In honor of New Yorker writer and editor and Baseball Hall of Famer Roger Angell’s 100th birthday, Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley discuss what they admire about Angell’s life and work, how he’s influenced their writing, and a few of their favorite Angell works. Then (26:22) they cue up a collection of original, recorded tributes to Angell from a distinguished group of baseball writers.

Audio intro: The Swinghoppers & Wolfgang Lohr, "Party Like it’s 1920"
Audio interstitial: Matthew Grimson, "Prize for Writing"
Audio outro: The Moody Blues, "I Never Thought I’d Live to Be a Hundred"

Link to tribute episode transcript
Link to WSJ interview with Angell
Link to Gammons on Angell
Link to Mark Singer on Angell
Link to David Remnick on Angell
Link to Verducci on Angell
Link to Roger Angell Day video
Link to Bonomo EW episode about Angell
Link to Angell’s “In the Fire”
Link to Ben on catchers
Link to Angell’s “Agincourt and After”
Link to Angell’s “Distance”
Link to Angell’s “Four Taverns in the Town”
Link to Angell’s “The ‘Go!’ Shouters”
Link to Angell’s “If Only”
Link to Angell on Tiant
Link to Angell on Blass

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After a deal with Steve Cohen to purchase the New York Mets was nixed last year due to issues of continued team control, the Wilpons looked for other suitors only to end up back with the hedge fund billionaire. According to Sportico, the deal values the Mets at $2.42 billion. Cohen will assume 95% ownership of the team, increasing his stake from 8%; the Wilpon family will retain control of the remaining 5%. The transaction will not include the Mets’ regional sports network SNY, a cash cow currently controlled by the Wilpons’ Sterling Equity with a 65% share.

The sale is the largest in MLB history, and given the franchise’s $391 million value at the time of the Wilpons’ purchase in 2002, it’s also the most profitable in terms of total dollar amount. Here are MLB franchise purchase price valuations since 1988 in chronological order:

And here’s profitability compared to the previous valuation:

In terms of annual profits based on the valuation of the franchise when it was bought and sold, the Mets’ deal is a little closer to the middle at around 9%. There’s an argument that being only a little bit above average isn’t great, though being above-average on a debt-laden team in the middle of a pandemic looks to be a pretty positive outcome. Here’s where the Mets’ sale stacks up in terms of its annual increase in value after inflation:

Before we get to Cohen, let’s take a look back at the Wilpons and how we got here.

From Initial Investment to Full Control

Fred Wilpon reportedly originally bought 5% of the Mets in 1980 when Doubleday & Co. purchased the team for $21.1 million. Six years later, Nelson Doubleday and Wilpon joined forces to purchase the club at a value of around $80 million. It wasn’t until 16 years after that that Wilpon and his family gained full control of the club, though the purchase was not without controversy. The sale price valuing the club at $391 million was set by an appraiser and initially contested by Doubleday. He argued against the price due to a number of factors ranging from:

Wilpon being “in cahoots” with baseball to force him to accept less-than-market value for his 50 percent of the Mets to baseball “manufacturing phantom operating losses” as part of its labor strategy.

Doubleday relented on his claims after the Wilpons agreed to quadruple the money owed at the time of sale from $28 million to $100 million. In the end, the Wilpons paid just $135 million to purchase the other half of the club from Doubleday due to team debt that was subtracted from the purchase. For about $1 million in 1980, $40 million in 1986, and $135 million in 2002, the Wilpon family gained full control of the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Like nearly every team outside of Pittsburgh during this odd season, there were a couple of weeks in which it appeared the Detroit Tigers might actually be able to make a surprise run at the playoffs. After being given just 3.1% postseason odds by our projections even with the year shortened to 60 games and the field expanded from 10 teams to 16, the Tigers shot out to a 9-5 start, raising their playoff chances to a season-high 39.2% on August 10. Some struggles followed, but then another decent run got them back to 17-16 on September 1, with 31.1% odds at a playoff spot. Since then, there has been another rough patch that the team won’t have a chance to recover from. Detroit has lost 11 of its last 15, giving it a record of 21-27 that places their playoff chances at worse than a 1-in-50 shot. We can say with near-certainty that the Tigers’ surprise pursuit of the playoffs is behind them. One of the major engineers of that pursuit, however, is still worth paying attention to over the campaign’s final two weeks.

