Fair T: Astros & Jays surge, Guardians & Mets fall, Judge’s story

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Speaker 1: Maybe they're not getting enough attention, but they should be. They're playing at an extremely high level school. Bul is a blast to watch every fifth or sixth day. Welcome everyone to the Monday edition of Fair Territory. I know I say this every week. You guys probably get tired of hearing me say it. But we've got a lot to talk about. There is a lot going on in the game right now, but it hit some things off the top, just real quick. Trek Schooble last night Sunday Night Baseball, thirteen strikeouts, just brilliant. James Wood the Nationals. Four intentional walks, the first player since Barry Bonds in two thousand and four to draw four intentional walks in a game. And the Miami Marlins, my goodness, they've won seventh straight. They've swept a road trip in San Francisco and Arizona. They finished June with a winning record. Good for the Marlins. But I've got some other things that I want to dive a little bit more deeply into. The last two weekends for Fox. I've seen the two NL East Powers, the Mets, the Phillies. The Phillies both weekends. The Mets a Saturday ago I gotta tell you, folks, not that impressed. And I'll go with each team and I'll tell you why I'm not that impressed with either as we go along here, Let's start with the Mets swept by the Pirates this weekend. The lowly Pirates outscored thirty to four. Hard to do nine straight runs, nine and more runs in each of those three games they allowed thirty to four. They're outscored, and they didn't face Paul's schemes in this series. Also, they had a team meeting Saturday and then the next day lost twelve to one. That's not what team meetings are supposed to produce. So we heard from the Mets owner Steve Cohen on X this morning, and he had some things to say. And let's look at what Steve Cohen said. Tough stretch, no sugarcoating it. I didn't see this coming. I'm as frustrated as everybody else. We will get through this period, and I'm sure that they will. Our injured pitching will come back over the next few weeks. It is unlikely teams hitting with runners in scoring position will continue at this week pace. Keep the faith. Well, that's a good message from Colin. That's the right tone he should be establishing as owner. The Mets, though, are three and thirteen in their last sixteen games. Guys like me, reporters like me, men and women were praising the Mets pitching just I don't know, a couple of weeks ago. Since then, they've lost Senga to the IL McGill, to the IL Canning to the IL Manaiah remains on the IL. Mantas came back could first start not so good yesterday, and he is lined up to pitch against the Yankees in the Subway Series in this coming weekend. So the Mets have some serious problems. And it's not just the injuries to the starting rotation. Their bullpen has sort of fallen apart too. In the month of June they ranked twenty eighth in bullpen Era And offensively they're too top heavy. They've had some situations with different positions this year that have not gone that well. Right now, they're going to below average production second base, third base, catcher, and center field. So there's not all that much that they can do right now before the deadline, but there is probably a lot that they can do at the deadline. Okay, that's the Mets. Now, the Phillies took two or three this weekend against Atlanta, and by the way, Atlanta with these two teams, the Mets and Phillies in the state that they're in, should be all the more embarrassed for the season that they're having. But the Phillies have again the NLA's lead. That's fine. They won two or three from Atlanta, very good, but there are some issues there too. Now Bryce Harper might come back tonight and that would solve some of their offensive issues. For sure. They've got an amazing rotation, second in the majors in era. Their bullpen is a bit of a mess, and Jason Stark wrote about this last week in The Athletic after interviewing Dave Dombrowski. Dembrowski has said we're gonna get Alvarado back in August for the regular season. He was their best reliever, but he's eligible for the postseason after testing positive for performance enhancing drug. He also plans, Dombrowski does, to eventually move a starter or two to the bullpen. They've already done that with Taiwan Walker. But that's not the only issue with the Phillies. The bullpen. The offense too. It just doesn't seem to be at the level that it should be considering the names in that lineup. The Phillies rank eleventh in the league and runs per game eleventh in the majors. That's okay, but it should be better, and they're a team that isn't getting what they would want to get from a number of different players. I would say that Boehm is won. He was hot for a while, not so much lately. Stott is another just up and down the lineup. Schwarber's been great obviously, Turners had a remarkable season so far, but they're not clicking the way they should now. Maybe the return of Harper helps that. Maybe they bring up Justin Crawford their top prospect at some point, to maybe address left field. But they've got some work to do at the deadline as well. So the NL East it's going to be a race. It's maybe not going to be as great a race or as dynamic erase as we would have thought with both these teams. I wouldn't say the Phillies are reeling right now, but both these teams have not quite played to the capability that we all expected. The Mets did early. They're struggling right now. The Phillies have had their moments, and certainly they face good pitching this week in Houston and Atlanta, but I do want to see more from their offense. All right