If I have one criticism of Shohei Ohtani, it’s that he has singlehandedly ruined baseball’s great parlor discussions. Admittedly, this is the only valid criticism of Ohtani that I can think of. But questions like “Which player would you want to start a franchise with?” or “Who’s the most talented ballplayer you’ve ever seen?” are so much less fun now than they were a decade ago. First person to answer just says, “Ohtani,” and there’s a brief but grave silence until someone pipes up and asks if anyone is watching the new season of Billions.
Setting Ohtani aside, Fernando Tatis Jr. would be on my short list of most talented or dynamic baseball players I’ve had the good fortune to witness. In the past, I’d compared his physicality to that of a 3–4 outside linebacker, but watching him scramble around the diamond is like watching an alien who’s holding something in reserve so he doesn’t get outed by the humans. If that is his goal, Tatis is not doing a great job of blending in.
With Ben Lindbergh in Sweden on Ringer business, FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens joins Meg Rowley for a turn in the co-host chair. Ben and Meg begin (1:40) by discussing the disturbing allegations made against Rays shortstop Wander Franco over the weekend. They then banter (5:00) about the experience of watching baseball while on vacation, before turning their attention to Ben’s Five Things series, the sneaky delights of mid-sized Midwestern cities, the Braves scoring big against Danny Mendick, chalk preseason predictions (and Ben’s beef with Other Ben’s prognostication choices), which teams’ World Series odds might be too light (or too heavy), a milestone Juan Soto walk, players being over and underrated, announcers’ refusal to discuss no-hitters, the joy of local commercials on baseball broadcasts, the Cardinals’ and Pirates’ recent runs of relative success and futility, and who might shake up the standings down the stretch. They close with a Future Blast from 2046 (55:20) and an invitation to play Magic: The Gathering, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Last week over at Pinstripe Alley, I investigatedDJ LeMahieu’s recent hot streak. Naturally, he got injured as soon as I finished writing, but I went through with the piece nonetheless because I felt like I was onto something. Specifically, I noticed that LeMahieu’s struggles this year came when pitchers were challenging him more; as a result, he was swinging more, but proportionally, more of those swings happened to come on balls than when pitchers were being stingy with their strikes.
When attempting to contextualize LeMahieu’s hot stretch, I noticed another hitter who’s been on fire lately thanks to some improved discipline: Ha-Seong Kim. Over the past 30 days, he’s tied for the major league lead in WAR with Freddie Freeman at 2.1. Some of that production has come from his typically excellent defense, but Kim has been no slouch with the bat either; in that span, he’s posted a 189 wRC+, eighth-highest among 167 qualifiers. Perhaps most notably, he’s also tied (with Lars Nootbaar and Alex Bregman) for the second-best BB-K rate, behind only Marcus Semien.
Prior to that 30-day stretch, Kim’s swing rate was already a career-low, and his BB-K rate near a career-best. But his swing rate has dropped even further in the last 30 days, ranking second-lowest at 34.2% to Nootbaar’s 34.1%, and his BB-K rate has gone from negative to positive; now it’s definitely a career-best. Nootbaar has followed a similar trajectory: his swing rate was already a career-low and has sunk even further, and his BB-K rate is now approaching a career-best thanks to his own torrid month. Read the rest of this entry »
June 23, 2023, was a rough day for the Braves. They scored 10 runs but gave up 11 in a hard-fought battle with the Reds. It was the first time they’d given up more than ten runs all season, and the first time they’d scored double-digit runs and still lost in over a year. They blew two leads and couldn’t quite pull off the comeback at the end of the night.
Yet in the grand scheme of things, June 23, 2023, was an insignificant day for the Braves. By that point in the season, their playoff odds were 99.5%. Sure, they lost the game, but it was one of only four losses they would suffer all month. They went on to win the series and sweep their next two, increasing their playoff odds to 100% within the week. The Braves have about as much reason to worry about losses as I have to worry about werewolf attacks. It’s not worth agonizing over something that only happens once in a blue moon.
But for one particular Brave, June 23, 2023, was an excellent day. Ronald Acuña Jr. went 3-for-5 with a home run and a stolen base. He made a great catch, too, covering 78 feet in 4.6 seconds to rob Tyler Stephenson of a hit. The following morning, he rose to first place in the National League in WAR, a position he has held ever since.
