Category Archives: Baseball

From bull run to big swing

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2019-10-19 JoseAltuve

Jose Altuve ended Game Six’s running of the bulls with one American League pennant-flying swing.

Brad Peacock took the mound to open American League Championship Series Game Six for the Astros on Saturday night. The moment he did, the righthander did something undone since the year Native Americans were finally awarded American citizenship, J. Edgar Hoover was named to run the FBI, and Macy’s held its first Thanksgiving Day parade.

He became the first pitcher to finish one postseason game and start the very next one, the very next day, since Washington Senators righthander Firpo Marberry nailed the final out of Game Three before starting Game Four, the following day, in the 1924 World Series.

The Series into which the Senators entered after finally making it, “Washington—First in war, first in peace, and first in the American League.” In which the Old Nats won Game Seven against the New York Giants in twelve innings. With (oh, the horror!) a bullpen game. Climaxed by a starter-as-reliever finishing it. Instigated by a kid shortstop made player-manager who outsmarted a Hall of Fame manager.

It may not be nice to fool Mother Nature, the old bat, but Bucky Harris knew it was more than nice to fool John McGraw. He started a righthander named Curly Ogden to deke McGraw into loading his lineup with lefthanded hitters. What McGraw didn’t know or suspect was Harris and Ogden knowing going in that Ogden would face two batters maximum.

Then Harris reached for his Game Four starter, lefthander George Mogridge. And with the game tied three all going to the ninth, Harris married sentiment to baseball and brought in his Hall of Fame righthander Walter Johnson for the ninth. And, yes, the Griffith Stadium crowd went nuts. Johnson pitched four scoreless, the Senators pushed the winning run home in the bottom of the twelfth, and Bucky Harris looked like a genius.

For the Senators, of course, their Game Seven bullpen game was do or be dead. For the Astros Saturday night, Game Six was do or face a Game Seven showdown with the Yankees. For the Yankees, Game Six was, of course, do or be dead. This promised to be a very brisk and bristling running of the bulls.

Until it turned into a pennant-winning two-run homer. And the relief of the Astros not having to burn Gerrit Cole in a Game Seven so they can send him out to tangle with Max Scherzer when they open the World Series at home against the Nationals.

Peacock’s manager A.J. Hinch didn’t have to outsmart a Hall of Fame manager Saturday night. All he needed was Jose Altuve in the bottom of the ninth to prove what one of Washington’s favourite and most fabled sons made law: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

And unlike the 1924 Senators, the Astros didn’t have to send a future Hall of Famer out to the mound for the finish. Though it probably would have made as many people weep for joy if Justin Verlander went out for the ninth as wept for joy in the stands in Washington 95 years ago.

Altuve decided to win the American League pennant a little more dramatically than Earl McNeely hitting the ball that hopped over Freddie Lindstrom’s head at third to send Muddy Ruel home with the 1924 Series-winning run. And Altuve had a tougher challenger in Aroldis Chapman.

Chapman shot through the Astros in the Game Five ninth, using only nine pitches to finish one-two-three. In Game Six, Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez called for so many sliders–one of which struck out Martin Maldonado swinging to open—it was as if he were trying to tell Chapman his fastball, which still had giddyup to spare, crossed over to the enemy side.

“I wanted to be on time for the fastball but looking up in the zone,” said the ALCS Most Valuable Player, half out of breath, after the game. “Something I can drive.”

On 2-1 he was on time enough for a Chapman slider landing just off the middle that he drove a two-run homer off the left center field pavilion. Finishing a 6-4 Astros win that knocked on the door of extra innings after a hard day’s night on both sides. “There’s nobody I want up in that situation other than José Altuve,” said Cole after the game. “He’s just got a gift from God.”

God apparently loves nothing more than a hair-raising finish to a mostly hair-raising game. Because with one on and one swing in the top of the ninth Yankee first baseman D.J. LeMahieu silenced the Minute Maid Park audience. And with one swing in the bottom of the ninth, Altuve ignited exponential pandemonium.

It was the most appropriate thing for which an Astro fan could have asked, even if it was the most extraterrestrial thing for which the Astros themselves could have seen. “I can’t believe that just happened,” said George Springer, whose two-out walk set Altuve’s table in the first place, and who had the hardest view in the house in the top of the ninth after moving to right field in a late defensive switch.

Springer wasn’t sure he could believe LeMahieu in the top of the inning, wrestling Astros closer Roberto Osuna to a tenth pitch, after four straight foul offs on 2-2 and ball three up and away, then driving a slightly hanging cutter over Springer’s leaping reach and into the right field seats to tie things up at four.

“He’s been a thorn in our side all series,” said Verlander, theoretically the World Series Game Two starter against Nats righthander Stephen Strasburg, of LeMahieu. One of the few thorns in the Astro sides all week.

For a few brief, shining moments, the Yankees—the St. Elsewhere Yankees, who’d survived and persevered in an injury-battered season as admirable as that of the Grey’s Anatomy Astros who’d survived and persevered likewise—had a hope of forcing the seventh game of a set in which they looked lost too often lost at the plate and too often like Candid Camera victims in the field.

The Yankees didn’t look that bad in the Game Six field. But the Astros in the field looked like they were playing Can You Top This, from Josh Reddick’s face-planting dive to catch Brett Gardner’s sinking liner to right with two on in the sixth, saving a potential two-run double, to Michael Brantley’s seventh-inning dive to catch Aaron Hicks’s shallow left popup before springing to his feet and throwing strong to double off Aaron Judge half way to second.

Not to mention at the plate in the bottom of the first, when Altuve drilled a one-out double up the alley in left center, Alex Bregman wrung Yankee opener Chad Green for a walk, and Yuli Gurriel hit the first pitch into the Crawford Boxes. LeMahieu got close in the top of the ninth but Altuve copped first prize in the bottom.

Brad Peacock performing his Firpo Marberry impression had a simple time getting three swift outs to open the game. Green, who’d opened fifteen Yankee games on the regular season with the Yankees winning eleven of them, probably had a hard time believing what just happened to him after one full inning in the book.

Seven Yankee pitchers surrendered six hits, struck out six, and walked six. If Jose Altuve’s a gift from God, the Yankees must think the devil is plaguing them. Seven Astro pitchers turned up deuces wild: two runs, two hits, two strikeouts. They didn’t have to do anything much more than that.

The Yankees’s series-long futility hitting with men in scoring position made it almost as easy for Peacock, Josh James, Ryan Pressly, Jose Urquidy, Will Harris, Joe Smith, and—until LeMahieu teed off in the ninth—Osuna to keep the Yankees from too much mischief.

They pushed a run home in the second on Didi Gregorius’s one-out double off the right field fence and Sanchez’s almost immediate single up the middle. They yanked one home in the fourth when Gio Urshela with one out hit Urquidy’s first pitch to him into the right center field seats. And that was all until the top of the ninth.

Again the Yankees flashed a series-long allergy to cashing in scoring opportunities, especially with the bases loaded. Aaron Judge worked a one-out, full-count walk off James in the third, Gleyber Torres fought back on 2-2 to send a soft liner into left center, and Edwin Encarnacion—back in the DH slot after Giancarlo Stanton didn’t deliver in the slot in Game Five—wrung James for a four-pitch walk to load the pillows.

That’s when Pressly came in. He threw one pitch to Gregorius. He got Gregorius to bounce back to the first base side of the mound, fielded it himself, tagged Gregorius for the side, and promptly left the game with a knee strain that scared the Astros a spell, since if he had to go off the roster injured he wouldn’t be eligible to return for the Series. He’s being listed day to day for now.

But after Urshela’s rip Urquidy held fort for two and two thirds and probably saved Hinch from reducing his Tums supply by a third at least. With the Yankees left to ponder whether Reddick’s or Brantley’s dives finished the coffin into which Altuve eventually hammered the nails.

“You can’t script it,” said Verlander. “I’m just trying to take it all in, see the crowd, feel the atmosphere.” That’s what two World Series trips in three seasons does for you.

You can say Yankee general manager Brian Cashman punted at the new single mid-season trade deadline by failing to land one more serviceable starting pitcher. That fail ended up biting the Yankees severely when Domingo German landed on the suspended list in late September over a domestic violence incident involving the mother of his two children—on the same day the Yankees honoured retiring CC Sabathia at a Hudson Yards party.

And you can point to a tiny handful of tactical moves manager Aaron Boone made that backfired, after he’d spent so much of the season essentially preparing his bullpen for the postseason, knowing his starting dearth and losing one of his bulls, Dellin Betances, to an Achilles tendon tear, tied one hand behind his back going in.

Boone’s heartaches now will include that he’s just become the only man in major league history to hit a pennant-winning walk-off homer as a player and surrender a pennant-losing home run as a manager. In the same uniform, yet.

And this loss is on the Yankee players as much as the Astros’ triumph is on their players. From a remarkable .294/.372/.518 collective regular-season slash line with runners on second or better, and 11-for-34 in that situation against the Twins in the division series, the Yankees in the ALCS seemed to approach men on second or better as though they thought someone would shoot them dead if they even thought about cashing in.

They went 6-for-35 in that situation all ALCS long and 1-for-6 in Game Six. Their threats amounted to the none-too-strong parent who admonishes his overindulged child, “If you do that again, so help me God I’m going to . . . be very, very angry at you!” Against these Astros, who don’t know the meaning of the word mercy when they spot weakness, that was tantamount to a death wish.

Put their pitching to one side and the Astros were smarter on the bases, they were stingier than Jack Benny (the radio and television character, not the man himself) in the field, and they weren’t ignorant at the plate when they saw Yankee relief arms more often than they might have expected going in.

“That’s a helluva team over there,” said Springer after the game, still catching breaths after the surrealistic finish. “That was a fight. I have a lot of respect for them.”

Some among the least forgiving Yankee fans—and that’s saying too much considering no fans in baseball are less forgiving, and few are more obnoxious, than Yankee fans denied World Series trips they still believe to be their annual birthright—would tell Springer that Game Six’s running of the bulls merely exposed the Yankees as full of it.

The only heartaches awaiting the Astros now will be whichever ones the just-as-hungering Nats might have in store for them. They’re not exactly worried. Yet. “We are a team that’s working together and pulling in the right direction,” Altuve said after the game. And that’s no bull.

From nuts to soup

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2019-10-18 AaronHicks

Among other things, Aaron Hicks went where only two Yankee center fielders went before the bottom of the first Friday night . . .

The Astros had no worries entering American League Championship Series Game Five. Other than winning. And maybe the prospect of yet another tiny but noisy pack of Yankee Stadium creatures discovering that maybe Justin Verlander did something naughty before he became one of his generation’s greatest pitchers.

If the Yankees’ least civilised fans could hammer Game Four starter Zack Greinke over his too-real anxiety and clinical depression issues, never mind Greinke saying no, he didn’t hear it, God and His servant Lou Gehrig only knew what they’d try if they discovered Verlander turned up with so much as an unpaid parking ticket in his past.

Playing the Yankees with a trip to the World Series on the line is one thing. To a man the Astros consider that a high honour. “We don’t want to take anything for granted,” said second baseman Jose Altuve after they helped themselves to a heaping Yankee implosion in Game Four. “We want to make sure we win tomorrow. We’re playing against a great team.”

A great team that entered Game Five after a night on which they looked like they couldn’t decide between being the 1962 Mets and the Washington Generals. Not even during the lowest days of their 1965-75 low or the most insane days of George Steinbrenner’s King of Hearts act of the 1980s did the Yankees look that inept.

The Astros are too kind to say the Game Four Yankees looked like they had Abbott catching Costello, the four Marx Brothers in the infield, the Three Stooges in the outfield, Charlie Chaplin coaching first base, Buster Keaton coaching third, and the cast of legendary radio dumb fest It Pays to Be Ignorant in the bullpen. With Allen Funt (Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!) managing them.

Whom would the Yankees resemble in Game Five? Would it be sock-it-to-me time in the south Bronx with the Yankees throwing their own buckets of water over each other? Maybe they’d pratfall to the mound, the bases, the outfield, hollering “Live from New York—it’s Friday night!!”

It’s not that the Astros were entirely without concerns of their own. Verlander may be a Hall of Famer in waiting but even he’s only human. The Rays proved that when Verlander started Game Four of their division series on a mere three days’ rest for the first such short-rest start of his life. And, was had.

Normally, Verlander only human is still better than many if not most. With a trip to the World Series on the line, the last thing the Astros needed for Friday Night Live was a merely human Verlander.

They needed a reasonable facsimile of the Hall of Famer in waiting who entered Game Five with a lifetime 2.89 ERA when he faces the same team twice in a postseason contest. They needed a reasonable facsimile of the Verlander who had a lifetime 1.05 ERA in three previous lifetime shots at closing out a postseason series.

