“People underestimate the power of nostalgia. If baseball can use it to get people to care about that worthless sport, then I can use it to get my siblings to care about the farm. Nostalgia is truly one of the great human weaknesses – second only to the neck.”

– Dwight K. Schrute

On August 9, in the fourth inning of the Guardians-Twins game, Carlos Santana loosed a ferocious cut at a 3-2 splitter from Alex Cobb. As the bottom fell out of the pitch, Santana’s bat caught the very top of the ball, redirecting it almost straight down into the ground. With the runner on first base breaking for second, catcher Austin Hedges turned and rose from his crouch, leaving a clear path for the foul tip to bounce up off the dirt and, with a loud thud, directly into home plate umpire Jim Wolf. The concerned Hedges whipped around immediately.

HEDGES: Oh God, are you ok, Wolfie? Did that get you in the nuts?
WOLF: Neck.
HEDGES: Neck?!
WOLF: Neck.
HEDGES: God. Let me give you a second.
WOLF: Hmm. Adam’s apple.

As Minnesota trainer Nick Paparesta deftly pressed his fingertips to Wolf’s collarbone to check for a fracture, the play jarred something loose in my memory. I remembered a baseball card I had when I was a kid. It was a Steve Decker card, catcher for the Giants, and on the back it said that Decker had once been hit in the throat by a foul tip. Not only that, but the ball had gotten lodged there, requiring hospitalization. Being a child, it never occurred to me that the ball had been trapped in place by Decker’s mask. I thought that it had somehow hit his throat hard enough that it had just gotten stuck there. I remember it clearly because it was such a jarring thing to read on the back of a baseball card, right next to his batting average and his two career stolen bases. As it turns out, I am also remembering it incorrectly. I checked every single Steve Decker card on the Trading Card Database. No such card exists.

Figuring that I simply had the wrong name, I checked every other card from Giants catchers when I was a kid. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did learn from a 1991 Kirt Manwaring card (printed, for reasons passing understanding, by the electrical company PG&E) that July is the best time to go bargain hunting for a new refrigerator. Next, I tried searching online for articles about Decker getting hit in the throat. I didn’t find them; I was definitely wrong about the catcher in question. There is no indication that Decker ever got decked in the throat. What I did find was even more interesting. I found out that short of reading the back of every catcher’s baseball card from 1990 to ’98, I would probably never figure out whose card I actually had when I was a kid, because in order to find it, I would have to wade through an ocean of stories about the exposed throats of catchers and umpires. They were everywhere.

The most famous ball to the throat in the history of baseball happened during Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Pirates center fielder Bill Virdon hit a chopper to shortstop. Shaded up the middle in double-play position, Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek ranged to his right, but a high hop hit him directly in the throat. Kubek collapsed to the ground, and though he tried to remain in the game, he was taken to the hospital.

However, I was looking for something more specific. I was interested only in situations similar to what happened to Wolf: a pitch or a foul tip that bounces up off the ground and up into a throat. I didn’t think I would find many plays that met such narrow criteria, but I was very wrong. I found funny anecdotes about Hall of Famers and heartbreaking stories about children, starting last week and stretching all the way back to the 1860s.

When the 1989 World Series was disrupted by an earthquake, the A’s decamped to Arizona to practice against instructional league teams, and Terry Steinbach took a foul tip to the neck. During the 1984 Japan-U.S. College Baseball Championship Series, future superstar Will Clark fouled a pitch into the neck of Japanese catcher Shinji Hata. In 1953, Southern League umpire Vic Delmore swallowed his tongue after being hit in the throat. Luckily, pitcher Al Bennett had seen the exact same play happen six years earlier, and knew how to remove it. On Sunday, Giancarlo Stanton’s bat somehow broke off at the handle as he finished his follow-through, flying backward and catching umpire Nick Mahrley squarely in the side of the head. The terrifying freak play ended with Mahrley being carted off the field with a concussion. While it doesn’t meet our criteria, Stanton’s bizarre broken bat demonstrates just how dangerous things are for the people squatting or standing behind home plate. Although I had never seen it happen until a couple weeks ago, for as long as people have been playing baseball, the brave souls who do their work back there have been taking foul tips to the throat.

As I had only ever seen this particular play happen once, and had only even heard of it happening once before that, I was shocked by its ubiquity. I resolved to tame this unruly mass of stories and assemble a complete history, but I quickly had to scale back my ambitions. There were two reasons for this. The first was that as I read more and more of these accounts, my own throat started to ache. It took me a full day to realize that I wasn’t just experiencing sympathy pain. I had Covid, and I was laid up for more than a week. I didn’t have enough energy to write, but I did have enough to sit around with a laptop, combing through newspaper archives.

