In the decade that began shortly after the historic home run chase many believe saved the game of baseball, it’s no surprise that only one National League player with fewer than 30 homers placed in the top three of MVP voting. In 2009, Hanley Ramirez only had 24 home runs but also had a league-leading .342 batting average to go along with 42 doubles and 27 stolen bases, which pushed him into the mix for NL MVP. He finished in second place, although he didn’t receive a single first place vote.

But as much as home runs were a primary driver in measuring the decade’s hitting success, it would understate the talent of the two players who accounted for seven of the MVP awards between 2001-2009 to define them by that one statistic. They were simply two of the greatest all-around hitters to ever play the game. Here’s a look back at how those two, along with the three other NL MVPs of the 2000s, were acquired.

In a span of just over four years, Jeff Kent was traded three times in exchange for an All-Star. In each case, it seems unlikely that the team trading him away believed he would finish his career as a borderline Hall of Famer with 377 career homers, 560 doubles (tied for 30th all-time), and an NL MVP award. Read the rest of this entry »

While Even Year Magic was in full swing from 2012-2014, there were plenty of other great World Series storylines. There was Mathenaging, Yostseason, and even Jon Lester fielding bunts. With such an action-packed set of games, let’s get right to it.

2012

The Tigers brought a mostly-sweet lineup to the table: Austin Jackson was a leadoff beast, Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder provided thump from the three and four slots — and yes, Omar Infante batted second in a season where he had a .283 OBP, but they can’t all be perfect decisions. Anyway, Infante had a career OBP of .308, which is — wait, no, that’s still bad. That one’s on Jim Leyland.

The Giants featured the fifth-best offense in baseball, a lineup with almost no holes all the way down, depending on how you feel about Brandon Crawford and Grégor Blanco. In Game 1, that deep lineup overpowered Justin Verlander. There were no key points in the game, no weird decisions — sometimes your dominant pitcher just gets hit. Heck, Barry Zito even had an RBI single. Can’t win ‘em all. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, MLB delivered its first economic proposal concerning player pay to the MLBPA since the two sides reached an agreement in March. There were reports that owners had previously agreed to propose a 50/50 split of revenue for what looks to be an abbreviated season played to empty ballparks, but after that potential offer leaked, it was never formally proposed due to the negative public response from the union. MLB’s actual proposal, which includes a paycut for all players from the prior pro-rated agreement in March, was particularly harsh to those making the most money, as the proposed cuts were on a sliding scale with the highest-paid players taking the deepest reductions. Jay Jaffe laid out yesterday why the proposal wasn’t likely to fly with the players, a sense confirmed by Max Scherzer last night:

After discussing the latest developments with the rest of the players, there’s no reason to engage with MLB in any further compensation reductions. We have previously negotiated a pay cut in the version of pro rated salaries, and there’s no justification to accept a 2nd pay cut based on the current information the union has received. I’m glad to hear other players voicing the same viewpoint and believe MLB’s economic strategy would completely change if all documentation were to become public information.

Jeff Passan and Jesse Rogers first reported the proposed salary breakdowns at ESPN:

The formula the league offered, for example, would take a player scheduled to make the league minimum ($563,500), give him a prorated number based on 82 games ($285,228) and take a 10% cut from that figure, leaving him with a $256,706 salary.

The scale goes down as salaries go up, with every dollar:

• $563,501 to $1 million paid at 72.5%
• $1,000,001 to $5 million paid at 50%
• $5,000,001 to $10 million paid at 40%
• $10,000,001 to $20 million paid at 30%
• $20,000,001 and up paid at 20%

Read the rest of this entry »

You have to scroll pretty far down our Texas Rangers Top Prospects list to get to Cole Uvila’s name. Befitting his under-the-radar status, the righty reliever is No. 36 in a system that, according to Eric Longenhagen, has a lot of high variance players. None of them are as unusual as Uvila, who at 26 years of age has yet to pitch above A ball.

