IBWAA members love to write about baseball. So much so, we've decided to create our own newsletter about it! Subscribe to Here's the Pitch to expand your love of baseball, discover new voices, and support independent writing. Original content six days a week, straight to your inbox and straight from the hearts of baseball fans.
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
The Angels hope Reid Detmers won’t be the next Bo Belinsky, a rookie lefty who threw a no-hitter for the Angels in 1962 before fading into oblivion . . .
Shohei Ohtani’s grand-slam against Tampa Bay Monday was his first as a professional, spanning five years in Japan and four-plus seasons in the U.S. . .
The St. Louis Cardinals were so unhappy with the continued inability of shortstop Paul DeJong to hit that they sent him to the minor leagues . . .
Playing in Atlanta Tuesday definitely revived slumping Red Sox slugger Trevor Story, who finally hit his first home run for Boston . . .
The Cubs nearly blew a 25-6 lead, holding on to win 26-23, on August 25, 1922 against the Phils at Wrigley Field . . .
The American League has never had a game in which the two teams combined for more than 36 runs, as they did on June 29, 1950 (Red Sox 22, Athletics 14 at Shibe Park).
Leading Off
Some Dare Call it Cheating
MLB Continues Ball Experiments, Maybe For TV Ratings
By Jeff Kallman
Eric Chavez is a 17-year major-league third baseman who is now the hitting coach for the National League East-leading Mets. He has heard his charges say they think enough of this year’s baseballs may be selectively dead — depending upon the needs of nationally broadcast games.
Chavez told Newsday’s Tim Healey that he didn’t believe the complaints at first, until the Mets played the Phillies May 1 in a game shown on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. “I thought for a second, ‘You guys are full of it’,” Chavez said.
[But the ball was traveling farther—balls that weren’t hit as hard. And I’m like, wait a minute, that shouldn’t have happened. The ball was just traveling better. That was the eye test, but then we lined it up with what the analytics were telling us.
This is the one thing about analytics. You can’t really argue, right? You can’t argue. These are facts. We’ve been hitting balls 104, 105 [mph] at the right launch angle that aren’t leaving. And all of a sudden, now we’re hitting balls 95 — a little less hard than the other balls — and those are traveling Sunday night.
For the record, the Mets defeated the Phillies, 10-6, in that game. For almost a full week as I write, all four teams from New York and Los Angeles are in first place in their respective divisions. And the Mets aren’t the only ones complaining that the baseballs themselves remain anything but innocent or uniform.
Never mind the hitters. The pitchers continue complaining about the badly- inconsistent balls and their badly-inconsistent grips. Last month, it seemed you couldn’t spend an hour without hearing about another Mets batter being hit by a pitch. They’ve been plunked, kissed, drilled, and coned 23 times since the season began, 19 times in April alone.
“The MLB has a very big problem with the baseballs—they are bad,” fumed Mets pitcher Chris Bassitt to the New York Post’s Mike Puma. “Everyone knows it. Every pitcher in the league knows it. MLB doesn’t give a damn about it. They don’t care. We have told them our problems with them, they don’t care. There is no common ground with the balls. There is nothing the same, outing to outing.”
Through this writing, 377 batters have been hit on the season. That, folks, is an average two batters a game so far. The Cubs and the Twins have caught and passed the Mets for batters taking one for the team with 29 each. The average plunk per team is 12.5. Some of the immediate consequences have run the range from the ridiculous to the absurd and back.
Yimi Garcia, Blue Jays relief pitcher, can tell you. He learned the hard way against the Yankees earlier this week. One moment, Giancarlo Stanton tied the game with a single swing, a monstrous one-out, three-run homer. The next, Garcia hit the next Yankee batter, Josh Donaldson, on an 0-1 pitch. As Donaldson made his way to first base, umpiring crew Alfonso Marquez issued no warnings but ordered Garcia to make his way to the clubhouse and out of the game.
Pitchers have been known to drill the next man up at the plate immediately after they’ve been hit for long home runs, but even the most head-hunting among the head-hunters isn’t foolish enough to do it when it means the tie-breaking run reaching base and the team at the plate still having two outs with which to work.
The television commentators for that Blue Jays-Yankee skirmish had observed all game long that you could be blind and see the pitchers on both sides struggling to grip the balls. But according to Marquez in a post-game interview, it was all the fault of Donaldson and Blue Jays catcher Tyler Heineman.
Earlier in the game there were some words exchanged between Donaldson and Toronto’s catcher, so that definitely played into it. There were pretty strong words. Then you have a game-tying home run and the second pitch, which we deemed intentional, which was the reason for the ejection.
If it crossed Marquez and his crew’s minds even once that no pitcher is going to put a tie-breaking run aboard with malice aforethought, the evidence doesn’t exist.
An inning later, a pitch from Jonathan Loaisiga bent the Blue Jays’ Bo Bichette backward when it sailed past but not into his head. Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoya didn’t appreciate the further lack of warnings over Loaisiga’s chin musicale. Marquez’s lack of appreciation for Montoya’s review ended with Montoya’s closing for the night.
Things didn’t work out for anyone but the Yankees in the end, after Aaron Judge ended the game with a three-run homer of his own. But the ball issue remains.
This isn’t the kind of amusement we once derived from the mound Houdinis throwing anything from emery balls (Joe Niekro), K-Y balls (Gaylord [It’s a Hard Slider!] Perry), ring balls (Whitey Ford), soap balls (Jim [Mudcat] Grant), or sweat balls (Phil [The Vulture] Regan). This is baseball’s government itself deciding the baseballs themselves should be experimented upon by Rube Goldberg for particular ratings.
If it’s not an average two batters hit per game thanks to barely controllable balls, it’s the prospect of MLB itself choosing which among suspect baseballs to provide teams based upon whether the match-up is boffo enough to warrant more or less travel, or more or less stingy pitching.
Some dare call it another kind of cheating. I dared last December, when I wrote about the ball inconsistencies discovered in last year’s baseballs. And, when astrophysicist Meredith Wills, Ph.D., discovered upon her own unsolicited but detailed analyses that both deadened and juiced balls were in play and may have been put there depending on whose game was going to be a smash hit on television.
We’ve known long enough that the current baseball regime believes the common good of the game is little more than making money for it. We should have a harder time accepting without recourse or demands for investigation that it also includes the Manfred regime—about which “incompetent” is almost high praise—all but sanctioning cheating even more egregious than Astrogate.
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 and, alas, has been a Met fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
Seaver Sculptor Strikes Out . . . And Other Mid-May Musings
By Dan Schlossberg
That long-awaited Tom Seaver statue in front of CitiField needs help from the bullpen.
The sculpted numeral “4” on its back was carved with an incorrect font — even though the Mets have not changed their number design in more than 50 years.
The “4” in the statue’s “41” is missing the distinctive stub that should have extended off to the right side.
“I missed it,” said sculptor William Behrends, who created the 3,200-pound statue.
Unveiled on April 15, in direct conflict with Jackie Robinson Day, the statue of the three-time Cy Young Award winner has been well-received by Mets fans.
Until now, at least.
There are no plans to redo it, although a replica given to fans in a recent promotion was rendered correctly.
Paul Lukas of Uni Watch shared a side-by-side comparison of the statue versus the real thing with Larry Brown Sports.
Seaver, who won three Cy Young Awards during his tenure with the team, was known as The Franchise. He won 25 games in 1969, leading the “Miracle Mets” to their first world championship after seven years at or near the bottom of the standings.
He passed away last year.
* * *
Congratulations to Dusty Baker on his 2,000th win, placing him 11th on the all-time managerial list. At age 73, he’s still going strong as manager of the Houston Astros, though his only World Series ring came during his days as a Dodgers outfielder. Baker has managed more games without winning a world championship than any previous pilot.
* * *
The Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, Iowa is about to get a major boost: a permanent $50 million ballpark that seats 3,000 but could be expanded to 8,000 for big events (like the annual Field of Dreams game).
The plan will add 100 acres to the original 190-acre farm on the site and will include nine baseball diamonds, a hotel, and a player dorm — all without touching the existing movie site. The Yankees and White Sox played a game there last year, while the Cubs and Reds are slated to play a game there this August.
An $80 million expansion has already been planned for the site.
HTP weekend editor Dan Schlossberg has been covering baseball since 1969. His e.mail is ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia
Toronto’s Alek Manoah has more confidence in his newly-added slider, making him even tougher . . .
Hard to believe Zack Wheeler was never an All-Star before 2021 . . .
The Yankees donned pinstripes on their home uniforms for the first time on April 11, 1912. They dropped the design for the next two years but brought it back for good in 1915.
The cost of the original Yankee Stadium was $2.4 million ($345 million in 2022 dollars).
Looking back at the Black Sox Scandal, the 1919 White Sox had one of the highest payrolls and were paid better than most of their peers. Owner Charles Comiskey was actually more generous than other owners. Eddie Cicotte was the second-best-paid pitcher in the AL, behind Walter Johnson. White Sox players approached gamblers, not the other way around. The confessions were stolen but the testimony recreated by court stenographers’ shorthand notes were still read back to the jury. There were 125 interviews with players from both teams.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Brian Harl [bchrom831@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.