That brings us to the second reason: There were way too many stories. Although the vast majority of foul tips to the throat go unrecorded entirely, the official record still contains enough instances that I wouldn’t be able to make my way through them all without dedicating at least a few weeks to the task, and a complete history would be far too long to publish. Without coming close to exhausting the supply, I found well over a hundred. I also found a trove of great old black-and-white photographs dating back to the 1950s, and I’ve shared a handful of them on Twitter just for fun. I also assembled a supercut of the videos I was able to find. You’ll note that I intentionally cut away from each play pretty quickly, before the person who got hit has a chance to react. There’s a reason for this: These plays can be very dangerous, and some of the videos are difficult to watch.

Because I can’t publish a complete history of bouncing balls to the throat, this will necessarily be an anecdotal history. As such, you’ll be reading the most entertaining stories I found, but first I need to acknowledge some truly tragic ones. In 1961, 12-year-old Brumit Estes of Cocoa, Florida, died from a ruptured artery in his throat when a pitch took a strange bounce off home plate during a Little League game. A dutiful catcher, he pounced on the loose ball and threw it back to the pitcher, then collapsed suddenly. He was dead before first responders could arrive. On July 11, 1967, a foul tip damaged the windpipe of 13-year-old catcher Rickey Looper of Cleburne, Texas. Looper was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, but he died early the next morning.

The most recent instance happened just a few weeks ago in Worcester, Massachusetts. Umpire Korey Pontbriand took a foul ball to the throat in the second inning of a Little League game. Pontbriand didn’t experience much pain initially and kept umpiring, but he switched from home plate to field umpire when he lost the ability to talk. A few innings later, Dr. Jennifer LaFemina, an oncologist and the mother of the game’s starting pitcher, pulled Pontbriand off the field because he was stumbling. As LaFemina prepared to transfer him to the hospital, he went into cardiac arrest. “I fell directly backwards and lost complete consciousness,” Pontbriand told reporters. “I had no pulse, and I wasn’t breathing at all.” LaFemina and her assistant immediately began CPR, getting Pontbriand breathing again by the time first responders arrived. Pontbriand was intubated for two days and spent 11 days in the hospital. If you like, you can help him with his medical expenses. Pontbriand had only recently recovered from taking a foul ball to the same spot last year, and he’s already hoping to get back to umpiring soon.

To understand how this play happens so frequently, we need to start at the beginning. The earliest foul tip to the throat that I was able to find probably happened in 1866. Not at all coincidentally, that was also the year Doug Allison, catching for the Masonic Club of Manayunk in Philadelphia, decided that instead of standing the usual 20 to 25 feet behind home plate, he would move right behind the batter. In a time before protective equipment of any kind, catching was already considered extremely dangerous. Allison’s move increased the danger, but because it made it easier for him to control the running game, catchers everywhere quickly followed suit. Allison’s future teammate, Hall of Famer George Wright, possessed the throat that would make history. He was a catcher for the New York Gothams when, as he later told a reporter, “One day a foul tip struck me in the throat and it hurt me so much that I never afterward was able to muster up sufficient courage to catch.” When Wright joined Allison on the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first ever professional baseball team, he did so as a shortstop. Because he switched positions in 1866, that’s the latest possible date that the fateful foul could have taken place.

A few years later, Allison became the first player to wear a glove. That innovation would take a while to catch on, but once catchers were so much closer to the action, the catcher’s mask followed quickly. According to Chuck Rosciam, author of “The Evolution of Catcher’s Equipment,” Fred Thayer was thought to have created the first mask by adapting a fencing mask for Harvard catcher Alexander Tyng. By the 1880s, masks were used widely, but more than a century before the debut of the Wu-Tang Clan, the neck was still woefully unprotected.

If the foul tip to the throat has a patron saint, there’s only one possible choice: Voiceless Tim O’Rourke. O’Rourke was catching in Lima, Ohio, in the 1880s, when a foul tip hit his Adam’s apple and “crushed back the cartilage into Tim’s throat,” leaving him unable to speak in much more than a whisper. When he made it to the major leagues, O’Rourke was primarily a third baseman and shortstop. By 1894, he was widely known as “The Voiceless Wonder.” After his playing days, O’Rourke would go on to work as a scout, and his son, Tim Jr., would sign with the A’s in 1929 (as a catcher, of course). O’Rourke’s other claim to fame is that he’s the owner of the two most wildly divergent headshots in the Baseball Reference database.

Mammalian necks long ago traded security for flexibility. We humans can turn and bend our heads in just about any direction, but that exquisite range of motion comes at a price (especially if you’re married to Lot or Orpheus). Without rigid bones to protect them, the extremely fragile contents of our necks are extremely exposed. The neck is home to four compartments. The vertebral compartment houses your vertebrae and spinal cord, and because it’s located toward the back of the neck, they’re less at risk from foul balls traveling straight upward. The visceral compartment, which houses the trachea (or windpipe), larynx, and pharynx, is right in the line of fire, protected by the thyroid cartilage of the larynx, also known as the Adam’s apple. The two vascular compartments on either side of the neck hold the vagus nerve, the carotid artery, and the jugular vein. The vagus nerve is an important part of your parasympathetic nervous system, and damaging it can have severe consequences. Damaging your carotid artery is also not ideal, since getting blood to your brain (and, more generally, keeping it inside your vascular system where it belongs) is a tried-and-true method for not dying. That’s a lot of precious cargo that doesn’t respond well to baseballs.

For this reason, catchers are taught to tuck their chins into their chest when blocking a ball in the dirt, explained Esteban Rivera, our resident catching expert. However, tucking the chin isn’t always possible. Esteban took a ball directly in the Adam’s apple while playing travel ball as a high schooler. “I went to block a ball in the dirt,” he told me, “but it nicked the edge of the plate and had a weird side bounce and caught me on a diagonal. I felt like [I was] choking and immediately started gasping for air.” For one thing, on a foul tip or an odd bounce, the ball doesn’t look like it’s on a trajectory to bounce straight upward until it’s too late to react. Even on pitches where a high bounce does seem like a possibility, for a competitive ballplayer, the instinct to block the ball can supersede the instinct for self-preservation. As for umpires, they’re usually leaning as far forward as possible in order to get a better view of the pitch, leaving their necks exposed.

Rosciam found that Spalding started manufacturing a mask with “ patented neck protection” as early as 1888, but the use of throat protectors wouldn’t become commonplace for nearly a century. Look up a picture of Yogi Berra or Johnny Bench in action, and you won’t see a throat protector. In 1971, Dr. Creighton J. Hale, a research physiologist who was also vice president and research director of Little League Baseball, patented a chest and throat protector that was immediately made mandatory for all Little Leaguers.

At the big league level, throat protectors needed a push before they were adopted. It came on September 6, 1976, when Dodgers catcher Steve Yeager suffered a freak accident in a game against the Padres. Teammate Bill Russell grounded out to third base, breaking his bat. A large shard flew directly toward Yeager in the on-deck circle, impaling him in the throat. Yeager was rushed to the hospital, where Padres team physician Dr. Paul Bauer performed emergency surgery to remove all of the shards of wood from his neck. Miraculously, the bat missed an artery by millimeters, and Yeager was back on the field less than three weeks later. Yeager worked with Dodgers trainer Bill Buhler to create a throat guard that hung from the bottom of the catcher’s mask, and the device became standard throughout the game.

Its spread was no doubt helped along in 1979. That year, I found no fewer than five separate incidents at the big league level, including a Steve Carlton curveball that bounced up into the throat of Tim McCarver. According to his memoir, McCarver spent two days in the hospital in Cincinnati due to a blood clot on his vocal cords, then had a steel throat protector welded onto the bottom of his mask. More recently, throat protection has been incorporated directly into the facemask. If you watch a game today and look at the catcher or the umpire, you’ll see that the metal cage extends a few inches below the jaw. Presumably for the sake of comfort, catchers rely on this rather than the hanging throat protector, while umpires often use both.

However, no throat protector is perfect. First of all, in the name of flexibility, plastic throat protectors usually dangle from the mask, leaving a space between the throat guard and the chest protector. They can stop or deflect balls that are fouled straight backward, but a ball on an upward trajectory can take advantage of that opening. Sometimes, the ball can even hit the chest protector and then roll upward into the throat. Here’s a play that happened in 2016. John Hirschbeck is wearing a dangling throat protector, but the ball travels right up behind it.

Here’s a side view from 2013. Rather than a dangling plastic throat protector, Carlos Ruiz uses a mask with an elongated cage, but even with the angle of this pitch – which is flatter than that of a foul tip – it’s unlikely that any kind of protector would have stopped it.

Another issue is that throat protectors aren’t wide enough to protect the entire neck. I imagine that this is a tradeoff made in the name of comfort and mobility, but they’re thin enough that they leave the sides of the neck exposed. Many of the plays I saw on video were balls that glanced off the side of the throat protector or missed it entirely.

Lastly, the force of the ball can detach the throat protector from the mask or even break it outright. In a 1990 article in the Bend, Oregon, Bulletin, Mike Wilson described a foul ball that hit his throat protector flush while umpiring. “The impact tore the protector from the mask and shoved it against my throat, pushing my Adam’s apple what felt like several inches backward,” he wrote. Pat Borders would go on to win World Series with the Blue Jays, but in 1987, he was a minor leaguer who had switched to catching as a last resort. “I just felt I was going to get released that year if I was still a third baseman, “ he told Tracy Ringolsby. “In the first inning of my first game there was a foul tip that broke my throat protector and got me in the Adam’s apple… A couple innings later I tore my (right) thumb nail off trying to make a throw. At that point I wondered, ‘What am I doing back here?’” Borders later took another foul ball to the throat, during spring training in 1990.