Not only does his future looms bright — Longenhagen cited “seemingly imminent big league relevance” — Uvila’s backstory is borderline bizarre. Moreover, he boasts a Driveline-developed curveball that features elite spin. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Uvila is coming off a breakout season with the High-A Down East Wood Ducks. In 64-and-two-thirds innings (including seven with Low-A Hickory), the 1,199th pick in the 2018 draft punched out 95 batters and allowed just 34 hits. That was followed by an eye-opening Arizona Fall League campaign that inspired a head-scratching question: “How on earth did this guy last until the 40th round?”

He hasn’t always been a pitcher. The Port Angeles, Washington native was primarily a shortstop in high school, and that was his initial position at Pierce College. By his own admission, he wasn’t a very good one. That led him to the mound, albeit not in a way you might expect.

“I couldn’t hit — I couldn’t catch up to [junior] college pitching — so I ended up getting a shot as a submariner pitcher,” Uvila explained. “I wasn’t dragging my knuckles, but I was low enough that my chest was completely over the rubber. Sidearm is 90 degrees and I was about 45 degrees from the dirt. Anyway, that got me off the redshirt list and onto the field, which was pretty much all I wanted. I never really imagined playing past junior college.” Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And so starts the show!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Eric’s the mock draft guy!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: It’s hard to say depending on who goes there, but I expect the team to take a pitcher

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Or at least prioritize a pitcher

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Maybe if someone like Bailey drops to them?

Read the rest of this entry »

Modern baseball writers are a somewhat spoiled bunch. If you’re writing a story about an MLB player, you have seemingly countless resources at your disposal to gather more statistics than you might know what to do with. For example, say that I wanted to write about Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Shane Bieber. His player page on this site lists any standard or advanced metric I could want, along with info on things like how hard he throws his fastball and how often opponents chase his pitches out of the zone. If I see he struck out 259 batters in 2019, and want to know how many other pitchers in the live ball era struck out at least 250 batters in just their second big league season, I can use Baseball-Reference’s Play Index to find the answer. If I want to get more specific, and learn how many times Bieber struck out a right-handed hitter with a breaking ball out of the zone, Baseball Savant’s search feature has me covered there too.

When it comes to writing about foreign professional leagues, however, the wealth of information isn’t quite so grand for the American writer. Sites like MyKBO.net and Statiz are great resources, and our KBO leaderboards tell us a lot of great stuff — like the fact that NC Dinos left-hander Chang-mo Koo 구창모 leads all pitchers in both ERA and FIP after four starts – but if you want to dig into why or how he’s doing that, we don’t have the pitch-by-pitch data to identify things like velocity, spin rate, or how batters are performing against individual offerings. That hasn’t diminished my curiosity about Koo, though, so I used the tools available to me — Twitch and ESPN archives of game broadcasts, a notepad, and my own two eyes — to track his pitches over his first four starts, in the hope that doing so would reveal something interesting. Fortunately, both for myself and my editor who enjoys for me to have story ideas, it did. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone gets the blues. Sometimes it’s for obvious, “good” reasons, like a global pandemic upending your life and taking hundreds of thousands of others. Sometimes it’s for complicated reasons, like bad brain chemistry and the reverberating effects of trauma. And sometimes it’s for trivial reasons, barely any reason at all. You lose at a game. You trip on a rock. You make a small, forgivable error at work. A tiny thing, in combination with the many other tiny things that make up life, can cast a pall over the ensuing several hours — even days.

Baseball players, being human people, are also subject to the occasional onset of the blues. The public nature of their jobs, though, can make the stakes of these incidences much higher: A small, forgivable error on the field, timed poorly, is a national disgrace, or a step toward the public, humiliating loss of one’s job. And with higher stakes come more dramatic reactions from the players. Reactions like, say, suddenly disappearing.

***

“Rabbit” Sturgeon — that’s how he was always referred to in a baseball context, never by any real, non-animal name — seems to have been born somewhere in Minnesota. He reported his age on the 1930 U.S. Census as 45, putting his birth date around 1885. There’s nothing much on the public record about his early life, but when William E. Sturgeon was around 20, he got into the two professions that would come to define the rest of his life: the railway and baseball.

