Line-Drive Luis Gave Padres A Huge Lift
ALSO: ATLANTA COULD NOT HANDLE UNRELENTING SERIES OF INJURIES
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Twice this week, the Mets showed how resilient they are when the chips are down, beating Atlanta and Milwaukee in the ninth inning Monday and Thursday, respectively . . .
ESPN’s ill-timed live interview with Milwaukee’s Garrett Mitchell while the Mets were batting in the top of the ninth inning in NL Wild-Card Series Game 2 Wednesday triggered considerable (and justified) fan outrage on the internet . . .
Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove (6-5, 3.88 in 19 starts during the regular season) suffered another elbow injury — his third this season — in the fourth inning of NL Wild-Card Game 2 after throwing just 44 pitches against Atlanta . . .
Rookie Baltimore outfielder Colton Cowser broke his hand when hit by a pitch in the fifth inning of the AL Wild-Card finale vs. Detroit . . .
Still hard to believe the upstart Tigers and Royals swept the favored Orioles and Astros in the best-of-three AL Wild-Card series . . .
After entering the final week of August with a shot at the Triple Crown, Atlanta DH Marcell Ozuna hit .277 with two homers and 10 RBIs over his final 37 games of the regular season . . .
The only pitchers with ERAs below 1.50 in at least eight post-season games were Christy Mathewson, Stephen Strasburg, and Ian Anderson . . .
Justin Verlander, the three-time winner of the Cy Young Award, had such a brutal September (8.89 ERA over his final six starts) that the Astros left him off their Wild-Card Series roster . . .
He missed chunks of the season with shoulder and neck issues and, at age 41, is virtually certain to fall far short of cracking the 300 Club . . .
By splitting their Monday doubleheader against the Mets, the Braves took the season’s series from the Mets, 7-6, and got the higher seed even after finishing the year with matching records . . .
Atlanta lost five — count ‘em, five — games in which they blew late leads to New York but never turned the tables and did the same to the 2024 Mets . . .
The San Diego Padres, now in the best-of-five NL Division Series against the Dodgers, posted baseball’s best record (43-20) after the All-Star break.
Leading Off
The Singular Career of Luis Arraez
By Phil Coffin
In this era of Three True Outcomes – a home run, a strikeout or a walk -- Luis Arraez is a singular player.
He doesn’t homer very often (1 per cent of the time in his career, versus the major league average of 3 per cent this year). He almost never strikes out (6.8 per cent of the time in his career, versus the major league average this year of 22.6 per cent in 2024). And he walks just as seldom (6.9 per cent in his career, versus the major league average of 8.2 per cent this year).
Instead, Arraez hits singles. Lots and lots of singles.
He led the National League in singles the last two years with 161 and 160; the year before, he was second in the American League by just one single, with 133. He hasn’t stopped this October, either; six pitches into the San Diego Padres’ opening game of the post-season, Arraez looped a single to left field. The next night, he singled again in the first inning and added another single in the second.
Just how much of his arsenal are one-base hits? Arraez has singled in 23.3 per cent of his plate appearances as a major-leaguer; the major-league average this year was 14.2 per cent.
It's not as if there haven’t been players with a somewhat similar offensive formula. Ichiro Suzuki (23.4 per cent of his plate appearances resulted in singles), Tony Gwynn (23.2), Rod Carew (22.8) and Pete Rose (20.2) made a good living by lacing singles to the opposite field.
Like those other singles hitters, Arraez’ singles have led to multiple batting titles –- three in a row, in fact (.316, .354, .314). But his lack of power (he had a below-average .392 slugging percentage this year) and indifferent glovework have led him from Minnesota to Miami to San Diego in three seasons. Offensively, he profiles as an old-school second baseman, but defensively, he played more games at first base this year (69) than at second (42).
That might sound like Carew’s career path, but Arraez is 27 and Carew was 30 when he moved more or less permanently from second to first. Carew also had a higher batting average, a higher on-base percentage and, perhaps more importantly given the position switch, a notably higher slugging percentage.
What might Arraez’s career arc look like? We can conjecture by looking at the 10 best comps in Baseball Reference’s Similarity Scores. You may not recognize many of the names, from 1 to 10: Judy Johnson, Bob Dillinger, Dick Porter, Sammy Hale, Pat Duncan, Lance Richbourg, Johnny Hodapp, Jimmy Welsh, Ernie Orsatti and Chaney White. To indicate how few real modern parallels there are to Arraez, only one of his top 10 comps played as recently as the 1950s. And few had long careers.
