On January 16, original Met Frank Thomas passed away. Thomas was acquired by the Mets before their inaugural season 1962 in a trade with the Milwaukee Braves. Thomas played for the Mets from 1962 until August 1964, when he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies.

As a Met, Thomas hit 52 home runs over two and two-thirds seasons, while posting a .262 batting average and driving in 173 runs. He hit 34 homers in 1962, a franchise record that stood until 1975 when Dave Kingman belted 36 round-trippers. Thomas’ 94 RBIs in 1962 were a Mets’ team record that stood until 1970.

Over his 16-year career, Thomas amassed 286 home runs, playing eight years with the Pirates, three with the Cubs, two with the Phillies, two with the Milwaukee Braves, and one each with the Reds and Astros in addition to his time with the Mets. Thomas drove in 962 runs, had a career OPS of .774, and an OPS+ of 107. He was a three-time All-Star and finished in the top ten in the National League in home runs four times.

Thomas, a native of Oakland, Pennsylvania (a Pittsburgh suburb), had an interesting path to the major leagues. After spending the first 13 years of his life in the Pittsburgh area, he and his family left for Ontario, Canada, where Thomas went to high school. After high school, he attended the seminary in Ontario for four and one-half years, where he studied to be a priest. After his seminary years, he decided to pursue a career in baseball. The Pirates signed Thomas as an amateur free agent in 1947. He debuted in 1951 and remained with the Pirates until 1958.

Thomas had a reputation for being opinionated and did not hesitate to debate matters with front offices, particularly his salary. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one instance came in 1955, when Thomas held out and took issue with only getting a $2,000 raise. Thomas wanted $10,000 more after hitting 23 home runs with 94 RBIs and a career-high average of .298, receiving 24 MVP votes along the way. From CBS Sports, Thomas once said that legendary general manager Branch Rickey treated him “like dirt on his feet.”

Thomas engaged in charitable activities after his baseball career. I was lucky enough to have him on a podcast in 2021, and he asked only that he would have a chance to mention his charities and how people could contribute to them. He raised money by signing photos and other baseball memorabilia and donated the proceeds to Camp Happy Days – Kids Kickin’ Cancer, and Courageous Kidz, a safe haven for children with cancer.

It was clear during the podcast that giving back was a big part of who Frank Thomas was as a person. This story from TrentonMonitor.com summarizes Thomas well, as a humanitarian and and man of faith.

He (Thomas) had his own Babe Ruth-like experience in the 1950s. He was told about a little boy in the hospital who would never smile. But when he poked his head in the boy’s room, his face lit up with a big smile and he exclaimed, “I know who that is. That’s Frank Thomas, my favorite ballplayer.”

Thomas gave the boy a ball autographed by the Pirates, but the youngster had a request. Would he hit a home run for him? Thomas recalled that he remembered thinking, “Dear God, can I do this?”

He told the boy that he would try. He was in the on-deck circle at the next game in Chicago when he asked, “Dear God, not for me, but for the little boy. I can’t do this unless you help me.” He went to bat and struck out.

The next time up he made the same request. On a 3-2 pitch, he connected for a home run. Thomas recalled that as he was rounding the bases he “was wondering what Stephen was thinking.” After the game, he returned to his locker to find a telegram from the boy’s mother. He had died shortly after the home run.

“That’s why I have the faith I do,” Thomas said. “God has never let me down.”

Rest in Peace, original Met, Frank Thomas.

The post Remembering Original Met Frank Thomas appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Good morning, Mets fans!

Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge hits his 60th home run of the season against Pirates pitcher Wil Crowe on Tuesday. Judge ties Babe Ruth for the second-most home runs hit in a single season for the franchise and is only one away from tying Roger Maris for the AL all-time single season record.

But alas, the New York team with the better record won on Tuesday as well. After falling behind 4-0, Pete Alonso hit a three-run homer to bring the Mets within one, then Francisco Lindor came through with a grand slam to put the Mets up 7-4. Edwin Díaz shut the door with a five-out save and the Mets came back to defeat Milwaukee 7-5, extending their winning streak to six games. For more on this win, check out our recap!

The Braves won once again as well, so the Mets’ division lead remains at one.

Latest Mets News

The St. Lucie Mets, the Mets’ Single-A affiliate, have won the Florida State League championship. Mets prospect Blake Tidwell threw five scoreless innings and fellow teammate and prospect Kevin Parada collected three hits and two RBIs.

FLORIDA STATE LEAGUE CHAMPIONS! pic.twitter.com/aE4Xdz8XrR

— St. Lucie Mets (@stluciemets) September 21, 2022

Latest MLB News

Global News reports that the Canadian government is preparing to end its COVID-19 vaccine mandate at the border. As the Toronto Blue Jays prepare to make the postseason, this means unvaccinated players can travel to and from the Canada/US border. Previously, unvaccinated players had to stay behind while teams went ahead into Toronto.

The Los Angeles Dodgers announce the passing of Maury Wills. Known for reviving base stealing as a strategy, Wills won the NL MVP in 1962 and broke the then single season stolen base record of 94, with 104 that year. He was 89.

David O’Brien of The Athletic reports that Braves pitcher Spencer Strider has left oblique soreness and will miss his next turn in the rotation.

Detroit Tigers shortstop Javier Baez is offering free, hot meals to everyone affected by Hurricane Fiona back in his homeland of Puerto Rico, as reported by TMZ from Baez’s Instagram account.

Team Great Britain defeats Team Spain 10-9 to qualify for the 2023 World Baseball Classic tournament. Great Britain went 3-0 to win the six-team Qualifier in Germany and scored a total of 32 runs over those three contest. This is the first time Great Britain has qualified for the World Baseball Classic after failed attempts in 2013 and 2017. Team Great Britain features former Phillies pitcher Vance Worley and Mariners prospect Harry Ford.

Latest on MMO

Rich Sparago reflects on the career of John Stearns.

Sam Klein highlights Ronny Mauricio, Jake Mangum and others on the latest edition of the Mets Minors Weekly Recap.

This Date in Mets History

2001: Ten days after the attacks of September 11, the Mets and Atlanta Braves play the first professional baseball game in New York City. Down 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth and a runner on, Mike Piazza takes Steve Karsay deep to center to put the Mets up 3-2 and in the process, helps the city heal and gives fans a moment they’ll never forget.

Birthdays: Antonio Bastardo (36), Joaquin Arias (37), Greg Burke (39), Scott Rice (40), D.J. Dozier (56)

The post Morning Briefing: Aaron Judge One Away From AL Home Run Record appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Even though Ron Swoboda wasn’t the best player or one that possessed a ton of tools, his name is forever revered by Mets’ fans for his contributions in bringing the first championship to Queens in 1969, after seven-straight losing seasons since the club came into existence in 1962.

What Swoboda was to many was ‘the affable everyman,’ a grinder on the field with a competitive will and drive to succeed, despite any shortcomings. What Swoboda lacked in talent, he made up for with his strong work ethic coupled with a benevolent charm.

The players who continually strive to improve and adhere to a team-first mentality are generally beloved and well-received, with Swoboda fitting that description perfectly. When an average player comes up big in the clutch, fans seem to gravitate to them even more, recognizing the height of the moment and appreciating the effort exerted on that pivotal play.

And boy, does Swoboda know something about coming up big on the grandest of stages.

Swoboda, 74, was a key member of the ’69 World Champion Mets, a team that had a 27-game improvement in the win column from their 73 victories in 1968. Their surge late in the season saw them eclipse the mighty Chicago Cubs and won the East Division by eight games.

Swoboda’s six hits in the World Series led both the Mets and Baltimore Orioles, and batted .400 with a .904 on-base plus slugging (OPS). What ‘Rocky’ is most remembered for in that Series was one of the greatest catches in Fall Classic history.

The setup was such: The Mets were up 1-0 to the O’s heading into the top of the ninth with a 2-1 lead in the Series. Tom Seaver was back on the mound looking to get three more outs to secure the complete game shutout and place the Mets one win away from a championship that the fans had clamored for.

Seaver retired centerfielder Paul Blair with a fly out to Swoboda, before back-to-back singles from Frank Robinson and Boog Powell put runners on the corners with one out in the inning.

The next batter was Brooks Robinson, the eventual winner of 16-consecutive Gold Glove Awards at third, who went to the opposite field with a hard line drive that appeared to be trouble. Racing in and to his right, Swoboda – who was not known for his defense – laid out and caught the sinking liner on his backhand, propping to his feet quickly to make a strong throw home as Robinson tagged from third to tie the game.

Swoboda could’ve taken the conservative route and played the ball in front of him, however, he recalls reading the ball of the bat extremely well and getting a swift jump in his pursuit of the ball.

At that point, he was all in.

Seaver and the Mets got out of the inning, allowing just the one run to score, and won the game in the bottom of the tenth as Rod Gaspar scored from second after Orioles reliever Pete Richert was charged with a throwing error on pinch hitter J.C. Martin’s sacrifice bunt.

One day later, the Mets would take Game Five and be crowned the champions of baseball for the 1969 season, a memory that Swoboda will never forget.

Swoboda recounts the storied ’69 season in his memoir titled Here’s the Catch: A Memoir of the Miracle Mets and More from St. Martin’s Press, released on June 11. In the book, Swoboda shares interesting anecdotes and memories from his baseball career, which started with the orange and blue.

