By and large, the new rule set for this season has led to more exciting baseball. Stolen bases are more common than they’ve been at any point this century. The average time of game is down more than half an hour from its peak in 2021, and lower than it’s been in almost 40 years. There’s less dead time between pitches and fewer annoying delays.

But as much as these rules represent a considered effort to goose the entertainment value of the sport, there wasn’t a mechanism to preserve baseball’s most exciting play: the triple. So concurrent with a rise in stolen bases, we’re down to 0.12 triples per team per game. According to the historical data on Baseball Reference, that’s an all-time low:

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Alexis Díaz is having a great season. He’s struck out 30 of the 61 batters he’s faced and held opponents to a .113 batting average. In most cases, that would make him the best pitcher in his own nuclear family. Unfortunately, he has an older brother. Last season, Edwin Díaz led all relievers in strikeout rate. This season, Alexis has the best strikeout rate among relievers. Edwin led the league in reliever WAR last season, and Alexis is currently tied for second. If Yennier Cano ever gives up a run, which does not look likely to happen anytime soon, Alexis could take over the league lead in that category as well.

The Díazes are the Sultans of Swing-and-Miss. I bet you thought I was going to go for “Brothers in Arms,” which is the reference that’s been busted out for every family of pitchers since humanity first discovered Mark Knopfler back in the 1970s. But no, Dire Straits has a wide and venerable catalog of songs appropriate for this situation. You might say that because Edwin’s return from knee surgery is So Far Away, the Mets are paying him Money for Nothing this season. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday afternoon, a friend of mine was straight up not having a good time watching his favorite baseball team. The Phillies, defending NL champions and consensus favorites to return to the playoffs this year, were losing to the Rockies. They’d already done that once this weekend and are heading into the last week of April under .500. So he came up with an interesting theory: With so many players leaving Phillies camp to play in the World Baseball Classic, perhaps the interruption in spring training had a deleterious effect on the team’s preparation and/or chemistry.

Then he asked me if I knew of anyone who’d studied the issue. I said no and almost let the matter drop right there. Looking at the statistical leaderboards, playing in the WBC didn’t throw Shohei Ohtani off his schwerve. (Or Ronald Acuña Jr., or Randy Arozarena, or Xander Bogaerts)

Most of all, there are more direct explanations for the Phillies’ slow start: Bryce Harper is hurt, they’re down to something like their fourth-string first baseman, and there’s a specific Phillies fan who’s done something to anger the baseball gods and call down their wrath. His name is Nick, he lives in Christiana, Delaware, and the baseball gods will not relent until he is found and sacrificed upon a stone altar. Hurry, there’s no time to lose. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the things that happened in baseball this weekend, the only one I cared about was a Double-A game between the Chattanooga Lookouts and the Rocket City Trash Pandas. Now, I know what you’re thinking. If an April Double-A game is worth caring about at all, it must be a real doozy. To have it overshadow a weekend of MLB action — the Rays went to 9-0, Jordan Walker tied Ted Williams’ record for longest career-opening hitting streak, Oneil Cruz got hurt — well surely I must be exaggerating.

Try this on for size: The Trash Pandas led 3–0 heading into the seventh and final inning of the game, having not allowed a hit. They went on to lose that game 7–5, still not having allowed a hit. “You can’t predict baseball” is a bit of a cliché; baseball has been around for more than 150 years. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. But allowing seven runs while preserving a no-hitter? That’s worthy of detailed examination. Read the rest of this entry »

The rules of baseball are in a state of evolution in 2023, and the college game is no different: This season, the SEC is going to have a mercy rule. If one team leads by 10 or more runs after seven innings, the game is over. Run rules are common in amateur baseball — Little League has had one for years — and college baseball is a friendly interscholastic amateur competition… man, I almost got that out with a straight face.

No, the SEC is the most competitive, highly scrutinized baseball league in the country apart from MLB itself. Even in the upper minors, winning isn’t everything. In the SEC, it just means… well, you know the line. And this league is instituting a run rule?

I’m the kind of stubborn old crank who despises mercy rules, seven-inning doubleheaders, and zombie runners in the higher levels of competition. Leagues where the object is to win, not learn or hang out. And the SEC is definitely one of those. But as a pragmatist, watching baseball in 2023, I get it. In fact, my primary objection to the 10-run rule is not that it’s bad for the sport, but that it gives coaches a convenient excuse to avoid the real solution to the problem the run rule is trying to solve.

You should just be able to forfeit. Read the rest of this entry »

Insofar as I’ve given thought to who my favorite manager of all time is, my favorite manager of all time is Earl Weaver. He exemplified the ideal shouting, dirt-kicking, umpire-haranguing baseball boss; every image and video of a red-faced Weaver screaming up at an umpire a foot taller than him is a blessing upon our society. But the man was legitimately a tactical mastermind; if baseball could be influenced by coaches the way other sports can, we’d talk about Weaver the way soccer people talk about Rinus Michels.

A lot of “great managers” really just manage a lot. Weaver, despite his hyperactive and combative personality, knew to keep his hands off his offense and let the multiple future Hall of Famers on his roster cook. Weaver’s overall recipe for success usually gets cited as “pitching, defense, and three-run homers” or something similar.

Take it from the man himself, in a (mock) radio interview for a Manager’s Corner segment with Tom Marr in 1982:

Marr: Bill Whitehouse…from Frederick, Maryland, wants to know why you and the Orioles don’t go out and get some more team speed.

