The Cleveland Guardians continued their busy deadline period Tuesday afternoon with the acquisition of veteran right-hander Alex Cobb. Pitching prospect Jacob Bresnahan and a player to be named later are heading west to San Francisco in return.
The struggling Atlanta Braves made a deadline move on Monday, acquiring DH/OF Jorge Soler and right-handed reliever Luke Jackson from the San Francisco Giants in exchange for left-handed reliever Tyler Matzek and minor league infielder Sabin Ceballos.
Theodor Reik, an Austrian psychoanalyst, is believed to be the original source of what (with slight modification) has become the saying “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” That’s the case here, as both Soler and Jackson were key contributors on the Braves team that won the World Series in 2021. If we were to set our time machine to travel back a rather unambitious three years in the past, we would see a similar deadline tale. When Soler was acquired by Atlanta back then (from the Royals for minor league reliever Kasey Kalich), the Braves were a struggling team (51-54) that was grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. Today, the Braves are a struggling team (56-49, but 37-40 since the end of April) that is grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. It would be wrong to say that Soler was the reason the Braves turned their season around in 2021, but his efforts (a .269/.358/.524 line and 14 homers in two months) proved to be a crucial part of that team push. Jackson has had an up-and-down career, but 2021 was his apogee, with a 1.98 ERA and 3.66 FIP for those Braves. Read the rest of this entry »
I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. This is a strange week for the column. The All-Star break cut into the number of games available to watch; mathematically speaking, fewer games means fewer chances for weird things to happen. I took a weekend trip and didn’t watch any MLB games on Friday or Saturday. I’m also hard at work on the upcoming trade value series, which comes out between the All-Star game and the deadline every year – check back Monday for that annual exercise’s kickoff. In any case, that means this is a hodgepodge list: some stuff from this week, sure, but also plays and series that got left out last week, and some low-level baseball to boot. Thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format idea. And two quick programming notes: I won’t be doing my regular Monday chat or Five Things next week; instead, I’ll be doing a jumbo-sized chat Friday morning.
1. The New Derby Format
The modern swing-happy Home Run Derby has been a great success, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s more fun to see sluggers launch as many home runs as they possibly can than it is to see them agonize over every single swing. The format wasn’t perfect, though. I’m not trying to be a grump about it – is it even possible to be a grump about the Home Run Derby? – but there was one downside to the timed-round format: not enough drama. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. As MLB pauses for the All-Star break, I thought I’d pause for one of my own. Just like the league, I’d like to recognize the stars of my own personal baseball bubble. There’s a lot of overlap between the guys who populate Five Things most frequently and the best players in the game, but it’s not a complete overlap. You generally know what you’re getting with this column: some fun, fluky plays and players. Today, you’re just getting an aggregated version of that: the most fun I had in the first half of the year. And no, if you’re wondering, there are no Didn’t Likes this week, c’mon. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for the idea for this format, which is just as exciting (to me) in baseball as it is in basketball. Read the rest of this entry »
There are just too many players in baseball these days. I don’t mean that in a “contract the league” way – I think that there should be expansion, in fact. I’ll get back to that, for the record. The problem, instead, is with me. As teams have increasingly realized that the best way to get the most out of players is by giving them frequent rest, more people are playing relevant roles every year. Take the Giants, for example: The 2010 World Series team featured 19 pitchers, from Matt Cain’s 223 1/3 innings all the way down to Waldis Joaquin’s 4 2/3. This year’s Giants have already used 24 pitchers, and we haven’t even hit the All-Star break.
Back in those days, it was easy to know most of your team’s bullpen, as well as the regular starters. It was just fewer names to keep track of, fewer different styles and deliveries and permutations of facial hair. The present-day Giants have an honest-to-goodness pair of identicaltwins and a closer with his own light show. They have the tallest player in baseball. It’s a wildly eclectic bullpen. And I haven’t even mentioned their best pitcher yet, which is kind of my point. Ryan Walker is having a season for the ages, and he’s doing it in anonymity.
One “problem” with Walker – note: not actually a problem – is that he’s an archetype of pitchers we’ve seen before. He throws a sinker, and he throws a slider. He hides the ball well and throws hard. He misses bats, and always has: Starting in 2019, his first full season, he compiled a 28% strikeout rate in the minors. There’s nothing particularly novel or unprecedented about Walker’s game – it’s just effective. Read the rest of this entry »
Willie Mays was already a superstar by the time the Giants moved across the country following the 1957 season, yet the denizens of San Francisco did not exactly embrace him. They took much more quickly to Orlando Cepeda, who homered against the Dodgers in his major league debut on April 15, 1958, the team’s first game at Seals Stadium, its temporary new home. The slugging 20-year-old first baseman, nicknamed “The Baby Bull” — in deference to his father Pedro “The Bull” Cepeda, a star player in his own right in their native Puerto Rico — was a perfect fit for San Francisco and its culture. He helped to infuse excitement into what had been a sixth-place team the year before, winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 1958 and kicking off a 17-year career that included an MVP award, a World Series championship, and an induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, not to mention a statue outside Oracle Park.
