1. This Is a New Kind of UConn
UConn’s six national championships (!!) in these last 26 years (!!!) can be separated into three separate pairs:
- 1999 and 2004: Very good teams who won as underdogs against Duke in the Championship/Final Four.
- 2011 and 2014: Ridiculous single-elimination runs led by one player who transcended the tournament.
- 2023 and 2024: Dominant teams who by the end of the tournament proved they were each unquestionably the best team in their given season.
The reason “blue blood” is a bad phrase for UConn is that their success is so recent. They aren’t old royalty. They’re Carnegie, not Windsor. That said, they’re iconic, and if asked the greatest program in the sport, you’d be a little aggressive if you answered UCLA, Kentucky, or UNC ahead of the Huskies. UConn is tied with the Tar Heels for the third-most NCAA Tournament championships in history. UConn has won those titles under multiple coaches. UConn is coming off an historically dominant two-year run, and it’s highly possible they’ll continue this into a third season.
What’s wild here is that despite Jim Calhoun being such a great coach and still having the most titles in UConn history, Dan Hurley has now been more successful than him, at least upon the top line. Calhoun built UConn up from a deeper depth, but in six years in Storrs, Hurley has elevated the program to a height beyond the highest ever achieved by Calhoun in his 26 seasons steering the ship. What they’ve done is too different for a thorough comparison so far, but Hurley’s best is better, and that is astounding.
Congratulations to the Huskies. Did Purdue look bad? Yes. But when enough teams look bad against UConn, the implication becomes that we should take a look at the common denominator.
2. Youth Pitchers Face Some Tough Incentives
Pitcher injuries are in the discourse right now, and this is good. Over the last 15 years, understanding of how to increase velocity has grown at an outrageous pace, a pace like that which carried us from the dawn of the internet age to a world where smartphones are commonplace. Alongside this, we’ve learned about the impact of spin rate, a revolution regarding revolutions.
I was told once as a teenager that the average human ulnar collateral ligament would snap under the force necessary to throw a 90-mph fastball. The implication was that some people are naturally capable of throwing 90, and some people aren’t. I don’t know if this was true. I do know, though, that the baseball industry has recently learned how to alter mechanics and increase specific muscle strength in order to throw baseballs faster than ever before. People who used to only be capable of throwing 80 or 85 can now touch 90, or even eclipse it. Velocity is more of a choice than it used to be. Spin rate? A similar phenomenon. I also know that understanding of physical recovery has improved substantially over the last few decades. MLB pitchers don’t ice anymore. They have better ways to bounce back. Four-man rotations don’t exist. Pitch counts are everywhere. Despite all of these advancements on the medical side, pitchers are getting hurt at accelerating rates. Which brings us back to velocity and spin rate. Are these the problems? I would guess so. I don’t know, but it’s my guess, and I’m not alone in that.
The best-case scenario here is that the next advancement in pitcher training revolves around strengthening ligaments. Maybe that’s the fix. I hope it is, because if it isn’t possible to make ligaments themselves more durable, I’m not sure we see anything other than a continued higher rate of Tommy John surgery and other season-ending procedures as baseball moves forward. There are already fewer aces than there once were, as baseball tries to counter this injury phenomenon with those lower pitch counts and all that increased rest. If the norm becomes that every pitcher gets Tommy John surgery one or two times in his career, the star prospects of pitchers dim even more.
If this issue—baseball being less fun for fans because the best pitchers always get hurt—was the only issue, we could maybe get over it. Where it gets really sad, though, is the youth game.
Let’s look at the incentives faced by college and major league teams:
- Maximize wins.
- Minimize expenses.
Every baseball team’s job is to win as many games as possible with as cheap of talent as they can find. The limitations of scholarship counts neutralizes this in the college game, but with players on the 60-day IL exempted from 40-man rosters, the reality for MLB teams is that two gifted but injury-prone pitchers making the league minimum are more valuable than one traditional ace. If a baseball team can get 100 innings apiece out of two flamethrowing 25-year-olds with devastating sliders at a combined cost of $2M/year, that team is going to be in a better position to win games than one getting 200 innings out of a workhorse who’s hit free agency and is bringing home $30M every season. The more replaceable good pitchers become, the smaller a deal injuries are to their teams.
Here’s an example of how this works in practice: In 2021, the Rays gave a combined 42 starts to Shane McClanahan, Tyler Glasnow, and Shane Baz. In 2022, they got 36 from that trio. In 2023, the number was back to 42. All three arms suffered major injuries in those three years, but the combined output was rather consistent. Were the Rays expecting this? That’s probably a step too far. But they could have expected it, and they could have built around it, and it probably would work. Injuries aren’t good for teams. But they’re not that bad.
For youth players, injuries are catastrophic. Get hurt at the wrong time and prospects’ careers can take a sharp U-turn. Continue to get hurt, and baseball careers are over. At the same time, though, youth pitchers are expected to compete with one another to throw the hardest. Throwing the hardest means youth pitchers have the raw tools coaching staffs can then turn into strikeouts. This has long been the case—the guys with the best raw tools are the guys who get the most looks. This is fair and fine and understandable. The art of pitching being lost at the youth game predates the strides made by Driveline. Now, though? Now, when youth pitchers must compete against other youth pitchers putting their UCLs through hell? It’s like minor leaguers in the steroid era: If you’re not subjecting your body to the danger, you’re accepting a sizable competitive disadvantage. It shows up for young teenagers trying to play on the best showcase teams. It shows up for high-schoolers looking for Division I offers or a place in the MLB Draft.
There is no natural market force discouraging pitcher injuries at the youth level. The natural forces discouraging them at the major league level are small. Young pitchers have to roll the dice these days. They have to learn to throw as hard as they can throw and spin as hard as they can spin and hope they don’t shred their elbow as a result. I don’t know how to solve that problem. I don’t know that it’s a problem that can really be solved.
3. The Cubs Might Have a Bullpen Problem
When the Cubs blew an 8–2 lead last week against the Rockies, it was funny, because the Cubs went on to win the game. “Whoops! Boy, glad that worked out. Say, doesn’t that mean something good, that we can win a game like that?” (I maintain that it does mean something good, even if it means something better to not create that kind of adversity.)
Last night, when the Cubs blew an 8–0 lead against the Padres, it wasn’t funny, because the Cubs went on to lose. “Now the bullpen is a problem.” (This is also probably fair.)
The Cubs’ bullpen isn’t necessarily going to be bad. It ranks 16th in FanGraphs’s projected fWAR over the rest of the season. Only 60% of that projected fWAR comes from the top two arms, making the Cubs more insulated from injury than, say, the 17th-ranked Marlins, where 83% of the projected fWAR comes from the closer and the primary setup man. Still, the Cubs have a lot riding on Adbert Alzolay turning in another great year out of the ‘pen. It’s decently likely. The median expectation, based on what Alzolay has shown in just more than a year of pitching as a full-time reliever, is that he’ll continue to be pretty good at it. The problem is that “just more than a year” is a small sample, especially in a relief setting. The median expectation is good. It comes with a lot of uncertainty. The uncertainty works in both directions. One of those directions is bad.
It’s not just Alzolay, either. Héctor Neris, the prize free-agent acquisition, is just one man, and he’s about to be one 35-year-old man. Mark Leiter Jr., expected third guy, has a similar small-sample situation to Alzolay’s. Drew Smyly is still pitching mainly in a low-leverage long relief role.
Alzolay’s “bad” performance so far is just that he’s given up two home runs in less than five innings of work. That’s a small sample, one not necessarily indicative of a problem. Neris has a high ERA, but his FIP’s great. Leiter has been lights out. Smyly has been solid. There’s no reason to doubt Julian Merryweather yet, and there’s a lot of other upside throughout the reliever corps. Last night’s debacle had a lot to do with a defensive miscue. In short? The bullpen hasn’t pitched too badly so far. There have simply been two very loud bad nights.
But just like last year, this is not a bullpen that should inspire tons of confidence. As of now, it’s still duct-taped together. Hopefully that changes—hopefully the young guys bloom. But for this moment, still in early April, big blown leads aren’t the most shocking thing in the world.
