Tag Archives: Los Angeles Angels

Dr. Pujols and Mr. Hydes

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2019-05-10 AlbertPujols2000thRBI

Albert Pujols flips his bat heartily after hitting the solo home run that meant RBI number 2,000 Thursday . . .

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to catch history in your hands. Even when you’re not trying to get paid for it.

Albert Pujols cranked a hefty solo home run in Comerica Park Thursday to land his 2,000th career run batted in. The blast put the future Hall of Famer into some very distinguished company as it was.

Cap Anson drove in his 2,000th run at the end of the 1896 season, but unless the Hall of Fame has an online-accessible library I couldn’t discover just how he drove it in. And the run batted in wasn’t counted as an official statistic until 1920.

But Henry Aaron drove his 2000th in in July 1972 with a three-run homer and Alex Rodriguez drove his 2000th in in June 2015 with a two-run homer. Babe Ruth is in the 2,000 RBI club, too. Yes, you might think the Big Fella did it with a big blast but, yes, you’d be wrong: he worked out a walk with the bases loaded against the St. Louis Browns in May 1932 to do it.

A 33-year-old Tigers fan named Ely Hydes just so happened to catch Pujols’s bomb in the top of the third, after Pujols turned on a Ryan Carpenter fastball right down the pipe and drove it into the left field seats, right into Hydes’s waiting hands.

Along came baseball government to prove that no good deed goes unpunished. When its representatives at the game refused to authenticate the ball, it crowned Hyde’s indignation not over the milestone sphere but things in general at Comerica Park involving the Tigers, as he sees it.

“I am not rich. I am a broke-ass law student,” Hydes wrote in a Facebook post. “I did not do this out of any sort of  ‘entitlement’ . . .  I had the best of intentions. This ball will most likely end up in the Hall of Fame. I’m sorry if no one can ‘authenticate’ it, but the only reason I ended up with it is because Tigers management treated me so terribly.”

Detroit Free Press reporter Aleanna Siacon writes that the Tigers and the Angels each made “generous efforts” to retrieve the milestone ball but Hydes didn’t much like being treated like an opportunist. You know, the sort of fan who can’t wait to cash in a history-making baseball for prolific pelf. Giants fans brawled in the stands over who’d get to leave the park with the ball Barry Bonds smashed for his 600th career home run in 2002.

And sometimes such opportunists try stealing souvenirs with less history attached to them. In 2014, a Minute Maid Park fan wearing a Derek Jeter shirt in the field boxes on Opening Day—Jeter’s last as a player—was spotted by Jeter himself. But when the longtime Yankee captain tried to hand the girl a ball, a woman in an Astros jersey sitting in front of her in the seats tried to steal the ball. Jeter wouldn’t have it. He leaned up against the rail and put the ball in the girl’s hands despite the woman’s upstretching.

Hydes wasn’t exactly in the frame of mind to brawl over the Pujols bomb, nor did he steal it from any adjacent fans.

“I considered it an honor to catch Pujols’s ball,” Hydes wrote in his Facebook post, “and tried to act all day with the honor I thought it obligated me to.” Indignant about current Comerica Park policies such as refusing to allow ballpark ushers to be tipped, which he said compelled him to put tips right into their pockets physically, Hydes tore into the younger generation of Illitches and how callously he thinks they’ve behaved since the death of Tigers owner Mike Illitch.

But his indignation with MLB is just about equal. “Honestly, if they were just cool about it I would’ve just given them the ball,” he told WXYT interviewer Kyle Bogenschutz. “I don’t want money off of this, I was offered five and ten thousand dollars as I walked out of the stadium, I swear to God . . . I just couldn’t take being treated like a garbage bag for catching a baseball.”

Pujols himself took a sanguine attitude about the ball and Hydes.

“I think he was given a little hard time and I told the guys, just you know, just leave it,” Pujols told reporters. “Just let him have it, I think he can have a great piece of history with him, you know. When he look at the ball he can remember . . . this game, and I don’t fight about it. You know, I think we play this game for the fans too and if they want to keep it, I think they have a right to. I just hope, you know, that he can enjoy it . . . He can have it . . . He can have that piece of history. It’s for the fans, you know, that we play for.”

Hydes was aware of Pujols’s comment. “You’re a class act,” he wrote, addressing Pujols. “You wouldn’t pay me a penny for the ball and I wouldn’t take a penny.”

When Roger Maris finally hit his 61st home run on 1961’s final day, busting Ruth’s single-season record, a 19-year-old Yankee Stadium fan, Brooklyn truck driver Sal Durante, caught the ball with one bare hand in the right field seats. Stadium ushers came to Durante for the ball. Durante asked only one thing—to hand it to Maris personally.

