Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, August 15

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is a great time for reflection in the baseball world. The trade deadline has passed, which means what you see is pretty much what you get roster-wise. The playoff picture is generally clear, but no one has clinched yet. It’s too early to think about postseason rotations, but too late to think about turning the year around. The urgency mostly isn’t there – unless you’re a Mets fan trying to ward off 25 years of ghosts, of course. But the downtime of the baseball season has its own small delights, and even when you aren’t watching the brightest stars on the biggest stage, baseball is awesome. So thanks as always to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the column format, and let’s get going.

1. Opportunity
The Twins might have traded away a ton of their major league roster at the deadline, but that doesn’t mean they’re filling up the lineup with replacement players they found at a local tryout. Seven of the nine everyday position players on the current squad were drafted by Minnesota in the first two rounds. The other two, Alan Roden and Kody Clemens, aren’t exactly nobodies – they’re both third round draft picks the Twins acquired this year, and of course Clemens’ dad is famous too.

It’s tough sledding for Quad-A players looking for a major league shot. But while the starters still look like your average major leaguer when it comes to their amateur pedigree, the bench is another matter. Mickey Gasper was a 27th rounder who didn’t debut until he was 28. But he’s only the second-most improbable Twin. Ryan Fitzgerald went undrafted in 2016, didn’t reach Triple-A until he was 27, and finally got his major league break earlier this year as a 30-year-old. He went 0-3 in a single game as an injury replacement, pinch-ran in another, and got sent back down. Sometimes life in the bigs is nasty, brutish, and short.

The deadline fire sale opened up some bench slots, though, and Fitzgerald is back in the majors. Sunday, he got his first big league start, and he made it count. He got things going early. His first at-bat brought his first big league hit:

Of course it was a home run (as replay confirmed). Of course it drove in Gasper. This is what realizing your big league dream after a decade of professional baseball looks like:

That homer was part of a well-rounded game. Fitzgerald added a line drive single, and he made a tough defensive play in foul territory:

Wait, let’s try that again. He made a tough defensive play in foul territory:

Yeah! Excellent work there. That’s a guy who isn’t going to let the tarp monster intimidate him.

Realistically, this is probably the beginning and end of Fitzgerald’s major league journey. He’s gotten into two games since then and gone 0-5. The trade deadline might have brought him opportunity, but it also brought a rejuvenated farm system, and Fitzgerald’s spot on the roster is tenuous even after all the retooling the Twins have done. There’s unlikely to be a storybook ending here, a sudden turn to stardom. Only 9,000 or so human beings in history have hit a home run in a major league game and now Fitzgerald is one of them. Is that the best thing you’ll hear about this year? No offense, Ryan, but hopefully not! There’s lots of cool stuff in the world. But it’s still pretty awesome.

2. Lockdown Relievers
The Braves got four effective outs to close out Tuesday’s contest against the Mets, with the last man out of the bullpen facing six hitters and retiring four. No one so much as reached second base. Great! Just one problem: It was Luke Williams pitching, and the Braves were down 13-5 at the time.

Spencer Strider put together the worst outing of his career to start the game. He gave up home runs to Francisco Alvarez, Pete Alonso, and Brandon Nimmo as the Mets hung eight runs on him over four innings. Hey, it happens. Those are pretty good power hitters, Strider’s fastball looks diminished in his return from elbow surgery, and he’s always been homer-prone even at his best.

Austin Cox came in next with a clear job: cover as many innings as possible. He needed 48 pitches to get through two and two thirds, but hey, he got eight outs! The Mets continued to tee off; Alonso and Alvarez each homered again, and Brett Baty got in on the act as well. That’s just what happens in blowouts. Successively worse pitchers pitch, and by definition, the batters are hitting well that day. Come the ninth, some poor position player is tapped to go out there and get clobbered. When Nick Kurtz hit four homers last month in an emphatic A’s win, he hit the fourth off of Cooper Hummel, who gave up four runs in an inning of work. Still, no one discounted that home run, or the team’s offensive outburst, because the A’s did their job so well that the other team sent in the backups.

Tuesday night could have been more of the same. The Mets have a great offense, recent swoon notwithstanding. Alonso’s first homer was the 253rd of his career, an all-time Mets record. Citi Field was festive, but it was also awash in nervous energy; the Mets were coming off of a massive losing streak and were looking for an offensive spark. The Braves are long-time rivals, a great group to take out your frustrations on. When the homers started to flow, the crowd and team both leaned into it. It felt like a perfect storm for a big crooked number as Williams mopped up.

The Mets didn’t even come close to following through on their earlier outburst, though. Williams’ “arsenal” consists of a slow fastball and a slower eephus. He’s up there to throw batting practice, in other words. But Alonso, the king of batting practice and a two-time Home Run Derby champion, lunged at a ball and flew out weakly:

Jeff McNeil gave Williams a chance to get some fielding practice in:

Even Cedric Mullins, who waited for a good pitch to hit, couldn’t do anything with it:

Williams is up to five (!) appearances this year. He has a better ERA – and better FIP, believe it or not – than either Strider or Cox. He’s a mop-up man par excellence, as the Mets discovered Tuesday night. It wasn’t to their chagrin, just so we’re clear – they won by eight runs. Those last four outs were absolutely delightful, though.

3. Achievable Goals
Wednesday night, the Angels beat the Dodgers 6-5 to move to 59-62 on the season. Their playoff odds rose from 1.7% to 1.8%. When you put it that way, the game doesn’t sound particularly consequential. But forget that – it was the biggest game they’ll play all year. That victory took their season record against the Dodgers to a perfect 6-0, a full-season sweep.

Make the playoffs? I’m sorry, but that wasn’t a realistic goal for the Angels this year. The statistical tyranny of a full season just doesn’t work that way. There are too many weak spots on the roster, too many games to fill, too many chances for the little places where the Angels can’t quite measure up to the class of the league to shine through. Finishing third place in the AL West? That’s both hard to achieve and unexciting. Health for the veterans and development for the youngsters? Boring! Every team wants those.

But to sweep your cross-region rivals, the consensus best team in baseball? To do so after they signed the best player in the sport off of your roster, then promptly won the World Series in his first year on the squad? And to knock them out of first place in the NL West in the process? It’s difficult but doable, the perfect goal for a team that isn’t hopeless but likewise isn’t playoff bound.

To make things even better, the last two games were incredible. Tuesday night, Zach Neto started a triple play against Shohei Ohtani, escaping a huge scoring opportunity for the Dodgers. It doesn’t get much more exciting than that. Then Jo Adell walked it off in the 10th inning. Seriously, try to think of something more exciting than turning this play in a rivalry game:

That win set up the last game of the season series, a chance to finish the season sweep Wednesday night. Like most things worth doing, it wasn’t easy. The Dodgers had a 5-4 lead heading into the eighth inning, but a leaky bullpen was their undoing. The Halos loaded the bases (walk, walk, botched sac bunt, infield single) and then Logan O’Hoppe lined a two-out single to take the lead, sending a packed home crowd into euphoria. Former Dodgers great Kenley Jansen closed things out, braving a fly ball to the warning track en route to the save. The team, crowd, and broadcast booth all erupted in joy as Bryce Teodosio squeezed the final out.

You think both teams didn’t care about this game? Look at how the normally mild-mannered Ohtani reacted to a wide called third strike in the eighth:

Look at how annoyed the Dodgers dugout got when Nolan Schanuel reached over a billion dollars of player contracts (Ohtani, Kershaw, Freeman) to half-heartedly gesture at a foul popup:

Not every team can come into the season with “win the World Series” as a believable goal. Heck, not every team can claim “make the playoffs” as a believable goal. The season’s too long. The gap between the haves and have nots is large. Smaller goals are great because they’re achievable. Even if “beat the Dodgers in six straight” isn’t likely, you can at least wrap your head around it. Using their old closer to do it? Beating your old star in the process? It’s a Hollywood ending in Hollywood. Let’s normalize smaller goals. It sure looks like a lot of fun when they work out.

4. Free Burgers!
Every team in baseball gets hot sometimes. Split the season into enough 10- or 12-game sets, and you’ll find little pockets of success from teams both good and bad. No team is as good as they look during a winning streak, or as bad as they look when the losses keep stacking up. The streaks don’t look the same for every team, though, and the Brewers might be the most exciting club to watch when they’re on a roll.

You can picture the highlights from a typical team’s excellent game. The sluggers hit some home runs; the pitchers strike out some batters. Those are great and valuable plays, but they’re not always good highlights — we get it, you hit the ball far and the other team couldn’t even make contact. But despite being second in the majors in runs, Milwaukee is 19th in dingers. Meanwhile, the team’s pitchers are just about average in terms of both their strikeout and walk rates.

