Brad Keller had a boffo season for the Kansas City Royals, and his slider was a big reason why. Buoyed largely by its improvement, the 25-year-old right-hander logged a 2.47 ERA and a 3.43 FIP over nine starts covering 54-and-two-thirds innings. Five times, Keller worked five or more scoreless frames, a complete-game shutout in mid-September serving as his shining-star effort.

Helped by pitching coach Cal Eldred, he jumpstarted his career by developing more depth during his pandemic-forced downtime.

“We made some adjustments during the shutdown,” Keller told me following the completion of the season. “Between spring training and spring training 2.0 we made some mechanical adjustments that allowed my arm to become more athletic, if that makes sense. That’s kind of a weird way to put it, but whenever I would throw my slider in the past, I’d almost block my arm out. We were like, ‘OK, we don’t do that on a fastball, we don’t do that on anything else, so let’s do that same thing on the slider.” Basically, I needed to start throwing my slider just like I throw my fastball.”

The adjustment took time to bear fruit. Initially, the pitch wasn’t breaking at all. As Keller put it, “the very first one almost took the catcher’s head off,” as it was devoid of downward movement. Diligence, accompanied by a Rapsodo and an Edgertronic, eventually did the trick. Once mundane, his slider morphed into a monster.

“With the help of analytics, it became like my fastball for a longer time toward the plate,” explained Keller. “The spin went up. It became sharper, and as a result I started getting some silly swings-and-misses on it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Tom House and Dusty Baker go way back. They were Atlanta Braves teammates from 1971-1975, and before that they roomed together in the minor leagues. Their bond remains as strong as ever. Just last week the Houston Astros manager tapped into the renowned pitching guru’s expertise — albeit for reasons you might not expect. Baker consulted with House because his second baseman was battling a serious case of the yips.

“We kind of have this troubleshooting thing,” divulged House, who is often referred to as the father of modern pitching mechanics. “When Dusty runs across something he’s not quite sure about, or if I have a question about something that I don’t have access to… we’ve maintained a pretty solid communication relationship since way back when.”

What’s shared between the old friends follows the Vegas Rule, but while anything Jose Altuve specific would thus remain in-house, an overview of the phenomenon qualifies as fair game. I asked what causes a player to suddenly not be able to throw a baseball with any degree of accuracy.

“It’s when the conscious mind and the subconscious mind have a disconnect,” explained House, who has a Ph.D. in sports psychology. “Basically, it’s what they call a double-bind — you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Your brain won’t allow your arm to throw properly, because it doesn’t want to suffer the consequences of throwing the ball. It happens with catchers all the time. Steve Sax is famous because he couldn’t throw from second base. With golf, it’s putting the ball into the hole.”

Interestingly, an attack of the yips — or, as House prefers to call them “the creature” — rarely inflicts duffers. Read the rest of this entry »

Three years ago, when MLB.com referred to Charlie Morton as an “unlikely” World Series hero, the description was fitting. After nine years in the majors, most of which had come with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Morton had alternated between being acceptable and downright dreadful. Then, in his first year with Houston at the age of 33, he didn’t just pitch the best season of his career — he closed out the final four innings of Game 7 of the World Series to secure the first championship in the history of the franchise. Nobody in their right mind would have foreseen such a responsibility being placed in his hands before the season started, and yet there he was, limiting the Dodgers to one run in a game in which they needed five.

These days, Morton is no longer some big surprise, a novelty pitching far above the expectations anyone holds for him. He’s just a great pitcher who gets the ball in big games because he is clearly the right man for the job. On Saturday, however, the Astros weren’t the team celebrating with Morton. They were the ones who felt his wrath.

Morton threw 5.2 shutout innings while allowing just two hits as the Rays defeated the Astros, 4-2, in Game 7 of the ALCS. With the win, Tampa Bay secured its second World Series appearance in the franchise’s 23-year history, and a chance at its first-ever title.

The Astros entered Saturday having battled back from a 3-0 series deficit to win three straight and force a Game 7, just the second team in MLB history to do so. After being held to just five combined runs over Games 1, 2 and 3, the Astros finally outpitched Tampa Bay with a pair of one-run victories in Games 4 and 5 before unleashing a back-breaking rally in the middle innings of Game 6 to knot the series up. But unlike the Boston Red Sox of 2004 — who rallied from a 3-0 ALCS deficit to steal the pennant away from the New York Yankees and eventually win the World Series — Houston could not pull off that fourth-straight win, a streak the team mustered just once during the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Everett Scott holds the Red Sox franchise record for games played at shortstop. A part of three World Series-winning clubs in Boston, he manned the position in 1,093 regular-season games from 1914-1921. Right behind Scott are Rick Burleson (1,004), Nomar Garciaparra (956), Freddy Parent (909), and Xander Bogaerts (908).

The last of those names stands out, and not just because he’s current. It also stands out because myriad prospect prognosticators didn’t expect him to stick at the position. To some it was barely even a question. I was once told by a name-you’d-recognize prospect guru — in a condescending manner, no less — that “Xander Bogaerts will never play shortstop in the major leagues.”

He was wrong. Moreover, had this been a normal 162-game season — and assuming Bogaerts had stayed healthy — the 28-year-old native of Aruba would already be within 100 games of Scott’s total. As it is, he’s in line to eclipse the century-old record by the midway point of the 2022 season.

Called up in August 2013, Bogaerts did play nine of his first 17 big-league games as a third baseman — the position he was earmarked for by his doubters. But that was circumstance as opposed to choreography. With Stephen Drew etched in at short, and Will Middlebrooks scuffling at the hot corner, the Red Sox were looking for a way to slot their top-rated prospect into the lineup.

According to Bogaerts, a permanent switch was never in the plans. Read the rest of this entry »

That final step towards a World Series return again proved elusive for the Tampa Bay Rays Friday night. After carefully nursing a slim 1-0 lead through the early innings, the Rays lost control of the game in the fifth, eventually dropping Game 6 to the Houston Astros by a 7-4 margin. After jumping ahead to a 3-0 series lead, the Rays have now lost three consecutive games, pushing themselves the brink of elimination and the ignominious feat of joining the 2004 New York Yankees as the only teams in baseball history to blow such a series advantage in the playoffs.

Offense has been at a premium in the ALCS, and initially, it looked like this game would be no exception, with four batters in the first inning going down on strikes. Blake Snell’s first inning was a glimpse into how the rest of his afternoon would go: he was effective on paper, but the Astros were downright stingy at swinging at pitches out of the strike zone, forcing him to work hard for his outs.

While the broadcasters talked about shadows more often than Gandalf did in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (yesterday’s were of the non-Sauron variety), Framber Valdez‘s primary weapon in Game 6 was his extraordinarily effective curveball. Despite the Rays being the second-most effective offense against bendy pitches in 2020, Valdez didn’t fear matching strength vs. strength, throwing the pitch more than half the time; when the Rays offered, they missed nearly two-thirds of the time. Hunter Renfroe’s futile attempts to hit the offering were great examples of what has made 2020 Valdez an upgrade from the 2019 edition: behind 3-1 against the former Padre, he dropped two beautiful curves in just about the perfect place to induce unsatisfying swings.

Read the rest of this entry »

It all started, as it so often has in this ALCS, with a homer — the first pitch from Rays opener John Curtiss, a fastball over the plate, was launched into the seats by George Springer. And it ended with a homer from Carlos Correa, crushed to center in the bottom of the ninth — his third ALCS walkoff in the last four seasons. The Astros, for the second day in a row, won a do-or-die game by a single run, the final score again 4-3. And their deficit in the series, once a daunting three games to none, has narrowed all the way to 3-2.

How they got there on the pitching side was a little less familiar than it was on the hitting side. The Astros used seven pitchers over the course of Game 5, the first five of whom were rookies. First on the mound was Luis Garcia, 21 years old, with all of 12.1 major-league innings on his resume. Despite some hard contact — a hard fly ball from Brandon Lowe, a line drive from none other than Randy Arozarena — he got through the first inning without allowing a baserunner. Garcia’s second inning was a little more fraught: he loaded the bases on two walks and a hit batter for Mike Zunino. But Zunino flew out, stranding all three runners. The inning, and Garcia’s postseason debut, ended without incident. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros had their backs against the wall, down 0-3 to a surging Tampa Bay team. For one night, though, they had an ace in the hole: their ace, Zack Greinke, made his first and likely only appearance of the series after two straight days of being pushed back in the rotation.

When Houston acquired Greinke last year, he was a severely overqualified third starter, the delicious dessert after a Cole/Verlander entree. With Gerrit Cole in New York and Justin Verlander felled by a pesky elbow, however, Greinke stands alone among the pitching staff, surrounded by Lance McCullers Jr. and a passel of rookies.

Greinke brought his usual bag of tricks: fastballs in the eighties, changeups with fastball velocity and hummingbird movement, and a slow curve that all other slow curves merely imitate. The Rays struggled to adjust to the funk; Manuel Margot watched four straight fastballs go by to lead off the first, the last three of which were strikes. Randy Arozarena got ahead 3-1 before taking a 72 mph curve for a strike and swinging over a diving changeup, giving Greinke two strikeouts in his first three batters faced.

In the bottom of the inning, Tampa Bay brought reverse Greinke: Tyler Glasnow throws 100 mph, snaps off lollipop curves whose velocity rivals Greinke’s fastball, and tries to do with power what Greinke does with guile. His height adds to the effect; a 100 mph fastball coming from a 6-foot-8 pitcher with an upright delivery gives the distinct impression of a payload dropped from orbit. Read the rest of this entry »

Though undersized by baseball standards — just 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds — Joe Morgan stands tall in baseball history. As the second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds during his prime (1972-79), he helped elevate an already-strong team that starred the more famous Pete Rose and Johnny Bench into a powerhouse for the ages, earning back-to-back NL MVP honors on the Big Red Machine’s 1975 and ’76 championship teams. Over the course of a 22-year major league career (1963-84) with five franchises, Morgan made 10 All-Star teams, won five Gold Gloves, and built a case as the best second baseman in the game’s history, less by attaining traditional milestones and awards than by standing out in ways that became more apparent with advanced statistics. In 1990, he was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility; he would leave a stamp on that institution later in life as well.

