Cleveland Sports Forum

Stark: What we learned in May — 5 teams that could be active at the trade deadline, a whole sport of Nolan Ryans and more

Jayson Stark Jun 2, 2021 220
It’s time to wave adios to May, a month we’ll always remember. For four no-hitters. For Javy Báez and his Flying Wallendas base running act. For an injured list that grew faster than Jack Black in “Gulliver’s Travels.”

But it’s time now to peer beneath the surface at where it’s all leading. And that’s where we come in — with another spectacular edition of What We Learned in May.

1. We have a whole sport of Nolan Ryans!
When Nolan Ryan retired in 1993, he was viewed — for good reason — as the most unhittable pitcher who ever lived. Now here we are, 28 years later, and we’re approaching a time when the average pitcher in this sport is Nolan Ryan. Take a look.

Ryan career K%: 25.3
MLB K% thru May: 24.2

Ryan career K/9 IP: 9.55
MLB K/9 IP thru May: 9.24

All right, I’ll admit I honed in just on strikeout rate. Please don’t flood me with all those other Nolan Ryan numbers. I’m well-schooled on all the other aspects of his unhittability. But focusing on Ryan’s strikeout rate was actually the whole point!

Is that what we want? A sport in which all hitters are striking out, every day, as if they’re facing Nolan Ryan? I’m going to inch out on a limb here and say: No!

“Is Nolan Ryan in today’s game just your run-of-the-mill power arm?” one AL GM asked, tongue only slightly in cheek.

On one hand, he said, hitters have such a different hitting philosophy now, compared with Ryan’s era, that it’s terrifying to think of how many K’s a guy like Ryan would pile up now. But on the other …

“I’m not exaggerating,” the same GM said, “when I say that a lot of the stuff coming out of pitchers’ hands now is so good that I honestly don’t know if Nolan Ryan would separate himself from everyone else the same way now that he did then.”

That’s an incredible thought. But spend 10 minutes some day watching Pitching Ninja videos and tell me he’s wrong.


2. At least May was better than April
Before one NL GM talked to me for this column, he spent time digging in on April-versus-May numbers over the last few years. So first off, he gets an “A” on his homework. But also: He actually felt relieved, when he was finished, that offensive numbers always seem to pick up after April. And that was true again this year.

APRIL SPLITS: .232/.309/.389/.698; .283 BABIP, 24.4 K%

MAY SPLITS: .239/.315/.397/.712; .292 BABIP, 24.0 K%

But here’s a trick question for you: Is that the good news or the bad news?

The beer-mug-half-full view is that, as we reported in last month’s What We Learned column, .232 would be the worst sportwide batting average — by far — in baseball history, so at least we’ve edged out of that territory. But now here’s the beer-mug-half-empty view: .239 would still be tied for the second-worst.

Lowest league average, all-time
1968
.237
1888
.239

(Source: baseball-reference.com)
Those, of course, are full-season averages. But we regret to report that even if we just look at May numbers, there’s nothing to feel all warm and fuzzy about.


Lowest May average, live-ball era
1968
.229
1966
.236
1972
.237
2021
.239

(Source: baseball-reference.com)
So this was still the lowest May batting average in nearly a half-century — not to mention the second-lowest since baseball lowered the mound after pitchers took captivity of the sport in 1968. But now let’s add in strikeout rate, and you’ll see how different these times are than those times — and not for the better.

May 1968
.229
6.06
May 1966
.236
5.93
May 1972
.237
5.54
May 2021
.239
9.17*

(*highest May K ratio ever)
If there is any solace in any of these numbers, it’s that at least the May strikeout rate wasn’t quite as messy as the April whiff rate (9.30 per nine innings). And maybe it’s all the pitchers’ faults in more ways than one.

As MLB.com’s Mike Petriello wrote last week, if you subtract the atrocious hitting we’ve seen from pitchers so far, the overall strikeout percentage has actually leveled off, after climbing in the previous 15 seasons in a row. So let’s cling to that, OK?

“It’s just a small source of hope,” said one AL exec. “I’m just hopeful we’re going to reach a tipping point where things start to balance out.”

3. Lights, cameras — but where’s the action?
Let’s take a quick survey. Who out there would like to see less action in your average baseball game? Raise your hands. Beautiful. The poll results are in:

Want less action: 0.0%
Want more action: 100.0%

That’s an unofficial count, but close enough! So that’s why it’s so concerning that it’s the “action” categories that keep on trending downward. Take a look at these four items on the old stat sheet, about one-third of the way through another season.

GIDP
.68
1968
SB
.46
1971
DOUBLES
1.53
1989
SINGLES
4.98
Ever
Now here’s a little more context. The only time in recorded history when hitters grounded into this few double plays was 1968, a year when pretty much nobody was on base. … The rate of stolen bases is at a 50-year low, but the rate of stolen-base attempts is now the lowest since 1964. … We’re on pace for over 1,100 fewer doubles just since the last full season, in 2019. … And the average team is no longer even managing to hit five singles per game, for the first time in history. That means that by year’s end, we’ll have seen more than 4,000 singles disappear just over the last decade.

“This doesn’t paint a real rosy picture of where we’re going,” said one NL exec. “But that’s the reason all the experimental rules in the minor leagues are so interesting and worth monitoring. They’re all getting at the same thing: The best version of the game is a version with more balls in play and more action.”

4. The all-hurt team might beat the All-Star team!
Here’s my All-Injured Team, made up solely of players who A) got hurt since Opening Day and B) were on the injured list as of June 1. This team can play!

1B: Joey Votto
2B: Jeff McNeil
SS: Trevor Story
3B: Mike Moustakas
CF: Mike Trout
RF: Bryce Harper
LF: Michael Brantley
C: Travis d’Arnaud
DH: Franmil Reyes

Pitchers: Corey Kluber, Zach Plesac, Kenta Maeda, Lance McCullers Jr., Danny Duffy, Dustin May, Zac Gallen, Marco Gonzales, Michael Kopech, Huascar Ynoa, Drew Pomeranz, Josh Staumont, Dellin Betances, Darren O’Day (and lots more)

Bench: Corey Seager, George Springer, Byron Buxton, Luis Robert, Didi Gregorius, Brandon Belt, Luke Voit, Aaron Hicks, Wilson Ramos (and many, many more)

“I can’t remember a year where we’ve had anything like this,” said one NL exec who has been in the game more than 30 years.

So is he right? I checked with Derek Rhoads, who does fantastic work charting injuries for Baseball Prospectus. His data was startling:

• As of May 31, there were 244 players on the injured list across the sport, an average of more than eight per team. There wasn’t a single day all last season when that many players were on the IL at once.

• Those 244 players on the IL represent a scary 29-percent spike if you just compare that with the 61-day mark of the last full season, in 2019.

• But measured another way, if you total up all IL placements, 103 more players wound up on the IL (non-COVID division) at some point in the first 61 days this season (385) than in 2019 (282). That’s up more than 30 percent.

• And if you want to include the COVID-related IL, it’s a jump of more than 50 percent compared with the first 61 days of 2019 (without even including vaccination-related stints).

So what’s up with that? In part, it’s because teams use the 10-day injured list so much more aggressively than the old 15-day IL. In part, it’s also because, coming off the uncharted territory of a 60-game season, teams are clearly being more proactive to protect players’ long-term health. So injured list activity isn’t a 100 percent barometer of injuries, per se. Nevertheless, the more you dig into this data, the more shocking it gets:

• The number of pitchers who made IL visits in the first two months was up 47 percent compared with 2019.

• Just elbow injuries alone were up 28 percent.

• And dreaded soft-tissue injuries, always an early season problem area, exploded into record territory. Hamstring issues almost tripled. Oblique injuries nearly doubled. And groin-strain IL placements were up an incredible 700 percent (from two to 16).

In truth, we don’t have quite enough clear-cut data to connect every dot between the weirdness of that 60-game season last year and the IL population boom this year. But at this point, how is it even possible to conclude this is just some fluky coincidence?

“Sometimes,” said one AL exec, “the most obvious thing is what’s actually causing that thing you’re seeing. … When you think, ‘What’s the one huge difference between this year and last year?’ it’s just obvious. You’ve got multiple teams with double-digit IL placements — and that’s just in the big leagues. The minor-league injured lists are even worse.”

But this is more than merely a bar graph come to life. This is being reflected in what you watch on the field every day in the major leagues.

“The upshot is that who ends up playing in the big leagues, because of this, is so different from what we’re used to,” the same exec said. “We’re not just talking anymore about the second-line layer of talent. In some cases, we’re down to four- and fifth-layer talent.”

5. Real fans haven’t helped!
Speaking for all of us who are big fans of humans, it’s been truly uplifting to evict all those cardboard cutouts from our favorite ballparks and replace them with real people. Just don’t equate “uplifting” with “inspirational.” Somehow or other, home teams mysteriously played better last year — with no fans — than they’re playing with the sounds of human accompaniment this year.

HOME TEAM WINNING PCT

2020: .557
2021: .533

So what the heck is that all about? Excellent question. On one hand, this would be a similar home-team win percentage to what we saw in 2019 (.529) and 2018 (.528). On the other hand, those seasons are really the outliers — because if this keeps up, 2021 would land in a tie for the 20th-lowest home winning percentage of the expansion era, which takes in the last six decades.

That 24-point drop is also a big, big number. It would be tied (with 1978-79) for the second-largest decline in home win percentage in the last 50 years. Only 2010-11 (a plummet from .559 to .526) tops it.

Nevertheless, is this one time we’re allowed to say it’s too early to get worked up, considering that most teams aren’t at full attendance yet? Uh, let’s go with that.

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” said one AL exec. “I’d put this in the category of things to monitor and see what happens as fans fill the park and we get deeper into the season.”

6. The first team out of the deadline starting blocks could be … the Diamondbacks!
I’ve never wanted to be That Guy, waiting for a couple of months of baseball to go by so we can all start focusing on the trading deadline. But once Memorial Day becomes a past-tense event, front offices start thinking that way. So we’ve been officially sucked in. Here are five teams that could get our trade juices flowing:

DIAMONDBACKS — They just had the worst May record (5-24) of any team in baseball, and they’re not catching the Padres/Dodgers/Giants. So other clubs are already forecasting that they could get super aggressive in a hurry. A couple of hot names to keep an eye on: Eduardo Escobar and David Peralta.

“Escobar,” said one NL exec, “is a name that I think is going to draw crazy interest.”

TWINS — The Twins emerged from May at 22-31 — 10 1/2 games out of first place, seven games out in the wild-card scramble. And you know how many AL teams in the wild-card era have started 22-31 or worse and made the playoffs? That would be zero. So unless they run off a bunch of wins ASAP, the Twins have all the makings of a team that’s not likely to wait around to sell, with Nelson Cruz at the top of quite a few AL shopping lists.

