Welcome to Death Watch Season
We are now 70 games in to the 2024 campaign. If you're a veteran player hitting below .200, time is running short to turn it around.
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Hi, friends!
Welcome to the Free Friday newsletter. We had a lot of new (free and paid) subscribers join this week so let’s get some housekeeping out of the way:
There’s a paid subscriber chat in the Substack app every Friday beginning at 7 PM ET/4 PM PT. We talk about all the games that happen on Friday nights and chat until the final pitch is thrown. You’ll only get an email with a link to this chat if you’re on the paid list, so upgrade to paid if you want in on this!
The same goes for our baseball zoom discussions every Saturday at noon PT. You will only receive an email about it with a link if you are on the paid list. (I don’t want to clog the inboxes of free readers).
Our book club selection for May/June is “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy” by Jane Leavy. It’s $6.99 on Amazon and also available on Kindle, Audible, Spotify, etc. We will meet over zoom on Monday, July 1st at 8:30 PM ET/5:30 PM PT to discuss it.
Our New York Long Game meet-up was a success!! I’ll have a full write-up about it plus the date for our LA meet-up in the next few days.
The Long Game is a reader-supported, independent newsletter. Both free and paid versions are available. The best way to support me and my work is by taking out a paid subscription now:
I left Twitter over a year ago, and one of the ways I have dealt with the fear that I will miss out on baseball news now that I no longer doom scroll my life away is by having the MLB Trade rumors account set to alert me every time it posts.
If you aren’t familiar with MLB Trade Rumors, it’s basically the hub of all baseball news, big and small. If a legitimate journalist reports something, it will collect that information, credit the reporter, then blast it out to the world. It’s how I found out that Shohei Ohtani picked the Dodgers, Ronald Acuña Jr. tore his ACL, and that the Rockies promoted a guy hitting .194 this week. You could abandon all social media forever safe in the knowledge that allowing this magnificent website to text you every baseball thing is all you ever need to stay informed.
I slept in today, and woke up unsure what I would write about. Then the MLBTR alerts started pouring in.
It’s Friday, June 14th. Do you know where your veteran hitting .186 is?
What the Blue Jays, Rays, and Astros have in common is they’re all teams that entered this season with playoff hopes and now have to scramble to get there. The Jays are 33-35, the Rays are 32-36, and Houston is 31-38. These are not clubs that enjoy the luxury of letting struggling vets flail their way through the season’s third month in an attempt to “find it.” All automatic outs must be thrown overboard, regardless of how much guaranteed money gets flushed with them. We are officially in loss cutting season.
Abreu won the AL MVP in 2020, then turned in two more solid years with the White Sox. I’m not kidding when I say that the highlight of the past five years of South Side baseball was in not re-signing Abreu after the 2022 season. Instead, the first baseman inked a three-year deal with the Astros for $58 million. He was mediocre in 2023, posting a .680 OPS after accumulating an .860 OPS over nine seasons with the White Sox. But he became absolutely unplayable in 2024, with a .124/.167/.195 slash line and an OPS+ of 4. (If you think that’s low, just wait until we get to Chris Taylor.)
To his credit, Abreu accepted a demotion to the minors to try to solve what was ailing him. Unfortunately, Father Time and Mother Nature remain undefeated. Abreu is 37. Whatever is wrong with him probably can’t be fixed, short of someone inventing a time machine. And so, even though the Astros still owe Abreu $30 million of the $58 million they pledged to him, they decided this morning to eat that money and cut him loose. It’s unclear if any team will pick him up. (This could be a brutal end to a fine career for Abreu. However, earning $28 million to go sit on a beach for the 18 months is the best job I can think of).
Daniel Vogelbach wasn’t owed the kind of money Abreu is. He made the Blue Jays roster after receiving a minor league invitation to spring training, and signed for $2 million. Vogelbach is limited as a player as he no longer plays the field and would lose a foot race to first base to leopard tortoise. But, he has demonstrated some pop against right-handed hitters over his career, and could perhaps serve as a cost-effective lefty DH to a club that needs balance from that side of the plate. The Blue Jays were barely playing him, however, and ultimately decided that prospect Addison Barger could help the team more in 2024 than Vogelbach could. So, he’s out.
The Rays cutting Harold Ramirez seemed like a mistake to me when I saw Ramirez’s .268 batting average. MLB’s league-wide batting average is a dismal .241 right now, third-worst since 1871, and only four points better than the 1968 season, after which the league lowered the pitcher’s mound to give hitters a chance.
But while Ramirez’s batting average has been pretty good, his plate discipline and power have been awful: he drew only three walks and collected four extra base hits in 169 plate appearances. His OPS is just .589.
Ramirez did hit .300 in 2022 and .313 in 2023, though. And he’s only 29 years old. The only reason he did not get claimed on waivers earlier this week when the Rays designated him for assignment is he is still owed $2.2 million of his $3.8 million salary for this season. But now that he’s cleared waivers and is an unrestricted free agent, whoever signs him will only be responsible for the pro-rated major league minimum, which works out to about $430,000 for the remainder of the season. (The Rays will be on the hook for the rest of the $2.2 mil he’s owed). Ramirez’s cost and his age make him attractive, and I’m guessing he’ll have a job by the end of this weekend.