Protective equipment has by no means been perfected. It’s still evolving. Before the 2005 season, at an annual retreat for MLB umpires, a Wilson representative gave Ed Hickox a new mask with a throat guard that was angled forward, telling him that it would better disperse the force of a ball. When a ball hit the guard a few months later, rather than deflecting the ball, it temporarily trapped it and directed all of the force into Hickox’s jaw. He suffered a concussion and damaged a joint between the bones of his inner ear, resulting in some permanent hearing loss. Shockingly, it turned out that Wilson hadn’t tested this new design to make sure that it actually was safer, and Hickox successfully sued for damages. You likely remember the trend toward hockey-style masks that swept the league at the beginning of this century. More recently the Defender mask, which was invented by former minor league umpire Jason Klein, has spread through the league. The mask features Kevlar padding and two sets of metal cages separated by springs that dilute the force of the ball. Catcher Tyler Flowers is enough of a believer that he has invested in the company.

In recent years, the advent of one-knee-down catching has made it possible for balls to bounce off the leg of the catcher and up into the umpire’s throat. In fact, that brings us back where we started, with Austin Hedges. I’m not sure why he seemed so shocked when Wolf said he’d been hit in the neck. Hedges was involved in a similar play just last September, when a Jonathan Hernández fastball ricocheted off Ramón Laureano’s bat, then the dirt, and then Hedges’ shinguard, sending it straight up behind the mask and the dangling throat protector of umpire Roberto Ortiz.

On the call for the Guardians, Matt Underwood got right to the heart of the matter: “Runners go, 3-2 pitch, and ow!” When a ball boy brought out a bottle of water for Ortiz, third base umpire Rob Drake intercepted it and unscrewed the cap for Ortiz. I recognized the gesture. It’s what you do when a loved one is going through something difficult and you’re completely powerless to help. You latch onto any nice gesture that comes to mind in order to fight off your insignificance in the face of actual problems. I can’t heal your bruised larynx, but I can make it roughly one percent easier for you to drink this water.

Up in the broadcast booth, there was dead air to fill. “He may want a beer,” opined color commentator Rick Manning. Underwood did his best to roll with the suggestion. “Well, it is almost three o’clock on a Sunday,” he said. From field level, sideline reporter Andre Knott saw his opportunity to chime in: “Did somebody say beer?”

The lighthearted tone of the broadcast continued a tradition that stretches back to the beginnings of the sport. I found plenty of pun-filled headlines and stories about catchers swallowing or almost swallowing their tobacco.

Even a story about Michael Showalter, who in 1919 really did pass out because a foul tip caused his gum to get stuck in his windpipe, was told with a humorous slant. According to the Carlisle Evening Herald, Showalter wasn’t just chewing gum, he was “lustily masticating a large wad.” After Patrick “Irish” Padden got hit during a 1937 game in the Canadian-American League, the Ottawa Citizen relayed the tale with exquisite sensitivity: “Umpire Paddon [sic] behind the plate got hit in the Adam’s apple with the ball and, after making an attempt to stay in the game, just slithered to the ground and was carried out. The very next ball crowned a spectator who also lost interest in the proceedings.”

During an 1892 game in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the Miner’s Journal turned a foul tip to the throat into a fun tale about a promising alternative medical treatment:

Catcher Young was hit on his Adam’s apple by a foul and nearly swooned in the sixth. Young fell motionless upon the ground, and was being bathed with water when Pitcher Ruckel ran up to the grand stand and asked a gentleman “for some of that.” A flask of whiskey came from the pocket of the person addressed, and after Young had taken a swallow of the fluid, he immediately got upon his feet. A large lump formed upon his neck, but he pluckily took his position.

When Frank Chance sent a foul tip right into the throat of catcher Larry McLean in June 1908, the Chicago Tribune reported, “It sounded like hitting a green watermelon with a mallet… Sympathetic members of both teams surrounded the dying man. Some of them stood him on his legs and feet, but others were more considerate.” [Editor’s Note: McClean was not actually dead.]

On May 11, 1957, Roberto Clemente fouled a pitch into the throat of Phillies catcher Stan Lopata (who would manage to go 2-for-4 with a three-run homer that day). The next day, a picture of umpire Jocko Conlon bending over to check on Lopata was syndicated all over the country with the header, “UMPS ARE HUMAN.” Conlan’s humanity was no doubt enhanced by the fact that he could empathize with Lopata. He’d taken a ball to the throat five years earlier.

This is a fluky play, and some players and umpires have been particularly unlucky. Last month, DJ LeMahieu became the only player I could find to get hit in the throat by a foul ball while batting rather than catching or umpiring. Slow motion replays showed a shock wave rippling out across his skin from the point of impact.

