NEW YORK — The moment that defined a rivalry came 47 years ago Sunday. It was a cool fall night in the Bronx, Game 2 of the 1977 ALCS, and Hal McRae stood on first base. The Kansas City Royals were trailing the New York Yankees 2-1 in the sixth inning, but McRae had an…
If Aaron Judge is the New York Yankees’ Superman, the Kansas City Royals may believe that they have his kryptonite in Michael Wacha, their Game 1 starter in the American League Division Series. Judge has just one hit (a single) in 18 career at-bats (.056) vs. Wacha, a righty veteran. It’s Judge’s lowest career batting…
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…
On July 16, 2022, more than 37,000 fans crammed into Nationals Park on a muggy midsummer afternoon. Washington already had 62 losses by that point — still days before the All-Star break — and there was little hope that a second-half surge was coming. Fans were there to see their homegrown prodigy, Juan Soto, and…
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)….
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,…
As the February sunshine beams down on all of baseball, and the standings say that everyone is undefeated, it’s easy to melt into a zen state of spring training nirvana. But there’s one question in our annual spring survey that jolts us back to life. That’s the part where we ask our voters — a…
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,…
