In the pre-PitchCom era, major league teams had more rigorous protocols for protecting their signs than your bank has for securing your account. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some teams’ custom PitchCom audio clips are read in a modified pig latin created by a pitching strategy staffer. That the hitter doesn’t know what pitch is coming is considered a huge advantage for the pitcher. And it’s not only pitchers who think so — just ask the 2017 Astros.

Sign-stealing aside, hitters stand in the box pondering which pitch might come hurtling their way mere seconds later. What that pondering looks like depends on the hitter. There’s Nick Castellanos and his “glorified batting practice” approach, in which he looks for the ball and hits it as hard as he can. But there’s also Carlos Correa, who starts his day studying pitcher tendencies in the video room.

For their part, pitchers set the difficulty level on the hitter’s guessing game. That terms like “fastball count” and “pitching backwards” exist tell us that pitchers follow (and, at times, purposefully upend) conventional tactics to sequence their pitches, and believe that certain pitch types are optimal in certain counts. Strategies become standard practices because they’re effective, but an over-reliance on one or two strategies can lead to predictability. Become too predictable and a pitcher effectively sets their opponents’ guessing game on “easy” mode. But does making it easy for the hitter to sit on a certain pitch automatically make the overall task of hitting easier? Does keeping a hitter guessing always ensure effective pitching? Read the rest of this entry »

Lucas Erceg’s story is fairly well known. A position player for his first seven professional seasons, the 2014 second-round draft pick converted to the mound in 2021 and went on to make his big-league debut last May after being traded from the Milwaukee Brewers to the Oakland Athletics. The transition has been a resounding success. Now with the Royals — Kansas City acquired the 29-year-old right-hander at last month’s trade deadline — Erceg has eight saves to go with a 3.40 ERA, a 2.87 FIP, and a 27.3% strikeout rate over 50-and-a-third innings on the season.

Pitching and hitting are different animals, and that includes the data and technology used to help hone one’s craft at the professional level. With that in mind, I asked Erceg if the degree to which he is analytically-inclined has changed along with his job description.

“I’ve always been kind of minimal with that” Erceg told me prior to a game at Detroit’s Comerica Park. “I think the more I start to look at numbers, and hyper-focus on what they are telling me, the more I’ll overcorrect instead of just making those day-to-day progressions.”

Erceg feels that he was guilty of overcorrecting during his hitting days down on the farm. Looking back, he realizes that he was prone to listening to too many voices, and as a result ended up “kind of bouncing around from idea to idea, never finding consistency.” The potential — especially in the power department — was there, but he ultimately stalled out developmentally as a slugger. In his final season as a position player, Erceg slashed .219/.305/.398 in Triple-A.

Moving to the mound coincided with a mental shift for the Menlo College product. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Major League Baseball released the first drip of its bat tracking data this spring, I’ve been keeping an eye on a particular leaderboard. I don’t know if anybody else cares much about it, but I’ve been fascinated by the fast swing leaderboard. I haven’t been tracking it religiously; I’ve just been checking in every couple of weeks. Also, I haven’t been looking at it the way you’re supposed to. I’m only interested the bottom of the list. I suppose that makes it not so much a leaderboard as a trailerboard, but I don’t care. I’m interested in it because there’s an honest-to-goodness horse race going on there.

A fast swing is one where the barrel of the bat is traveling at least 75 mph when it strikes or comes closest to the ball. That number was chosen, per Mike Petriello, “because that’s the line where, on a per-swing basis, a swing goes from negative run value for a hitter to average, on its way to positive.” All things being equal, it’s better to swing hard. On an individual player basis, here’s the correlation between fast-swing rate and wRC+. Roughly speaking, five percentage points of fast-swing rate is worth three extra points of wRC+:

Here’s something that may surprise you: Fast-swing rate (R = .48) has a stronger correlation to wRC+ than average bat speed does (R = .41). I assume that this is the case for the same reason that 90th-percentile exit velocity is a more useful stat than average exit velocity. You’re ignoring a big chunk of less useful information and focusing on the swings that can result in real damage. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’m going to keep the introduction short and sweet today so I can get back to my once-annual guilty pleasure: spending all day watching the US Open. But while I’m going full Jimmy Butler, plenty of baseball is happening, so I’ve got my eyes on that as well. You couldn’t watch a game this week without seeing something spectacular. We’ve got great baserunning, awful baserunning, and phenomenal catches. We’ve got teams misunderstanding risk and reward, and GMs touching hot stoves over and over again. It’s a great week to watch baseball, because it always is. Shout out to Zach Lowe of ESPN as always for the column idea, and one programming note: Five Things will be off next Friday. Let’s get to the baseball!

