This isn’t a round-numbered anniversary — next year will be 40 years — but every August 2, my thoughts invariably turn to Thurman Munson, particularly as a baseball-minded New York resident. Munson’s 1979 death, via the crash of a plane he was flying, remains a pivotal moment of my own childhood for the confrontation it forced with the mortality of the men playing the game. It robbed the game of an iconic player, one whose career I believe is worthy of a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

On Wednesday, the New York Times‘ David Waldstein published an account of Munson’s final moments and the events that led up to them, based upon depositions from two lawsuits that were recently uncovered by a Long Island lawyer named Allan Blutstein. Directed at Cessna (the airplane manufacturer) and FlightSafety International (the school where Munson learned to fly), the lawsuits were separately filed by the Yankees and the other by Munson’s widow, Diana.

The depositions include testimony from two of Munson’s most prominent Yankees teammates, Reggie Jackson and Graig Nettles, as well as manager Billy Martin. All three had flown with Munson — who had only begun flying in the spring of 1978 — less than three weeks before his fatal crash in flights that themselves were not mistake-free. Jackson and Nettles both testified that the oxygen masks deployed on theirs after a loud noise, while Martin recounted flames from one engine. Given that, it’s not hard to imagine the tragedy compounding into one that could have left an even bigger hole in baseball, and in the Yankees.

Waldstein’s story is not for the faint of heart. It grimly details the injuries Munson sustained when his plane crashed short of the runway at Akron-Canton Airport — due to pilot error brought on by fatigue and improper safety procedures, according to the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board — and his passengers’ failed attempts to save him.

You don’t need the blow-by-blow of his demise to appreciate Munson’s career, however. He packed a tremendous amount into his 11 major league seasons: seven All-Star appearances (six straight from 1973-1978), three Gold Gloves, an AL MVP award (with support in six other seasons), an AL Rookie of the Year award, and a central role on a team that won three straight pennants (1976-1978) and two championships. He excelled on both sides of the ball; five times he hit for at least a .300 batting average with a wRC+ of at least 120 (his career mark was 116) and twice he led the league in caught stealing percentage, throwing out more than half the baserunners who tried to steal against him.

Drafted with the fourth pick out of Kent State University in 1968, Munson broke in with Double A Binghamton that summer and played just 99 games in the minors before making his major league debut on August 8, 1969, the start of a 26-game cup of coffee. In 1970, the 23-year-old backstop took over the Yankees’ regular catching duties and hit .302/.386/.415 with six homers and a 127 wRC+ in 526 plate appearances. Defensively, he threw out 52% of would-be base thieves. His 5.5 WAR (the Baseball-Reference version, since we’re in the Hall of Fame realm here) ranked 11th in the league and tops among all catchers. He came within one vote of being a unanimous selection for AL Rookie of the Year, and the Yankees, who had maxed out at 83 wins during the 1965-1969 stretch, went 93-69, their best record until 1976.

Munson had his offensive ups and downs over the next couple of seasons, with good on-base percentages offsetting sub-.400 slugging percentages. He was worth a combined 7.6 WAR in 1971-1972, but in 1973 he broke out to his .301/.362/.487 with 20 homers, a 141 wRC+ and 7.2 WAR, numbers he would never surpass; the last mark ranked third in the league. That kicked off a five-year stretch during which Munson hit .299/.347/.438 for a 123 wRC+, averaging a hefty 622 plate appearances, 16 homers, six steals and 5.4 WAR per year.

In 1976, Munson helped the Yankees to their first playoff appearance since 1964, hitting .302/.337/.432 with 17 homers, 14 steals, 105 RBI (his second of three straight years topping 100), a 126 wRC+, and 5.3 WAR. It may not have been his best all-around season by the numbers, but when coupled with the Yankees’ 97 wins under Martin, it was good enough for him to garner 18 of 24 first-place votes in the AL MVP race. Though Munson went a combined 19-for-40 in the postseason, the Yankees were swept by the Big Red Machine after outlasting the Royals in a five-game ALCS.

