Al Kaline was not only a great player, he had a reputation of being both humble and personable. Both qualities came to the fore when I interviewed the Detroit Tigers legend several years ago in Lakeland, Florida. Sitting on a stool inside the Tigers’ spring training clubhouse, Kaline not only took the time to answer my questions about his career, he did so graciously. One day after his death at age 85, here is our conversation.

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David Laurila: What kind of hitter did you consider yourself?

Al Kaline: “I was basically a line drive hitter. I was a put-the-ball-in-play hitter who tried not to strike out. I moved the runners along if the situation called for it. I tried to be patient and get a good pitch — I didn’t want to get myself out by swinging at bad pitches — and I didn’t worry about getting two strikes on me. I felt that I could handle the bat well enough to hit with two strikes.”

Laurila: Not striking out was more important in your era than it is now.

Kaline: “Absolutely. Striking out was something… some of the power hitters were striking out 100 times, but otherwise very few guys were striking out 100 times. It was about putting the ball in play and making the other team make plays. So yeah, we didn’t strike out nearly as much.”

Laurila: Why do you think that was? 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 »

The first time I interviewed Keston Hiura was over the phone. This was a few months after he’d been taken ninth overall by the Milwaukee Brewers in the 2017 draft. Hiura was playing for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, and he called at the assigned time from a Midwest League ballpark after batting practice. I don’t recall which ballpark.

I was in Lowell, Massachusetts at a New York-Penn League game that had already started. It was loud at LeLacheur Park, so I talked to Hiura from the relative quiet of a stairwell down the left-field line. The interview went well. I found the former UC Irvine Anteater to be both forthcoming and articulate.

The second time I interviewed Hiura was at the Brewers spring training complex, four weeks ago. Standing face-to-face — closer than the six-foot distance now deemed necessary — I accused him of being boring.

Truth be told, the pertinent ground had already been covered. In our earlier long-distance conversation we’d gone over the toe tap into a high leg kick, the inside-out swing with a high finish, the way he kept both hands on the bat. For good measure, we’d touched on his patience-paired-with-aggression approach.

Everything that was true then is true now. 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 »

Dave Rozema had a colorful career. A free-spirited changeup artist, the Grand Rapids, Michigan native debuted with the Detroit Tigers in 1977 — one year after Mark “The Bird” Fidrych took baseball by storm — and while injuries soon took their toll, he started off with a bang. In a whirlwind rookie season, Rozema worked 218.1 innings, and went 15-7 with a 3.09 ERA.

He wasn’t averse to having fun, nor was he immune from trouble. Rozema was involved in multiple fracases, both on and off the field. On one occasion he emerged, in the words of Royals outfielder Willie Wilson, looking a lot like Rocky Raccoon.

This interview — originally intended for a book project that has remained on the back burner — was conducted in 2010, at Tigers fantasy camp in Lakeland, Florida.

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David Laurila: How did you come to sign with the Tigers [in 1975]?

Dave Rozema: “I was drafted in the fourth round, but it was in the January [secondary phase]. In the summer draft, I hadn’t been drafted until the 27th round [by San Francisco], so I wasn’t really that good. I had been offered a full ride to Eastern Michigan, along with Bob Owchinko and Bob Welch, but I decided to go to Grand Rapids Community College. I wasn’t a big scholar; my grades weren’t that good.

“[Tigers scout] Bob Sullivan asked me, ‘Hey, do you want to play baseball?’ I went, ‘Yeah.’ He went, ‘I’ll get you a few bucks. Detroit. Fourth round.’ My heart said I wanted to play pro ball, so I signed.”

Laurila: Your first professional season was in Clinton, Iowa, with Jim Leyland as your manager. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball, like the world around it, has been flooded with bad news for the last couple of weeks. Normally, losing one of the game’s most exciting 20-something pitchers to Tommy John would create a splash on the level of Dan-doing-a-cannonball-into-a-kiddie-pool. But in these times, the ripples created by the news of Noah Syndergaard’s surgery (along with Chris Sale’s) were relatively minor. What are UCLs compared to the concerns of COVID-19?

