Though he played regularly for only 10 of the 19 seasons he spent in the majors, Bob Watson left his mark on the field as a two-time All-Star and an exceptional hitter whose numbers were suppressed by the pitcher-friendly Astrodome, not unlike former teammate Jimmy Wynn, who died on March 26. Off the field, Watson left an even bigger imprint. When he was hired to serve as the general manager of the Astros, he was just the second African American in the game’s history to fulfill that role. He lasted two seasons at that post before accepting that same title with the Yankees, though the job turned out to be much different in the orbit of owner George Steinbrenner and a dysfunctional front office. Nonetheless, when the Yankees won the World Series in 1996, Watson became the first African American GM to oversee a championship team. He later had a role in assembling the rosters of two Olympic medal-winning USA teams and spent nine years as a vice president for Major League Baseball.

Watson, who battled health issues on and off since being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994, died on Thursday at the age of 74 following a long battle with kidney disease.

Though known as “Bull” for his sturdy physique (often cited as 6-foot-2 in the 205-217 pound range during his playing days but listed at a more modest six feet and 201 pounds via Baseball-Reference) and his strength, Watson was “a gentle giant… an incredibly kind person, and a mentor” according to Brian Cashman, who served as the Yankees’ assistant general manager under Watson and then succeeded him upon Watson’s resignation in February, 1998.

Born on April 10, 1946 in Los Angeles to parents who separated before his birth, Watson was raised by his grandparents, Henry and Olsie Stewart, in the city’s South Central neighborhood. He starred as a catcher at John C. Fremont High School, playing on a team that won the 1963 Los Angeles city championship alongside future major league outfielders Willie Crawford and Bobby Tolan. After graduating, he attended Los Angeles Harbor College, and signed with the Astros on January 31, 1965, just over four months ahead of the first amateur draft. He received a $3,200 signing bonus. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s hard for me not to look at my own numbers against them and be pissed,” a retired major league pitcher said. “Everyone involved deserves to be seriously punished because it’s wrong.”

– a retired major league pitcher on the Astros, quoted in ESPN, January 2020

Cheating is serious business. We know this, almost instinctively, from earliest childhood — the righteous anger one feels when you catch someone sneaking a peek at your cards, dropping a rock only after seeing you put down scissors, sticking out a suspiciously well-placed foot preventing your escape in a game of tag. That’s not fair — cheater! You appeal to others around you, trying to get them to see, to mete out justice. Something has been disrupted here; something is wrong that can only be righted with punishment. You entered into a contest with agreed-upon rules, and those rules were broken in favor of cheap victory. It is self-evidently outrageous, self-evidently cruel, and even if justice is not done — even if the false victory is upheld through deception, lack of witnesses, or negligence of investigation — the hurt is indelible. You will never play rock-paper-scissors with that particular kid again. You will tell all your friends, too, not to engage in contests with them. A cheater is a cheater is a cheater.

And yet we know, too, an instinct coming from a similarly primal place, that cheating, when executed for one’s own benefit, and especially when executed without detection, can be valuable, if a little guilt-inducing. When the value of the prize claimed outweighs the guilt, it can even feel better than a straightforward win. After all, the other party, if they were smart enough, would have cheated, too, or at least cheated better than they did; and really, when you think about it, isn’t outsmarting the opposition part of the competition? Haven’t you, in the successful execution of your subterfuge, put in more effort than the loser now sulking about your victory? Isn’t this all just part of the game — a part of the game that you happened to be better at? You are not a cheater, no; that word doesn’t apply to what you’ve done. To call the means of your success cheating would be to demean the skill involved in said success, you think. One might almost consider the loser who is accusing you of cheating to be the real cheater — trying to steal away, through non-competitive, extrajudicial means, the victory you earned through your own ingenuity. Cheating is bad. And you, what you have done, isn’t bad. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were hunkered down under a stay-at-home order waiting for Major League Baseball to release its long-awaited report on the Red Sox’s illegal sign-stealing efforts, then we have good news for you: the wait is over. On Wednesday, the league announced the conclusions of its investigation and the punishments handed down by commissioner Rob Manfred. If you were expecting the discipline to be comparable to that received by the Astros in January, you may want to get back to binge-watching Tiger King, because according to the report, there simply isn’t a lot to see here.

