I’m sure it feels fantastic to win a Cy Young or Most Valuable Player award. It’s all your hard work and dedication to your craft being rewarded at the highest possible level. Aaron Judge has won an MVP award himself after swatting 62 home runs in 2022. But this year, he was honored with an even more prestigious award — one separate from the game, and one that is dedicated to one of the most altruistic professional athletes of any generation, Roberto Clemente.

Each year, one player from every team is nominated for the Roberto Clemente Award, and one is honored as the recipient. Here are the criteria, via MLB.com: “The Roberto Clemente Award is bestowed annually to the player who best represents the game of baseball through extraordinary character, community involvement, philanthropy and positive contributions, both on and off the field.”

Winning this award is an incredible achievement for Judge, who started the ALL RISE Foundation in 2018 and has been a pioneer in supporting the Bronx, Fresno County, San Joaquin County, and his childhood home of Linden, California. The foundation facilitates several initiatives and programs including but not limited to student leadership development, youth character, health and well-being, and much more. Developing communities and providing the youth with the resources they need to become future leaders is at the crux of the foundation.

Judge is the first Yankees player to receive the award since Derek Jeter in 2009. Many baseball stars know the importance of using their resources to imbue the qualities of somebody like Clemente. But it is even more important for somebody like Jeter or Judge as public persons representing New York. Clemente is a hero, a legend — whatever word you want to use — to Puerto Ricans (and Latin America in general). And when I refer to Puerto Ricans, I’m talking about both those on the island and those who have migrated to the states, especially New York (Nuyoricans), of which there are many. Read the rest of this entry »

Clarke Schmidt had mixed results in his first season as a big league starter. The 27-year-old New York Yankees right-hander took the mound 33 times (including once as a reliever) and won nine of 18 decisions while logging a 4.64 ERA and a 4.42 FIP. Working primarily in five- and six-inning stints — 21 of his outings were between 5.0 and 6.2 innings — he allowed 169 hits and fanned 149 batters over 159 frames.

A new pitch played prominently in what is now a well-balanced repertoire. Schmidt added a cutter this year, and while it wasn’t his best offering results-wise — that honor goes to his curveball — it was his most used. All told, his usage breakdown was 28.1% cutters, 27.4% slider/sweepers, 23.9% sinkers, 19.1% curveballs, and 1.5% changeups.

Thirteen months ago, I sat down with Schmidt to discuss his sweeping slider, a pitch that was referred to in the subsequently published piece as a “baby whirly.” This past September, I circled back to hear about his cutter — and I had something else in mind as well. With the definition of “sweeper” increasingly becoming a matter of debate, I wanted to know how he currently labels the most horizontal of his offerings.

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David Laurila: What is the story behind your cutter?

Clarke Schmidt: “The reason they wanted me to add the cutter was lefties. The idea was that I could throw a fastball to lefties and be able to induce either A) weak contact or B) a swing-and-miss. That was the real reason, and then once I started throwing it we realized that my arm action was built even more for a cutter than they thought. The metrics on my cutter are really good. Analytically it became one of my best pitches, which is why they were like, ‘Why don’t we up the usage of this?’ Read the rest of this entry »

Hao-Yu Lee will be one of eight Detroit Tigers prospects participating in the forthcoming Arizona Fall League, and while he doesn’t possess the highest profile of the bunch, he does have the most-traveled backstory. Acquired from the Philadelphia Phillies at the trade deadline in exchange for Michael Lorenzen, the 20-year-old infielder hails from Taiwan and began dreaming of playing professionally in the United States at age 16 after a strong performance in a U-18 tournament, in Korea. Two years earlier he’d excelled in a tournament that took place 15-plus miles southwest of Comerica Park.

The Phillies signed Hao-Yu in June 2021—the Cincinnati Reds and Tampa Bay Rays were among the other MLB teams that had expressed interest — once he’d finished high school. No. 8 on our Phillies Top Prospects list with a 40+ FV coming into this season, he slashed .273/.362/.399 before going on the shelf with a quad strain in mid-August. He ended up playing in just eight games for the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps before missing the duration of the campaign.

The first big-league game Hao-Yu attended was in 2017 when he was competing in the Junior League World Series, which is held annually in Taylor, Michigan. He doesn’t remember if the Tigers won that day, but he does recall his first impression of Comerica Park. “I told my teammates that I was going to play here someday,” the confident youngster said of the experience.

