MARCO'S BASEBALL BLOG-O-ROONIE 2019: QUARTER POLE

MARCO’S BASEBALL BLOG-O-ROONIE 2019: QUARTER POLE

Hello intrepid Warriors of Baseball Fandom. After 40 some games of the 2019 season you might need an explanation. This I shall attempt.

1/COME ON BABY LET’S GO DOWNTOWN: Stat of the First Quarter… we have 32...that’s right, thirty two...players in the Bigs who are already double figures in home runs. (*as of May 16) That means if they repeat their success in the First Quarter of this season in the next 3 quarters we’ll have over 30 players who hit 40+ home runs this season! That’s a shocking number...way higher than anything we’ve seen before.

For instance, in 2001, the year when Barry Bonds hit his 73 tainted taters, the Majors had 11 players go over 40 in the four bagger department. That was in the days of Chemical Enhancement. (31 players hit at least 34 bombs). Now the players are mostly (I think) just strong. They’ve all learned how to hit drives to all fields and all the pitches are coming in at 93-98 mph and when they connect, the baseball just flies out of all these small ballparks. The batters get a crisp new baseball to hit every time a pitch even touches the dirt. The pattern is: strike out 3 or 4 times a game but hit a homer, bat .240 and go collect your check. Baseball wanted offense and this is what we get.

So the trend of ever more strikeouts, walks and homers (the so-called 3 “natural outcomes”) shows no sign of ebbing.

2/GREAT EXPECTATIONS: I keep picking the Washington Nationals to surprise everybody and play like the team they look like on paper but once they get on the field it’s Les Miserables. This year they can’t score. The usual guys got hurt...Trea Turner, Ryan Zimmerman, Anthony Rendon...add Juan Soto this season. Only Anthony Rendon, catcher Kurt Suzuki and Howie Kendricks have an OPS over .800. Gerrardo Parra has been the only bright spot lately with game-winning hits. The young heroes Soto and Robles are pressing and underachieving at the plate.

Brian Dozier has been a free agent disaster offensively. As recently as 2016 the Dozer hit .268/42 homers/99 rbi’s/.886 OPS for the Twinkies. Right now he’s at .187/5/7/.606 with 44 strike outs already. This after he was offensively non-existent for the Dodgers in half a season last year. I think Brian misses the American League. Hope he comes back ‘cause he’s been a scrappy, interesting player and he’s only 32. I wonder how much longer the Nats can go with him at second base?

You should expect mass firings for the Washington Nationals if this horrible losing keeps up. What a waste of good starting pitching. Scherzer, Strassburg and Corbin starting games for them and the Nats are way under .500? Cursed are the Damned!

Actually, all the contenders in the NL East turn out to be flawed. Harper has proved that he can go into just as deep a slump in Philadelphia as he used to in DC. Even though the Phils are in first place in the division, they don’t look that strong. Atlanta has good hitting but not enough pitching. The Mets look like the Mets usually look...teasing with dramatic come- from- behind wins and then falling flatter than cow patties.

3/ PARITY IN THE NL CENTRAL: Wow! Hold on there! The expected 3-way race for a division title among Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis in the NL Central is under attack from Pittsburgh! The much-maligned Piraticals (especially by me because their owner is a cheapskate who has ruined the reputation of one of the original stalwarts of the league by refusing to pay his stars and trading them off incessantly before the team can ever win something) have come to life and, even though they’re only at .500, are pounding the opposition with young pitchers and their new hitting star, Josh Bell. The big first baseman has switch-hit the pill at a .325/12/35/1.070 rate. He’s getting a little help from Melky Cabrera and Gregory Polanco (for a change!) and even though they are hardly a juggernaut, the Buccos are respectable and dangerous. SOGA! (that’s new-age tech speak for Sound of Grateful Applause)

And even the ever-irrelevant Reds have won 20 games! Their infielders Suarez (3B), Dietrich (2B) and Jose Iglesisias (SS) have been stellar and if Joey Votto and Yasiel Puig ever get going they might be almost average offensively! Meanwhile Ace Luis Castillo has an ERA of 1.90 and is on pace for about 250 Ks with a 3 to 1 K/BB ratio. He may be the best pitcher in the National League!

Arise from the Dead, Red!

Meanwhile, my pick to click, the St. Louis Cardinals, haven’t. Bad starting pitching! Unless Carlos Martinez comes back from the IL with a healthy shoulder, things look grim. The offense has a few bright spots...Ozuna has 38 ribs and Goldschmidt has been steady. Matt Carpenter is in another early season slump but when he rallies, he rallies big. (Last year’s hot streak was amazing!)

But as currently constituted, the Redbirds are not a Playoff team.

The Brewers are, even with an undergunned pitching staff now consisting of Zach Davies, Josh Hader and some spare change. The Crew is being carried offensively by Mike Moustakis, Ryan Braun, Yasmani Grandal and especially Christian Yelich (aka Ichabod!) who has this line: .342/18/40/1.218!

In first place, the Cubbies Abide. The Adorables have finally crystallized around 4 scary hitters...Baez, Bryant, Rizzo and Contreras...all well over .900 in OPS. These guys are the guts of that lineup. They have some good help from the supporting cast as well.

The Ursines are so much stronger than the rest of the division in starting pitching (except for maybe Pittsburgh!) that I expect them to pull away eventually. Quintana, Hendricks, Lester, Hamels. Nuff said. Veteran pros at or near the peak of their games. If Yu Darvish ever rediscovers his control you’ve got a Blue Chip rotation.

At this point Hoyer and Epstein need to go out and get some relief pitchers to help that bad bullpen, but the Cubs are going to be OKAY.

4/CARE AND FEEDING OF THE UNICORN: For just the second time in all of history, a player has arisen who can potentially dominate the league by being an “A” player both as a pitcher and as a hitter. I’m speaking of course about Shohei Ohtani-san of the Los Angeles Angels.

Ohtani just came off the IL after Tommy John-ing his elbow. He’s good to go as a hitter but won’t try pitching again until next season. But he is a quality hitter with tremendous power and is already a huge star who fascinates the public. But every time the guy hustles for an extra base or slides into home (feet first at least) I hear the Faint of Heart in the baseball media groaning that the Angels shouldn’t be risking the future Ace of their pitching staff by letting him run bases and other scary, dangerous, wreckless behavior like that. What if some other mean old pitcher hit him in the finger? What if he Stwained his Wittle Hamstwing Wunning down to first base? (On a Gwounder!)

Ohtani is the Long Promised, Newly Arisen, Hero of Heroes, ‘Last of the Dragons’. Baseball has NEVER had a two way player like him... except for Babe Ruth. And Babe Ruth was like the Atom Bomb for baseball. He changed the game for all time and cemented its popularity for generations.

From 1915 to 1918 when he played for his original team, the Boston Red Sox, Ruth was the top left-handed pitcher in the league. He won 23 games in 1916 and led the league with an ERA of 1.75. The Babe threw 9 shutouts. If there had been a Cy Young Award back then, Ruth would have won it.

But by 1919, Ruth was only starting 15 games. He was just as good a pitcher, but his hitting had taken off to unprecedented levels. Ruth led the league with a record homer total of 29 and led the league in RBIs, Runs, Slugging, On-Base, and OPS (1.114), all while playing the outfield on days he wasn’t pitching. He was only in 130 games and a lot of those were as a pinch hitter.

Back then there was no such thing as a DH slot. It was imperative that Ruth play everyday so they could get his bat into the lineup more. Even back then they knew they had to give pitchers a little time to rest their arms after all the complete game pitching they had to do. But Ruth was reinventing the whole game of baseball with his power. The fans were filling ballparks just to watch him hit balls into the fens. The Babe himself wanted to hit more than he wanted to pitch.

So they traded him to the Yankees (O Foul and Bitter Day!) and Ruth became a full-time outfielder and the greatest baseball attraction of all time. But for a few tantalizing seasons he was close to being the unimaginable UNICORN...THE BEST PITCHER AND THE BEST HITTER IN BASEBALL SIMULTANEOUSLY! I mean...God Loves Baseball and he sent the Babe.

Nowadays the American League has the DH (controversial as that may be for purists) and Ohtani doesn’t have to play the field when he doesn’t pitch. The Angels were pitching him every sixth day just to protect him. He doesn’t even DH the day before or the day after his starts except maybe for a pinch hit or two. Before he got hurt he was pitching on a high level (ERA 3.31 plus a 3-1 K/BB rate) and hitting much better than expected. He had 22 homers, 61 RBIs and an OPS of .925 in only 367 plate appearances!

Mind you, this in his first year in MLB and his first year out of Japan and in the hot spotlight of LA media at the tender age of 23. He was instantly popular with the fans and especially with his teammates. He gets to learn from Trout and Pujols how to cope with Super Stardom.

My point? LET THE KID PLAY BALL! Let’s see what the Unicorn can do! Hell, he could have gone to the National League and have to bat when he pitches anyway! You mean he can’t get hurt that way just as easily? But here he is in the DH friendly American League in the Show Biz capital of America with a team that can’t win anything anytime soon, especially if Ohtani doesn’t play.

DH it this year...work on your timing. Come back nice and slow as a pitcher next year. Be conservative for 2020. Ease into a routine. Grow that beautiful spiral horn out of your handsome head and bring glory to your Ancestors! Then you’ll be Shohei “Shogun” Ohtani! The One and Only UNICORN!

5/QUICK FLASHES:

The Houston Astros are the best team in baseball and are trying to become the first team ever to achieve a .500 + slugging average for an entire team over an entire season.

The Yankees current savior is third baseman Gio Urshela who is hitting .353. In about 500 previous major league plate appearances he was hitting in the .220s. So it probably can’t last but I’m glad to see the kid get his day in the sun.

The Red Sox have a phenom too...Michael Chavis who has hit some balls out of sight including a truly memorable high fly that cleared the foul pole and the Monster and landed out on the Massachusetts turnpike somewhere. (Against Colorado.) He’s the Baby Beast from Georgia and he’s really saved Boston at second base while Holt and Pedroia are out. I like his aggression but he has a lot to learn.

He didn’t catch up with two 98 mph fastballs from the Astros’ Garrett Cole the other night and you could see Mike ruffle his feathers in determination to catch up with the heat on the next pitch. 90 mph slider in the dirt...swing and miss by a yard. Ooops...this lesson brought to you by Major League Baseball!

6/LOWEST ERA IN A SEASON: A CAUTIONARY TALE BROUGHT TO YOU BY WALTER JOHNSON AND BOB GIBSON

(from BASEBALL EGG...a real good website )

‘When he retired in the late 1920s, Johnson thought his 1.09 ERA in 1913 was the lowest ever recorded. It was, but the mark shouldn't have been 1.09, it should have been higher.

In the final game of the 1913 season, the Senators played a meaningless contest against the Red Sox. As was the custom of the day, the teams treated the game as a farce. A coach went into the game to catch, the manager pitched an inning, and others played out of position. Johnson started the game in center field, having recorded his 36th victory a few days earlier. But in the ninth, Johnson trotted in from center and pitched to two batters with a seven-run lead. The move was a stunt, it was designed to give the fans something to cheer about. Johnson "lobbed" his pitches to the plate and allowed a pair of singles, then he retreated to center field. A Washington D.C. newspaper reported that Johnson was "laughing and pointing to the crowd" as he delivered his pitches. A relief pitcher allowed both of the runners to score, runs that should have been charged to Johnson. But they weren't. The official scorer witnessed the mockery and didn't count the performance against Johnson in his final totals. That decision went unnoticed for decades.

In 1968, Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA in one of the greatest seasons ever by a hurler. But, his 1.12 ERA was just a smidge too high to be the lowest in history. Gibson's was second to Johnson. Or so everyone thought. About fifteen years later, a researcher came across the scoring decision from 1913 and notified the league about it. The figures were changed and Johnson's official 1913 earned run average was raised from 1.09 to 1.14, second behind Gibson.’