The Opener

1. I’m not updating the blurb below about how the Arizona Diamondbacks’ situation is fascinating and fluctuating day-to-day because the broader point still stands. But, whee-ooo whee-ooo we got a trade and it seems: 🚨D-backs are sellers 🚨. They opened Trade SZN in earnest Thursday night by sending first baseman Josh Naylor to Seattle. Naylor makes a ton of contact, striking out only 12.4% of the time this year while batting .292 with 11 homers. He’s a strong, diversifying addition to the Mariners lineup who will be a free agent at season’s end. In return, Arizona gets two pitching prospects, Brandyn Garcia and Ashton Izzi, who sound like they definitely know way more about TikTok than you.
2. The Dodgers are 4-11 in their last 15 games which both not great! and also totally fine since they’re still essentially assured a spot in the postseason. Plus, even amid this semi-slide, Shohei Ohtani has homered in five-straight games. And even when the result is ambivalent, Ohtani is always unique! For instance, he gives up a home run in top half of the inning, and hits his own in the bottom.
3. There will be new Hall of Famers inducted this weekend. Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, Billy Wagner, Dick Allen and Dave Parker are being enshrined in Cooperstown. Ichiro feels distinctly momentous. He told Japanese newspapers that he is nervous for his speech … and that he is skipping a golf event for Hall of Famers to continue his daily baseball training.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I used to be really into the Google Cloud commercials that showcased Statcast data. Mostly I think they paired visuals and music in a satisfying way. But c’mon, these are fun! I’m pretty sure I told a lot of people how catchy and effective I found them to be.

I noticed them becoming more specific and sophisticated recently but hadn’t consciously clocked the creep of crediting “AI” until a couple different people pointed it out. On Bluesky, Sam Miller noted the “frivolous and misleading conclusions”. And in his newsletter, Will Leitch complains that they’re using “AI” to refer to what is “really just a calculator.” There are numbers in baseball. Those numbers have proliferated as our ability to measure more things has expanded, but there’s nothing “artificial” about using stats to get smarter about the game. This is baseball nerd erasure! And, to loop back to Sam’s point, the nerds know when the data spits out something actually substantive.

Because of my earlier affection for these commercials, I am especially irked at being made complicit in the use of silly sports spots to launder AI into the public conscious as purely additive. Like Will, I reject the implication that embracing stats in baseball is part and parcel with the AI-ification of entertainment.

AI is not inevitable. If it was, it wouldn’t need a cutesy campaign to push its omnipresence. But data can be a slippery slope. In fact, if baseball is a useful allegory for AI, one of the takeaways should be that obsessive quantification in pursuit of optimization creates a homogenized product. This is mostly a bummer in modern baseball; it’ll be a bigger problem everywhere else.

If you’ll allow me to talk about AI through baseball just a little longer I’d like to reiterate an analogy I made on social media a little while back:

I’m sure there are nuances of that comparison that could be quibbled with (I was a child during the steroid era; I don’t have an expert’s grasp of AI). But at its simplest my take is just that: We don’t have to do this. Even if AI worked perfectly (and it doesn’t!) efficacy is not a mandate. As with steroids, we can simply decide the societal damage done by widespread implementation of a particular tool is not worth any one person benefiting from it. And, in fact, that benefit is unfair as it incentivizes an arm’s race of increased usage. That would be bad, so we explicitly curtail the use.

Steroids allowed guys to hit a whole bunch of bombs. In the moment, those homers may have seemed like stunning monuments in motion. Emblems of human achievement. But they were inauthentic, and so we call the practitioners cheaters. Now, we’re living in an era where increasing swaths of society not only think themselves geniuses for knowing how to cheat, they do so wantonly. To abstain is sneer-worthy. They seem to think that a willingness to embrace the artificial is what makes them special. And that the damage done globally is merely the cost of doing business so that some people can congratulate themselves on being early adopters of a dangerous drug. They didn’t even have to hit the gym or make contact with a fastball. We can just call those people what they are: lazy frauds.

–Hannah Keyser

The Bullpen

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This is going to make me sound like an alien who is brand new to sports media, but I was surprised to find myself genuinely intrigued by a storyline heading to baseball’s upcoming trade1 deadline.

So much so that I was inspired to text multiple friends about it!

I was reacting to a recent episode of The Roundtable from The Athletic in which they discuss whether the Arizona Diamondbacks should be buyers or sellers at the trade deadline. On it’s face, that’s pretty generic mid-July baseball chatter and yet I was compelled by just how close of a call it really is right now. I know there are always teams on the bubble and obviously the results of games played between now and the end of the month will impact what those bubble teams do. But the expanded postseason and subsequent (and possibly directly resulting) widespread mediocrity in MLB has created a situation in which the majority of the league has a huge amount on the line in each game.

Literally, Zach just wrote about this and how to feel about different brackets of playoff odds. But I wanted to both shout out that episode above, which does a great job of balancing the big picture strategy stuff with the individual player specifics, and float a theory: The most important skill for a modern GM is an ability to read the room. Where is the team in their contention window and how does that fit with the league at large? Balancing the immediate with the future is good in theory but impossible to perfect in practice since that’s what most other teams are also endeavoring to do. Being able to situate those dual — and often conflicting — priorities in the current context is how you seize the moment and win championships. I think. —HK

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Sorry, remember that Ichiro link from above? Yeah OK I couldn’t let it go without highlighting: Ichiro is playing in an exhibition in August meant to grow women’s baseball in Japan. Amazing! Excellent cause.

This is almost certainly a lost in translation issue, but the story jumps from that fact to this closing quote:

As for the future of baseball, Ichiro said, "It's a sport in which humans compete against each other. I'd like to cherish human nature, passion and feelings without making it too impersonal."

I don’t know what that means really, but I’m hopeful Ichiro allows himself to speak freely in Cooperstown, like he did when he uttered the best baseball interview quote of our lifetimes. (Warning: Some language in there you might not want blaring around kids.)