1. Anthony Volpe’s Disruptive Speed
Another year, another below-average season with the bat for the Yankees shortstop. That’s turning him into a lightning rod for controversy, because he’s a type of player who often gets overlooked (defense and speed) playing for a team where players often get overrated. The combination of the two leads to some confusing opinions. “He’s a good player who will make fewer All-Star teams than you think because defensive value is consistently underappreciated” isn’t exactly a strong argument if you’re talking to an acquaintance at a sports bar.

One thing that everyone can agree on, though: After he reaches base, Anthony Volpe is a problem. I tuned into Monday’s Nationals-Yankees game to see Dylan Crews in the majors and to watch Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, but I ended up just marveling at Volpe for a lot of the afternoon. He got on base three times (that’s the hard part for him, to be clear) and tilted the entire defense each time. He wasn’t even going on this play, and his vault lead still dragged Ildemaro Vargas out of position:

I’m not quite sure how to assign value for that play. The ball found a hole there, but DJ LeMahieu could just as easily have hit the ball straight to Vargas. I’m not saying that we need an advanced statistical reckoning about the value of a runner bluffing a fielder into motion, but that doesn’t change how cool it is to watch Volpe spook good veteran infielders just by standing around and bouncing.

Some of his baserunning value is of the straightforward, look-at-this-fast-human-being variety. You don’t need to hit the ball very deep to drive him home from third:

Some of the value is effort-based. Volpe’s always thinking about an extra base. Even when he hits a clean single, he’s got eyes on the play. An innocuous outfield bobble? He’ll take the base, thank you very much:

Of course, if you show someone taking a bouncing lead in the first GIF, you have to show them stealing a base in the fourth: Call it Volpe’s Run. That double led to a pitching change, and after two looks at Joe La Sorsa’s delivery, Volpe helped himself to third base:

Not every game is like this, but most of his times on base are. He’s never content to go station to station. His instincts are finely tuned, his speed blazing. I’m rooting for Volpe to improve at the plate, and it’s for selfish reasons: I love to watch great baserunning, and I want to see him get more chances to do it.

2. Whatever the Opposite of That Is

Oh Washington. The Nats are near the top of my watch list right now. Their assortment of young offensive standouts makes for fun games, and now that Crews has debuted, the top of their lineup looks legitimately excellent. You can see the future of the team even before they’re ready to contend, and that’s just cool. They might even be good already – they won the series against the Yankees this week, with Crews hitting his first big league homer in the deciding game. But uh, they’re not quite ready for prime time yet. Take a look at this laser beam double:

Boy, it sure looks fun to pour on the runs when you’re already winning. Wait, I misspoke. Take a look at this long fielder’s choice:

Somehow, Joey Gallo didn’t score on a jog on that one. He slammed on the brakes at third base and realized he couldn’t make it home. Then he got hung out to dry because everyone else in the play kept running like it was a clear double (it was). What a goof! That meant the only question was whether he’d be able to hold the rundown long enough to let everyone advance a base. The answer was a resounding yes – to everyone other than Juan Yepez:

I think his brain just short circuited there. He was standing on third with Gallo completely caught in a rundown. All you have to do to finish the play is stand still. But for whatever reason, he started side-shuffling in retreat toward second, another base currently occupied by a runner (!). While Jazz Chisholm Jr. tagged Gallo out, Yepez was busy hanging José Tena out to dry. Famously, you can’t have two runners on the same base. The rest of the play was academic:

I feel bad hanging Yepez out to dry, because some clearer communication would have made this play a run-scoring double. First, Gallo was overly cautious tagging up on the deep drive to center. Then, he got bamboozled. Watch the base coach hold Yepez, only for Gallo to see the sign and think it was intended for him:

Just a disaster all around. I can’t get enough of the Gameday description: “José Tena singles on a sharp line drive to center fielder Aaron Judge. Juan Yepez to 3rd. José Tena lines into a double play, center fielder Aaron Judge to shortstop Anthony Volpe to catcher Austin Wells to first baseman DJ LeMahieu to catcher Austin Wells to third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. to second baseman Gleyber Torres. Joey Gallo out at home. Juan Yepez to 3rd. José Tena out at 2nd. Two Outs.”

Ah, yes, just your typical 8-6-2-3-2-5-4 double play. The Nationals are a lot of fun to watch – even when it’s at their expense.

3. We Get It, Rays

The whole never-trade-with-Tampa-Bay bit is overdone. The Rays lose plenty of trades. They win their fair share too, of course, but they are high volume operators in a business full of uncertainty. Sometimes, you get Isaac Paredes for almost nothing. Sometimes, you get Jonny DeLuca. When you churn your roster to the extent that they do, you can’t win them all, and that’s fine. But the Cardinals? Yeah, they should definitely not trade with the Rays.

