The Guardians aren’t out of it until . . .

Posted on October 19, 2026 by Jeff Kallman

You’ve been warned. The Rays are going to win the American League Championship Series. Why? Because Yandy Diaz says so, that’s why.

“It all ends tomorrow,” Díaz said, after the Rays hung on to win Game Five, 3-1, in Progressive Field Sunday. “We’re going to win tomorrow.”

His two-run homer in Game Four and his 3-for-5 performance in Game Five give him some psychological leverage.

But unless you’re a spit, scuff, mud, or scratchballer living rent free in opposing hitters’s heads (good afternoon, Hall of Famers Whitey Ford and Gaylord Perry), or a road runner living likewise before you reach base in the first place (likewise, Hall of Famers Luis Aparicio and Rickey Henderson), it’s not advisable to play the psych-out card.

More often than not, that card becomes bulletin board stuff. The kind that irons the other guys up. Ask David Cone. He’s the Mets pitcher who called Dodgers reliever Jay Howell “a high school pitcher” in a ghostwritten newspaper before Game Two of the 1988 National League Championship Series. Oops.

Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda posted the column on their clubhouse bulletin board. Guess who turned up as the Mets’s Game Two starter. Guess who got beaten like a piñata for five runs in two innings? Guess who ended up losing the pennant in seven games, before the Dodgers went on to bury the Bash Brothers Athletics in five in the World Series?

Díaz might want to beware.

Assume the Guardians have no intention of going home before getting to play a seventh ALCS game, even in Tampa. They didn’t play terribly in Game Five. They did everything they could short of having the Rays’s pitchers on the day kidnapped, and got only one run on a ground ball for their trouble.

Predicting victory the day after you take a 3-2 series advantage isn’t always a safe prediction. The combatants who predict their outcomes are never really safe. Joe Namath remains among the outliers.

Sonny Liston once predicted he’d flatten an upstart kid known then as Cassius Clay early, often, and permanently. (I don’t think it’ll go past two. It better not go past three.) He got out-thought most of the fight, then got so out-boxed in the sixth round that he couldn’t answer the bell for the seventh.

Jack Kent Cooke was a very confident Los Angeles Lakers owner before Game Seven of the 19679 NBA finals. Confidence is good. Unless it compels you to order championship balloons suspended from the L.A. Forum rafters in advance. And, to order flyers on the Forum’s seats saying what would happen when the Lakers won.

Somebody forgot to tell Bill Russell and his Boston Celtics. Ruh-roh. Nobody needed to tell him or them. The furious Celtics ended up upsetting the Lakers by two points.

Eat Your Vegetables, Not Your Children Dept.—Remember Mike Tyson saying he’d eat Lennox Lewis’s children? Now, remember Lewis having Tyson for lunch in the eighth round?

You can assume Seattle fans still haven’t forgiven Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselback for his 2003 NFL wild card game overtime-opening faux pas after winning the coin toss. He took the ref’s microphone and purred, for all to hear, “We want the ball, and we’re gonna score.”

Green Bay Packers cornerback Al Harris responded, “That’s what you think.” Hasselbeck’s pick-six throw ended up in Green’s hands. Green ended up going 52 yards for the win. The only Seahawks comfort was the Packers being stopped in overtime by the Philadelphia Eagles in the divisional round.

Now, you can’t really fault Díaz for feeling a little overconfident. The Rays did tie with the National League pennant-winning Brewers for the Show’s best home record this year. The Guards had the sixth-best road record. The Rays get to throw Freddy Peralta—the former Brewer, the guy who deflated as a Met before he was re-inflated as a Ray—out to start Game Six. The Guards are all but forced to go to a bullpen Game Six.

They’ve been there, done that, time enough and again enough. Their skipper Stephen Vogt isn’t exactly worried, about Díaz’s confidence or anything else the Rays might dream up for the Guards bulletin board.

