The Opener

1. Major League Baseball will be using ABS (aka automated ball-strike system; aka robo umps) in the All-Star Game, employing the challenge system tested in Spring Training. Give the total lack of stakes to the competition, this is as unintriguing an implementation of challenge-system ABS as could be (which is, generally, really fascinating from a strategic and player development perspective). However, it is indicative of the league’s steady efforts to acclimate fans to what is obviously becoming a near-term inevitability. I sort of feel like this actually places more of a spotlight on the umps, who probably got this chill assignment as a reward for being really good in games that matter, and now will have their mistakes highlighted on a national stage.
2. The New York Yankees DFA’d DJ LeMahieu. He finished third in MVP voting in 2020, after which he signed a six-year extension with the team, but has been an increasingly limited defender and a below-average offensive player in four and a half seasons since. It sounds like there might have been a bit of drama with the way it ended, which is a shame for a player who was still highly respected within the clubhouse.
3. The mighty Dodgers have lost six games in a row! It’s far from the end of the world, but I’ll let friend of the ‘stack R.J. Anderson contextualize what isn’t quite working for baseball’s most luxurious club.

I’m not a natural nature person. Many of my favorite things happen to geographically align more closely with pavement than greenspace, and I know this. Beyond that, I’ve just never gotten the payoff. Hiking anywhere within a 100-mile radius of anywhere I’ve ever lived sounds like a punishment — I know the landscape, why do I need to know what it looks like while grimy and panting and watching every step to avoid injury?

Yet I’ve come to acknowledge the appeal of the outdoor world’s more extreme offerings. This week, while touring through Yellowstone and Grand Teton with my fiancée — a far more seasoned nature appreciator — I saw three bison feeding amid steaming geysers, maybe 50 yards from the road.

I saw geothermal springs, fueled by the underground rumblings of an active volcano, so harsh that they create technicolor pools and also kill everything around them. I saw the expanse of the land turn sharply upward into the jagged mountains of the Teton range.

And I get it. I’m a casual fan of nature, and I demand to be wowed. The more intent observers of nature will have richer experiences for having enjoyed the squirrels and deer on the 37th-highest peak in Vermont, but in terms of sheer awe, I’ll be right there with them.

As part of my continued grumbling about the hiking prelude to seeing cool stuff, I proposed that trails needed something beyond the easy/moderate/hard scale and distance markers. They need an Awe for Effort metric, bang for the buck when the payment is time and exhaustion.

This is, admittedly, a stupid concept useful to very few people except me. But it got me thinking about how the vast majority of fans have to parcel their baseball-watching time. If they have energy to devote to the sport, they probably put most of it into a single team, then require significant payoff to actively follow something or someone else.

A lot of this newsletter is devoted to surfacing options for that something or someone else, but let me just say that Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is making a really great case for being this season’s Awe for Effort champ. On Thursday, with a two-homer game, he became the fourth-fastest player in MLB history to reach 25 homers and 25 stolen bases in a season.

He is swinging, he is homering, he is running, he is a bison on a geyser. Nominate your Awe for Effort All-Stars or plays or teams, whatever. Maybe we’ll make a little running note of baseball’s must-see marvels.

–ZC

The Bullpen

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You’re too late to vote on the All-Star ball crew but it’s ok because the public got it right: electing Phillies bat boy Adam Crognale, who was the subject of a hype video by the team in an effort to promote his case. Apparently, the players like him so much that in 2023, they requested he come on the road with them for away games. Lucky for Zack Wheeler and Kyle Schwarber — who said of Crognale “He takes his job very seriously. He’s no-nonsense.” — now they’ll get to take him to Atlanta, as well. –HK

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Tyler Naquin, memorable as a plucky role player in the outfield for Cleveland’s excellent teams in the late 2010s, is attempting to reboot his career as a pitcher. He made his High-A debut on the mound recently, back in the Guardians system. A true career reset. —ZC

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In the last issue, I said that the Nationals fired their “general manager” Mike Rizzo. But then I noticed some places referring to him as “president of baseball operations” Mike Rizzo… while other, seemingly equally reputable places, were with me in using “GM.” This bothered me enough to try go to the Nationals’ official front office web page, which doesn’t exist??? It should be at https://www.mlb.com/nationals/team/front-office (which works for most if not all other teams) but that just takes you back to the Nats’ homepage. Now I’m really invested. So I tracked down a digital version of the 2024 Nats media guide, which confirms once and for all that he ̶i̶s̶ was the “President of Baseball Operations & General Manager.” I get that title inflation is a thing but what?! Or more accurately: why?? PoBO trumps GM. If you are a PoBO, someone else can be the GM. But whatever seniority/responsibility/salary conferred by the GM title is presumably already yours if you are the PoBO — especially if someone else isn’t the GM! Also, can we go back to how weird it is that they don’t have a publicly available baseball ops org chart? –HK