The Greatest Astro/Phillie

The time is here. The lesser contenders have been dispatched (it seemed like it was gonna be the Mets’ year, didn’t it?) and we have our World Series matchup; the seemingly unstoppable Astros, who just keep pennanting and pennanting and are so far without a loss this postseason, and the scrappy Phillies, third in the NL East this year but hot at the right time.

And that brings us to our annual question: who was the greatest ever Astro/Phillie? Our methodology, as usual — pull up the top 200 career WARs for each team on Stathead (the best subscription on the Internet, if you like this kind of thing) and find the player who maximizes (WAR with Astros) times (WAR with Phillies.)

This year it’s not even close: Roy Oswalt, the Astros’ career leader in WAR from a pitcher. I’d forgotten that after most of a career in Houston, he went to Philadelphia halfway through 2010 and was terrific, helping the Phils get to the NLCS. He pitched just a year and a half in Philadelphia but that, combined with his record in Houston, is enough to give him the title by a long ways.

But if you really dislike the imbalance here, you can instead rank players by min(WAR with Astros, WAR with Phillies) and get a different greatest Astro/Phillie: Turk Farrell, who started and ended his career a Phillie with six years of Houston in between, usually good, never great. He was an all-star once as a Phillie and four times as an Astro, though two of those times were in 1962. Why were there two All-Star Games in 1962? No idea. Mysteries of baseball.

Sky Carp

The former Beloit Snappers, the high-A farm team of the Miami Marlins, are now the Beloit Sky Carp, and they play in a brand new park, ABC Supply Stadium, naming rights courtesy of Diane Hendrick’s massive Beloit-based roofing supply company. Why Sky Carp? Apparently it is a slang term for a goose. Not in my circles. I assumed the strange name was to provide a kind of uniformity among the Marlins’ farm teams, which are all named after sea creatures of some kind. But, as CJ points out, a snapper is a fish too!

I really like minor league ball, even though on the night we saw the Sky Carp edge the West Michigan Whitecaps, there weren’t really any big-time prospects on the field. Maybe the biggest was Trei Cruz, named Trei because he’s the son of Jose Cruz Jr. who was the son of Jose Cruz Sr. (Should the oldest Cruz have been a Hall of Famer? I’m not sure, but he should have gotten more than 0.4% of the vote and an early exit on his first ballot.) The youngest Cruz made two extremely nifty, almost to the point of showoffy, plays at short and drew a walk in a tough spot. I think there was an attempted steal of home in this game but I was getting a bison-elk dog and I only saw the end of the play.

A fun and cheap night out. Beloit is only an hour’s drive from Madison, and the stadium is a short walk to the historic downtown. Cities like Beloit work hard to give people reasons to travel there and the Sky Carp are a pretty good reason.

Phillies 3, Brewers 2

I think this amazing game in May 2018 — “the Aguilar Game” as it’s known — might be the last time we saw a Brewers win? We saw them get shut out by the Padres on Friday, we saw them lose 1-0 to the Rangers in August 2019, we saw them lose 9-6 to the Cardinals in March of that year, and we saw them lose 4-3 to the Dodgers in the 2018 NLCS. We’re bad luck!

CJ is about to go to sleepaway camp and I’m already starting to miss him and am feeling very indulgent so when he came to me Tuesday afternoon and said why don’t we get in the car and go see another Brewers game? it was a yes. And we still had credit from the game we bought tickets for in April 2020, that, as you can imagine, never happened. We’d been told it was good for any game in 2020 or 2021, but we didn’t make it back to the ballpark, and I assumed the money was just gone, fair’s fair — but no! The credit still existed. A nice gesture by the Brewers to the fans.

It sure looked like we were going to see a win this time. Nice game — as many fans on a Tuesday night as there’d been the previous Friday. Beautiful cool night but the roof was closed for predicted showers that never happened. A triple for each team, some slick defense manufactured runs, and the Brewers went into the 9th with a 2-1 lead and unstoppable supercloser Josh Hader coming in to face the bottom of the Philadelphia order. Hader was riding a streak of 40 consecutive scoreless appearances, tied for the most ever in major-league history.

Did I mention we’re bad luck?

Two home runs by terrible, terrible Philadelphia hitters, each one a no-doubter, more than 400 feet. Streak over, lead gone. We go to the bottom of the 9th, and now we see Philadelphia’s closer, none other than longtime Brewer Corey Knebel. And he is terrible. Can’t hit the strike zone. Maybe there’s one more twist left. He walks Andrew McCutcheon and then Hunter Renfroe smashes what looks like the game-winner to dead center but it dies at the track, and then crowd favorite Rowdy Tellez hits another one just as hard but gets a little under it and it’s also to the deepest part of the field, and then there’s two outs — but Knebel still can’t throw a strike, walks Victor Caratini and then Jace Peterson on a heroic at bat where he keeps on fouling it straight back, waiting for his pitch (this is your callback to the Aguilar Game) before finally getting ball four. Lorenzo Cain comes in to run for the catcher Caratini, so you have speed at second and third with the bases loaded.

But Craig Counsell’s bench is empty. Kolten Wong left early with a leg injury so he already had to put in Keston Hiura and Peterson’s batting for him. All that’s left is the guy who’s been batting ninth the whole game, lifetime .239 hitter Pablo Reyes, and hey, sometimes you just have to hand the guy the bat and hope for the best. And Reyes looks at three called strikes, on the last one making a sad little gesture at a swing.

Maybe next time.

Update: I was wrong about the last Milwaukee win we attended; we saw the Brewers win game 162 in 2018, an 11-0 laugher against the Tigers. But our in-person losing streak still stands at 5.

Padres 7, Brewers 0

A cool cloudy night in June, school out, CJ itching to get more parentally supervised driving time — he needs 50 hours with me in the car before he can get his license — meant it was time, after a two-year pandemic hiatus, to return to what on our last visit was Miller Park, and is now American Family Field — so many syllables, so awkwardly arranged. It was Brewers-Padres; here’s the box score. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a Padres game, but I was motivated to, because Manny Machado plays there now. Machado is the villain of the National League now, universally-except-in-San-Diego seen as a dirty player and a braggart. He was treated to resounding boos by the Brewers fans every time he came to the plate. But I still like him. One of my very first tweets was directed at him. He’s probably the best Oriole of our era, even though he’s not an Oriole anymore. I got us seats along the third base line, something I never ordinarily do, just so I could be closer to Machado when the Brewers were at bat.

Machado wasn’t the story of the game; that was Joe Musgrove, the Padres starter, who took a no-hitter into the eighth. I’ve never seen a no-hitter in person, and I can’t lie, after Musgove got through six I was starting to root for him. But it turns out watching a no-hitter isn’t that different from watching any other game! At least this one wasn’t. An inning where nobody gets a hit is pretty normal; this was just watching a lot of those in a row. Musgrove wasn’t dominant; he walked some guys, went deep in counts. Saved by his defense on a couple of line drives. It really just felt like a game where nobody on the Brewers happened to get a hit, until finally Kolten Wong did happen to.

On the Padre side, Machado hit a home run, just like he did the last time I saw him play. The boos crested to a new level. What I really wanted, though, was to see him play third. He was one of the greatest defenders at third I ever saw, going deep into the hole to stop a sharp grounder and making impossible turnaround throws. The stats say he’s no longer the third baseman he was in Baltimore, and no matter how much he mashes the ball — and this year he is mashing it to a very fine paste indeed — I think that’s a real loss. He wasn’t really tested in this game. The one play at third he made was completely routine, but, well, he made it pretty somehow.

The boos didn’t seem to faze him. He was a cheerful presence on the field, chatting with the third-base ump, throwing his arm chummily around a Brewer baserunner who made it to third. Real baseball.

Lots of Padre fans at AmFam. I didn’t know the Padres had out-of-town fans! Yelich by far the most popular Brewers jersey nowadays. A lot of Hader, too. Braun almost completely gone. Oldest non-Yount jerseys I saw: Corey Hart and Yovanni Gallardo. American Miller Family FieldPark is, as always, a great place to watch a game, unheraldedly one of the best parks in the league. It was good to be back.

Baseball and suffering

When I was younger, baseball made me suffer. I believed what Bart Giamatti said about the game: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.” When the Orioles lost a big game I was stuck in a foul cloud for hours or days afterwards. When Tanya first encountered me in this state she literally could not believe it had to do with baseball, and really probed to figure out what had really happened. But it was baseball. That’s what happened. Baseball.

I’m different now. I can watch the Orioles lose while wishing they would win and not feel the same kind of angry, bitter suffering I used to. I don’t know what made it change. It might just be the psychic arc of middle age. It’s not that I care less. When they win — whether it’s the good 2014 Orioles getting the ALCS or the awful contemporary version of the team having a rare good night — I thrill to it, just like I have since I was a kid. When they lose, I move on.

It would be good to bring this change to all areas of life. Not to stop caring, but to stop sinking into anger and suffering when things don’t go the way I want. I don’t know how I did it for baseball, so I don’t know how to do it for anything else. Maybe I should just pretend everything is baseball.

The greatest Astro/Brave(s)

The pennants have been decided, largely without my attention, because never in recent memory have four teams I less care for been vying for the title. The Dodgers and Red Sox are OK I guess but they just won. The Astros keep winning pennants and are holders of a recent world championship tainted by sign-stealing. And the Braves are a just-OK team that knocked out the Brewers. If they still had Kevin Gausman and Nick Markakis, I’d root for them anyway, but now? In fact, unless I’m forgetting somebody, there is no ex-Oriole playing on either side of the World Series this year. So much for that metric.

But the Series must go on, and with it, this annual feature: which player had the greatest combined contribution to the two teams that remain? I have to admit, I couldn’t think of a single player who played for both. (Has to do with growing up an AL fan when both of these teams were on the other side.) When I ran the numbers, there was a pretty close race for first, and here’s what’s cool — the two players, Denis Menke and Denny LeMaster, both came up with the (Milwaukee) Braves in 1962 and went to the Astros in the same trade in 1968! Menke was a shortstop, who had a couple of All-Star years in Houston but never fielded as well as he had for the Braves. He was later the hitting coach for the pennant-winning 1993 Phillies, and he died about 10 months ago in Florida. LeMaster was a starting pitcher for most of his time with both teams, never a star, always a reliable innings-eater.

And who was on the other side of the trade for these two great Astro-Braves? Chuck Harrison, who didn’t amount to much, and Sonny Jackson, who never really equalled his 49-steal age-21 rookie season, but who stuck around for 12 years playing kind-of-OK baseball, 7 years with the Braves following his 5 for Houston. He’s probably the player with the longest combined career for both this teams. And he went to Montgomery Blair High School in my home county of Montgomery County, Maryland. Maybe that’s the closest connection I can make between the Orioles and the 2021 World Series.

It didn’t have to be this way

This is not a post about COVID-19, or Afghanistan, or the slow-then-fast dissolution of the journalism industry, or somebody’s tweet that made me mad. It’s about the Baltimore Orioles. If you don’t care about the Baltimore Orioles — and honestly, if you are not, like me, a lifetime fan, why, why, why would you? — feel free not to read. But I’m gonna write.

The Orioles are rebuilding. Or so we are told. Rebuilding takes time. You lose a lot as the pieces of the next good team comes into place. Or so we are told. You trade away everybody who can place a fastball or hit a curveball for prospects and some of them pan out. You lose so much you get high draft picks and those draft picks pan out. Fan patience will be rewarded. Or so we are told. But some of us don’t live in Baltimore anymore. I, for instance, live in Wisconsin, and have taken on as a secondary rooting interest the Milwaukee Brewers. And that’s how I know it didn’t have to be this way.

If you spend your life in the American League East, you can say to yourself, well, there’s the big-market teams, the Yankees and Red Sox and Blue Jays, who never have to resist the temptation of the big-ticket free agent, and there’s the Rays, who have some kind of Magic Savvy, and then there is us.

But look at the Brewers. They’re not rich; payroll is 19th out of the 30 teams, right between the Rockies and the Rangers. There’s nothing really special about them, to be honest. There are no books about the genius of the Brewers. Right now they’re really good. But they’re not always good. They’re sometimes bad. But not as bad as the Orioles are right now. The Brewers have had a winning percentage under .400 exactly once in the team’s entire history, twice if you count their first year as the 1969 Seattle Pilots when it was .395. Milwaukee had some really good teams about a decade ago and then they weren’t so good and now they’re contenders again.

They’re normal. This is what following a normal team is like.

The Orioles have had a winning percentage under .400 in three of the last four years (barring a miraculous renaissance in the closing weeks of 2021.) And in the short season of 2020, they just cleared it, playing .417 ball.

How did the Brewers do it? Well, they did put together the best farm system in baseball by the middle of 2016. But they didn’t do it by putting a AAA team on the field. They still had Ryan Braun, Scooter Gennett, Jonathan Lucroy, Wily Peralta, Jimmy Nelson, well-liked players who’d been on the Brewers for a while. (Lucroy was traded for a couple of prospects in mid-season, and my beloved Carlos Gomez had departed the year before in a trade that brought them Josh Hader — it’s not like they didn’t do any tearing down.) They had a free agent pitcher, Matt Garza, who’s signed a big contract with them after the 2013 season when the Brewers finished 23 games out of first, and they traded a young shortstop, Jean Segura, who turned out to be pretty good, for Chase Anderson, so they had a couple of major league starters, and some of the guys they already had pitched OK too. They signed Chris Carter as a free agent. They went 73-89. The next year they won 86 games and didn’t make the playoffs, and then they added Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain, and then they were very, very good.

