Outside The Confines: Best of the West

When Joe West umpired his first game, Hank Aaron was still playing, albeit in the other league.

• Umpire Joe West set the all-time record for games umpired last night when he umpired his 5,376 game, breaking the record of Hall-of-Fame umpire Bill Klem. The San Diego Chicken was there to award him a bouquet of flowers.
• ESPN reprinted this profile of West by Tim Kurkjian from last fall. It’s all still true.
• The game that West was behind the plate for was the White Sox and the Cardinals, where former high school teammates Lucas Giolito and Jack Flaherty matched up against each other for the first time. The White Sox and Giolito came out on top. Now if they could only play a three-way game in which their other teammate, Max Fried of the Braves, was also pitching. Yes, there is little doubt that the 2012 Harvard-Westlake baseball team had the greatest pitching rotation in high school baseball history.
• White Sox manager Tony La Russa has been criticized a lot this season, despite managing a first-place ball club. Bob Nightengale gives La Russa a platform to defend himself. Tuesday night was also the first time in La Russa’s managerial career that his team was playing the Cardinals. That’s the only team he hadn’t managed against before last night.
• Kavitha A. Davidson writes that La Russa is the last of his kind and it’s a good thing that his kind will be extinct soon. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• The other great controversy since last we met is the New Era “Local Market” caps that came and went in a few hours after being greeted with withering mockery on social media.
• The Athletic has a rundown of every cap in that ill-fated and ill-conceived line. (The Athletic sub. req.) One day we’ll remember them fondly like 1999’s “Turn Ahead The Clock” uniforms. Actually, we’re still making fun of those 22 years later.
• Indians pitcher Zach Plesac ended up on the injured list with a fractured right thumb, which isn’t an unusual injury for a pitcher. But according to his manager Terry Francona, Plesac injured himself by tearing off his shirt.
• Joe DeMartino adds Plesac’s name to the list of all-time ridiculous ways athletes got injured.
• Neil Paine writes that this year, the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani is living up to all the hype. He really may be the next Babe Ruth.
• Matt Snyder grades every MLB team so far.
• David Schoenfield examines the breakout season that Blue Jays infielder Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is having.
• Here are six more players (and Guerrero) having breakout seasons.
• Twins outfielder Rob Refsnyder remade his swing this past season and it’s paying off so far. I’d say. While it’s only 11 games, Refsnyder is hitting .438/.472/.719.
• The Dodgers played the Astros in Houston for the first time since the sign-stealing scandal was revealed and the Dodgers players have made it clear they haven’t forgotten, although they claim that they don’t dwell on it.
• The Mets are going through outfielders this season like Spinal Tap goes through drummers. Yesterday they made a deal with the Brewers to acquire outfielder Billy McKinney for a minor league pitcher.
• R.J. Anderson has a list of five more outfielders that the Mets could reasonably acquire to replace their injured players.
• The Mets, with all their problems, are surprisingly in first place in the surprisingly weak NL East. Emma Baccellieri writes that the “Big Mets Energy” hasn’t changed despite their place in the standings. I think what she calls “Metsiness” is what others call “LOLMets.”
• The minority owners of the Tampa Bay Rays have sued majority owner Stuart Sternberg over his dealings with the city of Montreal.
• Craig Goldstein and Patrick Dubuque argue that like auto racing has restrictor plates to slow down cars, baseball needs a version of that to slow down pitching velocity. They have some ideas that might work.
• Ben Clemens examines whether or not pitchers really do approach an at-bat differently with a runner on third base.
• Kevin Goldstein gives rough odds on the candidates to be the first pick in the draft this summer. There’s no clear favorite at the moment.
• Daniel Brown speaks with retired slugger Greg Vaughn about his post-baseball life, which includes running a winery and extensive charity work for juvenile diabetes, which is a condition his son has. I may have to drive up to his vineyard in Lodi, CA.
• Minor League Baseball is back in 2021 and Chelsea Janes speaks with coaches and executives about what it means to be back in front of fans and the difficulties surrounding the re-organization and the missing 2020 season.
• Former major league Fred McGriff admits he’s never seen the famous Tom Emanski videos that he endorsed in commercials that ran constantly on ESPN in the 1990s. It is true that McGriff did train with Emanski before Emanski started selling the videos.
• Christina De Nicola has a terrific look at Jazz Chisholm and the emerging baseball talent coming from the Bahamas. The Bahamas are far behind the Dominican Republic or Venezuela in baseball interest and talent, but they are seeing a big increase in interest with the success of Chisholm.
• Former Cubs (and 11 other teams) player Matt Stairs always looked like a softball player when he was an active major leaguer. So would it surprise you to learn that Stairs was a legendary slow-pitch softball player from 2011 to 2014?
• And finally, we have a candidate for bat flip of the year as former major league All-Star Brandon Phillips hit a home run in the independent Atlantic League and let forth a majestic bat flip afterwards? These 39-year-old kids today just don’t respect the game. (grin)

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