Kyle Higashioka never walks alone. The 30-year-old New York Yankees catcher is an ardent Liverpool FC supporter, having adopted the English Premier League team in 2007. A California prep at the time, Higashioka “stumbled across some Steven Gerrard highlight videos on YouTube” — this shortly after Liverpool had lost a Champions League final — and the die was cast. He’s been hooked ever since.

There is irony to his infatuation. Higashioka was drafted and signed by the Yankees in 2008, and two years later, Liverpool FC was purchased by the John Henry-led Fenway Sports Group. Yes, Higashioka lives and dies with a soccer club that operates within the Red Sox umbrella.

He’s not apologizing. Pointing out that Henry was once a minority owner of the Yankees, Higashioka stated that supporting a baseball team and supporting Liverpool are two completely different things. Moreover, he “started liking [Liverpool] before the Red Sox owners bought them; it’s kind of the luck of the draw who owns a team.”

A fair-weather fan he’s not. Along with staying true during the downtimes — “the Roy Hodgson days wren’t great” — Higashioka has gone out of his way to watch matches. Greenwich Mean Time and the Pacific Time Zone differ by eight hours.

“Living in California, I would meet up with the Orange County Liverpool Supporters Club,” explained the Huntington Beach native. “I remember an opening-week match where I met them at the pub at 4 a.m. to watch a game against Stoke.” Read the rest of this entry »

Our oddball 2020 season has featured a lot of strange sights and next week, we’ll get another one, when the Toronto Blue Jays stage their home opener (or at least, their first home game not played in another major league team’s park) in another country. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shall we say mixed success the United States has had combating the spread of the virus, Canada refused to grant the exemptions needed for the Blue Jays to play their season in Toronto.

“Based on the best-available public health advice, we have concluded the cross-border travel required for MLB regular season play would not adequately protect Canadians’ health and safety,” Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship said Saturday in a statement. “As a result, Canada will not be issuing a National Interest Exemption for the MLB’s regular season at this time.”

Canada’s statement seemingly leaves open the possibility that the Blue Jays could come home for a theoretical postseason series if the environment is more favorable. But that would be a few months away, so Toronto’s next home game will be played — or at least is scheduled to be played — in upstate New York rather than the Queen City. And when I say upstate New York, I mean upstate New York; we’re leaving behind the pizza, bagels, and pastrami of the city for beef on weck, grape pies, steamed hams, Buffalo’s eponymous chicken wings, and Sahlen Field, which is usually home to Toronto’s Triple-A affiliate and this year will host the migratory Jays. Read the rest of this entry »

The impact of the Marlins’ outbreak of coronavirus and Sunday’s ill-fated decision to allow the team to play the Phillies continues to resonate throughout major league baseball. Both teams have now reported more positive tests within their organizations, and more games have been postponed, causing a ripple effect within the schedule. Meanwhile, the league is reportedly upgrading its protocols, has launched an investigation into the outbreak, and has reached an agreement with the Major League Baseball Players Association to reduce doubleheader games to seven innings apiece, just as the necessity for such twin bills appears to be increasing by the day as the postponements mount.

How necessary? On Friday morning, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that the night’s game between the Cardinals and Brewers — neither of which team has crossed paths with the Marlins or Phillies — has been postponed as well due to multiple positive tests on the Cardinals. Sportsgrid’s Craig Mish followed up with a report that it’s two players infected. The team has been instructed to self-isolate. In other words, a new front in MLB’s battle to forge ahead has opened up.

Folks, it’s going great.

Since publishing my latest update on the subject on Wednesday morning, three additional Marlins players, all as yet unidentified, have tested positive, bringing the team’s total to 18 players and two coaches. The majority of those players are unidentified, but among those reported to be infected are catcher Jorge Alfaro, first baseman Garrett Cooper, shortstop Miguel Rojas, right fielder Harold Ramirez, and starters Sandy Alcantara and José Ureña. ESPN’s Jesse Rogers reports that the infected players and other personnel will be driven back to Miami on sleeper buses, while the rest will continue on their road trip. Read the rest of this entry »

The nerves were easy to see in the eyes of Nate Pearson during the third batter of Wednesday’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Washington Nationals. It was the 23-year-old right-hander’s major league debut, and he had just allowed the first baserunner of his career on a four-pitch walk to Adam Eaton. With the camera aimed at first base, viewers saw Eaton get a big lead, then take another step, then another. Pearson never looked his way. His eyes were straight ahead, beads of sweat already forming under his cap, as he concentrated like the only thing he could think about was making sure his next offering was a strike. It didn’t work. He bounced a slider in the dirt, then turned to see Eaton standing on second base without a throw.