Morgan died at home on Sunday in Danville, California at the age of 77. According to a family spokesman, the cause was nonspecified polyneuropathy, a condition that affects the peripheral nerves of the body. He had endured other health woes in recent years, having received a bone marrow transplant in 2016. He’s the sixth Hall of Famer to die this year, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, and Whitey Ford, the last two of whom passed away earlier this month. He’s also the third member of the late 1960s and early ’70s Astros to die in 2020, after Jimmy Wynn and Bob Watson. It’s enough to make any baseball fan cry, “Uncle.”

Justifiably hailed as “the game’s most complete player” in a 1976 Sports Illustrated cover story, Morgan had more tools in his belt than the standard five, including an off-the-charts baseball IQ that earned him the nickname of “The Little General,” and, by his own admission, a brand of arrogance. As he told Mark Mulvoy in that SI feature, “To be a star, to stay a star, I think you’ve got to have a certain air of arrogance about you, a cockiness, a swagger on the field that says, ‘I can do this, and you can’t stop me.'”

Morgan hit .271/.392/.427 (132 OPS+) for his career, racking up 2,517 hits, 268 home runs, and, thanks to his keen batting eye and compact strike zone, 1,815 walks (and just 1,015 strikeouts). His walk total ranks fifth all-time, while the 266 homers he hit as a second baseman rank fourth. While he only posted batting averages above .300 in his two MVP seasons, and never finished higher than fourth in that category, he drew at least 100 walks in a season eight times, and topped a .400 on-base percentage eight times as well, leading the league in four of those years, and finishing among the top 10 11 times. He also stole 689 bases, a total that ranks 11th; of his 11 times cracking the league’s top 10 in that category, seven times he ranked second, five of those behind Brock. His 81.0% success rate ranks 17th among players with at least 300 attempts since 1951 (caught stealing data was not consistently available earlier), but fifth among those with 600 ore more attempts. Read the rest of this entry »

In Game 1 of the ALCS, the Astros out-hit the Rays, struck out eight fewer times, watched Framber Valdez whiff eight batters in six innings, put 13 runners on, and threatened in nearly every inning. They lost. In Game 2 of the ALCS, the Astros out-hit the Rays, struck out five fewer times, watched Lance McCullers Jr. whiff 11 batters in seven innings, put 16 balls into play at 95 mph or harder and 13 runners on base, and threatened in nearly every inning. They lost.

Game 3 of the ALCS, though, would be different. Jose Urquidy hit a season-high 98 mph with his fastball, striking out four through five innings. A first-inning homer from Jose Altuve gave the Astros an early lead. They out-hit the Rays yet again and put 11 runners on and threatened in nearly every inning.

They lost.

The battle for the American League is, barring a miracle comeback, over. In beating Houston 5–2, Tampa Bay took a 3–0 series lead in the best-of-seven matchup and can both clinch its first pennant in 12 years and deny the Astros their third of the last four seasons with a victory on Wednesday. The best team in the Junior Circuit during the truncated 2020 campaign has gone 8–2 this postseason and looked virtually unbeatable in every facet of the game. The pitching has been crisp, the defense has been perfect, the offense has kept the line moving. Throughout October, the Rays have been a well-oiled machine. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday afternoon, the Tampa Bay Rays moved to within two wins of advancing to their second World Series in franchise history with a 4-2 victory over the Houston Astros. The scoring was relatively sparse, with five of the game’s six runs coming on three home runs.

Sadly, the game itself was at times overshadowed by the passing of legendary second baseman (and former Colt .45 and Astro) Joe Morgan at 77. Morgan was perhaps more famous for his part on the Big Red Machine, but he was also a key contributor during Houston’s early years. Astros manager Dusty Baker, the only manager in baseball to play against Morgan at his peak (Bud Black and Terry Francona, among others, faced him late in his career) and a friend, said a few words about the Hall of Famer before the game.

“He meant a lot to us, a lot to me, a lot to baseball, a lot to African Americans around the country. A lot to players that were considered undersized. He was one of the first examples of speed and power for a guy they said was too small to play.”

But baseball grinds on despite grief, and after Game 2 was done, Charlie Morton had earned his sixth career postseason win, improving his October line to 6-2 with a 3.16 ERA in 11 starts. While it will go down in the history books as a five-inning shutout, and the ninth consecutive playoff start in which he allowed two runs or fewer, Morton’s start wasn’t anywhere near as neat as you might expect if you only read the box score. The Astros frequently made solid contact but, thanks to the Rays’ defense and a bit of bad luck, failed to cash in on any of their opportunities. Houston left seven runners waiting futilely on the bags through five, only going down 1-2-3 once (in the fifth). Read the rest of this entry »