National League Hinge Guys!

Every year, we try to find fun new ways to do the Baseball Previews. Today, we go team-by-team through the National League with each team’s Hinge Guy — the one player the season hinges on.

But the focus is 16 new That Guy Was Good essays. This whole project started out as an aside; I was going to write one or two short paragraphs on one TGWG player for each team. But as has sort of become my brand, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t even stop at 15. So now, heck, this might turn into a “That Guy Was Good” book.

From Dante to Kalvoski, here we go.

National League West

Colorado Rockies – Brenton Doyle, Center Field

The Rockies have the worst combined record in baseball since 2019, and this year feels like a continuation. But what feels even more discouraging than the losses is the befuddlement. The Rockies seem to have no idea whatsoever how to win in Coors Field. The current plan seems to be building a fantastic defense and hoping that, somehow, the rest works itself out. Well, with Doyle they do indeed have a world-class center fielder. He’s an absolute wonder out there and it’s worth tuning into Rockies games every now and again in the hopes that someone hits a long fly ball to center at Coors Field. There will likely be more than a few long fly balls hit against the Rockies this year.

Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Dante Bichette

Do you remember how old you were when you first started really understanding ballpark effects — the idea that you can’t always compare numbers to numbers without taking into account the players’ home ballparks?

I think for me it was when I read Bill James’ prediction that Fred Lynn’s numbers would fall way off after he was traded from Boston to California in 1981. That prediction was famously recounted by Dan Okrent in a 1981 Sports Illustrated article.

Over the rest of his career, Lynn was a .271 hitter and every single season he hit, yes, between 18 and 25 home runs. In many ways, this was the prediction that introduced the nation to Bill James.

I knew the lesson. And yet, I could not get over the fact that Dante Bichette lost the 1995 MVP Award to Barry Larkin. I was writing for The Cincinnati Post then. I was a big fan of Larkin’s. And yet I wrote in the Cincinnati paper that the MVP probably should have gone to Dante Bichette (I’m sure that went over super well with Reds fans). I simply could not get it out of my head that while Larkin was a fantastic player, he’d hit .319 with 15 homers, 51 stolen bases and 98 runs scored.

Bichette, on the other hand, had hit .340 with 38 doubles, 40 homers, a league-leading 128 RBI and a league-leading .620 slugging percentage. Bichette was just a Tony Gwynn and Mike Piazza away from winning the Triple Crown. I simply could not make the logic add up in my head for Larkin as the MVP. And I was not alone.

“I think if they’re going to make a vote as important as the MVP,” Bichette told reporters, “they need to look into it a little more. And I don’t think they did.”

In retrospect, Greg Maddux probably should have won the 1995 MVP, and if they had to go with a player, it should have been Barry Bonds or Mike Piazza or even my favorite Red, Reggie Sanders. But the larger point is that Bichette’s bananas season really was, as the voters surmised, a figment of the Coors Light air. He hit .378 and bashed 31 of his 40 home runs at home.

That said, what else was he supposed to do? From 1993 to 1999, Bichette hit .316 and slugged .540. He twice led the league in hits. He put up a 30-30 season in 1996. These are all-time numbers. And yes, he was propped up by Coors Field. Yes, he had a 1.038 OPS at home, and his road OPS was more than 300 points lower. Yes, he was a liability in the outfield — particularly in 1999 when his minus-34 Fielding runs registered as the third-lowest total of all time at any position.*

But Dante was paid to swat, and he did swat, and you can’t blame a man for doing what he’s paid to do.

San Francisco Giants – Justin Verlander, Starting Pitcher

The Giants strike me as this year’s grilled cheese sandwich team. When you order a grilled cheese sandwich, you are limiting the possibilities. You’ll almost never get a capital-letter BAD grilled cheese sandwich. You’ll also almost never get a capital-letter GREAT grilled cheese sandwich. It will usually be just fine, and you’ll leave the table full, and you’ll go about your day. The Giants have enough good players — Logan Webb, Matt Chapman, Willy Adames, Patrick Bailey, Mike Yastrzemski — that they’ll probably win about as many as they lose. And they have enough holes that they probably lose about as many as they win. Verlander can alter that equation a bit if he’s healthy; he can be a surprising slice of bacon or splatter of Tabasco that turns the sandwich into something more exciting.

Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Chris Speier

Baseball used to have two different drafts — there was the June draft, of course, but there was also something called a January-secondary phase draft. Here were the best players taken in the January secondary phase draft:

• 1st pick: Tim Belcher, 1984

• 2nd pick: Jim Sundberg, 1973

• 3rd pick: Phil Garner, 1971

• 4th pick: Chuck Finley, 1985

• 5th pick: Rick Burleson, 1970

The thing about the secondary phase drafts is that they allowed teams to draft players who had already been drafted but hadn’t signed. There was no limit to how many times a player could be drafted. My hero, Duane Kuiper, was drafted in four different secondary drafts.

Chris Speier was drafted by Washington in the 1968 regular draft, but he decided to go to college instead. It didn’t take him long in college to figure out that he would rather be playing ball. He went up to Canada to play in a semi-pro league and a Giants scout named Herman Hannah (who later scouted and signed Bob Brenly) saw him play, liked him, and convinced the Giants to spend the second pick in the January secondary-draft on him. It’s fair to say that Speir, a Bay Area kid, was pretty psyched.

“When are they going to send somebody over to sign me?” Speier asked the reporter from The San Francisco Examiner when told the news.

For the first five years of his career, Spy looked like he would be a star. He made three straight All-Star teams from 1972-74, hit with a little power, drew quite a few walks and played an excellent shortstop. Stardom wasn’t in the cards, but he was so solid, could play so many positions, and he played the game with such professionalism and purpose that teams just kept trading for him. He ended up playing NINETEEN big-league seasons. His son, Justin, pitched in the big leagues for 12 more years. Shoeboxes in attics across America are filled with Speier baseball cards.

San Diego Padres – Jackson Merrill, Center Field

Some of you will remember the rock supergroup Asia. They came together in 1981 with the singer from King Crimson, the guitarist from Yes, the keyboardist from Yes (and the Buggles) and the drummer from Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The Padres feel a bit like Asia to me. They still have that supergroup vibe with Fernando Tatis Jr. in right and Manny Machado at third, and Xander Bogaerts at short, and Luis Arraez at first and Yu Darvish on the mound when he’s healthy. But the key to this team will be Merrill, who is still not 22 but already is the spiritual force of this team. He’s the one they will count on in the heat of the moment.

Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Chase Headley

I wonder how many times someone went up to Chase over the years and said, “It’s Headly! Headly!” like Harvey Korman in Blazing Saddles. Korman’s character’s name was Hedley Lamar and everybody called him Hedy Lamarr after the remarkable actress and inventor. I realize this was a lot of exposition for a dumb joke. But I have thought about it so many times over the years, and if I can’t share it with you, what’s even the point of having a newsletter?

Chase Headley was a solid player who had one transcendent year. In 2012, more or less out of nowhere, he hit 31 home runs (more than double the total he’d have in any other season), drove in a league-leading 115 RBI (50 more than any other season), slugged .498 (99 points above his career average) and finished fifth in the MVP voting (he never got MVP consideration in any other season, and he was never chosen for an All-Star Game). He also won the Gold Glove that season.

How does a season like that happen? It never happened for any of the players ranked most similar to him, it never happened for Charlie Hayes or Doug Rader or David Bell. He took advantage of his charmed season; two years later he signed a four-year deal with the Yankees just as they were trying to unwind their time with Alex Rodriguez.

Arizona Diamondbacks – Corbin Burnes, Starting Pitcher

Several scouts have pointed to Corbin Burnes’ declining swing-and-miss percentage — his strikeout rate has dropped four years in a row — as a serious warning sign. It could be. He is 30 now. He’s throwing more curveballs, changeups and sliders than he has in years. But here’s the thing: Burnes is a pretty smart guy. He keeps finding ways to be effective. Now he’s at the head of a pretty darned interesting rotation with Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly and Eduardo Rodriguez, I have this feeling it will work out, especially because the Diamondbacks are going to score runs. They led the National League in runs last year.

Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Jay Bell

In 1997, Jay Bell got quite angry at me. I had just started as a columnist for The Kansas City Star, and Bell had been traded to the Royals along with Jeff King for four players, including Joe Randa, who would actually come back to Kansas City a couple of years later and have a fine few years.*

The funny part of the story is that I wrote a piece on Opening Day about how Kansas City was going to fall in love with Bell.

Bell had a helluva season too — he hit .291 with a career high 21 homers, 92 RBI, .461 slugging. But as the season went along, it did become clearer and clearer that the losing was wearing him down. The Royals fired their manager. The pitching collapsed. Each day you could see it wearing Bell down until there came a point late in the year when Bell, at least to my eyes, seemed to loaf on a ground ball.

I was still a kid then, full of righteous indignation, and I wrote about how disappointing it was to see Jay Bell — who I had celebrated as the paragon of baseball’s highest virtues — simply loaf like that. He was pretty hot, apparently, hot enough to barge into the office of manager Tony Muser to complain about it.

“What did you say?” I asked Tony as he told me the story.

“I said, ‘Jay, I can’t help it that he’s got eyes.’”