Rail in the U.S. was hitting its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, and increased regulation made the historically dangerous jobs involved in railroad operations rather less so. Still, doing such work was hardly easy, and the job of a brakeman was one of the most notoriously difficult. Brakemen were responsible for the application of brakes — a simple-sounding but absolutely vital task, especially when massive freight trains were involved. Brakemen also made sure that the axle bearings of train wheels weren’t overheating, kept an eye out for stowaways, and ensured that cargo and passengers were safe. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s 1 AM on a Saturday night in mid-May, and in his otherwise quiet New York City apartment, Jon Sciambi is getting ready for work. As his neighbors snooze, Sciambi, a veteran TV and radio announcer for ESPN, goes over box scores and lineups in his home broadcast studio ahead of the upcoming LG Twins-Kiwoom Heroes game in the KBO, Korea’s professional baseball league. With MLB – Sciambi’s regular assignment – on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic, his job now is to do play by play for games featuring teams and players that, a few weeks prior, he barely knew (if he knew them at all), doing so from thousands of miles away while stuck at home like so many other Americans. For both him and viewers around the country, the KBO is the only game in town, and one that Sciambi and the rest of his ESPN counterparts are learning more or less on the fly.

“This is our baseball window, is the way I’m looking at it, and we’re trying to sort it out,” Sciambi says. “We’re trying to get as much information as we possibly can and put it out there and get good stories and talk baseball and have some fun, man. Smile and have some fun.”

Ordinarily during this time of year, Sciambi and ESPN would be working their way through the early part of the MLB season, traveling from coast to coast and bringing viewers big games from the biggest teams. But COVID-19 has upended both lives and leagues, leaving sports networks scrambling to fill slots that ordinarily would’ve gone not just to MLB, but also to the other major North American professional leagues, which also find themselves on hiatus. ESPN, which normally airs a handful of MLB games a week and spends countless hours parsing transactions and takes, was no exception, suddenly finding itself without any baseball at all as every league on the planet came to an indefinite halt.

The solution came in the form of the KBO. Thanks to a rigorous program of testing and contact tracing, South Korea was able to contain COVID-19 more quickly and effectively than other countries, allowing its citizenry to resume a semblance of normal life. That included its professional league, which had been forced to stop spring training in mid-March and delay its Opening Day. A month later, though, the KBO announced that it would return at the beginning of May, albeit in stadiums without fans and with social distancing measures, such as no handshakes, high fives, or spitting. Aside from Taiwan’s CPBL, it would be the only professional league in action — and as the highest-caliber baseball available, it became an immediate draw for ESPN. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about MLB’s ongoing labor negotiations, the team-to-team differences in minor-league pay and front-office furloughs, and the perils of believing that baseball is purely for profit, follow up on the previous episode’s discussions of Carney Lansford’s claim to be a descendant of Sir Francis Drake and a forward-thinking 1989 Cy Young voter, and answer listener emails about bringing hockey’s three stars system to baseball and redoing the 2012 AL MVP vote with a 2020 awareness of WAR, plus Stat Blasts about an offensively futile game and the most hitless PA any batter has ever had against a single pitcher (featuring former major leaguer and Cardinals farm director Mike Jorgensen on his historic struggles against Dock Ellis, the first time he saw Albert Pujols, and how he helped avert a disastrous Pujols trade).

Audio intro: Townes Van Zandt, "No Deal"
Audio outro: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Thirty-Nine and Holding"

Link to Forst’s letter to minor leaguers
Link to unemployment info for minor leaguers
Link to latest Passan report on MLB labor issues
Link to info on the three stars in hockey
Link to info on FanGraphs’ stars of the game
Link to Mack Longpré and Sophie Welsman’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to Mack Longpré’s website
Link to 1987 bad sequencing game
Link to Good Night, Giants
Link to batter vs. pitcher hitless streaks data
Link to batter vs. pitcher on-base-less streaks data
Link to article on Bagwell vs. Sullivan
Link to article on facing Jeter
Link to Goold on a possible Pujols trade
Link to order The MVP Machine

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