Baseball's Goal: To Go Home!

EN ROUTE HOME — Here I am in another airport at 4:30 in the morning, but this time feels different because this time, I’m going home. It has been an extraordinary two weeks chasing around the country for WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL. I’ve met so many of you. I’ve signed so many books. I’ve taken so many planes. I’m so happy-tired or tired-happy or whatever the word is.

Saturday was just another extraordinary day. Early in the day, I was in Topeka talking baseball with Bill James at the Kansas Book Festival. As always, Bill gave me about 500 things to think about and, hopefully, write about, but the thing that sticks in my mind is this: He says there has never been anything in baseball history remotely like the Los Angeles of Anaheim of California of Brian Downing Angels. He means it like this:

The Angels records:

2016: 74-88
2017: 80-82
2018: 80-82
2019: 72-90
2020: 26-34
2021: 77-85
2022: 73-89
2023: 68-81

With one more loss, the Angels will clinch their EIGHTH consecutive losing season, the longest such streak in baseball. But, of course, there have been much longer consecutive losing streaks in baseball history. What makes these Angels unique in baseball history is, of course, this:

Question: Did the Angels, in my opinion, have the best player in baseball?

2016: Yes (Mike Trout won the MVP)
2017: Yes (Trout played only 114 games, but he was still the best player)
2018: Yes (Mookie Betts had the better year, but Trout retained the overall title)
2019: Yes (Trout won the MVP)
2020: Yes (Trout was down a touch, but it was a short season, and he was still the best)
2021: Yes (Shohei Ohtani won the MVP and blew our minds)
2022: Yes (Aaron Judge had the best season, but Shohei’s was beyond imagination)
2023: Yes (Shohei will almost certainly win the MVP again)

Bill says — and I don’t see how you can argue — that this is basically impossible. You cannot have the best player in the game (or at least ARGUABLY the best player in the game) every year and also stink every year. It just can’t happen. It is unimaginable that an in-his-prime Ty Cobb or Willie Mays or Babe Ruth or Henry Aaron or Albert Pujols or Ken Griffey Jr. (much less TWO OF THEM) could play on eight consecutive losing teams.

I suppose you could argue something like that happened with Ernie Banks in the late 1950s, but it wasn’t for nearly this long, and, anyway, Banks played in the time of Mays and Aaron and Mantle, etc. He was certainly AMONG the best players — and he won two MVPs — but I’m not sure how many people would have called him the best player in baseball in that stretch. This is a case where a team has eight losing seasons, and over those eight seasons has four MVPs and two second-place MVPs and top MVP finishes in the other years and this shouldn’t happen to teams that have all-time greats.

Bill brought this up in the context of: Is this another reason to love baseball? By that he means: Do we love that baseball cannot be won by one player? If Patrick Mahomes were traded to the worst team in the NFL tomorrow, that team would instantly become considerably better and, I imagine would do some big things over the next eight years even with total mismanagement. If Nikola Jokić were traded to the worst team in the NBA tomorrow, they would become instant contenders, I imagine, and certainly would not finish below .500 for the next eight years. Connor McDavid’s Edmonton Oilers seemed to be wasting his extraordinary talents early in his career and maybe they still are, I don’t know, but they are not finishing with losing records.

We’ve talked about it plenty, of course, but I don’t know that we’ve fully appreciated just how mismanaged, how absurd, how unlucky and how doomed this Angels team has been. There now seems a pretty good chance the Angels will not have either Ohtani or Trout next year. I think that’s probably best for everyone.

Later in the day on Saturday, I went to the Royals Salute to the Negro Leagues game and threw out the first pitch to my brother Bob Kendrick.

Yes, Bob played catcher in the suit. (Photo by Adam Sachs)

The first thing everyone has asked me is: Did I bounce the pitch? I did not. Not bouncing the pitch was my only goal. I’d say it was a little bit outside, and while I don’t want to make excuses, I will, anyway, because (1) It was raining and (2) the Royals had me throw some sort of non-regulation ceremonial baseball, which was definitely too light and had terrible seams.

Also, Bob could have helped me by framing the pitch a little bit better.

I will say that as I walked off the field, Zack Greinke looked directly at me … and shook his head sadly.

Anyway, at that point I was so spent from my extraordinary journey that I couldn’t help but feel a little bit numb. So many amazing, ridiculous, wonderful things have happened the last two weeks — and they’ve happened one after another after another between plane and car rides — that I find it a little bit hard to process it all. It will be good to get home.

I want to share a funny story I heard from a friend of mine yesterday. I don’t know if he’d want me to share his name, so please excuse the slight awkwardness of the telling. But he has two young kids, including a 7-year-old son, let’s call him J, and yesterday J had two soccer games. My friend could only stay for the first because he had to get to the Royals game, so he took the older son, his wife took the younger son, and they went to the game.

When they got there, he noticed that his wife walked out of the car alone.

“Where’s J?” my friend asked.

“I thought he was with you,” his wife said.

My friend, obviously, freaked out Catherine O’Hara style, and raced home, which was like 20 or 25 minutes away. And you know what he found? J was perfectly fine and calm, playing a video game. “Oh, good, you’re back,” J said.

But here’s the best part: When my friend asked J why he was so calm, he said: “Well, when you were first gone, I was a little scared. But then I remembered that Kevin was a little bit nervous at first, but then he went to check out the stuff in his brother’s room, so I went to my brother’s room to look at his baseball cards and stuff. And then I remembered he ate some ice cream, so I ate some ice cream. And then I played video games.”

That’s right: “Home Alone” is an instructional video.

OK, so let me end this wild, two-week voyage with one final story. Every single day, multiple times every day, I tell stories about why we love baseball. Such stories are everywhere and they are every day.

On Saturday, during the Royals-Astros game, Kansas City catcher Salvador Perez had to leave the game after being struck by a foul ball. Rookie Logan Porter entered the game. His journey to the big leagues is quite the thing. He was a clubhouse attendant for the Royals’ Rookie League team in Surprise, Ariz., when he was in high school. I would guess that’s why the Royals always had a soft spot for him. He went to play baseball at Northwestern Oklahoma State (Mike Hargrove’s old school!) and then to Utah Tech (school of Brandon Lyon!) and he went undrafted throughout.

The Royals signed him anyway, and sent him to play in his hometown, where in 34 games he showed a rather striking knack for getting on base (he posted a .448 on-base percentage). So they sent him to their other rookie league team in 2019, and in 44 games he was Ted Williams, hitting .352/.481/.652 with 14 doubles and nine home runs.

He still wasn’t a prospect or anything like that, but when you have a catcher with those numbers, you let him keep on going, right? After the COVID year, they sent him to Class A, where he struggled a bit more, but still got on base pretty well, so he kept on going, and in 2022, he hit well enough to move all the way up to Class AAA, where he hit .301 with a .452 on-base in 35 games. Nice!

He struggled badly this year, alas, and it didn’t look like he ever would get the call, and it didn’t look like his career would last much longer, unless he wanted to just keep hammering his way around the minor leagues.

Then, a few days ago, the Royals found themselves in a bind when backup catcher Freddy Fermin got hurt. So the Royals called up Logan Porter. In his first game — the second game of a doubleheader against the White Sox — he got the start and got two hits and two RBIs in an 11-10 victory. Amazing!

But Saturday was even better. In the eighth inning, he came to the plate in the bottom of the eighth inning with the Royals up by three runs. It might not have seemed the most high-leverage situation to anyone else, but to Logan Porter? It was everything, obviously.

On the mound for Houston was Joel Kuhnel. Porter had faced Kuhnel when they were both in high school. And this time, Porter hit a home run, the first of his big-league career, the culmination of a 10-year journey since he worked in a Rookie League clubhouse all those years ago.

Baseball. I mean … seriously. Baseball.