James Earl Jones was an incredible performer in so many other ways, but there’s always going to be a little part of me that associates him with baseball because of ‘Field of Dreams’ and ‘The Sandlot.’ RIP to a legend.
Michael Busch’s robust night buoyed his season slash line about as much as a single mid-September game can, from .245/.333/.420/113 wRC+ to .252/.337/.434/118 wRC+. That’s the 8th best wRC+ among first basemen, and is just four points behind Pete Alonso, who sits in 4th. (The trio at the top – Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bryce Harper, and Freddie Freeman – are in an entirely different tier of productivity.) Just a great season for Michael Busch so far.
Fun random fact, Cody Bellinger’s slash line since April 15 very closely mirrors Busch’s line (.279/.336/.447/118 wRC+). That’s entirely arbitrary, obviously, since it’s comparing one guy’s season line to another guys line with the first couple weeks of the season chopped off. I just thought it was funny when I noticed it.
You know things are starting to really go well for a developing player when you feel like, “Hmm, he’s had a down last 10 games or so, hasn’t he?” and you’re right, but those 10 games are .294/.297/.441/100 wRC+. That’s what a bad stretch looks like for Pete Crow-Armstrong these days.
Speaking of PCA, he showed off the glove last night in tandem with Cody Bellinger, which makes for a pretty incredible outfield defense (with Gold Glover Ian Happ in left and a clip from this weekend):
The Cubs allowed Shohei Ohtani to steal base number 47 on the season, but no homers last night. So the chances he reaches 50-50 on their watch are extremely remote. Fwew. No in-game montages this year for the Cubs.
(I still can’t believe the Braves halted an extra-innings game in the middle of an inning to show a lengthy 40-70 montage for Ronald Acuña Jr. I just think about that sometimes.)
The stars have aligned such that Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s return to the Dodgers’ rotation will come against the Cubs tonight, and against Shōta Imanaga. Pretty wild how that worked out, and I’m sure it will be a heavily-followed game around the world, relatively speaking.
Bob Nightengale about the Cubs letting four scouts go:
“The scouting industry took a massive hit this week, particularly in Chicago with the White Sox dismissing veteran pro scouts Billy Scherer, Joe Siers, Bruce Benedict and Duraka Shaheed, along with special assistant Marco Paddy, who was in charge of their international scouting. On the North Side, the Cubs fired four younger scouts while slashing their budget.
The Cubs also told their scouting departme🔴nt that they no longer will scout games at any level except the complex league and Dominican Summer League.
Brutal.”
Like I said when the scouting dismissals were originally reported, without more context it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions on this report. What did the in-person scouting infrastructure look like at the higher levels of the minors before this? What exactly is being changed? Are funds actually being slashed from the budget, as Nightengale indicates, or are they being repurposed toward other projects? Are net jobs being cut, or are skills/focuses being shifted? Etc., etc.
In the abstract, no, I do not like the idea of having fewer human scouts in the organization, and if it’s true that there would LITERALLY never be human eyes at the ballpark on possible A/AA/AAA trade targets, that seems bad. But I know the video and data available at those parks to MLB teams is now extremely robust, and organizations have to evolve to be as successful as possible. If, for example, human scouting/costs were shifted more toward the lowest levels of the minors and the amateur world, would that necessarily be a bad move? That, again, is where I’d like to see more context.
… If, however, this is just a pure cost-cutting move in response to expected budget slashing from above, then, yes, I’m pretty disturbed.
I understand that a lot of what White Sox GM Chris Getz did/had to do was preordained, couldn’t have been changed in a year, and wouldn’t have staved off a terrible season. But still, when you’re the baseball boss presiding over the literal worst season in baseball history, this is a silly thing to say out loud, :
‘Chicago White Sox GM Chris Getz, on the record 125 loss pace the team is on: “If you would have told me we would end up flirting with the record, I would have been a little surprised. Now if you would have told me prior to the year we would have ended up with over 100 losses, 105/110, I would not have been as surprised. This is the cards we’ve been dealt at this point. You try and make the best of it.”’
“I built this team to lose 110 games, not 125 games! This is crazy!”
Semantic jokes are the best jokes:
I also lol’d:
