The Ringer – Michael Baumann: Failure is nothing new to athletes, but there’s nothing familiar about the ways Trevor Rosenthal and Chris Davis have been failing. Not that long ago they were both among the best players in the game. Now, Davis has broken the all-time record for at-bats without a hit and Rosenthal finally got an out to stop his ERA from being infinity. Rosenthal and Davis are above all else human beings. The stats behind their failures and the nature of said failures matter only to history. There’s an element of sadness that comes with watching once great athletes struggle so mightily, and for them, the sadness may go to an even darker place.
Beyond the Box Score – Daniel R. Epstein: Willians Astudillo is a national treasure, and I will hear no other words on this matter. I won’t lie and say that I’ve always been his biggest fan, but he is someone I, like everyone else, started paying attention to last year. That carried through the winter and into this season. Put simply, Astudillo is fun, and he’s different. He looks different when compared to your average Major League Baseball player, and he certainly plays a different game than today’s average major leaguer. Oh, more than anything, Astudillo is really good, don’t forget about that.
FanGraphs – Jay Jaffe: The benefit of being a fan of a team from the midwest is that it leaves me with plenty of west coast games to check out once their game is over. While I watch a lot of west coast baseball the Seattle Mariners are the team I watch more than any other (at least since Vin Scully retired and I stopped having an actual interest in the Los Angeles Dodgers). The Mariners weren’t supposed to be good this year, and yet here we are a few weeks into the season and they have the best record in baseball. They won’t hold up, but they are fun to watch, man, are they fun to watch.
Lead photo courtesy of Ken Lambert – The Seattle Times