In 1953, umpire Len Roberts took two foul balls to the neck, one in the Texas League and one in the National League. The two blows left him prone to losing his voice. Umpire Manny Gonzalez took fouls to the throat in 2013 and ’17. So far as I can tell, Yankees legend Thurman Munson also took foul tips to the throat in back-to-back seasons. The first came on October 5, 1977, in the first game of the ALCS between the Yankees and the Royals. Munson stayed in the game and went on to put up an .890 OPS in the World Series. The second came on June 10, 1978. According to the Toledo Blade, Munson also got hit in the Adam’s apple by an errant throw from Reggie Jackson the next season.

”I was catching Bob Gibson at St. Louis in 1961 and took a foul tip right in the Adam’s apple, “ Gene Oliver told the Quad City Times in 1983. “You know how hard Gibson threw, and when the ball comes off the bat like that it comes at you twice as fast. I just walked around the field for awhile then got back behind the plate. On the very next pitch, I caught another foul tip in the Adam’s apple. Two on two straight pitches. I couldn’t swallow; I felt like my vocal cords were paralyzed. I walked straight off the field into the dugout and into the dressing room.”

During the 1968 season, Pirates catcher Jerry May was hit in the throat by foul tips on four separate occasions. That didn’t stop Charley Feeney of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from telling the story with a bit more panache and a bit less compassion:

“May caught with all sorts of aches, bruises and cracked fingers last season…

He was hit in the throat half-dozen times [sic] in the space of two weeks in July. Once he collapsed as he was about to give the pitcher a signal for a curve ball.

The “black-out” lasted 30 seconds. Medication restored Jerry May. He kept catching. He stopped hitting, but he kept catching.”

What does it feel like to be hit in the throat by a ball? “It’s not much fun,” said Erik Kratz during a 2005 interview. “You lose your voice, you can’t breathe, can’t swallow.” Said Jeff Newman in 1979,”I couldn’t breathe there for a second. I felt for my Adam’s apple and couldn’t find it.” Dioner Navarro got hit during a Rays-Marlins game in 2007. “All I remember was that it was hard for me to breathe,” he said later. “It was one of those situations where I needed to calm down, but I couldn’t… It was a scary moment.”

John Stearns took a foul to the throat while catching for the Mets in May 1980. Teammate Lee Mazzilli rushed to his side to check on Stearns. “I keep hearing bells, like a telephone ringing somewhere,” the catcher told him. “Don’t answer it,” said Mazzilli.

J.T. Realmuto got hit on the right side of his neck this April. “I got dizzy right away and then a headache behind my right eyeball,” he told reporters. “It was only on the right side.” The headache didn’t go away until Realmuto woke up the next morning, but he played and got two hits that day. “I went down and couldn’t breathe and almost swallowed my tongue,” Pirates catcher Hank Foiles told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1958. Cubs catcher Earl Averill, the son of the Hall of Fame outfielder, was knocked unconscious by a foul tip in 1960, and didn’t mince words afterward: “I thought I was a goner!”

In 1979, Derryl Cousins admitted to reporters that the fear affected him the next time he was behind the plate. He missed some calls, sparking arguments with batters. “Nobody was trying to show me up,” he said. “For the first three innings last night, I was flinching. Heck, I know I blew the [John] Mayberry call. The ball was only this far off the ground.” In 1988, youth umpire Brian McCleney confessed that he was most disturbed by the attention. “I opened my eyes and it seemed like the whole crowd was around me,” he told the Star-News. Although he had difficulty both breathing and talking, he said, “To me, the most embarrassing part was being taken off the field on a stretcher.”

Russell Martin got hit in both 2011 and ’12. “Any time you get hit in the neck,” he said, “you panic for a second.” However, maybe the most impressive thing I saw during all of my research was the matter-of-fact way Martin dealt with the second ball. He didn’t even spit out his gum after getting hit. He looked for all the world like any other guy from the Bronx waiting for the D train to come.

In all the stories I read, nearly every catcher or umpire who didn’t end up in the hospital (and some who did) stayed in the game. It’s a level of toughness inconceivable to most of us, and inadvisable for all of us. “It took the breath from me and kind of felt like I had a golf ball in my throat for a little bit,” Austin Romine said on July 30, 2017. “It was hard to get some air for a little while. It calmed down, and I just kept playing.”

Romine had taken a similar ball to the throat a year earlier, but this was the scariest of all the plays I saw. He went straight to the ground clutching his throat and stayed there. Later in the game, Romine get hit on the head by a backswing. After that, he was batting and took a Steve Cishek fastball straight to the hand. Only the final injury was enough to knock him out of the game. Despite the rough day, he summed up the attitude of so many of the people I read about over the last few weeks: “It’s part of the job and you’ve just got to roll with it.”

On August 7, Randy Arozarena slashed a double to right. He came into second base at a trot, so evidently safe that he didn’t need to sweat it. As the camera focused on him, he turned and hyped up the dugout. There was nowhere else to look; there had been no runners on base and thus no other action to follow.