The 2019 season wasn’t an easy one for Jeimer Candelario. The Tigers demoted him not once, but three times to Triple-A Toledo amid struggles at the big league level, and he also missed time due to shoulder inflammation. He quickly hit well enough in the minors to get his job back in the majors, posting a .320/.416/.588 line over 39 Triple-A games. He could never make that stick when he got called up though, finishing with a .203/.306/.337 line in 94 games, good for a 72 wRC+. Once an impressive offensive prospect, those numbers didn’t match Candelario’s pedigree, and neither did the .225/.317/.393 line the season before.

This year it appears he has finally begun to put it all together. Candelario is hitting .333/.391/.572 with seven home runs in 174 plate appearances through Tuesday. His 158 wRC+ and 1.7 WAR both lead his team and rank him 18th and 26th in baseball, respectively. Those numbers have only gotten better as the season has gone on — after entering August 19 with a .242/.286/.424 line, he has hit .398/.462/.677 over his past 26 games, with a 207 wRC+ that ranks fourth-best in baseball over that time. After showing all peaks and valleys over his first few seasons, he’s only improved with each game in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — On Wednesday night, DJ LeMahieu got it started for the Yankees, as he has so often done since arriving from Colorado in January 2019. Blue Jays starter Tanner Roark, having missed the strike zone with his first pitch of the night, left a 90.5 mph four-seam fastball in the upper outside corner of the zone — an area where the right-handed LeMahieu rarely swings — and this time the 32-year-old second baseman reached out and poked it onto the short porch in Yankee Stadium’s right field for a solo home run. The Yankees, who had dropped 20 runs on the Blue Jays on Tuesday night while retaking second place in the AL East, added another 13 more on Wednesday via a season-high season seven homers, including three by backup catcher Kyle Higashioka and another by LeMahieu. They did all of this despite Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge going hitless in their respective returns from injury.

“DJ just continued to set the tone for us,” said manager Aaron Boone, a night after LeMahieu had gone 4-for-6 with a homer and five RBI. Here’s the first-inning shot:

LeMonster pic.twitter.com/yq2OZDz2vY

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) September 16, 2020

The home run was LeMahieu’s fifth to lead off his team’s half of a game, moving him into the major league lead:

It was the 11th time LeMahieu has hit a leadoff homer in his two seasons as a Yankee; in that time, only Springer (15) has more, though until Wednesday, Acuña and Joc Pederson had as many in the same span. Read the rest of this entry »

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Happy playoff expansion day!

12:06

Dan Szymborski: Hmm, happy wasn’t the right word choice

12:07

Dan Szymborski: Well, if two players are playing similarly — and they are — I’m going to choose the player whose success looks more real.

Read the rest of this entry »

Geoff Arnold knows the East. Not only do the Baltimore Orioles, the team he serves as a play-by-play announcer for, compete in the American League East, their inter-league schedule this year is solely comprised of the National League East. As a result, Arnold has been getting regular looks at two of the game’s most intriguing divisions. Surprises, both pleasant and not so pleasant, are present in both.

How would Arnold rank the teams and players he’s seen this season? That was the crux of a conversation I had with the radio (and sometimes TV) voice of the Orioles prior to last night’s game.

———

David Laurila: Which is the best team you’ve seen this year?

Geoff Arnold: “The best team I’ve seen this year is probably the Tampa Bay Rays. They’ve got a really good starting rotation. We saw Tyler Glasnow when he was at his absolute best, and Blake Snell has obviously got great stuff. They’ve also got some hitters that can really make you pay for mistakes. They’re an extremely patient team; they get to 3-2 counts and work these long at-bats. I think their batting average on 3-2 counts might have been the highest in baseball when we last saw them.

“What Kevin Cash has done managing that bullpen… there were some guys they’d bring in and it was like, ‘I don’t know who these people are,’ yet he knew how to slide them into these specific roles — just like he figures out how to get enough production from their offense. Kevin Cash seems to know every right button to push. I’d say the Rays are the toughest team I’ve seen in the AL East, and probably the best overall.”

Laurila: What about in the NL East? Read the rest of this entry »

To paraphrase the late, great Chris Wallace, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another freaking other. After MLB announced its bubble-esque postseason format, Rob Manfred slipped in the claim that expanded playoffs are likely here to stay.