now, as we move on, speaking of Houston, the Houston Astros. We don't talk about this team enough. The Houston Astros just won two or three from the Chicago Cubs in the Kyle Tucker Ryan Presley Homecoming Series. It's an amazing series in a lot of ways. Cam Smith, the Astros big acquisition in the Tucker trade, had a big series as well. But what's amazing about Houston is they're playing and have played since May fifth without your Don Alvarez. It's almost two months now without ours. They've got a number of starting pitchers on the IL right now, Blanco Arraghetti, Christian Javier Hayden, was Nesky, Luis Garcia is an entire rotation. And yet here they are the month of June nineteen and seven, best record in the majors. It's a testament to what they do, a testament to their culture, a testament to the manager Joe Aespotta, the general manager Dana Brown. They're going to be looking for a left handed hitter at the deadline. They'll get Alvarez back, hopefully soon, maybe even this week, but they'll still need more left handed punch, and I imagine maybe they'll look for some other things, different pieces here and there as well. They're bullpen the back of the one of the strongest of the league with a brew and hater. They have been just one of the best stories of the season. And again, I don't know that they're getting quite enough credit for what they've done, because heck, we just expected every year from them, but this was the year, and we actually say this every year, this was the year they should have taken a step back the team. I want to discuss a team with a huge series coming up this week, the Toronto Blue Jays. The Blue Jays have played really well, just took two or three from the Guardians in Cleveland, two or three from the Red Sox at Fenway, and the big series I was talking about is a four game set against the Yankees at home when they are trailing the Yankees by only three games in the Al East. We've talked a lot about Tampa Bay and how well they've played, lost two of three this weekend to the Orioles. But they've been really good. The Jays are right behind them, and the Jays have had a very interesting season because their offseason acquisitions Santan Darren Hoffman, they're big acquisitions, have not done all that much Andres Himenez another one. But they've gotten contributions from some unexpected places. Addison Barger certainly one of them, Ernie Clement, Nathan Lucas. These guys have done things that no one really expected. Now. I know a lot of Blue Jays fans out there saying, can you hate the Bluelue Jays. You haven't said a nice thing about the Blue Jays in a year plus, blah blah blah, blah blah. I don't hate the Blue Jays. I certainly don't hate Toronto, and I certainly don't hate Canada. I have had questions with the way the Blue Jays have been run by their front office, questions that a lot of Blue Jays fans have, But I guess don't they don't like it when maybe this little guy with the bow tie asked those questions. That's fine, but the Blue Jays give them credit. Springer resurgent ear at age thirty five. They've got their rotation pretty much in place now much better, with Schurzer back, Eric Lower making a great contribution, and of course the three guys at the top, Bassett, Barrios, Gossman, They're terrific. So I kind of like where the Blue Jays are now. I'd like them even better if Santan Dare got back and if Hoffman kind of stabilized a little bit and maybe him and Theez started hitting more. But this is a team that has been much more of a force than I expected. And remember, I don't know in the winter, we were talking about them as kind of a team that might be sellers at the deadline, right they had Flat unsigned, they had Bobochet who still was unsigned and is going to hit the free agent market most likely. But the Jays have kind of exceeded what a lot of people, including myself, thought they would be. And they've got this huge series against the Yankees coming up in the middle of Canada Day celebrations. It should be a fun week in Toronto. Now. Finally, before we move on, the Cleveland Guardians, and this is the other side of the coin in the American League. Cleveland Guardians have been a huge disappointment. Now. They exceeded expectations last year, did things beyond what anyone thought they could when they made it to the American League Championship Series and of course lost to the New York Yankees. The Guardians did that kind of, in the words of one executive, spinning a bullpen fairy tale. That's how they did it. They spun a bullpen fairytale, and obviously it helped them get to where they needed to go. They have offensive issues for a while now. Offensive issues have persisted this year. Just got swept at home by the Cardinals. They're forty and forty two. They're eleven and a half games back in the AL Central. The Tigers obviously are running away. They've had a remarkable first half of the season. But you just wonder what's going to happen with Cleveland. They've got Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and the White Sox going into the break. Their schedule is really tough. They just have not, for whatever reason, found offensively deadline sellers. Yeah, they could be sellers, but they don't have much to sell. Carlos Santana maybe, but it's just disappointing to see what has happened with the Guardians. Maybe they bring up Chase the latter their number one prospect and get some good things out of him, but it just seems that this is not the Guardians year. All Right, we've gone through as much as we can go through, at least in the first segment. Stay tuned. We've got a lot more to come.

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Speaker 5: Well well, well, well.

