nonetheless, the deal has yielded the hottest hitter of any who changed teams in the weeks leading up to the July 31 trade deadline — albeit in a limited sample size — and, for the moment, a solution to the Yankees’ ongoing first-base woes.
At the time of the trade, the Yankees appeared committed to Greg Bird, an oft-injured 25-year-old lefty who had started 47 of the team’s 56 games at first base since returning from surgery to remove a bone spur in his right ankle. Bird extended that stretch to 66 starts in 78 games into late August, but by that point he had slipped into an 0-for-21 slump. With a banged-up offense feeling the absences of Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, and Didi Gregorius, manager Aaron Boone suddenly turned to Voit (toined to Voit to avoid Boid and fill da void, if you’re speaking Brooklynese), who has started 11 of the team’s past 14 games. The decision has paid off.
Entering Wednesday night’s game against the A’s, Voit — a beefy, amiable lug (6-foot-3, 225 pounds, seemingly with an ever-present smile) — had homered seven times in 65 plate appearances for the Yankees, batting .322/.385/.678 for a 185 wRC+ since the trade. Five of those homers either tied the game or gave the Yankees the lead, including this eighth-inning go-ahead shot against the A’s on September 4, which marked Voit’s third straight game with a dinger:
German Marquez is on quite the run. In the second half of the season, Marquez’s 2.3 WAR ranks third in all of baseball among pitchers behind only those marks recorded by Jacob deGrom and Patrick Corbin. His 2.29 FIP and 2.79 ERA since the All-Star break are both fantastic. He’s struck out nearly one-third of the batters he’s faced with five times as many strikeouts as walks. He’s doing all of this while pitching his home games in Colorado, and he’s just 23 years old. That’s quite the dramatic turnaround for a pitcher who put up a 4.73 FIP and a 5.53 ERA in his first 16 starts of the 2018 season. Like many young pitchers with a boatload of talent, Marquez has spent his first few years in the big leagues experimenting with different pitches and usage patterns. He seems to have found one that works.
A year ago, Marquez was primarily a fastball-curveball pitcher. He would mix in a change every now and again, and he did experiment with a slider, but it wasn’t used often and it stayed up in the zone. With a mid-90s fastball and good curve, Marquez produced a 21% strikeout rate, 7% walk rate, and an ERA and FIP in the mid-fours. In Coors Field, those still represented above-average numbers. For Marquez to progress, however, he was going to need to develop a third pitch. When Eric Longenhagen discussed Marquez ahead of the 2017 season, he anticipated the introduction of that third pitch.
Marquez also has a plus curveball in the 76-81 mph range that has a slurvy shape to it but bites hard and has solid depth. A back-foot curveball is the best weapon Marquez has against left-handed pitching right now, as his changeup is still below average. But Marquez is just 21 and his delivery is loose and fluid so there’s likely more coming from the changeup. Marquez’s command elicits similarly bullish projection because of the delivery and athleticism and he’s already throwing plenty of strikes. He’s a relatively low-risk mid-rotation arm, an above-average major-league starter.
Longenhagen mentioned the change as a potential addition, and Marquez did work to make that change more of a weapon heading into this season. That plan hasn’t exactly worked out. Marquez is throwing the changeup under 10% of the time this season. Even against lefties, he’s turned to it on just 11% of all occasions. What’s improved most for Marquez is the slider, and it is fooling hitters. Here’s Nick Hundley swinging at a slider despite holding a 2-1 advantage in the count:
The pitch works well in and out of the zone. When he throws the slider outside the zone, Marquez induces swings around 40% of the time, and batters swing and miss on two-thirds of those attempts. When the pitch is in the zone and batters swing, they make contact roughly 80% of the time, but on 44% of sliders in the zone, the hitter doesn’t bother to swing, like Evan Longoria in this 0-2 count.
When Shohei Ohtani made his return to the mound over the weekend, millions upon millions of fingers were crossed. And then, abruptly, his velocity dropped. The Angels suggested it didn’t have anything to do with the elbow injury that had kept Ohtani off of the mound for so long, and it was even somewhat believable, but now we know the truth of this dark timeline — the official recommendation is that Ohtani needs Tommy John surgery. It was reported before the season that Ohtani’s UCL had some damage. It was hurt again in June, and now it’s been hurt again in September. The rest-and-rehab approach didn’t take. It usually doesn’t, but it was worth a shot.
For whatever it’s worth, Ohtani still hasn’t decided whether he’ll have the operation. This is all new to him, and it’s a hell of a thing to accept. Presumably, he’ll acquiesce at some point, and then we’ll know we won’t see Ohtani pitch in the majors in 2019. This was one of the reasons why the Angels allowed Ohtani to pitch the other day at all — if he made it, it would provide some peace of mind, and if he didn’t make it, then an operation would allow Ohtani to be ready to pitch in a year and a half. Had the Angels waited, and had Ohtani gotten re-injured next spring, then he’d be out for much of 2020 as well. Now all parties have more information. Actionable information. Horrible, unfortunate, terribly upsetting actionable information.