The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series in both 1977 and ’78. The former year, Munson’s age-30 season, was a banner one (.308/.351/.462, 123 wRC+, 4.9 bWAR), but the latter (.297/.332/.373, 99 wRC+, 3.3 WAR) suggested that the grind of catching more than 10,000 innings in such a short timespan was taking its toll, particularly on his knees. He hit just six homers in the latter season, during which he played DH in 14 games and right field in 13. His bat came to life in both World Series; he went 8-for-25 in each, driving in seven runs in 1978. Indeed, he nearly always rose to the occasion in October, hitting .357/.378/.496 with three homers in 135 postseason plate appearances, and .373/.417/.493 in 72 World Series PA.

From a performance standpoint, Munson’s 1979 was looking a lot like 1978. Though he was the DH five times and started three times at first base, he caught 88 of the team’s 106 games through August 1 and hit .288/.340/.374, though with his still-steady defense, he was already to 2.4 WAR. After an 0-for-5 as a DH in the Yankees’ July 31 game against the White Sox in Chicago, he played just three innings at first base on August 1, then flew home to see his family in Ohio the next day; owner George Steinbrenner had granted him special permission to travel separately from the team.

The rest, alas, is history. To this nine-year-old Dodgers fan, Munson was, along with Jackson, one of the most seductively enjoyable players on the evil Yankees, one whose baseball cards I treasured. He wasn’t the first ballplayer I remember dying – sadly, Lyman Bostock preceded him by nearly a year – but Munson and the Yankees were staples of the televised games I’d witnessed to that point, Bostock merely an extrapolation from my baseball card collection and the daily box scores.

For all of his accolades and his .292/.346/.410 batting line, Munson finished his career with “only” 1,558 hits and 113 homers. Under the rules adopted by the Hall of Fame following the death of Roberto Clemente, he was eligible for the 1981 BBWAA ballot (not the 1980 one), but the writers, who had the first-year candidacies of Bob Gibson, Harmon Killebrew and Juan Marichal to consider among the 11 future Hall of Famers on the ballot, barely noticed. He received 15.5% of the vote, roughly one-fifth the support needed for election. The next year, with Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson both eligible for the first time, he sank to 6.3%, and he never reached double digits again during his 15-year run of eligibility.

Munson was similarly ignored when he appeared on three Veterans Committee ballots from 2003-2007, years where all of the living Hall of Famers were allowed to vote on a particularly expansive slate. Lost behind a handful of stronger or at least more popular candidates such as Ron Santo, Dick Allen, Gil Hodges, Minnie Miñoso, Tony Oliva and Joe Torre, Munson received single-digit vote totals each year. He did not appear on either the 2011 or 2014 Expansion Era Committee ballots, nor was he on the 2018 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, whose election of Jack Morris and Alan Trammell marked the first time since 2001 that any of the small committees elected a living ex-player.

Munson deserved better from the voters, because he’d laid a strong foundation for a spot in Cooperstown. Even with his death in the middle of his age-32 season, his 46.1 career bWAR ranks 14th all-time, about seven wins shy of the average Hall of Fame catcher. More importantly — most importantly given his abbreviated career — his 37.0 peak WAR, from his best seven seasons, is tied with fellow Yankees legend Yogi Berra for eighth all-time, a solid 2.5 WAR above the standard. Only five of the 15 enshrined catchers — contemporaries Gary Carter, Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk, and recent honorees Mike Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez — are ahead of him in this category. He’s 2.2 WAR ahead of Ted Simmons, another contemporary whose candidacy I felt strongly enough about to feature in The Cooperstown Casebook given the heft of his career numbers. If I do a second edition of the book, Munson will get a spotlight.

In short, Munson’s 41.6 JAWS is 2.4 points short of the standard, ahead of just six of the 15 enshrined. The only mistake he made was dying before rounding out his career with perhaps a couple more two-win seasons and enough lingering to escape the “Rule of 2,000” mob that has effectively short-circuited so many candidacies. His career is about a year ahead of where 31-year-old Buster Posey — winner of Rookie of the Year and MVP awards, as well as a three-time champion, but in the midst of an offensive decline — finds himself now:

Munson will next be eligible for inclusion on the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot. Here’s hoping he can join some combination of Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Keith Hernandez and Simmons, all of whom deserve a closer look from committee voters.

