Drew Hedman’s title with the Arizona Diamondbacks is Major League Run Production Coordinator. The 33-year-old Pomona College graduate was promoted to that position in January 2019 after spending the previous 12 months as a pro scout. His backstory is interesting, in part because he bypassed business school along the way.

Hedman played four seasons in the Red Sox organization, and while he topped out in Double-A, that alone qualifies an accomplishment. A total of 1,521 players were selected in the 2009 draft, and only three of them went later than Hedman. As a 50th-round pick, the writing was on the wall by the time the ink dried on his first contract. Not that he didn’t give pro ball the old college try.

“I certainly knew the odds weren’t in my favor, but with that being said, I always tried to be stubborn enough to think I’d be the exception,” Hedman told me. “I did everything I could to put myself in the best possible position to make it. Obviously it didn’t happen.”

Staying in the game beyond his playing days was a goal even before his release. The question was, in which capacity? A front office role made sense — Hedman has a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, with a focus in Economics — but his alma mater wasn’t yet the baseball breeding ground it’s become. Over a dozen Pomona alums have gone on to work for MLB teams since Guy Stevens, who now runs the Kansas City Royals’ R&D department — broke the ice in 2013. Hedman was cut loose in spring training that same year.

“Back then it wasn’t really a path that people [at Pomona] were exploring,” Hedman told me. “It wasn’t something I really knew existed, or knew how to approach if I wanted that to be a reality.”

A coaching role at the collegiate level ended up being Hedman’s “impactful first step” toward a return to professional baseball. In August 2013, he was hired as an assistant to Tim Corbin at Vanderbilt. 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 »

Pablo López has a pair of good throwing partners as he waits for baseball to return. The 24-year-old Miami Marlins right-hander has a Colombian catcher in his neighborhood, and a retired Venezuelan physician encamped in his spare bedroom. His relationship with the former is paramount to his future, and with the latter, a portrait of his past.

López is living in Miami, where he returned after spring training was abruptly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. His priorities in camp had been a continuation of his offseason efforts, which came on the heels of a promising, albeit uneven, 2019 campaign. Despite a queasy 5.09 ERA — his FIP was a healthier 4.28 — López is projected to land a spot in the Marlins’ starting rotation.

For now, all he can do is keep his arm fresh with the help of the backstop and doctor.

“I’m going to this warehouse that has a turf area about 150 feet long,” López told me late last week. “They have portable mounds we can use, and I’m there three times a week. Outside of those three days, there’s a green area close to my community and I go out and play catch with my dad.”

Danny López grew up playing baseball in Venezuela. His own father, Pablo’s grandfather, coached him during his teenage years. Medical school then squelched any possibility of pursuing a professional career, but he did continue as an amateur. According to Pablo, his father “played for a company — big companies had their own league — and while I never got to watch him play, I hear that he was pretty good.”

Rather than follow in his father’s footsteps, Pablo went in the opposite direction. Accepted to medical school upon graduating from high school — at age 16, no less — the multi-talented son opted instead to sign with the Seattle Mariners. Five years later, he was traded to Miami. Read the rest of this entry »

If someone asked you what Mike Trout’s signature skill is, what would your answer be? You might say it’s his power, even though he’s never led his league in homers, or his elite approach, even though he still strikes out a little more often than he walks. If you watched him in person when he was much younger, you might say it isn’t even his steady hitting that defines him, but the way the 6-foot-2, 235-pound mammoth of a man moves, sprinting with top-line speed to steal bases and gliding to field balls hit to center field. The correct answer, of course, isn’t any of those things. What separates Mike Trout from the pack is that he is one of the best, if not the best, at virtually everything. He is the sum of several staggeringly impressive parts.

Still, it feels a bit odd that the player we think of as the best in the game wouldn’t have any specific skill that stands far above the rest of the competition. But while it’s true that Trout has never cruised to a batting title, or demolished the field in homers or walks, the baseball community is constantly coming up with new statistics and methods through which we can evaluate players. Trends, trials, and technology help those new tools grow and improve, and with each one that sticks, we have a new chance to discover a player’s distinctive traits.

