Game 115: Royals at Twins

First pitch: 7:10 Central

Veteran Royals starter Seth Lugo began his career in the heated attention of the New York media, with the Mets. After he struggled in 2017 as a starter, he was moved to the bullpen, where he’d (mostly) stay for the rest of his Mets days. The Padres made him a starter again in 2023, and he’s been mighty reliable ever since. He throws in the low-90s, and will mix in a LOT of different pitches; the curve’s usually been his best one. YTD digits:

MLB tried having a game at the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee. Despite selling more than 80,000 tickets, it didn’t work. The game got rained out after a long delay, and there were all kinds of problems with the concessions. So Rob Manfred made baseball fans miserable, as usual.

Guardians player Emmanuel Clase was placed on leave pending a gambling investigation. There will be more of this.

Here’s a CBS Sportsline article on how the Twins tried Selling Private Ryan to the Red Sox, but asked for too much. They’ll do something like this eventually, I’m sure.

Sometimes I read Rolf Boone, a Twins blogger living in Washington state. Here’s his reaction to the sell-off. Check his site out sometime, it’s pretty good.

After the sell-off, a bar in Mankato posted the following (sqiuggly lines by me):

(It was a short-term offer for fans wearing Twins stuff. You can’t go in with a Twins hat and get a free beer today.)

Wrong sport, but Washington, D.C.’s City Council just voted to give the Commanders over $6.6 BILLION dollars for a stadium, with some being cash and some being tax giveaways. Remind me never to go to a professional sporting event ever again. That tax giveaway money will mean some city services lose funding. People will die. Sports owners are criminals. ALL OF THEM.

More from Neil deMause: the money Missouri wants to give the Royals is now up in the air, since it might be illegal. It’ll play out in court. What’s definitely legal is ignoring your voters who told you not to do this.

From Maggie Mertens at Defector: some girls’ softball teams in Minneapolis are having problems finding places to play. At time, school varsity teams can’t finish their games, because adult slow-pitch leagues kick them off the field. The feds had started ordering Minneapolis to fix this (it’s not a problem for boys’ baseball), but the feds have now dropped that notion. Because they don’t give a f**k about “protecting women’s sports.”

Here’s a solid article by the L.A. Times’s Benjamin Royer on the vast rise of pitching injuries in MLB, which is entirely attributable to programs/facilities like Driveline Baseball helping pitchers gain extra MPH and added spin.

Now, all these programs are just a very specialized form of exercise, and MLB can’t ban exercise — nor should they want to. What’s concerning here is the damage being done to young players who are trying to utilize the same methods to get the attention of scouts and colleges. A 2015 study found that 56.8 % of Tommy John surgeries are for players aged 15-19. And 2015 was before modern specialized training was widespread. The injuries are far more frequent today.

One orthopedic surgeon says: “There’s a saying around [young] baseball players that if you’re not throwing like, over 80 miles per hour and you’re not risking Tommy John, you’re not throwing hard enough.” And add to that what Linda Flanagan wrote about in Take Back The Game, how many young athletes aren’t playing different sports at different times of the year, anymore — they’re training year-round. Giving their muscles/joints less time to recover.

I don’t know what, if anything, can be done about this, but I find it very concerning. And it’s just another way that baseball is pricing poorer kids out of the ability to develop in the game.

The day, however, belongs to Dave Boswell, who in this week in 1969, managed to get in a bar fight with both coach Art Fowler, teammate Bob Allison, and manager Billy Martin, who pretty much laid Boswell out. (This is the same Martin who once got in a bar fight with a marshmallow salesman in Bloomington.) Boswell couldn’t make the subsequent road trip, but still managed an excellent season, pitching 256+ innings with a 3.23 ERA.

In Game 2 of the ALCS, Boswell allowed zero runs through 10 innings, but felt his arm immediately sear with pain after striking out Frank Robinson to end the 10^th. He came back for the 11^th, the Twins lost, and would lose the series 0-3.

In this fine SABR article by Gregory H. Wolf, you can read all about Boswell, who was a bit of a wild one, lifestyle-wise. He owned alligators and liked to shoot at snakes. (His pistol fetish annoyed some of his teammates – yeah, I wouldn’t feel great around a soused dude with a loaded gun, either).

That ALCS injury essentially ended Boswell’s career. He struggle with the Twins in 1970, and with Detroit/Baltimore in 1971, and then he was done. He’d go on to work for a Baltimore brewery, and died in Maryland at age 67.