“They’d have to play at a 95-win pace to put themselves in contention,” said one exec. “That’s a team that thinks very logically. So it seems logical that they’ll be a team that jumps in and sells.”

NATIONALS — But then there are the Nationals, the poster boys of Wait and See mode. They’re the only team in history to play sub-.400 baseball (19-31 in 2019) over the first 50 games of any season and then charge back to win a World Series. So even at 21-29 this year, GM Mike Rizzo is a long way from kicking off a closeout sale. But if he ever does, rival execs see him as far more likely to move players like Daniel Hudson and Kyle Schwarber than Max Scherzer, even though Scherzer’s free-agent countdown has begun.

“What about their history says they’re going to trade Max Scherzer?” asked one exec. “I just see them looking at the possible return on a rental player, which won’t be franchise-changing, even for Scherzer, and saying, ‘Why would we do that?’”

ROCKIES — The Trevor Story Watch is already on, and currently awaiting Story’s return from right elbow inflammation. But even before that injury, the Rockies were telling teams they weren’t ready to move, despite the 2021 reality that the value of all rent-a-players drops every day.

“Every year, the rental prices lessen,” said an AL exec. “It’s just too hard for any player you trade for to swing a team’s chances in a couple of months. So we’d pay more for a rental now than at the end of July. And that’s how most teams think. That’s why, if he was on the Rays, they’d have traded him last winter. Or maybe the winter before. Or the winter before that!”

RAYS — Speaking of the Rays, they obviously won’t be a traditional seller. But teams looking for infielders are targeting them anyway. And why is that? Because they have two of the best middle-infield prospects on earth — in Wander Franco and Vidal Bruján — and no logical position to play either of them.

They’ve already exported Willy Adames in one shocker of a deal. So to make room for Franco and/or Bruján, “I could see that leading to more major-leaguer-for-major-leaguer type swaps (like the Adames trade),” said one AL exec who is eyeing this closely.

7. Trading season won’t wait for July
One more thing on the deadline. The amateur draft used to be a reason to delay those deadline deals. Now it’s a reason to get them done ASAP.

OK, why would that be? Because the draft used to come around in June. But now MLB has booted it back to All-Star week in mid-July. And that means GMs will have more time to kick around deals this month than they will in July. So gentlemen and gentlewomen, start your data-roaming engines!

“The draft really throws a wrench into how people will allocate their time in July,” said one GM. “So that’s one reason you don’t want to wait around on a deal. In July, your attention will be split more than usual.”

8. Jacob deGrom is the Shohei Ohtani of the Big Apple!
Moments after Mets domination machine Jacob deGrom drove in another run Monday night, I got this tweet from an undercover tweeter known as “Pig Pen.”


Well, since he asked …

OHTANI (as a pitcher): .364/.417/.727 HR, 3 RBIs, .1.144 OPS
deGROM: .450/.450/.500 no HR, 3 RBIs, .950 OPS

So I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely all for deGrom DH-ing when he isn’t throwing 15-strikeout two-hitters. I’m guessing the Mets are not for that, however. Which means we’ll just have to amuse ourselves by dreaming about what might have been — and digging in on stuff like this:

deGrom the hitter: .450 AVG, .500 SLG
deGrom the pitcher: .129 AVG, .246 SLG

Awesome note from MLB.com’s Andrew Simon: If the Mets did make deGrom a full-time hitter, he could go 0 for his next 54 and still have a higher batting average than the hitters he’s faced this year! So there’s that. But also this:

deGrom the hitter: 9 hits this season
deGrom the pitcher: 7 runs allowed this season

What’s the closest any Cy Young Award-winning starter has come to getting more hits as a hitter than runs allowed as a pitcher the year he won? I had to know! And that answer is … not very! Greg Maddux in 1995 was the closest: 11 hits at the dish, 28 runs allowed during the season. Would you put this past deGrom in 2021? Why would you?

But deGrom could also take a shot at this:

Cy Youngs who batted .400: None!
Cy Youngs who batted .300: Just Bob Gibson (.303) in 1970!

So nobody loves Ohtani more than I do. But one thing I learned in May is: Maybe I’ve been obsessing over the wrong two-way sensation!

9. Pay attention to these dudes!
Here’s how this section works. I can’t list every player in baseball who had a great month, who is having a breakout season, who won a Player of the Week award once or who happens to be your favorite player. These are just some guys I think are fun, or on the road to something special. All complaints about players I “forgot” or “snubbed” or “obviously hate” will be rejected by the What We Learned authorities. Got it? Now let’s go.

RONALD ACUÑA JR. — How many leadoff men in modern history have ever led their league in home runs? That would be none. Where would you find the sensational Ronald Acuña Jr. in the NL home run standings at the end of May? That would be first — where he was tied with Fernando Tatis Jr., with 16.

Meanwhile, no player has ever hit 40 home runs, all of them out of the leadoff hole, in any season. Acuña is on pace to hit 51.

So could he be the first leadoff force of nature to win a home run title? Could he be the first to hit 40 — or even 50? Why would you bet against this guy doing anything?

“He’s got that thing all the great home run hitters had,” said one NL exec. “I’m talking (Willie) Mays, (Henry) Aaron, all of them. And that’s powerful wrists. When he hits it, it’s a lightning bolt.”

YASMANI GRANDAL — I really do need to write a whole column one of these days about the White Sox catcher’s incomprehensible season. But for now, let’s just focus on this: This man arrived at June leading his league in walks (42) — and his batting average was .131!

I’m not prepared to say this is not a thing that can happen. I’m just here to say this is not a thing that has ever happened. Or ever come close to happening.

The lowest batting average ever, by a guy who led his league in walks, was .204, by the legendary Adam Dunn in 2012. He beats Grandal’s average by 73 points! The last walk champ with more walks than hits was Jack Clark in 1989. He had 22 more walks (132) than hits (110). Grandal is on pace to have 87 more walks than hits (126-39).

“I wonder what the hell he’s telling the umpires back there,” quipped one exec, “if he’s working a deal to take them to dinner or something.”

ADOLIS GARCÍA — You know how many players in baseball hit more home runs than Adolis García in May (11)? Right you are. That answer is none. And guess which rookie emerged from May tied for the AL lead in homers, with 16? Right you are again. Adolis García.

That’s how a guy turns himself into the early favorite for Rookie of the Year. But you know how a guy normally doesn’t turn himself into an early favorite for Rookie of the Year? When he gets designated for assignment — in that same calendar year!

Yes, the Rangers actually did that, less than four months ago, on Feb. 10. And every team in baseball let García slide through waivers. He then got invited to the Rangers’ big-league camp, made a big impression, and the rest is history.

If you’re thinking nobody in history could possibly have won a Rookie of the Year award after being DFA’d that same year, well, we can’t answer that one. But our friends from STATS Perform did check as far back as reliable transaction data exists — and reported that nobody in the 21st century has ever done that. Because of course they haven’t!

10. Keep an eye on these teams!
THE ROCKIES — Are the Rockies the worst road team ever? They have a shot at it. They’re 4-22 on the road this season. Four and twenty-two! That’s a .154 winning percentage. We’ve never seen anything like it.

• Post-1900 record holder: Pinky Whitney’s 1935 Boston Braves (13-65, .167)
• Worst in the expansion era: Sherten Apostel’s 2020 Rangers (6-24, .200, in that 60-game season).
• Worst in a 162-game season: Choo Choo Coleman’s 1963 Mets and Lasting Milledge’s 2010 Pirates (both 17-64, .210).

So yeah, I’m saying there’s a chance.

THE DODGERS — I’m not sure why we haven’t paid more attention to this, but the Dodgers’ collection of aces has a chance to go down as one of the most dominating rotations of all time, at least if you measure that this way:

• They could be the first rotation in the live-ball era with a sub-1.00 WHIP! Their WHIP through May: 0.92.
• They could be the first rotation ever with 1,000 more strikeouts than walks! Their pace through May: 1,068 K’s, 195 BBs.
• They could be the first rotation ever with a 5-to-1 K/BB ratio! That ratio was over 6-to-1 heading into San Francisco last weekend. It was still at 5.48 through May. Amazing.

THE MARINERS — The Mariners got no-hit twice in May. At home. Which was helpful if they were trying to submerge below the Mendoza line for the month (which they did, at .199). They weren’t, obviously. But what they’re also not trying to do is compile the lowest team batting average of modern times! Still, they’re on their way. They flipped the calendar to June with a .205 team average. Here’s where that would rank them in full seasons since 1900:

Mariners
2021
.205
Brewers
2021
.211
White Sox
1910
.211
Dodgers
1908
.213
Yankees
1968
.214
Now here’s what’s really astonishing about that leader board. The Mariners and Brewers of 2021 both appear on it — and they both had winning records through May! If we toss out the 60-game stats of last year, the lowest average of all time by any team with a winning record is .214, by that 1968 Yankees juggernaut. Once again, I’m saying there’s a chance.

THE RAYS — They can jettison two of their three elite starters over the winter. They can place 18 different players on the IL. They can trade their energizer shortstop in the middle of an 11-game winning streak. And for those Tampa Bay Rays, none of it matters. Nothing changes. They just keep on chugging. And keep on winning.

So for their latest, greatest impossible feat, here’s what they did in May: They entered the month with a losing record (13-14). They finished the month 15 games over .500 (35-20). And who does that?

Last team to start any calendar month with a losing record and finish that month at least 15 games north of .500? According to STATS, it was Huck Betts’ 1933 Boston Braves 48-49 through July, 22-6 that August).

So here’s one thing we learned for sure in May (again). The Rays are gonna Ray!

Yankees transferred RHP Corey Kluber from the 10-day injured list to the 60-day injured list.

The procedural move clears a 40-man roster spot for infielder Chris Gittens, who has been called up from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in a corresponding move. The 35-year-old veteran righty, who tossed a no-hitter against the Rangers last month, will be sidelined until late-July, at the earliest due to a right shoulder strain.

what Corey has gone through in the last three seasons would be the end of line for lots of pitchers anyone remember that hard=-worker Danny Sslazar] but Kluber will likely be back again in August or at worst in 2022

Becoming a folk hero in Detroit. Even playing in the outfield. 8 home runs!

Eric Haase hit his eighth home run of the year on Tuesday night against the Mariners.

Haase’s two-run shot in the first inning flew 424 feet, at a velocity of 104.8 miles per hour, also bringing Miguel Cabrera home.

The 28-year-old is swinging a hot bat as of late; of his eight home runs, five of them were hit in this first week of June. He carries forth a .278/.333/.681 line, contributing to an incredible 1.028 OPS.

Always could hit homers; he's a Detroit area kid so I'm sure they're very happy to see him succeed.

DETROIT -- Jerry Dipoto has often justified his acquisitions of former top-end prospects who didn’t quite pan out with the assertion that someone or some team once believed in that player’s lofty potential. It’s not all hype.

Jake Bauers certainly fits that bill.

The Mariners' general manager announced ahead of Thursday’s series finale against Detroit that Seattle had acquired first baseman/left fielder from Cleveland in exchange for cash considerations or a player to be named later. The 25-year-old former Top 100 prospect will get a fresh opportunity after struggling to get his big league career off the ground.

Bauers, who made an early-morning drive from Cleveland to Detroit, batted seventh and started at first base, where he profiles more prominently and will give Evan White a backup once White returns from the 10-day IL. White, recovering from a left hip flexor strain, began a rehab assignment with Triple-A Tacoma on Thursday. Bauers has played 148 of his career 221 games at first base and 73 in the outfield.

“I think I'm going to fit in well here,” Bauers said. “I think the younger you are, maybe the hungrier you are, just as a group. So I think just kind of hoping to kind of feed off the energy that they have going on here. It seems like they enjoy playing the game, and anytime you're enjoying what you're doing, man, you're going to be in a better spot. So, just looking to come over here [and have] fun and win some games.”

Bauers, who ranked as high as baseball’s No. 64 overall prospect in 2018, was designated for assignment by Cleveland on Saturday after hitting .190/.277/.280 with a 56 wRC+ (league average is 100) over 113 plate appearances in 43 games.

He spent the entire 2020 season at Cleveland’s alternate training site after not making the team out of Summer Camp. Over parts of three seasons between Cleveland and Tampa Bay, he’s a .211/.309/.365 hitter with 25 homers.

“Obviously, it sucks going through getting DFA’d and all that,” Bauers said. “But to get another opportunity and get a fresh start, it feels good. I'm excited for it.”

Bauers was originally a fourth-round Draft pick by the Padres in 2013, then was dealt to the Rays as part of the 11-player, three-team trade with the Nationals that involved Wil Myers and Trea Turner. Then in 2018, he was part of the Mariners’ three-team trade with Cleveland and Tampa Bay that brought Edwin Encarnación to Seattle.

“We've seen him some, but he fits right in with our group, age-wise, experience-wise,” Mariners manager Scott Servais said. “He is a young player that we like and think he's got chance to grow with us. So, we'll give him opportunity to see what he does with it. … He's got a good throwing arm. He's a good defender. Obviously, a left-handed bat and we are overloaded with left-handed bats right now. But that's just where we're at.”

But Bauers’ ties to Mariners management run even deeper than that. Servais scouted Bauers in high school in Southern California, when Seattle’s skipper was working for the Angels’ player development staff. And Servais managed against the Rays when Bauers made his debut in 2018 at Tropicana Field and hit three screaming line drives for outs.

“I do think that it takes some players longer to figure it out the big league level,” Servais said. “Sometimes it's a coach, wearing a different uniform, being in a different uniform, that can help somehow flip the switch and allows that player to take off and relax. It happens to multiple players every year in our game and happened to me in my career.”

In a corresponding move, infielder Jack Mayfield was designated for assignment. Mayfield hit .176/.200/.206 over 35 plate appearances in 11 games, and his roster spot figured to be one of the first up for grabs once the club begins returning its injured infielders in White and Dylan Moore, who is also on a rehab assignment.

debut for Jake could've been worse. He singled in 4 trips, batted in a run; his 192 avg was the 3rd worst in the Seattle lineup. He was hitting ahead of another Top 100 prospect Taylor Trammell who's on his 3rd team already and trying to figure out how to hit.

[Trammell was all that San Diego got in the Bauers for lots of people deal involving the Reds. That was a net ZERO for the Padres; but they then dumped him on Seattle as part of a 4 player, none of whom I know much about ]

Rosenthal: Why trade deadline may be different; Rays’ deep talent pool; Angels surviving without Trout; more notes


By Ken Rosenthal 52m ago 1
To demonstrate some of the different dynamics in play at this year’s July 30 trade deadline, consider the approach the Diamondbacks are likely to take with their best player, center fielder Ketel Marte.

The Diamondbacks have lost 19 straight road games. They fired both of their hitting coaches on Thursday. Their 20-43 record is the worst in the major leagues. But they do not necessarily want to move Marte, who is under club control at below-market salaries through 2024. And if they are willing to take such a step, they likely would want major-league-ready players rather than low-level prospects in return. A trade of Marte only would make sense if the Diamondbacks intended to tear down their roster, and general manager Mike Hazen has consistently resisted a total rebuild.

Here’s the problem: The spate of injuries throughout the sport will make it difficult for teams to part with players they need for depth. So, a Marte deal might be easier to accomplish in the offseason, when teams are in less urgent states and more flexible with their rosters. Yet even then, the Diamondbacks might ask themselves: Why not build around a star player whose salary will top out at $12 million in ’24?

The biggest trade thus far – shortstop Willy Adames from the Rays to the Brewers for relievers J.P. Feyereisen and Drew Rasmussen – was an exchange of major leaguers who filled respective needs for their new clubs. Similar deals are possible over the next seven weeks. But the threat of further injuries might discourage some teams from moving players they otherwise would trade.

“I’ve already had teams ask about some guys that I can’t move because they are depth at the moment,” the GM of one contender said. “So unless they are immediate upgrades at the same position, I just can’t consider at the moment.”

An executive with another contender believes only sellers with impatient ownerships and/or competitive aspirations will insist upon major-league-ready talent, citing the Diamondbacks, Royals and Tigers as examples. The Twins, Nationals and Angels, teams that will want to contend again quickly, also might fall into that category if they decide to sell. But rebuilding clubs such as the Pirates and Orioles almost certainly will be content to keep collecting prospects.

Which raises another concern: The difficulty of evaluating prospects, especially at the lower levels. Most did not play in 2020 because the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the minor-league season. An executive with a potential seller said Major League Baseball’s experimental rules changes in some minor leagues are creating another layer of complexity.

“You’d rather get slightly more established guys with track records given the A-ball guys will be such massive unknowns right now,” the GM said. “There was no (minor-league) baseball in 2020, so there were no stats, limited scouting looks (and now) changes in league rules. It’s hard to evaluate those guys at the lowest levels right now.”

Another executive for a potential seller believes the biggest obstacle to trades will be the evolving financial landscape as the game recovers from the pandemic and faces the threat of a work stoppage when the collective-bargaining agreement expires on Dec. 1.

Will teams be willing to take on salaries when paid attendance was non-existent in 2020 and limited at the start of ’21? Will the threat of a work stoppage eroding part of the ’22 season make teams even more reluctant to trade affordable young talent?

There will be trades. There are always trades. The motivations and reservations this year are different, that’s all.

Rays at it again
During a season in which many teams are scrambling to find healthy bodies, the Rays’ assembly line of talent just keeps rolling. Consider right-hander Michael Wacha, who came off the IL on May 23 after a 19-day absence stemming from a hamstring issue. The Rays did not find a game for him to start until June 6, in part due to the emergence of rookie left-handers Josh Fleming and Shane McClanahan. Based on runs allowed per nine innings, Fleming’s run prevention since his major-league debut last Aug. 23 is essentially the same as Tyler Glasnow’s.

Then there is the Rays’ surplus of young infielders, starting with shortstop Tayler Walls, who has excelled defensively and produced a .761 OPS since his promotion on May 22. The Rays still have Wander Franco and Vidal Bruján, the game’s No. 1 and 13 prospects in Baseball America’s updated rankings, at Triple A – and this after trading Adames, who is still only 25, to bolster their bullpen.

The waves of talent make the Rays a potentially intriguing buyer, a threat to acquire any player available if they are willing to give up better prospects to get the cash they would require in any deal that involved them absorbing a high salary. But the Rays likely would aim only for a significant upgrade, and even then might have problems making such a player fit.

Twins designated hitter Nelson Cruz seemingly would make sense for Tampa Bay, which currently ranks fourth in the majors in runs per game, but ultimately might need offensive help. Fine, where would the Rays put him? Their DH, Austin Meadows, leads the team’s qualifying hitters with an .854 OPS. And the Rays won’t want to play Meadows in the outfield regularly when they have four superior defenders – Kevin Kiermaier, Randy Arozarena, Manuel Margot and Brett Phillips – helping them lead the league in Outs Above Average among outfielders by a wide margin.

Crazy, isn’t it? The Rays are one of the game’s least wealthy teams. But they’ve got rich people problems.

How Angels are reviving without Trout
The Angels lost five of their first six games after Mike Trout went on the injured list with a strained right calf, but since then they are 11-5, moving within two games of .500. And that’s with Anthony Rendon sitting on an adjusted OPS 22 percent below league average, and only in recent days starting to get hot.

Trout is not expected back before the All-Star break, so the team’s buy-sell question, at least for now, is on hold. It’s difficult to picture the Angels as a serious contender when they rate so poorly defensively, 29th in Outs Above Average, 27th in Defensive Runs Saved. But even with the fielding inadequacies, their pitching seems to be on the upswing. During this 16-game stretch, the Angels rank ninth in the majors with a 3.57 ERA.

Manager Joe Maddon chose to stick to a six-man rotation even after José Quintana went on the injured list with left shoulder inflammation, enabling Patrick Sandoval to continue his mini-breakout. The six-man rotation could help keep the Angels’ starting pitchers, including Shohei Ohtani, strong throughout the season. If the Angels do sell, they likely will draw heavy interest in their back-end relievers – righty Steve Cishek, lefty Tony Watson and right-handed closer Raisel Iglesias. All are on expiring contracts, and all are on decent rolls.

Why the threshold matters more to some than others
The financial penalty for exceeding the luxury-tax threshold – 20 percent for every dollar spent over $210 million for a first-time offender, 30 percent for a second, 50 percent for a third – is not usually reason enough for clubs to treat the limit as a hard cap. But for the Astros, in particular, the potential losses of draft picks and international slot space create a larger deterrent this season.

The sign-stealing scandal cost the Astros their first- and second-round picks in the 2020 and ’21 drafts, so club officials are especially mindful of the consequences of exceeding the threshold for a second straight year. The Astros currently are at $208.8 million in luxury-tax payroll, according to Fangraphs, making deadline additions difficult without accompanying subtractions – and the Houston roster contains little fat.

