The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

In a home run-saturated era, Ichiro Suzuki stood out. Before coming stateside, the slightly-built superstar earned the moniker the “Human Batting Machine” from Japanese media, and he hardly missed a beat upon arriving in Seattle in 2001, slapping singles and doubles to all fields in such prolific fashion that he began his major league career by reeling off a record 10 straight 200-hit seasons. Along the way, he set a single-season record with 262 hits in 2004, and despite not debuting until age 27, he surpassed the 3,000-hit milestone. Between Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, he totaled 4,367 hits, making him the International Hit King — a comparison that rankled some, including the Hit King himself, Pete Rose.

Despite his small stature (listed at 5-foot-11, 175 pounds), Suzuki was larger than life, an athlete on a first-name basis with two continents full of fans. Wearing “Ichiro” on the back of his jersey — his manager’s idea of a promotional gimmick — he built his legend in Japan by winning seven straight batting titles (1994–2000) and three straight MVP awards for the Orix Blue Wave, whom he led to a Japan Series championship in 1996. When he joined the Mariners, he faced widespread skepticism about whether his style of play would translate, because while NPB star Hideo Nomo had enjoyed considerable success with the Dodgers upon arriving in 1995, no Japanese position player had made the transition to MLB before. The Mariners — who within the previous two years had shed superstars Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Alex Rodriguez from their squad — won Suzuki’s rights and signed him, but his struggles in his first spring training caused manager Lou Piniella concern. Yet it all worked out, and in spectacular fashion. Suzuki led the AL with a .350 batting average, won Rookie of the Year and MVP honors while helping the Mariners to a record 116 wins, and began 10-year streaks of All-Star selections and Gold Glove awards.

All of this played out during a time when sabermetricians downplayed the value of batting average relative to on-base and slugging percentages. Like Derek Jeter, Suzuki was more a fan favorite than a stathead one, though his additional contributions on the bases and in right field helped him rank third among all position players for that decade-long stretch with 54.8 WAR, trailing only Albert Pujols (81.4) and Rodriguez (71.5). But Suzuki wasn’t just about the numbers. Beneath his near-religious devotion to routine burned a competitive fire that was offset by a sly sense of humor, both of which featured copious quantities of f-bombs that were hardly lost in translation, to hear others tell the stories. Read the rest of this entry »

As a player’s body changes over time, the same movements he used to make may not work well for him anymore. Adjusting to these changes (or not) will make or break his career. These changes have been especially stark for Giancarlo Stanton. The 35-year-old slugger serves as an interesting case for observing how great hitters can alter their swings over time to adjust to their changing physical attributes.

Stanton had a 116 wRC+ in 459 plate appearances in 2024 – the 15th season of his career. That’s nearly identical to the 118 mark he set across 396 plate appearances as a rookie in 2010. The difference between Stanton then and now, though, is night and day. Let’s take a look at Stanton at age 20 to get an idea of what his swing was like during his first major league season:

Open stance, non-neutral shin angle, slight hand row. None of these things are currently present in Stanton’s swing. None. When he came up, he looked like an uber-athletic NFL tight end. He could run well, move fluidly, and was twitchy enough to have a bit of extra movement in his swing (compared to recent years) and still have success. Yeah, he struck out over 30% of the time in his rookie campaign, but he was still learning big league pitching. He boasted a 141 wRC+ the following season with a very similar swing. It wasn’t until his third season where there was an obvious change. This was when Stanton showed what he was really capable of at the plate (and when he started going by Giancarlo):

Now that’s what I’m talking about. These are truly Stantonian homers here. In 2012, Stanton raised his wRC+ to 158, delivering 5.1 WAR in just 123 games. He cemented himself as one of the scariest sluggers in the game, and much of that should be attributed to his mechanical adjustments. He changed his stance to a neutral position and raised his hands up a considerable amount. From this point on, his hands would stay in a higher slot. His hand row from the previous two seasons always brought him to a higher point than where he started in his setup. As a player with 80-grade power, he didn’t really need that extra movement to create force. Depending on your body type (arm length, upper body flexibility, etc.), swinging a flat bat from a high slot makes it easier to get your bat on plane. Since he wasn’t the type of hitter who varies his shoulder plane all that much, it was a logical change to simplify his approach.