Things weren’t so sunny 10 days later. Arozarena batted with two on and two out, and a double would have been absolutely glorious. The runners would be off on contact, which meant the difference between a double and an out was two-plus runs — the two that would actually score, plus some chance of Arozarena himself scoring. But Arozarena struck out on a 1-2 slider from Bailey Falter, and the inning ended.

Advanced statistics don’t assess the value of a play in just one way. You can think about these two moments extremely differently depending on which metric you’d prefer to use. Our main offensive statistic, wRC+, ignores context on purpose. It works out the average value of a home run across all home runs hit in the majors in a given year, and uses that as the value for every home run. It does the same for every offensive outcome, in fact. Read the rest of this entry »

While Shohei Ohtani hasn’t pitched this year after undergoing UCL reconstruction surgery last fall, he has found another area of the game in which he could excel while terrorizing opposing pitchers. The 30-year-old superstar blew past his previous career high in stolen bases in late July, and on Friday night against the Rays he swiped his 40th bag of the year. Five innings later, he collected his 40th home run to join the 40-40 club in spectacular style, when he clobbered a first-pitch, walk-off grand slam. Unfortunately, Ronald Acuña Jr.’s torn ACL deprived him of a chance to follow up last year’s unprecedented combination of 41 homers and 73 steals, but it’s not out of the question we could have another 40-40 player this season, namely José Ramírez, and at least a couple more 30-30 ones.

I’ll get to those, but first, it’s Sho time. Prior to this year, Ohtani had reached 40 homers twice (46 in 2021 and a league-leading 44 last year) but had stolen just 20 bases or more twice (26 in 2021 and 20 last year). Unburdened by the demands of pitching this year, and playing for a new team with much higher aspirations than the Angels, he’s been able to withstand more wear and tear on his legs, has had more time to study opposing pitchers, and has come to appreciate the extra dimension he can add to his new team.

“I think he has bought into stealing bases, understands the value of the stolen base, getting 90 feet,” manager Dave Roberts told The Athletic earlier this month. “He’s in a pennant race now. And I don’t think he’s been in a pennant race in his big-league career. So his enhanced focus is not a surprise to me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Previously on Dragon Ball Z, we discussed whether it’s better to run hot and cold like a reheated frozen burrito or show up at the plate with the comforting and consistent warmth of a hearty helping of mac and cheese. Specifically, when you’re a hitter trying to microwave some offense in the playoffs. The tl;dr of that article: When comparing streaky hitters to their more consistent colleagues, the streaky hitters came closer to replicating their regular season numbers in the postseason. Despite the fluky nature of playoff series and their bite-sized samples that leave no space for slumps, hitters prone to slumping still bring enough electricity when they do get hot to maintain a charge in their individual numbers.

But individuals don’t win the World Series, teams do. In the context of a team playing a sport where the superstars don’t necessarily factor into every plate appearance, individual performances don’t carry the same weight that they do in other sports. Not only do teams need contributions from multiple hitters in the lineup, but the sequence of those contributions matters too.

In my last article, I used wOBA, which is derived from the run values associated with specific events (i.e. walks, doubles, home runs), to measure individual output. In turn, run values are historical averages of the number of runs scored following the given event. Those historical averages assume that what follows a given plate appearance is a league-average hitter doing whatever is most statistically likely. But that’s not how it works irl. The player on deck might be better or worse than league average, might have distinct tendencies toward hitting the ball on the ground or in the air, might be 0-fer their last eleventy-billion, or might be hotter than soup in the summertime. Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly before Walter Pennington was acquired by the Texas Rangers from the Kansas City Royals at last month’s trade deadline, Eric Longenhagen wrote that the 26-year-old left-hander had “caught some helium of late after striking out 35% of the hitters he’s faced in Triple-A.” Our lead prospect analyst went on to note that Pennington had recently made his MLB debut, adding that he “has a middle relief profile with little margin for error due to his underwhelming velocity.” Longenhagen assigned the 2020 non-drafted free agent out of the Colorado School of Mines a not-overly-enthusiastic 35+ FV.

Through his first seven big-league appearances — one with the Royals and now six with the Rangers — Pennington has fanned 10 batters and allowed three earned runs while attacking hitters with an array of sinkers, sliders, and cutters (he’s also thrown a smattering of four-seamers) in eight-and-two-thirds innings of work. Down on the farm, he’d heavily featured his slider while fanning 82 batters and allowing 43 hits in 63-and-a-third frames.

His velocity is indeed underwhelming. And not only has Pennington been averaging just 91.7 mph with his heaters, his arsenal doesn’t include a breaking ball that sweeps or dips in eye-catching fashion. Your stereotypical power pitcher he’s not.

Asking Pennington how he profiles on the mound elicited some intriguing answers. Read the rest of this entry »

Programming note: I’m taking a break from my Five Things column this week, as I’m traveling to Chicago for Saberseminar. Five Things will return next week with events from the last two weeks. In the meantime, please enjoy a ridiculous hypothetical.

