The Yankees reportedly got good news this afternoon, with Juan Soto’s ominous “forearm discomfort”—too often an injury which foreshadows Tommy John surgery—found to merely be inflammation upon examination via MRI. Soto isn’t in the starting lineup for tonight’s game against the Dodgers, a clash between baseball’s biggest (if not quite best) teams, but the current indication is that Juan Soto was fine.
Thank God.
A common complaint these days is that baseball needs bigger stars. Is it fair? Let’s look at two lists. Here are the ten best players, by fWAR, from 1990 through 1999:
- Barry Bonds
- Greg Maddux
- Ken Griffey Jr.
- Roger Clemens
- Jeff Bagwell
- Randy Johnson
- Frank Thomas
- Kevin Brown
- Craig Biggio
- Barry Larkin
Here’s the same list since the start of 2014:
- Mike Trout
- Mookie Betts
- Jose Altuve
- Freddie Freeman
- Max Scherzer
- Francisco Lindor
- José Ramírez
- Nolan Arenado
- Paul Goldschmidt
- Clayton Kershaw
Were Bonds, Maddux, Griffey, and Clemens bigger stars than Trout, Betts, Altuve, and Freeman? Yes. Was Johnson a bigger star than Scherzer? Yes. Was Thomas a bigger star than José Ramírez? Yes. And while a myriad of factors influence this—native tongue, playoff success, steroids—one which deserves more focus is injuries.
Of that 1990’s list, only Barry Larkin missed significant time in more than one season over the relevant decade, while three of the ten never missed significant time and a fourth—Griffey—returned from his half-season absence to score the most storied run in the history of Seattle baseball. The modern list? Five of the ten players have missed significant time twice or more over this last decade-plus, and José Ramírez, the closest the list offers to an ironman, missed 33 games in 2019. Aaron Judge? Soto’s bash brother? The guy who topped Roger Maris and plays at Yankee Stadium and is a towering, recognizable hulk of a man? He’s eleventh on the list, and he’ll soon crack the top ten (he didn’t debut until 2016), but he’s missed significant time in four separate seasons already. Shohei Ohtani? Possibly the greatest player to ever live? He missed big chunks of 2018 and 2019, a quarter of 2020, and a few weeks towards the end of 2023.
Baseball might still have the star power it commanded in the Clinton administration’s nostalgic haze. We don’t know if it does or doesn’t, because it can’t keep its best players on the field.
Injuries to starting pitchers receive a lot of attention these days, and rightly so. We’ve written before about the market inefficiency driving this: If a pitcher doesn’t push his physical limits, someone else will get his roster spot. If a pitcher does push his physical limits, that pitcher will likely spend a portion of his career hurt. The phenomenon isn’t limited to pitchers, though. Hitters are missing huge chunks of time as well.
With hitters, it’s harder to know whether the issue is more injuries or more responsiveness to aches and pains. Norms for playing hurt have changed, partly through the optimization of baseball: It often makes more competitive sense to get a player fully healthy than to continue trotting him out there at 75%. Still, it’s possible injuries are themselves the issue, and it’s possible the same phenomenon is happening that happened with pitchers: Hitters might be swinging too hard for their bodies to keep up, or contorting their mechanics in unsustainable ways. I don’t know the answer to this one. This hasn’t been in the discourse prominently enough to reveal any truths. I’m suspicious, however, that the answer is the same. That hitters are swinging and throwing with force their bodies cannot handle.
Major League Baseball has shown that it knows how to fix this kind of problem. When competitive optimization yielded a game no longer fun enough to watch, rules were changed to quicken baseball’s pace and increase action on the basepaths. But rule changes here are harder to identify, and might be harder to implement. Baseball knows how to fix this kind of problem, but it might not know how to fix this problem.
For example:
One rule change which would encourage teams to put a premium on their players’ health, potentially forcing a market solution to the injury issue, would be to shrink the size of rosters. A 35-man roster instead of a 40-man. A 22-man active roster instead of 26. Would it work? It’s irrelevant, because the MLBPA would never agree to eliminate more than a tenth of its members’ jobs.
