A recent post in the Effectively Wild Facebook group sparked my curiosity. A poster named Tim wrote: “Record I’d like to see set that isn’t inconceivable: Player gets 5 HR in a single game.” That record is not inconceivable, because it has been accomplished at least five times in the minor leagues.

In fact, the professional baseball record is eight home runs in a single game, set by catcher Jay Clarke of the Corsicana Oil Cities in a 51-3 win over the Texarkana Casketmakers in a Texas League contest in 1902. The last minor leaguer to hit five homers in a single game was Dick Lane of the Muskegon Clippers in 1948.

But of course the poster was in all likelihood talking about the MLB record of four in a game, which has stood since 1894. But it was a commenter on the post that really piqued my interest. They simply asked: “Would a team really continue pitching to a guy who’s already had 4 HR in a game though?”

It’s a valid question to ask, and it set me down a rabbit hole of seeing just how many players had a plate appearance with four homers already in a game, and how those plate appearances went. Looking back at history isn’t necessarily the best way to predict future behavior, but it is a fun exercise if nothing else, because frankly, before conducting this research I had no idea how many players ever had a crack at a fifth home run. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this, you are surely a baseball fan, and as such, you’re probably aware that Major League Baseball is putting lots of options on the table when it comes to rule changes to shake up the game and make it more interesting. We’ve already seen the intentional walk become automatic and the limiting of mound visits. MLB also reached an agreement with the Atlantic League to experiment with some other ideas, such as robot umpires, a three-batter minimum for pitchers, starting extra innings with runners on base, moving the mound back, and banning the shift. Some of these ended up being adopted in the majors on a temporary basis for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and may end up getting implemented more permanently, depending on how the upcoming CBA negotiations go.

But I have an idea that I think is better than any of these. It’s a small rule change; but it would radically change the game. Too radical even for this change-happy commissioner, I think. And here it is:

On a ball in play, a runner who reaches home can decide to continue on to first base and keep running.

Now, before I explain why I find this rule change so appealing, let me first get the logistics out of the way. How could it be determined if a player has decided to go to first or not? For this part, it would have to operate the same as a batter running to first base. (To be clear, I don’t think it should be a force play at first base, though it would still be fun if it was.) Read the rest of this entry »

On June 23, it was reported that Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association had agreed to terms to resume play in 2020 following the sport’s suspension due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This agreement came on the heels of the now-infamous March 26th agreement that was the subject of debate and contention between both sides of the bargaining table. Among other things, the agreement does not foreclose the right of the MLBPA to file a grievance and seek financial damages as it relates to the interpretation of the Agreement.

Specifically, the players may look to challenge whether the league did in fact negotiate in good faith as it relates to how many games were to be played in the abbreviated 2020 season. Further, the agreement also states that the Office of the Commissioner’s effort to issue a schedule for the 2020 season shall only be performed to the extent it is “…practicable and economically feasible.”

The term “economically feasible” is likely another point of dispute, as the league did not reveal any financial data, supposedly requested by the union, that would help to justify their claim that a season without fans would be a detriment to its bottom line. As the season now rolls along, we can explore the process by which the MLBPA may file a grievance to have its claims be heard and adjudicated.

What Is A Grievance?

Article XI of the parties’ 2017–2021 Basic Agreement (the CBA) sets forth the terms and conditions of grievance procedure. As defined, a “grievance” is “a complaint which involves the existence or interpretation of, or compliance with, any agreement, or any provision of any agreement, between the [MLBPA] and the Club…or between a Player and a Club.” Presumably, the March 26th Agreement would fall within this definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes numbers tell a story. Sometimes that story is a mystery.

I came across the Baseball-Reference page for Raymond Fagan and was stunned by what I saw. It says Fagan went 13-0 with a 1.16 ERA for the Class D Oklahoma City Senators in 1915. Now the stunning part – it says it was his only professional season. Despite those dominant results, it appears Fagan never pitched again.

