Under The Knife 8/23/23
More Specials, Please
Baseball has gotten better at “special” games. The Civil Rights Game was solid and Joe Morgan was proud of that initiative, which will live on next year in slightly different form at Rickwood Field in Birmingham. The Field of Dreams Game was awesome, though Baseball was smart not to squeeze that orange too hard. Two years was about right, and doing it again in a decade would be great.
The Williamsport game - the “Little League Classic” - is one I’m mixed on. It’s great to see Baseball supporting the youth, especially to see those kids getting to be around their heroes. However, being played on a minor league field makes it feel both small and too big. It ends up looking like just another game.
Long ago, I had the idea (and I’m sure I wasn’t the first) to have some sort of RBI Classic. Go into a community, build a field or two for the kids to play on, and then have the major leaguers inaugurate it with a game. If you can build a field in a cornfield in Iowa, professional groundskeepers can build a shrinkable major league field in downtown Detroit or suburban Salt Lake.
Playing at older fields like Rickwood is nice, though the Double-A Barons have been in two stadiums since they left Rickwood! I’m sure there are other parks that could get the glow up, like Jackie Robinson Park in Daytona, or Nat Bailey Stadium in Vancouver?
I’d stay with the throwback and come up with a way to rebuild some history. The Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field are gone, but how close could you get a replica? Could we celebrate Bill Mazeroski with a re-created Forbes Field? There’s probably hundreds of ideas and places - and I’d love to hear yours in the comments - that could work, but I’ll give Baseball points for trying. But as per usual, they could do more, and better.
(The White Sox front office firings haven’t escaped me, but I’ll address those on Friday to get some perspective. Good people lost their jobs and it bears thinking about how the Sox will fill in those gaps after two decades of consistency.)
So let’s get to the injuries:
JOE MUSGROVE, SP SDP (strained shoulder)
As pivotal as Shohei Ohtani’s free agency is going to be to Baseball this off-season, I’m just as intrigued by the Mets and the Padres. Both teams spent big and got little in return for it. Steve Cohen and Peter Seidler are still rich, still competitive, and went about the deadline in different ways, so I’m curious how each will approach the off-season. Was Cohen a single-season Steinbrenner? Will Seidler trust the process?
Part of both situations was - you guessed it - injury. Injuries cost both of these teams significantly and while it doesn’t explain all of the underperformance, it’s a big part of it. Joe Musgrove is one of those, though he certainly didn’t underperform before hitting the IL with a shoulder capsule injury. The hope is that they caught it soon enough to prevent serious, long term issue, and the fact that he’s back throwing about three weeks from the diagnosis is a positive. The team is going to be very cautious with him, but even if he doesn’t make it back this season, the hope is he helps in ‘24 and beyond.
Add in that the Padres have some big players on the horizon. Ethan Salas was promoted to Double-A at 17 and scouts look at him like I look at a brisket. Dylan Lesko is back from Tommy John and looking like a smart pick. Jackson Merrill’s not far away from forcing a decision on his future position. Keep these and what they have healthy and the team fans thought they’d get in 2023 might show up by 2025. “Wait and see” isn’t as satisfying as “win now”, but sometimes, it works out.
MIKE TROUT, OF LAA (fractured wrist)