The Astros got that reasonable facsimile Friday night. The trouble was that they had to wait until after the first inning to get it. And that was after the top of the first looked as though it was going to be another round of Yankee slapstick handing the Astros their World Series trip.

When George Springer shot a leadoff grounder under Yankee starter James Paxton’s glove that second baseman Gleyber Torres couldn’t barehand, and Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez allowed him to second on a passed ball, the fun looked like it was beginning for the Astros again. And, like it would continue after Springer reached third on a Jose Altuve ground out and scored on a wild pitch off Sanchez’s knee.

You’d have forgiven the Yankee Stadium public address people for sounding opening bars of “Dance of the Cuckoos,” right?

Even allowing the chilly Yankee Stadium night nobody, maybe even the Yankees, expected D.J. LeMahieu to lead off the bottom of the first by sending an 0-1 Verlander fastball into the right center field seats. Or, Aaron Judge to send a base hit into left and Torres to dump a quail down the left field line for first and third. Or, Aaron Hicks wringing a full count before ripping one off the right field foul pole.

And that’s the way the scoring remained in Game Five, the Yankees winning 4-1.

That pole ringer was only the third time any Yankee center fielder hit an elimination-game bomb to put the Yankees ahead. Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle did it to break a two-all tie off National League Rookie of the Year Joe Black in Game Seven of the 1952 World Series. And Roger Maris—usually a right fielder but playing center this time out—nailed one off the Cardinals’ Curt Simmons to bust a one-all tie in Game Six of the 1964 Series.

And never before in their long history of postseason presence and triumph had the Yankees ever hit a pair of first-inning bombs. That, folks, covers (count ’em) 404 baseball games. And all it took was an all-fields-hitting first baseman and a center fielder who missed over two months with an injured right elbow before he came back for the ALCS.

“We wanted to get ahead early,” Hicks told ESPN’s Buster Olney in a postgame field interview. “To take the first punch.”

Verlander never surrendered two first-inning home runs in any postseason game in his life until Friday night. And it was just the second time in 29 postseason starts that he surrendered four runs or more. “It was a combination of things,” he said after the game in front of his locker. “Fastball command wasn’t very good, and the slider was just hanging. I just wasn’t able to execute really anything.”

But from there he and Paxton, plus three Yankee relievers and Brad Peacock in his first postseason gig out of the Astro pen, hung nothing but zeroes up while putting on a pitching clinic so profound you were tempted to wonder whether pitching in the cold was their real secret weapon after that testy enough first.

Each pitcher kept each batter from much more than soft contact the rest of the way, each pushed periodic threats to one side, thank you, if you didn’t count Tommy Kahnle surrendering a base hit and a four-pitch walk following a seventh inning-opening out.

Verlander after the first resembled as close to his Hall of Fame self as he could on such a frigid night, and Paxton resembled the guy who pitched up big enough down the stretch as opposed to the guy who couldn’t get out of the third inning in Game Two. And Paxton looked like a reasonable facsimile striking out nine in six to Verlander’s nine in seven.

And there wasn’t a pratfall, tumble, stumble, rumble, trip, bad hand, or butter finger to be found from the first inning forward until Yankee closer Aroldis Chapman shot through the top of the ninth with strikeout, fly out to left, and ground out to third faster than you could say see you back in Houston.

“Getting those runs were big,” Paxton said in an on-field interview. “I was grinding the whole time, that’s a great team over there, they really battle, so I had to grind all the time. Making one pitch at a time.”

Never before, too, in 1,608 previous postseason games, too, had any pair of contestants scored in the first inning together without scoring a single run further the rest of the way.

Both sides turned in some defensive acrobatics, from LeMahieu tumbling to the foul track and falling toward the sidewall to catch Yuli Gurriel’s third-inning pop foul to late Astros right field insertion Josh Reddick running Gio Urshela’s long fly to right down deep in the corner and making a basket catch before he might have hit the wall to end the Yankee seventh.

The Yankees hope they don’t hit the wall in Game Six; the Astros would love nothing better than to make them hit it hard enough to send the ‘Stros back to the World Series. And considering the likelihood that it may be a bullpen game for both sides, with neither manager seeming to want to short-rest their Game Three starters Gerrit Cole and Luis Severino, Game Six should be a very intriguing running of the bulls.

At this writing the arms that begin Game Six may be anyone’s guess. Nobody’s said anything yet out of either team’s camp, but speculations runs that it could be Jose Urquidy for the Astros to open and, maybe, Chad Greene or J.A. Happ (who has starting experience) for the Yankees.

Not that either team’s necessarily worried. “If we find out in the morning,” said Yankee right fielder Aaron Judge, “we’ll do our homework and get ready.”

“Everybody’s ready,” said Astros third baseman Alex Bregman.

Not everybody. One Twitter twit lamented, “Such a sad day for baseball.” Please. You’re trying to win, you need to not send a pair of prime starters out on short rest because it’s liable to mean disaster, for them and for your team. You do what you must to win. The game won’t be any worse and probably be a little more of a good old fashioned hair raiser.

Such a sad day for baseball is actually an idea as old as the year Rhapsody in Blue and Mercedes-Benz were born, Woodrow Wilson died, and Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson perfected the starter-as-reliever technique that this year’s National League pennant winner applied mostly successfully.

And on Saturday evening, 7:08 Central standard time, the best two teams in the American League this year will play to win in Minute Maid Park. One of them will win the pennant or host a Game Seven. One will force a Game Seven or lose the pennant.  Let’s play ball!

The mental midgets strike

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2019-10-18 ZackGreinke

Zack Greinke catches a breath on the Game Four mound Thursday night.

The news came forth toward the end of American League Championship Series Game Four. It’s further evidence that the Yankees themselves, even while imploding late in a game that ran away from them already, have more class than a few too many of their fans.

I don’t think you could find any fan base for any major league baseball team that lacks for a small but orally diarrhetic subset to whom no kind of abuse is off limits. But what a small pack of Yankee fans did to Astros righthander Zack Greinke before Game Four began Thursday night crossed several lines.

Greinke was having a pre-game warmup in the left field visitors bullpen with a police presence there already because of Game Three’s trash throwers from the  right field stands. The small pack above the bullpen, who may or may not have been egged on by a particularly abusive pack of the Twitterpated, let him have it but good.

Not because he’s an Astro and thus the adversary for claiming the American League pennant. Not because his mission for the night was to keep every Yankee bat possible from wreaking havoc. No, these animals taunted Greinke over the very real anxiety disorder and degree of clinical depression with which he’s afflicted and the medications he is prescribed duly to control them.

Stupidity doesn’t begin to describe even a small group of subhumans who think the price of a ticket and a seat in the ballpark includes a license to abuse a still-young man verbally and violently over a mental illness he neither asked to bear nor lives without, whenever he does what those subhumans wouldn’t have even a tenth of the courage to do to earn his keep.

Greinke said after Game Four that he didn’t hear the nasty taunts. Maybe he didn’t. Pitchers are notorious for what the fictional Tiger pitcher Billy Chapel, played by Kevin Costner in the film For Love of the Game, called “clearing the mechanism,” blocking every sound from their heads other than that of their pitches hitting the catcher’s mitt when bats don’t hit their pitches.

But even if Greinke cleared his mechanism even preparing in the pre-game bullpen, it didn’t justify that kind of taunting.

Yankee Stadium security ejected one of the bastards post haste and warned each other to watch out for others. Greinke went to the mound and, except for a shaking first inning in which three consecutive walks produced a single Yankee run with the bases loaded, kept the Yankees at bay with no small help from the Yankees themselves, starting the Astros to an 8-3 win that puts them on the threshold of a World Series date with the Nationals.

And, personally, I hope the Astros get it.

Not because I hold any brief against the Yankees themselves. Not because I kid myself that the Yankees are the only baseball team with a subset of fans about whom “animals” may be speaking politely. (Hello, Phillies, Cubs, Dodgers, and Red Sox, for openers.) I hope the Astros get their date with the Nats because it’s the Yankees in the ALCS and I’m sick of re-learning how the Yankee fan subset can go from worse to intolerable every day.

And if I’m sick of it while not being a Yankee fan, I can only imagine how sick it makes the Yankees themselves feel.

The right field region louts throwing junk and debris onto the field over an overturned play at first base or cheering when Astros third baseman Alex Bregman was hit by a pitch in Game Three were mere louts. Greinke’s assailants could be tried by jury for impersonating human beings.

And it seems very safe to presume that not one of the animals would have accepted any challenge to do what Greinke does with 55,000+ right there in his office and a few million more eavesdropping next to television or radio sets. Not without running home to Mommy at the mere suggestion.

If you want to bark at me for being out of line, go ahead and bark. And go to hell while you’re at it. Because I happen to suffer an anxiety disorder with a degree of clinical depression myself. I’m also one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to practise my profession with an audience in my office or my daily toil broadcast on the national and international airwaves.

And I don’t care how much money Greinke earns to pitch baseballs every year. You don’t hammer someone dealing day in, day out with mental illness. You don’t reference the medications he is duly prescribed as though it indicates weakness or a character flaw. You don’t even hammer him over going by his middle name as if that suggests he’s a man of any disrepute.

It may be an exercise in futility to hope Justin Verlander and the Astros kick Yankee butt in Game Five. Based on what I saw in Game Four, the Yankees themselves may be more than capable of kicking Yankee butt. It was as if George Springer and Carlos Correa hitting three-run homers reminded them, “Hey! You can’t mop the floor with us like that! Only we can mop the floor with us like that!”

On Thursday night, the Yankees forgot how to pitch, how to hit, how to field, and how pathetic it looks to drag a veteran great out for a relief appearance for one last display for his longtime fans and have to lift him post haste because, bad as his knees became over the course of a great career, his shoulder decided to bark its resignation.

Thursday night’s Yankees performed the impossible: they made the 1962 Mets resemble a smoothly running vacuum cleaner sweeping and cleaning all in their path. The Yankees looked as though they plugged the hose into the blower, not the suction port.

Especially first baseman D.J. LeMahieu and second baseman Gleyber Torres, who suddenly seemed to think of ground balls as oncoming white tornados determined to throw them around like debris in the late innings.

Bregman’s leadoff bouncer in the top of the sixth bounced right up into and off LeMahieu as though trying to have him for dinner on the run, rolling toward the mound. That might have been no great shakes otherwise except that the Yankees’ starting pitcher, Masahiro Tanaka, happened to be nearer to first base covering on the play.

That play ended Tanaka’s rather gutsy evening’s work and began Chad Greene’s out of the bullpen. And one out and one base hit later, Correa sent Greene’s four-seamer right down the pipe right up and into the left field seats in a near-perfect impersonation of Springer’s bomb three innings earlier.

And all that was just the prelude to the Yankees’ eighth-inning version of Operation Dumbo Drop.

Bregman opened against Yankee reliever Adam Ottavino by taking a pitch over the heart of the plate and pumping it right down the left field line for a leadoff double. Yuli Gurriel then bounced one up the first base line. And that one decided LeMahieu must have been awful appetising two innings earlier, because it ate him up like dessert before bouncing away into right field, allowing Bregman to third.

That’s when Yankee manager Aaron Boone decided to get the hapless Ottavino out of there and bring CC Sabathia aboard for a possible final farewell. And Astros super-rook Yordan Alvarez decided to bounce one up to the second base side, where it hopped up off the grass and off the body of Torres, who’d approached the ball with thoughts of throwing home to nail Bregman.

There went those thoughts. The ball bounced away from Torres and Bregman could have bounced off the plate after scoring the seventh Astro run. Then Correa lined one clean to shallow right field and Aaron Judge caught it cleanly enough. Then Judge, who owns one of the best throwing arms in the league, made a fatal mistake.

He caught Alvarez dead to right near second and could taste the double play he would have consummated if his on-the-money throw to Torres didn’t bang in and out of Torres’s glove. Lucky for Torres and LeMahieu that the Astros only got a single run out of those  mishaps.

Sabathia got pinch hitter Aledmys Diaz to fly out to short right but had to leave the game after falling behind Springer on 2-1 when his shoulder flared up. Jonathan Loaisiga got Springer to foul out, which is just about how Sabathia must have felt leaving the mound as he did.

Maybe the only reason the boo birds weren’t so loud in the top of the ninth is because a reported 75 percent of the Game Four crowd had left Yankee Stadium by then. Altuve opened with a weak grounder to second that somehow, some way, rolled under Torres’s glove into right center, enabling the Astros’ second baseman to make second unmolested.

