Outside The Confines: Establishing greatness

Good morning. Let’s beat those Snakes.

• Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. homered twice last night in a win over the Cardinals. He’s six home runs shy of having a 40/40 season.
• Douglas Clawson has five stats that show how good Acuña has been this year.
• Esteban Rivera examines whether Acuña’s ability on the basepaths leads to his teammates seeing more fastballs.
• Matt Snyder ranks every contender into “tiers” as to how likely they are to win it all. The Cubs are in the “Don’t sleep on them” category.
• Brian Murphy looks at which non-playoff teams could play “spoiler” over the rest of the season.
• One player on each team with something to prove by the end of the season.
• David Schoenfield grades the 2023 season among the greatest seasons in baseball history. (ESPN+ sub. req.)
• In a follow-up to last time, MLB has placed Dodgers pitcher Julio Urías on administrative leave. That’s standard procedure while an investigation is underway.
• The announcement of the retirement of Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg has been postponed as the team and Strasburg fight over how much money he’s owed. Apparently the Nationals had offered to pay him all of the money he’s owed, but they backed out of the deal.
• In a probably related story, Brittany Ghiroli reports that the Nationals have laid off more than a dozen employees from their scouting department. (The Athletic sub. req.) General manager Mike Rizzo has not agreed to a contract beyond this year either. Ghiroli also looks at the Rays and Marlins seasons.
• Unfortunately for the Marlins, they put right-hander Sandy Alcantara and outfielder Jorge Soler on the injured list.
• Outfielder Andrew McCutchen is also out for the season with a torn Achilles.
• Braves right-hander Michael Soroka is also out for the season but he won’t need surgery for the numbness in his hands.
• Rays pitcher Shane McClanahan vows to return as good as ever from his second Tommy John surgery.
• Jay Jaffe looks at the great season that Rangers shortstop Corey Seager is having.
• Dan Szymborski writes that Phillies shortstop Trea Turner is still very good at baseball. There was some question about that earlier in the season.
• Ken Rosenthal and Will Sammon profile Diamondbacks outfielder Tommy Pham, who claims that his bad reputation is unearned. (The Athletic sub. req.) And many of his current and former teammates back that up.
• Jay Jaffe also examines how Twins third baseman Royce Lewis is finally living up to the hype.
• Matt Snyder writes that Yankees ace Gerrit Cole looks to finally win the Cy Young Award this year after many near misses.
• Yokohama DeNA BayStars pitcher Shōta Imanaga is expected to be posted to MLB this winter. Imanaga was the starting pitcher for Japan in the WBC title game this past March.
• Anne Rogers tells of what Royals pitcher Cole Ragans learned from Cole Hamels.
• Evan Drellich reports that the lawsuit by two “contracted” minor league franchises will be allowed to go forward. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• Jayson Stark explains that MLB has “tweaked” the automatic strike zone in Triple-A. (The Athletic sub. req.) He also explains why they did that and what impact it is expected to have.
• Davy Andrews looks at catcher pitch framing and how that advantage is going away even before an automated strike zone comes to MLB.
• Matt Monagan talks with the former major leaguers having a blast playing against the Savannah Bananas.
• The Athletics won their 43rd game this week, so they will not set a new modern record for losses. Stephen J. Nesbitt and Cody Stavenhagen look back 20 years at the 2003 Tigers, (The Athletic sub. req.) the team that just avoided breaking the 1962 Mets record for most losses in a season.
• And finally, in an excerpt from Joe Posnanski’s new book Why We Love Baseball, Posnansku shows that the famous embrace between Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese in 1947 almost certainly never happened. Or maybe it did! Just not when and in the way it has been retold in the history books.

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