In recent years, many of those new revelations have come along because of Statcast, which has introduced an increasing number of statistics into even the casual fan’s lexicon, a technology that gives us a peek into data and visuals we didn’t previously have access to. One of the more recent additions to Statcast’s suite of tools is Swing/Take value, which sorts each pitch into four attack zones based on where it crosses the plate — the heart of the plate, the shadow of the plate, chase pitches, and waste pitches — as well as whether the hitter swung or took the pitch, and uses Tom Tango’s RE288 table to assign the result of each pitch a run value. The result is sort of a hybrid set of data, a glimpse at the particulars of a hitter’s plate approach, as well as his impact when he does decide to swing. 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 »

On a purely objective level, Eric Davis had a solid major league career. He played parts of the 17 seasons in the majors, hit 282 homers, and collected 1,430 hits. Davis received MVP votes, made All-Star appearances, and earned three Gold Glove awards. Of a group of three childhood friends consisting of Davis, Darryl Strawberry, and Chris Brown, he’s the one who came out of baseball seemingly the least affected by personal setbacks and tragedy. Davis is still involved in Major League Baseball and has worked with underprivileged kids, something he knows about having grown up in South Central Los Angeles.

But as accomplished a player as Davis was, he was capable of being more. Like another All-Universe athlete from the 1980s who made the majors, Bo Jackson, baseball wasn’t Davis’s best sport in his youth. At John C. Fremont High School, he was considered a basketball player before a baseball player, but at the time, baseball had the quickest path to playing professionally. While the NBA’s policy disallowing anyone to play in the league within four years of high school was struck down by the US Supreme Court, no high schoolers made the NBA between Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby in 1975 and Shawn Kemp in 1989.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, what kept Davis from approaching a Cooperstown career wasn’t personal or legal troubles or a lack of talent; it was a flurry of injuries. From a knee injury suffered as a rookie while sliding to the torn rotator cuff with the Cardinals, Davis was a veritable encyclopedia of maladies. (For a comprehensive listing of his dings and scrapes – and for a great look back on Davis’ career – be sure to check out Norm King’s SABR Bio of Davis.) Some of them were of the ordinary variety, such as an assortment of leg injuries that cut short almost every one of his age 24-28 peak seasons, a broken collarbone diving in the outfield, and multiple shoulder ailments.

Others were less typical, as when Davis lacerated his kidney and ended up in intensive care and endured a month-long hospital stay. Spinal problems, which ruined his 1994 long before the strike ended the season, initially led Davis to announce his retirement at age 32. Just a year after his extremely successful 1996 comeback with the Cincinnati Reds (.287/.394/.523, 26 homers, 3.4 WAR in 129 games), he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Davis spent the second half of the 1997 season recovering from having a portion of his colon, along with a tumor the size of a baseball, removed but still returned to the Baltimore Orioles and hit .327/.388/.592 in his last real full season in the majors. By this point, he was a part-time right fielder/designated hitter, with his days in center field wisely consigned to the past. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor Larnach projects as an impact bat at the big league level. Ranked second on our Minnesota Twins Top Prospect list, and 55th on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list, the 23-year-old Oregon State University product has, in the words of our own Eric Longenhagen, “titanic raw power… and a refined approach.” Moreover, he makes consistent hard contact. Last season, 51.9% of Larnach’s batted balls were hit 95 mph or higher.

Larnach worked to further fine-tune his left-handed stroke over the offseason, and he continues to do so during the current pandemic-necessitated hiatus. He has a specific objective in mind. Larnach slashed .309/.384/.458 last year between High-A Fort Myers and Double-A Pensacola — heady enough numbers to merit an invitation to big-league camp — but an inefficiency has stuck in his craw. The extent to which he can conquer it remains unknown, but given that he draws much of his inspiration from the preparedness of Navy Seals, there’s a pretty good chance that he will.

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David Laurila: To start, how are you preparing while the season is on hold?

Trevor Larnach: “I’m hitting every day. I’m working with the hitting guy I’ve been with for quite a few years now, Tyler Graham. He recently went from Oregon State’s baseball staff over to the [Texas] Rangers’ staff, where he’s working with their Triple-A team. We’re basically taking what I learned from spring training into kind of an offseason format. I’m pretty much doing everything I did in the offseason, but incorporating a couple of things into my routine that got exposed in big-league camp.“

Laurila: What got exposed?

Larnach: “In big league spring training you’re facing big leaguers and upper level minor league guys. Of course, early on they’re still trying to work out the kinks — just as the hitters are — but putting that aside, I was experiencing big league level pitching: the stuff, the speed, the consistency. It kind of shapes your frame of mind to where you need to be to put yourself in the best position to succeed.