But if there’s a silver lining to any of this, let me suggest that we take a step back and consider what Ohtani has already accomplished. Yes, it sucks what happens to pitchers sometimes. Yes, Tommy John surgery is a risk, and, yes, Ohtani’s two-way career might never be the same. Yet Ohtani has already proven himself. He’s already proven that someone like Shohei Ohtani can work. As far as Major League Baseball was concerned, Ohtani was something of an experiment, and he has been wildly successful. It’s impossible to deny the conclusion.
A brief examination of basically any human encounter ever reveals that people frequently do not agree with each other. This one human over here has an opinion; this other one, meanwhile, has a different opinion. It would be fine, perhaps, if those individuals never interacted, but that is also part of being human: there’s a lot of interaction. At stores, for example. Or on streets. And the one human says to the other, “Hey, your opinion is different than mine!” And the second one says to the first, “I am mad about that!”
Sometimes the interaction in question occurs at home plate during baseball’s postseason and Sam Dyson, for reasons known primarily to Sam Dyson, has decided that the proper course of action for someone like him is just to slap Troy Tulowitzki directly on the buttocks. Tulowitzki, whom one will identify immediately as a different person than Sam Dyson, regards this as not the proper course of action and proceeds to lodge some complaints verbally. Other humans get involved and all manner of other complaints are lodged, some verbally and some even physically. Complaints abound, is what one finds. Then everyone retreats back to their respective holes in the ground (known, in the sport of baseball, as a “dugout”) and awaits the next event worthy of their indignation.
One small thing over which humans frequently disagree is how much joy is acceptable to display publicly. One camp, whom we might characterize broadly as The Sons and Daughters of John Calvin, believe the amount is very close to zero. Another camp, whom we might call Basically Everyone Else, contends that — so long as no one is getting hurt — it’s probably okay to just do whatever.
Edwin Diaz was recently named the American League Reliever of the Month. This is, evidently, an award that exists, and Diaz this year has already won it four times. The baseball season has had just five months. Diaz has been absolutely overwhelming, and no player is more responsible for having kept the Mariners competitive. Diaz’s Oakland equivalent would be Blake Treinen, who’s had a similarly impossible year. In the National League, there has, of course, been Josh Hader. You know who many of the best relievers are right now. You might’ve read a few articles about them over the course of the regular season. It’s along season, and almost everything gets written about eventually.
But there’s a reliever breakout that’s been happening under the radar. Over time, the 2018 Texas Rangers have faded from relevance. Yet, over time, those same Rangers have watched Jose Leclerc develop into something sensational. Leclerc maybe hasn’t been the best reliever in baseball. He’s definitely been one of them, however, and what makes it all the more remarkable is where Leclerc was just a season ago. Wild hard-throwers come, and wild hard-throwers go. Usually, they never manage to harness their stuff. Leclerc’s an exception who flipped a switch, and now the batters just don’t know what to do.
For every trial lawyer, the Holy Grail is that “Perry Mason moment.” That’s the dramatic point in the episode where the real killer, under skillful cross-examination by Mason, reveals everything to the shocked judge and jury, the chagrined prosecutor* agrees to drop the charges, and everyone rides happily into the sunset.
*On a completely irrelevant aside, the prosecutor in Perry Mason is just really awful. He doesn’t seem to know how to check his own cases, or interview witnesses, or use the Rules of Evidence, or object properly. I could never watch this show without wondering how he keeps his job.
It also almost never happens this way. Shocking, I know. (In my career, I’ve had three instances of what could be termed “Perry Mason moments.” Cultivating one requires a combination of preparation for the witness and a lot of luck.)
Earlier this year, I wrote about a lawsuit that Francisco Mejia had filed against Big League Advance, a company founded by former MLB pitcher Michael Schwimer which gives minor-league players capital advances against anticipated future major-league earnings. As I wrote then, Mejia made some pretty serious accusations against Schwimer’s company.
According to Mejia, BLA approached him when his mother was very ill and struggling with medical bills. The contracts were signed, says Mejia, without a translator, and BLA even paid for Mejia’s lawyer just so the contract could state Mejia had the advice of counsel. Mejia says that BLA employees showed up at his house unannounced to collect a payment of about $10,000 after Mejia made the big leagues and threatened to bar him from playing if he didn’t pay. And, according to the Complaint, given Mejia is projected to earn over $100 million in the major leagues, BLA stands to recover over $10,000,000 against a $360,000 investment, which Mejia says is unconscionable.
Then, last week, Mejia suddenly dropped his lawsuit.
The New York Mets are a treasure trove of interesting case studies. They’re a large-market team run frequently like a small-market one, a club that doesn’t always seem to consider the present quality of the team when making decisions about the future, an organization whose various departments — medical, public relations, etc. — don’t always appear to interact. Whatever they are, the Mess are never boring.
