Are They Goldbricking, or Are They Really Hurt?
PLUS: MULTIPLE PLAYERS PURSUE POST-SEASON AWARDS IN NATIONAL LEAGUE
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Reader Reacts
“Memo on misspelling: Hall of Famer Edd Roush does not have a "c" in last name. Nor do I in my last name Lowenfish. Cheers from Lee Lowenfish.”
— Lee Lowenfish (without a C)
I was always taught in journalism school that the worst things I could do were to call a living person dead or spell someone’s name wrong. But errors happen, in baseball reporting as well as baseball playing. Thanks for the catch, Lee, and keep up the good work with your books.
— Dan Schlossberg (with a C)
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
After Johan Santana threw 134 pitches in his no-hitter for the Mets, his career ended prematurely. Here’s hoping the Phillies’ Michael Lorenzen (124 pitches Wednesday night) doesn’t suffer the same fate . . .
Toronto’s Davis Schneider was the 134th player to homer in his first major league at-bat and the fourth Blue Jay to homer in his first plate appearance, after Al Woods (1977), Junior Felix (1989) and J.P. Arencibia (2010). The 849th pick in the 2017 amateur draft, Schneider stood 28th on Toronto's prospect list when promoted. In his first weekend, he went 9-of-13 with two homers and five RBI, a 1.887 OPS, and a 1.154 slugging percentage . . .
Few catchers bat first — with Hall of Famer Craig Biggio a notable exception — but Adley Rutschman has done a great job for first-place Baltimore in the No. 1 spot . . .
Not doing a great job is veteran right-hander Charlie Morton, earning $20 million from the Braves but showing signs of his fast-approaching 40th birthday . . .
Mookie Betts and Suits star Meghan Markle (yes, THAT Meghan Markle) are distant cousins. And yes, they have met.
Leading Off
Don’t Dismiss Slumps Without Tracing Injuries
And stop writing the injured off as goldbricks
By Jeff Kallman
It seemed as though you could count on one hand Yankee fans who suspected something wrong with Anthony Rizzo above and beyond a mere baseball slump. All around social media, most of those fans called him things usually reserved for downright busts. Few of them paid close attention to the moment Rizzo’s season started dissipating.
As of the end of play on May 28: 11 home runs and a .304/.376/.505 slash line. From 29 May through the day the Yankees put him on the injured list with “post-concussion syndrome”: one homer, a .172/.271/.225 slash.
On May 28, in the sixth inning, Rizzo’s head met fatefully with Fernando Tatis, Jr.’s right hip, when Tatis scrambled back to first on an inning-ending, strike ‘em out/throw ‘em out double play. No intent involved. But Rizzo stumbled upward and toward second base, in obvious pain before he collapsed.
It took three days to get Rizzo back in the Yankee lineup, after passing concussion protocols. Nobody noticed from there that a player whose strike zone knowledge equaled that of a jeweler’s eye, but who couldn’t buy, trade for, or extort a hit, might have had something else amiss.
Rizzo may be known as a stubborn competitor, but nobody else in the Yankee brain trust saw anything other than a proud, hard-working veteran mired in a slump. Well-established players with skills to burn don’t normally fall from the top of a skyscraper to start any decline phase.
Now that Rizzo’s finally on the injured list as of August 3, maybe it’s well past time to pound something into the skulls of Joe and Jane Fan plus Joe and Jane Sportswriter, most of whom still consider injuries and their necessary recovery times little more than evidence of moral failure.
Suck it up, precious! you can hear most thinking and saying when players get hurt and take longer than fans and writers think they should take to get back on the field. And the injured players are stuck. Let them speak out about being hurt and they get written off as whiners. Let them keep quiet about it, they get written off as fading failures.
If you don’t know that there’s something physically or neurologically wrong with a player who dives into a slump as vividly as Rizzo, where do you take it? This time even the Yankees had no apparent idea that passing the protocols wouldn’t be the end of Rizzo’s dilemma.
When one of the game’s best players slumps as badly as he did after the Tatis collision, there should have been questions above and beyond the usual swing mechanic fixing or timing. Rizzo himself admitted he’s stubborn enough to play through injuries, but this time was different. This time, he felt “foggy” while the Yankees played a set with the AL East-leading Orioles.
Today’s medicine may be far, far more advanced than it was when Brooklyn legend Pistol Pete Reiser decided that not even Ebbets Field’s concrete outfield walls had any business standing between him and fly balls. Concussions plus shoulder injuries taught him the hard way. And, cost his team plenty enough seeing a Hall of Fame talent play himself out of a should-have-been Hall of Fame career.*
But if too many teams didn’t get it in Reiser’s time, they still don’t get it often enough. Too many fans, sportswriters, and sports shock radio jocks get it even less. They still love the “hard nosed” type, even when he crosses the line between hard- nosed and bull-headed and spends about half his time on the injured list.
They’d rather turn players into hate objects than look above and beyond the surface to see and think that, just maybe, something’s drastically and fatefully wrong with them.
Speaking of hate objects, that’s what too many Twins fans did to Joe Mauer when his name came up last winter among entrants on next year’s Hall of Fame ballot. As if Mauer asked to be concussed twice, once behind the plate off a hard foul tip, the other making a foul territory play after he was converted to first base largely to save his life.
They called him a thief because the concussions reduced him after he signed that glandular contract extension. (Enough Cardinal and Angel fans also called Albert Pujols a thief, too, when his legs and heels began betraying him before his time after his first season as an Angel.)
The good news is, Mauer’s concussion issues didn’t kill his Hall of Fame case. (Neither did Pujols’s leg issues.) The bad news is that baseball and its fans still don’t get it. Sometimes, neither do the players themselves.
