Most teams in the AL East are not getting their usual 15 automatic wins from Baltimore that they’ve come to expect.
At the beginning of August, St. Louis was a rather pedestrian 54-48. They went 22-7 in August.
They caught on fire, while the Brewers decided to regress to the mean, and now the Cards have a nice lead in the NL Central.
Braves rookie Spencer Strider set an Atlanta Braves record, emphasis mine, with 16 strikeouts while allowing only two hits and no walks in a 3-0 win over Colorado. (The franchise record for strikeouts belongs to Warren Spahn, who had 18 K’s in an extra-inning game in 1952 while the team was in Milwaukee).
Strider became only the fourth rookie in MLB history to record 16 strikeouts without allowing a walk. (Remarkably, Dwight Gooden did it twice in 1984.)
Same here.
The members of the band Blasterjaxx, which collaborated on the viral hit “Narco” with Timmy Trumpet, have officially endorsed Edwin Diaz as the only person in Major League Baseball who should be allowed to use it as his entrance music.
Incidentally, Timmy Trumpet performed it live for Diaz’s entrance into a recent Mets game.
I don’t generally enjoy the manufactured drama and glitz inherent to sports, but that was actually pretty great. Apparently, Mr. Trumpet is Australian and had never been to a baseball game before. He showed up on two nights, the first of which did not have a Diaz appearance (although he played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the stretch, and it was a fun rendition). The second night, he went out and played when Diaz came in. Dude certainly has some chops.
I love Diaz. He was a great closer for the Mariners and was sad to see him go (though I understood the trade).
I say good for him, he’s a great player and some fanfare is warranted.
Top of the 9th was very fun for the Nats against the Mets in our 7-1 victory at Citi Field, but the Nationals’ Twitter account got a little too excited and tried to talk shit to the Empire State Building, which promptly shut us down.
The incredible level of strikeouts in baseball today is well illustrated by the fact Strider has 13.7 K’s per nine innings. He’s a fine young pitcher to be sure, but that would be the fourth highest K/9 rate in the history of the sport. The only three higher rates all happened in the last thee years.
Nolan Ryan never even came close to 13.7.
So I’m engaged in a season long project I call just the MVP Project. The basic jist is this: after every Blue Jays game, I assign, in the manner of hockey games, a number of “stars” to Blue Jays players. If the Blue Jays win, a first, second and third star is assigned. If they lose, only a third star is given out.
A first star is worth 5 points, second star worth 3, third star 1.
The idea is to see who will end up with the most points, and thus team MVP, and to see if it makes sense. t’s meant to deliberately assign credit for WINNING GAMES, not just piling up numbers when they are lost.
So far 33 different playedrs have received at least a third star and thus one point. The top players:
George Springer - 60
Vladimir Guerrero - 60
Bo Bichette - 58
Alek Manoah - 52
Kevin Gausman - 48
Alejandro Kirk - 47
Matt chapman - 45
Lourdes Gurriel - 44
Jose Berrios - 42
Teoscar Hernandez - 41
Springer has more first stars than Vladdy so he wins the tiebreaker so far.
I don’t have a set standard for handing out stars; it’s totally my judgment.
In case you are wondering, here is who BBReference, based on WAR, thinks the top ten Blue Jays are:
- Alex Manoah
- Alejandro Kirk
- Vladimir Guerrero
- George Springer
- Matt Chapman
- Kevin Gausman
- Teoscar Hernandez
- Jordan Romano
- Bo Bichette
- Ross Stripling/Santiago Espinal
I am not sure which method is better but I do find it very, very interesting. My system may slightly undervalue defense - I try to watch as many games as I can but if I don’t see them in their entirety I have to go by boxscores and they don’t tell you enough about defense - and I’m a bit surprised at the results.
Jose Berrios, for instance, is rated in my system as the ninth most valuable player on the team; in any WAR system he isn’t one of the top 40. However, the Blue Jays have won most of his starts, so if he does pitch well, being the starter, he’s the most important player on the team can can easily get a star. My system doesn’t assign blame for losses, so that means bad players who get a lot of playing time, like Berrios or Yusei Kikuchi or Raimel Tapia, are likely overrated. My system rates Raimel Tapia above Yimi Garcia and David Phelps, which is crazy, and clearly overrates Bo Bichette.
Anyway, it’s fun.
More than 50% of minor-league baseball players have voted to unionize, paving the way for them to organize and join the Major League Baseball Players Association.
It has asked for voluntary recognition from the league.
This could lead to higher salaries and better living conditions.
One can hope. MLB reorganized the minor league system last year, removing the official affiliation of ~40 teams (1/4 of MiLB), in what I am fairly certain was a move to cut costs. If minor league players unionize, and demand higher pay (the minors, especially the low minors, are infamous for their ridiculously low pay), I can easily foresee MLB deciding to further reduce the minor league system to compensate.
If a billionaire owner can’t afford to pay his A-ball players even a living wage, the problem is with the system.
Eat the rich.
I completely agree, and I apologize if my prior post made it sound otherwise. Despite the issue with the aging fan base of baseball, the teams seem to be, on the whole, making large fistfuls of money, and taking a machete to the minor leagues (in many cases, culling teams which had existed for decades) was an accountant’s move.
Isn’t most of the reasons that they’re cutting the minors is that basically 95% of the players there have zero chance to make the majors? Scouting is so good and accurate now that you’re just very unlikely to have some kid blossom in the minors that was unexpected, someone getting off the bus from Oklahoma with just a glove and spikes and working their way up to the big leagues doesn’t really happen these days.
If that’s the case then it’s a stupid reason.
If a minor league team has a roster of 30 players and only one of those players has a chance at making the majors, what are they going to do? Get rid of the other 29? How are they going to field a team with only one player?
(By the way, I am not suggesting that you are the one who came up with that reason.)
As Ted Knight famously stated in Caddyshack, “Well, the world needs ditch-diggers too.” So does baseball.
Exactly so. And, very few prospects are ready to play at the major-league level, without several years of experience and training in the minors.
Looking at the top players in MLB today, based on their WAR scores for the 2022 season to date:
- Aaron Judge: Picked in the first round of the amateur draft in 2013; missed 2013 with an injury, then spent 2 1/2 seasons in the Yankees’ minor league system, before reaching the majors.
- Shohei Ohtani: Never played in the minors before joining the Angels, but played five seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball.
- Nolan Arenado: Drafted in the second round in 2009; played four seasons in the minors before joining the Rockies.
- Paul Goldschmidt: Drafted in the 8th round in 2009; played 2+ seasons in the minors.
- Sandy Alcantara: Signed with the Cardinals as an international free agent in 2013, when he was 17 years old; spent 3+ seasons in the minors.
- Mookie Betts: Drafted in the 5th round in 2011; played 2+ years in the minors.
- Tommy Edman: Played three seasons of college ball at Stanford, then spent another 3+ years in the Cardinals’ farm system.