Manfred, as he is wont to do, conflated what the owners — his bosses — desire with what has actually been decided; expanded playoffs would require an agreement between the league and the MLBPA. Even though Manfred’s declaration is merely media signaling, though, it’s worth discussing its potential effect on baseball’s competitive landscape, because it would be absolutely earth-shattering.

While the commissioner didn’t elaborate on what type of expanded playoffs he was talking about, it’s fair to assume that they might take the form of this year’s tournament — eight teams in each league qualify, with best-of-three series at the higher seeds’ home parks to cut the field in half — though they could also feature a 14-team field, a possibility reported by Joel Sherman in February. I’ll assume a 16-team field here, as I think the extra television revenue will prove awfully enticing. From there, there would be the normal five-seven-seven structure we’ve grown accustomed to.

In an abbreviated season, expanded playoffs make some sense. 60 games isn’t enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, so a postseason cutoff was always going to feel arbitrary. Sixteen, eight, 10 — none would feel normal, because this season isn’t normal. Given that, creating more of a tournament atmosphere via short series feels like a fun one-off plan.

If every possible 2020 playoff format is going to feel equally valid, the owners have an obvious reason to expand the postseason: money. Owners take in the vast majority of playoff revenue — players get a share of the gate receipts in the first three (in the case of the Division Series) or four (League Championship and World Series) games of each round, while the owners get the rest of the gate as well the television money, which overshadows revenue from ticket sales. More games means more games to sell to TV networks. Ask a group of businesspeople if they’d like some extra money at almost no cost, and well, they probably won’t say no.

But in a full baseball season, a 16-game playoff does something else entirely. One of the neat features of a 162-game season is that it does an excellent job of determining which teams are best. On a given day, anyone can beat anyone. In the broad sweep of time, however, five percent edges add up. That doesn’t mean the 10 best teams always make the playoffs, but it does mean that you can be fairly certain the top team in each league is better than the sixth-best team. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss Rob Manfred’s desire to make the 16-team playoff format permanent and how the absence of off days will affect the 2020 postseason, then conduct a Stat Blast quiz about the best same-named teammate duos, plus a non-quiz Stat Blast about pitcher usage in seven-inning doubleheaders.

Audio intro: Rhett Miller, "Permanent Damage"
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey, "Who?"

Link to Manfred’s comments
Link to story about MLB “bubbles”
Link to Ben Clemens on the postseason schedule
Link to Sam on every team making the playoffs

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The 1960s didn’t create many new Red Sox fans. Carl Yastrzemski debuted in 1961 and ascended to superstar status two years later, but outside of Yaz’s origin story, the franchise didn’t have much going for it. Starting with Ted Williams‘ penultimate season in 1959, Boston finished below .500 in eight consecutive campaigns, being spared last place thanks only to the piles of sadness that were the Athletics and the brand-new Senators in those years. As the Red Sox started assembling the early cast of a team that would, starting in 1967, finish with a winning record for 16 straight seasons, few stars shone as brightly as Tony Conigliaro. Until, that is, one errant Jack Hamilton fastball dimmed that star.

It took Yastrzemski a few years to really get going, but as a hitter, Conigliaro arrived in the majors nearly fully formed, much in the manner of Bryce Harper. Conigliaro’s signing was back in the pre-draft days, when amateurs had more of an ability to determine their franchise, and 14 teams pursued him before he signed with Boston. Assigned to the Wellsville Red Sox of the New York-Penn League in 1963, Conigliaro led the circuit in batting average, slugged .730 (the next-best mark was .575), and finished fifth in home runs only because he missed the first six weeks with a broken thumb after getting in a fight back home.

Boston added Conigliaro to the roster in 1964, and he started in center field on Opening Day at the age of 19. He eventually moved to left field in his rookie season — he was stretched in center — but he quickly became a fixture in the lineup and was batting second by the time summer started. He made a great first impression after hitting a home run in his first Fenway at-bat, a shot over the Green Monster off White Sox pitcher Joe Horlen. Only 23 players in baseball history have tallied 400 plate appearances in a campaign before their age-20 season, and only Mel Ott had higher a wRC+ (Juan Soto passed them both in 2018). Read the rest of this entry »