Michael Brantley then hit a jam shot bloop single to shallow left, scoring Altuve with the eighth Astro run. It could have been nine after what was ruled a wild pitch but should have been ruled a passed ball on mal-positioned Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez let Brantley have second on the house with Bregman at the plate. There went the temporary cred Sanchez snatched with his two-run homer in the bottom of the sixth.

Bregman walked, but Gurriel popped out to Gregorius at short and, with Tyler Lyons entering to pitch for the Yankees, Alvarez and Correa struck out in succession to end that threat. All other things considered, the Yankees were probably lucky to escape with what remained of their Game Four lives.

And, for all intent and purpose, the game, after Astros reliever Roberto Osuna shook off a two-out walk to get Torres to fly out to right on the first pitch.

Did you know the Yankees had the game’s first lead thanks to that bases-loaded walk to Brett Gardner in the bottom of the first? I had a hard time remembering, too, after the shenanigans that followed in due course. Especially because the Yankees had the ducks on the pond three times all game long and cashed in only that lone run.

Especially after learning of the abuse thrown at Greinke pre-game. He may be too proud to say that it cut him to his soul enough to walk three in the first and surrender that run, but there isn’t a jury on earth who’d rule him unjustified.

And Greinke more or less settled down from there, before he was lifted with first and second in the fifth. He proved a better man than that small group of Yankee Stadium yahoos who thought taunting his illness, his medication, his mother, and his preferred manner of address was acceptable opposing-ballpark behaviour.

Maybe the least offensive spewings from that left field stands subset involved hammering Greinke concurrently—the louse!—for choosing to go by his middle name instead of his proper given name.

So much for the reputedly overly knowledgeable Yankee fan, who forgot if he really knew about the righthanded pitcher named Selva Lewis Burdette, Jr., once a Yankee prospect, who beat the Yankees three times to help the then-Milwaukee Braves win the 1957 World Series.

Or, about the Hall of Fame relief pitcher named James Hoyt Wilhelm, master of the hydra-headed knuckleball, who was once made a starting pitcher, and who just so happened to throw a 1959 no-hitter at the Yankees in the silks of the Orioles.

Or, about the Hall of Fame Yankee first baseman who considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth when forced to retire thanks to the fatal disease that has since borne his name. Well, part of his name, anyway: Henry Louis Gehrig.

Not to mention, about such Hall of Famers as George Thomas Seaver, Lynn Nolan Ryan, and George Kenneth Griffey, Jr. About a longtime Astro great and one-time Yankee named William Lance Berkman. About a Hall of Fame-bound, postseason-haunted Dodger pitcher named Edward Clayton Kershaw.

Not to mention such recent baseball notables as LeRoy Timothy Lincecum, Luis Dustin Pedroia, Ivan Carlos Beltran, D’Vaughn Juan Pierre, Guilleard Alfonso Soriano, Stefan Andrew McCutchen, Augusto Elvis Andrus, and Thompson Nicholas Swisher.

All of that can be dismissed as purely getting your dumb on. (Do those left field bullpen bastards also love the music of the Beatles, whose bassist and co-chief songwriter happened to be named James Paul McCartney?) Taunting Donald Zachary Greinke for his too-real anxiety disorder and clinical depression can’t be and shouldn’t be dismissed that readily.

One of the Twitterpated had the audacity to tweet that Greinke’s sympathisers are too much “mental midgets” to handle New York. This native to the Bronx—a very different Bronx, in which you were taught respect and punished for taunting the afflicted—would suggest such a Twitter twit is too much of a mental midget to handle a man with Greinke’s unpretentious courage.

I don’t envy the Yankees as a team and an organisation for having to contend with such grotesquery. It’s not their fault that they have a subset of fans who need trainers more than ALCS tickets. But let’s go, Astros.

Troll this, Harper haters

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2019-10-17 BryceHarper

Even as they celebrate a stupefying sweep to the National League pennant, the Nationals really would have had 2019 life easier with the departed Bryce Harper. Says who? Says the evidence.

Are we over the false addition-by-subtraction narrative involving a certain former National yet? I don’t want to throw any sand in the eyes of Nats fans delirious over their team’s romp to the World Series, but ask not for whom the bell trolls, it trolls for thee.

The Nats’ previous postseason foul-ups, bleeps, and blunders had little to nothing to do with Harper himself. They went to four postseasons with him and didn’t get past the division series. So Nats fans and observers alike think getting past this year’s division series and into the World Series could only have happened without him.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been quite so ramped up if the Nats hadn’t so happened to finish sweeping the Cardinals out of the National League Championship Series the night before Harper’s 27th birthday. In a season before which Harper committed a Freudian slip during his welcome-to-the-Phillies presser (I want to bring a championship to D.C.) with which nobody could resist trolling him now.

Maybe what even the least-believing Nats fans can’t admit to themselves in the flush of the Nats’ surrealistic achievement is that in their heart of hearts—no matter how many catcalls or signs saying “Snake!” or “M(oney)L(oving)B(ryce)!” or “Bryce Arnold” (pasting Harper’s head atop Benedict’s body) showed up—they may think it would have been easier to do with Harper.

If that’s what they really think, they’re actually right. It’s just a shame that what’s proving a glorious Nats season after all had to begin under another false narrative.

Nats fans who misspelled T-R-A-T-I-O-R before Harper smashed a homecoming home run late in his first return to Nationals Park in enemy fatigues either forgot, or chose to ignore, that the Nats lost him after trying to slip him the proverbial mickey as 2018 wound down.

They offered him ten years and $300 million with $100 million of it to be deferred enabling Harper to collect checks until he reaches five years short of Social Security. The part everyone missed or chose to ignore: Deferred money decreases the actual value because it’s a set figure that doesn’t adjust for inflation. In essence, and with the best intentions, the Nats actually offered Harper below his market value to stay.

And when Harper and the Phillies began talking this past February, with Harper essentially telling his agent Scott Boras to keep his big trap shut while he talked turkey with Phillies owner John Middleton, the Phillies didn’t even think about trying to low-ball him.

Harper previously made no secret of wanting to stay in Washington. He knew how appreciated he was in the ballpark and in the city. But if you tell me you’d rather take what proves less than what your fair market tells you you’re really worth, I’ll tell you you’re lying through your teeth. The Nats as much as told him, “We appreciate you, too, but not as much as you think.”

It wasn’t as though the Nats’ owners were going broke, either. The Lerners are actually the wealthiest owners in baseball; Ted Lerner is recorded being worth $4.9 billion. Middleton is merely the third wealthiest baseball owner at $3.2 billion. But Middleton had no problem showing Harper the real market value and securing, not lowballing him.