A different rule change which would decrease wear and tear on players, allowing them to perform the same actions but less often, would be to shorten the regular season, inserting off days. 154 games again, or perhaps even 140, instead of 162. Would it work? It’s irrelevant, because owners would never agree to eliminate five percent of gate sales in a sport whose total attendance last season was nearly four times that of the NFL.
There might be solutions out there. I hope there are. But load management has dramatically increased, and we’re still seeing more IL trips from the biggest names than we used to see. Aaron Judge can’t become a superstar if he’s missing sixty games every other year.
Miscellany
- It was vintage Kristaps Porziņģis last night in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, with the Celtics putting to rest any doubts about whether or not they’re at full strength. The Mavericks were hit in the mouth in Game 1 against both the Clippers and the Thunder, so they aren’t strangers to bouncing back. But the Celtics made their mark, and now they have an opportunity to seize full control on Sunday.
- I know Canadians are sick of all the talk about the Canadian Stanley Cup drought, and that they don’t necessarily want the Oilers to win. But. The state of Florida has three Stanley Cups since the nation of Canada last won one. That’s bonkers.
- Carlos Alcaraz beat Jannik Sinner this morning. He’ll be a sizable favorite on Sunday against Alexander Zverev. Sinner will take over the world number one ranking, but this is a big moment for Alcaraz’s claim to the title in a reputational sense. If Alcaraz can finish the job at the French Open (likely) and then win Wimbledon (unlikely, but he should be the favorite with Novak Djokovic out)—he’ll have won three of the last five majors. He’s a year younger than Sinner, which is a meaningless distinction at this point except that he’s been visible for longer, highlighting that he accomplished more in the earliest stages of his career. If these two are the next two big men’s singles players, Alcaraz has the edge, with this morning a pivotal victory towards that cause.
- On the women’s side, Iga Świątek is a massive favorite to win her fourth French Open and fifth major title on Sunday against the Italian Cinderella, Jasmine Paolini. Świątek’s only 23, and for those wondering, Rafael Nadal also won four of his first five majors on clay. Paolini is 28, and she had never made it past the second round of a grand slam until this year’s Australian Open, in which she reached the round of 16.
- Dan Hurley’s reportedly in Los Angeles today to hear the Lakers’ pitch. Provided there isn’t some provision about Bronny James needing to be the sixth man, Hurley should take the job. The upside is enormous, the lifestyle is great, and the college game is not as safe a place for a dynasty-builder as it’s often described to be. It’s insane that UConn has won two NCAA Tournaments in a row. The tournament is too random for that to continue to happen. Being the best team helps, but there’s also luck involved. There’s no way Dan Hurley “figured out” the NCAA Tournament to a degree so large he could ever be favored over the field. UConn’s caught some breaks, and those breaks won’t always break the Huskies’ way. The downside is large in Los Angeles. But even back in Storrs, it’s bigger than it appears.
- Lastly, the Oklahoma–Texas Women’s College World Series finals were never quite a foregone conclusion, but they did lack the drama some of us were craving from the closing Big 12 chapter of the Red River Rivalry. That rivalry is changing dramatically next year, with Texas and Texas A&M far more authentically at odds with one another than Texas and OU. Oklahoma, who’s losing their own unfriendly rival (Texas and OU are friendly, OU and Oklahoma State are not), is going to be out on an island a little bit. The rivalry won’t mean nothing, but it’s going to be even more collegial than it was when the two walked hand-in-hand into the open SEC doors. Between the football win in October and last night’s victory, Oklahoma went out on top in a lot of respects. That’s nice for them, because Texas is an athletic machine right now. They’re the best athletic department in the country (they’ve already clinched this year’s Director’s Cup), they’re a national championship contender in college football, they’re great at most of the rising women’s sports, and they’re moving into a conference that still doesn’t care that much about men’s basketball, their only prominent vulnerability. There’s a good chance that this move to the SEC leaves Texas alongside Georgia and LSU and Alabama, while Oklahoma might find its home down by Arkansas and the Mississippi schools. At least OU will have softball.
