MLB Bullets reaches a milestone

Good morning. It kind of stinks that I can’t cheer for Daniel Vogelbach tonight or last night. Also, Vogy has a higher OPS than Mike Trout at the moment, so maybe all those trade suggestions around here weren’t all that crazy after all?

• Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia recorded his 3000th strikeout last night when he fanned his former teammate John Ryan Murphy. Sabathia talked about the achievement after the game.
• Sabathia’s family was on hand for the occasion.
• Sabathia was the 17th pitcher in major league history to strike out 3000 and David Adler has details on all of them.
• Jon Tyler looks back at Sabathia’s career and his legacy going forward.
• Mike Axisa examines Sabathia’s chances for enshrinement in Cooperstown. I think Axisa is a little too pessimistic here. I agree Sabathia probably won’t go in on the first ballot, but I find it hard to believe he won’t be voted in pretty quickly thereafter.
• Before I move on to other topics, I want you to take a look at Dodgers pitcher Rich Hill writing about his son Brooks, who was born with severe health problems and died about a month after his birth. Hill wants everyone to know about the love and the pain his family went through and also about a new fund he’s started to pay for research into genetic disorders.
• Dayn Perry looks back at the best and the worst of the first month of MLB in 2019.
• Also an ESPN.com roundtable discussion of the winners and losers in April.
• Tom Verducci takes a look at the trends in MLB so far this year.
• Pete Blackburn looks back at the poor first month of the defending World Series champion Red Sox.
• Marc Topkin lists ten reasons the Rays have the best record in baseball.
• Rays pitcher Tyler Glasnow speaks with David Laurila about his cutter and how he’s been having so much success with it.
• Dan Szymborski evaluates six hitters off to poor starts and their likelihood of turning things around going forward.
• Gabe Lacques notes a trend in baseball that no one in MLB likes to see—attendance is continuing to drop. Except in Philadelphia. (Actually, only 12 of 30 teams are down, but the teams that are down are really down and the teams that are up are barely up.)
• Phillies fans booed outfielder Bryce Harper. Harper said he agreed with them.
• Richard Justice has seven “bold” predictions for May.
• Marc Carig has a fascinating history of the term “Red Ass” in baseball. (The Athletic sub. req.) It all started one road trip in 1910 when the Cardinals forgot their trousers. So they ended up taking the field by just painting their whole lower half red. Fans of other teams mocked and laughed at the Cardinals and they got angry, which is how the term started. (Maybe not, but if you don’t have an Athletic subscription, you’ll never know if I’m lying.)
• Blue Jays rookie Vladimir Guerrero Jr. played on the road for the first time in his career, and wouldn’t you just know it was in Anaheim? (They couldn’t arrange Montreal.) Tim Brown writes about the homecoming for Vlad Jr. and how Angels fans let him know just how much they loved his father. As Brown writes “But you know that.”
• Michael Baumann examines how the careers of other “top prospects in baseball” have gone.
• White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson isn’t happy about his recent suspension or the lack of diversity in the league office.
• The Atlantic League got its first taste of the new “no shifts” rule that MLB is paying them to experiment with and the first time didn’t go very well. The umpires didn’t get the rule right, for one.
• The Marlins sent outfielder Lewis Brinson down to the minors. Brinson was supposed to be the prize return in the Christian Yelich trade.
• The Mariners demoted outfielder Mallex Smith, whom they got from the Rays this offseason for Mike Zunino.
• The Dodgers got bad news as outfielder A.J. Pollock might need elbow surgery.
• The Nationals put third baseman Anthony Rendon on the IL after he was hit in the elbow with a pitch last week that he’s unsuccessfully been trying to play through.
• Ichiro Suzuki will serve as an instructor for the Mariners at the major league and Triple-A level.
• Ben Lindbergh praises the hitting skill of the Twins’ Willians Astudillo and also how he’s a marketer’s dream for Minnesota and MLB.
• Nick Piecoro details how every tattoo on the body of Diamondbacks reliever Yoan Lopez tells the story of his life.
• A profile of White Sox scout John Kazanas and a look at how a baseball scout goes about his job.
• Blue Jays teenage rookie Elvis Luciano got his first major league win and his teammates celebrated by pouring pretty much any disgusting thing they could find on him. I shouldn’t say that. Ballplayers could find a lot more disgusting things to pour on another ballplayer. They kept it gross, but at least it was PG.
• And finally, Reds outfielder Yasiel Puig is apparently no longer the Wild Horse. Or at least, he’s taken to wearing mermaid costumes.

And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster.