Taylor does make one change: After he breaks his bat in a game in Vallejo, he’s forced to switch to a lighter model, which he uses to crush a ball that’s caught at the wall. After the game, he tells me that he can’t wait to try it again, because he knows now that his old bat was too big. Feeling unreasonably optimistic about how Taylor will look with a lighter bat, I email Yoshi to tell him what Taylor told me. When I get to the clubhouse the next day, Yoshi pulls me aside and says he knew this all along, going so far as to call Yuki out of the clubhouse to corroborate the story. Yes, Yuki says, Yoshi told him Taylor’s bat was too heavy weeks ago. Great. No one told Taylor, but I’m glad everyone else agreed. Then again, it might not have mattered. Using the lighter bat, Taylor goes 0-for-3 and looks no less perplexed.
Just when we think the Stompers are stable, they have another hemorrhage. With less than a week left to go in the season, the RailCats reach out again, the Grim Roster Reaper returning for future considerations. This time, they ask for Matt Hibbert, our best remaining hitter, runner, and fielder. Hib got Metzger a spot with the Stompers, and now, it seems, his friend is returning the favor. For the first time, we actually agonize over letting a player leave. “A little late, isn’t it?” Sam says to Theo. His indignation grows when he checks the American Association standings. “Gary’s not even going to the playoffs!” The RailCats are thirty games out of first place and twelve behind the wild card leader. (Metzger, who hits .184 and slugs .287, hasn’t helped.) Worse, their season ends six days after ours, so Hibbert would barely be getting any extra baseball.
At the start of the season, Theo told Hibbert he’d do whatever he could to get him a promotion, and Hibbert has earned the chance. But we also have a team to take care of, a team that’s trying to win a title and doesn’t have a Plan B if Hibbert leaves. Conflicted, Theo consults Ray Serrano, the Stompers’ 2014 manager. Ray tells him he has to let Hib go: It’s a midlevel indy league’s lot in life to feed talent to other teams. Even if it’s only two weeks, maybe someone will like him enough to bring him back next year. Maybe he’ll have a chance. Once Hibbert leaves, the majority of the hitters from our Opening Day lineup are playing someplace else.
This isn’t the way Sam and I have envisioned the stretch run. Good teams are supposed to get better after the break, upgrading wherever they’re thin. We were a good team, but now we’re going backward, growing weaker by the day. The cavalry is leaving, and Sam’s texts are turning morbid.
In ten games for Gary, Hibbert goes 4-for-26.
* * *
While some of our players are being picked up, others are walking away from their posts, mostly because they have other obligations but partly because it’s depressing to play poorly for a cratering team. T. J.’s last game is August 16: He’s going to school in Florida to study strength and conditioning. We’re being blown out by San Rafael, so he takes the mound just for the hell of it, our first position-player pitcher. Because baseball is cruel, he pitches two scoreless innings, striking out Matt Chavez (who’s already homered in the game off Eric Schwieger) with low-70s sinkers and low-60s curves. Taylor Eads, with one year left at Spring Hill, returns to Slidell on the twenty-sixth.
The pitching staff is also evaporating. Paul Hvozdovic pitches for the last time on August 13, then goes back to school to start coaching. “I needed to know what would have happened if I’d gotten a shot,” he tells Sam on his last night. “I got my answer.” Ten days later, Jon Rand gives up six runs in an ugly inning against the Admirals, who rarely score six in a game. Afterward, he waits for the rest of the team to leave the clubhouse, then releases himself, cleaning out his locker and disappearing without a word to anyone. In retrospect, I realize that the happy-go-lucky lefty from the first half has been missing for some time. The higher his ERA rose, the less he laughed, the longer his goatee grew, and the darker he dyed it, a physical manifestation of his mood. All around us, dreams are dying. The four departed players, all twenty-five years old or younger, will probably never again play professionally. When they cross the clubhouse threshold, they leave their identities as athletes behind.
I can’t blame the lefties for leaving. Every southpaw who starts the season with us—Conley, Rand, Hvozdovic, Schwieger, Godsey—eventually crashes and burns. Godsey got released after a drunken altercation at Steiners—“care of wild animals,” the police report cryptically said—and his season may have been the biggest success. Paul’s ERA rises to 4.92, and his is the best of the rest. We did whatever we could to turn their seasons around. Rand told us that watching his footage and warming up while wearing an mThrow sleeve helped him throw harder, and it did seem as if something had: His four-seamer sat at 81 in his first outing, but it climbed to 85 (on average) a month later. Then it slowly sank back down, the Flowers for Algernon fastball. Paul was also a video devotee, and he told us our work helped him find flaws in his timing and balance. One day, he experimented with his slider and asked to see the results on a PITCHf/x plot. Sure enough, the difference stood out: Slider 2.0 was a little slower and sank much more, which we had hoped would add variety to his arsenal. But new pitch or not, he had answers only for the Admirals. In six starts, he gave up two runs in 12 innings against Vallejo, but he allowed a combined 22 runs in 17 2/3 innings against Pittsburg (once) and San Rafael (three times), as the Pacifics pounded him with their right-handed heart of the order. Conley, meanwhile, we moved to the bullpen. We told him to work quickly without holding anything back, and we hoped he’d have another gear, like so many unsuccessful starters who’ve gone on to lead long lives in the bullpen. When he threw his first fastballs in relief, we held our breath and stared at the radar gun—and then exhaled, disappointed, when we saw the same low-to-mid-80s as always, coupled with the same long pauses and shaky control. With nothing else to try, we reluctantly released him, the only spreadsheet signee who officially failed.
Too late, we come to suspect that our lefties’ struggles aren’t a coincidence. More likely, they have been done in by a lurking variable that stared us in the face all season but had gone undetected despite all our scouting and stat-mining. It finally dawns on us after Isaac leaves, at which point we wonder: Hey, where are all the left-handed hitters?
Answer: not in the Pacific Association, and especially not on the Pacific Association’s three non-Stompers teams.
That number on the bottom right, 18.9 percent, might be the most surprising stat of the season, even more shocking than Chavez’s slash line. It reminds me of a question one of our podcast listeners sent us to poke fun at our tendency to talk about crazy hypothetical questions, like what would happen if players ran the bases counterclockwise, or a team planted a tree between the mound and home plate, or baseball’s defenders adopted cricket’s “silly position,” so named because it requires standing so close to the batsman that someone would have to be silly (if not suicidal) to try it. “If baseball were different, how different would it be?” he asked. “Would it only be slightly different or VERY different?” As always, we answered it seriously, concluding that the answer was usually “slightly,” because baseball’s time-tested equilibrium is difficult to disrupt.
When Sam and I embedded in indy ball, we expected baseball to be slightly different. We figured, and confirmed, that players would be worse in certain ways, and that their shortcomings would mean that some strategies made more or less sense than they did in the majors. What we didn’t expect was a league without left-handed hitters. Even that was only slightly different, from a spectator’s perspective: We watched games for weeks without noticing anything was amiss. But it was very different—career-killingly different—for the left-handed pitchers on the Stompers’ staff.
In the major leagues in 2015, there were 277 pitchers who faced at least 250 batters. Only 6 of those 277 faced left-handers in fewer than 20 percent of their matchups, with Marlins reliever Adam Conley—a lefty, unfortunately for him—the low man at 15.7 percent. Compare that to the percentages of left-handed hitters faced by our four most-used
left-handed pitchers:
Jeff Conley faced thirteen lefties, who batted and slugged .200 against him. If he’d faced lefties three or four times as often—which in the majors would have put him right in line with the rest of the league—he might have done well enough to stay in Sonoma all season. For weeks, Sam and I wondered why the spreadsheet had worked so well with our right-handed recruits but had been so disastrous with Conley and so disappointing with Paul. We wondered why Schwieg, who looked good, who’d been good in 2014 (when he’d faced 25 percent southpaws), who’d pitched so well in college that he qualified for our spreadsheet before our spreadsheet existed, kept giving up run after run after run. The truth was that the deck was stacked against our lefties to a degree that was unheard of everywhere else in professional baseball. No other domestic pro league in 2015 had a lower percentage of plate appearances by batters who hit exclusively left-handed than the Pacific Association.
If we’d had perfect foresight, we could have assembled a staff full of right-handed pitchers that was tailored to take advantage of the unique conditions in the Pacific Association, and then the book you’re reading would probably be called We Were Right! or I Know, Right? or Right of Way: Our Wild Experiment Discriminating Against Southpaws. But, based on 2014 data, there was no way to anticipate that we would play in such an outlier league for left-handers. As it was, our pitching staff was roughly as left-handed as those of the other teams in our league, even though we were facing far fewer left-handed hitters.
But there is a silver lining: If we’d come to our senses sooner and put a strict righties-only policy in place, we wouldn’t have signed Dylan Stoops. I find Dylan when I dive back into the spreadsheet of 2015 seniors, inspired by Santos’s success and our need for another arm. Stoops, a 6-foot-3 lefty from Pennsylvania, is a control guy who struck out 75 and walked only 15 in 71 innings as a senior swingman for Richmond, a D1 school. His stats have some blemishes: eight home runs allowed as a senior, and shaky peripherals as a junior. But he has a convincing “why”: As a junior, he pitched through loose cartilage in his knee, and he was still rehabbing from postseason surgery when his senior year started. He even has an answer when I ask about the homers, explaining, “When our field was being worked on this spring we played at a park that was 280 down the line.” I’m too jaded to fall for the neat narrative, but Stoops is easy to talk to and I’m tired of having a terrible bullpen. I offer him a job.
He takes a day or two to think, then sends me the same Dear John text I’ve gotten so many times this summer:
I talked with my parents again and I think with it being such short notice and a short stint out there that I just can’t afford to do it financially right now. I also have my grad school classes starting in August and I waited a long time hoping something came up baseball wise but I had to go ahead and pay for them already. I wanted to thank you for considering me and I’m sorry it can’t work out. You guys were really helpful throughout this and I won’t forget that. If it’s possible I’d love to be a part of this next year, if this was my only opportunity I totally understand. Thanks again and good luck the rest of the way!
I almost resign myself to starting from scratch with another free agent. But it’s late in the season, and I’m sick of the search. I offer Dylan round-trip travel, not caring if I have to cover the cost. My largesse (by the Pacific Association’s pitiful standards) seals the deal.
The Stompers still owe me the airfare, but Stoops is money well spent. After a shaky, trial-by-fire first outing, in which he enters with the bases loaded and lets all three runners score, he’s almost unhittable. Only once does he come in for less than two innings: He gets a save with 3 2/3 innings scoreless in a 1-0 win, shuts down the Pacifics for three innings four days later, even picks up a start and goes seven. He’s the left-handed weapon we’ve wanted all year, and he’s happy to work in any role save for lefty specialist, which he labels “beyond aggravating.” Lefties can’t touch him (.243/.310/.270), but the few righties he faces have trouble too (.200/.333/.300), probably because he pitches with no discernible pattern, throws his off-speed stuff for strikes in every count, and relies on a more righty-proof curve, as opposed to Schwieg’s righty-susceptible slider. “I was blessed with two above-average breaking balls paired with my fastball,” he says, when I ask him why righties can’t hit him. “[They] allow me to work differently than other left-handed pitchers. With the movement on my curveball and slider I am able to throw pitches inside that can end up off the plate or under a right-handed hitter’s hands.” Hitters say Stoops is deceptive, and when he does throw his slider, batters miss it on half of their swings. He’s second on the Stompers in strikeout rate and second in getting grounders. No one takes him deep.
Stoops, who won a title in the prospect-rich Cape Cod League and was heavily scouted as a junior, is a first for us, a semi-legitimate prospect who slipped through the cracks not because he’s atypical, but because he got hurt at precisely the wrong time. I look for a right-handed counterpart on the spreadsheet and settle on Cole Warren, a righty from Southern New Hampshire University. His stuff impresses Yoshi, but he develops a sore arm after we sign him, which wasn’t the idea.
Unlike Stoops, most of our replacement players aren’t special: They’re freely available talent that’s unclaimed for good reasons. While I’m away at a wedding, the Stompers sign Peter Bowles, a college teammate of Andrew Parker’s at Towson University. “Yoshi was comfortable, Theo was comfortable, I was comfortable, the players were comfortable, Parker vouched for him, and he plays all seven positions,” Sam explains. I’m not comfortable, but after Taylor Eads, I can’t claim that my methods work any better. Bowles goes 8-for-50 with one extra-base hit and, appropriately, is listed as “Peter Bowels” on Pointstreak for a significant portion of his time with the team. Yoshi says he’s terrible, and for once I agree. Also terrible, according to Yoshi, is Connor Jones, a Villanova grad Sam and I liked at the March tryout and kept in mind for just the sort of emergency we’re experiencing. After Matt Hibbert leaves, Jones plays center for a few games because he’s the best of our below-average options. Soon he gives way to Chad Bunting, an outfielder from Vallejo who’s traded to us for future considerations. Bunting has a bad ankle, but right now no injury is a deal breaker unless there’s visible bone. Sam and I want to trade for an Admirals infielder, Aaron Brill, but we learn that our clubhouse hates him because he once bunted when the Stompers were up big and because he wears stirrups and sunglasses and goes overboard on EvoShield. It’s a fatal combination of bush league and big league that earns him the nickname “Johnny JuCo.” Everything seems different from the other dugout: Bad calls look better if they don’t go against you, and pitchers who throw off-speed stuff in hitter’s counts are gutless if you’re playing against them but savvy if they’re on the same side. Brill would probably be best friends with everyone on the Stompers if we’d signed him in the spring.
We do sign Eddie Mora-Loera, a small, spunky infielder whose college stats make me cringe. And we add Keith Kandel, a small, spunky outfielder from the amateur Intercounty Baseball League, because Yoshi says “he steals the bases.” Sam sends eight emails listing the various reasons why it makes no sense to sign Kandel, such as “stole 10 bases in a league where a 5-10, 200 pound catcher stole 18,” and “eight errors in 26 games, which is about 1.4 times as many errors per game as Moch has made,” and “a 40-year-old first baseman hit .444 in the IBL this year.” Sam concludes, “The only way to think that Keith could be good here is if you believe that the IBL is actually considerably BETTER than the Pacific Association.” We don’t believe that, but we sign Keith anyway. The only alternative is an Arnold Field groundskeeper, who plays in a men’s league on weekends and keeps offering to fill in.
Two players come and go so quickly that I don’t have time to introduce myself. The first is Aritz Garcia, the Stompers’ Spanish shortstop from 2014. Garcia, a popular player and a strong defender who had a .400-plus OBP, had to quit last year after twenty-o
ne games because of a visa issue, which he now says is straightened out. With great relief, we move Moch to second and install Aritz at short. He gets into one game before his immigration attorney tells him that playing for the Stompers could jeopardize not only his visa request, but also his chances of citizenship. That’s the end of Aritz. The second one-and-done player is Eric Mozeika, a Yoshi find who walked more men than he struck out during his college career. He gets good movement, and we’re so desperate for right-handed relief that Sam and I are happy to have him. But on the same day he debuts for the Stompers, Mozeika gets a call from Bridgeport, the Atlantic League team to which we tried to trade Feh. Just like that, he leaves.
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