By the time he finished his first career outing, those nerves appeared to be gone. Pearson showed there was no need for nervousness. He ended up throwing five shutout innings, allowing just two hits and two walks while striking out five. The Nationals ultimately won the game anyway, 4-0, thanks to stellar pitching by their own starter — some guy named Max Scherzer — but even in a shortened season in which every game is crucial to a Toronto team on the fringes of a playoff hunt, it’s difficult to think of a reason for a Blue Jays fan to feel anything other than pure excitement over Wednesday’s game.

Pearson’s journey to a big-league mound was a bumpy one. He had a screw put in his throwing elbow in high school, and he was used mainly as a reliever at Central Florida Junior College, albeit an extremely good one. Toronto drafted him 28th overall in 2017 with the intention of stretching him out to be a starter, and he started at Advanced-A in 2018. A couple of injuries, however — an intercostal strain and a fractured arm caused by a line drive back to the mound — limited him to just 1.2 innings for the whole season.

When he finally returned in 2019, the Blue Jays challenged him, asking him to pitch across three levels of the minors. And despite only throwing 21.2 pro innings in the 22 months since he’d been drafted, he responded well, totaling 101.2 frames and allowing just 26 runs on 63 hits with 27 walks and 109 strikeouts. As he began throwing in Blue Jays camp this spring, it was obvious he had the stuff to make the Opening Day rotation, but there were quickly rumblings of the team keeping him in the minors to start the season for just long enough to delay his free agency by a year. Wednesday, as it happens, was the first day the Blue Jays could add Pearson to the roster without him getting a full year of service time in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m biased, but I think summer in Vancouver can be one of the most beautiful seasons anywhere in the world. The rainforest, having spent the autumn, winter, and spring growing lush under the cover of clouds and rain, shines rich green under the sun, illuminated by the light coming off the ocean. It’s hot, but not overwhelmingly so. On some days, you can look out over the water and see the spout of a humpback whale or the dark, swift-moving fins of a transient orca pod. And at sunset, the bright place where the sky and the ocean meet seem to go on forever.

In the summer of 2017, fires engulfed the Pacific Northwest. There was record heat; record time passed between rainfalls. I spent that summer working in a basement shop, bitter and sad, and when I emerged from the top of the staircase at the end of every day, I would often see a sky choked thick with ash and smoke, the sun swollen and red. Everything that was normally so vibrant was cast over with a dull haze. It was sometimes difficult to breathe. I thought, at the time, that it seemed apocalyptic: the reality of climate change clearly visible above me, around me, hanging in the air itself.

That was the summer Nate Pearson came to town.

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The Vancouver Canadians are the Blue Jays’ short-season affiliate, playing in the Northwest League. Baseball has a long, diverse history in Vancouver, though the city isn’t exactly baseball-crazy. Back when the Canadians were a Triple-A franchise, affiliated most recently with the A’s, there were some pretty lean years in terms of attendance and interest. But a renovation of their ballpark, the 68-year-old Nat Bailey Stadium, and affiliation with the recently-successful Blue Jays has made the franchise one of the healthiest and most well-attended in the minor leagues. The banners around the stadium show some of the Canadians alumni who are currently successful major leaguers — Kevin Pillar, Marcus Stroman, and Noah Syndergaard, to name a few.

They show, too, the legends who visited and played in Vancouver in days long gone: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who came north on barnstorming trips. Though thoroughly renovated for the demands of a 21st-century baseball team, the Nat is deliberate in making you feel its history. A little museum is tucked into the concourse under the grandstand; the tall wooden scoreboard is a replica of the original, salvaged from the remains of Sick’s Stadium in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I saw Matt Shoemaker was on the grass, grimacing in pain. It was last year in Oakland; Shoemaker ran over to cover first on a groundball, then crumpled to the ground. He had torn his ACL.