No, Brewers highlights are just like the team itself: all speed and contact. A Milwaukee rally? It disproportionately features great baserunning and runs scoring in bunches thanks to piles of hits, walks, and steals. Defensively, they boast excellent fielders at most spots on the diamond and position everyone well. It’s still 5-4 on the scoreboard a lot of nights, but the Brewers get to their offense in a fan-friendly way and keep opposing runs off the board with some flair too.

In addition to having the best record in baseball right now, which always makes streaks more fun, the Brewers have one of the best fanbases in the majors. Wisconsin has historically punched well above its weight in terms of sports fandom, but that mostly means you can find a Packers fan in any sports bar in America (cheesehead optional but encouraged). The Brewers don’t inspire quite that level of devotion, but their games are always a great time. Particularly in the summer, with the roof open and school out of session, Brewers games feel like a party, and the team is providing great entertainment for the party-goers right now. It’s an absolute blast to watch them romp over teams both hopelessly outmatched (the Pirates) and monetarily superior (the Mets).

Even better, this recent winning streak alerted me to one of the most delightful traditions in the sport. George Webb, a local restaurant chain, offers free hamburgers to all customers every time the Brewers go on a 12-game winning streak. That’s about as rare as it sounds. George Webb, the eponymous restaurant founder, first hinted at the deal in the 1940s (!), when he predicted that the minor league Brewers would go on a 12-game winning streak. That didn’t happen, and by the time the Seattle Pilots re-established the Brewer name as a major league team in 1969, Webb had passed away.

No matter – his son kept the guarantee going, and it finally paid out in 1987 when the team started the year with a 13-game winning streak. It happened again in 2018, with a 12-game streak spanning the regular season and playoffs. The third George Webb giveaway in history? It’s going on right now thanks to Wednesday’s drubbing of the Pirates, the team’s 12th straight win.

First, what an incredibly cool promotion. If you’re doing a giveaway three times in 80 years, you’ve probably done something right. It has to be rare enough that it’s special when it happens, and yet popular enough that people still care about it even while it’s mostly not happening. And trust me, the people in Milwaukee know about this giveaway.

Brandon Woodruff told reporters he was more nervous about winning burgers for the city than about keeping the streak going. Fans had burger signs and props. The broadcast booth leaned into it with frequent updates on George Webb’s guarantee and a running discussion of how close to ready the burgers were. (The exact distribution plan isn’t set in stone, which makes sense for a promotion that happens once a quarter century.) I first learned about it because my mother-in-law is about to get a free burger for the third time – hi Janis! It’s a regional tradition, and it coincides with one of the most exciting teams in baseball doing what they do best.

5. Ascending Aces
The Reds are mounting a long-shot playoff bid right now, and they just got a huge boost, welcoming their best pitcher back to the rotation after months on the IL. On Wednesday, I tuned in both to see Hunter Greene’s return and to watch hipster ace Cristopher Sánchez (he’s an ace, but only people who are too cool for mainstream players know it yet) continue his recent run of success. The game didn’t disappoint.

Greene is in the middle of a dominant two-year stretch, with a 2.67 ERA and great peripherals to match. He’s doing it in one of the toughest parks in the majors, and with a poor defense behind him to boot. That’s okay, though, because he’s striking out nearly a third of his opponents. The Phillies were no match for his bludgeoning fastball:

Or his knife-sharp slider:

It was no guarantee that he’d look so sharp; again, this was his first start after a long layoff. But after shaking off a bit of rust, particularly on his sparingly used splitter, Greene picked up right where he left off. Over six innings and 85 pitches, Greene looked every bit as good as he ever has. He struck out six Phillies, allowing just three hits and no walks, and generally looked like the kind of pitcher teams are tripping over themselves to start in big games. Heck, even the splitter looked sharp by the end of his outing:

Sánchez was nearly as good. He, too, struck out six batters, and kept the Cincinnati offense off balance all day. Through five innings, he’d allowed only a single run, with both teams scuffling for any semblance of offense. The Reds finally broke through in the sixth with a three-spot, driven by Elly De La Cruz’s speed and a messy defensive sequence:

Someone has to win these games, of course, but I found myself wishing both pitchers could win. The current cast of elite pitchers could use a few new members. Greene has been a presumptive future star for years now, and he’s finally putting all of his prodigious gifts together. Sánchez took a more roundabout route to the top, but he’s been one of the best in the majors this season.

In the doldrums of August, it’s easy to feel like baseball is all the same all the time. It’s not, though; there are new players, new stories, new teams to follow every day. This week was a great reminder of that for me; almost anywhere you look, there’s something cool going on, and these two pitchers adding their name to the list of must-watch stars at the same time was an unexpected treat.