Site Outage Postponed

I have way too many things that still need to be accomplished before migrating the server. I’m going to keep plugging and will update when I’m ready to move the site.

UPDATE: Sorry, I have to push back the update until next Monday. Home was far too busy this past week. Things get back to normal tomorrow. Hopefully the extra time will help shorten the outage.

BBTF.org will be offline starting Tuesday, August 8th at 9 AM EDT for a much-needed server migration and backend updates. The ETA to be back online is TBD. I will provide updates on Twitter. 

Thanks for your patience.

The ragtag team that saved Darryl Strawberry’s career

Back in 1996, Strawberry was in a different place. He was a slumping star with drug, alcohol, legal and tax issues on his resumé—a player no affiliated team would touch. The Saints, who were then an independent bunch known more for their marketing mischief than their developmental pedigree, were Strawberry’s last chance.

He was hesitant to take it.

“I didn’t really want to come to play,” Strawberry says. “I thought I was completely done with baseball.”

The story of how Strawberry lifted up the Saints and himself for a few amazing weeks in the summer of ’96—and the unlikely friends he made along the way—is one of the many poignant moments in “The Saint of Second Chances,” a new documentary about former Saints co-owner ...

Republicans propose $614M in public funds for Brewers’ stadium upgrades

Republican legislators announced a bill Monday that would devote more than $614 million in public funding to repair and renovate the Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium—far more than taxpayers spent to build it more than two decades ago.

Under the proposal, the state would give the team $60.8 million next fiscal year and up to $20 million each year after that through 2045-46. The city of Milwaukee would contribute a total of $202 million, and Milwaukee County would kick in $135 million by 2050.

The team would contribute about $100 million and extend its lease at American Family Field through 2050, keeping Major League Baseball in its smallest market for another 27 years.

Reports commissioned by the Brewers and another by a state consultant found ...

200 WINS! Adam Wainwright caps career with long-awaited milestone

Welcome to the 200-win club, Adam Wainwright! In one of the last scheduled starts of his decorated MLB career, Wainwright reaches a long-awaited milestone.

Wainwright and the Cardinals defeated the NL Central-leading Milwaukee Brewers 1-0 for Waino’s 200th career win. Wainwright allowed four hits and struck out three in seven innings.

With the victory, Wainwright becomes just the third pitcher in history to win at least 200 games with the St. Louis Cardinals and just the sixth active hurler to reach 200 victories.

Can Freddie Freeman Re-Open the 3,000 Hit Club?

What makes the nadir of the 3,000 Hit Club so jarring to a baseball fan is the newness of this phenomenon. The explosion of offense in the 1990s wasn’t just homers, but batting average as well. Even going back 10 years, there were always a lot of players with career hit totals somewhere north of 2,000.

In 2023, that number is seven, and that’s only because there were four new members this year: Freeman, Jose Altuve, Elvis Andrus, and Andrew McCutchen. (I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Evan Longoria won’t get 72 hits over the next two weeks.) Contrast that with 2004, which featured 27 active players with 2,000 career hits.

That brings us back to Freeman. While he was always good at hitting for average throughout his ...

MLB playoffs 2023: Orioles clinch postseason berth

AFTER THE ORIOLES improved from 52-110 in 2021 to 83-79 last season—the ninth-biggest year-to-year improvement in MLB history—Baltimore fans expected, or at least hoped, that Elias would address the rotation. The Orioles had ranked 23rd in the majors in ERA, 26th in strikeout rate and 25th in FanGraphs WAR—not exactly a playoff-caliber rotation. The big moves were anticlimactic: The team signed veteran innings eater Kyle Gibson to a one-year, $10 million contract and acquired Cole Irvin from the A’s. Thus, the less-than-stellar projections.

There are three ways to view the offseason:

(1) Elias saw the 2022 season as a bit of a fluke, viewed regression as likely and didn’t want to commit big money in free agency just yet, not until it was ...

Rays to announce St. Petersburg stadium deal this week

Here’s what we know:

After 16 years of speculation, dating back to the change from Devil Rays to Rays, the team is staying in St. Petersburg, FL.
The stadium plan remains what was reported earlier: a fixed roof stadium seating 30,000 and anchoring a larger overall development in the Historic Gas Plant District, which is where the current stadium is located today.

The new stadium would open for the 2028 season, but the overall development may not be complete until a decade later. You can view the Rays stadium redevelopment proposal here.

Last week, Topkin also reported the Rays would be willing to take on around $600 million to fund a new stadium, with rumors floating that Stu Sternberg was interested in selling a stake in the team for ...

How the knee-down revolution changed catching - without downgrading defense

Swanson initially thought that having a knee down might affect how umpires perceived pitches: Since umpires typically position themselves between the batter and the catcher’s inside shoulder, Swanson experimented with dropping the right knee for a left-handed batter and the left knee for a right-handed batter.

“I thought there was a chance umpires were using the catcher’s body, specifically their knees, to gauge the height of pitches,” he said. “I thought if we remove the knee from their visual field, maybe they’ll lose perception. … I was never able to validate the hypothesis.”

However, he found there were other benefits to catchers being closer to the ground: The best framers got most of their borderline strike calls in the lower ...

Knuckleballer does something not seen in MLB since 2018

It’s 2023, and the knuckleball still plays in the big leagues.

Matt Waldron and the Padres beat the A’s, 5-2, on Saturday afternoon at the Oakland Coliseum. It was a fairly straightforward victory—one team trying desperately to stave off elimination from playoff contention, over another team long since eliminated.

Still, this wasn’t just any Padres victory. This was Waldron’s victory—the first in the career of the 26-year-old right-hander. And it had been a while since the last time a knuckleballer earned a win in a big league ballgame. Nearly five years, to be exact.

Waldron pitched 5 1/3 innings of two-run ball, using his knuckleball-heavy mix to induce plenty of weak contact. In the process, he became the first pitcher to use ...

Shohei Ohtani done for season, cleans out locker before Angels announce IL move

With nothing left for him this season beyond medical procedures, Shohei Ohtani has cleared out his locker with the Los Angeles Angels. Potentially for the final time.

The two-way superstar, who tore the UCL in his pitching arm last month, missed his 11th straight game Friday and it became clear after the game that he would miss more, as his locker was cleared out once reporters entered the clubhouse for postgame interviews.

Some of his things were even in the trash, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The next morning, the team announced that Ohtani is on the 10-day injured list with an oblique injury and will miss the rest of the season. General manager Perry Minasian finally elaborated on the story Saturday afternoon, telling ...

Giants’ all-Alou outfield made history 60 years ago. It almost didn’t happen

Easily, however, we wouldn’t be in position today to celebrate that historic feat. Easily, we could have been deprived of knowing about the Alou family royalty. Easily, none of the brothers could have played a single inning in the majors.

“It almost didn’t happen, the three brothers playing together,” Felipe Alou, 88, told the Chronicle this week. “I really wanted to go back home, back to the university that I was attending. I had a ticket back to the Dominican. If I went home that day in 1956, I wasn’t going to return.”

Alou seriously considered quitting baseball in his first professional season in the New York Giants’ farm system because of extreme racism surrounding his first farm team in Lake Charles, La., where he ...

As Padres’ season spirals, questions emerge about culture, cohesion and chemistry

For whatever else needs to be fixed or tweaked or changed regarding the Padres — and the most important thing would be their best players performing better on the field — there is a belief in the clubhouse that the culture within the team is one that lacks cohesion and a central purpose.

This does not mean players don’t like each other or don’t work hard, those inside say. Multiple players pushed back on suggestions there are deep-seated resentments between them.

The issue, several sources said they believe, is a lack of engagement.

This, according to multiple veterans who have been with the Padres for varying lengths of time and most who have also played for other teams, is largely borne of the team’s best players being on ...

Minor League Baseball Unionization One Year Later: ’Now We Just Get to Play Baseball’

This year? The situation has finally changed. For the first time, all minor leaguers will be paid over the offseason, $250 a week for players at home. That’s game-changing (and life-changing) for players like Washington.

“It’s just the peace of mind,” says the 27-year-old reliever, who spent this season with the Triple-A Oklahoma City Dodgers. “It’s not having to worry about what I’m going to do in the offseason, am I going to be able to make ends meet, all of that… It’s helped a lot, honestly, just mentally. I don’t have to stress as much.”...

It paid off. Literally. For the first time, Case says, he finished the season with money in his pocket: He’d never been paid enough to save during the season before. Now, ...

Cardinals’ disappointing 2023 season can and must be turned around in 2024; is John Mozeliak up for the task?

That brings us to the front office helmed by president of baseball operations John Mozeliak. There’s no assailing his broader record of success as the Cardinals’ lead operator. First as general manager and then in his current role, Mozeliak has guided the Cardinals since the fall of 2007, and they’ve enjoyed a tremendous level of success during his tenure - 10 playoff appearances and a World Series title in 2011. One lost season doesn’t meaningfully tarnish those prior achievements, especially in light of the Cardinals’ market size and (somewhat self-inflicted) payroll limitations, but it does raise questions about the future. That’s especially the case since Mozeliak failed to address the rotation last offseason, and that flawed rotation ...

Hanshin Tigers clinch first Central League pennant since 2005

Teruaki Sato homered for the second straight game as the Hanshin Tigers beat the Yomiuri Giants 4-3 to clinch their first Central League title in 18 years and sixth overall on Thursday.
The Tigers, unbeaten so far in September, completed a three-game sweep of the archrival Giants at Koshien Stadium while extending their winning streak to a season-high 11 games.

“I’m glad we won the title today in front of Tigers fans at Koshien because we are going to Hiroshima tomorrow,” Hanshin manager Akinobu Okada said.

The Tigers and the second-place Hiroshima Carp are scheduled to play a two-game series from Friday at Mazda Stadium.

“I repeatedly told my players that September would be the month of a real battle, but we’ve won way more than ...

An “Old-Fashioned Pitchers’ Duel” Didn’t Always Mean What You Think

From that decade on, the context for “old fashioned pitchers’ duel” was established: There’s a lot of slugging in the game today, but there was once a time when baseball was ruled unilaterally by the men who threw the ball. However, that’s not where or how this saying began. The truly interesting history of the phrase begins well before Ruth ever sent one deep.

In a Montana newspaper’s write-up of NL Opening Day 1919—a piece delightfully headlined “Old Man Baseball Crawls Out Of Dugout”—one of the subheadings read, “Brooklyn Takes Two Games From Boston—Rudolph and Cadore Have Old-Fashioned Pitchers’ Duel. Oh-h-h Boy, Come On, She’s Off!” That’s a fantastic set of words, but after a 1918 season in which NL teams had averaged just ...

Red Sox fire Chaim Bloom

Bloom was named Chief Baseball Officer on October 28, 2019. He has worked in baseball for 19 years, starting as an intern for the Tampa Bay Rays, where he spent 15 years of his career preceding his time with the Red Sox.

In addition to this change, General Manager Brian O’Halloran has been offered a new senior leadership position within the baseball operations department.

The search for new baseball operations leadership will begin immediately. In the interim, the day-to-day operations will continue under the direction of O’Halloran, and Assistant General Managers Eddie Romero, Raquel Ferreira, and Michael Groopman.

Is the AL Cy Young Race Cole’s or Too Close To Call?

According to our new Cy Young projection system, Cole is running away with the award. Per ZiPS’ forecasting, his lead in traditional Cy Young Points (CYP) over second-place Luis Castillo is the same as the gap between Castillo and seventh-place Zach Eflin. FIP-based CYP still has Cole in the lead, mostly due to his league-leading innings total, but there, he’s only narrowly ahead of Kevin Gausman. Gausman’s season feels quite similar to his 2022, when he earned just a single fifth-place vote despite leading the league in FIP thanks to elite strikeout and walk numbers.

This year, Gausman is also underperforming his league-leading FIP with uninspiring contact quality numbers. In many ways, his profile is a poor man’s Strider: better ...

Julio Rodríguez Joins What Could Become a Bumper Crop of 30-30 Players

Rodríguez is the second player to reach 30-30 this season, after Acuña, who hit his 30th homer on August 31 to go with what was then 61 steals (he added his 62nd later in that game). That was already an unprecedented combination, and with six homers and three steals since, he’s up to 36 of the former and 65 of the latter, with sights set on the first 40-70 season in major league history. Meanwhile, four other players currently have at least 25 homers and 25 steals, giving them reasonable shots of reaching 30 in both categories, and two others have an outside chance of crashing the party as well….

What’s driving this year’s potential bumper crop is the return of the stolen base thanks to the new rules — namely the pitch clock, ...

Plunking Down a Plan to Curb Strikeouts

With all that in mind, my plan for cutting down on league strikeouts is to add the following to the MLB Rulebook:

A team may not hit an opposing batsman with a pitch more than once per game. Any subsequent instances of the same team hitting an opposing batsman with a pitch shall result in the immediate ejection of the offending pitcher, even if the prior hit-by-pitch was committed by a different pitcher.

It’s simple. It leverages an outcome that is already discouraged and penalized. There is ample precedent both for beanballs to result in ejections and for sports leagues to implement escalating in-game penalties. So far as I know, no one has ever proposed this before. And most importantly. it targets the specific behavior that has led ...

The racist incident that shook baseball nine years before integration

On a midsummer day at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1938, a WGN Radio reporter asked an innocuous question to New York Yankees outfielder Jake Powell in a pregame interview: What did he do in the offseason?

The 30-year-old replied that he worked as a police officer in Dayton, Ohio, where he stayed in shape by cracking Black people over the head with his nightstick, using the n-word. WGN immediately terminated the interview and issued several apologies that night, but the outrage quickly spread beyond Chicago. Powell’s crude, racist comment led to a national backlash among African Americans that put the game on its back foot on race nearly a decade before baseball finally integrated.

The medium of radio helped escalate the controversy, ...

Max Scherzer to miss rest of regular season with shoulder muscle strain

Texas Rangers right-hander Max Scherzer will miss the rest of the regular season because of a strained muscle in his shoulder, the team announced Wednesday.

Rangers general manager Chris Young said it was unlikely Scherzer would be able to pitch in the postseason if Texas qualifies.

Scherzer has a strained teres major, a muscle that connects the scapula to the humerus.

ESPN: The Biogenesis Files

The largest performance-enhancing drugs operation in U.S. sports history was exposed 10 years ago. Biogenesis of America, a Miami wellness clinic fueled by a cocaine-addicted biochemist who introduced himself as “Dr. T,” outed some of the nation’s biggest stars as PED users; still others have not been publicly tied into the scandal—until now.

Drawing upon more than 1,400 pages of confidential U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigative documents obtained exclusively by ESPN and dozens of interviews, this package of stories provides an unforgettable look at Tony Bosch’s operation, the attorneys and league officials caught using unsavory tactics, and the depths to which athletes will go for an advantage—and to protect their images

...

Baseball Hall of Famer John Smoltz Leads Latest List of Retired MLB Stars to Sign with PBX

PBX Pickleball, the organization that unites retired professional athletes with the pickleball community, has signed Baseball Hall of Famer John Smoltz, fellow Cy Young Award Winner and 3x All-Star Eric Gangé, World Series Champ and All-Star Game MVP J.D. Drew, 4x All-Star Russell Martin, 3x All-Star Jason Kendall, 2x All-Star Brian Roberts, 2x All-Star and World Series Champ Derrek Lee, 2x All-Star Jeff Cirillo, 4x Gold Glover and veteran MLB manager Mike Matheny, All-Star Russ Ortiz, and former MLB Manager of the Year Clint Hurdle as the latest PBX Pros.

Smoltz, Gagné, Drew, Martin, Kendall, Roberts, Lee, Cirillo, Matheny, Ortiz, and Hurdle join a list of accomplished retired professional athletes who will participate in the PBX ...