As I wrote then, it was a cruel, unfair freak accident for someone who had seen far too many of those in his career. Shoemaker, though, seemed determined to push through. I was rooting for him to return and succeed. On Saturday, finally, he made his first start in over a year — having, again, overcome adversity to come back to the field.

And though he was making his return in front of an empty stadium, in the middle of a global crisis, it was hard not to give in to the creeping feeling of joy, sneaking in from behind the anxiety. It is wonderful to see someone succeed in spite of everything.

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“Overcoming adversity” is about as tired a baseball cliche as there is. Look deep enough into the background of pretty much any player and you’ll find adversity that was overcome — that’s just the nature of life, and especially the nature of pursuing a career as stressful, all-consuming, and specialized as professional baseball. That’s not to say that these stories aren’t worth hearing: It’s important to understand the lifetimes of effort and struggle that go into the games we watch for entertainment. But flattening every story into a pat tale of “overcoming adversity” doesn’t do justice to the gravity of players’ experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Hours before their season officially begins, the Blue Jays finally have a new home for the 2020 season. Denied permission first by the Canadian government to host their home games at the Rogers Centre, and then by the state of Pennsylvania to station themselves at the Pirates’ PNC Park, they will instead call Sahlen Field, the ballpark of their Triple-A Buffalo Bisons affiliate, their home for the majority of the pandemic-shortened campaign.

This is a less-than-ideal outcome for the Blue Jays, whose players had quite reasonably hoped to have access to a major league park given the larger spaces and better amenities than most minor league parks have; outfielder Randal Grichuk described Buffalo as a “worst-case” scenario. On the other hand, key youngsters such as Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. have played at Sahlen in recent years. Biggio had positive things to say:

Cavan Biggio just said on @FAN590 that the infield in BUF is one of the best minor league fields he's played on and he hopes #jays can turn this into a home field advantage because visiting teams won't be thrilled about going to a minor league park.

— Dan Shulman (@DShulman_ESPN) July 24, 2020

While the Blue Jays were granted a National Interest Exemption to host their Summer Camp at the Rogers Centre, playing their regular season games in Toronto was ruled out when Marco Mendocino, Canada’s Minister of Immigration, announced last Saturday that the Canadian government had “concluded the cross-border travel required for M.L.B. regular-season play would not adequately protect Canadians’ health and safety,” mainly given the inability of players to follow the 14-day post-travel self-quarantining guidelines while keeping to the schedule of games. The Blue Jays’ spring training facility in Dunedin, Florida — the only option “that is 100 percent seamless right now,” according to team president and CEO Mark Shapiro — was ruled out because Florida is now the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with an average exceeding 10,000 new cases per day. Read the rest of this entry »

The Buffalo Blue Jays? The Pittsburgh Blue Jays? The Biggio-Bichette-Vlad Jr. Traveling Sons of All-Stars and Motor Kings? One way or another Canada’s only Major League Baseball team will be the Toronto Blue Jays in name only during the 2020 season. That’s the upshot of a decision handed down by the Canadian government on Saturday, not because of anything the Blue Jays or MLB has done wrong, but because the United States has done such a poor job of containing the spread of COVID-19 that letting teams travel across the international border between the two countries has been deemed a public health risk. It’s a decision that’s left the Blue Jays and the rest of baseball scrambling for alternatives given that the team opens the season on July 24, with its home opener scheduled for July 29.

Already it was clear that one of the substantial logistical hurdles for any league attempting to play its games in the midst of a pandemic — the wisdom and morality of which are questionable at best, but a topic for another day — is the variation in local laws and mandates, particularly when it comes to quarantine rules and guidelines. Until late last week, the defending champion Nationals weren’t sure they could play at Nationals Park because of a directive for those in close contact with individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 to self-quarantine for 14 days, and a similar situation with respect to the Dodgers in Los Angeles is still being untangled.