“We don’t have another choice,” Vogt told MLB.com’s Adam Berry. “We don’t like being in this position, but, like we said the last series, our backs were against the wall. They’ve been against the wall for a long time. This is when this team thrives.”

The Guards were one win away from early winter vacation in their division series against the feel-better White Sox. Then they out-scored the Pope Sox 20-8 and swept the next three. Pope, schmope, listen to a yogi: the Guards aren’t out of it until they’re out of it. Even Díaz knows it.

“We know we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Vogt went on. “It’s a really good team, and a really good team when they play at home, especially. So we know this is going to be tough, but if there’s a group I’m betting on to get this done, it’s our guys.”

They’ll have to. They didn’t look like their usual contact-hitting, brainy-baserunning, timely-swinging selves on Sunday. Sure, their lone run came on a mid-game ground out. But they’ve scored only four runs since Petey Halpin’s Game Three two-run homer and beyond-epic bat flip off it.

The Guards will open with Shawn Armstrong, a reliever who was so-so on the season but who’s been wonderful world this postseason so far. (1.51 fielding-independent pitching; 4.5 K/9, no walks, in 7.2 innings including four in the ALCS.) It’s a risk since he’s appeared in three games this ALCS, and they’ll have to find a way through Peralta.

And, through Díaz’s pronouncement of their death.

Cleveland rocked, and so should the LCSes

Posted on October 11, 2026 by Jeff Kallman

Gavin Williams (with 12) tied Charles Nagy’s Cleveland franchise single-game postseason strikeout record.

Unfortunately, there are some things even a pope can’t bring about. Whatever the Holy See’s divine pull, even he couldn’t deliver the White Sox from the hands of their adversaries. The hands or, in the case of the Guardians, the arms.

By the way, that’s the American League Central-winning Guardians. That means that this year’s American and National League Championship Series will be played strictly by teams who finished the regular season in first place.

So take that, Commissioner Pepperwinkle and your claque, you suggesting the shorter regular season, further diluted (sorry, expanded) postseason with best-of-seven division series, and letting the higher-seeded teams choose their victims (sorry, opponents) in the wild card and division series rounds.

Take that, baseball government spokesman Glen Caplin, and while you’re at it, take your formal statement and shove it:

A shorter regular season unlocks making October even better for our fans—with fewer weekday afternoon games, a longer Division Series, and more opportunities to see the game’s best pitchers on the biggest stage. And allowing the top seeds to select their opponents in the first two rounds would create compelling storylines, intensify existing rivalries, and create new ones.

The pre-LCS is long enough as it is now. We’ve just been through 25 games and, if each set had gone the distance, we could have been through 32. That’s before adding a minimum of eight and maximum of fourteen to come, which would have us at 46 games all postseason long. And what did it all mean this time around?

So far, it’s meant that the cream rose, for the most part. Three out of the four League Championship Series combatants finished one through three overall on the season: the NL Central-winning Brewers (103-59), the NL West-winning Damndodgers (100-62, and yes people do make it sound one word when they say it), and the AL East-winning Rays (98-64).

The Guardians won the AL Central as baseball’s eleventh-best team. Five out of the six teams standing between them and the now-gone NL East champion Braves (94-68) made it into the postseason but got dispatched early enough and, in one or two cases, in utter embarrassment enough.

What was the fun of the Yankees shoving the Red Sox to one side and out of the action in two straight in their wild card series just to turn up even more futile getting swept away by the Rays? What was the fun of the Padres shoving the Cubs to one side and out of the action in two straight only to get bumped off by the Brewers in four?

Chicago had enough heartache when the Cubs got pushed away. Now they have to handle the White Sox, who had an even more charming tale of resurrection following three straight 100+ loss seasons, getting overthrown after it looked early enough and often enough as though they just might overmatch the Guardians.

Savour it, Guards fans. Your heroes are going to their second ALCS in three seasons. Two years ago, the Yankees shoved them away in five. They won’t have things simple against the Rays this time around. But they’re liable to make it fun regardless.