Fresh off rumors that the team is interested in pursuing, for their next general manager, someone who is less reliant on data, the team has recently caused the internet buzz again by choosing not to promote the team’s top first-base prospect, Peter Alonso. My colleagues Jay Jaffe and Sheryl Ring have already addressed the service-time games that involve Alonso, but I think it’s interesting to also tackle the situation by looking directly at Alonso vs. Jay Bruce as a pure baseball decision.
It’s a completely non-controversial opinion that 2018 has been a monster season for Alonso, one that has given him real hype as a prospect, something that was not a foregone conclusion entering the year. Even the ZiPS projections for Alonso didn’t quite see this comping, ranking him as the No. 2 Mets prospect coming into the season, the No. 3 first-base prospect in baseball, and the No. 99 prospect overall — all of which I believe were the most optimistic forecasts. Alonso started off the season blazing hot, hitting .408/.505/.776 with seven home runs in April for the Binghamton Rumble Ponies. That performance led to a mid-June promotion to Triple-A Las Vegas. Alonso struggled early there, hitting .171/.330/.368 with 29 strikeouts in 76 at-bats for the 51s. That was extremely concerning in light of the fact that, at 23, Alonso was not a young player at Double-A, but he hit .297/.367/.676 with 17 homers in 182 at-bats after the All-Star break.
Joey Wendle has been scorching the baseball. The Tampa Bay Rays infielder/outfielder is slashing .350/.405/.536 over his last 50 games, and he’s been especially torrid in his last 10. Wendle has 17 hits in his last 39 at-bats, pushing his season mark to a heady .300/.349/.429.
Pair those numbers with his defensively versatility — he’s started 10 or more games at three different positions — and the result for the 28-year-old late-bloomer is a 2.7 WAR that ranks first among AL rookies. Wendle is legitimate Rookie of the Year candidate.
His offensive output is surprising, but it’s by no means shocking. Wendle batted a solid .285 with a .441 slugging percentage in 380 Triple-A games, and he more than held his own in a pair of September cameos before coming to Tampa. The Rays acquired Wendle from the Oakland A’s last winter in exchange for Jonah Heim.
His left-handed stroke has never been better, and a big reason is that he’s no longer trying to build a better mousetrap. He’s simply being himself when he steps into the box.
“Personally, I feel the best swings are natural,” Wendle told me on a recent visit to Fenway Park. “I think some of my best swings came before I had any instruction. At the same time, you can slowly build them as you progress. I’d say that my career has gone from a natural swing to a bit of a forced swing, and now to a place where I understand my natural swing better.”
I asked the former West Chester University Golden Rams standout to elaborate on “forced swing.”
We live in interesting times, and despite Major League Baseball’s supposed problems — a lagging pace of play, an excess of strikeouts and homers coupled with a shortage of balls in play, a glut of teams in rebuilding mode, service-time manipulations, and so on — we’ve generally been blessed in recent years with down-to-the-wire suspense when it comes to races for playoff spots. Thanks in part to the expanded Wild Card format (which has its critics and, admittedly, its flaws), only once since 2003 has the full playoff picture been determined before the season’s final day. Unfortunately, it was last year that broke the streak.
At Stake Heading Into Final Day of Season
Year
Playoff Spots At Stake
2004
NL Wild Card
2005
AL East, AL Wild Card, NL Wild Card
2006
AL Central, AL Wild Card, NL Central, NL West, NL Wild Card
2007
NL East, NL West, NL Wild Card*
2008
AL Central*, NL Wild Card
2009
AL Central*
2010
AL East, AL Wild Card, NL West, NL Wild Card
2011
AL Wild Card, NL Wild Card
2012
AL East, AL West
2013
AL Wild Card*
2014
AL Central, AL Wild Card, NL Central, NL Wild Card
2015
AL West, AL Wild Card
2016
NL Wild Card
2017
Pfffffffft
* Resulted in Game 163 tiebreaker
Amid the drama of the 2011 races, which saw the Rays and Cardinals snatch spots away from the collapsing Red Sox and Braves, respectively, on the season’s final day, I coined the phrase “Team Entropy” — taking a page from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all systems tend toward disorder — to describe the phenomenon of rooting for scenarios that produced end-of-season chaos. I’ve returned to the concept on an annual basis since then, tracking the possibilities for end-of-season, multi-team pileups that would require MLB to deviate from its previously scheduled programming.
The idea is that, if you’re a die-hard fan of a team trying to secure (or avoid blowing) a playoff spot, flag-waving for your squad of choice generally takes precedence, but if you’ve embraced the modern day’s maximalist menu of options that allow one not just to watch scoreboards but also to view multiple games on multiple gadgets, you want MORE BASEBALL in the form of final-weekend division and Wild Card races. You want extra innings and tiebreaker scenarios topped with mustard and sauerkraut. You want TVs, laptops, tablets, and phones stacked like a Nam June Paik installation so you can monitor all the action at once, and you want the MLB schedule-makers to contemplate entering the Federal Witness Protection Program instead of untangling once far-fetched scenarios. Welcome to Team Entropy, friends.
