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.

OT - NBA Off-Pre-Early Thread for the end of 2023

I estimate only 10-12 Primates care about the NBA, and hopefully some of them have regard for human life. Boom shakalaka.

Is It Time to Stop Using Scripts on Sports Uniforms?

By my count, 19 of MLB’s 30 teams currently have a script logo on at least one — and in most cases more than one — of their non-CC jerseys: the A’s, Brewers, Cardinals, Dodgers, Giants, Guardians, Marlins, Mets, Nationals, Orioles, Phillies, Pirates, Rangers, Reds, Royals, Tigers, Twins, White Sox, and Atlanta.

That’s a lot of script jerseys! Obviously, scripts also appear occasionally in hockey, football, and basketball, but they’re most prevalent in baseball. And baseball is the sport widely perceived to be facing the steepest marketing challenges with younger fans — the ones who are no longer being taught cursive writing..

Personally, I like most of MLB’s jersey scripts and am in no hurry to see them change. But this ...

Ex-Nats reliever Sean Doolittle exits after ‘11 incredible seasons’

Sean Doolittle, a two-time All-Star reliever who helped the Washington Nationals to a World Series title, has announced his retirement.

Doolittle revealed his decision in a social media post Friday, writing that he had a “full heart” as he said farewell “after 11 incredible seasons playing the sport I love.”

He said he felt very welcome in Washington, where he first pitched from 2017 to 2020, earned his second All-Star honor in 2018 and recorded a save in Game 1 of the 2019 World Series as the franchise won its first and only championship.

“The 2019 World Series title will always be the highlight of my career because we were able to share it with you,” Doolittle wrote, addressing Nationals fans. “I don’t have the words to tell you how ...

Here are the 2023 Arizona Fall League rosters

Ten of MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 prospects are headed to this year’s showcase circuit, with the Guardians and Tigers leading the way with two apiece:

17. Colson Montgomery, SS, White Sox (Glendale)
19. Carson Williams, SS, Rays (Peoria)
31. Ricky Tiedemann, LHP, Blue Jays (Surprise)
39. Harry Ford, C, Mariners (Peoria)
54. Jackson Jobe, RHP, Tigers (Salt River)
58. Kyle Manzardo, 1B, Guardians (Peoria)
67. Jace Jung, 2B, Tigers (Salt River)
71. Kevin Alcántara, OF, Cubs (Mesa)
85. Chase DeLauter, OF, Guardians (Peoria)
89. Kevin Parada, C, Mets (Glendale)

Qualifying Offer Value To Land Around $20.5MM

The qualifying offer for the upcoming offseason will be in the $20.5MM range, reports Joel Sherman of the New York Post. The specific number may not be known until shortly after the conclusion of the regular season.

It’ll be the highest QO value in league history. The offer price is calculated by averaging the salaries of the 125 highest-paid players in the majors. That figure generally increases year over year as overall spending rises….

Shohei Ohtani, Cody Bellinger, Blake Snell, Matt Chapman, Aaron Nola, Sonny Gray and Josh Hader are among the players who are near locks to receive and reject the QO this winter. Jordan Montgomery and Lucas Giolito were taken out of QO consideration by midseason trades, while Eduardo Rodriguez and ...

Jeff Greenberg named Tigers general manager

The Detroit Tigers have named innovative and experienced executive Jeff Greenberg as the club’s General Manager. Greenberg, 37, will report to President of Baseball Operations, Scott Harris, and joins the Tigers after spending the last 16 months as an Associate General Manager with the Chicago Blackhawks.

Greenberg will be the 20th General Manager in the 123-year history of the club, dating back to 1901.

Prior to joining the Blackhawks, Greenberg spent 11 seasons with the Chicago Cubs, including his final three seasons as an Assistant General Manager. He also held roles as Director of Pro Scouting and Baseball Operations, Director of Baseball Operations and Assistant to the General Manager. While with the Cubs, Greenberg played a key ...

Left-handed hitters describe the craft of hitting lefty pitching

Last year, only 53 left-handed major-league batters faced southpaw pitchers at least 100 times, tied for the lowest number of players since at least 2002. This year, there are only 45 left-handed hitters with 100 or more plate appearances against left-handers through play Tuesday. That cohort is set to decline in numbers for a fourth straight full season. There were 67 in 2013.

More and more, data drives lineup decisions and takes many left-handed hitters out of the lineups against southpaws. Right-handed batters face right-handed pitchers in the majority of their plate appearances because, of course, they are of the dominant handedness, but teams generally try to limit left-on-left exposure. On the surface, there is a good reason for ...

Yankees’ status quo under Brian Cashman resulted in ‘disaster’ season, and a fresh perspective is needed

Numerous missteps have led the Yankees to where they are today and GM Brian Cashman, who has been at the helm since 1998, is under more heat now than at any other point in his tenure. We know this because, on July 9, the Yankees fired hitting coach Dillon Lawson. It was the first time they fired a coach during the season since 1995. It was a clear act of desperation.

“It has been well documented that I have been reluctant in the past to make changes to our coaching staff in the middle of a season,” Cashman said in a statement after Lawson was let go. “I am a big believer that successes and failures are collective efforts. However, I ultimately felt that a change was needed and that a new voice overseeing our hitting operations would give ...

Carroll makes more history: 1st rookie to have 25-HR, 50-SB season

Can we just go ahead and give Corbin Carroll the National League Rookie of the Year Award already?

The D-backs outfielder continues to pile up impressive accomplishments. In Arizona’s 7-1 win over the Giants on Wednesday at Chase Field—which gave the D-backs the season-series win over San Francisco—he stole his 49th and 50th bases of the season and belted his 25th home run.

With those steals and the homer, Carroll became the first rookie in MLB history to compile 25 or more home runs and 50-plus stolen bases.

The Athletic: How the $445 million Mets crashed and burned

As Tommy Pham, the perpetually intense veteran outfielder, bluntly put it in a recent interview, “We had a terrible f—ing June.”

Often after games or during meals on the road, players discussed how they could turn things around.

After a devastating sweep in Atlanta, Pham, infielder Eduardo Escobar, catcher Francisco Alvarez and star shortstop Francisco Lindor talked about small things that the Mets needed to improve in between bites of food at a Brazilian steakhouse, Fogo de Chão, in Pittsburgh. Pham, 35, has played on seven teams, and organizations know when negotiating with him that he brings an edge, strong work ethic and little tolerance for lackadaisical effort.

For weeks ahead of the dinner, Lindor had held himself ...

Oakland vs. the A’s: The inside story of how it all went south (to Las Vegas)

Thao was stunned. Since taking office in January, she and her staff had picked up where previous mayor Libby Schaaf left off, negotiating with A’s owner John Fisher to facilitate a massive, city-altering $12 billion project for a ballpark village on 55 acres along the waterfront at Howard Terminal. The work to keep the A’s had been a long haul, spanning several mayoral administrations and three A’s ownership groups, but Thao believed they were $101 million away from procuring the required amount of public funding for the infrastructure outside the ballpark. It was a paltry sum for such a vast project, and Oakland had just been assured of another $65 million in federal grants that would have brought the difference down to $36 million. Thao ...

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, ...