Not that it was simple getting here. The Guards got wrestled down 2-0 to start this division series, and in their own house. Then the set moved to Rate Field, the house where the White Sox delivered a storybook resurrection this season, then flattened what was left of injured and aging Houston in the wild card round.

You thought the White Sox got a bit rude in the Guards’s house? The Guards shifted from scoring a mere three across division series Games One and Two to scoring four in the top of the Game Three third alone. They shifted from resembling the team over which the White Sox might step into overthrowing them twice in Rate Field and once in their own joint.

This time, it wasn’t a higher-scoring huff. This time, the only scoring the Guards needed was José Ramírez, in the bottom of the fourth and with Steven Kwan aboard on a leadoff single, hitting one over the right field fence. Their pitching—which struck a record 21 White Sox out—took care of the rest. (What a way to bookend their season: as my friend Jessica Brand pointed out, the White Sox opened 2026 by getting punched out 20 times in a game by the Brewers’s pitching staff.)

José Ramírez about to hit Sean Burke for the two-run homer that was all the Guards needed on a record-making night for their pitching staff.

Everybody wondered if Guardians starter Gavin Williams would be running on empty, or at least down to his final drops, after his Game Four-ending shutout relief inning. We should all have such depleted tanks. He took a no-hitter into the sixth, including twelve strikeouts (tying Charles Nagy for a Cleveland franchise postseason game record) and striking out the side twice, before he threw a breaking ball errant enough to hit White Sox shortstop Colson Montgomery on the foot to open.

Chicago would love to have many innings back over the city’s postseason history. The sixth Saturday night would have to rank among the top five at least. From the Montgomery plunk, the White Sox went to a two-out base hit from Kyle Teel before Williams’s evening finally ended with a bases-loading walk to Miguel Vargas—with lefthand-hitting first baseman Munetaka Murekami due up and Guards manager Stephen Vogt bringing lefthander Erik Sabrowski in to pitch.

Maybe Murakami would overcome his weakness against portside pitching this time, when the White Sox’s season depended the most upon it? Not quite. Sabrowski struck him out swinging. The best threat of the White Sox’s night evaporated just like that. The Pope watching from his Vatican roost must have been reminded that even he has only so much divine influence.

The Guards needed nothing more than further bullpen bulls Hunter Gaddis and (coming in with one out and a man on first in the eighth) Cade Smith to keep the White Sox pinned. Smith even paid tribute to Williams’s effort by striking the side out in the bottom of the ninth to finish it.

In one way, the outcome didn’t matter: Except for the Damndodgers, the LCSes will be fought by the lower budget corps. The Damndodgers lost their season series to the Brewers, 3-4. The Guardians, with the number 29 player payroll of 2026, fought the number 26 White Sox to get to the ALCS. Where they’ll meet the number 27 payroll Rays.

Never mind that saying the Damndodgers do it with dollars alone is a willfully ignorant lie.

There’s no earthly reason to believe the Brewers will be NLCS pushovers. Not with Jacob Misiorowski starting Game One. And no, Les Mis does not live by fastball alone, even if his is faster and better controlled than Nolan Ryan’s. He’s got a cutter, a slider, and a curve ball, any and all of which can dance like Fred and Ginger and beat, sweep, and clean you like a Hoover.

There’s no earthly reason to believe the Dodgers are invincible despite winning the two previous World Series. (Remember how the Blue Jays got thatclose to winning last year but for old man Miguel Rojas? Commissioner Pepperwinkle hopes you forgot.) Not even with Tarik Skubal starting Game One. Maybe Sku and Les Mis fight to a draw and turn things over to the bulls. Maybe the Brewers start praying their bulls aren’t full of bull. Maybe.

There’s also no earthly reason to believe the ALCS will be a crashing bore. If the Guards keep pitching the way they manhandled the White Sox, assuming their arms and/or shoulders don’t resign their commissions, they stand a chance against a Rays team that figured out how to build a dominant, all-elements team from the Family Dollar clearance shelves.

