CHICAGO — A mere mention of the year 1991 elicited a pained groan from Sandy Alomar Jr. as he leaned against a railing in the Cleveland Guardians’ dugout. Three decades have passed. Alomar played for seven teams across 20 seasons, appeared in 49 playoff games, won an All-Star Game MVP award and supplied a slew…
I actually have the NL Manager of the Year ballot this year, an award on which I think I’ve only voted once previously in my 15ish years in the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), and certainly my least favorite one to vote on, because I don’t think there’s a good way to evaluate managers…
The Athletic’s MLB offseason grades 1.0. By Tim Britton, Grant Brisbee and Aaron Gleeman According to a report by an economics professor at Yale University, roughly 80 percent of all grades handed out to undergraduate students last year were As. Too bad for major-league executives, then, that they don’t attend Yale (at least not anymore, in several cases)….
By Zack Meisel, Cody Stavenhagen and Stephen J. Nesbitt GOODYEAR, Ariz. — A decade ago, on a dusty baseball diamond in Puerto Rico, a veteran pitcher shared with Fernando Cruz the secrets of throwing a splitter, a pitch treated like a black-market product, a dark art best learned in the shadows and deployed at one’s…
As Jonah Heim squeezed the final strike of the 2023 postseason and Josh Sborz spiked his mitt on the mound to celebrate the Texas Rangers’ first World Series title, a thought crossed my mind: How will this change the franchise rankings? See, the Wild-Card Era (1995 to present) franchise rankings are not a creation of…
Shortly after haggling his way out of free-agent purgatory and into a new contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kiké Hernández asked his wife, Mariana, to investigate another market. She contacted former Dodger Rich Hill’s wife, Caitlin, with a request: Could the Hernándezes live in the Hills’ house again? The Hills had bought the property,…
Welcome to this year’s ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball. I’ve been compiling and writing such rankings for 17 years now, and those of you who’ve read them before will find the format here similar to those from the recent past. My farm reports covering at least 20 prospects in each team’s system,…
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — There were Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer. This was their first Hall of Fame election. They won’t need a second. On Tuesday, they became baseball’s newest first-ballot Hall of Famers. And that stamps them as baseball royalty, connected forever to this special stamp of greatness. Beltré reeled in 95.1 percent of the…
Look, we get it. The Baseball Hall of Fame is a breathtaking idea. It’s a celebration. It’s a history lesson. It’s a pilgrimage. The museum in Cooperstown is home to heroes and memories and the posters on our walls. The very notion can fill a fan with wonder, and actually being there feels like going…
Every year at this time, we marvel at the many creative ways baseball players find to make an appearance on the ever-popular Strange But True Injuries of the Year leaderboard. So we’d like to thank this year’s baseball population for … cooking breakfast … playing the piano … and doing their best to get in…