Even with these changes, we’re still pretty far off from where Stanton has been over the last few seasons. He maintained these mechanics throughout 2012 and 2013. However, during this time, health became an issue. He missed time in both of these seasons for knee, abdominal , ankle, thigh and shoulder injuries. Without biomechanical data, we can’t definitively say these injuries forced his body to change and/or he had to adjust his swing to compensate for his compromised health, but my goodness, those are injuries almost from head to toe! It wasn’t until the 2014 season that Stanton played over 140 games in a single season. And unsurprisingly, he came into that year with another modified setup:

This is the first time in his career where we saw Stanton narrow his stance. I’m theorizing here, but taking away movement could have had two benefits for him: Similar to my point before, he is so strong that he never really needed to move all that much to create power, and less movement would give him a better shot at making contact. Second, by narrowing his stance and not crouching as much, he would put less stress on his body. He ended this season with a 161 wRC+, the highest mark of his career. He also remained healthy until the middle of September, when he was hit in the face by a pitch that prematurely ended his season.

The narrowed stance kept working for him in 2015. Across his 74 games to start the year, he scorched 27 home runs — a full-season pace of 58. But on June 26 — his 74th game — he broke his hamate bone swinging at some point during his final two at-bats, both strikeouts, and missed the rest of the season.

The one thing about Stanton’s swing that he has never really reconciled is that he doesn’t decelerate much. I think this is a big reason why we see such egregious whiffs from him. Once he gets started, there is no slowing down. It also comes with some added risk of injury. This is such a violent swing, and his body bears the brunt of that force because he doesn’t have the brakes in place to come to a controlled stop.

Although he was healthy to start the season in 2016, it was clear the injury had compromised him. By the end of the year, he’d completely gotten away from the setup that he’d had so much success with before the hamate injury. In fact, he returned to a similar stance that we saw from him early on in his career:

Forward lean, slightly open hips, and more knee bend. Sound familiar? That’s because this is essentially rookie year Stanton, not the great hitter he was in 2014-2015. His performance also reverted back to where it was in 2010; his 118 wRC+ in 2016 was identical to his mark as a rookie. It makes sense, then, that he ditched this setup in 2017. Closed stance Stanton has entered the chat:

Stanton didn’t close his stance off until about June, but he didn’t run it back the first few months with the stance he used during his down 2016 season. He came into 2017 with the same stance he had in 2014-2015, when he was raking. But from the summer on, he closed things up, finishing the season with 59 home runs and winning NL MVP. It was a special run that completely took off due to another mechanical change – probably the most important of his career.

Stanton was traded to the Yankees following the 2017 season and showed up with the same exact setup, and for good reason. After struggling big time out of the gate, he ended up with a 128 wRC+. Not great but still very good. He was healthy for pretty much the entire season too, playing in 158 games. Then in 2019, the injuries piled up. After a knee injury that kept him out for almost the entire year, he returned in the playoffs and sustained a quad injury. Then it was hamstring injury that limited him to 23 games during the shortened 2020 season. Over the two years, he played in a total of 61 regular season games.

Unlike other times in his career, Stanton’s injuries in those seasons didn’t lead to a mechanical overhaul. At this point in his career, he knew what the best version of himself looked like. If he could get his body back to feeling healthy, it made sense not to go through any big changes. And in 2021, that worked out well. He swatted 35 homers in 139 games and finished with a 138 wRC+. He suffered a minor quad strain early in the season, but other than that, he was healthy all year.