So the Empire Emeritus and the Olde Towne Team aren’t there? Except for entitlement-drunk Yankee fans who still think the World Series is illegitimate without them (and who still think, erroneously, that only the ghost of George Steinbrenner can “restore” them), who cares? Except for entitlement-longing Red Sox fans who think they’ve earned the right to a fifth Series title this century (they already lead the century with four), who cares?

The Lords of Baseball will cast their longing eyes upon the proceedings, misread the forest, misinterpret the trees, and ignore those among their ranks who lack the up-and-down development, discipline, and intelligence of those now playing for pennants.

Must I remind you that big payrolls (read: $200 million or higher) did the Mets and the Blue Jays no seasonal favours? That they didn’t keep the Yankees, the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Padres, the Cubs, the Braves, and the Astros from early postseason exits?

The Lords, and the fans and writers who think only money determines who takes the next lease to the Promised Land, insist that what you’re seeing coming out of Tampa Bay, Milwaukee, and Cleveland is three flukes, two of whom stand to be used as toothpicks by the big blue whale out of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, if the Dodgers do get thwarted, the wailing will start swiftly enough over how difficult-to-impossible it is to win more than two straight World Series anymore.

Too many people can never be satisfied. Those who can be will now enjoy a pair of likely to be splendid LCSes and a just-as-likely to be splendid World Series.

They’ll love Arozarena in Seattle . . .

Posted on July 28, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Arozarena’s smile could light up any ballpark felled by a power outage.

Nobody likes to see teams send their most heroic postseason heroes onward. Sometimes that happens when the most recent of their postseason heroics are still in full rearview mirror view. That stings the deepest.

So maybe the Rays did their fans a favour by sending Randy Arozarena to the Mariners long after the postseason postings that made his name disappeared from rearview sight. But it’s a small favour. And, depending upon the net results of the haul they got in return, it might not even prove that much of a favour.

Once up as high as ten games atop the American League West, the Mariners have since gone 11-20 as the formerly-moribund Astros reheated enough to take the division lead by a full game. Losing a ten-game lead in a 24-game stretch was unprecedented. No team before them ever blew that fat a lead that soon.

Arozarena’s season began slumping until he re-heated before the trade, but he hasn’t factored in the Mariners fortunes just yet, even if they took a pair from the White Sox after making the deal. The Mariners have the patience of Job when it comes to waiting for his full emergence in their silks.

They sent the Rays two prospects with upside enough if you consider the Rays’ ability to shape players, minor league outfielder Aidan Smith and pitcher Brody Hopkins. The Rays had better hope they can forge that pair into more than just replacement-level major leaguers. Arozarena was worth about a hundred times that much from the moment his 2020 coming-out party began.

Arozarena picked up one hit on Saturday but then went 2-for-4 with a run scored in Sunday’s 6-3 Mariners win. He beat an infield hit out in the first to score almost promptly on Cal Raleigh’s immediately-following home run, then he beat another infield hit out to load the bases with two out in the second only to be stranded there.

“He’s really loved by his teammates and fans,” said Mariners outfielder Luke Raley, himself an Arozarena teammate in Tampa Bay for two seasons, “and he’s going to be a fun addition for sure. He’s the low heart-beat kind of guy. He’s just made for the big moment. Late in the game, you need a big hit, you want Randy at the plate.”

Raley spoke after the Mariners demolished the bottom-crawling White Sox 10-0 Friday night. He even revealed Mariners president Jerry Dipoto consulted him on Arozarena before pulling the proverbial trigger on the deal. “I kind of gave him a three-, four-minute spiel about my thoughts and the things that [Arozarena] does,” Raley said. “You try to explain it, but it’s really hard—because until you see it, you don’t fully understand it. But he just is like a bright star.”