It was wonderful stuff when Tony Conigliaro went from tragic beaning in 1967 to the AL’s Comeback Player of the Year award in 1969, wasn’t it? But did returning to try to keep playing despite that beaning end (and his permanently-damaged eye sight) up contributing to the almost decade-long coma that ended in his death at 45?
There can’t be another Anthony Rizzo case in baseball’s future. Rizzo’s escaped with his life so far. The next player might not be that fortunate. One already wasn’t: too-oft concussed Ryan Freel (ten times), once a character of a utility player, ended up with mental and physiological issues that culminated in his 2012 suicide. Turned out Freel also suffered CTE—which can’t be diagnosed until its victim dies.
There needs to be a drastic improvement in baseball and other sports medicine. But there also needs to be a drastic improvement in fan, media, and team and teammate attitudes toward the injured.
Don’t be too quick to applaud the “guts” of the guy who plays through injuries great or small alike. You don’t know which one’s going to put paid to his career—if not his life.
*Too late to save Reiser, the Dodgers became the first major-league team to put padding on their home outfield walls after they traded him to the Boston Braves.
_____
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Mets fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
Acuña Has MVP Competitors But Other NL Awards Seem Less Intense
By Dan Schlossberg
For almost all of this season, Ronald Acuña, Jr. has been widely considered a lock for his first Most Valuable Player Award.
Suddenly, however, he has serious competition.
The rifle-armed Atlanta right-fielder leads the majors in runs scored and stolen bases but former teammate Freddie Freeman, who now plays first base for the Los Angeles Dodgers, is right on his tail — though not in the base-running department.
Acuña, who bats first for the front-running Braves, seems certain to break the club record for steals in a season, Otis Nixon’s 72 in 1991. Maybe that’s because the bases are bigger and both the distance between them and the number of allowable pickoff throws has been reduced.
But Acuña is also hitting for the best batting average of his career and has spent much of the season as runner-up to Line-Drive Luis, the versatile, singles-hitting infielder of the Miami Marlins. And no, don’t count on Arráez in the MVP race — barring another Miracle in Miami.
MVPs are usually home run hitters, meaning Matt Olson may get strong consideration. The man obtained from Oakland after Freeman left Atlanta as a free agent is on track to top the franchise record for home runs, the 51 of Andruw Jones in 2005. He also leads the National League in runs batted in, thanks to Brian Snitker’s decision to move him from second to fourth in the power-packed Atlanta lineup.
Should Acuña and Olson split the vote, Freeman could sneak in and bag his second MVP trophy. That would be like a presidential election in which there’s a major third-party candidate (see Ralph Nader in 2000).
Unlike the MVP race, the National League’s other award bids aren’t exciting.
Erstwhile Rookie of the Year favorite Corbin Carroll, an All-Star starter in the outfield, has cooled off considerably from his hot start and his Arizona Diamondbacks have faded as a result.
Elly de la Cruz of the Cincinnati Reds has also faltered after a fast start, though his team has other rookie infielders who could stage a second-half surge.
That opens the door for slugging Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez, who has vastly improved his defensive game, and maybe even Miami pitcher Eury Pérez.
Nor is there an obvious front-runner for the Cy Young Award. Spencer Strider, 24, was an All-Star for the first time and also broke his own record for being the fastest pitcher to fan 200 men in a season. But he’s been inconsistent and unable to diminish a rather bloated earned run average.
Last year’s winner, Sandy Alcantara of the Marlins, probably pitched too many innings last summer and hasn’t been lights-out this year. And Aaron Nola, with free agency looming, has been far worse in 2023 than he was in 2022, when his Phillies backed into the National League pennant after entering the playoffs as the sixth seed.
There’s no Edwin Diaz to win the honor in relief, though brother Alexis might have done that if he’d maintained his first-half success. Could Cubs’ southpaw Justin Steele steel the award? If he keeps up his current pace, he might.
Then there’s always Old Standby Clayton Kershaw, a three-time winner in the past and still a perennial standout whenever he’s healthy enough to start for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Want a good choice for Comeback of the Year? You can’t do worse than Marcell Ozuna, left for dead after a suspension for domestic violence followed by a DUI. But the Braves, unable to unload his guaranteed $64 million contract, allowed him to overcome an .085 April and become a productive DH once again.
He should reach 30 homers once this season is over.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is weekend editor of Here’s The Pitch, national baseball writer for forbes.com, and author of a forthcoming book on Hank Aaron. E.mail him at ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia
Gary Gaetti hit more lifetime home runs (360) than any player who homered on the first major-league pitch he ever saw . . .
Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton batted 1,354 times without ever homering . . .
Darrell Evans of the 1985 Tigers was the oldest American Leaguer to win a home run crown, with 40 at age 38 years and 5 months . . .
When Atlanta’s Davey Johnson hit 43 home runs as part of the first 40-homer troika in baseball history, he also made 30 errors, mainly as a second baseman . . .
When New York Giants first baseman Bill Terry hit for the cycle on May 29, 1928, his home run came with the bases loaded . . .
Babe Ruth hit 88% of his team’s home runs in 1919, when he hit 29 and the rest of his Boston Red Sox teammates combined for four . . .
A year later, when Ruth hit 54 for the Yankees, the second-best slugger in the American League was George Sisler, who hit 19 for the St. Louis Browns . . .
The six members of the 500 Home Run Club who never fanned 100 times in a season were Hank Aaron (755), Babe Ruth (714), Albert Pujols (703), Ted Williams (521), Mel Ott (511), and Gary Sheffield (509).
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.