The ushers agreed. They brought him to the Yankee clubhouse and Durante—who later admitted he’d had to borrow the money from his future wife, Rosemarie, to get his ticket for that game in the first place—handed it to Maris saying, “Here’s the ball, Roger.”

With his family and some team officials around him, Maris surprised Durante by signing and dating the ball and handing it back to him. “Keep it, kid,” Maris said genially. “Put it up for auction. Somebody will pay you a lot of money for the ball. He’ll keep it for a couple of days and then give it to me.”

Somebody did. California restauranteur Sam Gordon paid Durante $5,000 for the ball and then turned it over to Maris. Gordon also paid for the honeymoon when Durante married Rosemarie, with whom he raised three children as a Coney Island bus driver.

Durante was subsequently offered another $1,000 to catch the ball on the street after being dropped from the top of a giant Seattle World’s Fair ferris wheel (the Space Needle was ruled out for safety reasons)—by Tracy Stallard, the Red Sox pitcher who’d thrown the ball Maris hit out for the record. Durante wore a catcher’s mitt for the stunt and the ball hit the mitt and bounded right to the pavement. He got the $1,000 anyway.

Maris died in 1985. Rosemarie Durante died in 2014. Sal Durante is still alive at 77. He once admitted that he, like a lot of Yankee fans and other baseball people at the time, hoped originally that Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle and not Maris would break Ruth’s record. He once said meeting Maris and his family made him glad it turned out to be Maris.

Sometimes giving a player a milestone ball hurts in the aftermath. When New York cell phone salesman Christian Lopez caught the ball Jeter clobbered for a home run that was also his 3,000th major league hit, in 2011, Lopez happily gave Jeter the ball, and Jeter and the Yankees happily gave him season tickets for the rest of that season and a pile of signed memorabilia. The guesstimated value was $80,000.

The bad news was that Lopez would be hit with a hefty tax bill for his effort. A number of companies ponied up to pay it for the generous fan.

Alex Rodriguez remembered. When A-Rod homered off Justin Verlander for his 3,000th major league hit, a fan named Zack Hample—notorious as an all-but-professional souvenir hunter (his trophies are said to include Mike Trout’s first major league home run)—refused to turn the ball over.

“The thing I was thinking about is, where’s (Jeter’s) guy?” Rodriguez said after Hample refused to hand over ball—which was authenticated almost on the spot, by the way. “The guy that caught (Jeter’s) ball? That’s the guy that I needed here. Where is that guy? I wasn’t so lucky.”

“A-Rod will not be in possession of this ball tonight,” Hample harrumphed, “unless he personally mugs me outside on 161st St.”

Hydes says the Pujols ball now reposes on his coffee table. But not for long, perhaps. “I don’t know it’s been a rat race so far, but I’ve got a brother who’s a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan,” he says, referring to the club where Pujols shone for so long, “so I might give him the best gift ever.”

Pujols’s milestone mash made 4-0 a game that ended with the otherwise struggling Angels blowing the Tigers out, 13-0. He would have been overtaken after awhile by Angels second baseman Tommy La Stella hitting two out, one in the second and one in the seventh, if baseball government hadn’t been so cavalier about the milestone mash.

In a career that’s seen a glandular share of headlines and bombs, married to an equal reputation for being one of the game’s most humane players, Pujols probably never figured to achieve a milestone with controversy attached to it, even as his career has had a sad decline phase provoked mostly by injuries since becoming an Angel.

But, typical of the man, he’s handled this one with the class baseball government lacked.

UPDATE: Several hours after I published the foregoing essay, Ely Hydes changed his mind, agreeing to give the ball to either Albert Pujols or the Hall of Fame.

“All I ever wanted was to sleep on it,” he told the Detroit News. “I slept on it and I woke up and I think [Pujols] is a class act. He’s not my player, he’s not my guy, I don’t deserve the ball. I reconsidered. One-hundred percent, I’m either going to give it to Pujols or to the Hall of Fame.”

Hydes still refuses to accept money for the ball, too.

Cahill another low-risk Angel arm

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2018-12-20 TrevorCahillSigning Matt Harvey even to what may prove a single-season rental befuddled no few who watch the Angels closely. Signing Trevor Cahill to what may prove a single-season rental seems to do likewise until you look a little closer. Angel fans hope the pitching-needy team knows what they’re doing and won’t have yet another reasonably-laid plan explode in their faces. Especially when they could have had a couple of

Cahill isn’t trying to overcome even half the baggage Harvey had to start overcoming in Cincinnati last year. Signing Cahill for a year and $9 million with about $1.5 million possible in incentives looks at least as reasonable and with just as small a risk. And, as with Harvey, the Angels couldn’t have been unmotivated by the thought that division-rival Oakland had eyes upon Cahill, this time in terms of bringing him back again.

The Athletics bought low on the veteran righthander for 2018 and he proved valuable enough for their slightly surprising run to the wild card game. The only reason he made only twenty starts worth 110 innings was an Achilles tendon strain that knocked him onto the disabled list in mid-June and kept him there until almost mid-July.

He posted the best fielding-independent pitching rate (ERA minus defense factors) of his career with a better than respectable 3.54, and the best strikeout-to-walk rate (2.44) of his career. And he continued the overall bounceback from a 2016 spell of relief pitching by getting ground balls at a rate almost equal to his career 55 percent.

All that while making seventeen quality starts (three earned runs or fewer) out of his twenty. He came away from the season with a 7-4 won-lost record and eight no-decisions out of the quality starts. Three of those turned into A’s losses; if they could have hung up the key lead runs while he was in the game Cahill’s won-lost record might have ended up at 12-4.

In other words, Cahill at last re-emerged as the decent pitcher who launched his Show career with the A’s in 2009 and whose signature tendency seems to have been working with his defenses to get results and keep them in games. If the A’s might have won the three no-decision losses instead, Cahill might have been 15-4 in 2018; add to that two losses in which he pitched well enough to win and he might have been 17-2.

If the Angels have Harvey as a number-three starter, they likely have Cahill as the fourth man. Both pitchers finished 2018 having shown they can get ground balls and miss bats at reasonable rates. Getting grounders and missing bats are things the Angels love unconditionally.

With Garrett Richards and Shohei Ohtani (as a pitcher) down for the 2019 count thanks to Tommy John surgery they may yet lack a legitimate ace, but there have been teams who’ve gone to the wars and endured in the pennant races with four or five solid pitchers despite no ace. It’s difficult but not impossible.

Still, the Angels could have made more impressive-looking moves. Charlie Morton could have been had for comparable money to Harvey; the now-former Astro signed for two years and $30 million with the Tampa Bay Rays. They went in on Nathan Eovaldi but they, too, couldn’t convince him to say goodbye to the world champion Boston Red Sox. Nor could they convince Patrick Corbin to stay southwest; Corbin went to the Washington Nationals for six years and $140 million, or about $12 million a season more than the Angels will pay Harvey just in 2019.

I get the Angels might have been wary about a six-year commitment to Corbin considering their recent history with multiple-year deals going past two or even three. That’s allowing that those deals’ implosions haven’t really been anyone’s fault. I say again:  nobody including Albert Pujols asked his heels and knees to betray him, and nobody including Josh Hamilton asked a) him to incur a substance-abuse relapse that Super Bowl Sunday or b) the Angels’ brass to make such a disgraceful hash out of trying to humiliate Hamilton for it.

The deal for which you can really crucify the Angels in the past decade was Vernon Wells—and it wasn’t even a free agency signing. But it was done purely out of rage; or, purely out of owner Arte Moreno channeling his inner 1980s version of George Steinbrenner, after then-GM Tony Reagins couldn’t convince then-free agent Adrian Beltre to sign up after the 2010 season.

Moreno hit the ceiling hard enough to go through it and almost to the moon. When he came down, he gave Reagins one day to deal for Wells or else. Knowing now-retired manager Mike Scioscia preferred defense-uber-alles catchers, for all the good that did him anyway, Reagins sent big-hitting Mike Napoli to the Toronto Blue Jays, who needed catching help and a big bat, for Wells. Whoops.

Beltre, of course, went on with his just-ended, Hall of Fame-in-waiting career. Napoli went on to contribute mightily to World Series teams in Texas and Cleveland and won a ring while he was at it with the 2013 Boston Red Sox. Wells was a Gary Matthews, Jr.-level bust in Anaheim, so much so that the Angels choked on a lot of money on Wells’s inexplicably backloaded contract to move him to the New York Yankees, where his once-promising career ended in something close enough to a whimper.

The Angels now have a much-improved farm system; last spring it was rated the second-best in the American League West behind the Astros. Want to know how long it took for the Angels to recover the farm? How does eight years strike you?

At the same time Moreno went ballistic over losing out on Beltre and demanded the deal for Wells, the Angels made a sacrificial lamb of their scouting director Eddie Bane. Bane was made to pay for a series of bad drafts and worse free agency signings even though Bane was the lead instigator in the Angels’ landing a kid named Mike Trout.