What happened to Raymond Fagan? Did he suffer a career-ending injury? Did he get into legal trouble and change his name? A Google search yielded no answers. This mystery required a deeper dive. Read the rest of this entry »

We usually think of origin stories as the province of fictional superheroes or the real-life super rich. It could be an ordinary boy bitten by a radioactive spider or arriving on earth as refugees from an annihilated planet. Perhaps we think of a nearly destitute J.K. Rowling toiling away at her first novel in a coffee shop, or Jeff Bezos creating an empire from scratch on a computer in his living room. Yet many of us who came from humble origins and went on to live simple, unremarkable lives also have a narrative that informs who we became. Mine happened in third grade.

I am a husband, a father, and a teacher. To these three descriptors of my identity I would add one more, just slightly less central. I am a baseball fan.

I am not one of the true obsessives who grew up playing Strat-O-Matic and graduated to planning his whole calendar around the SABR conference or spending countless hours with multiple fantasy leagues (two is my limit). But I have been a fantasy league commissioner since 1992, and the majority of text messages that my adult son and I exchange have some connection to the top Atlanta Braves prospects for the coming year. I also get to sleep most nights not by counting sheep, but by silently reciting World Series winners backward from 1970.

Baseball, its present and its past, is deeply ingrained in my outlook on life. My bookshelf is 70% baseball, 30% history and politics.

Baseball on the field was part of my youth, first as a fourth-rate Little League catcher and then as a minor league batboy for the Class A Lynchburg Mets.

Family vacations have often included trips to Baltimore or Atlanta for games. My son’s youth and high school games with me as spectator, coach, or scorekeeper were part of the rhythm of our family life for over a decade. Our baseball bond defines our relationship.

As the immortal lyric of David Byrne plaintively asks, “well, how did I get here?” Read the rest of this entry »

I imagine most people reading this have a favorite team. And over time, you’ve likely had numerous players on that team whom you particularly enjoyed watching play. But when push comes to shove, who receives your greatest loyalty, the team or the players?

I’m a Cardinals fan, and I greatly enjoyed Albert Pujols‘ contributions to the Redbirds’ success during his 11 years wearing the birds on the bat. Since he’s left St. Louis? Sure, I’ve been happy for him when he’s done well — getting his 3,000th hit as well as his 500th and 600th home runs — but it’s not the same. He’s an Angel now, not a Cardinal, so I’m simply not as invested in his accomplishments.

This stance is probably understandably similar for most of you. Teams are (mostly) eternal, while players are ephemeral. Can I name the starting eight position players for the 2011 Cardinals? Probably not, but I still know they won the World Series that year.

When it gets flipped, however, is when we go off the playing field and into the negotiating room. When the owners and players are battling over matters of the game — particularly the divvying up of the loot — I largely stand behind the players. The owners become the faceless, monolithic corporations that extort billion-dollar ballparks from their communities and work extremely hard to give the players as small a portion of the pot as possible, while the players have short careers and are positioning themselves to take care of their families as much as possible before their careers end.

Of course, it’s not that cut-and-dried. Both sides have their virtuous and unseemly characteristics. Each group is willing to put their interests before others.

But regardless of who sticks it to whom for their own benefit, it’s largely the players who suffer the vitriol of the fans and media when the two sides clash. The question is, why is that? The answers actually make a lot of sense — even if they really don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

With the 2020 Major League Baseball season on hiatus due to the Coronavirus, one can’t help but wonder of a season that could have been. Do the Nationals, after losing slugger Anthony Rendon to the Angels, have what it takes to repeat as World Series champs? Can Pete Alonso be this season’s home run champion again? Will Trout win another MVP?

Hopefully we will know sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I took the liberty of looking at players who will become first-time arbitration eligible following the 2020 season, focusing on Lucas Giolito of the Chicago White Sox.

Rather than conduct an analysis based off of career numbers (excluding the vacant 2020 season), I utilized The BAT Projection System by Derek Carty, which is part of FanGraphs, to fill in the gap for 2020 season statistics.