Going past $210 million might hurt the Astros in two ways – first, in the quality of draft-pick compensation they would receive if they lost free agents who rejected qualifying offers; and second, in the penalties they would incur for signing a free agent with a qualifying offer attached.

The Astros likely will face qualifying-offer decisions with two players – Carlos Correa, who would be almost certain to reject it, and Justin Verlander, who also might reject it, figuring he could beat a one-year deal in the $18 million range even though he will be coming off Tommy John surgery entering his age 39 season.

If the Astros stayed under the threshold, they would receive a pick after Comp Round B, in the 75 to 80 range, for each of those players they lost. But if they went over, that pick would come after the fourth round.

Now, let’s say the Astros replaced Correa by signing Trevor Story in free agency after he rejected a qualifying offer (this idea is more of a hypothetical; the ‘Stros under the current system have yet to sign a free agent who rejected a QO from his previous team). If they stayed under the threshold, they would lose a second-round pick plus $500,000 in international slot space. But if they went over, they would lose their second- and fifth-round picks, plus $1 million in international slot space.

A number of other teams are hovering just below the threshold – the Red Sox are at $209 million, the Yankees at $206.5 million, the Phillies at $204.7 million and the Padres at $204.1 million. The Padres and Phillies, both of whom are unlikely to make one of their players a qualifying offer or sign a free agent who rejects one, stand to lose the least by going over.

As first-time offenders with no qualifying-offer attachments, the only cost to those clubs would be money. And if one or both went to, say, $220 million, the 20 percent tax on the $10 million they spent above the threshold would amount to just $2 million.

Rockies prefer to hold starters
For all their problems, the Rockies entered the season believing they had built the strongest rotation in the franchise’s 29-year history. The performance of the rotation, which ranks 20thin. But righty Jon Gray, a potential free agent, likely will be the only starter the Rockies are willing to trade.

It is expected the Rockies will offer Gray an extension, as teams often do before deciding to trade potential free agents at the deadline. The team, however, probably would need to overpay Gray to persuade him to keep pitching at Coors Field. Only two starters originally signed by Colorado, Aaron Cook and Jeff Francis, made it to free agency without changing organizations. Jason Jennings, Ubaldo Jiménez and Jamey Wright were among the pitchers traded before they hit the open market

Not surprisingly, the Rockies are drawing interest in right-hander Germán Márquez, whose adjusted ERA is 18 percent above league average. Marquez, though, is under club control at below-market salaries through ’24, and the Rockies need more pitchers like him. With most free agents wanting no part of Coors, the team needs to rely on scouting, player development and the occasional trade to bolster its pitching. Márquez came as part of a deal with the Rays for Corey Dickerson, and Austin Gomber was included in the Nolan Arenado blockbuster.

A trade of Story could bring additional pitching talent, and so might a trade of Gray if he gets hot in the coming weeks. The Rockies also could make Story a qualifying offer, preserving their right to draft-pick compensation. Such an outcome would appear unlikely, for the value the Rockies receive in a trade should exceed the value of the pick. But interim GM Bill Schmidt, who has run the team’s draft since 2000, has a history of success in the high rounds. Story himself was a compensation pick, the 45th overall choice in 2011 after the Rockies lost free-agent reliever Octavio Dotel.

Around the horn
• One of the more amazing feats of Zack Greinke’s potential Hall of Fame career is that he never has been on the injured list for arm trouble, and has not been on the IL since suffering a strained oblique in 2016.

Greinke, 37, also missed time because of a broken left collarbone in 2013, a fractured left rib in ’11, and personal reasons in ’06; it later was revealed he suffered from depression and social anxiety disorder.

Even after a three-inning stint on Thursday night, his shortest since Aug. 14, 2016, Greinke is first among active pitchers with 3,024 2/3 regular-season innings. Justin Verlander is next at 2,988, followed by Jon Lester at 2,637 1/3. Including postseason, Verlander is at 3,175 2/3, Greinke 3,131 1/3.

• The Brewers intended to upgrade their corner-infield offense even before third baseman Travis Shaw dislocated his left shoulder on Wednesday night. Luís Urias replaced Shaw at third on Thursday, with Jace Peterson taking over second as the team awaited the return of Kolten Wong from a left oblique strain. First base, meanwhile, remains a potential area of improvement.

That improvement might come internally, from Daniel Vogelbach, who raised his adjusted OPS to league average with a double and home run on Thursday night, or Keston Hiura, if he gets it together at Triple A. The Brewers, after trading Feyereisen and Rasmussen, also want to improve their bridge to late-inning relievers Devin Williams and Josh Hader, and might need to get creative on that front externally as well.

• The Rockies’ Ryan McMahon not only has hit 13 home runs, but also leads the majors in Defensive Runs Saved, ranking in the top 10 at two positions – second base, where he is first at plus-7, and third base, where he is tied for ninth at plus-3.

According to Sports Info Solutions, which began tracking DRS in 2003, here are the players who have finished a season in the top five at two positions:

Nyjer Morgan, 2009 14 in LF, 12 in CF

Ender Inciarte, 2015: 13 in RF, 12 in LF

Alex Rios, 2008: 12 in RF, 11 in CF

Hunter Renfroe, 2019: 12 in RF, 7 in LF

Addison Russell, 2015: 10 at SS, 9 at 2B

Brad Wilkerson, 2004: 8 at 1B, 10 in LF

Sports Info Solutions’ Mark Simon, who provided the above numbers, recently interviewed McMahon about his defense on his podcast.

• And finally, perhaps the only benefit of the rash of injuries throughout the league is the opportunity it has created for numerous journeymen who otherwise might have been stuck at Triple A.

The Padres swept the Cardinals in May using position players such as Brian O’Grady, Patrick Kivlehan and John Andreoli, and the trend has only continued in recent weeks.

Outfielder Patrick Wisdom, 29, has eight homers in 16 games with the Cubs, who signed him to a minor-league deal in January. Catcher Eric Haase, 28, has eight homers in 21 games with the Tigers, who designated him for assignment during the offseason, then outrighted him to the minors. Outfielder Billy McKinney, 26, has contributed to both the Brewers and Mets, hitting seven homers in 52 games.

As Rays right-hander Collin McHugh said on Twitter, “The push (with VERY good reason) to highlight the young superstars in today’s game often overshadows my second favorite baseball narrative . . . the late bloomer!

Let’s wax about sticky stuff and switch hitting; Jesse Winker finds his groove and more: Joe’s Week in Baseball


By Joe Posnanski 1h ago 4
Welcome to Joe’s Week in Baseball, a meandering diary of thoughts, ideas, essays, stats … you know, baseball stuff that will run each week. Here’s this week’s entry.

Saturday, June 5
I’m rubber, you are glue

Baseball is a game of cheaters (or players pushing the edge). It has always been so. The very essence of the game as we know it — a titanic battle between a pitcher and hitter — comes from pitchers pushing the edge (or cheating) by refusing to play by the simple rules of the day. Pitchers were supposed to, well, pitch the ball, underhanded, like horseshoes, for the sole purpose of starting the action. Hitters were even allowed to ask for pitches to be thrown in a specific location — as in Kit’s famous “I like the high ones” proclamation in “A League of Their Own.”

But a few pitchers didn’t want to play by those rules so they started trying all sorts of things to disrupt hitters — by putting spin on the ball, by illegally breaking their wrists and elbows in ways that were all but undetectable, by flaunting the underhand pitching rule entirely. Cheating? Pushing the edge? Sure. The powers of baseball either had to bear down on these pitchers or change the rules to accommodate them.

They changed the rules.

So it began, a 150-year car chase scene, players cheating (or pushing the edge), the people running baseball always trying to catch up. Players gambled and threw games. Players corked bats and sharpened spikes. They spit on baseballs and cut up baseballs and greased up baseballs to make them easier to grip, spin more, drop faster. They took amphetamines and steroids and human growth hormone to boost energy, get stronger and recover from injuries. They stole signs, which was perfectly legal as long as they didn’t use devious methods to steal the signs and relay them. So, naturally, they developed devious methods to steal signs and relay them.

And now, it seems, pitchers are utterly abusing Rule 3.01, which reads, in part:

“No player shall intentionally discolor or damage the ball by rubbing it with soil, rosin, paraffin, licorice, sand-paper, emery-paper or other foreign substance.”

I want to put the whole rule in there so you can see the scope of cheating (or edge-pushing) that has been going on in baseball history. Pitchers have been rubbing baseballs with paraffin? What in the hell is paraffin?* And licorice? Yep, apparently, pitchers used to put it on the ball to make it harder to see.

*Paraffin, noun, British: a flammable, whitish, translucent, waxy solid consisting of a mixture of saturated hydrocarbons, obtained by distillation from petroleum or shale and used in candles, cosmetics, polishes and sealing and waterproofing compounds.

I’m actually surprised that there’s not a specific mention of Flex Seal. Have you seen how that stuff can make a screen-door boat float?

In any case, this rule has been enforced, um, let’s use the word “unevenly” to be kind. Every now and again, someone might make a stink about a pitcher using pine tar to grip the ball better — you might remember a few years ago when the umpires tossed Michael Pineda for hiding pine tar on his neck. But for the most part, the rule has been ignored and unenforced and when baseball rules get ignored and are not enforced, you know what happens next.

Players push the edge. Or cheat. You know. One or the other.

Sports Illustrated this week — in a story headlined “This Should Be the Biggest Scandal in Sports”— reports that pitchers have not just flaunted the rules but taken it to a “Bill Nye the Science Guy” level of developing designer sticky concoctions that, in at least one case, actually caused some alarm at airport security.

How bad has the problem gotten? Apparently very bad. ESPN reports that baseball will now respond by instructing umpires to check players constantly, with one management source estimating “there will be eight to 10 random foreign substance checks per game.”

Yep, that will pack in the fans.

This, unfortunately, has been baseball’s mode forever — ignore a problem until it gets so bad that the only way to deal with it is to make an embarrassing public spectacle out of it. This is what happened just in this century with steroids, with the ever-slowing pace of play, with the absurd deluge of home runs, with sign stealing, and now with pitchers supergluing baseballs to their hands. It is only when these things reach DEFCON 2 that anybody acts.

In this case, DEFCON 2 is a league-wide .236 batting average, a game where teams average more strikeouts than hits, nightly no-hitter watches and all the rest.

How much would it change the game if they really could get the illegal stickiness out? I’m not sure, but one baseball insider tells me that there would be a massive explosion of offense. Remember when swimmers started wearing those NASA-designed swimsuits and they broke 13 world records within a month and then broke 25 more world records at the Olympics in Beijing? Yeah, that’s what he thinks this sticky stuff has done for pitchers. He thinks without it, hitters will have their revenge.