But while those situations may tilt in favor of the teams — testifying either to the outsized importance of sports within our culture or to a misplacement of priorities (take your pick) — that’s not the case with regards to the Blue Jays. With the U.S. regularly breaking single-day records for new coronavirus cases, and the U.S.-Canada border already closed to nonessential travel through at least August 21, on Saturday the Canadian government denied the Blue Jays permission to play home games in Toronto, which the same day reported just 43 new cases of COVID-19 infections. The Blue Jays had previously received an exemption allowing them to host their summer camp at the Rogers Centre with players and staff operating under a strict “modified quarantine” in which they were collectively isolated at the facility, which includes a hotel. Read the rest of this entry »

Many species of shark, most commonly lemon sharks, give birth in shallow, nutrient-rich mangroves teeming with small sea life that can easily sustain their offspring while also insulating them from the predators typically found in deeper, open waters. Most young sharks spend years feasting in these hazy, sandy green mangroves until they’ve grown, then head out to sea. Some leave the safety of the roots and reeds early and enter the blue black depths at greater risk of a grisly fate. Many of them won’t make it. The ones that do will likely become the strongest of all the adult sharks.

Now that teams have announced their 60-player pools for the upcoming season, we can see how they’ve balanced rostering players who can help them compete this season with prospects for whom they’d like to ensure playing time, while avoiding prospects whose service time clocks they don’t want to risk winding. Below, I have analysis of the prospects in the player pools for the AL East clubs. I’ll be covering every division in the coming days, with some divisions requiring their own piece and others combined where appropriate.

Two of our site tools go hand-in-hand with this piece. The first is The Board, which is where you’ll want to go for scouting reports on all of these players (click the little clipboard), as this piece focuses on pathways to playing time and potential roles and strategic deployment rather than on scouting. Perhaps the more relevant visual aid are Jason Martinez’s RosterResource pages, which outline the player pools that have been dictated by all 30 teams in a depth chart format, and also include columns that indicate where the prospects in the pools rank within each club’s farm system.

A couple roster mechanics to keep in mind as you read: Teams are allowed a 60-player pool. They don’t have to roster 60 guys from the start; not doing so allows them to scoop up released or DFA’d players without cutting someone. Within those 60 players still exists the usual 40-man roster rules from which teams will field an active roster of 30 players, a number that will shrink to the usual 26 as the season moves along. Big league clubs are allowed a three-man taxi squad that can travel with the team but isn’t part of the active roster; that squad must include a catcher (this is clearly to mitigate the risk of some injury/COVID/travel-related catastrophe). Players not invited to big league camp, or who aren’t on the active roster (40-man players and beyond) when the season begins, will train at an alternate location, typically a nearby minor league affiliate. Lastly, only players in the 60-man pool (including prospects) may be traded during the season. Read the rest of this entry »

May 29 marks the 10-year anniversary of Roy Halladay’s perfect game against the Marlins. It’s a bittersweet occasion, alas, because while it shows the two-time Cy Young winner and future Hall of Famer at the absolute pinnacle of his career, Halladay is not here to celebrate. On November 7, 2017, while flying his Icon A5 light sport airplane, he crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, landing upside down in 4 1/2 feet of water. The autopsy published two months later found that he had morphine, amphetamine, Ambien, and alcohol in his system. More recent revelations that he had been in and out of rehab to treat addictions to opiates and to an anti-anxiety drug called Lorazepam deepen the already stark contrast between a player who publicly was known for his exceptional control, both on and off the field, but who privately was battling depression.

The anniversary and the absence of its central figure provides a time for reflection. What follows here are 10 thoughts on Halladay’s career and life, one for each year since that special night in Miami’s Sun Life Stadium — or, if you prefer, one for each of his perfect innings plus one for the aftermath. You can watch the game in its entirety below:

1. Halladay nearly threw a no-hitter in his second major league start, and did pitch a complete game.

Chosen with the 17th pick of the 1995 amateur draft out of a suburban Denver high school (Arvada West), Halladay made solid progress through the minors and cracked Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects in ’97 (23rd) and ’98 (38th). After a strong showing at Triple-A Syracuse in the latter year, the 21-year-old righty made his major league debut on September 20, 1998, throwing five innings of two-run ball with five strikeouts against the Devil Rays. Seven days later, he no-hit the Tigers for 8.2 innings before being foiled by pinch-hitter Bobby Higginson, who homered and also deprived him of a shutout. Halladay did hang on to collect the first of his 203 regular season wins, and the first of his 67 complete games. Read the rest of this entry »