First place on the WAR leaderboard isn’t necessarily meaningfully different from second, third, or even fourth. At times, Acuña’s lead was so slight that you had to add another decimal place just to see it. Still, leading the league for 53 days (and counting) is an impressive accomplishment. Plenty of guys can get hot and amass a high WAR in a short stretch, but maintaining such a high degree of excellence over eight weeks is something else. Four others occupied second place in that time, and nine shuffled through spots three to five. But Acuña has yet to give up his lead. Read the rest of this entry »
Triston Casas is a studious hitter. He’s also an impactful one, as evidenced by his 19 home runs and 124 wRC+ — this after an abysmal April and a less than stellar May — in his first full big-league season. At age 23, the 6-foot-4, 250-pound first baseman profiles as a cornerstone in the Red Sox lineup. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote back in June, the left-handed-hitting slugger “should become a middle-of-the-order force capable of hitting 35-plus annual homers.”
Casas, whom Boston drafted with the No. 28 pick in 2018 out of Plantation, Florida’s American Heritage High School, discussed his scientific approach to hitting prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.
———
David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite ice-breaker questions: Do you view hitting as more of an art, or as more of a science?
Triston Casas: “It’s more of a science. There are numbers involved that can help you, and if you know how to use them accurately, they can pretty much give you a formula for how to have the most success at the plate. Every pitch has a certain characteristic based off the vertical and horizontal movement and the vertical entry angle. Your swing has a certain attack angle into the zone that has to match that pitch characteristic. If it does perfectly, you’re going to have a really good result. More importantly, if you match it, you don’t have to be perfect in terms of the timing, because you’re matching that plane.”
Laurila: A lot of hitters I’ve talked to, including Justin Turner just recently, have stressed the importance of timing.
Casas: “I think hitting is more about being on plane. To me, on plane means matching the plane of the pitch coming into the zone. Being on plane gives you a lot of margin for error. If your swing is too direct or too steep, your timing is going to have to be perfect to match the vertical entry angle of the ball into the zone, as opposed to matching it and being able to hit the ball within that 90-degree angle that allows you to hit it fair.” Read the rest of this entry »
There haven’t been a lot of bright spots in St. Louis this year. The Cardinals are 14 games below .500, owners of the second-worst record in the NL. The bottom has fallen out for the franchise in a way that hasn’t happened in 30 years. I’d hardly blame fans for being a bit checked out; it’s hard to look for silver linings when the rain cloud is this dark.
If you’re so inclined, though, there are always things to be optimistic about. The obvious one: the Cardinals’ offense has performed at a high level despite the poor results. They have an aggregate 111 wRC+ on the year, the fifth-best in baseball, and underlying statistics that match that. As always in St. Louis, it’s an ensemble affair, but three stars stand out atop the WAR leaderboard: Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, and Lars Nootbaar.
Wait, Lars Nootbaar? I know what you’re thinking: I’m the chairman of the Nootbaar Nutbar fanclub, and my preposterously biased take should be ignored. But the leaderboards don’t lie: He’s tied with Arenado for the most WAR on the team, and that’s despite a 100-PA deficit caused by early-season injury issues. He has the best wRC+ on the squad. It’s not just smoke and mirrors; Statcast thinks he deserves the vast majority of his production.
In fact, let’s take it just one step further. Nootbaar has flown under the radar on a lot of broad sweeps of the best players in baseball because of two things: he’s not playing at a best-in-game level, and he’s missed a lot of time with injury. That puts him in the vicinity, WAR-leaderboard-wise, with guys who play more but aren’t as good on a rate basis. He’s tied with Luis Arraez, Christian Walker, and Bryson Stott, just to name a few, for 2023 WAR, but he’s played less than any of those guys. So let’s ignore health, just for a minute. Read the rest of this entry »
The Astros currently rank third in the American League in runs scored — not an uncommon sight for a franchise that has only been outscored by the Dodgers and Red Sox over the last decade. But they’ve done it with a lineup with some pretty big holes, with half of their eight players with at least 300 plate appearances this season posting an OBP under .300. The team’s offense has been driven this year mainly by four players: Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez, Alex Bregman, and Chas McCormick, with an assist from Yainer Diaz. A year ago, Houston signed Alvarez to a six-year, $115 million contract extension that ensured he would remain in town until the end of the 2028 season. Tucker, though, does not have a long-term deal and is scheduled to hit free agency after the 2025 season. What would a possible deal look like?