The scuttlebutt is that we caught a preview of this on Wednesday when Gerrit Cole pitched against the Rays. You might remember that in January, there was some buzz around an alleged text message from Cole asking about getting a specific substance to use on a baseball. The thing blew over pretty quickly, Cole refused to talk about it, etc. But in the game against the Rays, there might have been extra attention to Cole, who had been all but unhittable this year.

And he got hit pretty hard, giving up five runs in five innings. It was the second time in two weeks that he got rocked, and it didn’t help matters that his spin rate was down considerably on all of his pitches.

Obviously, there’s too much here we don’t know, but it is striking how many people around baseball are convinced that the game will have a seismic shift if and when pitchers are forced to stop using these sticky substances. And it’s worth repeating this baseball truism: If players can push the edge (or cheat), they will. We have 150 years of evidence.

Sunday, June 6
Winker!

From the start, Jesse Winker hit. Few people around the country noticed because other things were camouflaging that fact — he couldn’t stay healthy, his outfield defense was a bit shaky, the Reds were generally pretty bad. But from his first year in 2017, in limited at-bats, he hit for average and some power, and he displayed outstanding plate discipline. In his 89 games in his second season, he walked more than he struck out. Last season, he smacked 12 home runs in 54 games. Point is, he showed promise.

Still, for all those camouflaging reasons I just mentioned, this incredible season feels like it came out of the blue. Winker crushed three home runs Sunday to give the Reds a four-game sweep over the suddenly fading Cardinals. It was Winker’s second three-homer game of the season, making him the first Reds player ever to do that. It also gave him 17 homers this year, which leads the league.

In all, Winker is hitting .350/.412/.665. He also leads the league in OPS and OPS+.

In fact, the Reds outfield now features two of the top three OPS sluggers — Winker (1.077) and Nick Castellanos (1.042), with Fernando Tatis Jr.’s OPS squeezing in the middle. The Reds are third in the National League in runs scored but are still chasing .500 because their pitching has been a huge disappointment. It’s funny; I thought the Reds were going to pitch well and struggle to find runs. But ace Luis Castillo is 2-8 with a 6.63 ERA, and the bullpen has been a wreck. You just never know in this game.

But back to Winker: One thing that’s fun about him is that he has an old-fashioned, see-the-ball-hit-the-ball approach that cuts against the more commonplace approach of hitters breaking down video, studying spin rates, developing individual plans for individual pitchers. Teammates say that Winker’s preparation usually involves him going to one of them and saying, “Who’s this guy? What does he throw?”

There are only a handful of hitting geniuses like that in the game — Atlanta’s Freddie Freeman comes to mind. They just step in and take their swings and pound baseballs. It’s good to know that some hitters are so talented that even in today’s era, they can still do that.

Strike three?

You’ve undoubtedly seen this little graphic by now, particularly if you’re a Yankees fan:



This happened in the bottom of the ninth inning of the Yankees-Red Sox game. The score was tied. There were two outs. New York had runners on first and third. And the count was full.

You can see the location of Pitch 7.

It was called strike three to end the inning.

We spend quite a bit of time here at JWIB talking about bad ball-strike calls because it is clear that something must be done. All these years of being a sports fan and sportswriter have led me to believe, without exception, that once we have the technology to correct missed calls, it is unsustainable to keep on missing those calls. Every sport, including baseball, has come to use technology in some form or another to help officiate games. They didn’t always want to do it. Baseball fought hard against replay reviews. Tennis still insists on having linespeople despite line-calling technology that is way better. Football has kept adding more replay reviews until it feels like two-thirds of the game is spent waiting for officials to review.

Balls and strikes will inevitably be called, at least in part, by automated ball-strike systems. This is, in the phrase a friend of mine uses, “the future we already know.” The question is only how long it will take and what sort of system will be used. You can’t keep having umpires blow obvious calls like that.

I think that balls and strikes should be called by some sort of blend between an automated system and human umpiring. I like having real people call those really tight pitches. In Statcast, it is called the “Shadow Zone,” where about half the pitches are called balls and half are called strikes. There is some ambiguity about these pitches because there is some ambiguity about the strike zone itself — different batters have different zones. I know some people will disagree, but I’m good with these pitches being judged by a home-plate umpire.

What I’m not good with is an umpire ever missing a pitch that is obviously a ball or strike, like the pitch to Rougned Odor. It’s inexcusable in today’s world with today’s technology for that to ever happen. I believe baseball should immediately institute some sort of ear-piece system that offers a tone if a pitch is definitely a ball or definitely a strike. Umpires are calling them right more than 99 percent of the time — Statcast shows that umpires are better at ball-strike calls than they have ever been.

But it’s not good enough. They have to get that right 100 percent of the time.

There are definitely risks to doing this — there always is when you bring technology into the game. The concept of a definite strike would undoubtedly grow as time goes on. Have you heard of the sports version of the expression “bracket creep”? It is the idea that anytime you have a bracket, say a 64-team college basketball tournament or a four-team college football playoff, it will inevitably grow. The same is true for using technology in sports. As technology gets better, its influence on the game will grow. Once you have a system calling obvious balls and strikes, people will start demanding that the system call all pitches.

Thing is, we’re already down that road. The Odor botched call happened on “Sunday Night Baseball,” in front of a nationwide audience, and to paraphrase The Dude, this will not stand.

Tuesday, June 8
Goodbye, switch-hitting

The question with Baltimore’s intriguing Cedric Mullins has always been the same: Can he hit? As a talent, he offered a variety of goodies. Though he’s smaller — listed at 5-foot-8, 175 pounds — he has a lot of speed, he has a little bit of pop, he plays good defense, he doesn’t strike out all that much. And he was a switch hitter. Also, from his first appearances at spring training, big-league coaches and managers have been impressed with his work ethic, professionalism, all that good stuff.

But can he hit?

The answer before last season was pretty decisively “no.” He hit .265 in the minor leagues. He made it up to the big leagues for a time in 2018 and posted an unhappy 86 OPS+ in 45 games, but that was Babe Ruth compared to 2019 when he went 6-for-74 in 22 games before getting set to Triple-A Norfolk, where he hit .205 before getting sent down again. It wasn’t clear that he would get another big-league shot.

But last season (if we can call it that), because of an injury to Mullins’ good friend Austin Hays, he was given another chance and he showed a little bit — he proved to be a fine bunter, he somehow managed to hit .271 with a touch of power, and he came into spring training with a chance to win a full-time job.

And he didn’t miss.

The key might have been him giving up switch-hitting.

For the 2021 season, Mullins gave that up, focusing all of his energy on hitting left-handed. He looked at his performances as a right-handed hitter — .147 average with a .189 slugging percentage in 111 plate appearances — and decided: “Nah, I could probably do better just hitting left-handed all the time.”

It has been great for him. Right from the beginning of spring training, he just crushed the ball.

He hasn’t stopped. Over the weekend, he reached base in 11 consecutive plate appearances — this included nine hits in a row — and after homering again Tuesday, he’s now hitting .325/.394/.541 with nine homers, nine stolen bases and a league-leading 75 hits. Throw in his excellent defense, and Mullins is putting up an MVP-type season.

There are exactly 20 switch-hitters in baseball this year who have played enough to qualify for a batting title. The best of them is Cleveland’s José Ramírez, who has always been a terrific hitter from both sides of the plate. There seems a purpose to his switch-hitting — he hits with a touch more average from the right-handed side and a touch more power from the left-handed side. That makes sense.

But in so many cases, it really doesn’t — the hope seems to be that the platoon advantage alone will make switch-hitting worthwhile. But what if you’re Ian Happ, and you slug 100 fewer points as a righty? What if you’re Detroit’s Jeimer Candelario, and you hit .224/.316/.377 as a lefty while putting up 110 more OPS points as a righty? What if you’re St. Louis’ Tommy Edman and, in admittedly limited time, you’re hitting .320/.372/.568 as a righty and not even approaching those numbers as a lefty?

I don’t know. I’m just saying that it’s hard to hit in baseball. It seems doubly hard to hit in two different ways. I get that switch-hitting can get you scouted, can get you noticed, can get you a shot that you might not otherwise have gotten in baseball.

But, more than that, there are those very special players — the Mickey Mantles, the Chipper Joneses, the Pete Roses, the Carlos Beltráns — who can do it. It seems to me that the mere mortals might be better off focusing on hitting one way as Mullins has.

Wednesday, June 9
Win with Lynn

It goes without saying that I’m usually wrong. This is true about baseball. This is true about life. My daughters can give you the complete rundown of my general wrongness. But for the life of me, I could not understand why teams last year didn’t go all in and try to trade for Lance Lynn. Where were the Yankees? Where were the Phillies? Where were the Twins, Braves, Astros, even the Dodgers?

At the time, I chalked it up to last season being so off — teams didn’t really seem to know how much their hearts were really in trying to win it all. There were no fans in the stands, the season was over in the blink of an eye, it didn’t quite feel like baseball.

But, looking back, I think it also came down to something else: Too many people around the game just didn’t realize that Lynn is an elite pitcher. He’s a true ace, one of maybe a dozen or so around baseball. It is, admittedly, easy to miss. Lynn doesn’t have the obvious stuff of a Shane Bieber or Cole or Jacob deGrom. He doesn’t have the youthful promise of a Jack Flaherty or Freddy Peralta. He doesn’t have the legendary pedigree of a Clayton Kershaw or Max Scherzer or Zack Greinke.

Instead, he’s a 34-year-old veteran — a grizzled veteran, even — who has endured injuries, trades and doubt. He made the All-Star team in his first full season in the big leagues with St. Louis in 2012 but has not made one since. He was a very good pitcher for the Cardinals from 2013 to 2015 before Tommy John surgery shut him down in 2016. He came back and pitched very well for the Cards in 2017, but they thought he was doing it with smoke and mirrors and did not bring him back.

He signed a one-year deal with Minnesota for $12 million and, for the first time in his career, really did not pitch well. The Twins traded him to the Yankees midseason.

That’s when the Texas Rangers took a gamble on him — a three-year, $30 million deal. And it came up blackjack. Immediately, Lynn proved to be healthy and at the top of his game. He finished fifth in the American League Cy Young voting in 2019 and actually finished second to his teammate Mike Minor in Baseball-Reference WAR. He was really, really good in 2019 pitching around a dreadful defense — he finished top 10 in the league in WHIP, strikeouts per nine, strikeout-to-walk ratio and ERA. He did it his way, leading the league in wild pitches — his stuff is hard to handle — but keeping the walks way down.

In 2020, short season and all, he was every bit as good. For the second straight year, he led the American League in number of batters faced.