But it is bad news. Bad for the Mets and bad for Syndergaard himself. How bad? For a change of pace, let’s start off with the long-term projection rather than finish with it. The projection is notable in this case as there’s a key difference in the model. With no actual game-related news to distract me, I’ve been able to complete work on one of my ongoing data projects: better long-term playing time projections for players with injuries, especially serious ones that cause entire seasons to be missed.

While ZiPS has had a generalized model for injuries — both specific and, well, general — for some time, the focus was mainly on projecting how well the player would play upon returning and the long-term qualitative impact on their play. So long-term, pitchers with bum shoulders would fare worse than those taking a trip to Dr. Andrews’ Magic Elbow Factory, and speedy infielders with leg problems would see their aging curves accelerate. Less of the focus had been the long-term effect on playing time itself, something I’ve been able to work on a lot recently. Read the rest of this entry »

The means by which the Mariners offenses that stretched from the early 1990s into the early 2000s were so consistently good are mostly what you’d expect. Ken Griffey Jr. Edgar Martinez. Alex Rodriguez. Ichiro Suzuki. They might not have been there all at once, but at least two of them overlapped in Seattle’s lineup over a span of 15 consecutive seasons (1989-2004). But is that the end of story? No, actually.

There have been plenty of teams with multiple star position players who have found themselves in lineups that weren’t that productive overall. Where Seattle’s run of lineup dominance gets interesting is how the Mariners were able to surround their superstars with enough other talent from year to year to remain one of the top lineups in the game for more than a decade.

Like the Cleveland Indians, whose eight-year run of dominance was highlighted last week, the Mariners were unable to bring home a World Series championship despite a 116-win season in 2001, and advancing to the ALCS three times in seven seasons. Nevertheless, it was a good time to be a Mariners’ fan. Here’s a look at how it began. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2014, the Dodgers and Time Warner launched Sportsnet LA. Unfortunately, the channel hasn’t been available for a lot of Dodgers fans for the last seven seasons, as the network was never able to strike a deal with DirecTV. Despite often leading the sport in attendance and enjoying incredible popularity in a massive media market, the Dodgers had television ratings among the bottom half of teams, averaging around 100,000 fans per telecast, roughly the same number of fans watching locally in Cleveland.

But if baseball is played this season, nearly all Dodgers fans in Los Angeles will have access to the games for the first time since 2013, when a 25-year-old Clayton Kershaw won his second Cy Young award. Ramona Shelburne was the first to break the news that DirecTV will now include Sportsnet LA in their channel lineup; the network confirmed it a short time later with the following statement:

Spectrum Networks announced a carriage agreement to launch the Los Angeles Dodgers award-winning regional sports network, Spectrum Sportsnet LA, to AT&T Video subscribers beginning today. With the agreement, AT&T DirecTV, UVerse, AT&T TV and AT&T TV Now customers in Southern California, Las Vegas and Hawaii will have access to Sportsnet LA’s live game coverage when the season is cleared to begin.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Eric Longehagen and Kiley McDaniel blurbed Sam Delaplane last March, they called the Seattle Mariners pitching prospect “an interesting sleeper.” Pointing to his eye-popping strikeout numbers in Low-A, they went on to suggest that Delaplane — unranked despite the platitudes — “might get pushed quickly.”

Delaplane proceeded to prove our scouting duo correct. Following 21 relief outings in Hi-A Modesto, the righty ascended to Arkansas, where he flat out shoved against Texas League hitters. In 37 Double-A innings, Delaplane fanned 58 while allowing just 13 hits. His ERA was a microscopic 0.49.

Flash back six years. In order to compete collegiately, the San Jose native had to travel 2,400 miles — and not to a baseball hotbed. The lone offer Delaplane received coming out of high school was from Eastern Michigan University; the low-profile program was coming off of consecutive losing records in the Mid-American Conference.

Delaplane spent four years at Eastern, earning a degree in marketing. Sold mostly on the promise of his strong senior season — a 3.27 ERA and first-team All-MAC honors — Seattle selected Delaplane in the 23rd round of the 2017 draft.

His most-lethal weapon had yet to evolve and blossom. It wasn’t until after Delaplane got into pro ball that he “flipped the switch” and turned a hook into what Longenhagen described as a “power, Brad Lidge-style slider with late, downward movement.”

Defining Delaplane’s best offering is a matter of semantics. 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 »