In the case of the Astros, when Manfred issued his report on January 13, he found that the team illegally stole signs during the 2017 regular and postseason and into the 2018 regular season. He suspended president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season (both were fired by owner Jim Crane within hours), fined the team $5 million (the maximum allowed under MLB’s constitution), and stripped them of their first- and second-round picks in both this year’s and next year’s amateur drafts. When it came to disciplining the Red Sox, however, Manfred only found evidence that the illegal sign-stealing occurred during the 2018 regular season; suspended only J.T. Watkins, the team’s video replay system operator; stripped away only its second-round pick in this year’s draft; and did not fine the team. As with the Astros, no players were punished.

The baseball world waited 3 1/2 months for this? A previously unknown backroom employee has taken the fall for an entire organization while those above him escaped without punishment — it doesn’t get much more anticlimactic than that, nor does it make a whole lot of sense, given the need for intermediaries between the video room and the dugout. And it certainly isn’t a severe enough punishment to act as a deterrent. There isn’t a team among the 30 who wouldn’t trade a second-round draft pick and a single baseball operations employee for a world championship. Read the rest of this entry »

For a guy who didn’t play at all in 2019, and was right around replacement level the year before, Evan Gattis has been in the news a fair bit this winter. In fact, as much as any of the Astros’ marquee players, he’s become one of the faces of their illegal sign-stealing efforts and the aftermath, a situation he’s confronted with a candor rare among his former teammates, but typical of his time in the majors. Last week, the 33-year-old slugger confirmed that his playing career is indeed over. In his six-year career, the free-swinging Gattis hit .248/.300/.476 (110 wRC+) with 139 homers and 8.9 WAR, but those numbers barely scratch the surface of what’s been one of the more improbable tours through the professional ranks in recent memory.

Within The Athletic’s landmark November 12 report on the Astros’ sign-stealing efforts was a reference to a September 21, 2017 game in which White Sox reliever Danny Farquhar described hearing a banging sound while on the mound. That trash can-based signal was the cue to alert an Astros hitter if a breaking ball or offspeed pitch was coming. Within hours, Jimmy O’Brien of Jomboy Media posted a detailed breakdown to Twitter and YouTube, showing Farquhar facing off against Gattis, with audible bangs anticipating some of the pitcher’s selections. Upon reaching a 2-2 count, Farquhar summons catcher Kevan Smith; the two changed signs, and Gattis struck out chasing a low changeup.

On YouTube, that clip of Gattis receiving signs and then getting hung out to dry once they were changed — compelling audiovisual evidence to accompany the deep reporting of Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich — has been watched over 4.5 million times. Gattis has struck out four and a half million times on that pitch alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the COVID-19 pandemic stopped Major League Baseball in its tracks, the illegal sign-stealing scandal and its aftermath was one of the game’s top stories, not only as the Astros continued their half-assed apology tour around the Grapefruit League, but as commissioner Rob Manfred’s hotly-anticipated report into the Red Sox’s sign-stealing activities hung in the balance. For the past few weeks, more pressing matters have prevailed, but a few details of where things stand regarding the sign-stealing mess have emerged, enough to gather into a single roundup. Mostly, they all serve to remind us just how much we miss baseball, the booing as well as the cheering.

Hinch and Luhnow suspensions won’t extend beyond 2020

If you were lying awake at night wondering how the year-long suspensions of the Astros’ former manager A.J. Hinch and president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow would be affected by the stoppage, it appears that you now have an answer, though it may keep you tossing and turning. Sources told ESPN’s Buster Olney that in the event no baseball is played in 2020, the pair, who were almost immediately fired by Astros owner Jim Crane when Manfred released his report on January 13, would be considered as having served their suspensions. The specific wording in the report (PDF here) states that both suspensions end “on the day following the completion of the 2020 World Series” rather than mandating a specific number of games missed. The report obviously did not account for the contingency of the cancellation of part or all of the 2020 season due to pandemic, but likely any official declaration that the World Series is indeed scrubbed due to previously unforeseen circumstances would apply, thus ending the suspension.