This is the effervescent who defected from Cuba in a rowboat and was first signed by the Cardinals. A year before that coming-out party, Arozarena made what some call a mistake and others call serious. When the Cardinals destroyed the Braves 13-1 in 2021 National League Division Series Game Five, manager Mike Schildt broke into a postgame rant that left himself and his team resembling sore winners:

They [the Braves] started some (excrement). We finished the (excrement. And that’s how we roll. No one (fornicates) with us ever. Now, I don’t give a (feces) who we play. We’re gonna (fornicate) them up. We’re gonna take it right to them the whole (fornicating) way. We’re gonna kick their (fornicating) ass.

Schildt’s rant went viral thanks to Arozarena capturing it on video and sending it there. Once the rejoinders went flying in earnest, he couldn’t wait to take the video offline. The only place the Cardinals went from there was to a four-game sweep out of that National League Championship Series by a team of Nationals whose manager was smart enough not to say they were going to [fornicate] the Astros up in the World Series—they simply did it, in seven thrilling games.

A cynic might suggest the Cardinals waiting to trade Arozarena to the Rays the following January was a matter of not wanting it to look as though they were teaching him a lesson about impudent videomaking. But their loss was the Rays’ gain, once baseball resumed after the long enough and weird enough pan-damn-ic shutdown. The Rays hit the expanded postseason running. Arozarena hit it exploding.

He hit ten home runs to smash Hall of Famer Derek Jeter’s record for a single postseason. He set a single-postseason record with 29 hits. He was named that American League Championship Series most valuable player. Perhaps fittingly, too, he slammed the exclamation point down upon one of the weirdest and wildest World Series game-ending walkoff hits in Game Four.

He pounded the plate nine times with his right palm to be sure he wasn’t imagining having scored the walkoff run to finish 2020 World Series Game Four’s insane finale. Compared to his grin, the Cheshire Cat was suffering depression.

Arozarena was on first in the ninth when pinch-hitter Brett Phillips singled Kevin Kiermaier home with the tying run. Except that Dodgers center fielder Chris Taylor coming in to field the ball had more eye on Kiermaier and the ball caromed off his glove to his left. Taylor scrambled to retrieve the ball and get it to his cutoff man Max Muncy.

Except that Muncy took the throw past first and wheeled to throw home, but the throw bounded off catcher Will Smith’s mitt at the split second Smith began wheeling for a tag on an oncoming Arozarena—who wasn’t within two nautical miles of the plate just yet. Arozarena tumblesaulted after tripping and stumble back toward third before righting himself when he saw Smith lacked the ball, diving home and pounding the plate with the palm of his right hand nine times.

The Rays would lose that Series, of course, but Arozarena went from there to become the 2021 American League Rookie of the Year, his rookie status unblemished by his late arrival down the 2020 stretch. He was likely the first ROY to win that award after making himself into a postseason breakout star. And few postseason breakout stars had Arozarena’s knack for making even opposing fans take to him.

He was made for the arena. A word that just so happens to be the final three syllables of his surname. But he’s also made of more endearingly human things. When he learned he’d been traded, Arozarena delivered a farewell to admire. He slipped into the stands and greeted, shook hands with, and thanked as many fans and stadium workers as he could before departing. No newspaper ad or billboard stuff for him.

Arozarena’s likely salary escalation plus the Rays’ apparent inability to make any AL East gains prompted the team to move him to Seattle and pitcher Zach Eflin to the Orioles. Closing the book on this season and looking toward next may make baseball sense for the Rays.

“Tampa Bay has been hovering on the edge of the AL playoff picture for nearly the entire season, but a late-season surge wouldn’t have been out of the question,” says FanGraphs writer Jake Mailhot. “By moving Arozarena at this point in the season, the Rays have indicated that they’re more interested in ensuring they’re set up well for the future than in hoping for a long-shot playoff run over the next few months.”

But sending a franchise icon away—in a year that cost them their $182 million shortstop to administrative leave over an underage sex scandal in the Dominican Republic—stings even more. The Rays may lead the Show in frugality, but don’t think for a nanosecond that they entered 2024 intending to change Arozarena’s home address just yet.

They’re not the first to think they had to move such an icon, of course. But depending on what’s to come the rest of this season and most of next, Rays fans may yet come to see the Arozarena trade as comparable to that of the Mets trading Hall of Famer Tom Seaver to the Reds in 1977. Breaking hearts and backs and what was left of a franchise’s spirit alike.

Why Wander Franco must go

Posted on January 6, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Rays shortstop Wander Franco amidst reporters as he arrived at a Dominican court Friday. (AP/WTSP Tampa Bay photo.)

Last August, when a social media post first hinted that Wander Franco dined upon forbidden fruit, he was held out of the Rays’ lineup. But he was quoted as saying, “They don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s why I prefer to be on my side and not get involved with anybody.”

Franco had the part about “they” not knowing what they were talking about kind of right.

He wasn’t just “running around” with an underage girl in his native Dominican Republic. Authorities there say he was sexually involved with her and, apparently, paying her mother about $1,700 a month for seven months in return for, as the old rhythm and blues song pleads, mama keeping her big mouth shut.

You thought Trevor Bauer turned out to be a nightmare for women and for baseball? Sexual violence with a fellow adult who wasn’t awake to continue giving her consent (which was never discredited in court even if his victim lost her restraining order bid) is demeaning and dangerous. What should we call kidnapping (for two days), seducing and schtupping a fourteen-year-old girl even once, never mind over four months?

Especially if the girl in question, fourteen years old when Franco began his relationship with her, may have been forced into this kind of rodeo before, sadly and sickeningly. She said so when interviewed by a psychologist during Dominican authorities’ investigation of the Rays shortstop.

“Since I was little,” the girl told a psychologist, according to court documents made available to The Athletic, “my mother has seen me as a way for her to benefit both from the partners she has had and from my partners. And it is something that I dislike very much.”

The shortstop who was worth sixteen defensive runs saved above the American League average in 2023 won’t be able to throw his way out of this one as readily as he can throw enemy batters out after slick and swift fielding of their batted balls. This isn’t, say, a high school sophomore having a romp with an eighth grader, as shattering as that sounds. This is a legal adult in his early 20s accused of putting it to at least one girl of eighth-grade age and possible others as well.

Like Franco, the mother is charged formally with commercial sexual exploitation. Like Franco, she could go to prison for 20-30 years if convicted in court. If her daughter told the truth to the investigating psychologist, mama may not have had to be paid to keep her big mouth shut in her daughter’s case.

For now, the Rays and baseball’s government have a more immediate problem to solve, namely what to do with a 22-year-old shortstop who’s at once a face of the Rays and a guy who was on baseball’s restricted list over this case from last August through the end of the World Series.

MLB has been investigating since. The sport’s protocols governing domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse allow teams and the commissioner to discipline a player for violating it regardless of a court verdict. Bauer escaped legal punishment but not baseball discipline. Franco’s case is far more grave than even Bauer’s.

It isn’t helped by a Tampa Bay Times column, written by John Romano, describing him as a ballplayer beyond his years on the field and at the plate but a comparative child off the field and without a bat in his hands.

If his baseball skills had advanced beyond his chronological age, then Franco’s social skills were more like an adolescent.

It was nothing dramatic; nothing immediately noticeable. But common courtesies seemed to elude him . . . It wasn’t that Franco was mean or rude, he just didn’t seem to consider the needs of those around him.

There was also a propensity to make impulsive choices. Franco was a father at 17. He bought a Lamborghini, a Mercedes and a Rolls Royce SUV before he was 21. He traveled with high-end bling, which the world discovered when his car was broken into at a Jacksonville hotel during a minor league rehab assignment and $659,000 worth of jewelry was stolen.

He got into an altercation with centerfielder Jose Siri near the end of spring training in 2023, and then another with Randy Arozarena during the regular season. The longer he was in Tampa Bay, the more isolated he seemed to become in the Rays clubhouse . . .