Signed by the Mets for $35,000 in 1963, Swoboda made his major league debut with the club in 1965. In his rookie season, Swoboda hit 19 home runs – a Mets rookie record until Darryl Strawberry broke it in 1983 with 26 – drove in 50 runs and posted a 103 OPS+. His 19 homers were third-most among all rookies that season.

In total, Swoboda played nine seasons with the Mets, Expos and Yankees before transitioning into broadcasting, where he’s currently calling games for the Miami Marlins’ Triple-A affiliate, the New Orleans Baby Cakes. While he currently resides in New Orleans, the fondness and affection he holds for New York come through in the animated cadence in his voice when he recounts the years of memories he made with the Mets.

Swoboda’s book is a fun read that offers detailed insight into what it was like to navigate through the game, through good times and bad. With terrific anecdotes about some of the Mets’ all-time greats, including Casey Stengel, Gil Hodges, Tug McGraw and Tom Seaver, along with what it was like to go through laborious slumps, dealing with being lifted late in games for defensive replacements and coming through in the biggest moments, the book brings about great nostalgia for one of the most beloved teams in franchise history.

I had the privilege of speaking with Swoboda in mid-June, where we discussed his memoir, the Miracle Mets and the upcoming 50th-anniversary celebration at Citi Field at the end of this month.

MMO: Talk to me a bit about your new book Here’s the Catch. When did you decide you wanted to write a memoir, and was the 50th anniversary of the ’69 Mets a main motivator behind writing it now?

Swoboda: I had been telling these stories to friends and folks at dinners, men’s clubs and whoever would listen. I loved relating all of the stuff that I had been fortunate enough to go through as a player and just trying to put together all these little stories and entertain people.

I had a lawyer friend who told me that I needed to write this stuff down. And honestly, I didn’t feel any great compelling feeling to do that. He said to me if I didn’t write this stuff down and put it together now for the 50^th anniversary, no one will ever buy it. [Laughs.] And I went, ‘I get that; I understand that.’

A few years ago, I started writing stuff. I had a big stack of stuff I started putting together, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I had an agent, and he called me and asked how the manuscript was coming. I said, ‘How does dead in the water sound to you? I have this big pile of stuff, and I don’t know what a book looks like. I don’t know how to put it together. I need somebody to help me whittle this thing into a book form.’

He introduced me to a guy named Jamie Malanowski, who was a writer in his own right. He’s published a couple of things, but he’s also a speechwriter for Andrew Cuomo in New York, and he said, “Send me the stuff.”

He started editing, and we got it down to what looked like a decent manuscript size. He knows what a book looks like, and that’s what we handed to the agent who shopped it around, and St. Martin’s Press bought the idea.

You want it to have your voice in the way you speak and the way you tell stories. Obviously, when you’re writing, there’s a little more detail than you can pluck off the top of your head; that’s why you write it. But you want it to have that voice, that sense of excitement and humor.

I wanted people to know how I felt going through slumps, sitting on the bench and going from that to the heights. Getting a little something going, and now all of a sudden you’re in this thing and you’re producing something offensively and trying to make yourself a better outfielder at the same time.

I wanted people to feel the feelings I had when this was all happening. I hope that’s all in there because I was going for that.

MMO: What I also loved about your book is that you wrote about the environment and culture around the country at the time. You brought readers back to that era.

Swoboda: I couldn’t stress to people who’d aren’t old enough to have lived through that period of time – 1968-1969 – the culture, the war in Vietnam, Woodstock and all these great music festivals. The war and anti-war, identity politics, Stonewall Inn riots, women’s liberation movement and gay awareness.

And here comes the New York Mets! One of the least predictable things, and we were center stage there. It was an incredible time when everything seemed possible.

MMO: Where did your passion for baseball come from and what’s your earliest memory of the game?

Swoboda: I was a kid growing up in Sparrows Point, Maryland, hard by Bethlehem Steel. Bethlehem Steel was the first integrated tidewater steel plant in America, meaning it was the first time they brought iron ore in by ship from outside the continental U.S.

The iron ore came from Cuba after the Spanish-American War, and it sailed up not far from where I grew up. It sailed up and docked, and they smelted the iron down and made from the iron steel and all kinds of steel products. Bethlehem Steel employed 35,000 people at its peak when I was growing up in high school, around the clock.

Around that steel mill were all these value-added companies that made other products from their steel. It was an incredible economy and dominated our world as we were growing up. But I was a kid that never felt any destiny; I just loved baseball and practicing the game. I played all kinds of things that I could do by myself.

I’d come to New York as a kid and saw these guys playing stoop ball, and I had a set of steps in my house that I played step ball on. I threw the ball against the steps, and I played that for hours.

I’m out in the street playing these games, and I lived on a gravel road, and there was an open field that I used to saw one of my mother’s brooms, and she wondered, What the hell happened to the broom?

I’m down there hitting rocks, hitting gravel rocks into the woods, and imitating the batting stances of the Baltimore Orioles, who were our team. And spending this time alone and doing this practice because I don’t’ know why I loved it. I loved the zen of it.

I’d get lost in these little one-man games I would play, and then I eventually played on teams. You’re practicing with guys, and I had a great friend of mine who I grew up with, Larry Butts, and he and I would practice together. I always liked the practice. I loved the zen of it and getting lost in the movements. I think without that I didn’t bring any natural, extraordinary abilities to the game except for the fact that I liked to practice. I think because of that I was able to refine some things.

I played in a big amateur talent in Johnston, Pennsylvania. They had a really good tournament. I’m 18 going on 19 and two guys walk in my house, a part-time scout that I had played for earlier with the Mets and a full-time scout, and offer me $35,000 to sign with them. They sort of presented it in a give or take way. My mom and dad were making about $12,500 between them, barely getting to $13,000 with both of their salaries. And here’s a guy offering you $35K! I was going to sign, and it was simple.

MMO: Were the Mets the only team to make you an offer?

Swoboda: The only team, the Orioles never did. I was planning on going back to the University of Maryland and being a physical education major, and then this thing happened.

The big selling point from the Mets was they’re an expansion team and they’re terrible. They’re terrible now, but they’re going to get better, and the road to the big leagues will be shorter because of that.

I didn’t need anything more than that and the $35K. I never saw that kind of money! I paid off my mom and dad’s house, bought myself a car and I bought my brother a car. We shared in it because that’s what it meant to me, a chance to make the world a little better for my family, who gave me the opportunity. How could you feel any other way?

MMO: You detail a lot about Casey Stengel in the book. What was the Old Professor like to play under, and what was your relationship like with him at a young age?

Swoboda: Amazing, amazing, amazing! Look, Stengel was a legend walking around, he was a treasure. The guy could sit down with the writers around him and reel off fifty years of baseball history. He may not get your name quite right, but he knew who you were and you knew what he was talking about.

I loved to eavesdrop on these sessions that Casey had with the writers, and ‘Stengelese’ was this verbal journey he would take guys on. If he didn’t want to answer your question, he would take you on the same journey down around the primrose path, and by the time you came back, you might not remember what the question was.

There are two ways to censor: one is deprivation, you know, no comment. The other is inundation. He gave you so many words and stories that you may have forgotten your real question, which he didn’t answer. But he did in some of these verbal journeys. There were little stories, like parables, nuggets of gold about how you play and examples of how players reacted in certain situations and what you needed to know as a major league player, and I listened to that stuff. I thought I extracted some good ideas and good stories out of it.

I thought he knew I was doing that, and our relationship was excellent. He’d put me up there as a rookie in 1965, and he said, “You can’t learn how to hit these guys sitting on the bench,” in that gravelly voice.

It all started on Opening Day 1965. I’m on the bench in my uniform in Shea Stadium with 56,000 people there and the Dodgers and Don Drysdale on the mound.

Late in the game, we’re trailing – no kidding – and I hear Casey in that voice go, “Swoboda, get a bat.”

And you’re like, really? What are you going to say? No thank you; I’d rather not. No. You’re going to walk down there like you’re the king of the world and put your helmet on and walk up there and try not to pass out on the way.

Your heart is beating so fast that you’re dizzy and nervous as hell. You step in the batter’s box, and you really wonder if people can physically see you shaking. You’re trying to act like a player, and Drysdale throws you a fastball. BOOM, strike one. I’m like, I never saw it! I still haven’t seen it, but it sounded like a strike. You tell yourself that you need to get some hacks up there, and he throws you another one and you swing a couple of beats behind it and you’re 0-2.

I remember this thought occurred: The good news is that it doesn’t seem like this is going to take very long. [Laughs.] And then the next pitch is a slider, and I could actually see it. I hit it on the line to the second baseman, Jimmy Lefebvre, and I’m out.

I’m going down the first base line and made that right turn towards the dugout, but I was elated. I’m going, ‘Holy cow, I just hit a line drive off of Drysdale! You can have the out!’ The best out I ever made as a big leaguer, you know?

The next series I pinch-hit against Turk Farrell, and it was late in the game and I hit a home run. I hit that as far as any home run I ever hit. I just caught up with a fastball and banged it over the second wall in left field past the visiting bullpen. I mean, I bombed it and that was my first home run.

After the game, this shows you how naïve I was. They had a guy come up who said he had gotten the baseball and he wanted to know if I wanted it. I told him to keep it. I said, ‘Besides, I’m not sure that’s the baseball.’

The guy said, “What do you mean?”

I said, ‘If that’s the baseball, you couldn’t have gotten here that fast!’ [Laughs.]

Supposedly, Babe Ruth said that along the way, and for some reason, it came out of my mouth. We’re two Baltimore guys, you know what I mean? Two former Yankee right fielders, and there the comparison starts to break down.

MMO: Conversely, you write that your “failure to get along with Gil Hodges when I was playing for him sits like a stone in my gut.” Were there certain reasons that you believe were the cause of not being able to get along with Hodges?

Swoboda: I’ve had some time to think about it obviously, and I’ve always had a fractious relationship with authority. When it leans on me when I feel like it’s pushing on me, I don’t react well, and Hodges was an authoritarian figure.

I had a pretty good year in 1967, my third year in the big leagues. I thought I sort of knew how to operate. But Gil had the way he wanted you to play as a player and the things he wanted you to do.

When I look back on it, the problems we had were all on me and my immaturity, and it caused a little friction between us. All Gil wanted you to do was act like a grownup and be the best player that you could be and help the Mets. I couldn’t always do those things. I could do some of them but not all of the time.

I would do things that would just annoy him and I wasn’t trying to annoy him, I was just immature. And because of that our relationship didn’t grow; it was rocky and it was on me. I’m responsible for that and it annoys me to this day that I couldn’t figure out how to make it better because he was a great manager and an incredible baseball mind.

One of the things I’ve taken putting 1969 back together [for this book] was you can go online and look at all the play-by-play sheets and box scores, and you can look at the decisions Hodges made as a manager at various points in games and what he did. It was incredible. He had one of the most creative and adroit baseball minds that I’ve ever been around, and I played for Gene Mauch, reputed to be a genius and certainly a guy that knew a lot more about baseball than me. But I felt like Mauch was so brilliant that he could lose you in the complexity of his thoughts.

When Hodges did creative things, they all seemed to resolve themselves in an understandable way. And when you’re managing in the big leagues, the last thing you want to do is confuse your players, and he never did. You might not agree with it, and you might not want to get pinch-hit for, but when you look back at the rationale for the things that he did, you go, wow, that was brilliant. And he did that all the time.

He should be in the Hall of Fame, and that should be a no-brainer. The process that can’t make that happen to me is wrong.

MMO: You write how Hodges believed in platooning. which became clear early in spring training in 1969. You platooned with Art Shamsky, who you note was a better hitter for average. How difficult was it for you to play in a platoon, and did that ever affect relationships with guys on the team?

Swoboda: Sham and I always had a good relationship. I thought he was a great player. He was a great hitter and he wasn’t writing the lineup card, so we knew what the deal was. It was a strict platoon with Shamsky and me in right, and that didn’t really happen until later on when I started to produce a little bit, and made myself a little better outfielder.

We started platooning strictly in right field and you knew what the deal was down the stretch. Just like Donn Clendenon and Ed Kranepool at first base, Clendenon could’ve played against everybody, but Hodges believed that Eddie had something to offer against the right-handed pitchers, and he strictly platooned. He did it at third base with Eddie Charles and Wayne Garrett and at second base with Al Weis and Ken Boswell, so we knew what the deal was at those positions.

It never entered the relationship with the guy. Sham and I hung out, and we’re still good friends today. He’s one of the better organizers of the ’69 guys because he lives in New York, and when there are things to be done with appearances and such my phone rings. I appreciate that because he’s been a good friend over the years and will be until the end.

MMO: Heading into the ’69 season, did you have any idea that your club would be exponentially better like it turned out to be that year (73 wins in 1968 to 100 in ’69)?

Swoboda: Exponentially? No. I thought we would be better. I remember Gil Hodges told the writers in spring training that he thought we could win 85 games. I remember me and Kranepool looking at one another going, ‘Us? Is he talking about us?’

We had won 73 games the year before, so 85 wins seemed like you were putting the carrot on a really long stick. But that was Gil. If we finished .500 that year, if we had won 81 games, to me, that would’ve been a pretty good improvement. And that’s where we were until about mid-June, bubbling around .500, and thinking that we’re a little bit better but no great shakes.

The next thing you know, we’re in the middle of June, and we just reeled off an eleven-game winning streak that started against the California teams at Shea Stadium and continued to the Coast, and we vaulted into relevance. We’re looking at one another, and there were five or so one-run games that we won in that streak, and I think management, Hodges and Johnny Murphy, the GM, thought, we have to rethink this thing.

They had a chance to make a deal for Joe Torre with the Braves in spring training. The Braves wanted to get into our young pitching into maybe a Nolan Ryan or Gary Gentry and guys like that. Guys that they thought might be on the roster, and Murphy said no thank you to the deal. The Braves traded Joe Torre straight up to the Cardinals for Orlando Cepeda; they didn’t get the pitching that they were looking for.

They [Mets] started talking to Montreal because Donn Clendenon was available. Mauch wanted to trade Clendenon to the Astros for Rusty Staub – which he eventually does – but Clendenon is not going to Houston because Harry “The Hat” Walker was there and the African American players thought Harry was a racist.

Clendenon had an option; he had an offseason job with Scripto Inc. He said, “You try to trade me, and I’ll just leave baseball.”

So they had to deal with him. They told him to get in shape, play for Montreal and we’ll find a deal.

The deal was the New York Mets, and they asked him if he’d go there, and he said you bet your life! It was a 5-for-1 deal, and Clendenon came our way, and we had something we didn’t have because he had some serious power and a guy that platoons with Krane at first.

I think as we rolled out of June, we’re a better team. Our pitching started to come around, and Clendenon started showing what he could do for you, and the rest starts to become history. We got better and reeled off some pretty good winning streaks. The Cardinals fell by the wayside, the Pirates fell by the wayside, and it was us and the Cubs. I remember thinking at some point, Here we are playing better and better than I thought we could play, and we can’t catch the Cubs. I’m thinking, We arrived at something that we had never experienced before, and we’re going to end up as the pumpkin in somebody else’s Cinderella story.

The Cubs looked like they were uncatchable.

Well, the last week in August and the first week in September is when the Cubs broke and collapsed. Was it because they were more mature and Leo Durocher – who didn’t invent baseball but certainly thought he did – played the same guys? They had Ernie Banks and Billy Williams; Hall of Famers and All-Stars. They had man-for-man maybe better players, but they played the same guys, and I think they hit the wall at the end of August, and when they faltered, we blew by them and never looked back.

I think we were coming out of the weeds and people still didn’t know if they should take us seriously or not, so we had that factor. People didn’t know what to make of us, they didn’t have a handle on us until we started rolling. We didn’t have the responsibility; we weren’t carrying the baggage of expectations. We were just playing, just surfing on these amazing times. We were up on top of the wave and just rolling.

It was the easiest baseball I ever remember playing.

MMO: You write about the work you put in with Eddie Yost in ’69 where he hit you thousands of fly balls, grounders and line drives with the fungo bat. How crucial was that extra work in helping to refine your defense in the outfield?

Swoboda: A lot of people don’t understand that Shea Stadium was a hard outfield to play because the stadium stood so tall. Most fly balls and balls in the air never came out of the stadium, out of the backdrop of the fans. We always had pretty full stadiums, and the fans are moving around. It’s like a fluid background, and it changes with the atmospheric, and it’s a tougher read and background. It’s tough to play there, and a lot of people in their first exposure to Shea Stadium, outfielders especially, made mistakes on reads, and I made my share.

With Eddie Yost, we came up with this routine. He’d get about 150 feet away with his fungo bat, and he’d hit me line drives and groundballs; left, right, over my head and in front of me. I’m working on my hands and working on my footwork, but the thing you were really working on without even thinking about it was reading the ball off the bat. That read off the bat was so tough off that bad background in Shea Stadium. I started reading the ball better off the bat, and if you did it good there, you did it better everywhere else.

I became a better outfielder at a certain point in time, and platooning with Shamsky in right field, Hodges stopped putting in Rod Gaspar as a late-inning replacement. He had done so in Seaver’s almost perfect game against the Cubs. I was sitting on the bench when Jim Qualls got his base hit to break the thing up. He had put Gaspar into the field in the eighth inning, and so it was something that I felt like I was better at and didn’t want him to do. In my mind, I thought I could do better, and I accomplished that before the end of the year. I wish I had learned more about hitting.

MMO: Can you walk me through your brilliant catch in Game 4 of the 1969 World Series? What was going through your mind in that moment?

Swoboda: We’re up on the Orioles, the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles for all the right reasons. They’ve got one out in the top of the ninth, and we have a one-run lead. Frank Robinson singles, Boog Powell singles behind him, and it’s first and third and one out.

Brooks Robinson was up, and I was in a little bit, not way in, a couple of steps. I always moved back on the ball pretty well and I was comfortable with that. You wanted to be in a better position if you had the chance to catch a fly ball and throw Robinson out at home plate. I didn’t move so close that I was exposing myself to something over my head.

Robinson hits a line drive off to my right, and I’m going from the get-go. I make the best jump I could make, and from the get-go, I’m taking an angle like I’m trying to catch the damn thing. And what am I thinking? Well, Joe Pignatano, one of the coaches and a good friend of Gil Hodges, once said to me and he wasn’t joking, “Don’t think, Swoboda. You only hurt the team.”

I wasn’t thinking anything but baseball, and I took a line that I thought would get me there. And 99 percent of the way there, I wasn’t sure I was going to catch it. I was trying to intersect it, and at the last second I laid out, thinking that was the next best thing I could do. On my backhand, that ball hit me up in the webbing where I knew it was going to stay. I’m on a full head of steam and sliding through the grass and doing the roll and came up and threw home, and fortunately, I was pointed in the right direction when I came up.

Frank Robinson, a smart ballplayer, tagged up like he should’ve and scored just ahead of my throw. But we stopped what could’ve been a two-run triple, or at the very least it drives in the tying run and puts Powell on third base. It would’ve been second and third at the very least if that thing gets by me and tied with them having the chance to go ahead. With every chance also that if we don’t get to it, Powell could score from first. I always thought that Boog was going to have to wait just like Robinson to see if I caught it or not. He’s not tagged up at first, but he has to wait and stop to see what happens with me and the ball.

MMO: And I think an underrated aspect of that play was how quick you got to your feet and made a strong throw home.

Swoboda: It’s funny, with this full-bore momentum on my backhand, it was kind of balletic and for someone not normally associated with ballet in the outfield. But I did, I kind of skidded and got my feet back under me, and as I said before, fortunately I was pointed in the right direction because that was where I probably was going to throw it.

I threw it home, and it was all in a flash, and in your mind it plays back like those stop-action pictures that were taken and captured. The Daily News owns that full layout still shot. They had a big, mechanical stop-action camera that was invented after World War II to take pictures of rockets that they were trying to develop in stop-action pictures. That camera was a big, bulky thing. It’s now in the Smithsonian Institute, but it was a connection of a motor drive and a big, long lens; the thing was huge! And that was the camera that caught the still shots.

MMO: It must be a great feeling to forever be remembered for such a crucial play in the World Series.

Swoboda: For an average player, and that’s really what I’m trying to say in this book, I’m just an average guy who, like every guy who gets a chance to play in the major leagues, tries to be the best you can be, and about all I could manage was flat average. But there are great moments possible when you are reaching out.

I think I quoted Robert Browning in there, the poet, about a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. It’s true that you can, in striving, be a little bit better than you are under normal circumstances for a moment. The average takes over later on, but you can be a little better than you think you are. Everyone who is trying to do hard things should keep that in mind.

MMO: I loved the way you ended your book, with grafs from a New York Times article called “I Am Swaboda.” The article essentially is about how you resonated with fans because you weren’t a star player but you still were able to come up big and draw such fan appeal.

Swoboda: Do you remember the movie Frequency? It’s a kid, and he’s got a radio, and there’s an atmospheric disturbance, and it turns out he’s talking to his father (Dennis Quaid) on this two-way radio back in time. His father had been killed in a fire, and he’s talking to his father, and they have no idea that he’s talking back to 1969. And the father is talking about the New York Mets, and he says something to the effect of I’ll always love Ron Swoboda.

My picture is up in the movie, and I met the guy that wrote the screenplay. I asked him, ‘Why did you pick me? We had all kind of cool guys on that team.’

This guy was not even a Mets fan; he was a California guy, and he said he went into the newspaper files for that season and read my quotes and how I reacted to things that were happening in the ebb and flow of the season and said I sounded like the everyman.

And I went, wow, because that was all I was ever shooting for. That’s all I was ever after was to sound like a human who happened to be playing this game, and in my book I hoped I’ve accomplished how you felt when you were going through the ups and downs of the season and you didn’t feel like you were Willie Mays or someone great. You were just a guy trying to do what you could do and lucky to be amongst 24 other guys trying to do the same thing who lived the dream.

MMO: Obviously, the recent news about Tom Seaver’s health was disheartening and emotional for so many. Can you talk about what it was like playing behind a Seaver pitched game and the kind of competitor he was?

Swoboda: You had Tom Seaver followed by Jerry Koosman at their best, you’re not going to have too many losing streaks, period. They’re going to interrupt that. Seaver as your ace, Koosman as your warrior, and he ended up drawing the other team’s ace a lot of the time.

Seaver was number one for good reasons. When Tom showed up in the big leagues in 1967, he was Hall of Fame quality from the get-go, from day one. When they took him out of the box and put him on the mound, he was the same guy with the same confidence and the same stuff. All he needed was the time to accumulate Hall of Fame statistics, which he would do.

He was the same guy from day one.

I was talking about dementia and that Tom is fighting his way through and Bud Harrelson is experiencing the opening phases of Alzheimer’s. And I said this to somebody: those memories are treasures to me, treasure. And the thought that something insidious can sneak in there and steal them from you and they’re gone is a tragedy on the level that I have no words for. The joke on the other side of that is I don’t have any marbles to spare, and it is a frightening thing to me that it can happen to all of us. It scares the hell out of me, more than dying.

My dad passed away in April at the age of 96, and he really had his marbles and really had clarity up until the very last. I’m hoping that I’ve inherited some of his genetics. He lived it all though. We had a 96^th birthday party, and he let us celebrate him. After that, he stopped taking all of his medications and he let nature take its course, and he was gone in less than a month. I felt like he said, that’s it, that’s enough. And he left with the dignity that he deserved.

MMO: At the end of this month, you along with many of your teammates will gather for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the ’69 Championship at Citi Field. What are you most looking forward to?

Swoboda: It’s going to be a crazy, busy and wonderful time. I think some of the guys that we haven’t seen, I’ve gotten to see Art a lot, Eddie Kranepool and I have stayed in contact, but they’ll be more fellas that you don’t see, and that will be the joy for us.

There was a wonderful quote from Fred Shero when he was the head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers, and I was always a big Islanders fan, so I wasn’t a great fan of the Flyers. Going into Game 6 of one of the Stanley Cups, Shero wrote on the blackboard for his team, ‘Win today, and we walk together forever.’

That quote to me is all over the experience I’ve had with the 1969 New York Mets.

We walk together forever.

MMO: Thank you very much for your time today, Ron. It was a pleasure to speak with you about your memories and contributions to the 1969 Championship team. Enjoy the 50th celebration and best of luck with the book.

Swoboda: Thanks, man. This is going to be a wonderful celebration. Take care.

Purchase Ron Swoboda’s book here.

The post MMO Exclusive: ’69 World Series Champion, Ron Swoboda appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

With a third inning homer on Thursday for the Angels, future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols became the fifth player in Major League Baseball history to reach the 2,000 RBI milestone.

The former Cardinal joins Hank Aaron (2,297), Babe Ruth (2,214), Alex Rodriguez (2,086), and Cap Anson (2,075) in the group.

However, Elias doesn’t recognize Ruth and Anson as part of the group because RBI didn’t become an official stat until 1920.

Pujols joined the 3,000 hit club last season and is sixth on the all-time home run list with 639. The three-time MVP winner came into today hitting .207/.286/.388 this season for the Angels. He was also sitting at 99.9 career bWAR before the game on Thursday, ranked 21st all-time among position players.

The post MLB News: Albert Pujols Joins 2,000 RBI Club appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Babe Ruth has been dead for over seventy years, but he’s been haunting Jane Leavy’s mind for over two decades.

Leavy, the New York Times best-selling author whose works include heavily researched biographies on Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, had been planning to write a then-novel on the most celebrated and, by most standards, greatest Major League Baseball player of all-time back in 1995.

Due to the voluminous works that were written on Ruth, Leavy felt it necessary to go the fictional route in order to better “inhabit the caricature that he had become,” as she says. She did not want to recycle the same information that had appeared in endless pages dedicated to Ruth in years past.

Sidetracked with her aforementioned works on Koufax and Mantle, Leavy returned to her Ruth project in 2011, when she met with his daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, who is now 102-years-old. It was during a sit-down with Julia that her initial idea of writing a novel shifted.

Julia informed Leavy that Ruth’s father, George Sr., and mother, Kate, were separated, information that was not privy in previous works on Ruth.

While Leavy didn’t have the opportunity to speak with former contemporaries of Ruth, as other notable writers had, what she did have was the digitization of archived resources at her disposal. It was through a simple Google search that she further researched Julia’s claim of Ruth’s parents being separated. What she found was that not only were they separated, but George Sr. had filed for divorce from his wife after he found her in a compromising position with his bartender at the saloon he owned in Baltimore.

With reams of information at her fingertips – literally – Leavy was able to compile a profusion of information pertaining to Ruth’s childhood, which up until this point was filled with many myths and just plain falsities.

This amounted to her penning a six-hundred-plus-page biography titled “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created.” In it, Leavy dispels several decades-long myths, including the real reason Ruth was sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School for boys at the age of seven.

The book revolves around Ruth and Lou Gehrig’s 1927 barnstorming tour, after a season in which Ruth hit 60 home runs – a total that would not be exceeded until Roger Maris in 1961 – and Gehrig fresh off his first M.V.P. season. The book traces the superstars’ tour in fantastic detail while eschewing every career highlight. Instead, Leavy focuses on how Ruth transcended the game not only on the field but off it.

With the help of Christy Walsh, who pioneered the sports agent role, Ruth became a cultural phenomenon who made appearances in films, advertisements, and ghostwritten columns. With help from Walsh, Ruth ultimately became the model for the modern celebrity athlete.

Beyond the adulation Ruth was constantly met with was a man who needed the spotlight and people who loved him around. Being brought up in St. Mary’s, where they were overcrowded with young boys, Ruth knew and was used to being around large crowds, and felt at his best in those situations.

Understanding that notion, what the book does a superb job of is retracing young Ruth’s childhood in detailed form, to illustrate what made Little George – as his parents called him – into the Big Fella.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Leavy in late December, where we discussed how long she had thought about writing a book on Ruth, who Christy Walsh was and how important he was in Ruth’s life and debunking some decades-long myths.

MMO: How long had you been thinking of writing a book on Babe Ruth, and what was the process like?

Leavy: It was basically a nightmare. I’ve been thinking about it probably since 1995. That was when I took my then-seven-year-old son to the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore. At that point, the trip was for me to introduce him to the Babe, but also for me to research into what I thought would be a novel about Babe Ruth.

I somehow got sidetracked doing Sandy Koufax, and then Mickey Mantle. When they were done, where do you go? Where do you go after Koufax? You go to Mantle. Where do you go after Mantle? You go to Babe Ruth. And don’t ask me where I go next because I have no clue. [Laughs.]

MMO: I read in an interview you gave with another outlet that you took a full year just to read all the biographies already written about Ruth for your research.

Leavy: Yeah, I had to persuade myself before I could persuade anybody else that there was a new way to tell the story about Babe Ruth and a new story to tell. After [Abraham] Lincoln, Muhammad Ali and a couple of other people, he is one of the most written-about guys of the twentieth century.

He [Ruth] was written about repeatedly, and repeatedly well, starting with Bob Creamer in 1974. I had to be sure that there was something that I could add to what they had already done. I was very skeptical that I would find new material about him; my friends will tell you I was a bore for months!

There was nobody who was presently alive who I wanted to speak to who I could speak to because most of them are dead. I was able to get to some family members and to some elderly gentlemen who had seen him play. I knew that I wouldn’t have access to the teammates, opponents, managers, general managers, and Yankee officials that some of the other biographers had been able to speak with.

The only place that I was going to find stuff that was new was in archives. Those archives weren’t available in 1974, not in any way that you could easily access. As it turned out, there was plenty for me to write that was new.

Just as I didn’t have access to the living voices, Bob et al. didn’t have access to the voices that emerge out of legal documents that I was able to find at the Maryland State Archives and to newspaper articles. While they would’ve been in microfilm, you would’ve had to spend your whole life going through reams of tape in order to find what I could find with a click of the mouse.

Player’s Tribune

MMO:  I loved what you wrote in the introduction of your book about how Cal Ripken Jr. wanted to hold Ruth’s bowling ball at the Hall of Fame, so he could stick his fingers in the holes to see how wide his hand and spread were. Can you talk about that story a little bit, including what you found out about the diameter of his thumb?

Leavy: In June 2014, as a celebration of the 100^th anniversary of Ruth’s debut in the major leagues for the Boston Red Sox, the Hall of Fame opened a new Babe Ruth exhibit, which was the first new one in thirty years. I made sure to be there, and I was remembering what I had seen of him when I was a child and remembering his big red locker from Yankee Stadium standing sort of by itself, like a totem. Its doors were flung open so you could see the stenciled white letters “Ruth,” and the number three.

I get to this redone thing, which was upstairs on the second floor, and museums have changed a lot in the way they present things. It’s in a dim room with black ceilings, and Tom Shieber, the curator who is a very good friend and helped me a lot, had organized it sort of like a scrapbook if you were walking through his life.

By the time you get to the locker, it’s sort of subsumed in dark museum cabinetry, and it’s filled up with a bat of his, a picture of him sitting by the locker on his last visit to Yankee Stadium, silver loving cup that had been given to him, and all sorts of stuff. It’s become sort of an exhibit case more than an object.

While I’m standing there looking at it, I’m feeling claustrophobic on his behalf because I’m thinking, This is not big enough for the Babe. This is too dark for the Babe. He needs green grass; he needs wide expanses to gallop after fly balls.

As I’m trying to make myself stay there, Cal Ripken Jr. – who I covered as a young reporter for The Washington Post – in fact, I covered him in his rookie year, comes over to me and says, “Come here, I’ve got to show you something!”

He dragged me over to, I think, the last display cabinet where they had Babe Ruth’s blue and black paisley custom drilled bowling ball. After Babe retired in June 1935 and baseball couldn’t find anything or any place for him in the game, he spent a lot of time bowling, mainly by himself. And so this is the ball that he had used, and Cal says to me, in that very Cal way of his, “Gee, I wish I could stick my fingers in Babe’s ball.” [Laughs.]

I looked at him like, ‘Oh, come on, Cal. You realize what you just said?’

He really wanted to feel the spread of his hand. As silly as the initial statement sounded, what he was saying was, Here’s a great athlete of the late twentieth century, trying to get a grip and literally feel what was the greatness of Babe Ruth. He wanted to do that by feeling how large his hands were because he can’t get a tactile feel for the Babe any other way. So I said, ‘No problem, Cal. We can do that. I know there’s another ball downstairs.’

I went off to get Tom Shieber, and we were all set to go downstairs, but by that time, Cal had disappeared. What I did was, I got a bowling ball expert from Oneonta to come in with his bowling ball measuring tools, and he measured the distances between the thumb hole and the middle finger, the thumb hole and the pointer finger, which were ample; four inches, and the other one was about a quarter-inch shy of that.

The guy figured that the spread of his hand must’ve been about ten inches, which is plenty big but not overwhelming for big guys today. What blew him away was the diameter of the thumb hole. He measured that Babe Ruth’s knuckle on his left hand would’ve been exactly 1 3/32 inches wide; that’s approximately the size of an unshelled walnut.

If you want to know what made Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth, why he could equally handle a 54-ounce bat and make a baseball dance from the pitcher’s mound, that’s the reason.

MMO: That anecdote very early on stuck with me, especially in relation to how he could handle such a big bat for his career.

Leavy: You know what’s funny? When I started writing about Sandy Koufax back when, people would say to me, “Have you shook his hand?”

I said, ‘No, not yet.’

Well, then I did, and I’m not a big person, but my hand splayed out and sits in the palm of his hand. When he shook my hand, it reached all the way up past my elbow.

They were trying to say to me very much the same thing about Ruth. Look at what he was physiologically able to do in the way he held a ball and could make it do what he wanted to at his behest.

MMO: One of the myths you debunk in the book was the fact that young George was not an orphan or an incorrigible. Can you touch on what you found out about why he was sent to St. Mary’s?

Leavy: We live in such a different time than the one he grew up in. Today, if you have family woes and a tough growing-up story, somebody pitches it to an online magazine or a cable show, and you get sympathy votes for that. In Babe Ruth’s era, when he was coming up, this was nothing to brag about and nothing to talk about.

In the absence of fact, two colliding myths grew up. One was, why did he get sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School? Why did he spend his childhood there?

Many people assumed, and some still do, that he was an orphan because people thought St. Mary’s was an orphanage. It was not. It was a reform school that also took in some orphans, some wayward boys, and some incorrigibles, which was a legal term for boys who were sent by the courts because they had gotten in trouble with the law.

The other myth about Babe was that he was one of those incorrigibles, that he had been a roustabout kid, running amok on the waterfront of Baltimore, and that his parents had gotten a friendly justice to send him to St. Mary’s. And this is where those documents and archives we were speaking about turn up.

I went to interview Babe Ruth’s daughter, Julie -who’s still alive at age 102 – back in 2011, that’s when I started working on this. And she said to me, out of absolutely nowhere from nothing I was smart enough to ask, “Well, you know, George Sr. [Babe’s father] and his mother Katie were separated.”

I did a double-take and said, ‘No, I didn’t know that!’ And Babe Ruth certainly never said that in the thousands of interviews.

All I had to do was go to my computer and type in George Herman Ruth Sr. v. Katie Ruth, adding the legal versus, and guess what pops up? What pops up in the archives is the entire case file for not a separation, but a divorce. The reason Babe Ruth was sent to St. Mary’s was that his parent’s marriage was stormy, tempestuous and fraught with loss after loss after loss of children. By the time Babe Ruth was seven and was sent to St. Mary’s, he had seen the deaths of four siblings; two from malnutrition that I found in death certificates in the archives.

In March 1906, George Sr. found his wife in a compromising position with the bartender at George’s saloon, and he threw her out. Had she and the bartender arrested and immediately filed for divorce, which was granted two months later in May 1906. She never came back to the family home, as far as I could tell, except to pick up her clothing and the depositions in the divorce are ugly and tawdry and sad beyond belief. Once that marriage was completely dissolved, George Sr. didn’t have any time or interest in raising his son.

MMO: While your book is on Babe Ruth, another huge component of Ruth’s adult life, and who you write extensively about, is Christy Walsh. Talk about the role Walsh played in Ruth’s growing fame.

Leavy: Christy Walsh was, in fact, the model for Jerry Maguire. And while he didn’t stick out his hand and say, “Show me the money,” that’s basically what he was doing. He was the first guy to do that for a baseball player in a very systematic way.

Their relationship started in February 1921. Everybody wanted a piece of the Babe, and Christy was out of work and was fired from yet another job. [He] found out where he was staying, climbed up a fire escape, and found a window to Ruth’s hotel room open; this is according to Christy’s nephew, Richard. [He] climbed through the window, slapped him on the butt, and said, “I want to represent you.”

This resulted in a one-year deal to allow Walsh to syndicate ghostwritten byline columns under Ruth’s name. Ghostwritten columns, at that point, before radio and before pre-game shows and before reporters went down to get locker-room quotes routinely, those were the ways that a player allegedly could speak to his fans. Everybody sort of knew that they weren’t really true or real, but it didn’t really matter; people ate them up.