It goes without saying that Bell left Kansas City not long after that. He signed with the Diamondbacks, where he upped his game into the stratosphere — he hit .289 and hammered 38 home runs. I went to see him at some point to clear the air. He’d forgotten all about it.

This provides one of my all-time favorite bits of baseball trivia: Jay Bell is the only player in baseball history — and as far as I can tell, nobody else is even close — to have 38 home runs in one season and have 38 sacrifice hits in another. Bell had 39 sacrifices in 1990 while with the Pirates.

The only other player with 38 sacrifice hits since 1930 is Bert Campaneris (40 sacrifices in 1977). Campy topped out at 22 home runs in 1970.

Los Angeles Dodgers – Rōki Sasaki, Starting Pitcher

I’m not sure the Dodgers have one hinge player; the whole vibe of this team is that they are so deep, so preposterously talented, that no one bad break can bring them down. While Mookie Betts tries to shake off a spring bug of some kind and Shohei Ohtani tries to deal with his worldwide fame and baseball fans keep remembering, “Oh yeah, they’ve got Blake Snell too now,” the player to watch is Sasaki who has the stuff and makeup and aura to be the best pitcher in baseball right now.

Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Manny Mota

It is bad that the first thing I think of with Manny Mota is that Airplane! scene?

Mota was an ageless wonder and the purest of pure hitters. He got his first at-bat in 1962, his last at-bat in 1982, and over all those years, he hit .304. Jim Murray wrote that he could get wood on a bullet.

Let’s talk about that last at-bat. In October 1979, Mota was invited to the White House to meet with President Jimmy Carter. He had just retired as a player after setting the all-time pinch-hit record of 147. He brought the record-breaking bat to present. President Carter congratulated Mota on a wonderful career, Mota asked President Carter to buy more sugar from the Dominican Republic, and then a reporter asked Mota if he would ever pinch-hit again.

“In life,” Mota said, “anything is possible.”

Mota did indeed pinch-hit seven more times in 1980, cracking three hits, including a walk-off single off the Giants’ Mike Rowland in the 12th inning. He was 42. Then he retired for real and focused all his energy on being a first base coach. But he couldn’t quite shake the hitting bug. In 1982, when he was 44, the Dodgers activated him once again.

“Poppa’s back!” Dusty Baker shouted.

He was indeed back for one more at-bat. He came into the at-bat hitting .2992 as a pinch-hitter. With a single, his pinch-hitter average would rise above .300. He was put into the game in the ninth inning of a game against the Cardinals. He was not sent up to face some hard-throwing kid. Instead, he found himself matched up against another ageless wonder, Jim Kaat. Both men were born in 1938. They had faced each other only once because Mota was strictly a National Leaguer and Kaat, until recently, had been in the American League.

The at-bat came in the bottom of the 13th inning after a wild game. With one out and a man on second, Kaat came into the game to replace Eric Rasmussen. The Dodgers countered by sending up Manny Mota to pinch-hit for Mike Scioscia. The at-bat should have felt epic. Sadly, it did not. Mota hit a routine ground ball to second base.

“That is probably the last time,” Mota said after the game. “My time has come.”

National League East

Washington Nationals – James Wood, Left Field

It isn’t like the Nationals lack players to get excited about. I mean, a fan can absolutely get pumped up to see just how good James Wood will be, to see Dylan Crews as an everyday player, to watch Jacoby Young play unparalleled center field defense, to root for starter MacKenzie Gore to take the next step and so on. The problem here is that there’s no cohesiveness and no buy-in from ownership or the team itself. Sure, they got some prospects when dealing off all the superstars from their 2019 World Series team; that’s the easy part. Building a TEAM out of those prospects, that’s where the challenge comes. Wood, in particular, flashed some star talent as a 21-year-old last season. He will be worth watching.

Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Jayson Werth

Werth did not retire that long ago — his last season was 2017 — and so he doesn’t fully fit the TGWG profile except for two things. One, he was good. He’s one of those rare players who received MVP votes in more years (four) than he was named an All-Star (just once) and I think that’s because voters took into account his leadership qualities and the respect and high regard his teammates felt for him. The walk-off home run he hit against the Cardinals in the 2012 playoffs feels like perfect Werth.

And two, even though 2017 was not that long ago, it was for the Nationals. Werth represents a moment in the team’s history when everybody was on full-tilt to win; in 2010, the Nationals gave Werth an enormous contract (for the time) because they were hungry to take that next step. Werth played a huge part in making the Nationals one of the most successful teams of the decade.

Double Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Steve Rogers (Expos Edition!)

One of my favorite facts about Steve Rogers is that everybody called him “Cy,” even though he never actually won a Cy Young Award. He certainly could have won one, especially in 1982 when he went 19-8 with a league-leading 2.40 ERA. But the voters gave it to Steve Carlton by a landslide because Lefty won 23 games and led the league in strikeouts. Starters couldn’t really win Cy Youngs in those days without winning 20 games.