Veteran cuttin’ season was kicked off, of course, when the Blue Jays designated Cavan Biggio (.620 OPS) for assignment a week ago. Craig’s son was often lumped in with Toronto’s other nepo babies Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., though that probably wasn’t fair as he never had the upside of the latter two.
Anyway, the Dodgers picked him up, despite having three other players in Gavin Lux, Chris Taylor, and Enrique Hernandez who are all struggling and have a similar player profiles to Biggio. It’s safe to say this move would not have happened if Max Muncy’s oblique hadn’t exploded. Biggio is playing third base and hitting ninth. The Dodgers are using him not only as a temporary fill-in for Muncy, but also trying him out to see if he can be better than Taylor, Hernandez, or Lux, who will then become redundant when Muncy returns.
Taylor has been particularly abysmal, hitting .100/.196/.111. His OPS plus is -9, which I’m so certain is worst in the big leagues for anyone with 100 ABs that I’m not even going to bother looking it up. Taylor is five years younger than Abreu, but looks just as cooked. He’s still owed about $24 million on the $60 million contract he signed before the 2022 season.
Taylor is different than Abreu, Ramirez, Vogelbach, and Biggio, however, in what he means to his team. Only a handful of guys in major league history have hit walk-off homers with two-out in the bottom of the ninth in sudden death playoff games, as Taylor did in the 2021 wild card game vs. St. Louis.
And it’s not as if he’s Travis Ishikawa, a folk hero over one playoff homer (also against the Cardinals, sorry!) Taylor has been an anchor during the most successful decade in the history of Dodger baseball. He has an .805 OPS in 16 playoff series over the past seven years. He was named NLCS MVP in 2017, and is the third-longest tenured Dodger after Clayton Kershaw and Austin Barnes.
Corey Seager, Cody Bellinger Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy, and even Joc Pederson have received most of the headlines for Dodger offensive prowess over the past ten years. But there’s no question that the club picking up Taylor off the scrap heap and turning him into an all-star is a big reason why they’ve gone to the playoffs eleven years in a row. This man played every position on the field except pitcher, catcher, and first base over his first five seasons with the Dodgers and did so while posting an .804 OPS—endearing him to fans forever. His struggle is painful to watch. We all know what’s coming if he doesn’t start hitting. He exists on death row, and if Biggio hits, he may be gone in a fortnight.
But the Dodgers are in cruise control with a six-game lead in a weak division. They can afford to give Taylor the entire summer to fix his swing if they want to and still coast into October. They could rationalize that he’s a plus defender all over the field, a valuable base runner, and a veteran leader. Maybe he hangs on until the trade deadline when the team trades for a real shortstop and moves Mookie Betts to second base. Maybe they decide he’s more valuable than Gavin Lux, and cut or trade Lux instead.
Still, if I’m Taylor, the Abreu news hits like a freight train.
Are there any veteran players you think might be cut from your favorite teams soon? Let me know In the comments!
AROUND THE LEAGUE:
Shöta Imanaga changed the name plate at his locker to “Mike Imanaga II.” When asked why, he told reporters that Mike is the name he gives to Starbucks baristas, and the II “just sounds cool.” (Andy Martinez / Marquee Sports Network)
The Royals’ Kyle Isbel started his game winning slide yesterday from third base.
Most City Connect gear is horrible. I will be purchasing this corduroy throwback Twins cap the second it is for sale, however.
The Pirates are 1.5 games out of the wild card. It’s almost as if Paul Skenes should have started the year on the team. Cardinal fans gave him a standing ovation after his first career start at Busch this week.
Patrick Mahomes is trying to learn the knuckleball that Padres’ Matt Waldron throws.
Aaron Judge has a .690 slugging percentage. Nobody has finished with a .700 SLG in the last 20 years.
The Braves went 6-12 over the last 18 games, including dropping 6 of 8 to the Nationals. Is it time to start worrying about Atlanta? GM Alex Anthopoulos talked about the team’s tough stretch. (Mark Bowman / MLB.com)
The New York Post got some photos of Ippei Mizuhara delivering food for Uber Eats. (Jared Schwartz/ New York Post)
PHOTO(s) THE WEEK:
Reds’ fan William Hendon, 19, rushed the field and backflipped to avoid getting tased:
…..(he got tased after he stuck the landing):
That’s all for this week! If you enjoyed this newsletter, you can help me out by sharing it with your friends. <3
The Blue Jays have another struggling (and expensive) veteran in George Springer, hitting.198 with a .582 OPS
Hey Molly! Long-time fan here, thanks for putting out this newsletter. I literally paid for a subscription solely so I could comment here and let you know that, as a White Sox fan, I am familiar with one player who has 100+ ABs and a lower OPS+ than Chris Taylor's: Martín Maldonado, who is batting .078/.130/.118 with a -28 (!!!) OPS+. (I know it's boring and pedantic to storm into a comments section with a minor correction that wouldn't even be true if Maldonado had 3 fewer ABs, but I think it's very important that everyone know how bad the White Sox are at being a baseball team.)