The first public sign that there might have been issues was earlier in the summer when Rays manager Kevin Cash took the unusual step of sending Franco home for two games. It wasn’t a suspension per se, more like sending an unruly child to timeout. Cash talked that day about Franco needing to control his emotions better.

Eventually it was decided to invite one of his best friends from the Dominican, Tony Pena, to join Franco in Tampa Bay. A few years older, it was hoped that Pena would be a steadying influence. And for a short time, Franco’s off-field mood and on-field performance did seem to improve. He hit eight homers in a 32-game stretch in July and August.

Then came the social media post heard ’round the sport. Then the probe. Then Franco’s arrest during 2023’s final week when he failed to appear on a court summons. Then the details thus far in the current case. And, his release under such conditions as a guaranteed two million pesos payment (roughly $35,000 U.S. dollars), and showing up every month before the Dominican Public Ministry. (He is allowed to leave the country so long as he meets those conditions.)

Can the Rays or baseball government itself send Franco—who signed the fattest contract in Rays history after the 2021 season, eleven years and $182 million—back to the Phantom Zone before he goes to trial?

Hark back to 2019. Pirates relief pitcher Felipe Vázquez, in his second All-Star season, was bagged for having sex with a Florida girl whose age he claimed not to know was thirteen years old when he first intercoursed with her. Baseball’s government wasted no time putting him on the restricted list—they did it practically the moment he was arrested.

The Pirates wasted no time, either. They disappeared Vázquez just as fast. They scrubbed his image from scoreboard videos and banners outside PNC Park, not to mention removing his name from inside-the-park monitors showing National League relief pitching leaders. “By game time, looking around,” wrote The Athletic‘s Rob Biertempfel, “it was as if Vázquez had never played for the Pirates.”*

It was the least both baseball government and the Pirates could have done out of respect to Vázquez’s victim. Returning Franco to the Phantom Zone now is the least both baseball government and the Rays can do out of respect for his victim, too.

They may wish to consider a remark from Franco himself to the girl in question, during a WhatsApp conversation cited in the court documents and disclosed by the Dominican news agency Diario Libre: “My girl, if my team realises this it could cause problems for me, it is a rule in all teams not to talk to minors, and, nevertheless, I took the risk and I loved it.”

If that quote is accurate, the Rays and baseball government have even less time to move. For the girl’s sake, and for baseball’s. And in that order.

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* In due course, Vázquez was convicted and sentenced to two-to-four years in state prison with a 23-month credit for time served before trial and sentencing. He lost an appeal in Pennsylvania Superior Court in 2021 and was deported back to his native Venezuela last March.

Self-awareness as a vice

Posted on September 9, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

George Kirby, a second-year pitcher who inadvertently proved a little self-knowledge might be a dangerous thing—for his image, not for his particular line of work.

Maybe the only thing that brings Joe and Jane Fan to a boil faster than a baseball player speaking honestly about an injury is a pitcher who admits he didn’t do well with being kept in a game past his sell-by date for the day. George Kirby, second-year Mariners pitcher, may be learning the hard way.

After surrendering back-to-back first-inning runs to the Rays Friday, Kirby pitched five more spotless innings. In the bottom of the seventh, he threw one pitch for an unassisted ground out to first base, a second pitch Jose Siri drilled for a double, then three pitches to René Pinto. The third was lined down the left field line and into the seats to tie the game at four.

Mariners manager Scott Servais lifted Kirby for Isaiah Campbell. Campbell walked Yandy Díaz, induced Brandon Lowe to force Díaz at second base, but then fed Harold Ramirez a pitch meaty enough to feed the left field seats. An eight-inning leadoff bomb off another Mariners reliever secured the 7-4 Rays win.

But Kirby faced the media postgame and admitted he wasn’t exactly thrilled about pitching the seventh, which he entered having thrown 93 pitches or so already. “I didn’t think I really could go any more,” the boyish-looking righthander said. “But it is what it is.”