Bane’s execution followed the Angels gutting most of their international scouting operation, and executing its director Clay Daniels, over bonus skimming shenanigans by underlings who kept Daniels in the dark about their doings. The Angels cashiered the man whose smarts brought them the likes of Francisco Rodriguez (one of the late secret weapons in the Angels’ 2002 world championship run), Ervin Santana, Kendrys Morales, and Erick Aybar in the first place.

It’s forgotten sometimes, too, that the Angels let Corbin escape in the first place. That happened when Reagins (under Moreno’s orders, perhaps?) made the 2010 non-waiver trade deadline deal that practically drained the best of the Angel farm (including then-promising Tyler Skaggs, too) in order to get Dan Haren, who may have led the American League in strikeout-to-walk ratio in his first full Angel season but who gave them 1.7 total wins above replacement-level for his two-and-a-half years with them.

They got Skaggs back in a convoluted three-team deal and Skaggs’s second Angels life has been riddled with injuries, too.

Maybe compared to all that, signing Harvey and Cahill even on a seasonal rental might actually wreak less havoc than the Angels have brought upon themselves in the past decade. Maybe. Might.

Devil or Angel?

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2018-12-19 MattHarveyThe way Matt Harvey’s tempestuous tenure with the New York Mets ended last May is still an eye-rubber. When Harvey refused a Mets’ request to go to Las Vegas and work his way back to something resembling his former mound self, prompting the Mets to trade him to the Cincinnati Reds. When the Mets decided he wasn’t worth saving anymore, and nobody on or around the Mets seemed to care.

Harvey was already less than thrilled about being exiled to the Mets’ bullpen, where manager Mickey Callaway thought he would have at least as good a chance to re-horse as Callaway had seen happen for a pitcher he coached in Cleveland, Carlos Carrasco. His final relief appearance as a Met went from promising to disaster. (An inning-ending strikeout to open; a spotless sixth; an RBI single, a sacrifice fly, a walk, and a three-run homer in the seventh, putting the Mets in the hole against the Atlanta Braves, 11-0.)

A week earlier, in San Diego, Harvey managed somehow to make a tony Beverly Hills restaurant opening. Microcosmically that was Harvey’s dilemna as a Met. As former Met Jesse Hahn, his high school teammate, once said, he had no relationship with Harvey “because he’s always big-timed me.” The Dark Knight proved only to self-immolate  himself in the brightest lights he could find and, when his health began to erode the talent that was once just as electric, he may have tried too hard to keep the illusion because he lost his own plot.

But once he got out of New York and into Cincinnati he seemed a changed young man and pitcher. For the first time in what seemed an excessive sentence, Harvey was healthy. He never missed a single starting assignment as a Red. And as he approached free agency, the only Red headed that way in 2018, he showed enough to convince the Los Angeles Angels that his potential upside, very different from the incendiary young Met, was worth gambling $11 million for a single season.

Are the Angels tempting too many fates? Anaheim is closer to Hollywood and Beverly Hills than San Diego, even if Harvey in Cincinnati seemed a changed young man without the lure of the demimonde. But tempting the fates has always been in the Angels’ DNA, even when they were successful. And far bigger deals than Harvey’s have incinerated them in the recent past, though the flames weren’t always of their own making.

It was nobody’s fault including Albert Pujols’s when serious heel and knee issues began reducing the future Hall of Famer—whom the Angels signed for a decade and the value of a large state economy—to little more than a designated hitter who can still hit for distance (he hit home run numbers 500 and 600 in Angel fatigues) but can barely stand up at first base anymore. Lacking the kind of teammates not named Mike Trout who can get on base ahead of him hasn’t done Pujols’s run production that many favours, either. A lot of people may still wonder how Pujols still managed to drive in 100+ runs in four of his seven Angel seasons.

It was nobody’s fault that Josh Hamilton battled injuries as an Angel before relapsing into a brief spell of substance abuse on one otherwise fine Super Bowl Sunday. But what the Angels did to Hamilton upon that relapse was a disgrace. Hamilton himself reported the relapse to major league baseball, as vivid a cry for help again as you could ask. Angels owner Arte Moreno elected to run him out of town on the proverbial rail, though Moreno might have preferred a hypersonic airplane. And now-retired manager Mike Scioscia demanded he apologise. Then the Angels paid the Rangers to take him back, basically.

The Angels were pitching strapped before they trained their sights on Harvey. They’ve lost Garrett Richards, J.C. Richards, and Rookie of the Year Shohei Ohtani (as a pitcher, not a designated hitter) for 2019 thanks to Tommy John surgery. They couldn’t convince J.A. Happ to sign for two years and $28 million; Happ’s returning to the New York Yankees. They couldn’t convince Patrick Corbin to stay in the southwest at a “strong” offer; Corbin, of course, signed for $140 million with the Washington Nationals.