From what I can tell, the Rangers made it clear to everyone that Lynn was available for the right price. And, at least in their view, nobody offered the right price. It seems to me that a durable and excellent pitcher making $10 million a year would be worth his weight in gold for any team trying to win a championship. But apparently, other teams didn’t see it that way.

Finally, in December, the White Sox traded younger pitcher Dane Dunning along with a prospect for Lynn. And … guess what! It’s turning out to be the deal of the offseason. Lynn is, unsurprisingly, pitching at Cy Young level. He’s 7-1 with a league-leading 1.23 ERA. He, as much as anybody, is the reason the White Sox are four games up in the American League Central.


Aroldis Chapman. (David Berding / Getty Images)
Thursday, June 10
Chapman Rocked

Through the years, I (and my buddy Mike Schur) have written and spoken countless words about the Yankees’ witchy hold over the Minnesota Twins. It has been horrifying and it seemed to be going just like always as the Yankees easily won the first two games of the three-game series against the Twins this week.

But then came Thursday. Everything looked normal. The Yankees took a big lead in the first, thanks to the super-hot Giancarlo Stanton, who hit a three-run bomb. They took a 5-3 lead into the ninth inning. In came closer Aroldis Chapman. The last time Chapman had blown a two-run lead in the ninth? That would be July 15, 2019, against Tampa Bay. Coming into the game, Chapman had allowed one earned run all season and had struck out 43 batters in 23 innings.

And then: chaos. Chapman gave up a line-drive single to Jorge Polanco on a slider. So he stopped throwing his slider and instead turned to his legendary fastball … only it wasn’t there. His velocity was down in the mid-90s, which still seems super fast, but not in today’s game. Chapman gave up a game-tying homer to Josh Donaldson. He then gave up another line-drive single, this one to Willians Astudillo. Then Nelson Cruz absolutely mashed a home run into the center-field shrubbery to give the Twins the most unlikely of victories.

And, yes, immediately the question was asked: Was Chapman affected by MLB’s new clampdown on sticky substances that help pitchers grip the ball? Chapman said no, that he had never used any such substances. I wonder if this will be the constant refrain every time a pitcher has a bad outing.

Extra-innings fever! Catch it!

OK, so the Braves and Phillies entered the 10th inning of Thursday’s game tied 1-1. What followed would have been utterly baffling to any baseball fan right up to the year 2020.

The Braves started with a runner on second base, because that’s the rule now. After a groundout moved the zombie runner to third, there was a walk, a wild pitch (scoring one run), another walk, a strikeout, another walk, a passed ball (scoring a second run) and a groundout to end the inning.

The Phillies then had their chance, and they had a runner on second, too. After a passed ball, there was a single to score one run, a double to put runners on second and third, and a single by Jean Segura to score two runs and win the game.

So a tight 1-1 game featuring superb pitching performances from Atlanta’s Ian Anderson and Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler and sharp defense ended up being a bizarre fireworks show.

I’ve generally been agnostic about the zombie runner extra-inning rule. My feeling has been that with the regular season meaning less and less and games stretching out in length, the purity of extra innings doesn’t seem worth fighting for. Yes, some of us fans can’t get enough baseball, but I don’t think the casual fan has much love for games that go on and on without any hint of ending. And at the same time, I don’t think many baseball fans would have any tolerance for tie games — though, honestly, I could see an alternate universe where they would be embraced by baseball fans the way they are embraced by soccer fans.

Point is: I totally get why baseball has created the zombie runner concept, and I’m still pretty dispassionate about the whole thing. But I do have to say that the longer it goes on, the less it feels like baseball. The Phillies and Braves were playing one kind of game and then it became an entirely different kind of game. The idea seems to work all right for college football, where the overtimes look nothing at all like the regular game. But I’m not sure it really does work for baseball. Then again, I don’t think you want to go back to full-blooded extra-inning games because those don’t make much sense in 2021. So who knows?

I will tell you one idea I heard that I find intriguing — it’s a shootout concept. The idea is that the home team would get to decide whether to hit or pitch. The hitting team would then get to send up their hitters in any order they like. If the hitting team scores a run, they win. If the pitching team pitches a scoreless inning, they win. I’m not sure about all the details, but that does sound fun.

‘Why do those two clash?’ Inside the legendary Gerrit Cole-Trevor Bauer rivalry at UCLA

By Stephen J. Nesbitt 6
As the baseball bounded into foul territory, tracking toward the left-field corner at Jackie Robinson Stadium in Los Angeles, the two competitors would bolt from the home dugout. They’d sprint on the dirt track, past the bullpen, and beeline for the ball. They were the top college pitchers in the country, chasing records, chasing greatness, chasing each other. Their parents would watch the footrace from the bleachers and wince.

An injury could cost their sons millions in the MLB draft and doom UCLA’s dreams of a College World Series title. But Gerrit Cole and Trevor Bauer couldn’t bear losing to the other.

“Those are two very competitive dudes,” says former UCLA pitcher Zack Weiss.

They were just college kids then, all potential and everything still to prove. They were UCLA’s pair of aces. They spit fire. They threw gas. They frustrated and fueled each other. This was before Cole and Bauer were drafted first and third overall in the 2011 Draft, before the big leagues, before the sticky-substances speculation, before they joined the Yankees and Dodgers, before they were the highest-paid pitchers in the game, before they were Cy Young candidates on World Series contenders in baseball’s biggest markets. Back then, they were starting back to back for the Bruins and battling for foul balls, side by side in the tinderbox of college baseball.

Former UCLA assistant coach Steve Pearse remembers watching an ESPN documentary a few years ago called “Best of Enemies,” about the Celtics and Lakers, about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Pearse was struck by how much the Bird-Magic dynamic reminded him of Cole-Bauer.

“You can’t say one name without the other,” Pearse says. “It’s sort of a weird deal. It’s Cole-Bauer. It’s Mantle-Maris. It’s McGwire-Sosa. It’s Bird-Magic. They’ll always sort of be connected that way.”

Their three years together feels like a box no one wants to crack open.

Over MLB’s most recent offseason, almost as many former UCLA teammates declined interviews as accepted them. Bruins head coach John Savage turned one down, too. Cole considered The Athletic’s request for a few weeks then said he preferred to focus on the present. Bauer’s agent, Rachel Luba, said a publicist would be in touch. A follow-up received no reply.

None of that is terribly surprising. The story that is told about their time at UCLA, the one that has generated buzz in Major League clubhouses and press boxes, is about their rivalry and how they butted heads. Everyone has a theory about how it started. No one really knows for sure. Cole never addresses it. Bauer hasn’t held back, exactly — he once told reporters he and Cole spoke only once in their first six years after school — but he has tried smoothing things over. In May 2018, former UCLA assistant Rick Vanderhook told USA Today the odds of Cole and Bauer ending their feud were worse than “the odds of the earth burning up.” In the same story, an anonymous Astros starter said the rift was “all jealousy” on Bauer’s part. So, later that day, Bauer joked that Cleveland’s TV crew should Photoshop his face to be green with envy. Bauer claimed that at UCLA Cole had insulted his work ethic and said he didn’t have a future in baseball.

“I didn’t appreciate it,” Bauer said at the time, “so we had a rocky relationship. But those feelings have long since faded. I’m happy he’s having success. … I’d love nothing more than to trade Cy Youngs with him for the next 10 years.”

And yet, after all that, Bauer now calls that narrative a “fictitious beef,” a “fake news story,” a media creation. He’s tired of it, true or untrue as it may be.

So, the box has been shut. For more than a decade now, former teammates and coaches and others close to the UCLA baseball program have been asked, over drinks or dinner, what it was like when Bauer and Cole were in college. When they do open up, they talk about the pitchers like human beings, not warring baseball gods. They tell stories about road trips, rap tracks and Bauer’s favorite faded cap. They say the rift is overstated, more bickering than throwing blows. “It makes for great storytelling, right?” first baseman Cody Decker says. “There’s a feud there, for sure, but it’s not a blood feud.” Weiss echoes him. “Maybe they’re not going to hang out and go have a beer together after the game is over,” Weiss says. “But when the lights are on, it’s business. Those two made each other better.”

They consider Bauer and Cole a case study in getting similar, spectacular results from two pitchers with wildly different processes, physiques and personalities.

“At the end of the day, why do those two clash? It’s because of that,” says Rob Rasmussen, who shared the rotation with Cole and Bauer at UCLA. “They just ultimately believed they could take two different roads to reach the same destination. And they each wanted to prove that their road was the best one.”

Gerrit Cole in 2010
Gerrit Cole in 2010. (Patrick Green / Icon SMI / Icon Sport Media via Getty Images)
When Cole showed up to UCLA workouts in the summer before his freshman year in 2008, even those who didn’t know him knew of him. “That’s what happens when you throw 100 mph in high school and get drafted in the first round by the Yankees,” Rasmussen says. The Yankees had taken Cole 28th overall out of Orange Lutheran High. They had from June 5 until Aug. 15 to sign him. Bruins players were certain Cole’s training with them was a tactic Scott Boras, his advisor, was using to squeeze the Yankees for a bigger signing bonus.

“You thought, ‘OK, it sounded nice. Gerrit could come here and be the Friday night starter. But now he can go take $4 million as an 18-year-old. How can he turn that down?’” says Danny Lee, a former UCLA broadcaster.

On campus the day before the signing deadline, Cole asked Decker, the team’s senior captain, “Hey, Cody, you think I’m going to be here tomorrow?”

“I looked at him and said, ‘No. If you are, I’m going to kill you,’” Decker recalls. “He asked why. I’m like, ‘Because you’re being offered so much money. … If you turn down your money, I’m going to lose my mind.’

“He looked me dead in the eye and, without even an ounce of (sarcasm), says, ‘Or I’ll just play here for three years, go first overall and sign for $10 million.’

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I hate you.’ I just remember how irate I was that this cocky kid had the balls to say that to me. I’m like, you idiot, you have no idea how this business works. Turns out, he knew way more than me.”

If Cole walked in with an air of supreme confidence, Bauer arrived a lone wolf.

Bauer graduated from Hart High in Santa Clarita, Calif., a semester early, with a 4.8 GPA, and enrolled at UCLA in 2009, after the holidays. He was there to study mechanical engineering and make hitters look silly. He did both. But Bauer wasn’t one to bend over backward to fit in, especially at 17, and his aloofness and independence irritated teammates. Bauer had honed his workout routine and his arm-care program in high school, focusing on flexibility and mobility rather than on adding muscle in the weight room. Savage signed off on Bauer working out alone, so long as he pitched well.