By the middle of the twenties, Christy Walsh – who was trained as a lawyer but never practiced – had legal rights to manage all of his money and basically saved him from himself, because absent Christy Walsh, he [Ruth] would’ve spent every cent that he had and ended up in the poor house.

MMO: Talk a bit about the relationship between Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Leavy: The book, as you know, recreates their 1927 barnstorming tour. I wanted to let readers feel what it was like to be Babe Ruth at the absolute apex of his fame. To feel what it was like to be around him. I specifically chose not to do the conventional biographical beginning, middle, end, because I had figured that had been done pretty well already.

In 1927, Lou Gehrig is what my grandmother would’ve called a pisher; he was a young guy, he was 24 and had won the Most Valuable Player Award because Babe Ruth wasn’t allowed to win it a second time; he had won it in ’23. And he was in awe of Ruth.

What comes across in the articles I was able to access through the Library of Congress and newspapers dot com and all those local stories was it was such a big deal that they came through their town. The local writers wrote the byplay between them and what the relationship was like between them. It was at that point affectionate, and it was maybe brotherly. Christy Walsh used that to promote Ruth as the wise elder, which was kind of hilarious in retrospect.

Gehrig had never been west of St. Louis, and in Ogden, Utah, where they changed trains on the route to California on this barnstorming tour, they went for a ride through the canyon. Gehrig was so naive that he was disappointed that there were no cowboys and Indians, and he said something like, “Well, it sure was an education to go around with the Babe.” [Laughs.] I bet it was!

I think the relationship was good then and not exactly equal; that would change later, will become fraught later. But at this point and time, it was quite a good relationship.

MMO: The inside cover of your book features a picture of hundreds of boys trying to cram themselves in to take a picture with Ruth after an exhibition game in 1925. Ruth looks completely unfazed, in fact, he’s smiling and looks to be genuinely enjoying the attention.

After reading your book and piecing his life together, I came away thinking that Ruth enjoyed the spotlight and adoration so much because of his tragic upbringing. Losing at least four siblings and still being placed in a reform school and having a feeling of being unwanted, did you get the sense that Ruth was at his best when he was around others?

Leavy: Yes. One thing that Julia told me, I asked her what he said about St. Mary’s, and she said, “He only said one thing ever. That he never felt full.” Which I think is a statement of actual hunger, because the Xaverian brothers had a lot of boys they had to care for, and not that much money, and they had meat once a week, and guess what? It was hot dogs. Is it any wonder that he’d gorge himself on them later?

Those kids lived head to toe in long rows of metal cots that were separated just wide enough apart that they could get down and say their prayers at night. There was nothing personal to distinguish one child’s bed or place from another. They slept together, bathed together, went through puberty together and they played baseball together.

And what Babe Ruth learned at St. Mary’s – in addition to how to make a shirt collar or how to throw a baseball and how to hit one – was how to be public. That’s what was comfortable for him. That’s where he felt most at home in his skin. What he couldn’t do, and what was so hard for him, his second wife Claire would say later, was being alone.

At the end of his career in June 1935, when baseball could find no useful place for him in the entire game and the institution that he had made and thought of as a family turned their back on him, it was a replication of the abandonment in his childhood, and I think it was excruciating for him.

MMO: After you compiled all your research and finished the book, did your perception of Ruth change for the better or worse?

Leavy: What I wanted to do when I was first going to write a novel, I wanted to write a novel because I wanted to inhabit the caricature that he had become. I thought there was no other way to do it other than fictionally. I was wrong as it turned out. I couldn’t understand or anticipate what history and the digital revolution was going to give me, so I was able to do it with actual fact instead of with gut reaction.

I came to admire him even more than I did when I started out because his parents abandoned him. Imagine how he felt; he was seven-years-old and they had lost four children and there were only two left. They may have lost six, but I could only find documentation for four, and they still didn’t want him. That’s got to feel pretty awful, and he was left at St. Mary’s to make a self and to make a life, and he did it. That it was flawed, that he didn’t know how to be a parent or a husband when he came out of St. Mary’s is hardly surprising, and he’s certainly not the only major leaguer about whom you could say that.

And he did change over time, and he was quite frustrated as I read in a 1963 story by a young guy named Jhan Robbins, who had visited him as a high school reporter in the Yankee locker room in 1934. Jhan had asked about not being asked to be the Yankees manager, which was, of course, the talk of all the tabloids and all the papers in New York. And Ruth went nuts on him! “That’s what’s wrong with all of you newspaper guys,” to a fourteen-year-old kid. “You never give a guy a chance to change. Wasn’t I good to you? Didn’t I always give you things to write about? Can’t you see that I’ve changed? Sure, I ran around in my time, but I’m different now.”

Babe Ruth learned the lesson that so many celebrities have learned since. Since he was the model for celebrity, which is if you create a persona – and he certainly colluded in the creation of the persona of the guy that ate too much, drank too much, stayed out late too much – you’re going to get trapped in it. And it’s going to be very hard for people to accept that you’re not necessarily that person anymore if you were that person ever.

MMO: Thanks very much for your time today, Jane. The book was a terrific read and I wish you all the best with it.

Leavy: Thanks so very much.

Follow Jane Leavy on Twitter, @janeleavy1

Visit Jane’s website here.

You can purchase “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” here.

The post MMO Exclusive: Jane Leavy, Author of “The Big Fella” appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Whether you loved him or hated him, there’s no denying how important and historic Daniel Murphy‘s performance in the 2015 playoffs was.

But that was then, and this is now.

It stung when Murphy signed with the Washington Nationals and proceeded to torment the Mets for two and a half seasons. And while he had his career renaissance away from New York and is a different player now than he was then, the Mets are Murphy are not a good match in free agency this winter.

Earlier this week, there have been some articles out there that have wondered if the Mets could consider re-signing Murphy this winter.

Considering that the Mets have an affinity to pursuing mid-tier, banged up and aging veterans, I wouldn’t put it past them.

But I’m here to be a voice of reason as to why New York should not bring back Murphy, even if it is from my lips to the Wilpon’s ears.

I Used to be an Adventurer Like You…Then I Took an Arrow In the Knee

This past offseason, Murphy had micro fracture surgery on his knee and was sidelined until mid-June.

While he has rebounded at the plate to hit .302/.338/.468 with 10 homers, 36 RBI, a .343 wOBA and a 113 wRC+, he has been worth just 0.5 WAR.

If you remember Murphy as the Mets second baseman, you will remember that defense wasn’t exactly one of his strengths.

That has held true this year, as he has recorded -12 DRS and a whopping -5.5 UZR across 391.1 innings at the keystone.

Someone who was bad defensively from the onset, combined with knee surgery which has surely limited range and mobility is a deadly combo. Plus, he will be turning 34 next April and is no longer in his prime.

The future for Murphy is likely with an American League team where he could DH regularly and slot in in the field occasionally, not as an everyday second baseman for a National League team.

Jeff McNeil

Infielder Jeff McNeil has held down the fort at second base practically since his midseason call up, and for good reason. He can rake.

The 26-year-old, finally healthy, zoomed through the upper two levels of the minors this season en route to Queens and has looked promising as a big leaguer as well.

In 42 games (154 plate appearances), McNeil has a triple slash of .319/.382/.464 with two homers and 13 RBI. In addition, he has a robust 135 wRC+ to complement a .365 wOBA, while being worth 1.4 fWAR.

McNeil has opened some eyes offensively, and while he isn’t a stud defensively, he’s been passable (-1 DRS, -0.1 UZR/281.0 IP).

It would be a travesty to bring Murphy in here, only to relegate McNeil to a bench or super utility role.

The infield is the least of the Mets worries, with Todd Frazier under control for one more year, Amed Rosario coming into his own, McNeil surging, Peter Alonso on the precipice and guys like T.J. Rivera and Wilmer Flores able to slot in at multiple positions.

Where the Mets must improve is in the bullpen, or to pursue an offensive bat like Manny Machado (a pipe dream, but would make Frazier expendable). Murphy doesn’t have a place on this team.

Play the Kids!

We saw what happened this year when the Mets tried to stack their team up with guys past their prime…it didn’t work.

Frazier has been pretty much what we expected, but Adrian Gonzalez was a huge flop, Jose Bautista fizzled out, Jose Reyes is…well…that’s a whole article in itself, and Jason Vargas has been overall bad.

It’s time to give the young guys a chance to play everyday.

The Mets have a good young core of talent, with McNeil, Rosario, Michael Conforto and Brandon Nimmo already in the bigs, and guys like Alonso and Andres Gimenez in the wings.

It’s bad enough that Jay Bruce is a square peg in a round hole for two more seasons, the Mets don’t need anyone else clogging up more defensive positions.

And don’t get me wrong, I liked Murphy the player when he was a Met and even before his Babe Ruth-esque postseason I went to battle for him, but that ship has sailed.

I want McNeil and I want him now.

With that being said, this has been my rant on why Murphy is a bad fit for the 2019 Mets.

fin.