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Speaker 1: Time out for the Inside Dish, the part of the show where I talk about maybe a story I've written, a trend in the game, something else entirely. But today I'm going to talk about the story that I published today about Aaron Judge. This story was three weeks in the making and it has kind of an interesting backstory to it. So I wrote about this in the wind up for the Athletic. I don't know about a week ago, but I'll go into more detail here. So three saturdays ago, I'm at Yankee Stadium and we've got the Yankees Red Sox broadcast on Fox, and of course Aaron Judges red hot at the time, and I'm asking people questions, what is standing out to you about him, what do you think? And someone told me, this person shall remain name was check out how much he is swinging. That's the difference. He's swinging a lot more than he ever has. And I found this curious because great hitters get pitched so carefully that sometimes, like Juan Soto, they ended up not swinging a lot right. Intentional walks happen. Walks that aren't intentional but semi intentional happen. They don't get a lot of good pitches to hit, and the great ones are exceedingly patient. So I started looking into this. I made some calls that week, knowing that we had the Yankees Red Sox again the next weekend from Fenway, and I could talk to Judge at Fenway hopefully, and in the coming days or the days that led up to that game, I spoke to the Yankees hitting coach James Rawson and some others just about what was to me an interesting sort of phenomenon that he was swinging at this high rate in virtually every possible situation. So then I talked to Judge on Saturday, and this was the day after he hit that monumental home run off Garrett Crochet at Fenway to tie the game after striking out three times. So I'm like, wow, all right, he had the three strikeouts, but that home run was kind of a legendary sort of home run, or at least at that moment, it seemed like it. I taught the Judge and then on Sunday prepared to write the story and did write the story. Problem was, Judge struck out not only three times Friday night, but three times Saturday and three times Sunday, and the Yankees were swept, swept by the Red Sox at Fenway, the Raphael Dever's Red Sox at Fenway. And we decided at the Athletic, well, the story is written. It's where we want it to be. But if we published it on Monday, after we just struck out nine times in this series, after the Yankees just got swept, it might not be a good idea. And I remember Chris Kershner, our Yankees right telling me, you run this on Monday. The comments are going to destroy you. And yes, people would say this is weird timing. The guy's not hitting, what are you writing this for? So I figured, okay, no problem, it's Aaron Judge. I'll wait a couple of days, Wait, a couple of days, we'll get hot again, I'll publish. Problem was he didn't get hot again. He didn't get hot again at all. For a couple of weeks from June fourteenth to twenty eighth, he hit something like one seventy six with a six forty five ops and only two homers. And I kept waiting and waiting, and it was kind of driving me nuts. And the reason it was driving me nuts is because most writers, when they write something, they want it published. They wanted to get out to the world. They don't want to think this is the biggest thing that they've wasted their time. And it happens. Sometimes you lose a story for whatever reason that you can't go with. You don't have it good enough, or maybe the timing isn't right. Who knows. There are one hundred reasons why you might not publish a story. But in this case, I knew I had something that I thought was interesting, something that really had not been written about as far as I know, and I wanted it to get out. So I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting, and finally, yesterday Sunday, there it is to home run from Aaron Judge. One of them was early in the count, and that was one of the points of emphasis in the story, that he's swinging early in the count. And today we published the story. Finally, I didn't even have to tweak it that much. It was pretty much all set. So Judge in the story explains that he is being more aggressive this year. He was surprised that I told him about the swing rates. He didn't know, at least at that point, that he had been swinging at a higher rate. Now he's just going out and playing. He's not studying the numbers necessarily as deeply as maybe we are. But he did say, hey, I'm trying to be more aggressive. I'm trying to be more aggressive because I know then I might only get one or two pitches to hitting it at bat, and I want to be sure that when that pitch comes, the one that looks good to me, then I'm going to be swinging. And again, it is almost like the anti Juan Soto approach. Right Soto, it seems like every at bat is this masterpiece in which he runs the count to three and two and it's just working in his favor, and he's a Maestro just kind of dictating the whole at that. Now Judge is dictating at bats too, but only in a different way. And I also found it curious, and I asked Judge about this because he grew up not far from San Francisco in Linden, California. Barry Bonds when he was hot, like crazy hot, like Judge has been at various points, what happened, Intentional walks happened, And yet it was James Wood drawing the four intentional walks on Sunday and Aaron Judge has drawn I believe, only eighteen all year. It might be off on that number. So that was curious to me. And Judge basically said, in his humble way, I'm not Bonds. I'm not getting pitched like that. It's different. Bonds was getting one pitch maybe per game. I'm not in that area, So that was interesting. It was also interesting to hear the Red Sox pitching coach Andrew Bailey say we attack aggression with aggression. We're not dancing around even great hitters like Aaron Judge, because Aaron Judge, like all great hitters, fails more often than he succeeds. So the whole thing to me was just interesting and I'm sitting on it week after week after week. Okay, it was only three weeks, but it seemed like forever. And yesterday, after he hit the two home runs, I was kind of very excited that finally I could get this story out there. It's out there today. I've seen some people already in the comments talking more about Barry Bonds than talking about Aaron Judge because Bonds is mentioned in the story. And yes, I mentioned that he used performance enhancing drugs or was alleged to have used them, and people just can't still accept that he was a guy that has all these records, or is a guy that has all these records when too many he was tainted. I get it. That's a fair discussion. It's not what this article is about. So anyway, the Aaron Judge story is finally out there. I am thrilled it's finally out there. Is it my best story ever? Know? But when it was sitting there and sitting there and sitting there, I was just stewing and I could not get over it. Now I'm over it back right after this.