A few weeks after Bauer arrived at UCLA, Cole, who had bonded and built trust with teammates throughout the summer and fall, ripped Bauer in front of everyone in the weight room for not following the same strength-and-conditioning program as them. That, Bauer told Sports Illustrated, was when Cole told him he had no future in baseball. “I was like, ‘F— you, Gerrit,’” Bauer said.

“As I look back on it, 10 years later, there were certainly things that Trevor could have done — and I think he would admit the same thing — that would have ingratiated himself to the team a little bit more,” Rasmussen says. “But there were certainly things that we could have done as 18- to 21-year-old punks to treat him better and welcome him more.”

“He was 17. He didn’t really know the nuances of the team. He was just thrust into it,” Decker adds. “At the time, I think it was all of our faults, including mine, that we didn’t recognize that.”

Once, around 10 p.m. on a weeknight, Pearse was sitting in the coaches’ office at Jackie Robinson Stadium when he started hearing noises.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

“I’m going, what the heck?” Pearse says. “I thought it was possums playing handball.”

Puzzled, Pearse walked out of the office and around to the back of the stadium. It was almost completely dark outside. Thump. Pearse flipped on a floodlight and saw Bauer throwing weighted balls against a cinder-block wall.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Pearse asked.

“Just getting my workout in, Coach,” Bauer replied.

For three years at UCLA, Bauer was true to his routine. Weiss remembers driving in for a 6 a.m. session in the weight room and seeing Bauer already in the parking lot with medicine balls and resistance bands. “He was 100 percent busting his ass.” Weiss says. After Bauer backed up his training methods with results on the mound, the workouts caused less friction, though no one forgot the initial strain between Bauer and the rest of the Bruins.

“You essentially become a fraternity at that point in your life,” Rasmussen says. “If there’s one person who’s not including themselves in a lot of stuff, then, yeah. Especially if they’re having success, right? It’s easy to MF someone when they’re having success and not having to do the things that you have to do.

“But what’s not shown is the times that he was doing it when we weren’t.”

For all of the hype he carried as a freshman, Cole and his bravado fit well with the Bruins. He was boisterous, unafraid to speak up. He toed the line between confident and cocky. He worked hard. He was a good hang. One day, Savage told Rasmussen he’d be rooming with Cole on road trips. “Coach Savage said, ‘Hang out with Gerrit and show him the ropes,’” Rasmussen remembers. “I was like, ‘What do you want me to show this guy? I can tell him where the good food is in Eugene, Ore., but I’d like him to teach me that fastball.’”

At 6 feet 4 and 215 pounds — with three inches and 40 pounds on Bauer — Cole was “like the Create-a-Player you made on video games,” says outfielder Jeff Gelalich. Decker says, “You could close your eyes and hear his bullpens.”

In the second game of the 2009 season, UCLA got a glimpse of its future. Cole went six innings against UC Davis, allowing an unearned run, and Bauer pitched a perfect ninth for the save. Later, in a midseason sweep of Washington, Cole had a season-high 13 strikeouts. The next day, Bauer, who didn’t start regularly until the season’s second half, threw a complete-game one-hitter.

They were oil and water, yet they were outstanding.

“If Gerrit pitched on Friday night and struck out 11,” Pearse says, “you’d better believe Trevor wanted to come back on Saturday and strike out 12. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

By the end of the season, Bauer led UCLA in wins (nine), ERA (2.99), innings pitched (105 1/3) and youth (newly 18 years old). He went 7-0 in Pac-10 play and was named the conference’s freshman of the year. Bauer was quieter than Cole in the clubhouse, but just as fiery on the field. “If he had an inning he didn’t like and you patted him on the back, he would snap at you and say, ‘That was terrible. Get away from me,’” Decker says. “I’d have to legitimately pull guys away from him to not fight him.” But, Decker adds, it wouldn’t be fair to focus only on the freshman season. “He was a kid, man.”

Trevor Bauer in 2010
Trevor Bauer in 2010. (Nati Harnik / Associated Press)
“I tell the baggage claim story a lot.”

Gelalich is thinking of a specific instance, but the truth is there’s a whole genre of stories about Bauer and baggage claims. See, one element in Bauer’s arm-care routine was a shoulder tube — a six-foot javelin-like pole with a handle in the middle and weights at the ends. Before picking up a baseball, Bauer would warm up by wiggling the tube around in the air. He took it everywhere. For road trips, he’d pack the tube in its protective case and check it at the airport.

One Sunday night, the Bruins were on a Southwest flight headed home to Los Angeles after an East Coast swing. A bus waited to take them to campus. The players and staff collected their equipment at baggage claim around midnight.

Everything was there except for Bauer’s shoulder tube.

“So, we waited,” Gelalich says. “And waited.”

“We were like, really?” outfielder Brett Krill says.

“We sat at LAX for an hour,” Weiss says, laughing, “because they lost his javelin.”

The first time Bauer’s shoulder tube went missing in an airport was a week into his college career, when UCLA arrived in Houston for a six-team showcase at Minute Maid Park — a ballpark Cole would later call home. Bauer “basically told the whole team he refused to pitch” unless the tube was recovered, according to Decker, which further distanced Bauer from his teammates. To them, it was stubbornness. To him, a strict arm-care routine wasn’t optional.

Today, Bauer is seen as one of the pioneers of a pitching revolution. A few chapters of Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik’s 2019 book “The MVP Machine” are devoted to Bauer’s unconventional climb and nonconformist approach. His training methods — weighted balls, shoulder tubes, resistance bands, max training, pulldowns and long toss — are now used at all levels. New-age pitching terminology, with phrases like “tunneling” and “spin axis” and “perceived velocity,” now seeps into broadcasts, no longer treated as an entirely foreign language to the average fan.

Ten years ago, though, Bauer was mostly alone.

“Gerrit Cole is the guy who has perfect pitch,” Lee says, “and can pick up an instrument and learn it in a week. Trevor Bauer is the guy who is good at it, but he spends hours and hours and hours practicing and learning chords. Not everybody has quote-unquote perfect pitch. Some people get that way by working nonstop. It’s hard not to respect a guy who does that.”

Former UCLA assistant T.J. Bruce, now Nevada’s head coach, remembers seeing Bauer’s foul-pole-to-foul-pole long-toss routine for the first time. Bruce had questions. So, later that day, he sat on the bench beside Bauer. “We talked for an hour,” Bruce says. “He explained everything. It was so interesting.” Another time, after a game, a teenager asked Bauer for a few pitching tips. Bauer stopped, sat down and talked to the kid until it was time to leave.

“Now, I kind of laugh,” Weiss says. “People have their own opinions of Trevor in the media and on social media, but everything he was doing in 2011 is now commonplace in Major League Baseball in 2021. He took a ton of heat to get it there. Man, he was met with a good amount of adversity along the way, but now it’s like, ‘He was right. You guys were wrong. Sorry.’”

Whatever differences the Bruins had when Bauer and Cole were freshmen were mostly ironed out by 2010. Behind a weekend rotation of Cole (11-4, 3.37 ERA), Bauer (12-3, 3.02) and Rasmussen (11-3, 2.72), UCLA started the season winning one series after another. Five wins in a row. Ten. Fifteen.

“It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done,” Rasmussen says, laughing. “I always joked that I threw 91-mph changeups after the two of them. I threw a fastball and slider, and it was like I was throwing slow-pitch softball up there.”

The Bruins won their first 20 games, then 21 and 22.

They tell you correlation is not causation, but UCLA’s 22-0 start — the longest win streak in program history, the one that laid the foundation for the Bruins’ first trip to the College World Series since 1997 — began just days after Bauer walked into the clubhouse with a sheet of rap lyrics he had written.

If you’re the type to poke around on Reddit or Twitter, you may already have heard Bauer rap. (If not, just search Consummate 4sight.) But this track seems to have been lost to time. The way teammates remember it, Bauer had a handful of them collaborate, and they took turns on the mic as they recorded the track on a laptop. Each line was about a different teammate, talking up their talent with a rhyme or wordplay, and together they formed a hype song for the 2010 Bruins.

“It was really rad,” says Krill, one of the voices on the track. “It was one of those things where you’re like, damn, he really took time to get to know every single one of us and how we can help the team, then he put it into a song.

“I can’t remember the damn lines, but it was good.”

While coaches and teammates recall countless plays from UCLA’s 2010 postseason run with perfect clarity — like infielder Tyler Rahmatulla hitting a season-saving homer with the Bruins down to their last out in the Super Regionals, and Rasmussen tossing a two-hit complete game to send them to the College World Series — they keep coming back to Texas Christian.

After Bauer pitched UCLA past Florida in the College World Series opener, Cole took the mound against TCU at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Neb.

“That was probably the loudest stadium I’ve ever been in,” Gelalich says. “I couldn’t hear myself think. I remember being nervous standing in left field, kind of all alone. But all of the pressure didn’t seem to impact Gerrit at all.”

Cole struck out the side in the first inning and never lost his stride, punching out 13 Horned Frogs and allowing three runs over eight innings in the 6-3 win. Still, TCU emerged from the loser’s bracket later for a rematch in the semis and took the first game from UCLA. In the second game, Bauer copied Cole whiff for whiff — eight innings, 13 strikeouts, three runs (two earned) and one win. At one point, which TCU fans have not forgotten, Bauer flashed a “horns down” sign to the cameras.

“It was poetry,” Krill says.

“Trevor just stuck it to them,” Gelalich adds.

After throwing 135 pitches against TCU, Bauer wasn’t available against South Carolina two days later in the first game of the best-of-three College World Series final. Cole started and was knocked around in a 7-1 loss. Rasmussen tossed six scoreless innings in the second game, but South Carolina’s Whit Merrifield walked off with a single in the 11th inning. As the Gamecocks flooded the field and their fans erupted, Cole sat on the bench with tears in his eyes. Bauer — the would-be Game 3 starter who had warmed up during Game 2 but never entered — stood at the top step of the dugout and just watched. When the teams shook hands, Bauer asked if he could touch the trophy. He gave it a wistful tap.

By the time Aaron Fitt walked into Savage’s office in January 2011, on assignment to write Baseball America’s preseason cover story about Cole and Bauer, it was clear UCLA’s aces would be taken at the top of the draft that summer. What wasn’t clear to him, not until sitting with Cole for 45 minutes and then Bauer for almost an hour and a half, was just how different they were.

Cole was professional and polished. He talked about his lessons learned, his coaches and the mental side of pitching. He was friendly and engaged, but said nothing especially surprising. Then Cole left and Bauer entered. Bauer was fascinating, candid, quietly intense. He took Fitt through his training regimen and his scientific approach to pitching. “Hearing him break it all down, it’s like, what planet is this guy from?” Fitt says. Bauer had carved his own path. A cookie-cutter approach is good for cookies, he said, but not for pitchers. He spoke about idolizing Tim Lincecum, “The Freak,” but then bristled at being called a freak or quirky or weird. “It gets kind of old sometimes,” Bauer said.