Sadly, 10 days after Mays’ death at the age of 93, the 86-year-old Cepeda passed away as well. The Giants and the Cepeda family announced his death on Friday night — fittingly, during a game against the Dodgers; fans at Oracle Park stood to observe a moment of silence. “Our beloved Orlando passed away peacefully at home this evening, listening to his favorite music and surrounded by his loved ones,” said Nydia Fernandez, his second of three wives, in the statement. No cause of death was provided.
As the second Black Puerto Rican to play in the AL or NL, after Roberto Clemente, Cepeda became a hero in his homeland as well as a favorite of Giants fans. He spent nine seasons with the Giants (1958-66) before trades to the Cardinals (1966–68) and Braves (1969–72), followed by brief stints with the A’s (1972), Red Sox (1973), and Royals (1974) at the tail end of his career. The 6-foot-2, 210-pound righty was a middle-of-the-lineup force on three pennant winners, including the 1967 champion Cardinals, and was selected for an All-Star team 11 times, including two per year from 1959–62; he was the first Puerto Rican player to start an All-Star Game in the first of those seasons. He was the first player to win both the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards unanimously; Albert Pujols is the only one to replicate that feat. Cepeda finished his career with 2,351 hits, 379 homers, 142 steals, and a lifetime batting line of .297/.350/.499 (133 OPS+).
Not everything came easily for Cepeda. If not for the pitcher-friendliness of the Giants’ home ballparks — first Seals Stadium and then Candlestick Park — as well as a series of knee injuries that led to 10 surgeries, he might have hit at least 500 home runs. His path to the Hall of Fame took an extreme detour due to a conviction for smuggling marijuana, which resulted in a 10-month stint in federal prison as well as a humiliating fall from grace in Puerto Rico. Only after his release and his conversion to Buddhism was he able to rehabilitate his image and work his way back into the game’s good graces, a process that culminated with his election to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1999, 25 years after his final game. He was the second Puerto Rican player inducted, preceded only by Clemente. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The parenthetical part of the title is largely just a nod to Zach Lowe, whose ESPN basketball column inspired this one. He occasionally mentions flaws or foibles holding a particular team or player back, in lovingly GIF’ed up detail. I’m more of a rah-rah type, and plenty of weeks I don’t have a single Didn’t Like in the column at all. This week, though, I can’t help it; mental lapses, baserunning errors, and overall sloppiness are all over the column. That’s not to say I don’t love watching it, because part of what’s fun about baseball is when a theoretically staid game gets messy, but let’s be clear: A lot of these plays are not good plays. We’ve got superstars getting confused, on-field collisions, and absolute howlers. Let’s get started.
1. The Profligate Nationals
The Nats are one of the unheralded fun stories of the baseball season. They’re hanging around .500 and playing like better days are ahead. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore look like franchise mainstays. James Wood, another part of the return from the Juan Soto trade, isn’t far off. Mitchell Parker and Jake Irvin might be mid-rotation starters. Jacob Young is an elite defender. They have plenty of interesting role players, and the whole team plays with reckless and joyful abandon.
That’s particularly true on the basepaths, where the Nats rank third in steals but only 11th in total baserunning value. They’re always angling for how to advance another base, whatever the costs. Sometimes that ends in tears. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. I’m not sure if this is by design or simply a scheduling coincidence, but this week was full of compelling matchups between current rivals. The Cubs and Cardinals squared off. So did the Yankees and Orioles. The Guardians and Mariners aren’t exactly rivals, but their series rocked too, and I’m sad I couldn’t find a way to squeeze them in this week. That said, there’s a ton to talk about, so let’s get to it, after our usual nod to Zach Lowe of ESPN, who is surely enjoying a well-deserved vacation after the conclusion of the NBA season. To baseball! Read the rest of this entry »
Willie Mays was the gold standard. We can debate whether he was the greatest baseball player who ever lived or merely on the short list of those with a claim to the title. Based upon both the legend and the statistics, we’re on more solid ground declaring that Mays was the game’s greatest all-around player, accounting for his skill and achievement at the plate, on the bases, and in the field. Combining tremendous power, exceptional speed that factored on both sides of the ball, and preternatural grace afield, the man could do it all on the diamond, and he did it with an endearing, charismatic flair. “The Say Hey Kid” — a nickname bestowed upon him when he was so fresh on the scene that he didn’t know his teammates’ names — projected a youthful exuberance and an innocence that made him an icon.
Mays began his professional career while still in high school, with the Birmingham Black Barons, signing a $250-a-month contract in July 1948, when he was just 17 years old. He was supposed to return to Birmingham this week, one of three Negro Leagues alumni from the 1920-48 period — along with Bill Greason and Ron Teasley — slated to attend a major league game tonight between the Cardinals and Giants at historic Rickwood Field, the country’s oldest professional ballpark. Sadly, Mays passed away two days ago, in an assisted living facility, at the age of 93.
Willie Mays gave this statement to Dusty Baker on Monday, a day before Willie passed, to share with the city of Birmingham: pic.twitter.com/hQ0XmRKsmc
Mays was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. At the time of his death, he was its oldest living member, a distinction he inherited when Tommy Lasordadied on January 7, 2021, and one that now belongs to 90-year-old Luis Aparicio. Read the rest of this entry »
