During the pandemic-induced outage, I haven’t had the chance to avail myself of many of the multitude of rebroadcasted classics, but on Monday night, when my wife and I were trying to figure out what to fit into the Better Call Saul-shaped hole in our TV viewing schedule, she discovered that we had TiVo’d the MLB Network re-airing of Clayton Kershaw’s major league debut on May 25, 2008. The Dodgers were at home that day, facing the Cardinals, and so on the microphone was none other than Vin Scully. I answered the question of whether we should watch it by breaking out the birthday package of imported jamón iberico. This one called for the top-shelf stuff.

Less than three minutes into the broadcast, while Kershaw was still facing leadoff hitter Skip Schumaker, Scully cut to a clip from a March 9 spring training game, likely the first time the legendary Dodger announcer saw the team’s 2006 first-round pick in action. “The pitch that we will forever remember,” began the 81-year-old announcer, witness of literally millions of pitches over the course of the first 58 years of his stint with Dodgers — including thousands from Hall of Famers like Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, and Juan Marichal — but at this point probably fewer than 100 from the 20-year-old southpaw, “was made by Clayton Kershaw against the Boston Red Sox. He retired the side in Vero Beach, but he threw a curveball that buckled the knees of Sean Casey….” Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Woodruff made it to the big leagues without one of his old friends. He dramatically upped his game when he reintroduced that old friend to his arsenal. The results speak for themselves.

Woodruff debuted with the Brewers in August 2017 after logging a solid but unremarkable 4.30 ERA with Triple-A Colorado Springs. The righty then put up a 4.81 ERA and a 4.37 FIP in 43 innings after reaching Milwaukee. Respectable, but once again unremarkable.

The career-altering reunion happened midway through the ensuing season; a coming-out party of sorts took place down the stretch. With the Brewers chasing a playoff berth, Woodruff made seven September relief appearances and allowed just a lone one run in 12.1 innings. His October performance was every bit as good. In an identical number of innings, the former Mississippi State Bulldog surrendered two earned runs over four postseason outings.

Last year, Woodruff moved into Milwaukee’s starting rotation and fashioned a 3.62 ERA and a 3.01 FIP. Moreover, his 10.6 strikeouts per nine innings was the best of his professional career. Piggybacking on his previous postseason success, he proceeded to pitch four-innings of one-run ball in the National League Wild Card game.

This spring, I asked the 2014 11th-round draft pick about his ascent. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of last year, it looked like the Wilpon family might sell the New York Mets to Steven Cohen for around $2.5 billion. The proposed sale was an unusual one. It did not include SNY, the Mets’ regional sports network, which is owned by the Wilpons; the Wilpons were also set to maintain some degree of control of the team for years after the sale. In what didn’t come as much of a surprise given the deal’s unusual nature, things fell apart and the Mets are once again looking for new owners. Enter Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez.

As reported by Scott Soshnick in Variety, Rodriguez and Lopez have sought help from JPMorgan Chase to raise funds to purchase the team. The piece notes that A-Rod and J-Lo have a combined net worth of around $700 million, which is obviously well short of what is needed to meet a potential purchase price over $2 billion. While that gap might appear insurmountable, an A-Rod/J-Lo owned Mets team isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. First, consider that any purchase of this type is going to be financed with a considerable amount of debt. As Tom Ley wrote in his analysis of the Cubs’ previous sale — in the Ricketts’ initial plans to purchase the Cubs, there was talk of financing as much as $750 million of a potential $1.15 billion deal, though in the end, they paid $845 million and financed $450 million — teams are bought with significant amounts of financing:

Ted Lerner purchased the Nationals for $450 million in 2006, and the “Debt Primer Presentation” GSP sent to the Ricketts includes the details of that sale as a case study for how a highly leveraged purchase can work. Lerner took on the maximum amount of debt—$360 million—in order to purchase the team. Jim Crane bought the Houston Astros for $615 million in 2011, reportedly by taking on $300 million in debt; the Dodgers ownership group assumed $412 million in debt when they purchased the team in 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know the legend of Steve Dalkowski even if you don’t know his name. He’s the fireballer who can summon nearly unthinkable velocity, but has no idea where his pitch will go. His pitches strike terror into the heart of any batter who dares face him, but he’s a victim of that lack of control, both on and off the field, and it prevents him from taking full advantage of his considerable talent. That, in a nutshell, was Dalkowski, who spent nine years in the minor leagues (1957-65) putting up astronomical strikeout and walk totals, coming tantalizingly close to pitching in the majors only to get injured, then fading away due to alcoholism and spiraling downward even further. Dalkowski, who later sobered up but spent the past 26 years in an assisted living facility, died of the novel coronavirus in New Britain, Connecticut on April 19 at the age of 80.

Ron Shelton, who while playing in the Orioles’ system a few years after Dalkowski heard the tales of bus drivers and groundskeepers, used the pitcher as inspiration for the character Nuke LaLoosh in his 1988 movie, Bull Durham. In 2009, Shelton called him “the hardest thrower who ever lived.” Earl Weaver, who saw the likes of Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, and Sam McDowell, concurred, saying, “Dalko threw harder than all of ‘em.”

“It’s the gift from the gods — the arm, the power — that this little guy could throw it through a wall, literally, or back Ted Williams out of there,” wrote Shelton. “That is what haunts us. He had it all and didn’t know it. That’s why Steve Dalkowski stays in our minds. In his sport, he had the equivalent of Michelangelo’s gift but could never finish a painting.”

In 1970, Sports Illustrated’s Pat Jordan (himself a control-challenged former minor league pitcher) told the story of Williams stepping into the cage when Dalkowski was throwing batting practice:

After a few minutes Williams picked up a bat and stepped into the cage. Reporters and players moved quickly closer to see this classic confrontation. Williams took three level, disciplined practice swings, cocked his bat, and motioned with his head for Dalkowski to deliver the ball. Dalkowski went into his spare pump, his right leg rising a few inches off the ground, his left arm pulling back and then flicking out from the side of his body like an attacking cobra. The ball did not rip through the air like most fastballs, but seemed to appear suddenly and silently in the catcher’s glove. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »