There was a lot of good baseball this week. Elite pitching performances. One-run contests. Stars getting big hits in big moments. Thursday night’s Game 3 — New York Mets 4, Milwaukee Brewers 2 — was a true postseason epic. Back-to-back Brewers homers in the seventh inning. Pete Alonso going deep in the ninth to keep his…
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…
Matt Blake texted Cleveland Guardians pitcher Shane Bieber a conciliatory message over the weekend. As a member of the Cleveland player-development system in the 2010s, Blake aided Bieber’s rise from college walk-on to unanimous American League Cy Young Award winner in 2020. For a time, Bieber represented the modern model for the manufacturing of a…
In the story Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara initially told to ESPN, the two men logged into Ohtani’s bank account together on eight or nine occasions in 2023 and wired increments of $500,000 to Mathew Bowyer, an alleged illegal bookmaker under federal investigation. In the story Ohtani told the public days after Mizuhara recanted his initial…
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)….
SEOUL — For years, it was nearly impossible to see Shohei Ohtani anywhere without his longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, just a few steps away. On Thursday, following Mizuhara’s abrupt firing over his involvement with illegal gambling, it was almost impossible to see Ohtani at all. Ohtani didn’t enter the Los Angeles Dodgers clubhouse during the…
PHOENIX — Flags only fly forever if you raise them. At Dodgertown, the ancestral home of the Los Angeles Dodgers in Vero Beach, Fla., a mural celebrating six World Series winners greeted visitors. No such signage exists at Camelback Ranch. The team has won the National League West 11 times since shifting its spring training…
TEMPE, Ariz. — Every morning for the past six years, no matter how early Angels players and staff got to Tempe Diablo Stadium, they saw a throng of Japanese media standing on the Tempe Butte mountain overlooking the team’s spring training complex. This wasn’t a recreational sunrise hike. Every camera was zoomed in, waiting for…
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,…