“It’s like no interview I’ve done to this day,” Fitt says.

Ten years later, the cover story paints a portrait of Cole and Bauer together that we haven’t seen since. When asked about their relationship, they alternate compliments and teasing, though you can sense there’s more bubbling beneath the surface. For example: Cole sees himself as a classic power pitcher and refers to Bauer as a “mixer” or a “thumber.” That really bothers Bauer.

Then there’s this excerpt:

“It’s interesting: A lot of things (Cole) does —” Bauer pauses again, “— annoy me. We’re two different personalities. He’s very loud, kind of a vocal leader, in a sense. So at practices, he’s the one getting guys fired up — you know, ‘Yeah, great play!’ — that kind of stuff. I’m more of the sit-back, keep-to-myself, quiet, lead-by-example type. So when he’s out there yelling, for me it’s just like, ‘Oh Gerrit, just shut up.’ But I’m sure when I’m sitting there talking to someone about overlaying video and looking at pitch breaks and stuff like that, he’s probably sitting there thinking, ‘Oh Bauer, shut up.’ You know? So I think we have a pretty good relationship, for being two vastly, vastly different personality types.”

Maybe that quote was Bauer being as even-handed and thoughtful as he could be. It was also accurate. Still, Fitt learned later that Cole was ticked off by it.

The time to visit Lincoln, Neb., is not the first week of March.

“It was about 12 degrees,” says former UCLA assistant coach Jake Silverman. “Freezing cold.”

It was the Bruins’ first trip outside California in the 2011 season, Cole and Bauer’s last spring in Westwood, and the dueling aces were ready for the weather. Cole carried a perfect game into the seventh and shut out Nebraska over nine innings in a 1-0, 11-inning UCLA win. The next day, Bauer threw 10 innings of one-run baseball, striking out a career-high 17, in a game the Bruins lost, 2-1, in 12 innings.

A month later, Bauer struck out 17 again, against Stanford. After the game, he was noticeably upset. Weiss asked why. Bauer said he wanted to strike out 20. A couple of at-bats were eating at him. He’d missed a spot. He’d lost a borderline full-count call. And then Stanford’s Stephen Piscotty had hit a five-foot grounder on a two-strike curveball that almost bounced in the dirt.

“There were a lot of strikeouts that season on curveballs that barely got to the cut of the grass,” Weiss says. “People were beaten before they got in the box.”

“Trevor and Gerrit both have this great desire to make really, really good hitters look bad,” Pearse says. “That’s just a trait that superstar pitchers have. They want to dominate the game. They want to dominate the hitter. They were something else. The best 1-2 combo, I would guess, in college baseball history.”

UCLA's aces: College stats
Trevor Bauer
34
8
44
15
373.1
460
2.36
1.026
Gerrit Cole
21
20
49
5
322.1
376
3.38
1.135
While UCLA claimed its first outright conference title since 1986, the Bruins’ season ended in the NCAA regional. Cole (3.31 ERA) did little to ding his draft stock as a junior, but that season belonged to Bauer, the first Golden Spikes Award winner in school history. He went 13-2 with a 1.25 ERA and capped the season with nine consecutive complete games, leaving as UCLA’s career leader in wins (34), strikeouts (460) and innings pitched (373 1/3).

For each Cole and Bauer start, scouts and cross-checkers were scattered in the stands behind home plate, wielding radar guns and notebooks. Silverman was responsible for scheduling scout interviews for the Bruins’ draft-eligible players. Now an assistant at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Silverman hasn’t had another player meet with more than 12 teams. Cole and Bauer met with all 30. In those meetings, they were themselves.

“Gerrit was really good about giving teams the 15 to 20 minutes and then it was done, shake their hand, and out,” Silverman says. “Trevor, I had to interrupt a couple times, ‘Hey, let’s move on.’ Because he doesn’t care — in a good way. He’s going to give you everything. Whether you like it or not, whether you want to draft him or not, that’s your problem.”

Before Bauer’s last college start, in a 2011 NCAA regional, he had just finished warming up when Fresno State’s head coach came out of the dugout. The coach complained that Bauer wasn’t in UCLA’s proper uniform. His cap was the wrong color.

There was a story behind that cap.

During Bauer’s recruiting visit to UCLA, Savage handed him a Bruins baseball cap. (This was the same day Bauer, rather famously now, wore a Duke hat on campus. Ben Howland, the Bruins’ head basketball coach at the time, told Bauer to take it off. Bauer did not.) That blue UCLA baseball cap was the only one Bauer would wear throughout his college career. By his junior year, that cap was several shades lighter than his teammates’ caps. The lid was faded and frayed. But it fit just the way he liked. Bauer complained that new caps were bulky and uncomfortable, with corners that poked out and irked him.

“He said he didn’t want to look like a train conductor,” Krill says.

And now the Fresno State coach was asking the umpires to make Bauer change his favorite cap.

“He was trying to do a little gamesmanship,” Weiss says. “Trevor was obviously not pleased. He proceeded to strike out everybody.”

Bauer struck out 14 in a complete-game win, passing Lincecum (199) and Mark Prior (202) to set the Pac-10’s single-season strikeout record at 203.

UCLA players, including Trevor Bauer(47) stand in the dugout as they watch South Carolina players celebrate their 2-1 win in game two of the best-of-three NCAA College World Series baseball finals, in Omaha, Neb., Tuesday, June 29, 2010. South Carolina beat UCLA 2-1 in 11 innings to win the championship.(AP Photo/Dave Weaver)
UCLA players, including Trevor Bauer (47), after falling to South Carolina in the 2010 College World Series. (Dave Weaver / Associated Press)
Ten years after leaving UCLA — after the Pirates drafted Cole first overall and the Diamondbacks took Bauer third — Bauer is brash, brutally honest, occasionally out of bounds. Cole is loudest when he’s on the mound. Bauer has one Cy Young. Cole has none. Bauer started a media company. Cole has tweeted once this year — congratulating his brother-in-law, Brandon Crawford. “They are literally nothing alike,” says one former teammate. Another compares them to golf rivals Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, the natural and the mad scientist. “The good Lord put Cole on this earth to be a big-league pitcher,” a former coach says. A teammate adds, “Gerrit could have pitched in 1896 or 2021.” Bauer is styled as more of a self-made star, an inventor tinkering, tweaking knobs, trying to maximize his talent. “If you told Trevor, ‘There’s no way in hell you can throw 100 mph,’ he will do everything in his power to do that,” the coach says, “just to prove you wrong.”

Cole loves baseball history. Bauer wants to change the game, to drag it into the 21st century, to perfect the science of pitching by looking where others haven’t.

Yet their careers are tangled and intertwined, bound by the backstory.

UCLA's aces: Big league stats
Gerrit Cole
107
58
216
4
1343.2
1534
3.14
1.105
Trevor Bauer
81
69
209
6
1278.2
1390
3.81
1.243
Former UCLA teammates and coaches find the notion that Bauer and Cole can’t coexist outrageous. “I see that narrative in the media, and I laugh,” Gelalich says. They fell two wins short of a College World Series title but helped build the Bruins team that won it in 2013. So, when someone fishes for gossip about those days at UCLA, former Bruins tell a story like this instead: It was the last home series of the Bauer-Cole era. The Bruins were ahead, 2-1, in the ninth inning against Cal, and Bauer was still pitching. With two outs and the tying run on second, Cal’s Devon Rodriguez stepped into the batter’s box.

Bauer and Rodriguez had history. They’d gone to high school together. Earlier in the game, Rodriguez doubled and flew out to the warning track. In the ninth, Rodriguez smacked a ground ball that deflected off UCLA’s first baseman and directly to the second baseman, who flipped to Bauer covering first. Bauer turned and said something to Rodriguez. They jawed back and forth, and the benches and bullpens cleared.

“I know for a fact, because I saw it, the first person out there to defend Trevor on the field was Gerrit,” Silverman says. “The whole team was there, but it’s not like Gerrit said, ‘Oh, it’s Trevor. I’m not getting involved.’ If you really had disdain for somebody, you’re not going to go out there and defend them and have their back. Say whatever you want, but that speaks volumes.”

Adds Weiss, “People always ask me about them and assume my answers will be negative. I’m like, ‘Dude, none of it was negative. They were both super helpful, solid teammates who really, really, truly gave a shit.’ In college, not everyone always cares. They did.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic / Associated Press photos)

If we had THIS bullpen we'd be in even worse shape than the Twins are themselves:

The single-season record for inherited runners allowed to score by a team's bullpen is 52.8 percent, set by the Mariners in a shortened 2020 season. Over a full season, the 2003 Royals hold that unenviable record, having allowed 48.7 percent of inherited runners to cross home plate. Either way, at 63 percent, the 2021 Twins are on pace to blow past those numbers.

Tyler Duffey, once Minnesota's go-to reliever in messy situations, has allowed nine of 11 inherited runners to score, Caleb Thielbar has allowed 10 of 13 to score and Taylor Rogers has done the same with five of his 10 inherited runners. Wherever the Twins turn, they've been unable to find a solution to these woes -- resulting in a win probability added as a group that ranks 26th of 30 teams in MLB this season. It's been a rough season for the bullpen as a whole due to struggles from Alex Colomé and Cody Stashak in particular, and their struggles aren't even fully reflected by the collective 4.56 ERA, third worst in the American League.

You probably don't remember:

Samad Taylor, 3B-LF, Double-A New Hampshire (Blue Jays) — Taylor has had a breakout season so far for Double-A New Hampshire. After struggling at the plate in 2018 and 2019 in Low A and High A, Taylor homered (his ninth) and doubled on Sunday. That raised his slash line to .317/.385/.600.

10th round pick in 2017 traded with LHP Thomas Pannone for the second coming of Joe Smith

Hunter Wood recently underwent surgery to insert an internal brace into his right elbow.

Wood had already been on the 60-day injured list after injuring his elbow in late May. He is done for the season.

one of ours for awhile

Another one of ours for awhile.

Blue Jays acquired RHP Adam Cimber from the Marlins in a four-player trade.

Corey Dickerson is the big name in the deal, but Cimber could make the biggest impact. The 30-year-old submariner has posted a 2.88 ERA and a 21/11 K/BB ratio in 34 1/3 innings with a 49.5 percent ground ball rate this season. He should be an important late-inning arm for the Jays. He's under team control through 2024.