Lenin might not have actually said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” But that doesn’t mean not-Lenin was wrong. College football just lived through such a week, as the Big Ten’s addition of UCLA and USC for the coming football season snowballed into an all-out raid on the Pac-12. Oregon and Washington are following the two Los Angeles schools to richer pastures. The Big 12, already in the process of adding four mid-major schools to replace the outgoing Texas and Oklahoma, is swooping in to pick Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah from off the curb. Left with the proposition of propping up a rump four-team conference, Cal and Stanford are being courted by the ACC. Those schools, with their sterling academic reputations, are considered a good cultural fit for a conference that already includes Duke and Virginia; the same could be said about UCLA and the Big Ten.
If those institutions want to keep up the pretense of looking smart, they’re going to have to rename these conferences. An Atlantic Coast Conference with two teams in California? An 18-team Big Ten? A 16-team Big 12? People are going to start to think these jokers can’t count or read a map. But that’s of secondary importance. What this audience wants to know, surely, is what this means for college baseball. Read the rest of this entry »
LOS ANGELES — In an honor that was decades overdue, the Dodgers finally retired Fernando Valenzuela’s number 34 on Friday night at Dodger Stadium. The festivities kicked off Fernandomania Weekend, a three-day celebration of the transcendent superstar’s impact on the franchise, first as a pitcher during his initial 11-season run (1980–90) and then as an analyst on the team’s Spanish-language broadcasts (2003–present). Beyond starring on the field by winning NL Rookie of the Year and Cy Young honors and helping the Dodgers capture a world championship in 1981, Valenzuela emerged as an international cultural icon. He brought generations of Mexican-American and Latino fans to baseball and helped to heal the wounds caused by the building of the very ballpark in which he starred.
Valenzuela’s rise is something of a fairy tale. The youngest of 12 children in a family in Etchohuaquila, Mexico (pop. 150), he was discovered by Dodgers superscout Mike Brito at age 17 and signed the next year (1979). Taught to throw a screwball by Dodgers reliever Bobby Castillo during the 1979 Arizona Instructional League, he went on a dominant run at Double-A San Antonio the following year and was called up to the Dodgers in mid-September. The pudgy and mysterious 19-year-old southpaw spun 17.2 innings of brilliant relief work without allowing an earned run during the heat of a pennant race. He made the team as a starter the following spring, and his career took off when he tossed an Opening Day shutout against the Astros in an emergency start, filling in for an injured Jerry Reuss. He kept putting up zeroes, going 8–0 with seven complete games, five shutouts, and a 0.50 ERA in 72 innings over his first eight starts, drawing outsized crowds in every city where he pitched. Despite speaking barely a word of English, he became an instant celebrity on the strength of a bashful smile, preternatural poise, and impeccable command of his signature pitch, delivered with a distinctive motion that included a skyward gaze at the peak of his windup.
To borrow a metaphor from Erik Sherman, author of the new biography Daybreak at Chavez Ravine, Valenzuela was baseball’s version of the Beatles, a composite of the Fab Four with a universal appeal. He landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated less than two months into his rookie season, an unprecedented event in the magazine’s history. Fernandomania took hold of baseball and survived that summer’s seven-week player strike. In October, the rookie displayed incredible guile, winning two elimination games and preventing the Yankees from taking a 3–0 series lead in the World Series. His Herculean 149-pitch effort in Game 3 turned the tide, helping the Dodgers capture their first championship since 1965. He would play a vital part on two more NL West-winning Dodgers teams and make six All-Star teams before leaving the fold and making stops with half a dozen other major league teams, though he never matched his success in L.A.
On Friday night, a crowd of 49,315 fans, many of them wearing replicas of Valenzuela’s Dodgers and Team Mexico jerseys, showed up early to pay tribute to the beloved pitcher. U.S. senator Alex Padilla, the first Hispanic senator from California; team president and CEO Stan Kasten; retired Dodgers broadcaster Jaime Jarrín, who served as his interpreter during Fernandomania; and former battery-mate Mike Scioscia spoke about Valenzuela’s impact upon the team, the city, and a fan base that expanded radically as it supported him. Sandy Koufax, Julio Urías, and broadcaster Pepe Yñiguez joined them onstage, with broadcaster Charley Steiner serving as master of ceremonies. A mariachi band accompanied a beaming Valenzuela’s walk to the stage. Afterwards, former teammates Orel Hershiser and Manny Mota unveiled the number 34 on the Dodgers Ring of Honor. Read the rest of this entry »
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Facebook Group
Twitter Account
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Get Our Merch!
