Friday Rewind: Plus Pennant Racin', Sept. 29

Might be a bit of a quicker version today — I spent the morning with a camera crew from Japan’s public media organization, NHK (see below!). They’re doing a show about Shohei Ohtani and also a documentary about Shohei Ohtani — the latter of which is an annual thing and grants them pretty much the only extended interview with Shohei — and so I’m getting a bit of a late start on today’s Pennant Racin’ and Friday Rewind. But I’ll throw together what I can, including any jokes I can come up with about Angel Hernandez.

Winners

Baltimore Orioles (beat the Red Sox 2-0)

Woo hoo, the Orioles not only clinched the American League East title for the first time in almost a decade, they clinched a 100-win season, their first since BEFORE Cal Ripken Jr. It was sort of a perfect Orioles’ victory — five pitchers shut out the Red Sox on three hits, and the O’s managed only four hits, but one of them was an Anthony Santander home run in the first inning off Chris Sale, and another was a Heston Kjerstad pinch-hit, RBI double, and that’s all it takes.

There’s something about the Orioles being back in the playoffs that connects deeply to my childhood, when the Orioles were ALWAYS good. It’s funny, when I was 10, 11, 12 years old, it seemed to me that there was a permanence to the world and a permanence in sports, and the Orioles would always be good, the Cowboys would always be good, the Raiders would always be good, Pittsburgh would always be the city of champions, etc. Then as you get older, you realize that nothing is permanent, and the Orioles fell into a deep hole, only to pop out their heads every now and again like they were checking the weather.

This Orioles team, though, is not only going to the playoffs, is not only a 100-win team, but they seem to have some of the attributes of those old 1970s Orioles teams. They win together. They’re not star-studded. There’s a little bit of mystery about them. It’s pretty awesome.

Toronto Blue Jays (beat the Yankees 6-0)

The Blue Jays seemed to be careening a little bit, but Chris Bassitt restored order with 7⅔ shutout innings, and three Blue Jays homered, and Toronto maintains its two-game lead over the Mariners for the last wild-card spot and a one-game lead over the Astros for the No. 2 wild-card spot. Their playoff chances are a pretty solid-looking 94.3%. That’s an A in any class you take.

Chris Bassitt, by the way, leads the league in wins now with 16 — well, he’s tied with Tampa Bay’s Zach Eflin You know the last time an American League pitcher won 20 games in a season? It was Justin Verlander, pre-pandemic. That makes three consecutive seasons (well, four, if you count the pandemic year) that no AL pitcher has won 20, and the last time that happened was never.

In fact, between the founding of the American League in 1901 and the strike season of 1981, an American League pitcher won 20 games every single season but one — that one year was 1955, when Whitey Ford, Bob Lemon and Frank Sullivan led the league with 18 victories. It was a pretty big deal then; newspaper reporters wondered what the heck was going on.

The news was especially dire in Cleveland, where the team took pride in their 20-game winners. It seemed like they always had a 20-game winner (they’d had one every year since ’45) and had TWO in 1954 and they were not ready to have a season without one. When Bob Lemon lost what would have been his 19th victory and he had only one potential start left, the papers were pretty hard on him. It felt like the end of an era.

The last Cleveland pitcher to win 20? Corey Kluber with 20 in 2018. Before that, you have to go back to 2008 and Cliff Lee. Before that? You have to go to 1974 and Gaylord Perry. So, yeah, three 20-game winners in the last 50 years for Cleveland.

The Blue Jays finish off the season against the Rays, who don’t really have anything to play for and will undoubtedly be lining up their rotation for the playoff run. Taking two of three will clinch a playoff spot. Taking one of three will PROBABLY be good enough, but who wants to risk that?

Seattle Mariners (beat the Rangers 3-2)

So, the Mariners’ hopes go on … and they can probably thank Aroldis Chapman for that. This has been SUCH a weird season for Chapman. He’s 35 now, and he’s been one of the most famous/infamous players in baseball for more than a decade. He might have thrown the hardest fastballs in baseball history. There were times when it was a joke even TRYING to hit against him. And yet, he was a key figure (not in the right ways) in the Cubs’ World Series triumph (which he almost blew) and in the Yankees’ ALCS loss to Houston (which he did blow). He became known as a postseason nightmare. More to the point, he was suspended by MLB for a domestic violence allegation that involved firearms.