Come Saturday, Kirby apparently couldn’t wait to walk that back, the faster the better: “Skip’s always got to pry that ball out of my hands. Just super uncharacteristic of me as a player and who I am out on that mound. I love competing. Like I said, I just screwed up.”

The social media jerk brigades turned out in force with the customary charges of gutless, backbone-challenged, you name it. So did a few former players, for that matter. There seemed little room for charity, little thought that Kirby might have spoken Friday out of frustration over surrendering a game-tying bomb, and even less thought that Kirby might actually have a little self-awareness going for him.

Kirby had already faced Pinto twice earlier in the game when they met in the bottom of the seventh. Pinto flied out in the second and lined out in the fifth. Including the close of business Friday, all batters facing Kirby for the third time around, lifetime thus far, have a meaty enough .814 OPS against him, including what are now twelve home runs in 46 such games in which they got that third chance.

The first time through a lineup, Kirby’s batters have a .684 OPS against him, but the second time through they have a .602. Their batting average against him drops from .265 the first time to .221 the second. The third time they see him? They’re two points below .300.

This is also a pitcher who kept the Astros in check in Game Three of last year’s division series. You might remember that game: the eighteen-inning marathon in which neither side could even sneak a run home, with Kirby starting for the Mariners and going seven shutout innings, scattering six hits. With Jeremy Peña hitting Mariners reliever Penn Murfee’s full-count meatball over the left center field fence for the game’s only run and the eventual world champion Astros’s trip to the American League Championship Series.

Kirby also made his first All-Star team this season, and if he didn’t quite pitch like one during his fourth-inning appearance (a leadoff double, a one-out RBI single), you could attribute that to All-Star inexperience. On this season whole, including Friday night, Kirby leads the entire Show with a 9.44 strikeout-to-walk ratio and an 0.9 walks-per-nine rate, not to mention having a very respectable 3.31 fielding-independent pitching rate that suggests his 3.48 ERA means a little hard luck pitching in the bargain.

He pitched 131 major league innings last year and, after Friday, has pitched 165.2 innings this year. The most innings he’d pitched in the minors in any full season was 111.1 in 2019.

Backpedaling his Friday comments may indicate that someone told Kirby it wasn’t such a great look to admit his true sell-by date for the game expired after six innings. The jerk brigades were only too happy to pile that message on, including dredging up the usual outliers who could and did go long and (figuratively, most of the time) threaten murder and mayhem if their managers even thought about lifting them early.

Allow me to reference a decade that ended with the average innings pitched per start being 6.4. Care to guess? The 2010s? The Aughts? The 1990s? Strike three. The decade I referenced was the 1950s. Now would you care to stop saying they were all “tougher” in the allegedly Good Old Days—the days when baseball people thought injuries were half in a player’s head if not signs of quitting?

(Further ancient history: Paul Richards, once thought a genius when it came to pitching, also thought once that the way to fix injuries—especially among his once-vaunted and unconscionably overworked “Baby Birds” Orioles kids of the late 1950s/early 1960s—was to send them for . . . tonsillectomies. True story.)

Hell if you do, hell if you don’t. But I’m not going to be one of the ones telling Kirby he should have kept his big mouth shut Friday. A little more self-awareness such as his might actually mean longer and less physically-stressing careers for a lot of young pitchers. Not to mention better chances of postseason success, considering the Mariners lead the American League’s wild card chase.

How often have pitchers who’ve insisted on “gutting it out” despite fatigue or sensing their best stuff’s expired end up murdered on the mound and thus hurting their team as a reward for their “guts?” How often have fans, hanging the no-guts/no-backbone tags on pitchers who don’t “gut it out” past their game’s sell-by date, turned around and hung the no-brains/no-sense tags on managers who left their pitchers in one inning too many?

Ponder that foolishness before you join the fools who think Kirby needs a spine transplant.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

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