The post A Mets, Daniel Murphy Reunion Shouldn’t Be in the Cards appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

On this day in Mets history, 48 years ago, Hall of Famer Tom Seaver tossed his 19-strikeout gem against the San Diego Padres and set the major league record with 10 straight strikeouts to end the game. It happened on April 22, 1970 and our own Stephen Hanks was there. Here is the article he wrote back in 2010 to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Mets history. Please enjoy…

* * * * * * * * *

There is a mantle above an unused fireplace in my home office that I’ve turned into a little shrine to my sports idol Tom Seaver. It’s nothing crazy, just a bunch of old action photos, vintage baseball cards, magazine covers, bobble head dolls, figurines depicting that classic Seaver right-knee scraping the mound motion, even an empty bottle of Tom Seaver recent vintage wine.

But among all these treasures, there is one that bears special significance today: the scorecard I recorded at Shea Stadium on April 22, 1970, the day the man I consider the greatest right-handed pitcher of all time (Roger Clemens forfeited that title the day he picked up a syringe) struck out 19 San Diego Padres, including the LAST 10 IN A ROW.

Here are both pages of my original scorecard. (click to enlarge)

It’s hard to believe it’s been 40 years since that glorious afternoon, but not hard to believe how I ended up being an eyewitness to baseball history. Tom Seaver had been my baseball hero from the day he started his first game for the Mets in 1967, although I became aware of him during his one season pitching for the Jacksonville Suns in 1966. At that point, I was a 10 1/2-year old Mets fanatic desperate for a young star and baseball role model to cling to.

I attended my first Mets’ game at the Polo Grounds in 1963, watched the entire 10-hour epic double-header, including the 23-inning second game, against the Giants in 1964, and spent my early childhood thinking my favorite team would never get out of last place. By mid-1966, my burgeoning adolescent hormones were contributing to take my Mets obsession to a fever pitch. And like all Mets fans who didn’t think the losing was cute anymore, I was hoping for a savior to finally change our fortunes.

So I started checking The Sporting News, which in those days was considered the “Bible of Baseball” and printed every major league and Triple A box score from the proceeding week, in addition to all the league stats. I started noticing there was a 21-year-old named Tom Seaver on the Jacksonville pitching staff who was actually winning as many games as he lost.

Even more impressively, he was striking out an average of eight per game, wasn’t walking a lot of guys, and had a great hits-to-innings pitched ratio. At that point, very few Mets fans knew about the bizarre circumstances that made Seaver a Met–the voiding of his contract with the Braves while he was still at USC, and the Mets subsequently being selected out of a hat in a lottery staged by Commissioner William Eckert. All I cared about was that we might finally be developing some semblance of a major league pitcher and I followed Seaver’s minor-league starts religiously throughout the summer.

Although it was clear that Seaver was the Mets’ best pitcher going into the 1967 season, he started Game 2 against the Pirates, struck out 8 in 5.1 innings and got a no-decision. By his next start, a 6-1 win over the Cubs, this hard-throwing righthander with the picture-perfect delivery was my favorite player and probably the favorite of every other Mets fan.

For me, Tom cemented his hero status on May 17, 1967. That year and until 1971, the Mets games on radio were carried on WJRZ-AM with a pre- and post-game show hosted by an intelligent and very congenial man named Bob Brown, who staged various fan contests. I sent in a bunch of postcards hoping to get selected for a call and before the game against the Braves that May night, my phone rang. It was Bob Brown offering me a chance to win a baseball glove if I could pick three Mets to get a total of four hits in the game at Fulton County Stadium. So naturally I picked the Mets’ three hottest hitters at that point–Tommy Davis, Ed Kranepool and Jerry Buchek.

Going into the ninth inning, Davis and Kranepool had combined for three hits (Buchek was shutout) but Davis came through for me with a single and I won a Bobby Shantz glove. You may think this whole story has been a digression, but the kicker is this: Tom Seaver went three for three that night, with two RBI, a walk and a stolen base. The best athlete on the team was a rookie pitcher.

Anyway, you know what happened over the next couple of years. Seaver wins 16 games in both ’67 and ’68 (with 32 complete games combined) and then leads the Mets to the promised land in 1969 with 25 victories, including the near-perfect game against the Cubs. After celebrating my team’s improbable World Championship, which I watched from my home in the South Bronx not far from Yankee Stadium, my family moved that December to the spanking new Co-Op City middle class housing project in the Northeast Bronx. Now 14, I was old enough to get a job delivering the Daily News in my 33-story building and the gig earned me about $30 to $40 a week, a fortune for a kid that age at that time. My plan for spending my new-found wealth? Go to as many games of the defending champs as possible, especially considering you could sit in the upper deck behind home plate for a buck and a half.

But I didn’t want to attend just any games. I wanted to see EVERY game Tom Seaver pitched at Shea Stadium (that wasn’t on a school night, of course) and the Mets’ five-man rotation made it pretty easy to figure out when Tom Terrific was going to be on the hill. Seaver was on a five-day cycle even when there were off days. So I knew that after opening day on April 7, Tom would pitch on the 12th, 17th and 22nd, the latter a Wednesday afternoon game I could attend because it would be the second day of Passover and public schools would be closed. I really splurged for that one and for six bucks got tickets for me and my brother in the first row of the loge (second deck) behind home plate.

After settling into our seats on a beautiful spring day (I don’t recall it being chilly), Tom proceeded to strike out two in the first inning. The way the sound of the Seaver fastball was reverberating after hitting Jerry Grote‘s mitt only confirmed it was going to a long day for the Padres. Ken Boswell‘s double off some guy named Mike Corkins drove in Bud Harrelson (who had singled), giving the Mets a first-inning lead. But the Pods’ cleanup hitter and leftfielder Al Ferrara led off the second inning with a home run to tie it (I think it scraped the back of the fence on the way down) until we got the lead back in the third on a Bud Harrelson triple that just missed going out. Given the Mets’ offense, which could disappear for innings or days at a time, I figured that run would have to hold up if Tom was to get a W. (I can’t tell you how many times during Seaver’s Mets career I sweated out a game because of lack of run support. My mother once threatened to start giving me sedatives whenever Tom pitched because I’d pace around the TV room and scream at the set imploring the Mets to score a freaking run.)

By the top of the 6th inning, Tom had yielded just one other hit and had nine strikeouts. Of course the score was still 2-1 so the ace would really have to bear down. After a popup and a fly out, Tom struck out Ferrara for his 10th K of the game. I don’t think I was aware of it at the time–and I could be corrected if I’m wrong–but by the top of the 7th, afternoon shadows were starting to creep over home plate while the sun was still shining over the rest of Shea. This would not be good for a Padres lineup that was already flailing at Seaver’s fastball, which that day looked and sounded like it was in the upper 90s–and we didn’t need a radar gun to tell us that.

At this point in the game, I was totally transfixed on the man on the hill, picking up every nuance of that motion on the mound. As a Babe Ruth League pitcher, I was already mimicking Seaver’s delivery, which was never better described than by Roger Angell in The New Yorker after Tom was traded on June 15, 1977 (still one of the worst days of my life):

“One of the images I have before me now is that of Tom Seaver pitching; the motionless assessing pause on the hill while the signal is delivered, the easy, rocking shift of weight onto the back leg, the upraised arms, and then the left shoulder coming forward as the whole body drives forward and drops suddenly downward–down so low that the right knee scrapes the sloping dirt of the mound–in an immense thrusting stride, and the right arm coming over blurrily and still flailing, even as the ball, the famous fastball, flashes across the pate, chest-high on the batter and already past his low, late swing.”

In the top of the 7th, Seaver struck out Nate Colbert, Dave Campbell and Jerry Morales, the latter two looking. While that was impressive, none of the 14,000 of us cheering madly at every strike thought it out of the ordinary for our Tom and when he led off the bottom of the 7th, he got the obligatory polite ovation.

Of course if this game had been played in 2010 instead of 1970, Gary Matthews, Jr. would have been pinch-hitting because, hey, you need to get another run and our ace might be hitting his pitch count to boot. Thankfully, Gil Hodges wouldn’t think of pulling his best arm and when Bob Barton, and pinch hitters Ramon Webster and Ivan Murrell all K’d in the 8th (the latter two swinging), there wasn’t a soul in Shea who thought we weren’t watching history, let alone believe the Padres would actually hit another pitch.

As Tom took the mound for the top of the 9th, the buzz in the park was palpable and my heart was palpitating. Van Kelly led off the ninth and when he struck out swinging for the 8th strikeout in a row, the crowd sounded more like 40,000.

With every strike that whizzed by a Padre hitter I felt as if I was being levitated out of my seat. I don’t have a pitch chart of the game (don’t know if there is one available), but it seemed as if every pitch in those last two innings were strikes and the crowd roared louder with every one. Cito Gaston struck out looking for nine in a row and 18 for the game. One more strikeout and Tom Seaver would set a new record of 10 Ks in a row and match Steve Carlton‘s 19-strikeout game (which he lost thanks to those two Ron Swoboda home runs) against us the year before.

With the entire park on it’s feet and screaming itself hoarse, Tom fittingly blew away Ferrara for the record-breaking K. By this point I was jumping up and down so wildly I almost fell over the loge railing. I carried that emotional high all the way to 7 train and for the entire trip back to the Bronx. It is still the greatest pitching performance I’ve ever seen live (and I saw a couple of Seaver one-hitters and his 300th win at Yankee Stadium). Again, the Terrific One didn’t just strike out 10 in a row, he mowed down the LAST 10 IN A ROW.

As you can see above, I dutifully saved my scorecard of that game (and I wasn’t a kid who kept score much, so I must have had a premonition) and all of my handwritten annotations (including the note about Jerry Grote setting a new putout record-20) were added that day. There is one additional scribbling on the Mets side of the scorecard.