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00:20:18
Speaker 1: All right, Like last week, we are taking questions from chat BCC. That's a free chat app. Go to foul Territory dot Chat. It's totally free to get in and join the conversation. All right, let's start it off here with the questions. Oh, here's a good one from Jeremy Meyer. Would the Age trade Luis Severino because he's unhappy with the whole mound? Now everyone knows Severino's home road splits have been kind of crazy this year. Unfortunately for him, the road splits did not or the record took a hit yesterday against the Yankees. He did not pitch very well. And the question now is okay, he's so miserable in Oakland, then he's pretty much said that would the Age trade him? The problem here and MLB Trade Rumors dot Com that a really good analysis of this last week is that he's, even with the great road numbers, not pitching all that well this season. His performance has not been that good, poor strikeout rate, lowest ground ball rate of his career, and his overall numbers really aren't that good. And here's the big problem. He's owed more than fifty five million from right now through the end of his contract, which would be in twenty twenty seven. He has a player option for twenty seven, but at this point you would have to think he'd be exercising it. So I don't know if the A's can trade Severino, whether they want to trade sever Reno, that's another question, and it'll be answered in the next few weeks. All right, next question, This one comes from Delightful, who asks are we making a big enough deal out of the Tigers this year? To this point, they were kind of an afterthought this year despite their magical twenty twenty four campaign, and it feels like it's getting written off because of a weak American League. Delightful fair point, and the Tigers as an ALE Central team, maybe you don't get as much attention as the ALSE teams or even the Astros in the West, but my goodness, they have an eleven and a half game lead in the Central. They're tied with the Dodgers for the best record in Baseball fifty three and thirty two, the third in the majors, in ERA, fifth in runs per game. Maybe they're not getting enough attention, but they should be. They're playing at an extremely high level. Scooble is a blast to watch every fifth or sixth day, and their offense has been better than expected, so I would tend to agree they're not getting enough credit. This isn't the thirty five and five run in nineteen eighty four, but it's been pretty darn good, all right. Next question, This one comes from Robbie Hyde, who asked, oh, is it time for the Red Sox to move on from Walker Buhller. I was struck after that game yesterday in which Walker Buller struggled again, his ERA rising to six point four or five when he said, I think I'm fighting for my spot in the game. Honestly, that was as straightforward and as honest or remarked as you'll ever hear from a player. Here's a guy with four quality starts out of fourteen, a guy the Red Sox paid more than twenty one million for one year. And yes, he is struggling. He is struggling like crazy. Korra was asked yesterday Alex Korra if his spot in the rotation was in jeopardy, and Korra basically said, not right now. Our managers never talk about a pitcher losing his spot in the rotation right after a game. That never happens. But at some point, yes, the Red Sox might need to do something, So we're gonna see with Walker Brewery right now. The Red Sox, they've had a number of issues surfaced in recent weeks. One of them is they're starting rotation. They've had injuries too. Hunter Dobbins got hurt he was pitching well, Cutter Crawford still out, and Tanner Hawk on his rehab assignment has not been good. So a myriad of issues facing the Boston Red Sox right now. And finally a question from Mounts who asked, is Oneil Cruz really available? Well? I wrote last week that the only untouchables with the Pirates were Paul Stein's and Andrew McCutcheon, So immediately a lot of people drew the rifle conclusion. Woo, O'Neil Cruz is in play. He would be difficult to get, I would imagine. But his ops before his two home runs yesterday was seven fourteen. Now it's up to seven forty, but it's still down from his seven to seventy three ops last year. He's entering arbitration this winter, so he has three years of club control remaining. He's going to get more expensive. I get it. But at the same time, O'Neil Cruz is still part of the Pirates' future, I would think, and for that reason I don't expect him to be training before the deadline. All right, before I go, I want to send all my best wishes to Ron Washington. Of course, he is not going to be the Angels manager for the rest of the season, and he is one of my favorite people in the game. He is one of everyone's favorite people in the game. Wash get well soon. And also he's Dave Parker going into the Hall of Fame this year. One of the most entertaining, fun players and a great player. Dave. We will miss you so badly. All right, we'll moving back Thursday with our normal show. I want to thank everyone for watching, for listening. You know where to find us YouTube, Apple, Spotify. Have a great week everyone.

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