Judy Johnson. Not a bad comp to have. Johnson, a longtime Negro Leagues star as a third baseman in the 1920s and ’30s, is in the Hall of Fame. He had a “psychotic passion for getting on base,” Mark Ribowsky wrote in his history of the Negro Leagues. Johnson played until he was 36.
Bob Dillinger. He was a third baseman for an array of bad teams in the 1940s and early 1950s. He did lead the American League in steals three years in a row. His major- league career was over at age 32, although he continued to hit in the Pacific Coast League for four more seasons.
Dick Porter. He was a right fielder, mostly for Cleveland, for six seasons from 1929 to 1934, an era of high-octane offense. Porter’s power was low octane: he was the only regular AL outfielder who did not hit a homer in 1933. He hit .303 in a half-season with the Red Sox in 1934, but that wasn’t enough for Boston, a .500 team, to want to bring him back the next season.
Sammy Hale. A pint-size third baseman, Hale established himself on some crummy Philadelphia Athletics teams in the 1920s but stuck with them as Connie Mack rebuilt a juggernaut. He was a below-average hitter in his final two seasons, 1929 with the A’s and 1930 with the St. Louis Browns. He was 33 then and about to become an itinerant minor league who played in Class D until he was 44.
Pat Duncan. Redland Park, where Duncan played most of his career, was a horrific place for power hitters. His SABR Bio Project profile says that in its first nine seasons, Redland Park did not allow a single ball over the fence on the fly. Duncan was the first major-leaguer to do so, in 1921. Still, Duncan, a left fielder, didn’t really hit with power, he was only 55 for 139 stealing in his career, and after he hit .270 and suffered an injury when he was 30, his major-league days were over.
Lance Richbourg. After a couple of partial seasons elsewhere, Richbourg played right field for five seasons with the Boston Braves but they never won more than 70 games. He hit .304 in 1930 at age 32, but the National League average was .303. His average slid the next year and he was picked up by the Cubs on waivers, but Richbourg, then 34, didn’t play in the 1932 World Series, famed for Babe Ruth’s “called shot.” Nor did he ever play in the majors again.
Johnny Hodapp. Like Arraez, Hodapp never found a real home in the field, playing second, third, first and some outfield. He, too, was a singles hitter –- 21.2 percent of his plate appearances –- except for a glorious 1930 season with Cleveland. He hit .354 with 51 doubles, 111 runs scored and 121 RBIs at age 24. But that was the peak, not a hint of his promise; three years later, he hit .312 for the Red Sox, who were so unimpressed that they traded him to the minor-league Rochester Red Wings.
Jimmy Welsh. He was big for his era at 6 feet 1, but Welsh was mostly a singles hitter. He joined Richbourg in the outfield on some of those bad Braves teams in the 1920s. At age 27, in 1930, he batted 28 points below the league average and never played another game in the majors.
Ernie Orsatti. An undersized outfielder for nine seasons with the Cardinals, including their Gas House Gang years, Orsatti had even less power than Arraez. While Arraez has a one-year career peak of 10 homers, Orsatti had a career total of 10 homers. He had a higher-powered career outside of baseball, according to his SABR Bio Project profile –- as a stunt man and bit actor early on and as a key cog in a major talent agency after baseball.
Chaney White. A stocky outfielder, White played on Negro league teams through the 1920s and ’30s, finishing up his career at age 42 (while hitting .308 in 73 plate appearances). He was said to be quite aggressive on the field, once cutting the chest protector off catcher Josh Gibson in a collision.
Phil Coffin is a longtime editor at The New York Times and the author of When Baseball Was Still Topps: Portraits of the Game in 1959, Card by Card, and A Baseball Book of Days: Thirty-One Moments That Transformed the Game, due out later this year. His email is philco53@comcast.net.
Cleaning Up
Even Sherman Wasn’t This Devastating to Atlanta
By Dan Schlossberg
The Atlanta Braves are watching the rest of this postseason on television because they encountered one of the most severe injury waves in the history of baseball.
Actually, it was more like a tsunami.
How many teams can lose their best hitter and their best pitcher before Memorial Day and still reach the playoffs? The Braves needed 162 games to do it but they somehow managed by taking the season’s series from the red-hot Mets, 7-6, and finishing with the exact same record (89-73) for the second time in three seasons.
Then they learned that Chris Sale, fresh off winning the pitching Triple Crown and probable Cy Young Award, suffered back spasms that would sideline him for the best-of-three Wild-Card Series.
When Game 2 starter Max Fried got whacked by a line drive in the first inning and then yielded all five San Diego runs in the second, it was just another reminder that Atlanta could not stay healthy even at the very end of the season.