Presumably, it’s the specificity of the report’s wording that has led to this conclusion. MLB must believe that it’s on thin ice if Manfred revises the punishment now, either on legal grounds or simply as a matter of precedent, and as we’ve seen throughout this saga, precedent is everything when it comes to handing down punishments. What’s more, one need only look at the league’s reluctance to launch investigations into both the Astros and the Red Sox despite the numerous complaints — 10 to 12 teams went to the commissioner’s office about the Astros “cheating their asses off for three or four years,” according to the Washington Post, and Manfred sounded assurances that the scandal was confined to the Astros even as rumors swirled — to draw the inescapable conclusion that the league’s desire for closure far outweighs its zeal to administer punishment. Read the rest of this entry »

Like his longtime Astros teammate Joe Morgan, Jimmy Wynn packed a lot of punch into a relatively diminutive frame, and did a great many things well on the diamond while thriving in a low-offense environment. Listed at 5-foot-9, the “Toy Cannon” made three All-Star teams during his 15 major league seasons (1963-77), but he likely would have drawn even greater appreciation had his career taken place a few decades later. His combination of tape-measure power, a keen batting eye, a strong throwing arm, speed, and solid work in center field has made him a stathead favorite, one whose career numbers (.250/.366/.436 for a 129 OPS+ with 291 homers, 225 steals, and 55.8 bWAR) tell quite a story. Bill James ranked him 10th among center fielders in The New Bill James Historical Abstract circa 2001, and similarly, it took Wynn until well after his playing career to be fully appreciated by Houston fans, that after he had worked his way back from a dark domestic altercation (in which he was stabbed by his wife in self-defense) to become a community icon whose name graced a baseball facility for urban youth, and whose number 24 hung in the rafters of Minute Maid Park.

“It’s never too late to make things right,” Wynn wrote in Toy Cannon, his 2010 autobiography, a frank account of his career and the mistakes he made along the way. “Even if it does mean that you may have to crawl out of a deeper hole at an older age to get your life turned around. You can still do it, one day at a time, if it’s important to you.”

Wynn died last Thursday in Houston at the age of 78. His cause of death was not announced.

Born in Cincinnati on March 12, 1942, Wynn was the oldest of seven children of Joseph and Maude Wynn, and grew up near the Reds’ ballpark Crosley Field. His father was a sanitation worker, though Wynn “still called him a garbage man because that’s what he was doing and there is no shame in that work at all,” as he wrote in his autobiography. Joseph, who played semipro ball in Cincinnati into his late 40s, coached his son in Little League, and worked with him tirelessly.

“My father made me the kind of hitter I am,” Wynn told Sports illustrated’s Ron Fimrite in 1974:

“I was a shortstop when I was a boy growing up in Cincinnati and my father saw me as an Ernie Banks type—a good fielder who could hit home runs. He threw baseball after baseball at me, and when he got tired he took me out to a place near the airport where they had pitching machines. I developed the timing and the strong hands and wrists you need to hit homers.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Zach Davies threw a lot of changeups last season. Taking the hill for the Milwaukee Brewers, the now-27-year-old right-hander relied on the pitch an eyebrow-raising 31.3% of the time. In 2018, that number was 12.2%. In 2017, it was 14%.

Why the notable uptick in change-of-pace pitches?

“I was getting guys out in any way possible,” explained Davies, who was dealt to the San Diego Padres this past November. “Going into last year, I was coming off injuries [rotator cuff inflammation and lower back tightness] and wasn’t guaranteed a starting spot. I wasn’t able to go into spring training and work on pitches, and best way for me to get outs was fastball-changeup. That’s why the numbers were skewed. This year there will be a lot more of a mix.”

Not having a feel for his curveball, Davies threw his bender just 3.5% of the time last year, down from the 15-16% range he’d been accustomed to. His cutter usage was also down, albeit by only a few percentage points. I asked the command-artist what returning to more of a mix will entail.