This week, someone in my chat asked me an interesting hypothetical: How different would baseball be if the fences were the same distance from home plate all the way around? It would obviously be wildly different from how the sport currently works. Center field is the deepest part of the park by far, of course, and it’s hard to picture exactly what an equidistant fence would look like. You might think it’s a triangle, but that’s not right – it looks more or less like an arc, which is what an actual stadium looks like, only with a much sharper curvature.

That sounds so darn weird that I wanted to see what it would mean for offense. I don’t have any strong analytical reason for doing so. We aren’t plumbing the depths of smart baseball analysis here; we’re making up a dumb world and wondering what kinds of dumb things would happen in it.

First things first: There would be more home runs. I picked 370 feet as the distance because it feels reasonably close to the real world average of fence depths. I picked a 10-foot tall wall for similar reasons; if we’re getting weird in some ways, I’d prefer to standardize the others. There’s an easy math trick you can use here; baseballs tend to fall at roughly a 45 degree angle by the time they’re descending, their forward momentum getting slowly blunted by air resistance. That means that a ball that clears the wall by a millimeter would travel 10 more feet before hitting ground that was at field level – in an outfield bullpen, say. In other words, every ball that travels 380 or more feet in the air is going to be a home run now. Read the rest of this entry »

Friends, I come to you today to relieve my soul of a burden I’ve been carrying. I’ve been harboring a cranky, irrational, old man opinion, and worse still, I’ve been lying to you about it.

Time and again, while evaluating pitchers, I’ve praised the slider. Dylan Cease’s slider? Incredible. Andrés Muñoz, Chris Sale, whoever. In the kayfabe my position demands, I must praise a slider that gets outs. But my heart isn’t in it. I am awed by the slider’s effectiveness the same way I’m awed by the voraciousness of a swarm of locusts.

Deep down, I detest the slider. It is a crude instrument, with none of the curveball’s grace or the changeup’s playfulness. The curveball is a calligraphy brush, all swooping lines and fine control. The changeup is a Blackwing pencil, rich and precise, its marks here one moment and gone the next.

The slider is a crayon. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the halcyon days of April? The season had just kicked off. Aaron Judge was bad. Alec Bohm was one of the hottest hitters in baseball; Colt Keith was the worst. Blake Snell couldn’t buy an out. The Cubs led the NL Central. The White Sox… okay, the White Sox have been bad all year, but my point is that we ascribe outsize importance to the first month of the season as it’s happening.

Bohm was hitting so well that it felt like he was a completely different hitter. Since May 1, he’s been almost exactly the same as his prior career self. Snell figured things out. Judge obviously did too. But there was also signal in that first month. Bobby Witt Jr.’s breakout was center stage. Juan Soto and Gunnar Henderson set the tone for their impressive campaigns. The key to interpreting early-season results is to let a bunch of ideas in, ideas suggested by that first month, but to be willing to discard them quickly if they turn out to be flashes in the pan.

In that spirit, I’m about to get breathlessly excited about some post-All-Star break statistics. Some of what’s gone on in the last month won’t surprise you – Witt, Soto, and Judge are absolutely incandescent. Chris Sale is on his way to a Cy Young. The Brewers are cruising to an NL Central title. All of those things have mostly been true all year, so seeing them in the first month of the second half doesn’t feel strange. But there’s other stuff happening too, and the bits that feel shocking now but would have seemed normal if they’d taken place in April are what I’m focusing on today. Read the rest of this entry »

Pedro Avila might not strike you as exceptional. He’s mostly on mop-up duty in the Guardians bullpen, hoovering up low-leverage innings. His sinker was deemed the “most normal” in baseball by Leo Morgenstern earlier this year. And his 3.60 ERA and 3.92 FIP is right around average for major league relievers.

But behind this veneer of normalcy lies the weirdest changeup in baseball.

Below is a plot of the average vertical and horizontal moment of every pitcher’s changeup during the 2024 season (minimum 50 changeups, data as of August 15, vertical movement measured without gravity). You have a 50/50 shot of guessing which one is Avila’s:

The brown dot on the left of my beautifully drawn circle is Logan Allen’s changeup, Avila’s erstwhile teammate. Michael Baumann wrote about Allen’s “weird-ass changeup” last July, noting that the pitch had the least horizontal movement of any major league changeup in the 2023 season. (Unfortunately, despite Michael’s request, no “Weird-Ass Changeup World Tour” tag has since been added to the CMS.) The purple dot on the right is Avila’s changeup, which is averaging even less horizontal movement than Allen’s.

But the average movement profile doesn’t fully capture what’s weird about Avila’s changeup. To truly appreciate the weirdness, it is necessary to take a look at why it moves like that.

It starts with his crazy grip. Look at this grip!

He aligns his thumb and pointer finger in a quasi-circle-change grip while pressing on the exact opposite side of the ball with his other three fingers. The funky grip — a circle-change/splitter/forkball/vulcan-change hybrid — informs the way the ball comes out of his hand.