First, in 2018, they sent Tommy Pham to Tampa Bay in exchange for some depth prospects, and Pham racked up 8 WAR in the next year and a half with the Rays. Then, before the 2020 season, the Cardinals swapped Randy Arozarena for Matthew Liberatore; Randy became the face of the postseason, and Libby turned into a long reliever. The most recent deal might not be the most damaging, but it’s an apt capper to a transaction trilogy.

Dylan Carlson was supposed to be the next big thing in St. Louis, but that ship had sailed long before the Cardinals jettisoned him at the deadline this year. His offensive game just broke down out of nowhere over the last two years, and he played himself out of St. Louis even as the team floundered for outfield depth this year. He had a 50 wRC+ in a part-time role when the team decided it was time to move on.

That’s fine, guys need changes of scenery all the time. But trading him to the Rays, of all teams, felt a little on the nose. The reliever they got back, Shawn Armstrong, is a perfectly good bullpen option. He made 11 appearances for the Redbirds and compiled a 2.84 ERA (2.78 FIP), a solid month’s work. But I’m using the past tense because they designated him for assignment earlier this week, hoping another team would pick up the balance of his contract and save them $350,000 or so. They’ve made a similar move with Pham, whom they also acquired at the deadline, since then. In Armstrong’s case, they also did it because he’d pitched two days in a row and they needed another fresh arm on the active roster; it was a messy situation all around.

We have their postseason odds at 1.1% after a desultory August, and they likely aren’t losing much of that value by moving on from Armstrong. It’s the signaling of it all, though: They traded for the guy, got exactly what they wanted from him, and still couldn’t keep him around for two months. Meanwhile, Carlson looks like a reasonable major leaguer again. He hasn’t been a world beater by any means, but he’s hitting the ball hard more frequently in a semi-platoon role that takes advantage of his ability to hit lefties. He already has three homers as a Ray after none all year as a Cardinal.

Carlson had to go, because something wasn’t working in St. Louis. Armstrong was a perfectly reasonable return, and he did exactly what the team hoped for when the Cardinals acquired him. The optics, though! They traded yet another pretty good outfielder who didn’t fit into the puzzle in St. Louis. Tampa Bay has two years to get the most out of him. As is customary, none of the players the Rays sent back to Missouri moved the needle. For appearances’ sake, if nothing else, the Cardinals can’t keep making these trades.

4. Outrageous Robberies

It feels weird that Jackson Chourio, a five-tool superstar with blazing footspeed, doesn’t play center. It seems like a knock on him, almost. Sure, this guy’s a prodigy, but he can’t handle the tough defensive position that you might expect him to play given his talent. Except, that’s not quite right. Why would you play him in center field when you currently have Spider-Man patrolling the grass? I mean…

Blake Perkins robs ANOTHER home run! ? pic.twitter.com/vvEn9GVR7V

— MLB (@MLB) August 28, 2024

Oh my goodness. I don’t even want to hear about catch probability on this one, because the difficulty of this play is the part where he gets over the wall in deep center. This isn’t one of those “robberies” where the fielder grazes the wall with his back and everyone celebrates. Blake Perkins can do those just fine – he has four robberies this year, and they weren’t all this hard – but he can also go the extra mile. He went all the way up and over to get this one:

That’s an 8-foot wall, so he probably got to the ball 9 or so feet in the air. He had to cover a ton of ground before getting there; 101 feet from his initial position, to be precise. He took a great route, which gave him time to decelerate and time the jump, but the ball kept carrying. In the end, he had to parkour up the wall a little bit to get enough height:

What more can I say? You can’t do it any better than that. Perkins reacted like he was shocked by his own play:

So no sweat, Jackson. You’re a pretty good outfielder too; you just can’t climb walls quite so nimbly. There’s no shame in second place when first place looks like that.

5. Getting by With a Little Help

Austin Riley is on the IL right now, and 2024 has been a down year for him. That’s largely an offensive issue, though his defense isn’t quite up to previous years’ standards, either. That said, he can still turn an absolute gem out there. Take a look at this beauty from two weeks ago:

That’s the area where he’s improved the most. His arm is below average for third base, so he compensates by getting his feet planted and putting his entire body into the throw. That ball had to travel forever, and to be fair, it two-hopped Matt Olson, but that’s an accurate ball given where he caught it and how quickly he had to let it go. That’s very nice, but watch Jo Adell at the bag. What is he doing?!? That isn’t how you’re supposed to run out a bang-bang play. If he went straight in, he’d beat the throw comfortably. Instead, he curled his way into an out.