“A big positive for me was getting to talk to Nelson Cruz, Torii Hunter, Justin Morneau, Josh Donaldson, Marwin Gonzalez, and all these different guys. I was picking different things that each one had to say, and incorporating them into my game. Spring training is a perfect time to test things out. I was putting what I worked on in the offseason to test, while at the same time taking in things I took from those guys.”

Laurila: How does the pitching you were facing tie into that? Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Anthony Kay, Pablo López, and Zac Lowther — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Anthony Kay, Toronto Blue Jays

“I’ve been throwing this changeup ever since I’ve been pitching. I never really had a curveball until I was 16 or 17 years old. Growing up, it was mainly just fastball-changeup because my dad didn’t want me [throwing curveballs]. My older brother played, and he also didn’t have a curveball until he got older.

“I first learned a circle change, and I still pretty much throw it to this day. Of course, there has been a little bit of variation. When I came back from [Tommy John surgery] in 2017 it was pretty inconsistent, and I was trying to find a grip that made it more reliable. I used to be on the seams, like a two-seamer, and now I’m kind of moved over to where it’s almost the same, but just off the seams. I was cutting it a lot, and I think being on the seams was a big reason for that. Now that I’m off them, I feel I get a truer release to it.

“It was mostly an inconsistency issue. There were some days where it would be really good, and there were days where it wouldn’t be good at all; it would cut. So I figured I might as well just mess around with it a little bit and try and get it more consistent. I don’t know that I really understand why [the adjustment makes made it more consistent], but it did. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not privy as to whether the Cincinnati Reds assign a grade to character in their draft reports. I also don’t know how much the San Diego Padres weigh that attribute when pondering possible acquisitions. I do know that Taylor Trammell projects as more than a quality big-league outfielder. He projects as a role model.

Trammell became a Padre last summer. Part of the trade-deadline deal that sent Trevor Bauer to the Queen City, he’d been selected 35th overall by the Reds in the 2016 draft out of Kennesaw, Georgia’s Mount Paran Christian School. Blessed with plus raw tools, Trammell is slotted No. 69 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

A prima donna he’s not. When he reaches the big leagues, Trammell will do so with a genuine appreciation for what life has presented him. Moreover, he doesn’t just embrace the game of baseball. He embraces the people who come to see it played.

“I have thoughts on fans,” Trammell told me in Padres camp last month. “I love them. There are people who come to games and want to heckle, and they have the right to do that. Do I agree with it? No, but if you want to pay money to come yell at us, I mean, do whatever you want. Go to a boxing match. Go to a baseball game. Go to a basketball game. Any game. When there are a whole bunch of fans in the stands, whether they’re rooting for you or not rooting for you, it’s great for baseball. They want to see a game and we’re putting on a show for them.”

If you’re rolling your eyes with skepticism upon reading that, you shouldn’t be. By all accounts, that’s who Trammell is. Part of a working-class family — his father is a post office employee, his mother once balanced two jobs — he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. The values he grew up with remain the same. Read the rest of this entry »

The cruelty of high expectations is having to meet them. When Stephen Strasburg made his debut on June 8, 2010, it was with the weight of a franchise and the eyes of the baseball world on him, and the belief that he’d be an ace from the first pitch. How could he not be? College superstar, Olympian, No. 1 pick, top prospect; The next inevitable step was transforming into the second coming of Roger Clemens, except without all the bad stuff.

The clamor for Strasburg was loud and endless: His Double-A debut in 2010 was nationally broadcast and featured as many media members as your average World Series game. It was only a matter of time before he came up, even despite the fact that he was just 21 at season’s start, and in early June, the Nationals finally gave in. His first assignment: a wretched Pirates team. But the opponent mattered far less than the fact that he was coming at all.

A decade, a Tommy John surgery, and a World Series ring later, Strasburg — like every other major leaguer — sits at home right now, waiting for the season to start. But in an attempt to tide over the baseball fans crawling through withdrawal right now, MLB Network aired his debut (along with those of some other current stars) on Thursday night. I vividly remember watching it live when it happened, kicking back with a six-pack of Miller High Life and giggling constantly as he carved apart a Pittsburgh lineup unfortunate enough to be there. So given the chance to experience it again, how could I resist? Read the rest of this entry »