Scott Firth, a former performance coordinator at Tread Athletics, described Avila’s grip in a tweet from January 2023 and the movement profile that results from it.

“Looks like fosh/modified box grip, some guys will cut it hard with 3 fingers on outer part of ball,” Firth wrote. “Low spin low efficiency could catch ssw [seam-shifted wake] either direction depending on cw [clockwise] or ccw gyro.”

The contradictory forces of fade from the pronation and cut from the pressure of his three fingers results in chaos; because of that grip, the ball comes off the pointer finger and middle finger simultaneously, sending the pitch downward:

Avila’s changeup almost imitates a knuckleball in the randomness of its spin axis. A helpful way to understand this is by looking at Avila’s spin-based movement and observed movement. The spin-based movement is the orientation directly after release; the observed movement is the implied axis based on the movement of the pitch. (When the spin-based orientation does not match the observed orientation, it is generally assumed that “seam-shifted wake” is responsible. More on that later.)

The observed spin axis on Avila’s changeup nearly goes around the entire clock. Check out the green bars on the graphic below:

Avila’s changeup might ultimately move similarly to Allen’s from a “shape” perspective, but the aesthetic experience from the hitter’s vantage point is distinct. It’s a complete outlier from the perspective of spin efficiency, defined as the percentage of spin that is either sidespin or backspin/topspin. The median changeup is 95% spin efficient. Allen’s changeup has 72% spin efficiency, one of the lowest marks in baseball. Avila’s changeup checks in at 24% (!!) spin efficiency, which is more like a typical gyro slider than any changeup.

The Guardians broadcast picked up on this following a slow-motion replay of an Avila changeup. After watching the replay, Guardians color commentator Rick Manning remarked that “It’s almost like a forkball but he spins it like a slider.”

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this is not the traditional way to throw a changeup. Driveline, for instance, published an article showing five different grips for aspiring changeup-throwers to try; none of them resemble Avila’s.

The classic changeup is thrown with heavy pronation. Think Logan Webb’s changeup fading down and away from a left-handed hitter:

Logan Webb, Nasty 87mph Changeup. ?

7th K pic.twitter.com/TGSkcD98Pu

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 15, 2024

Some pitchers struggle to throw a changeup with heavy pronation. One key reason, as Noah Woodward pointed out in a March 2023 post, is that the act of “turning over” the ball is awkward for pitchers who don’t throw another pitch that requires turning over their wrist in the manner required of a Webb-esque changeup.

For pitchers like Tarik Skubal or Matthew Boyd with more of an inherent supination bias, the seam-shifted wake changeup is a way to throw an offspeed pitch without contorting their arms in uncomfortable directions.

“I throw a changeup just like a slider now, but using essentially the smooth part of the baseball to create no drag on one side, but seam is on the other side,” Boyd told MLB.com’s Jason Beck in March 2023. “And because of that, I get more movement than I did before, but the pattern of how my wrist is moving is like the other pitches. So it allows for the other pitches to be more consistent.”

Avila’s changeup does not fit neatly in either of these categories. It is, somehow, a pronated seam-shifted wake changeup. That explains why Avila leads the league in the gap between his changeup’s spin-based axis and his observed axis.

But that gap doesn’t tell the whole story. Most other pitchers have a similar pattern when their actual spin orientation deviates significantly from the “spin-based” orientation: It shifts to the left (or right) in a predictable pattern. Take Skubal’s seam-shifted wake changeup, for example. The “observed spin” is shifted to the left of the spin-based movement.

Avila’s changeup is not like that. Because of the heavy gyro spin that his grip produces, the pitch leaves the hand at somewhat random orientations and can either fade or cut, as the movement map of all his changeups in 2024 shows. Notice how the green dots (his changeups) can end up on either side of the pitch plot:

So Avila’s changeup is definitely weird, but is it good? It certainly produces some bizarre swings, even when it’s poorly located. Heliot Ramos, for one, looked flummoxed after whiffing on one middle-middle Avila changeup:

Avila’s changeup gets a lot of whiffs — among changeups thrown at least 100 times, his ranks in the 85th percentile in swinging strike percentage and the 78th percentile in whiffs per swing. On the other hand, he throws one out of every six changeups in the “waste” zone, which sort of makes sense to me — that grip feels prone to misfires. (Shout out to Alex Chamberlain’s pitch leaderboard for these stats.)

While Avila’s changeup has graded out as basically average from a run value perspective, I’m not always sure that run value is the best way to evaluate the quality of a given pitch. There are interaction effects between pitches — in other words, the thought of the changeup in the batter’s mind might improve the quality of his fastball — and Avila is using the changeup as his primary out-pitch and getting pretty good results.

Given that the Padres DFA’d Avila in April, this season looks like a success for him, and the changeup is without question a big part of all that. As always with pitching, weird is where you want to be.

On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on.

At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.

Read the rest of this entry »