Alek Manoah Refused Triple-A Assignment, Unlikely To Pitch Again In 2023

Alek Manoah’s disappointing 2023 season has reportedly come to an end.

According to Jeff Blair of the Sportsnet podcast Blair and Barker, Manoah failed to report to his Triple-A assignment in Buffalo because he was upset at the Toronto Blue Jays’ decision to sideline him in favour of the team’s other starting pitchers.

“It seemed like the Alek Manoah camp didn’t like the fact this option was coming because it was performance-related,” Blair said. “Kevin, you and I have both witnessed this from a Major League level to a Triple-A level, when guys get sent back and it’s performance-related, they’re a little salty about it.”...

By refusing to report to Buffalo, Manoah has allegedly lost the opportunity to pitch for the Blue Jays at a Major ...

Sources: Mets hiring David Stearns as president of baseball operations

The New York Mets are hiring David Stearns as their president of baseball operations, sources told ESPN on Tuesday, tabbing the architect of multiple division titles in Milwaukee to help deliver the first World Series championship to Queens in nearly four decades.

Stearns, 38, has long been rumored to take over the Mets after stepping down as Brewers president after the 2022 season and will officially begin in early October, after the regular season ends, sources told ESPN.

A New York native who grew up a Mets fan, Stearns was denied permission by the Brewers to talk about the Mets’ top baseball operations job after the 2021 season.

The Athletic: A former White Sox exec on skimming bonuses, team ownership, life after prison and more

On May 16, 2008, the White Sox fired senior director of player personnel David Wilder, along with two scouts, as the result of an FBI investigation into a bonus-skimming scandal in the Dominican Republic orchestrated by the trio. They were found to have defrauded the Sox organization of more than $400,000, receiving kickbacks from signing bonuses and contract buyouts of Latin American players. It was part of a wider investigation into the practice in Major League Baseball. Wilder eventually pleaded guilty to mail fraud in federal court, and in 2013, he was sentenced to two years in federal prison…..

Do you feel like you weren’t valued before you started skimming?

That’s the reason I started doing it. I got passed over for a World ...

Report: Angels open to trading Mike Trout if he wants out

The Los Angeles Angels are willing to trade Mike Trout if the All-Star outfielder requests one, according to a USA Today report.

Earlier this month, Trout said he plans to discuss the future path of the organization with team management in the offseason.

“When it’s brought up in the offseason, you’ve obviously got to talk about it, and think about it,” Trout told the Orange County Register. “I haven’t thought about it yet. There are going to be some conversations in the winter, for sure. Just to see the direction of everything and what the plan is.”

Trout still has seven years and more than $248 million left on a 12-year, $430 million contract he signed in 2019.

Nationals primed to make jump from rebuild to contention sooner than expected

The Nationals entered the season with low expectations and stumbled through the campaign’s first half at the bottom of the NL East at 36-53. However, something changed following the All-Star break. Washington started to win series after series and has now posted a 28-25 record in the second half.

A young core led by CJ Abrams, Keibert Ruiz, Lane Thomas, MacKenzie Gore, and Josiah Gray has helped turn a corner following a 107-loss campaign last year. The building blocks of the next good Nationals team are starting to show.

“We’re having much more of a fun summer covering this team than I thought we were going to,” longtime Nationals broadcaster Bob Carpenter told theScore in August. “I thought we were going to have to be making excuses ...

Cubs calling up top prospect Pete Crow-Armstrong, sources say

The Chicago Cubs are calling up their top prospect, outfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, sources told ESPN.

Crow-Armstrong, 21, is ranked 15th in ESPN prospect guru Kiley McDaniel’s latest top 50 prospects. He compiled an .876 OPS split between Double-A and Triple-A this year, including 20 home runs and 37 stolen bases. He’s considered one of the best defensive center fielders in the minor leagues and will likely get a chance this week to roam spacious Coors Field, where the Cubs play a three-game series against the Rockies.

The son of the actress that played the mom in “Little Big League” is now a big leaguer.