Weaver: Team speed! For Christ’s sake, you get [expletive] [expletive] little fleas on the [expletive] bases gettin’ picked off, tryin’ to steal, gettin’ thrown out, takin’ runs away from you. Get them big [expletive] who can hit the [expletive] ball out the ballpark and you can’t make any [expletive] mistakes.

Marr: Well, certainly this show is gonna go down in history, Earl!

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Ordinarily, a minor league free agent with a non-roster invite wouldn’t warrant a standalone article. But Jorge Alfaro, who signed with the Red Sox on Monday, is not your ordinary player.

First of all, the path to regular playing time is relatively straightforward for Alfaro. He’ll be competing for minutes with Connor Wong and Reese McGuire. Wong has hit well in the minors but struggled in a brief major league audition last year, and he has an option year left. McGuire has been solid defensively the past two seasons, but his bat is not of such quality that the Sox would move heaven and earth to keep him in the lineup. If Alfaro plays well in spring training, there’s every reason to believe he’ll head north with the Red Sox and play regularly.

Alfaro’s contract indicates as much. If he makes the team, he’ll be paid $2 million, which is more than either McGuire or Wong will earn this season. He’ll also have two chances to opt out — June 1 and July 1 — if he hasn’t been called up by then. Minor league free agent or not, Alfaro aims to play in the bigs this year.

The second reason Alfaro is worthy of discussion: Well, he’s Jorge Alfaro. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the waning days of Albert Pujols’ career, one gets to remembering. The man cast such a huge shadow over the sport for so long, his early days seem like a different era. For a sense of how long, I remember hearing about him for the first time from a physical copy of USA Today’s Sports Weekly — the thing we used to read while walking to school uphill both ways, etc. The Cardinals, it was reported, were so impressed with a 21-year-old third baseman who’d barely played above low-A that they were considering plugging him into their Opening Day lineup.

Pujols’ rapid rise to prominence is unusual but not completely unheard of, and the rise of a precocious young hitter from the Dominican Republic conjures up certain images: signing as a teenager, working up through the low minors, proving himself against grown men at an age when his American counterparts are still eating meal plan tater tots and going to frat parties.

But Pujols, who moved to New York and then to Independence, Missouri, as a teenager, was a college baseball player. He played one season at Maple Woods Community College (now Metropolitan Community College-Maple Woods). There, he did about what you’d expect one of the best hitters ever to do against juco competition: hit .466 with 22 home runs in 56 games, led his team to a regional title, and earned All-American honors. That spring, the Cardinals picked him in the 13th round of the draft, and two years after that he was in the majors. Two World Series, three MVP awards, and almost 700 home runs later, you know the rest of the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Jon Berti is a player of immense historical import, and you’ll never guess why.

No, that’s wrong. If you know anything about Jon Berti, you probably know exactly why he’s a player of immense historical import. Berti has actually put together a pretty nice all-around season: He can play anywhere and while he’s hitting for basically zero power, his .344 OBP makes him quite a valuable player for the Miami Marlins.

But more to the point: He’s extremely fast, with 96th-percentile sprint speed according to Baseball Savant, and he’s determined to get his money’s worth from this physical gift. Despite being limited to just 83 games by a bout of COVID in May and a groin strain in July, Berti has stolen 34 bases. A quick run through Berti’s event log reveals that he has been on first or second with nobody on the base ahead of him 97 times this season, and on 38 of those occasions he’s decided to keep running as far as his little legs will carry him, plus four more pickoffs that don’t count toward his caught stealing total.

That kind of aggressiveness is admirable, but distressingly rare. Berti, despite only playing in a little more than half his team’s games, is leading the majors in stolen bases. If he finishes the season with fewer than 40 steals, it will be the lowest majors-leading stolen base total of any full season since 1958. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is enjoyable this time of year. It’s like catching up with a friend we haven’t seen in a while. We spend April trying to figure out what the game is — not as it is right now, I mean, but as it will be all season. We parse through small bits of over- and underperformance, endeavoring to sift signal from the noise. Shohei Ohtani has been great. That probably means something! Ryan Flaherty has also been good. We might expect that means less. The Dodgers will likely recover; the Padres likely won’t.

With any friend, part of learning the who of them is knowing what matters and what is mere flotsam; alma maters and disappointments, cities lived in. Sayings only our mothers use. It’s why it is so hard to make new friends as an adult: grown-ups have all these stories from way back, full of people we don’t know, doing all sorts of things. It’s a lot to learn.

And while baseball’s who shifts around and grows, changing with new players and seasons, there are bits that endure, memories of childhood and cut grass that constitute a more fixed personality. I thought I might look beyond April to other artifacts, stories from way back full of people. So, inspired by how little they change year to year, I made perhaps an odd choice — namely, of reading The Official Professional Rules of Baseball and The Official Baseball Rules (2018 Edition), to see what baseball tells us about itself.

Here are a few of the things I found.

Baseball allows for small moments of grace…
Sports inspire intense competition. It’s sort of the whole thing. Once play begins, teams are generally expected to press their advantage, however minute. It’s why managers challenge when an opposing runner comes of the bag for the briefest of instants. It’s annoying, and a bit fussy, but there might be an out hiding in there. Can’t just give up an out! Baseball knows this about itself, this impulse to be fastidious in the service of winning, but it also knows that we humans are prone to make mistakes. Managers have to wear those mistakes when they come in the fourth inning, but earlier, before the stakes are set, baseball allows its generals a bit of grace.

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