Then he signed with the Kansas City Royals and, as can happen, he mercifully disappeared from view. But he did keep on going, he still throws absurdly hard — his average fastball velocity is 99.5 mph — and batters still swing and miss 42.2% of the time, and he struck out 53 batters in 29 innings without allowing a home run, and the surprising Rangers just had to have him. They traded two young players for him in June, one of those being Cole Ragans, who the Royals hope will be their ace of the future.

But Chapman, back in the spotlight, hasn’t been nearly as good (a late-August headline in the New York Post: “Aroldis Chapman imploding as pressure mounts on Rangers”). And on Thursday, with a chance to lock down a playoff spot for the Rangers, he was disastrous.

He came into the game with Texas winning 2-1 in the bottom of the ninth inning. On the second pitch of the inning, he threw a 98-mph fastball that Cal Raleigh blooped over the shortstop’s head for a single — I think Raleigh broke his bat on the hit, it certainly sounded that way.

Next up: Dylan Moore. Understand, the Mariners are playing for their playoff lives at the same time that the Rangers are playing for a champagne celebration. Moore hits the prototypical “ground ball with eyes,” that scoots past shortstop Corey Seager for another single.

It’s hard to say that Chapman did anything WRONG with those two pitches; I mean, the only thing he did wrong was that he allowed them to be put in play, and whenever that happens, the fates decide.

Up stepped Ty France, and this time Chapman took matters into his own hands, and he walked France on four pitches — and when I tell you that none of the pitches were close, well, I’m really underselling it.

Yeah, that’s Pitch 1 down by Ty France’s ankles.

So, that loaded the bases with nobody out, and then Aroldis Chapman exited the game and left it to Jonathan Hernández, who did get two outs without giving up a run, but finally, he gave up a two-run, walk-off double to J.P. Crawford, and the Mariners are alive (26.8% chance!) and the Rangers are still in need of a victory in this four-game series (or an Astros loss) to clinch a playoff berth.

Happy Friday! The Rewind is free so everyone can enjoy it. Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support.

Miggy!

He actually hit his 511th home run on Wednesday, but then the game was halted for rain, and it didn’t become official until Thursday’s completion. But it’s now in the books, 511 homers, tying him with Mel Ott, placing him one behind Ernie Banks and Eddie Mathews, what a nice neighborhood to be in.

Losers

Chicago Cubs (lost to the Braves 5-3)

Yikes, yikes, yikes, the Cubs are a half-game out of the last wild-card spot for the first time in a while — and it’s likely to become a full game once the Mets-Marlins game is completed on Monday (more on that in a minute) — and, I mean, everybody knows the Braves are good, but you simply CANNOT get swept by them with the postseason on the line.*

*I know a certain Cardinals fan friend of mine is glowing right now because his hatred for the Cubs is white-hot. I cannot say I fully approve of his unabashed and unquenchable thirst for Cubs’ pain — it makes my Yankees loathing look like nothing at all — but I must admit to getting a huge kick out of it. I feel the same way about John Elway and all his fans.

The first two Cubs losses against the Braves were gut-wrenching. Game 1, the Cubs blew a 6-0 lead with their best pitcher, Justin Steele, on the mound. Game 2, they blew leads in the ninth and 10th innings, and had to endure the apparently harsh pain of Ronald Acuña Jr. and Atlanta fans celebrating his 40-70 season.

Game 3 was much more straightforward — the Cubs did score first, but the Braves led 5-1 by the third inning, thanks to Matt Olson’s 54th homer, and Ronald Acuña Jr.’s 105th RBI from the leadoff spot. That puts him just one RBI behind Mookie Betts for the record for leadoff hitters.

The Cubs are no longer masters of their own fate. They’ve got three at Milwaukee, and even if they win out, a Marlins sweep in Pittsburgh would send the Cubbies home for the winter.

The New York Mets grounds crew

Yeah, this was a BAD series for the Mets crew. On Tuesday they had to postpone the Mets-Marlins game because SOMEBODY forgot to put the tarp on the field when Tropical Storm Ophelia’s rains came through. Steve Cohen had to apologize, and the Marlins were forced to play a probably-unnecessary doubleheader with their playoff lives on the line; it was all pretty bad.