With the American League West rival Oakland Athletics (who now claim Las Vegas as their AAA affiliate, the Mets having moved theirs to Syracuse) showing interest in the righthander, the Angels convinced Harvey to sign up for a year at comparative bargain money. They’re banking at minimum that Harvey will continue the improvement he showed in Cincinnati, where he began finding a little more velocity on his pitches after it eroded with the Mets (92.6 mph as a Met; 94.4 as a Red) and where he began missing bats again.

As a Red, Harvey pitched 128 innings. His ERA didn’t look anything like his Dark Knight years at 4.50, but he had more quality starts than not—his 24 starts included fifteen quality starts (five or more innings, three or less earned runs) including his final gig of the season. He had seven no-decisions in those quality starts and five of them the Reds went on to lose by a single run. Maybe his biggest was nearly no-hitting the Giants against Madison Bumgarner in August, taking the hitless bit to the sixth and the Reds winning the game 7-1.

His swinging strikeout rate jumped from 8.2 with the Mets earlier in the season to 9.9. He returned to a 7.9 strikeouts-per-nine rate as a Red with a 42.6 percent ground ball rate. And his fielding-independent pitching was enough points lower than his ERA to suggest Harvey, too, could hardly do more to neutralise the Reds’ overall futility. It wasn’t his fault the Reds couldn’t really afford to keep him aboard even at the two years for which he looked and scouts figured he might receive.

After that jewel against the Giants, Harvey couldn’t resist a soft joke about his incumbent status, not having pitched in a full week before that game. “After a successful outing last time, it is big to have another,” he told reporters. “I’m getting there. Health is the biggest thing. It is hard to stay sharp when you’re used to going every sixth day. You feel a little out of whack. The guys are calling me the Saturday starter, like in college.”

As a Met, Harvey’s early promise got flattened first by Tommy John surgery and a return season in which his workload was questioned severely. Earning Comeback Player of the Year honours for 2015, Harvey crowned that season famously by all but demanding the ball to go back out for the ninth of Game Five of the World Series.

Then-Mets manager Terry Collins read his man’s heart deeper than the fuel tank even with a 2-0 shutout in the making. Harvey ran empty with a leadoff walk and, after a stolen base, an RBI double to break the shutout. The Mets’ porous defense allowed the Royals to blow a sure save for now-prodigal reliever Jeurys Familia, when Lucas Duda threw home wild on a sure double play, and the bullpen held fort before a spent Addison Reed got murdered in the twelfth for the Series.

Then it was thoracic outlet syndrome surgery to kill Harvey’s 2016 in its crib. (The syndrome is cause when blood vessels and/or nerves between your collarbone and your first rib compress, causing shoulder and neck pain and finger numbness.) Then, a 2017 interrupted rudely by a shoulder injury. Concurrently, Harvey melted down. The demimonde among whom he felt most at home when not rooting for the New York Rangers of the NHL no longer comforted him. And the aforementioned big-timing attitude left him wanting for empathy when his mound trouble matched his off-field heartbreak.

“Besides life on his fastball and bite on his slider, you know what was missing with Matt Harvey? Compassion,” wrote Joel Sherman of the New York Post when the Mets traded him to the Reds.”There was no empathy from a teammate or member of management for Harvey’s plight. They wanted him to rebound and do well, but that was about the team and their own selfish desire for success.”

The Angels saw a haunted pitcher finding smarter ways to pitch with the numbers trending upward little by little in Cincinnati after he’d collapsed so completely in New York. They’re investing in a realistic enough chance that Harvey approaching 30 years old can continue the upward trend enough to give them one less rotation piece over which to fret. If he does continue upward and stays healthy he becomes a bargain of a middle-rotation piece.

Harvey seemed too often at core as though the big-timing attitude seen in him was really a clumsy way of letting the world know that it wasn’t his teammates who weren’t worthy of him but the other way around. If he learned anything else in Cincinnati other than beginning to remake himself as a major league pitcher, he may have learned that one of the loneliest places on earth is the place to which you fall, good and hard, discovering no empathy, after you’ve burned yourself too deeply seeking artificial life.

For Harvey the Angels are his chance to pitch himself into either an extension with the Angels or a decent payday after the 2019 season ends. So far, all he has to do is remember that, as close as they are to Angel Stadium, the Los Angeles/Hollywood demimonde is only smaller, not less psychically incendiary than it is in New York.