In early 1983 I was about to launch my own magazine called NEW YORK SPORTS and the Mets gave me the best launch present I could imagine by bringing Seaver back from the Cincinnati Reds that winter. Putting my idol on the cover of my magazine’s premiere issue was a no-brainer and before spring training I hiked out to Shea with a camera crew to shoot Tom Terrific.

As I was leaving my house that morning, I thought, “Damn, I’ve got to ask Tom to sign the 19 K-game scorecard” and found it in a huge pile of Seaver memorabilia I had been collecting for years. After assuming my best professional editor’s air during the photo session (even pressuring my hero to smile once in a while), I reverted to sheepish fan mode and asked Tom to autograph the scorecard. As he turned my prized possession into even more of a collector’s item, he looked down at the card and said, “Hmmm, that was a pretty good outing.” Indeed.

There’s one more postscript. In 1996-97, I was editing a elementary school classroom newspaper and decided to do a feature on the Baseball Hall of Fame. The executives at the Hall took me to lunch at a quaint Cooperstown bistro and we spent a pleasant hour or so talking baseball history. Naturally, Tom Seaver came up in the conversation and I told my story of attending the 1970 pitching masterpiece, mentioning that I still had the scorecard. The Hall curator perked up. “Wow, would you be willing to donate that to the Hall of Fame?” he asked wide-eyed. “Well, what would I get for it,” I responded. “Well, we could give you a lifetime pass to the Hall of Fame.”

I’ve been to the Baseball Hall of Fame a few times since that lunch meeting. The scorecard still resides in my own personal Tom Seaver Museum. Happy Anniversary, Tom!

The post On This Date: Tom Seaver Fires Record-Breaking 19 Strikeout Gem! appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Major League Baseball announced Friday afternoon that they have ratified the new posting agreement between MLB and Nippon Profession Baseball beginning on Nov. 1, 2018 through Oct. 31, 2021.

MLB announced today that its Clubs have ratified the new protocol agreement w/Nippon Professional Baseball. The agreement consists of the following key terms: pic.twitter.com/FPssS4Ud0v

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) December 1, 2017

MLB also announced that Japanese star Shohei Ohtani will be posted officially today by the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters and then teams will have until Dec. 22 at 11:59 p.m. ET to sign him.

The release fee for Ohtani is set at a maximum of $20 million and he will be subject to collective bargaining agreement’s designation as an international amateur, meaning he’ll be subject to international bonus pools.

The most he can be offered is $3.53 million from the Texas Rangers. The New York Yankees have the second most money to offer him at $3.5 million and the Minnesota Twins have made recent deals to up their bonus pool money to $3.245 million. Though the Mets could still make trades to add pool money they’re currently sitting at only $105,000.

It was reported earlier today that the Yankees and Los Angeles Angels are expected to have strong interest in the one they call Japanese Babe Ruth.

Given that Ohtani could have waited two years to avoid the international amateur rules and is losing out on millions of dollars by coming to the US now it’s safe to assume his decision won’t only come down to money.

In fact, Ohtani’s agent has asked each MLB team that intends to bid on the two-way Japanese standout to say in writing why he would be a good fit for their club, the Associated Press reported.

“Balelo’s memo asks for a team to evaluate Ohtani’s talent as a pitcher and as a hitter; to explain its player development, medical training and player performance philosophies and facilities; to describe its minor league and spring training facilities; to detail resources for Ohtani’s cultural assimilation into the team’s city; to demonstrate a vision for how Ohtani could integrate into the team’s organization; and to tell Ohtani why the team is a desirable place to play.”

The 23-year-old Ohtani hit .332/.403/.540 in 65 games this season and had a 3.20 ERA in 25.1 innings. Thigh and ankle injuries limited his time on the mound in 2017.

In addition to Ohtani, MLB announced that right-handed submarine reliever Kazuhisa Makita will be posted by the Seibu Lions on or before Dec. 31. A release fee has not been set for Makita and him being 33-years-old means he’s not subject to amateur signing bonus pools and can sign for any amount.

https://youtu.be/yTjd4k798i0

Makita, posted a 2.30 ERA, 1.02 WHIP and 7.00 SO/W over 62.2 innings for the Lions in 2017. The former starter has been a reliever the past two seasons rarely allows home runs (0.4 HR/9 in career) or walks (2.0 BB/9) while throwing a fastball in the mid-80s and a nasty sweeping slider.

Makita recently signed on with agent Steve Hilliard, previously worked with Hiroki Kuroda, in his efforts to come to MLB. He says that he would likely return to Japan to play if he doesn’t receive a major league deal.

The post MLB Ratifies Posting System, Announce Ohtani Will Be Posted Today appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

The Los Angeles Angels made a trade on Thursday for veteran reliever Jim Johnson but that’s not really the key part of the deal. Along with Johnson, the Angels will receive $1.21 million in international bonus pool money from the Atlanta Braves.

Angels general manager Billy Eppler is being very open about what that money will be used for, “The money acquired in this deal was with an eye toward Shohei Ohtani and the pursuit of him as a player for us.”

The Angels now have a max amount of $1.315 million that they can offer the 23-year-old Ohtani.

Another team that’s officially jumping into the Ohtani sweepstakes are the New York Yankees after general manager Brian Cashman said Friday morning they have strong interest in the Japanese Babe Ruth.

The Yankees have the second most bonus pool money to offer Ohtani at $3.5 million, just behind the $3.53 million the Texas Rangers can offer him.

Major League Baseball is expected to finalize the posting system today after a 1 p.m. conference call and make Ohtani officially a free agent. Teams would then have until Dec. 22 to sign with a MLB team.

The San Francisco Giants front office met with representatives of National League MVP Giancarlo Stanton last night in Los Angeles. The Giants and Cardinals are seen as the front-runners for the Miami Marlins slugger and have reportedly made offers already. Stanton has a full no-trade clause.

Other MLB News and Notes

Milwaukee Brewers have avoided arbitration with catcher Stephen Vogt on a deal worth $3.05 million for the 2018 season. Vogt was projected to get $3.9 million and was seen as a possible non-tender candidate at that price point.

The Yankees have finished conducting their interviews for manager and will not do a second round. The six hopefuls are Rob Thomson, Hensley Meulens, Eric Wedge, Chris Woodward, Aaron Boone and Carlos Beltran.

The Tampa Bay Rays are expected to tender a contract to Brad Miller if they aren’t able to trade him before the deadline tonight. The Rays traded away reliever Brad Boxberger on Thursday to the Arizona Diamondbacks and could continue to be active in trade talks today.

The Baltimore Orioles signed right-handed pitcher Perci Garner to a minor league deal, he made his major league debut with the Cleveland Indians in 2016.

Left-handed reliever Rex Brothers avoided arbitration with the Atlanta Braves on a non-guaranteed $1.1 million deal for 2018 according to David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The Colorado Rockies and Seattle Mariners are showing interest in Jay Bruce according to Bob Nightengale of USA Today.

The post MLB Roundup: Yankees, Angels Are Serious Contenders for Ohtani appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Shohei Ohtani‘s agent has asked each MLB team that intends to bid on the two-way Japanese standout to say in writing why he would be a good fit for their club, the Associated Press reported Friday.

“The memo from Nez Balelo, co-head of CAA Baseball, was distributed to all 30 teams by the commissioner’s office late Friday along with materials for the Dec. 1 vote on a new posting agreement between Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball,” the release from AP said. “If the deal is approved, the 23-year-old is expected to be put up for bid later that day or the following day.

“Balelo’s memo asks for a team to evaluate Ohtani’s talent as a pitcher and as a hitter; to explain its player development, medical training and player performance philosophies and facilities; to describe its minor league and spring training facilities; to detail resources for Ohtani’s cultural assimilation into the team’s city; to demonstrate a vision for how Ohtani could integrate into the team’s organization; and to tell Ohtani why the team is a desirable place to play.”

According to Jim Allen of the Kyodo News on Twitter earlier this week, Nippon Professional Baseball is tentatively set to post Ohtani on Dec. 2, which would give teams until Dec. 23 to strike a deal with the highly coveted 23-year-old.

This comes on the heels of a tentative agreement reached between Nippon Professional Baseball, Major League Baseball and the Players’ Association on a posting system to cover this offseason as well as a three-year deal going forward, according to Joel Sherman of the New York Post.

Original report: Nov. 16, 10:58 a.m.

The Major League Baseball Players Association has set a Monday deadline to resolve the issues surrounding the new international posting system according to Jon Heyman of Fan Rag Sports.

Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball has been working with Major League Baseball over concerns that the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters would receive a $20 million posting fee while Shohei Ohtani could only max out his possible contract around $3.5 million.

Mets general manager Sandy Alderson said this on Wednesday about the possibility of acquiring the pitcher/outfielder, “I don’t think there’s a downside in looking into it. I think the only downside is creating a false set of expectations on the part of fans which I think have to be tempered.”

The Mets currently only have $105,000 left in their 2017 international signing bonus allowance but could make trades to increase that.

Of course, Ohtani isn’t going to be making his biggest money on the contract he signs and instead in likely endorsements for the player deemed the “Japanese Babe Ruth.”

The 23-year-old Ohtani hit .332/.403/.540 in 65 games this season and had a 3.20 ERA in 25.1 innings. Thigh and ankle injuries limited his time on the mound in 2017.

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