Then came Thursday, and the Marlins came back to take the lead in the ninth when the rain started to fall. The umpires might have let them play on for a bit but were told there would be a window to resume play after a short while. The window never opened, the rain kept coming, and then about three hours later, the rain slowed enough to take off the tarp (Miami manager Skip Schumaker hilariously helped remove it) but the field was in bad shape and then the rain started up again and the game was finally called, to be completed on Monday (if necessary, I suppose).

“Without getting into the details,” Marlins GM Kim Ng said, “obviously this is an unfortunate incident.”

But the best part: The Mets grounds crew apparently did get a nice group photo in front of the Marlins dugout:

Umpire Angel Hernandez

It has been a little while since we’ve had a good Angel Hernandez dust-up … but you know, like those LiMu Emu commercials, one will eventually pop up and crush your spirits. This one, though, has a great ending, so hold on.

Our story begins when Hernandez rings up Bryce Harper on a check-swing that was nowhere near an actual swing. It would probably behoove baseball at some point to clarify the whole check-swing* thing; as of right now, there is no clear rule on what constitutes a check-swing, and inside such chaos, Angel Hernandez thrives and grows stronger.

*Is it “check-swing” or “checked- swing”? The second of those seems more right, but I keep seeing it both ways.

Anyway, third inning, Harper’s working hard against Pirates pitcher Luis Ortiz, he works the count to 3-2 and then takes ball four — he barely moved the bat off his shoulder. He begins to take off his pads to run to first when he hears the crowd start to boo. And then — much in the halted way that a child opens up a closet to see if there’s a monster inside — he looks up to see Angel Hernandez at third base. And he knows that Angel has struck again, this time by calling him out on strikes when he didn’t even come close to swinging.

“Angel in the middle of something again,” Harper would say later. “It’s every year. It’s the same story, same thing. I’m probably … going to get fined for being right. It’s the same thing over and over and over again.”

Yes, this is how so many people feel about Angel Hernandez.

But I promised a winning ending to the story — and here it is. Harper lost his mind, obviously, and he got tossed, and on his way out he threw his helmet into the stands, where, after some bouncing around, it ended up in the possession of 10-year-old Phillies fan Hayden Dorfman. The Phillies sideline reporter, Taryn Hatcher, grabbed an exclusive interview with Hayden, and it was quite delightful as he explained how just being a cute 10-year-old kid got him the helmet that would make him the envy of all his friends.

And then Taryn asked him the obvious question: “Who’s your favorite umpire right now? Is it Angel Hernandez, who kicked Bryce out?”

And Hayden simply said: “NO!”

Hey, if you feel like it, I’d love if you’d share this post with your friends!

Book Update

Mentioned this earlier, but this was another incredible week for WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL. The book made the New York Times bestseller list for the third consecutive week (crazy!). Did a bunch of interviews, with a bunch more to come. I’ve signed the book for a bunch of awesome celebrities and people I admire a lot, which is super-fun. We’re trying to put together a super-cool October event in Nashville, will fill you in on more details as they come in.

It’s all a whirlwind, I have to say, but a whirlwind in the best sorts of ways. I have had a thousand athletes say to me after achieving something special, “Yeah, I don’t think this will sink in for a while.” That’s sort of how I feel now.

I will once again tell you that my next scheduled event is in Charlotte, on Oct. 18, at Park Road Books — I’ll be in conversation with Tommy Tomlinson. I stopped in the bookstore the other day to chat with the good folks, and they told me to pass this along: “Come early if you want to get a seat.” I would probably add to that, based on the pretty huge crowds that have been at each event on the tour so far: Come early if you want to get in at all. Park Road Books is not a huge place.

Also, my publishing house, Dutton, is giving away TEN FREE COPIES of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL! All you have to do is enter here.

JoeBlogs Week in Review

Sunday: Our last MLB Must-Win Update (well, sort of).

Monday: Now it’s Pennant Racin’…. Plus Week 3 of the Browns Diary.

Tuesday: More Pennant Racin’, and a tribute to the late, great Brooks Robinson.

Wednesday: Pennant Racin’.

Thursday: More Pennant Racin’, ahead of my Substack AMA.