And don’t go there about the postseasons to which the Nats went with Harper but without getting past the division series. It wasn’t even close to Harper’s fault. Don’t believe me? Ask NBC Sports’ Bill Baer, who also remembers as I do that:

* It wasn’t Harper who let the Cardinals hang four runs on the scoreboard in the top of the ninth in Game Five, 2012 division series—after the Nats jumped the Redbirds for six in the first three innings (with Harper himself starting the scoring with a first-inning RBI triple off Adam Wainwright, then going on to nail Wainwright with a leadoff home run in the third), and following starting pitcher Gio Gonzalez wild-pitching and then walking the Cardinals back to a three-run distance.

* It wasn’t Harper—whose notorious second home run of the set off then-Giants/now-Nats arsonist Hunter Strickland tied Game Five of the 2014 division series—who wild-pitched Joe Panik home with Pablo Sandoval at the plate to break a two-all tie or who stranded himself after a two-out walk in the top of the ninth to end that game and the Nats’ season.

* It also wasn’t Harper’s bright idea to hook Jordan Zimmermann one out from a Game Two shutout in that set, which would have tied the set at a game each; or to leave the better bullpen arms plus available Stephen Strasburg untroubled in Game Five, either.

* It wasn’t Harper who let the Dodgers hang up a four-spot in the top of the seventh of Game Five, 2016 NLDS, or did nothing much from there to answer back even while Clayton Kershaw pitched the ninth to save it. In his final two plate appearances after that seventh, Harper singled a pinch runner to third and worked Kershaw for a one-out walk.

* It wasn’t Harper who puked the Nats’ bed in the fifth inning of Game Five, 2017 NLDS, when an exhausted Max Scherzer was sent to the mound in relief, surrendered a two-run double, and then watched in horror with everyone else when his catcher committed a run-scoring passed ball and a throwing error on the same play, then committed catcher’s interference to load the bases, before the inning’s fourth run scored when Scherzer plunked Jon Jay.

* Harper did, however, set up the next Nats scoring in the bottom of the sixth, when he doubled Jayson Werth to third right before Werth scored on a wild-pitch walk and Ryan Zimmerman doubled Harper home. And after the Cubs made it 9-6, Harper sent the seventh Nats run home with a sacrifice fly.

But no. Everyone wants to remember he struck out to end the game. Nobody wants to remember he wasn’t the reason the Cubs went forward and not the Nats, or that the Cubs made a still-manageable 7-4 game into an 8-4 game when Addison Russell doubled Ben Zobrist home in the top of the sixth.

What of 2019, after the Phillies signed Harper to a platinum contract making him a Phillie for life? Who replaced Harper in right field for the Nats this season, trolls? Fellow named Adam Eaton. Nice fellow. Wouldn’t harm the proverbial fly, seemingly. Good ballplayer. Didn’t exactly hurt the team. Pitched in big in that seven-run first in Game Four.

And wasn’t as good as Harper in 2019. Not even close.

It only begins in right field itself. For a guy whose defense has been solid one season and not so solid the next, Harper in 2019 was worth nine runs saved above the league average to the Phillies in right. Eaton to the Nats? One. I submit a man who saves his teams nine runs above average is more valuable at that position than a man who saves his team but one.

The sourpusses to whom the incomplete traditional batting average (which should really be considered just a hitting average) is the alpha and omega of hitter measurement will look at Harper’s .260 traditional batting average against Eaton’s .279 and decide right then and there, with no further need to examine, apparently, that you should want Eaton at the plate more than Harper.

Well, no, you shouldn’t.

Harper also had an .882 OPS to Eaton’s .792 this season. Harper’s on-base percentage was .372 to Eaton’s .365. I submit that right then and there the argument ought to have stopped. Bryce Harper would have been more valuable to the Nationals than Adam Eaton was this season and beyond.

And so what if Harper struck out 62 more times than Eaton? Harper on a team that turned out not to be quite as good as the Nats this season produced 219 runs (the sum of his runs scored and driven in) to Eaton’s 152. Since Harper’s Phillies finished 2019 with a .327 on-base percentage and Eaton’s Nats finished with a .352 on-base percentage, I submit that Harper looks even better for seeing his opportunities and seizing them.

On a more advanced examination level, Harper created 115 runs to Eaton’s 95; Harper’s run creation boils down to 7.0 runs created per game to Eaton’s 5.9, and Harper used 3.8 outs per run to Eaton’s 4.5 outs per run. You read it right. Bryce Harper in 2019 used fewer outs than Adam Eaton to account for more scoring.

That’s without observing that Harper delivered 72 out of 149 hits for extra bases overall (that’s a .483 extra base hit percentage) while Eaton delivered 47 out of 158 hits for extra bases overall (a .297 extra base hit percentage). And I didn’t even mention Harper hitting 35 home runs to Eaton’s fifteen until this very second.

By the way, if you want to talk about doings on the bases, you might care to observe that Harper and Eaton had the same number of stolen bases and arrests trying in 2019: fifteen thefts, three caught. That’s about the only way in which the Nats got equal value from Eaton this year.

Now we get to the proverbial nitty gritty, the thing that separates the boys from the men around here: how did these two guys do when they checked in at the plate in the highest-leverage moments, the moments that most mean runs on the scoreboard and/or chances to take leads and even win if these guys are at the plate?

All you people who still think the Nats were better off with Adam Eaton than they would have been with Bryce Harper this season aren’t going to like this:

High Leverage Hitting PA H XBH RBI BA OBP SLG OPS TB
Bryce Harper, 2019 127 35 21 50 .307 .370 .667 1.037 76
Adam Eaton, 2019 87 17 5 16 .236 .305 .333 .638 24

The Nats scored the second-most runs (873) in the National League in 2019 behind the Dodgers (886). I submit that Harper would have made the Nats the most-scoring team in the league by a few runs. And if you wanted someone to get the job done when you had runners on second or better and two outs, Harper’s the one you wanted: he has a 2019 OPS of 1.214 in that situation against Eaton’s .559.

Do you still want to tell me this year’s Nats are better off not having had Harper but having had Eaton? Even remembering the world lamented Harper’s low traditional batting average in the first half, consider Harper’s season-long high-leverage hitting and consider in hand whether that would have helped the Nats to far enough better than that much-discussed 19-31 start.

Without denigrating one degree the Nats’ stupefying October run from the wild card game to the World Series they’re now waiting to play, I think it’s fair to say that Harper would have made the Nats’ off-the-charts postseason pitching breathe that much easier whether in right field or at the plate.

Ain’t I a stinker? And I didn’t even think about wins above a replacement-level player until now.

But being the stinker I am, I have to do it: Harper was worth 4.2 WAR by Baseball Reference‘s measurement, and Eaton was worth 1.6. On the Phillies only catcher J.T. Realmuto (4.4) was worth a feather more than Harper and probably because he played a far tougher field position. On the Nats, five position players were well ahead of Eaton, from Anthony Rendon’s 6.3 to Howie Kendrick’s 2.6.

Think about that for a moment. While it seems like too much of the world thinks the Nats were better off this year without Bryce Harper but with Adam Eaton in right field, an aging, injury-historied veteran Nats infielder was worth one full WAR more than Eaton. (And of course you have to love it that Kendrick, worth that one full WAR more, dropped the bomb that yanked the Nats into their freshly-swept NLCS in the first place.)

Stinker that I am further, I have to measure Harper and Eaton by what I call a real batting average. Once again: the traditional batting average is a false measurement because it accounts for nothing more than your hits divided by your official at-bats and treats all your hits as having equal value.

You don’t need more than a nursery school education to know that all hits do not have equal value. But if you think a single is worth a double, a double is worth a triple, or all the above are worth a home run, maybe you should think about going back to night school. In kindergarten. Failing to account for every trip made to the plate is simply an incomplete measure of a batter’s value at the plate.

A real batting average would add your total bases (which do measure the true value of your hits), your walks, your intentional walks (once again: you deserve extra credit when the other guys decide they’d rather you take first base than their pitcher’s head off), your sacrifices, and the times you got hit by a pitch, then divide that total by all your plate appearances.

So—how do Harper and Eaton account for themselves in terms of a real batting average? Again, the Harper-haters aren’t going to like this one:

Real Batting Averages PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Bryce Harper, 2019 682 292 99 11 4 6 .604
Adam Eaton, 2019 656 242 65 0 3 9 .486

Would you care to remember that the real reason the Phillies ended up four games under .500 had nothing to do with Harper and everything to do with a) their none-too-good pitching this year, b) the apparent regressions of Rhys Hoskins and Maikel Franco; c) losing Andrew McCutchen for the season to injury after 59 games; and, d) their now-executed manager.

Gabe Kapler may have been deft with analytics, but he seemed blissfully unaware of the best ways to apply the data and seemed clumsy too often in the actual, critical, in-the-game, game-on-the-line moment. He forgot, if he ever knew, that the arguable accidental grandfather of analytics, Casey Stengel, boiled it down to one simple sentence: Baseball is percentage plus execution. Steeped in percentage, Kapler—with or without any string pulling from the front office—seemed ignorant of execution until it wasn’t executed but he finally was.

The Nats aren’t allergic to analytics at all, even if they don’t play it up the way other analytically-inclined teams like the Astros do. But they, like the Astros, execute. That’s the real reason why they finally executed the Dodgers before so thoroughly vaporising the Cardinals to reach the coming World Series. The real evidence says the Nats would have had that much more execution if they hadn’t essentially low-balled Harper last year.

So have your fun, Nats fans and others who still can’t resist trolling Harper over the Nats going there without him. I get that you resent him going to the enemy after everything Washington did for him, and you’re not liable to root for him in enemy fatigues, ever.

I also get that it should make you pray that much harder that the Lerners learned their lesson and don’t compel Anthony Rendon further to test his first free agency market, rather than offering to do him right by his actual market value. And, that they do what it takes to make Stephen Strasburg want to ignore the opt-out clause he can exercise this off-season to come and stay in the Nats family after all.

But I don’t get why you cling to the false narratives that say the Nats’ administration had no responsibility for Harper’s departure and that the Nats really were that much better off without him this year. Yes, they won the pennant without him. But the evidence says winning the pennant would have been a lot easier with him.

The Maddoning crowd

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2019-10-16 JoeMaddonAngels.jpg

Shown here during his years as Mike Scioscia’s consigliere, Joe Maddon returns to the Angels as their new manager—right in the middle of a further storm over Tyler Skaggs’s death.

Rarely have warnings about being careful what you wish for proven this prescient. If Joe Maddon really wished to return to the Angels he served three decades plus, and as their manager, yet, he couldn’t have picked a worse time to get his wish.

Amidst the thrills of the two League Championship Series a bomb exploded a couple of days ago. There was more to Angel pitcher Tyler Skaggs’s shocking death in Texas before the All-Star break than just an accidental overdose. Too much more.

Now Maddon will take the Angels’ bridge. It may have been a done deal from the moment the Angels pinked first year manager Brad Ausmus, which just so happened to be almost the precise moment in which Maddon learned he wouldn’t be returning as the Cubs’ manager once his contract expired at season’s end.

And if it was bad enough the Angels just had a second straight losing season and a third in four, despite having the best all-around baseball player on the planet, even that was nothing compared to the firestorm now erupting around Skaggs’s death.

“When stuff comes out, you want to know if it’s true,” said Mike Trout when autopsy results made public in early September showed how Skaggs died. “Obviously, if I knew I would definitely have said something or did something.”

Nobody has any reason to disbelieve Trout. But he may not like what transpires further. Especially after signing the gigabucks contract extension making him an Angel for life before spring training ended.

This is what we know so far: Skaggs, the likeable pitcher who was a clubhouse and fan favourite, was an opioid addict. For just how long seems unknown just yet. Also unknown for dead last certain at this writing is what manner of pain led Skaggs to the stuff in the first place. His family hired a Texas legal wolf to get to the bottom of it all. The digging is getting very disturbing.

What we also know so far is that the Angels’ communications director, Eric Kay, himself an opioid addict, knew about Skaggs’s issue with the drugs, procured them for the pitcher, and often used them with him. Kay has also told agents with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration that five more Angels, so far unnamed, use opioids and that there were other team officials aware of Skaggs’s issue with them.

The Angels deny such knowledge. And Kay issued a statement this past weekend concurrent to his denial that he provided the actual pills that provoked Skaggs to overdose accidentally and asphyxiate in his sleep in a Texas hotel room in early July:

I felt and continue to feel that it is time for everyone to stand up and take responsibility for their respective roles in this. Nothing anyone does will ever provide closure for the Skaggs family. I can’t, the Angels can’t, and the courts can’t, regardless of what happens there. But at least I can help them “know”‘ instead of “wonder.” My hope is that there is some peace in that for them.

But four Angels past and incumbent—pitchers Trevor Cahill, Matt Harvey, Andrew Heaney, and Noe Ramirez—have been interviewed and questioned by federal agents. NBC Sports says those four aren’t suspects, just witnesses. So far.

And ESPN’s T.J. Quinn says the Angels may face heavy sanctions from baseball’s government if it’s proven any team officials knew about Skaggs’s problem but didn’t speak up to the commissioner’s office about him using substances banned by baseball. The sanctions could include up to a $2 million fine against the Angels and the officials in question banned from baseball for life if proven.

An Angel spokeswoman, Marie Garvey, issued a statement on Tuesday in which she said the team had no knowledge that Kay provided Skaggs opioids:

We have never heard that any employee was providing illegal narcotics to any player, or that any player was seeking narcotics from him. The current and former employees that are being accused of knowing this behavior have categorically denied that assertion. The Angels maintain a strict, zero tolerance policy regarding the illicit use of drugs for both players and staff. Every one of our players must also abide by the MLB joint drug agreement.

There could be a reason why any Angels officials who did know about Skaggs’s problem, if they did know, were loath to speak up and out. A few years ago, then-Angels outfielder Josh Hamilton—a recovering substance abuser whose Angels seasons were throttled by injuries—had a relapse while watching a Super Bowl. Hamilton didn’t flinch. He reported it to the team and to baseball’s government immediately. That’d teach him.

It wasn’t enough then for Angels owner Arte Moreno. Never mind that Hamilton could have tried to run and hide but didn’t. For his forthrightness Hamilton was run out of town on the proverbial rail, right back to the Rangers from whence he’d come, with Moreno paying Hamilton’s entire salary just to be rid of him.

Adding insult to injury: Hamilton’s forthrightness didn’t impress then-manager Mike Scioscia one degree, Scioscia all but demanding that Hamilton owed the Angels a public apology, if not a perp walk. All Hamilton did was his absolute duty under baseball’s drug agreement when he relapsed. And his reward for doing his duty and shooting straight was orders to be out of town before sundown.

If you think that didn’t scare the living you-know-what out of anyone else working for the Angels, I have a fully-operating California bullet train to sell you for a song. Maybe a short medley. The scared may have included Kay and his boss/mentor Tim Mead, now running the Hall of Fame, but then the Angels’ vice president for communications.

We know that Kay’s mother, Sandra, claims her son told Mead about Skaggs’s opioid issues a few years prior to Skaggs’s death. We know Mead once visited Kay in the hospital with Kay’s mother present, and that Kay checked into a rehab program this past July. (Coincidence? Convenience?) We know Sandra Kay claims to have talked to Mead about Skaggs’s drug issue and that Mead denies the conversation.

“Keep in mind,” says Jessica DeLine, a writer for the SB Nation blog Halos Heaven, “opioid abuse often begins after surgeries, when the drug may be prescribed to the patient. Per the Mayo Clinic, opioids are highly addictive and your risk of addiction is increased after taking the drug for just a few days.”

Skaggs underwent Tommy John surgery in 2014, during his first Angels season after two with the Diamondbacks, and missed the entire 2015 season recuperating and rehabbing from it. It’s entirely possible that things happened for him just as the Mayo Clinic describes: he may have been prescribed one or another opioid (oxycodone and fetanyl were found in his system after his death) after the surgery and he got hooked.

In 2017, Skaggs spent 98 days on the disabled list with a strained oblique; in 2018, he spent three months on the DL with hip adductor muscle issues. If he wasn’t prescribed any opiate after his Tommy John surgery, who’s to say the pain of those injuries instead didn’t lead him to opiates’ doors?

“Someone is lying here,” DeLine writes, “and it’s either Tim Mead . . . or Sandy Kay. What would be the reasons either of them would lie? Sandy’s benefit would perhaps be to shift blame away from her son and onto the Angels. Mead’s reasons should be rather obvious.”

Skaggs’s death shocked baseball. The Angels were thoroughly waylaid by it. They went public with their grief. The Rangers in Texas allowed them to postpone the opening game of their pre-break series out of respect and even laid Skaggs’s number 45 on the back of their home mound, in the Angels’ uniform font style, out of further respect.

The Angels took two of three from the Rangers, lost two of three to the Astros, then returned home after the break to host the Mariners. What they did to open that series shocked baseball even further.

Wearing Skaggs jerseys and numbers one and all in tribute, pitchers Taylor Cole and Felix Pena combined to pitch a no-hit, 13-0 blowout against the Mariners in which Trout himself, emergent as a team leader over his friend’s death, opened the carnage with a two-run homer in the bottom of the first. When the game ended, the players left their jerseys on the mound surrounding Skaggs’s number 45 as a final tribute.

The news of opioids in Skaggs’s system the night he died came forth not long after that game. Now the possibility of the Angels administration sleeping at the switch while their pitcher battled such an addiction, and one of their P.R. people looks to have abetted him, stains their familiar logo halo.

That’s what Maddon is walking into right off the bat after signing a reported three-year contract to manage the team for whom he served as Scioscia’s longtime (and 2002 World Series-winning) consigliere on the bench before starting his own mostly successful managing career.

And Maddon has his own unfortunate small history of being caught with his pants down over comparable troubles. He looked almost entirely clueless in his responses when Cubs shortstop Addison Russell was exposed as a domestic abuser by Russell’s former wife last fall. Nobody with brains suggests Maddon condones domestic violence, but his tepid response at first, upon Russell’s exposure, was a terrible look for the man who shepherded the Cubs to their first World Series win (2016) in over a century.

Now Maddon has to think about more than just bringing a club together under a new bridge commander and thinking about percentages and execution on the field. He has to think about the potentials around disturbing revelations that may or may not prove to have been true involving the death of a popular pitcher and its continuing effects on his new players.

He may even have to think about the ramifications if it should turn out that any Angel players, other than the four current or former pitchers interviewed by federal agents, knew Skaggs had a serious addiction problem and did or said nothing to intercede before it was too late. Especially if the Manfred administration comes to appear more interested in making players do a Pittsburgh drug trials-like perp walk than in making real moves to solve a too-real, too-dangerous issue.

And those will still be nothing compared to the additional anger and grief Skaggs’s widow and family will suffer.