“It’s really just going into games with the desire to throw different pitches,” said Davies. “It’s forcing myself to throw curveballs and cutters, everything, in every count. Coming here — them trading for me — I have the sense of having a job. I can work on things without feeling like I might be sacrificing my season.” Read the rest of this entry »

The worst thing you can do when you put a ball in play is hit a popup. That’s the worst thing usually, at least: right now, the worst thing you can do is be playing baseball at all, because you plus the opposing team makes 10 people, you jerk. But most times, it’s hitting a popup.

You’ve seen the reasoning for this before, but I’ll quickly lay it out again. When you hit a popup, you don’t reach base. Per Baseball Savant, balls hit with a launch angle of 50 degrees or higher produced a wOBA of .016 in 2019. Given that an out is worth 0 and league-average wOBA is .324, that’s pretty close to being an automatic out. Want it in a triple slash line? If you hit the ball at a 50 degree angle or higher, you bat .015/.015/.022. That’s ugly.

There’s good news, however. Want to avoid popping up and slamming your bat to the ground in disgust? There’s a simple solution: avoid swinging at high pitches. I’m no physicist, but the relationship between high pitches and popups seems straightforward. Your bat is likely to contact the ball from below, there’s some angle-of-incidence angle-of-reflection magic, and bam, Eric Hosmer is camping under the ball. Either that or you get some Alex Bregman magic:

Read the rest of this entry »

In the first instance of what could be a wave of players electing to undergo surgeries while MLB remains on an indefinite hiatus and before hospitals begin canceling elective surgeries to focus their resources on COVID-19 patients, Justin Verlander had surgery on his right groin on Tuesday. Per the Astros, the recovery timeline is six weeks, and since there isn’t likely to be any baseball in that time after the Centers for Disease Control recommended limiting gatherings of 50 or more people for the next eight weeks, it made sense for the 37-year-old righty to go under the knife now.

It’s been a rocky spring Verlander, who’s coming off a season for which he nabbed that long-elusive second Cy Young after going 21-6 with a 2.58 ERA, 3.27 FIP, 300 strikeouts — reaching that plateau in the same game in which he notched his 3,000th career strikeout — and 6.4 WAR. Recall that he was scratched from his February 27 start due to discomfort in his right groin, though the Astros felt the danger was minimal enough that they allowed him to throw a simulated game that same day. He was roughed up in his Grapefruit League debut on March 3 against the Cardinals, then left his March 8 start against the Mets after two innings, complaining of soreness in his right triceps. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros received some bad news about Justin Verlander’s health yesterday after he left his spring start early on March 8. The results of his MRI showed a lat strain and he’s been shut down without a timetable to begin a throwing program. His availability for opening day is definitely in jeopardy and it wouldn’t surprise me to see him miss at least the first month of the season as he ramps up his workload during extended spring training.

Losing Verlander for any amount of time is concerning for the Astros because their depth behind him is rather lacking, as Jay Jaffe explained yesterday. The loss of Gerrit Cole, Wade Miley, and Collin McHugh has left the back end of the Astros rotation rather open. And with Verlander out for the foreseeable future, that opens up another spot temporarily. Zack Greinke, Lance McCullers Jr., and Jose Urquidy should hold down the first three places, leaving two to a group filled with question marks. Josh James, who was likely leading the competition for the fifth spot, likely earned a role in the rotation with Verlander’s injury. That means the battle for the final spot comes down to Austin Pruitt or Framber Valdez, with Forrest Whitley an extreme long shot.

Both Pruitt and Valdez have collected less than 200 innings at the major league level, though Pruitt is already 30 years old while Valdez is just 26. Neither has been all that impressive during their short big-league careers. Valdez has the raw stuff, including a plus curveball and a mid-90s fastball, but he simply can’t control it. Pruitt doesn’t have the same raw stuff, but his repertoire has elements that are intriguing. There may be enough there that the Astros can tinker with to help him reach his ceiling. Read the rest of this entry »