Those were cruel blows to normally-stoic manager Brian Snitker, the oldest manager in the National League (he turns 69 on Oct. 17).
Entering the season, he had expected Spencer Strider and his new breaking pitch to bring him 20+ wins plus 300 strikeouts; Austin Riley and Ozzie Albies to replicate their 30-homer, 100-RBI seasons; the hard-throwing A.J. Minter to be his left-handed salvation in the late innings; and Atlanta native Michael Harris II to continue his development into a potential 30/30 player and Gold Glove center-fielder.
All are young and talented, along with Acuña Jr., coming off the game’s only 40/70 season. Nobody expected 73 steals again but he definitely could have joined newly-minded Dodger Shohei Ohtani as the first 50/50 players in baseball history. The rifle-armed Venezuelan right-fielder had even predicted it — before suffering his second season-ending ACL tear in four years.
The big question here is Sean Murphy, so coveted by the Braves two winters ago that they foolishly agreed to include William Contreras in the three-team trade that brought him from Oakland. Now Contreras is the best catcher in the league and the Most Valuable Player in Milwaukee, once the home of the Braves.
Murphy hurt his oblique on Opening Day of the ‘24 season, opening a roster spot for the illustrious Chadwick Tromp, and was never the same after a two-month layoff. Thanks to more than his share of strikeouts and ground balls with men on base, his final batting average was actually under the Mendoza Line.
Fortunately for the Braves, their top prospect is a catcher named Drake Baldwin. He’s almost certain to break camp with the club next spring.
So let’s think about next spring for a second.
Let’s suppose Strider returns, joining another Spencer — Schwellenbach — in a rotation that also features Sale, Reynaldo Lopez, and former postseason hero Ian Anderson (or AJ Smith-Shawver, Bryce Elder, Grant Holmes).
That’s assuming ancient and erratic Charlie Morton, soon to turn 41, finally retires (good news) and Southern California native Max Fried returns home via free agency (bad news).
Raisel Iglesias remains the closer and Joe Jimenez the main set-up man, perhaps joined by Minter if the Braves keep him from following Fried out the door.
Travis d’Arnaud and Baldwin should be the catchers, while the infield should again include Riley, Albies, and comeback candidate Matt Olson, who went from 54 homers last year to 29 this year. Shortstop needs a better bat, with Milwaukee’s Willy Adames a likely free-agent target.
That leaves the outfield, where only Harris is a certain starter. If Acuña’s knees allow, he’ll return to right, possibly pushing Jorge Soler to left. But what of Jarred Kelenic, Ramon Laureano, Adam Duvall, and the others who tried and failed to prevent that position from becoming a black hole in the lineup?
DH could require some decision-making too. After taking a Triple Crown bid into September, Marcell Ozuna went into an agonizing slump. He hit just two homers after Aug. 20, preventing him from enjoying successive 40-homer seasons for the first time.
His contract runs through 2025 but what if Acuña can’t play in the field? And what if the Braves decide Soler shouldn’t after his multiple defensive misadventures this year?
Ozuna’s damaged throwing arm limits him to DH duty but he might be an attractive trade chip if the team decides to lure players who can provide much-needed speed and contact hitting to a lineup that strikes out too often and steals too little. Whether Acuña can return to his old base-stealing ways remains to be decided.
At least the waters of the tsunami seem to be receding. But the damage was done.
Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman did much less damage to Atlanta.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is weekend editor of Here’s The Pitch and national baseball writer for forbes.com. He’s also the author of Home Run King: the Remarkable Record of Hank Aaron and 40 other baseball books. Email him at ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia: A Look At Max Fried
Free agent Max Fried’s career with the Braves: eight seasons, 167 games, 72-36 (.667) record, 3.10 ERA, two All-Star appearances, three Gold Gloves, a World Series ring, and the last Silver Slugger ever given to a National League pitcher after he hit .273 in 2021, the last year pitchers batted . . .
In what was probably his last game for Atlanta, Fried was the starter and loser in Wild-Card Series Game 2 in San Diego, yielding five runs on eight hits in two innings . . .
Hit in the butt with a line-drive in the first, the lefty said later the bump swelled in the second inning, when he got two quick outs before the roof fell in . . .
Although he pitched six scoreless innings in 2021 World Series Game 6 to sew up the title for Atlanta, Fried was injured or ill in all three post-seasons since . . .
A Santa Monica native, Fried could be headed home to pitch for the Dodgers, where he’d be reunited with first baseman Freddie Freeman.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.