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on an awful umpire call from the Mexican League, discuss the all-time top power-plus-speed players, lament Johnny Cueto’s Tommy John surgery, and acknowledge Mike Trout overtaking Mookie Betts on offense. Then they bring on Fangraphs writer Meg Rowley to discuss baseball grumps, good and bad broadcasting, the role of the commissioner, how fans and writers should reckon with the Roberto Osuna story and other bad news besieging baseball, the progress the game has made, and the Mariners losing their lead in the AL wild card race.

Audio intro: No Doubt, "Suspension Without Suspense"
Audio interstitial: The Black Keys, "Things Ain’t Like They Used to Be"
Audio outro: Stars, "Progress"

Link to video of awful umpire call
Link to list of players with most HR+SB games
Link to Meg’s article about baseball grumps

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On June 15, the A’s lost to the Angels 8-4. For Oakland, it was their fourth consecutive loss, and it dropped them to a record of 34-36. At that point, the A’s were 11 games back of the Mariners, and while the underlying numbers suggested the standings should’ve been an awful lot closer than that, they weren’t, and there was little the A’s could do. You’ll remember it seemed like the AL playoff picture was already decided. The Mariners had a firm grip on the second wild card.

That race is now officially tied up. The A’s and the Mariners are both 18 games over .500. In the Mariners’ defense, it’s not like they’ve collapsed — since June 16, they’ve gone a mediocre 18-20. The A’s have gone a baseball-best 30-10. The Mariners have spun their wheels, while the A’s have caught fire. It looks like a coin flip the rest of the way. The playoff picture is settled no more.

How is it that the A’s have surprised as much as they have? How is it that baseball’s lowest opening-day payroll is currently tied for a playoff spot? Much credit has to go to the bullpen, led by Blake Treinen, Lou Trivino, and, now, Jeurys Familia. The bullpen has been incredible when it’s had to be. But as is always the case, this has been a team effort. Matt Chapman is a member of that team I’d like to bring to your attention.

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Gabe Kapler’s first season as a big-league manager is going well. Following a tumultuous 1-4 start that had more than a few Philadelphia fans in a tizzy, Kapler’s club has gone on to become one of baseball’s biggest surprises. Considered not yet ready for prime time by the vast majority of prognosticators, the youthful Phillies instead lead the National League East under his guidance.

Kapler himself was viewed by many as not yet ready for prime time. The 43-year-old former outfielder’s previous managerial experience consisted of one year in the minors, and that was back in 2007 in the South Atlantic League. He spent the past three seasons as the director of player development for the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he furthered his reputation of being innovative, if not a bit unorthodox, in his methods and approach.

He’s been a rock in his current role. With the month of August upon us, and his team firmly in contention for an unexpected playoff berth, Kapler has shown that he’s very much ready for prime time. He’s also proven — and this is something he expects from his players — that he can take a punch and get back up to fight harder and smarter the next day.

———

Gabe Kapler: “As a player, you don’t have a choice but to live and breathe the phrase ‘control what you can control.’ Baseball can be a brutal game. You square up every ball and nothing drops for a hit for two weeks straight, and every day you watch your average drop further with no end in sight. You feel sick, but you know, because of how many times you’ve done it before, to stay the course. You’re confident that you can recover.

“As a manager, I find myself leaning on that phrase even more than I did as a player. I trust in it, especially with recent exposure to the natural ebbs and flows. I’ve seen it work for people I trust and respect. While this season has been enlightening on many levels, my belief that our commitment to preparation, process, and constant iteration and improvement is the one constant, controllable aspect of this job. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets’ trade deadline strategy seemed a bit dysfunctional. They traded pending free agent Asdrubal Cabrera for an upper-level pitching prospect, which seems like a good idea. However, that was basically the one positive thing the Mets did. They also traded Jeurys Familia, but the return was incredibly light and could have been stronger if the Mets were willing to pay down any of Familia’s salary to get better players back. They added Austin Jackson and kept Jose Bautista for some reason. Keeping Devin Mesoraco wasn’t that terrible because he will probably pass through waivers. Zack Wheeler was shopped extensively but did not move. All of this comes on the heels of a public relations debacle regarding Yoenis Cespedes’ injuries, and a disappointing Tuesday ended with an exclamation point thanks to a 25-4 loss to the Nationals that night.

It certainly appears as though the Mets don’t know what they’re going. Even more concerning, the Mets might actually agree. The following words come from the Mets’ Assistant General Manager, John Ricco, in Ken Davidoff’s New York Post piece from deadline day.

“I think all that happened today is we did not make a trade by the trade deadline,” the assistant general manager said Tuesday in a conference call. “It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re headed into one direction or the other [on the starting rotation]. We’ll make a more informed decision this offseason.”

Davidoff further elaborates on the difficult task the next Mets General Manager faces with an organization in disarray and an ownership group that has repeatedly underfunded the team in an embarrassment to the franchise and the game. The Mets — who over the past half-decade have not been tanking nor rebuilding in a way that would justify a low payroll — haven’t had a payroll higher than 15th in MLB since the 2012 season. From 2000 through 2011, the Mets’ average payroll ranked fourth in baseball, congruent with their status in a massive media market as a club with good attendance and a great local television contract. The Mets are still in a massive media market, generate solid attendance, and have a great television deal, but over the past five years they’ve spent money like the Royals.

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Anyone who has ever studied statistics generally, and sabermetrics or other analytics specifically, will have at least a passing familiarity with the idea of sample sizes. I’m not a sabermetrician – nor do I play one on TV – but you can’t be a good trial lawyer without at least a decent understanding of statistics. And regardless of the statistic, it’s generally true that one game isn’t really all that useful. I mean, it’s useful in the sense that being entertained is useful, but it’s usually not useful in the sense that you can determine talent levels from it.

Enter the Nationals and Mets. They are both, in theory, Major League Baseball teams. They both play on the East Coast. And on July 31, as major league teams are wont to do, they played a baseball game. And when they were done, this had happened.

And as you might expect for a team that scored 25 runs, a lot went right for the Nationals. Daniel Murphy had three hits, hit two homers, and drove in six, yet had just a 0.10 WPA, because that’s what happens when your team scores 25 times. Tanner Roark, the Nationals’ starting pitcher, tossed seven innings of one-run ball and had two hits, including a bases-clearing double. Matt Adams and Mark Reynolds both homered for Washington, and neither of them even started the game. The Nationals walked eight times, had a hit batsman, racked up 26 hits and, as a team, hit .520/.593/1.000, which, in case you were wondering, comes out to a 311 wRC+ and a .646 wOBA. In other words, the Mets’ pitching staff allowed eleven more batters to reach base (35) than they got outs (24).

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On Sunday, I asked a few friends a question: what is your favorite sort of baseball play? One said a well-placed bunt for a hit on the third-base line. Another, preferring defensive highlights, elected for a smartly turned 6-4-3 double play with the shortstop going to his backhand, or else a home run robbed. One described the thrill of watching a pitcher who, after finding himself facing a bases-loaded, no-outs situation, manages to wiggle off the hook. Strikeouts swinging on a 100 mph fastball, and long balls that thump the batter’s eye, and outfield dances and coy smiles at a job well done, each answer was different, making up a tableau of the game’s joys.

For my part, I tend to be drawn to the interstitials between plate appearances, the little bits of tragedy or humor that bring alive the stats and those who make them, the funny faces that suggest a favorite passage from a book or that the pitcher has pooped himself. We can like so many different things, and baseball has room for all of them, the whimsy and rigor, the skill and struggle. It is your most compelling friend, your most interesting hang, a great, hard puzzle. It’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten, hearty and surprising. This is baseball’s greatest strength. It has so much to offer. But it also has some grumps.

…

I think we sometimes make the mistake of paying grumps too much attention. They’re so obviously grumps after all. When good fights present themselves, we should fight those good fights, but much of the grump’s grumping is so clearly just dumb, so plainly wrong, as to be beneath our sustained notice. This past Saturday, Braves broadcasters Joe Simpson and Chip Caray engaged in a bit of silly fuss over what the Dodgers wore during batting practice. They grumped. We chirped and rolled our eyes. We moved past it.