Rogers never won 20. He did lose 20 once, back in 1974, and he led the league in losses again in ‘76 when he lost 17 — but he was much better than that in both of those seasons. Rogers was a ferocious sinkerballer who, more than anything, kept the ball in the ballpark. He allowed just 151 home runs in more than 2,800 innings. He has the lowest home run rate of any pitcher of the last 75 years.

Fewest home runs allowed per inning since 1950 (minimum 2,500 innings):

1. Steve Rogers, 5.3%

2. Nolan Ryan, 6.0%

3. Rick Reuschel, 6.2%

4. Kevin Brown, 6.4%

5. Tommy John, 6.4%

As such, he relied on his teammates to make the plays … which wasn’t a great strategy for an Expos pitcher in the mid-1970s. “The Expos played defence,” the Montreal Gazette wrote, “like central Europe in the Second World War.”

Nothing came easy for Rogers. He was an overthinker — as you might expect from someone with a petroleum engineering degree — and the constant knock on him was that he pitched too much with his head and not enough with his heart.

“Steve Rogers was a total disappointment as far as I was concerned,” the Expos’ ill-tempered manager Dick Williams cruelly said in the documentary “Les Expos No Amours” (The No Love Expos). Those two clashed constantly.* In 1979, when the Expos finally put together a good team, Williams complained about having to send Rogers out to pitch a key September game against Pittsburgh. When Rogers got bombed, Williams raged and a Montreal reporter wrote, “Rogers, supposedly the ace of the staff, is no more or less than a constant loser.”

As the Expos got better — and Williams moved on — Rogers put up better seasons. He’s unquestionably the greatest pitcher in Expos history. Alas, though, he’s perhaps most remembered in Montreal for giving up the Rick Monday home run that lost the 1981 National League Championship Series. Legacies are a funny thing.

Philadelphia Phillies – Trea Turner, Shortstop

The Phillies starting rotation is electric, with Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Christopher Sánchez, Jesus Luzardo … and Andrew Painter soon just a phone call away. And the Phillies offense has weapons, starting with all those Schwarber and Harper bombs. But it will not be enough for the Phillies to merely be good, not with the Dodgers and Braves and even the Mets loading up. They need an X-Factor and Trea Turner is the best candidate. So many people around baseball — me included — saw him as a perennial MVP candidate when Philadelphia gave him that 11-year, $300 million deal. He’s been solid but he hasn’t played quite at the level. The Phillies need it now.

Bonus “That Guy Was Good” — Von Hayes

In 1982, a 23-year-old Von Hayes had what most people would call a solid rookie season. He hit just .250 but banged 14 home runs, stole 32 bases and played a pretty good right field. He finished seventh in the Rookie of the Year voting behind a couple of Hall of Famers (Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs) and a handful of solid players like Kent Hrbek and Gary Gaetti.

It was a promising beginning, particularly in Cleveland, where there wasn’t much good baseball stuff happening.

Less than three months after the season ended, Von Hayes had his photograph in the Philadelphia Daily News with the cutline “Young Ted Williams?”

The world moves fast. The Phillies had wanted to trade their Gold Glove second baseman Manny Trillo, because he stubbornly wanted more money. Their general manager, Paul Owens, tried to trade Trillo to the Cubs for Leon Durham but couldn’t pull off the deal. That’s when he fell in love with Hayes. His scouts were gaga over Hayes. Future batting champ, they told him. Perfect swing, they told him.

And the name: VON HAYES! That’s a name that belongs in lights.

Owens had to have him. He offered Trillo. No. He offered Trillo and a prospect. No. He offered Trillo and a prospect and another prospect. No. The longer the back and forth went on, the more desperate Owens felt. The deal seemed to be dead multiple times but Owens could not let go.

And finally, in the end, he offered Manny Trillo, top shortstop prospect Julio Franco, 21-year-old fireballer Jay Baller, power-hitting catching prospect Jerry Willard and solid big league outfielder George Vukovich.

“To be traded for five guys,” a bewildered Hayes said. “I I don’t know what to say.”

There wasn’t anything to say. His future was cast that day. Hayes was a good player in Philadelphia. He hit .292 and stole 48 bases in 1984. He led the league in runs and doubles and finished eighth in the MVP voting in 1986. He walked 121 times in 1987. But after that deal, none of it could ever be enough for many. Pete Rose dubbed him “Five for One Hayes,” and a group of Phillies fans never stopped booing him.

“They can do whatever they want,” Hayes said of those fans. “I’ll still be eating steak every night.”

New York Mets – Juan Soto, Right Field

You’ve run into the wall!