The Brewers did everything the Orioles said you have to resist doing in order to improve; and they improved. They took the Dodgers to game 7 in the NLCS in 2018. and they’re running away with the NL Central right now.

I’m not saying the current Orioles disaster isn’t a way to get better. Yeah, yeah, the Astros did it, I get it. I’m saying it’s the worst way to get better. It stinks to watch. The Orioles just lost their 14th game in a row. It’s their second 14-game losing streak this season. They are 38-81. I feel sorry for the players who have to be on the field for this. Especially because it didn’t have to be this way.

This is it, right? This is as dogshit as the Orioles get?

That’s it. That’s the post.

[Dean Kremer allows six runs in 1/3 of an inning including a grand slam. Yesterday we lost 13-0. The day before that we lost 10-2 in a game where we were getting no-hit into the 8th. Two days before that we took a 7-4 lead into the ninth and lost 10-7.]

Pandemic blog 38: The greatest Ray/Dodger

The greatest Rayger?

Anyway, this is one I do every year for the World Series. This one was pretty simple; the Rays haven’t been around very long, so there aren’t very many players who logged serious time on both teams. There are two contenders with a case. James Loney was either a Dodger or a Ray for most of his career, and he had a solid 11-year career. Never an all-star, 6th in Rookie of the Year voting for LA in 2007. J.P. Howell also played most of his career for LAD and TBR, but never on the same team as Loney. He had some very good years in the bullpen for some very good Dodger teams but the only time he saw the World Series was with the 2008 Rays, and he was bad, losing two of the games.

Wilson Alvarez also played for both the Dodgers and the Rays! But he just feels like a White Sock to me.

Pandemic blog 37: the short season

We are heading for a World Series and while the rest of the world has been turned awry, one thing is as usual: the Baltimore Orioles are not in it.

But!

I have been high on the Orioles in the past. I thought the team had much more talent than their awful record in 2018 suggested, and indeed they were not quite as bad in 2019. But last year, I think their still-terrible 54-108 record was roughly in line with who was on that team. Now you take that team, which already traded Andrew Cashner at the deadline, and you also trade Dylan Bundy, Miguel Castro, Richard Bleier, and Mychal Givens, so you’re now down two starters and three of the guys who threw the most bullpen innings, and oh yeah, the best hitter on the 2019 Orioles, Trey Mancini, is getting cancer treatment and is gone for the year, and Jonathan Villar, probably the best all-around position player, is traded away too, and oh yeah, Anthony Santander gets injured halfway through the season, what are you looking at?

People were saying this team could be worse than the awful 2018 team. They were saying this team could lose 50 out of 60.

They didn’t! Instead, they took another step up towards respectability, going 25-35, with a Pythagorean record of 28-32. They didn’t even finish last in the AL East this year (sorry, Red Sox.)

How did it happen?

Well, first of all, everybody hit. Pedro Severino hit. Renato Nuñez hit. Rio Ruiz hit. Anthony Santander hit until he got hurt. Ryan Mountcastle, whose star as a prospect seemed to have dimmed, finally came to the majors and did nothing but hit. A joy to watch. Players who in previous years seemed to have clearly established that not even a lick could they hit, like Cedric Mullins and Chance Sisco, hit. They hit in weird ways. DJ Stewart hit .193 but walked and homered a ton and ended up with a solid .809 OPS, the best ever by a player hitting below the Mendoza line in 100 or more PAs. (He edged out old 2001 Mark McGwire at .808.) On the other side, Jose Iglesias had one of the strangest batting seasons ever, hitting .373 (36 PAs short of qualifying for the batting title, which no Oriole has won since Frank Robinson’s tricoronation in 1966) but walking and homering just 3 times each. It’s hard to walk and homer that rarely and still be a good hitter! But this guy doubles off the wall like mid-2000s Brian Roberts. His .956 OPS was by far the best ever for hitters with 100 PA, at most 3 homers and at most 3 walks. Jerald Clark of the Twins in 1995, a player I have no memory of at all, comes closest, and it’s not that close.

What remained of the bullpen was pretty good, too, making up for an expectedly spotty starting rotation.

What’s the future? The hitters, let’s be honest, are probably not as good as they looked this short season. On the other hand, by 2021 the first of the prospects should start to show up. Dean Kremer, who came in the Machado trade, is already here and showed signs of real promise. Yusniel Diaz should be up. Mountcastle is here to stay. And maybe, just maybe, it’s Adley Rutschman time.

I don’t think the 2021 Orioles are a .500 team but I think there’s reason to think the absolute wretchedness is past — if ownership wants it to be.