He was a Cub JP
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I'll go with Jamie Moyer he pitched a long time and gave up a lot of dingersComment -
Rick Sutcliffe?Comment -
Moyer seems like a good guess also.Comment -
He retired in the mid 70'sComment -
Fergie JenkinsComment -
Billy Hands with five.
(Half dozen other pitchers served up four)
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I got another good one.
Which KC Royal pitcher owns the single season KC record for most K's?Comment -
SaberhagenComment -
Dennis Leonard JPComment -
The Tigers are one of the teams seen to be on the rise heading into 2022, in no small part because of a cavalcade of promising rotation arms that have begun to establish themselves in the big league rotation. Casey Mize, Matt Manning, and Tarik Skubal are three of the most impactful variables that might make the difference for Detroit in 2022. The pedigree of these three are well known, and their arrival in the Majors long-anticipated. Manning was the ninth overall selection of the 2016 draft, and Mize followed two years later going first overall. Skubal was the unheralded of the three, a former ninth round pick who rose to prospect prominence prior to the 2020 season.
But in the year between the Manning and Mize selections, the Tigers spent another first-round pick on a college righty whose road to the Majors took on a more circuitous route. After leading the University of Florida to a National Championship, Alex Faedo went 18th overall to the Tigers in the 2017 draft, signing for a $3.5MM bonus, barely less than it took to sign Manning the year prior. Faedo was a high character right-hander who looked like a future rotation piece based on the strength of his slider.
The gaudy strikeout numbers that Faedo posted in college didn’t translate to pro ball, however, and after making an appearance on top-100 prospect lists prior to the start of his professional career, Faedo soon after fell from the national spotlight. His fastball lost a tick or two of velocity, his change-up never fully developed, and the slider lost just enough effectiveness to dim his prospect star. He remained among Detroit’s better looking prospects, however, with Baseball Prospectus pegging him as the 10th, 6th, and 11th-ranked prospect in the Tigers’ system prior to the 2019, 2020, and 2021 seasons, respectively.
He finished the 2019 season in Double-A having recaptured some of the swing-and-miss that had eluded him in his first couple of seasons on the farm. He made 22 starts for the Erie SeaWolves that year, posting a 3.90 ERA in 22 starts covering 115 1/3 innings with a career-best 28.3 percent strikeout rate. He was expected to compete for a rotation spot at some point in 2020 despite not having tossed an inning in Triple-A, but a bout of COVID-19 delayed his season, and then forearm soreness led to Tommy John surgery, which ended it. Faedo hasn’t pitched since that 2019 campaign, but he’s on his way back. Faedo started throwing bullpens in his recover from Tommy John on January 11th, which should put him on track for game action sometime in March, per Evan Petzold of the Detroit Free Press (via Twitter).
The lost time means the Florida native still hasn’t pitched above Double-A, and at 26 years old now, his days as a top prospect are behind him. But expect the Tigers to push him once he’s proven healthy. If he can get himself back up to speed, Faedo could absolutely become a factor somewhere on the roster for the Tigers.
Even before the injury, Faedo had yet to establish a third pitch, so it could be that he eventually makes his bones out of the bullpen. A fastball that reached 95 mph as a starter could play up out of the bullpen, and he certainly wouldn’t be the first former prospect with a slider-forward arsenal to become an impact bullpen arm. Perhaps that’s not the result the Tigers or Faedo hoped for when he was a first round pick back in 2017, but in 2022, the Tigers are going to need some farmhands to pop in unexpected places in order to make a real push for contention. If Faedo can earn his keep on the 26-man roster at some point in 2022, both team and player ought to be encouraged. That’s still a long ways off, but with his first bullpen sessions in the rearview, consider the first hurdle crossed.Comment -
From what I've heard and read the entire Gwynn family was/is multi-talented.
That gene pool runs deep.
More importantly, by all accounts the Gwynn's (all of them) are rock solid citizens too.Comment -
Tony and his brother Chris honed their skills hitting "sock balls" in the backyard. When the Gwynn brothers lost their their supply of Wiffle balls by hitting them over the neighbor’s fence, or destroying them by hitting them so hard, they replaced them with sock balls, wads of tape, or figs picked from neighbor’s trees.Comment -
Never heard of Billy Hands,lol. Lefty swings always look the best.Comment -
Now that the Niners are out of the playoffs I'm officially in baseball mode. I just hope there is baseball to look forward to but from everything I'm hearing they're making progress so hopefully we hear something soon about a deal being worked out.Comment -
The two sides are going back and forth on arbitration.
Jeff Passan, who every now and then I speak with on twitter says things are going slow.
Why am I not surprised?
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107 at bats, not once did Maddux strike out Gwynn.
.417 lifetime vs. one of the greatest pitchers of this generation or any generation for that matter.
I think you know this one.
Greg Maddux once threw a nine inning, 76 pitch complete game shutout.
It takes 76 pitches sometimes for Brad Keller to get out of an inning.
My two favorite hitting quotes
"Swing at strikes, hit the ball"
-Tony Gwynn
"If I hit a homerun, it was a mistake"
-Wade BoggsComment -
Home runs get you on sport center dude!Comment -
That's correct.
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Over the past couple weeks, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have returned to the negotiating table on core economics issues. They’ve been the first notable collective bargaining discussions since MLB instituted a lockout early on December 2. Yet fans’ hopes that talks might quickly thereafter lead to a resolution of the work stoppage that’s soon to enter its third month are unlikely to be realized.
As Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic explained this afternoon, the sides remain divided on myriad key issues. According to Rosenthal and Drellich, the possibility of Spring Training commencing as originally scheduled “is clearly in jeopardy.” Of more import to most is the threat of a delayed start to the regular season. Multiple reports over the course of the lockout have suggested March 1 could serve as a soft deadline for a new CBA to be in place if the season is to open on the currently-slated March 31. With the calendar flipping to February in a few hours, there’ll need be rapid progress over the coming month.
According to Rosenthal and Drellich, the MLBPA views the proposals thus far made by MLB as less favorable to players than were the terms of the 2016-21 CBA. That’s an ominous development. The players union entered this round of collective bargaining talks less than enamored with that CBA and in search of a few significant changes (i.e. dramatically expanded luxury tax thresholds, a path to free agency after five years of service, a $100MM cut to revenue sharing), some of which it has since stopped pursuing.
Nevertheless, it’s not particularly surprising to hear of the union’s ongoing displeasure with negotiations given some players’ public comments on the matter. For instance, Giants player representative Austin Slater told Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle last week that he considered MLB’s most recent economics proposal “disingenuous” and “a smokescreen,” although he did characterize that set of talks as more “professional” than prior meetings had been.
Unsurprisingly, The Athletic writes that MLB believes it has made player-friendly concessions. The league acquiesced to a union proposal for a salary pool to award exceptional performers who haven’t yet reached arbitration eligibility — at least in concept. Yet there’s a massive separation in the amount of money each side would like to see involved. The union proposed the creation of a $105MM pool; MLB offered to set aside $10MM. And as Rosenthal and Drellich explain, the gap is actually larger than those numbers might suggest since the parties continue to haggle about the number of players who should qualify for arbitration.
Throughout negotiations, the MLBPA has pushed for arbitration eligibility after two years of service time. The league has considered that a non-starter, preferring to keep the previous system in place. Under that setup, most players required three years of service to reach arbitration, while a certain subset of players with between two and three years — those in the top 22% of service among their class — also qualified through the Super Two provision.
The union’s proposed $105MM pool for pre-arb players, then, would only be divided among players with less than two years of MLB service, with anyone in the 2+ service bucket reaching arbitration. MLB’s $10MM counteroffer was tied to the previous arbitration setup, to be divided among players with less than three years of service (aside from Super Two qualifiers). So, not only is the union seeking a significantly larger sum than MLB was willing to offer, the PA’s vision was to divide that money among a comparatively smaller group of players than MLB has in mind. (According to Rosenthal and Drellich, MLB is also unwilling to expand the number of players in the 2-3 year service bucket who could qualify as a Super Two in addition to its steadfast opposition to universal two-year arbitration).
As MLBTR has covered in recent weeks, numerous gaps between the parties persist. MLB and the MLBPA have differing goals on such topics as playoff expansion, an international draft (which Rosenthal and Drellich write the union is unlikely to agree to “unless it is part of a significant tradeoff”), the competitive balance tax, the league minimum salary, revenue sharing and the amateur draft order. That they’ve resumed discussions of late is a welcome development, but they remain far apart on enough important topics there doesn’t appear to be an imminently forthcoming resolution. Barring rapid progress, the specter of lost gameplay seems to loom larger than ever.Comment -
Shohei Ohtani is coming off an MVP-winning season, the kind of showing Angels fans dreamed of when he chose to sign in Anaheim during his highly-publicized posting process over the 2017-18 offseason. It’s widely expected the Angels will try to work out a long-term deal with the two-way star, but those discussions didn’t get underway prior to the lockout.
Ohtani tells Sam Blum of the Athletic (via an interpreter) the team and his representatives at CAA Baseball have had “no talks yet” regarding an extension. Last October, the 27-year-old expressed openness to a long-term deal. He didn’t go into detail regarding the chances of eventually signing an extension when speaking with Blum, instead noting that he’s “in the second year of my two-year deal coming up this season” and “just trying to complete that last year of the two-year contract.”
As Ohtani noted, he signed a two-year contract last February that guaranteed him a total of $8.5MM to avoid arbitration through 2022. He’ll make $5.5MM this year and is scheduled to go through arbitration a final time before reaching free agency two seasons from now. Ohtani would be entering his age-29 season during his trip to the open market. That’s relatively young for a free agent, setting him up for a megadeal if he stays healthy and continues to perform at an elite level.
The parameters of a potential Ohtani extension are essentially impossible to predict. There are, of course, no contractual precedents for players with his skillset. Ohtani’s coming off a .257/.372/.592 showing with 46 home runs and 26 stolen bases. That overall offensive output checked in 52 percentage points above the league average by measure of wRC+, the fifth-highest mark among 135 batters with 500 or more plate appearances. While he didn’t perform particularly well in the abbreviated 2020 season, Ohtani has a wRC+ of 120 or better in his other three big league campaigns.
In addition to that middle-of-the-order offense, Ohtani has flashed at least middle-of-the-rotation upside. He’s worked 183 2/3 innings across 35 MLB starts, posting a 3.53 ERA/3.75 SIERA with a very strong 29.2% strikeout rate, albeit with an elevated 9.7% walk percentage. The majority of those frames came last season, when he put up a 3.18 ERA in 23 starts. He averaged north of 95 MPH on his fastball, backed up by an elite swing-and-miss secondary offering in his high-80s split.
Given Ohtani’s unique ability to produce at a high-end level on both sides of the ball, it stands to reason the Angels would love to keep him in the fold beyond the next couple seasons. The team does already have a pair of long-term investments in star position players on the books. Mike Trout is slated to make a bit north of $37MM annually through 2030, while Anthony Rendon will earn over $38MM per season from 2024 through 2026 under the terms of his backloaded deal. The Angels also owe Raisel Iglesias $16MM in both 2024 and 2025, while David Fletcher will make at least $14MM combined between 2024 and 2025.
Between those commitments, the Angels already have around $100MM guaranteed in the first two seasons of what are currently slated to be Ohtani’s free agent years. Anaheim set a franchise record with an outlay in the $182MM range to start last season. An Ohtani extension would probably require owner Arte Moreno to stretch his longer-term payrolls a bit further if the front office is to have the requisite payroll flexibility to supplement a Trout – Ohtani – Rendon core group.Comment -
That's pretty hard to imagine in todays game a hitter going that many at bats not striking out against a pitcher let alone a hall of famer like Maddux. Today's hitters either hit the ball 400 feet for a round tripper or they make a U turn to the dugout because they just struck out again.Comment -
If memory serves, Gwynn owned Smoltz as well.
I think one of the few guys he struggled against was Randy Johnson.
This is from memory, could be off base here.Comment