But on Monday, as we sifted through Sean Newcomb and Trea Turner’s tweets and subsequent apologies, and grappled with the Astros trade for Roberto Osuna, I kept thinking about Simpson and Caray. I thought about baseball, with all its room for what we like, also having room for hurt and pain. I kept thinking about how brittle our affection can be. I thought about that and those grumps, and I worried.

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Less than three weeks ago, in the context of a July 11 game that featured the longest pitching appearance by a position player since 1988, the earliest mound entry by one since 1979, and the first instance of multiple position players tossing multiple innings in the same game since 1956, I noted that the count of such instances for this season had already reached 29 (not including those of Shohei Ohtani), essentially guaranteeing a smashing of the single-season record of 36 (or 32, depending upon how you feel about Christian Bethancourt, whose conversion to the mound didn’t take), set just last year. In the 21 days since then — four of which were part of the All-Star break — an additional 17 non-pitchers have taken the hill, an average of one per day. On Tuesday night, we saw the worst of them, and perhaps the nadir of the entire genre, when the Mets’ Jose Reyes was battered for six runs by the Nationals while throwing 48 pitches in a single inning of work.

Reyes, who already has little business being on a major-league roster given his ineptitude as a position player (.182/.254/.240, -1.1 WAR entering Wednesday, when of course he homered twice!), entered a game in which the Mets trailed 19-1 in the eighth inning. Working with a fastball that averaged 81.5 mph and topped out at 86.9, and a curve that averaged 63.5, he retired Ryan Zimmerman on a fly ball, and then proceeded to allow the next six batters to reach safely: Juan Soto won a 10-pitch encounter with a double to rightfield, Matt Adams followed with a two-run homer to right-center (21-1), Michael Taylor and Matt Wieters both walked, pinch-hitter Mark Reynolds followed with a three-run homer (24-1), and then Trea Turner singled. Reyes got Anthony Rendon to fly out, but then Wilmer Difo tripled (25-1). Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Reyes then hit Zimmerman with a 54-mph curveball, after which Zimmerman pretended as though he might charge the mount. Finally, Soto flied out to end the debacle.

While a position-player pitching appearance is supposed to be either a break-glass-in-emergency desperation move (generally in extra innings) or a lighthearted farce that draws attention away from an otherwise unpleasant blowout, this was unpleasantness itself. In all, Reyes’s 48 pitches were three more than Jacob deGrom threw in a single inning on June 17 before being pulled out of concern for his health. Regardless of Reyes’s current playing ability or his status as a pariah in the wake of his 2016 domestic violence suspension, manager Mickey Callaway allowing him to toil that long was irresponsible, though it was at worst the second-most irresponsible act of the night following a dead-armed Steven Matz being torched for seven first-inning runs and then later examined for complaints of forearm tightness. Chalk it up as the umpteenth data point illustrating the team’s incompetence and lack of accountability when it comes to protecting its players.

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Yesterday, we cranked the ZiPS projection system through the American League standings in the wake of the trade deadline, churning out new AL playoff odds from the gears and turbines. Now, it’s the National League’s turn — and, this year at least, the best has been saved for second. The methodology is the same as for the American League yesterday. For those who purposely ignored that piece, regarding baseball’s junior circuit as a bunch of filthy upstarts, allow me to repeat it here.

To arrive at the standings forecasts below, I first began with the updated ZiPS projections as of the morning of August 1st, which includes my spin on the new depth charts. There’s some variation from the FanGraphs Depth Charts, but they tend to be in the same neighborhood given that the disagreements between playing-time predictions typically involve mostly fringe-type players; it’s not like one of us thinks Clayton Kershaw will start for the Dodgers and the other things they’ll release him or something.

After that, I “undid” every transaction made since June 15th, both reshuffling the depth charts as if the trades never happened and removing or adding the fractional wins that players have added to their new teams since those trades. Then… ZiPS-zap-zippity-zoop… out came the new projections and a bottom line of the changes in playoff odds.

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