He also remembers the tournament, and for good reason. Not only did Taoyuan, Taiwan capture the international bracket, they went on to beat Kennett Square, Pennsylvania in the finals. Moreover, Hao-Yu “raked that tournament; five games, five homers!” Read the rest of this entry »

Where is the line that tells you whether a pitcher is a starter or reliever? It’s subjective, but there are a few benchmarks that baseball folks have used over time to determine a pitcher’s role. Do they have more than two pitches? Do they have extreme splits? Does their velocity hold as their pitch count increases? Depending on the answer to any of these questions (and more), you’ll have a decent idea of a pitcher’s fate as a starter or reliever.

Sometimes, though, pitchers get moved to the bullpen simply because the other five options at any given time seem more viable, and not necessarily because they didn’t possess the skills to dish out six quality innings. The latter firmly describes Michael King.

King was a starter throughout his entire minor league career and even started a few games during his debut season in 2020 before settling into a long relief role in 2021 thanks to a crowded Yankees rotation. But the version of King we saw in the minors and those two seasons is not what he is now. For that, we have to reference his 2022 season, when he fully embraced his ability to supinate and started throwing his sweeper as his only breaking ball, upping the usage to 30%; the year prior, he only threw it 10% of the time. Before suffering a season-ending elbow fracture, he posted a 2.29 ERA and 2.23 FIP in 51 innings, delivering several multi-inning outings out of the bullpen.

On top of his sinker and sweeper, King displayed his ability to mix in his four-seamer and changeup at the right times, both of which have been crucial to his success as a starter; more on that later. That gave him a four-pitch mix where each pitch was at least average and more than one that was plus. That’s the exact kind of arsenal you’d expect a rotation arm to have, but coming off elbow surgery and bullpen success and facing another full starting five, the expectation wasn’t that he’d get the chance to pitch in that role. Read the rest of this entry »

They say everything in baseball happens in cycles. Actually, I’m not sure if they say that, but it certainly sounds like a real quote. And that’s fortunate for me, because today I’d like to talk about another thing that happens in cycles: Tommy Kahnle being a valuable reliever. Years after it seemed like that might never happen again, he’s back on the Yankees and pitching well, to the tune of a 2.66 ERA and 3.97 FIP across 40.2 innings of work, that despite a four-walk disaster of an outing on Wednesday night.

The last time Kahnle was good and healthy was also with the Yankees, in 2019. Before that, you’d have to go back to 2017 (split between the White Sox and Yankees). He was hurt and ineffective in 2018, then only pitched a combined 13.2 innings from 2020 to ’22 due to injury. But now here he is, back at it, though you might not know it thanks to the Yankees’ general desultoriness (probably not a word, but my spellcheck didn’t flag it, so let’s roll with it). Read the rest of this entry »

Gavin Williams came as advertised when I saw him pitch earlier this month. The 24-year-old rookie right-hander’s fastball topped out at 99.3 mph, while his slider sat in the mid-80s and occasionally topped 90. Allowing one hit and a lone run over five rain-delayed innings against the Minnesota Twins, Williams was all about power.

He also came as advertised when I spoke to him on the day preceding his outing. I was told that the 6-foot-6, 255-pound Cleveland Guardians hurler is a man of few words, and that was pretty much the case. While accommodating, Williams was anything but verbose. No matter. I largely got what I was looking for: a self-appraisal of what he brings to the table.

“Most people know me for my fastball, really,” the righty replied when I asked for a self scouting report. “That’s the main thing people know me as, and it’s what I know myself as.”

The Fayetteville, North Carolina native first hit triple digits during his freshman year at East Carolina University, and as meaningful as that milestone was to his identity on the mound, he recognizes that retiring big-league hitters takes more than pure velocity.

“I don’t think 96 to 100 is that big of a difference,” Williams said. “If it’s down the middle it can get hit. Putting it where you want to is a bigger thing. It also matters how it moves.” Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently, the Yankees can’t have nice things even after shifting their focus to next season. Less than two weeks into his major league career, and just two days after he hit the fourth home run of his brief stay with the Yankees, long-awaited prospect Jasson Domínguez — nicknamed “The Martian” for his otherworldly collection of tools — has been diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He’ll soon undergo season-ending surgery that will likely sideline him for part of 2024 as well.

The 20-year-old Domínguez, who has been on prospect hounds’ radars since he signed out of the Dominican Republic for a $5.1-million bonus in 2019, entered the season ranked 50th on our Top 100 Prospects list and third on the Yankees list as a switch-hitting 50 FV prospect with a projected ETA of 2025. He did not figure in the Yankees’ immediate plans for this season, having split his 2022 campaign between A-level Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. He finished the year with a 10-game cameo at Double-A Somerset; the last five of those games were in the Eastern League playoffs, capped by a two-homer, six-RBI performance in the championship series clincher.

This season, Domínguez hit .254/.367/.414 (117 wRC+) with 15 homers, 37 steals, and a 15.2% walk rate at Somerset, albeit with a dramatic improvement from the first half to the second. Before the All-Star break he scuffled, batting just .204/.345/.346 (95 wRC+) with 10 homers, 23 steals, and a 28.4% strikeout rate, numbers mitigated somewhat by his plate discipline (17.7% walk rate) and his age in a league where he was nearly four years younger than the average position player. He caught fire after the break, doing a better job of making contact and translating his 65-grade raw power into game power, hitting .354/.416/.549 with five homers and 13 steals from July 14 through August 20 while trimming his strikeout rate to 19.3%. He not only netted Player of the Week honors in the final week of his run at Somerset, he earned a promotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 3, Aaron Judge made a spectacular running catch that ended in a clash with the right field wall at Dodger Stadium. The play safeguarded what was ultimately a 6–3 victory that brought the Yankees’ record to 35–25 and their playoff odds to 80.1%, but both sides of the collision — wall and player — suffered tremendous damage in the process:

The fence wasn’t supposed to open in that direction, but Judge’s right foot wasn’t supposed to bend that way either; no amount of Spike Lee celebrations could change that.

The resulting injury to the towering right fielder’s big toe kept him out until July 28, and when he returned, expectations had diminished for both him and his team. The Yankees had gone just 19–23 in their captain’s absence, dropping their playoff odds to 32%. And there was no guarantee that the diminished version of Judge, who just three weeks earlier disclosed that the toe might never feel the same, would prop the Bombers back up. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Sparks had a solid playing career. The now Houston Astros broadcaster debuted with the Milwaukee Brewers two months before his 30th birthday, in 1995, and went on to toss butterflies in the big leagues through 2004. His best season came with the Detroit Tigers in 2001 when he logged 14 wins and posted a 3.65 ERA over 232 innings.

Sandwiched between the knuckleballer’s stints in Beer City and Motown were a pair of seasons in Anaheim, where his teammates included Orlando Palmeiro. According to Sparks, the left-handed-hitting outfielder wasn’t always a left-handed-hitting outfielder.

“He was originally a right-handed second baseman, but he broke his arm,” the pitcher-turned-broadcaster explained prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “He was ambidextrous to begin with, so he started playing the outfield throwing left-handed, and that’s how he remained. I played with Orlando, but he never told me that. Joe Maddon was a minor league field coordinator with the Angels, and he’s the one who told me.”

Sparks proceeded to point out that Palmeiro made the final out of the 2005 World Series against the Chicago White Sox while playing for the Astros.

Meanwhile, an outfielder whose best big-league seasons came with the Boston Red Sox played with Sparks on the rookie-level Helena Brewers in 1987. Read the rest of this entry »

Suffice it to say, the 2023 season has not gone the way either the New York Yankees or their fans had hoped. The team’s current nine-game losing streak is their longest in 41 years. And while the team’s 60-65 record isn’t on the same grim level as those of the Athletics or Royals, it’s still awful by the franchise’s typical standards. New York has teetered on the edge of .500 a few times recently, including being outscored in three of four seasons from 2013 to 2016, but you have to go back to 1992 to find the last time they crossed that negative line. Rather than tear everything down to the foundation when things go wrong, the Yankees tend to be a team that reloads and tries again next time. But can they do that this offseason?

The Yankees have had some bad breaks this season, but blaming everything on that would be a mistake. I’m not going to wax poetic about why this season has been so miserable — other writers have already laid out the club’s tale of woe — but we still need to review the basics to get a good view of where things truly stand. The pitching bears quite a lot of the blame. In detailing how the preseason PECOTA projections for the Yankees diverged from what has actually happened, Patrick Dubuque didn’t mince words at Baseball Prospectus:

Two of the Yankees’ seven starters have met expectations so far, and it’s their two worst ones. Injuries have pressed those sixth and seventh (and eighth) starters into service, even more so than our depth chart team anticipated. But when you imagine a collapse like the Yankees have had, you assume that it’s injuries. You envision Aaron Judge’s plate appearances replaced by Billy McKinney’s, like the world’s most unprepared Broadway understudy. While Brito and Randy Vásquez haven’t bailed the team out, they also didn’t make the hole. And at this point, it’s more hole than boat.

Read the rest of this entry »