Though he missed 10 days with a minor calf strain in late May/early June, Stanton was also mostly healthy for the first half of 2022, and he hit well enough to make the All-Star team (133 wRC+ during the first half). But then the lower body injuries returned, and this time they were even lower than before. He made it three days into the second half before landing on the IL with Achilles tendonitis. He missed just over a month, and when he came back in late August, it took him about two weeks to get going. He also had a minor injury scare when he fouled a ball off his foot on September 5; he wasn’t in the lineup for the Yankees’ next four games, though he did pinch hit in two of them. He caught fire upon returning to the lineup on September 10, posting a 133 wRC+ with seven home runs over his final 79 plate appearances of the regular season.

Still, these particular injuries represented a new challenge for Stanton. As a closed-stance hitter, he is far more reliant on his connection to the ground, making these repeated injuries from the ankle downward especially concerning. Not only does he have to regain his strength, but he also has to figure out how to move in space and interact with the ground. This gets more difficult for players as they age and the injuries compound. The thing about Stanton, though, is he has always been willing to tweak his mechanics. However, he needed to hit rock bottom before deciding to go away from the setup that he’d had so much success with for so long.

Health was a problem for Stanton again in 2023. He strained his hamstring in April and missed almost two months. Upon his return, he was far off from his diminished 2022 form, when he finished the year with 113 wRC+, which to that point was the worst mark of his career. His 86 wRC+ to end the year was bleak. He stayed healthy after his return, but the awful performance brought up the question: Was this just too much for him to overcome? For Stanton, the answer was to do what he had done so well for his entire career. He made some more changes, this time to his mechanics and his body.

There was a lot of discussion around Stanton’s adjustments at the beginning of 2024, including this comprehensive look from Jay Jaffe. In short, the main point was that he slimmed down (a lot!) and shifted closer to the neutral setup he had from 2014 and 2015 rather than the extreme closed stance he had employed beginning in June of 2017.

This goes back to the talk about matching your swing to your physical attributes. Stanton has dealt with so many lower body issues over the last five years, and they have impacted what he can do physically. He couldn’t sustain the same movement pattern in the closed stance with his current body, so he went to a similar version of the swing that his body could handle. His regular season still wasn’t great, but it was a major step up from the year before. And when you consider the show he put on in October, it’s safe to say his changes worked pretty well overall. For a last look, let’s see where he stands as of October, from a mechanical perspective:

Whatever your opinion is of Stanton’s career, how he projects for the rest of it, or anything related to that, there is no denying that what he has done throughout the last 15 years has been remarkable. There aren’t many hitters who can change as much as he has and still have success. A big part of being a great baseball player is making adjustments. Stanton has done that incredibly well for a long, long time.

The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Even in an era brimming with colorful characters and exceptional hurlers, Luis Tiant stood out. The barrel-chested, mustachioed Cuban righty combined an assortment of exaggerated deliveries with a variety of arm angles and speeds that baffled hitters — and tantalized writers — over the course of a 19-year major league career (1964–82) and an affiliation with the game in one capacity or another that extended through the remainder of his life. “The Cuban Dervish,” as Sports Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite christened him in 1975, died on October 8 at the age of 83. No cause of death was announced.

The son of a legendary Negro Leagues and Latin American baseball star colloquially known as Luis Tiant Sr. — a skinny lefty, in contrast with the burly physique of his right-handed son — the younger Tiant was exiled from his home country in the wake of Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro’s travel restrictions, and separated from his family for 14 years. Against that backdrop of isolation, “El Tiante” went on to become the winningest Cuban-born pitcher in major league history, and to emerge as a larger-than-life character, so inseparable from his trademark cigars that he chomped them even in postgame showers. On the mound, he was a master craftsman whose repertoire of four basic pitches (fastball, curve, slider, and changeup) combined with three angles (over-the-top, three-quarters, and sidearm) and six different speeds for the curve and change yielded 20 distinct offerings according to catcher Carlton Fisk.

I covered Tiant’s life at length — and I mean length — here at FanGraphs shortly after he passed. Now that he’s a candidate on the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, I invite you to (re)read that profile for the biographical details of the man’s fascinating life and career, which began with Cleveland (1964–69), and included stops with the Twins (1970), Red Sox (1971–78), Yankees (1979–80), Pirates (1981), and Angels (1982). I’m devoting this space to a more thorough review of his case and quest for Cooperstown in the context of this ballot, particularly as he’s competing for votes with one of his former teammates and contemporaries, Tommy John.

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Tiant finished his career with a collection of accolades that at first glance looks a little light for a Hall of Famer. He won two ERA titles, posting a 1.60 mark in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, and a 1.91 mark in ’72, when after a three-season odyssey of injuries, different uniforms, and diminished effectiveness he worked his way from the bullpen to the rotation and became a Boston folk hero. While he additionally led his league in shutouts three times, he doesn’t have much additional black ink when it comes to traditional stats. He made just three All-Star teams and never won a Cy Young award, topping out with a fourth-place finish in 1974, as well as fifth- and sixth-place finishes. That’s a little misleading, however. In 1968, he accompanied that 1.60 ERA with a 21-9 record in 258 1/3 innings, but that year Denny McLain became the first pitcher in 34 years to top 30 wins, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA in 336 innings. It was only the year before that the Cy Young had been split into separate awards for each league, and voters could submit only one name; not until 1970 would they be allowed to submit a top three. McLain won unanimously, but it’s quite possible that Tiant would have finished second if voters had been allowed larger ballots; in the MVP voting, he tied for fifth with the Orioles’ Dave McNally (22-10, 1.95 ERA in 273 innings), with McLain (who won both MVP and Cy Young) the only pitcher above them.

As it is, Tiant scores a modest 97 on Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor, which measures how likely (but not how deserving) a player is to be elected by awarding points for various honors, league leads, postseason performance and so on — the things that tend to catch voters’ eyes. A score of 100 is “a good possibility,” while 130 suggests “a virtual cinch.”

Speaking of the postseason, Tiant was very good within a limited footprint, going 3-0 with a 2.86 ERA in 34 2/3 innings. The fractional two-thirds of an inning came in mopup duty with the Twins in 1970, the rest in ’75 with the Red Sox. He threw a complete-game three-hitter with just an unearned run allowed in the ALCS opener against the A’s; a Game 1 shutout against the Reds in the World Series; a four-run, 155-pitch complete game on three days of rest in Game 4 — a start that’s the stuff of legends; and then a valiant seven-inning, six-run effort in Game 6, when he faltered late but was saved by Carlton Fisk’s famous 12th-inning homer. Had the Red Sox won Game 7, this “hero of unmatched emotional majesty” (as Peter Gammons called him) might well have been the World Series MVP.

Whether or not Tiant’s basic numbers scan as Hall-worthy depends somewhat upon the era to which you’re comparing them. Pitcher wins are an imperfect stat to begin with for reasons statheads have spent the past 40-plus years explaining, but historically they’ve remained foremost in the minds of Hall voters, and so I think the following is at least somewhat instructive. Of the 53 pitchers who have collected somewhere between 210 and 249 career wins, just 15 are in the Hall, nine of whom began their major league careers before 1920. None debuted during the 1921–49 stretch; of the other six, four arrived in the 1950–65 range, namely Whitey Ford (236 wins, debuted 1950), Jim Bunning (224 wins, debuted 1955), Juan Marichal (243 wins, debuted 1960), and Catfish Hunter (224 wins, debuted 1965). The other two reached the majors over two decades later, namely John Smoltz (213 wins, debuted 1988) and Pedro Martinez (219 wins, debuted 1992).

Meanwhile, of the 38 pitchers in that 210–249 win range who aren’t enshrined, 11 debuted prior to 1920, six more in the 1921–49 period unrepresented within the first group, three in the 1950–65 range (Mickey Lolich, Jim Perry, and Tiant), 11 in the 1966–87 span, and then eight from ’88 onward, including three still active or not yet eligible (Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Max Scherzer). If we set aside the pre-1950 group and the ones not yet eligible, that’s six out of 24 pitchers in this range who are in the Hall versus 18 outside. While none of the outsiders won a Cy Young, neither did Bunning or Marichal. Run prevention-wise, Hunter is the only Hall of Famer from this group with a lower ERA+ (104) than Tiant (114). Even so, Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, Kevin Brown, and Curt Schilling are all outside with an ERA+ in the 117-127 range.

Viewed from this vantage, it shouldn’t be surprising that Tiant didn’t get elected. But when he first became eligible, on the 1988 BBWAA ballot, he had reason for optimism given that Hunter — statistically the most like Tiant as expressed by his Similarity Score (another James creation) — had been elected just the previous year with a comparable win-loss record and ERA (224-166, 3.26 ERA) to Tiant’s marks of 229-172 and 3.30. The second-most similar pitcher to Tiant by that method, Bunning (224-184, 3.27 ERA), had received 70% on that same ballot. While slugger Willie Stargell was the only candidate elected via the 1988 ballot, Tiant received 30.9%, far short election but a debut hardly without promise; meanwhile, Bunning inched up to 74.2%.

Alas, both pitchers got lost in the shuffle on the 1989 ballot. Not only did Johnny Bench and Carl Yastrzemski both debut and gain easy entry with vote shares in the mid-90s, but Gaylord Perry and Fergie Jenkins also debuted, both with more robust résumés than either Tiant or Bunning in terms of statistics and honors. Both were former Cy Young winners with more than 3,000 strikeouts, with Perry owning a second Cy Young and membership in the 300-win club as well. Bunning fell back to 63.3%, while Tiant slipped to 10.5%.

First-year candidate Jim Palmer, a three-time Cy Young winner, jumped the line to gain entry in 1990, as Bunning slid to 57.9% and Tiant to 9.5%. When Jenkins and Perry were elected in 1991, Bunning aged off the ballot (he would be elected by the Veterans Committee in ’96), while Tiant sank even further, to 7.2%. He had missed his window; after Jenkins’ election, it would take until 2011 for another starter with fewer than 300 wins (Bert Blyleven) to gain entry via the writers. As “That Seventies Group” reshaped expectations for Hall starters’ credentials, Tiant never even climbed back to 20%, topping out at 18% in 2002, his final year on the ballot.

Tiant’s candidacy has fared similarly amid ever-changing ballot formats since then. In three appearances on the Veterans Committee ballots (2005, ’07, ’09), he maxed out at 25%. He’s now on his fourth appearance on an Era Committee ballot. He was considered alongside the likes of future Hall of Famers Kaat, Ron Santo, Gil Hodges, Minnie Miñoso, and Tony Oliva, plus this ballot’s Ken Boyer as part of the 2012 Golden Era Committee ballot, for candidates who made their greatest impact on the game during the 1947–72 period, as well as a similar cast that also included this ballot’s Dick Allen three years later. In both cases, he fell short of the level of support needed to have his actual vote total announced; customarily, the Hall lumps together all of the candidates below a certain (varying) threshold as “receiving fewer than x” votes to avoid embarrassing them (or their descendants) with the news of a shutout. When the Hall reconfigured the Era Committee system in 2016, Tiant wound up classified within the Modern Baseball Era (1970–87); after finishing below the threshold for vote totals on the 2018 ballot, he was bypassed for the ’20 one, a ballot that finally gave Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker their first shots.

As you can see from the table above, Tiant’s Hall of Fame Monitor score (HOFM) is the lowest of the group, but he fares better via advanced metrics. He ranked in his league’s top 10 in WAR eight times, leading in 1968 (8.5) and finishing fourth in both ’72 and ’74. While he cracked the top 10 in ERA just four times, he did so in ERA+ seven times (including the two league leads), a reminder that toiling in hitter-friendly Fenway Park may have cost him some recognition. While he’s on the lower side of That Seventies Group in terms of S-JAWS, the adjusted version of my Hall fitness metric that tones down the impact of high-volume innings totals from earlier eras, his ranking is still impressive. The newer version jumps him from 59th overall to tied for 42nd with Palmer and Smoltz, two pitchers generally considered no-doubt Hall of Famers; meanwhile, he’s 45th in both career WAR and in adjusted peak. Voters won’t see another candidate above those rankings until Kershaw and friends (a quartet that also includes Justin Verlander) become eligible.

In introducing S-JAWS, I noted that Tiant is below the standard — the mean of all enshrined starters — but basically at the median (53.6). While he doesn’t particularly stand out next to a cohort of 300-game winners, he’s got much stronger advanced stats than Hunter (who nonetheless had a Cy Young and five championships going for him) and Kaat (a Cy Young winner but a compiler whose lengthy broadcast career helped his 2022 Era Committee election). His S-JAWS equals or surpasses some other enshrinees whose careers overlapped, such as Don Drysdale (53.7), Marichal (53.2), Bunning (51.4), Ford (45.5), Sandy Koufax (44.2), and Jack Morris (37.4), but those pitchers all have higher Monitor scores, with Bunning (98) the only other one below 100. The enshrined starters he outranks in S-JAWS mostly had shorter careers in earlier eras, where innings totals were higher and runs even more scarce.

I’ve wavered on Tiant, mainly in light of older versions of JAWS and in direct comparison to his Era Committee competition, because even beyond the numbers his case hasn’t always jumped out. On my virtual 2018 Modern Baseball ballot, I tabbed Marvin Miller, Alan Trammell, and Ted Simmons, but left my fourth slot empty because I didn’t see any of the other seven candidates (Tiant, John, Morris, Steve Garvey, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, and Dave Parker) as strong enough. Morris was elected, but Tiant is by far the strongest of that group by JAWS if not more traditional reckonings. If I had a do-over, factoring in his cultural importance as one of the most high-profile Cuban player success stories, from battling racism in the minors after being cut off from his family to his mid-career comeback and emergence as a folk hero, I’d consider him more strongly — but including him on that ballot would have hinged upon how much extra weight to give John for his own comeback after the pioneering elbow surgery that bears his name.

I’m still wrestling with Tiant versus John on this ballot. Tiant — who pitched in the same rotation with John in Cleveland, New York, and Anaheim — is squarely ahead on a performance basis, and in a vacuum I think he’s Hall-worthy; I’m pretty solidly in favor of any post-integration pitcher with an S-JAWS of 50 or higher. What I’m less sure of is whether Tiant will emerge as one of my top three on my virtual ballot, or whether Hall voters’ unfortunate history of waiting until after a candidate’s death to recognize them — see Santo, Miñoso, and Allen for just the latest in the litany — suggests that I should put aside my soft resistance to the 81-year-old John and prioritize voting for him while he’s still around to appreciate the honor. With three more candidates to evaluate, I have a bit longer to think about it.

Aaron Judge is the best hitter on the planet. Over the last three seasons combined, he has a 202 wRC+. We’re witnessing one of the best stretches by any hitter in baseball history, full stop. The fact that a player as great as Judge can struggle as much as he did this postseason (113 wRC+ in 64 plate appearances) is telling of how slumps can happen to anybody at any time, regardless of talent. You could chalk it up to randomness, and you’d probably be right, but randomness doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for it.

For example, hitters can find their mechanics out of whack, sometimes with no explanation. When that happens, they look to address the inefficiency and get themselves back on track. Sometimes it’s bad luck, but oftentimes it’s mechanics. Those blips can explain why hitters go through ups and downs. And depending on who you are and what your hitting style is, the fluctuations can be wide.

During the World Series, when Aaron Boone was asked if he thought Judge was pressing at the plate, he made a comment that stuck with me. Boone said, “… it can always be a little bit of a mechanical thing.” It’s not exactly clear if he meant that for Judge specifically or for all hitters, but regardless, I think it illuminates the mindset of players when they work through slumps. Depending on the shape or severity, it usually pushes hitters to get in the cage to figure out what tweak will unlock the best version of themselves. With Judge in particular, any mechanical issues can completely disrupt his bat path. Let me clarify that a bit further. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever, a recovery that gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended. Tommy John surgery has somewhat obscured the pitcher’s on-field accomplishments, however.

A sinkerballer who relied upon his command and control to limit hard contact, John didn’t overpower hitters; after his surgery, when the usage of radar guns became more widespread, his sinker — which he threw 85-90% of the time — was generally clocked in the 85-87 mph range. He paired the sinker with a curveball, or rather several curves, as he could adjust the break based upon the speed at which he threw the pitch. He was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. He made four All-Star teams and was a key starter on five clubs that reached the postseason and three that won pennants, though he wound up on the losing end of the World Series each time.

Thomas Edward John Jr. was born on May 22, 1943 in Terre Haute, Indiana. He cut his teeth playing sandlot ball and more organized games at Spencer F. Ball Park, a three-block square with about 10 baseball diamonds used for everything from pickup games to those of two rival high schools, Garfield and Gerstmeyer, the latter of which he attended.

At Gerstmeyer, John excelled in basketball as well as baseball, so much so that the rangy, 6-foot-3 teenager was recruited by legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, and had over 50 basketball scholarship offers but just one for baseball (few colleges gave those out in those days). When Rupp paid a visit to their household, the senior John told the coach that his son was probably going to bypass college to pursue professional baseball. As the pitcher recalled in 2015:

Rupp said, “Well, we have a pretty good baseball team down in Kentucky, and your son might even be able to make our team.” My dad never liked Rupp, but that really made him mad. He told Coach Rupp, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Rupp was furious. His assistant came in and tried to smooth things over, but it didn’t matter.

On the mound, John lacked a top-notch fastball but had a major league-caliber curveball that he learned from former Phillies minor leaguer Arley Andrews, a friend of his father. He pitched to a 28-2 record in high school, and while the Cleveland Indians scout who signed him, John Schulte, expressed concern about his inability to overpower hitters, he signed him nonetheless two weeks after John graduated from Gerstmeyer in 1961 — four years before the introduction of the amateur draft. Read the rest of this entry »

“Juan Soto hates swinging.” That’s a takeaway you’re sure to hear if you follow baseball this winter. His free agency is the biggest story of the next few months, and his offensive approach drives fans to distraction. Walks aren’t all that fun, and Soto feasts on them. How could you not bring it up when your team is pursuing him for a record-breaking deal?

From a certain standpoint, it’s true that Soto hates swinging. Of the 101 batters who saw at least 1,500 pitches with zero or one strikes this past season, Soto ranked 99th in swing rate on those pitches. When he isn’t defending the plate with two strikes, he spends a ton of time with the bat on his shoulder.

That’s not a specific enough way of looking at it, though. For an example, let’s chop the strike zone up into pieces. Soto saw 675 pitches that weren’t in the strike zone or even near it – what Baseball Savant defines as the chase and waste zones. He swung at 6.5% of those, 42nd out of the 44 batters who saw 500 or more such pitches. He was almost never fooled into swinging at awful pitches, in other words.

Next consider the edges of the zone – pitches that are either barely strikes or barely balls. There aren’t a lot of good options on these pitches. Hitters don’t generally crush the ball when it’s located on the corners, unless they’re sitting on either a pitch or a location. Sure, if you’re looking high and away, you might tag it, but more likely you’ll swing and miss or make weak contact. Soto swung at 31.3% of these pitches, the second-lowest rate in baseball.

Those pitches in the chase and waste zones? You shouldn’t swing at them. There, Soto’s patience is an obvious asset. The ones on the borderline? It’s less obvious. There are great hitters who take an expansive approach to borderline pitches, like Bobby Witt Jr. and Yordan Alvarez. There are awful hitters who do it too, as you’d expect. Swinging too much at offerings we call “pitcher’s pitches” is pretty clearly not going to pan out every time.

Likewise, discretion is no guarantee of valor. There are great hitters who, like Soto, mostly let these pitches go. Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber fit the bill. It’s not just high-walk-rate sluggers, either; Matt Chapman, Adley Rutschman, Nolan Arenado, and even Randy Arozarena behave this way. On the other hand, plenty of bad hitters take borderline pitches and are still bad.
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I’m using a new format for our postseason managerial report cards this year. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the Wild Card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series is so short. This year, I’m sticking to the highlights, and grading only the managers who survived until at least their League Championship series. I already covered Stephen Vogt and Carlos Mendoza. Today, I’m looking at Aaron Boone.

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in behind closed doors for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Luke Weaver and Brent Honeywell were also important contributors this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Juan Soto is important because he’s great, not because he won the 2019 World Series. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the start of 2013, the Dodgers have been the best team in baseball. Over that 12-season span, they’ve won the National League West 11 times, made it to the NLCS seven times, and made it to the World Series four times. Their 1,215 regular season wins are 95 more than the team in second place, and their 64 postseason wins are also the most in the game. Despite all that, until late Wednesday night, they’d only managed one championship. What deserves to go down as one of the most impressive dynasties in the history of the game has been consistently denied that sort of recognition because of the delightful, infuriating unpredictability of playoff baseball. During an absolutely wild World Series Game 5, that unpredictability finally worked in the Dodgers’ favor.

This paragraph is just a list of things that happened during Game 5, so hold on tight. There was a brief no-hit bid from one starter and a disastrous, abortive start from the other. There were monster home runs, broken bat singles, seeing-eye grounders, great defensive plays, calamitous errors, inexcusable mental mistakes, a five-run inning, a five-run comeback, unearned runs, nearly catastrophic baserunning decisions, a catcher’s interference, a disengagement penalty, a surprisingly high number of sacrifice flies, a starter coming in to get the save on one-day’s rest, and, I’m absolutely certain, a bunch of other stuff that I’m too fried to remember. The only thing that didn’t happen, thankfully, was two ding dongs grabbing Mookie Betts. In the end, the Dodgers were the team left standing, securing a 7-6 victory over the Yankees at Yankee Stadium for their eighth World Series title in franchise history and the second in the past five years. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Anthony Volpe’s go-ahead grand slam in the third inning will be what Yankees fans remember most from Game 4 of the World Series.

It was the highest-leverage swing of his young career, the most pivotal play in the most important game this organization has played in at least 15 years. It was the main reason why in the ninth inning, once the game was well out of reach, the majority of the 49,000-plus fans at Yankee Stadium were chanting his last name, which Volpe said was “definitely number one” on his list of coolest moments. It restored the Yankees some level of dignity as they avoided getting swept out of the Fall Classic with an 11-4 blowout win over the Dodgers.

Indeed, if the Yankees pull off a miraculous comeback and become the first team to win the World Series after losing the first three games, Volpe’s blast will go down as the biggest turning point in the State of New York since the Battle of Saratoga. If the improbable happens — if the home run is going to be more than a fun little footnote to just another failed season — we’ll have plenty of time to rhapsodize about the local kid’s signature Yankee Moment. For now, though, I’d like to dig into the two other runs that Volpe scored in Game 4 and the events that led up to them, as they offer a window into the most important element he brings to the Yankees offense: his baserunning. Read the rest of this entry »

Scheduling a bullpen game in the World Series is, to some extent, outside Dave Roberts’ control. More than half of his useful starting pitchers are on the IL, so he has to do something. Game 4 isn’t the perfect spot for Johnny Wholestaff — the way MLB’s playoff format works, it’s the only game of the series that isn’t adjacent to an off day — but it’s also the only spot in a four-man rotation that’s guaranteed to only come up once.

The Dodgers’ manager was fortunate, however, in that by the time Game 4 rolled around, his team was already up 3-0 in the series. No team has ever overturned such a deficit in World Series play, and only once in baseball history has a team come back from 3-0 in any best-of-seven series. This we all knew going in. I was mildly surprised to learn that history is even less kind to clubs that spot their opponents the first three games of a Fall Classic: Before this season, teams with the opportunity to sweep a World Series had won Game 4 21 times in 24 attempts.

So Roberts entrusted Game 4 not just to his bullpen, but to his low-leverage guys: Ben Casparius, Daniel Hudson, Landon Knack, and Brent Honeywell. Sure enough, his team lost. Read the rest of this entry »