In his mind, I’m sure that ball was a double right out of the box. That’s reasonable! Look at where Riley made the play:

Riley’s plant foot ended up all the way into the grass in foul territory. Not many baseballs get fielded there, and Adell hit that one on a line, so when he started out of the box, he was surely considering his options in regards to second base. He came out of the box looking down the line and taking a direct, rather than rounded, route. But as you can see from the high angle replay, he started to bend his path to cut the bag and head for second, right around the same time that Riley rose and fired:

The closeup of Adell is definitely a bad look:

But take another look at those last two shots and you’ll get a better idea of what happened. Adell probably couldn’t see the ball in the corner cleanly. There was a lot of traffic: baserunners, umpires, Riley himself, the pitcher, and so on. About halfway down the baseline, he looked away from the play to pick up first base coach Bo Porter, exactly what you should do when you can’t find the ball on your own. But Porter just plain missed it. He was pinwheeling Adell toward second, imploring him to arc out for extra speed. He clearly thought the ball was in the outfield and that Adell going wide could give him a shot at an extra base.

I’d put more blame on Porter than on Adell in this situation, but there’s blame to go around for both. I’d give credit to Riley, too, of course. Base coaches and baserunners make mistakes sometimes, and they aren’t always punished by outstanding defensive plays like that. But this is an unforgivable mistake given the game situation.

Adell’s run was far less important than the two in front of him. If there was any question at all about his being safe or not, any question about whether Riley had fielded it, the correct play was to book it to first and completely forget about the double. Reaching first safely is worth more than a run: the runner scoring from third plus the first and third situation that would’ve result from it. Teams have scored 0.52 runs after first and third with two outs this year, and 0.59 runs after second and third with two outs. Meaning, if Adell had taken a straight line path, the Angels would’ve scored a run and had that 0.52 on top of it, so making an out at first base cost them an expected 1.52 runs. Advancing to second would have gained them another 0.07 expected runs, but only if that runner on third scored, which didn’t happen because Adell was out at first. They would’ve needed to successfully advance to second 96 times out of 100 to make the math work there. It’s worse than that, though: Going from a one-run lead to a two-run lead is worth astronomically more than stepping up from two to three. Take that into account, and we’re looking at a play where you’d need to be right 98 times out of 100.

The Angels mistook playing hard for playing smart. The winning baseball play there is to ensure the run. It didn’t end up costing them, but it could have. They never scored again, and the Braves put plenty of traffic on the bases the rest of the way. The funny thing is, I’m sure that Adell will get knocked for not hustling on this play, and I don’t think that’s what went wrong. He and Porter just got greedy aiming for a hustle double when the right choice was to nit it up (play extremely conservatively, for the non-poker-players out there). It’s a strange way to make a mistake – but it’s definitely still a mistake.

If you checked the standings on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, you may have noticed something rather novel: The Royals were tied for first place atop the AL Central, depriving the Guardians of sole possession for the first time since April 13. The moment was fleeting, because on Wednesday afternoon Kansas City lost to Cleveland after taking the first three games of the series. Nonetheless, the team has been the AL’s hottest over the past two months, is currently positioned to end its nine-year postseason drought, and has a very real shot at capturing the division title.

The Royals have been above .500 since April 6, and they’ve had just one calendar month with a losing record (12-15 in June). They were 18-13 in March and April, 17-11 in May, 13-10 in July, and are 15-10 in August. A dreadful 4-12 stretch knocked them 10 games behind the Guardians as of June 25, but they’ve gone an AL-best 32-21 (.604) since, half a game ahead of the Astros (32-22). This team is for real.

After allowing 11 runs to the Phillies in back-to-back games over the weekend — the first of which happened after Kansas City pulled within a game of the Guardians in the standings — the Royals rolled into Cleveland and swept a doubleheader on Monday, overcoming early deficits in both games. Down 2-0 in the opener, MJ Melendez’s three-run homer and Bobby Witt Jr.’s solo shot powered the Royals to a 4-3 win, and after Alec Marsh surrendered three first-inning runs (two unearned) in the nightcap, they chipped away, with Salvador Perez breaking a 4-4 tie with a solo home run in the fifth and then hitting a grand slam in the sixth, keying a 9-4 win. On Tuesday night, after starter Michael Lorenzen exited the game in the second inning due to a left hamstring strain, five relievers held the Guardians to a total of two hits and one run over 7 1/3 innings, and trade deadline acquisition Paul DeJong clubbed his fifth homer in 19 games en route to a 6-1 win. Alas, on Wednesday the Royals carried a 5-2 lead into the seventh, but starter Michael Wacha and the bullpen faltered, yielding four runs in what became a 7-5 defeat. Read the rest of this entry »

I was contemplating Astros right-hander Hunter Brown the other day — I imagine this is a topic many of you contemplate regularly as well — and when I looked at his Baseball Savant page, I found myself a little nonplussed:

Brown is one of those pitchers who throws three fastballs; his exciting midseason turnaround owes much to the addition of a sinker. But wow, he’s thrown a lot of fastballs to left-handed hitters, hasn’t he? Read the rest of this entry »

“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 »