The BAT is a standard projection system that predicts outcomes in accordance with basic factors such as hitter and pitcher, park quality, umpires, weather factors, and more. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball as a sport, like most activities of daily life, is one which we consume primarily through our eyes. While I’m certain some people still enjoy it by listening to the radio (a mode I’m still partial to), I think you would be hard-pressed to that argue baseball is not visual. That’s not to say we don’t listen to the sounds (personally I find baseball on mute to be close to a kind of torture). However, our judgments of the game, and more importantly our judgments of the players in it, are based on what we see visually. We don’t know Mike Trout is good just because the announcer tells us he is good, we know he is good because we can see how good he is. We can see the balls he snatches away as they clear the fence, as well as the balls he smashes over them.

There are other methods we can use to see that Trout is good as well. Sabermetrics and Trout have seemingly been tied together in their emergence into the public baseball consciousness. As he blossomed into a star, so did Sabermetrics as it rose to the forefront and into the view of the average fan. Like Trout, the way we digest sabermetrics is in a sense almost purely visual. We come to FanGraphs, and we read a stat line off the screen. When we look at exit velocity or launch angle, we’re looking at metrics we’re aware of because a computer system visualized them for us.

To a large extent, what I’ve said above is simply a result of us privileging sight more than our other senses. Baseball utilizes the other senses as well. We all likely have memories tied to the smell of the stadium or a leather glove. Maybe every time you go to a game you get a hot dog, and that taste is as connected to baseball as the sound of a cheering crowd. Baseball at its best is a palimpsest of all of these senses working together to create our experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Excitement. Disappointment. Tradition. They make baseball great! Following your favorite team for six months a year will cause any halfway-devoted fan to learn more about the 25th man on the roster than will ever be necessary. It also might mean that fans could always recite the name of the prospect that never was, even years after the fact. And if those fans continue to follow that same team for many seasons, the list of players that they remember will continue to grow. Not all the memories are pleasant, however. That’s not how life works. In fact, the not-so-happy moments from the playing field tend to be what most fans remember the most. It’s those memories of a certain type of player type that live on in the collective mind of fans everywhere, and it’s those types of memories that I will be delving into in this piece.

A recent Grant Brisbee piece at The Athletic set out to create an all time team of “lightning rod players” he loved from the San Francisco Giants, and I felt it was a delightful read. It seemed like a lot of fun to dig in on all those players, and as a Cardinals fan, it made me think about what a similar team of St. Louis players would look like. What follows is my detour down the cul-de-sac of memory lane that many would rather soon forget, an imaginary lineup dubbed the Tino Martinez All-Stars.

Let me be clear — this will not be a scientific process. There will be a statistical element, but it will not be a “who was the worst player at every position” contest. Maybe the players were overrated, maybe they are overpaid, or maybe they were just overplayed. The bottom line is, apathy is the enemy! Also, I was born in 1983, so the team I’ll be picking will undoubtedly be influenced by the Cardinals clubs I have seen the most. You have been warned. Read the rest of this entry »

[Editor’s note: I mentioned to my father that I run the Community Blog and that anyone can write in, and he decided to submit a piece. This is a reminder that you or anyone you know may send us words.]

In 1960, I was a 10-year-old baseball fanatic. For me, live baseball consisted of the Triple-A Seattle Rainiers, and access to major league baseball meant getting your chores done in time to get to watch Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean preach the baseball gospel on the game of the week every Saturday (and if you were living right, sometimes on Sunday). That summer I was lucky enough to get to fly back to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and spend a week with my grandparents. I was transported to a world where if the Tigers had a baseball game on Tuesday, then major league baseball was on the television on Tuesday! Long live Ernie Harwell!

The big buzz that summer was who got the short end of the stick in the big trade when the Tigers sent Harvey Kuenn to Cleveland for Rocky Colavito. Free agency was still a long ways in the future so trades were infrequent, and dealing away the league-leader in average, hits, and doubles (Kuenn) for the leader in homers (Colavito) was a big deal.

Being a young Tigers fan, it was easy to become a life-long Yankee-hater. The Tigers would finish the year 12 games under .500 and 26 games behind New York. From the year of my birth until the year of my 14th birthday, the Yankees were the American League champs every season but two. Back then there were no playoffs, which meant the AL and NL regular-season champs met in the World Series, and the only question at the start of the year was who was going to face the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »