Things I Wrote Down in June That Didn't Fit Anywhere Else

Things I wrote down in June that didn't fit anywhere else, assembled here in the order I wrote them, which is not the order of their importance but is the order in which they presented themselves to me over the course of a month of reading box scores at odd hours and making notes in the margins and occasionally setting down whatever I was reading and staring at the wall for a while before the wall clarified something sufficiently that I could write it down.

The first thing I wrote down, on a Tuesday morning in the first week of June, was a question: Does anybody cover the Polecats? Not rhetorically. As a genuine inquiry into the structure of league coverage, motivated by the observation that I had been reading league publications for several weeks and had found in them very little sustained attention paid to the Poland Polecats. A paragraph here. A mention in the notes at the end of a column there. An occasional flag in a notebook column — this notebook column — that the Polecats were interesting without doing the work of explaining what specifically was interesting about them.

I am partly responsible for this failure. I have been writing this column for the duration of a season in which the Polecats have been doing something worth watching, and I have mostly written about other things. Consider this paragraph my formal acknowledgment of the failure and my attempt, in the space remaining in this column, to begin correcting it.

Isaac Collins plays for the Polecats. The first time you watch Isaac Collins play after having read only his box scores, there is a specific kind of disorientation that results, which is the disorientation of discovering that a player you expected to encounter through statistics is being described by those statistics in a fundamentally incomplete way. Collins does not hit forty home runs. He does not drive in a hundred runs. He does not strike out the side in the seventh inning of a high-leverage situation. What Collins does is occupy every moment of every game with a level of attention and preparation that makes him, over the course of a five-game series, more valuable than the accounting systems of box scores are designed to capture.

The baserunning is where it is most visible, because it happens in public, in front of anyone watching, and because the correct decisions produce consequences visible in the box score even when the decisions themselves do not appear in it. When Collins takes the extra base on a single to right field, that extra base becomes a run two at-bats later. When Collins reads an outfielder's arm correctly and goes from first to third on a hit that most runners take one base on, the third-base position changes everything about what the next hitter needs to do in that situation. These consequences are real. They show up in the run total. What does not show up is the calculation Collins made in the half-second before he committed to going — the outfielder's arm speed and release angle, the momentum of his own body, the probability of safe versus out, the value of the base against the cost of the out in this specific game state — and which was correct.

Collins also does not take the extra base when taking it is the wrong decision. This sounds obvious. It is not obvious. Most players are calibrated incorrectly on the basepaths in one direction or the other — too conservative, costing their team bases they should have taken, or too aggressive, making outs that cost runs. Collins is calibrated correctly, or close enough to correctly that the aggregate of his baserunning decisions over a season produces value that does not appear in any single box score and appears very clearly in the aggregate. In August, when the games are close enough that one extra base in the sixth inning is the run that decided a series, Collins will have been taking those bases all season. Write his name down before it becomes expensive to have been wrong about him.

The second thing I wrote down was in larger handwriting than usual, which means I was pressing harder on the pen, which means I was more energized than my normal note-taking state: Shea Langeliers won a thirteen-inning game with a walk-off two-run home run and Phil Maton got the win and I want someone else to have noticed this happened.

I am going to give you the brief outline of that game even though I told myself I was moving on to the next note, because the outline deserves to exist in print. The Wales Black Sox and another club played baseball for thirteen innings. That is not a short game. Thirteen innings means the managers used most of their bullpens. It means the lineup turned over multiple times, so that the decisions made in the fifth inning about which reliever to deploy had compounding consequences by the eleventh that no one could have fully anticipated in the fifth. It means the score was close enough, for three hours and thirteen innings, that neither team found a way to end the argument decisively.

And then Shea Langeliers came up in the thirteenth inning and hit a two-run home run. Phil Maton pitched the thirteenth inning and did not give up runs, and then his team scored two runs, and the game ended, and Phil Maton received credit for the win. This is how the accounting system works. The pitcher who is pitching when the winning team takes the lead gets the win. I am not criticizing the system. I am noting that Phil Maton won a baseball game and that Shea Langeliers hit a walk-off two-run home run in the thirteenth inning of a game in Wales and that both of these things happened and deserve to exist in print.

The third thing I wrote down — which I crossed out and rewrote four times before settling on the version I have here, which means it took real effort to get right — was this: the Jaybirds' bullpen is actually good. Not "good given the circumstances." Not "good relative to what you'd expect." Not "good for a team with the Jaybirds' record." Actually good. The qualifying clauses are tempting because the Jaybirds' overall results invite qualifying clauses, but I want to resist them, because the qualifying clauses attach to the rotation, not the bullpen.

The rotation has bled runs in the middle innings of games the Jaybirds needed to win. Those runs have created deficit situations. A bullpen in a deficit situation produces different statistics than the same bullpen in a lead-protection situation, and the difference in the statistics does not reflect a difference in the bullpen's quality — it reflects a difference in the context the rotation created. The Jaybirds' relievers in lead-protection situations are executing. The sequencing is right. The arms are doing their jobs. The record that results from bullpen performance in deficit situations looks like a bad bullpen record. It is not a bad bullpen record. It is a good bullpen in bad situations, and the situation is the rotation's fault. I want that distinction on the record, in print, because I think it matters for how you evaluate the Jaybirds' second half and the July 15 waiver wire decision they will make with first priority.

The fourth thing — the one I kept coming back to and rewriting most — was: the Keystone Fightins play in Cleona, Pennsylvania. I want you to say that phrase out loud. Cleona, Pennsylvania. Now say Nevada. Now say Cleona, Pennsylvania again and pay attention to the distance between the two sounds. That distance is not only a geographic fact, though Pennsylvania and Nevada are genuinely separated by significant geography. It is a franchise identity fact. The distance between what the Fightins were and what the Fightins are in the process of becoming is the kind of distance that does not shrink when the moving trucks leave. It shrinks across a full season, as the team learns what it means to be this team in this place against this competition, and the Fightins are in the middle of that process at sixty games. Migut understands this. The Fightins' situation is not what the current standings suggest it is. Watch what happens in August.

The fifth thing: Tom Bryce, Roseville, California, twenty and forty. I have stared at twenty and forty for longer than I have stared at any other number in this month's notebook, trying to find the most honest and useful thing to say about it. Here is what I found: twenty and forty does not say anything about Tom Bryce as a manager or a person or a participant in this league that twenty and forty in one season is entitled to say. It says the Golden Bears have had a difficult sixty games. It does not say Tom Bryce is finished. It does not say the second half cannot look different from the first. Twenty and forty in June is a man having a hard season. Tom Bryce will be back in September to account for the full year, and he will be back next season to show what the answer to this season was. He has been back from difficult seasons before. This is not a column about Tom Bryce being finished. It is a note that twenty and forty happened and that it should not be used to say more than it says.

The sixth thing — and I have saved it for last because it is the thing I most enjoyed writing down, which is not a criterion I usually use but which I am using today on the grounds that the last item in a notebook column should be the one that lingers — is this: Peter Gammons announced the TSL-Krispy Kreme partnership and delivered the line "not something to be glazed over," and I was in the room when he said it.

I want to give you the full context of that moment, because the context matters. Gammons received the assignment to announce the partnership with the gravity he brings to every assignment, which is the gravity of someone who has spent fifty years understanding that every act of public communication is a small act of historical record and should be treated accordingly. He prepared notes. He revised the notes. He asked whether Krispy Kreme had a preferred way to characterize the nature of the arrangement that he should incorporate into the announcement. He was told there was no required language, but that he should feel free to represent the partnership with appropriate dignity and enthusiasm.

He considered this for approximately thirty seconds. Then he said: "This is not something to be glazed over."

I have been present when people said things that were exactly right — the phrase that closed the question and opened the next one, the line that the room understood immediately as the line — and when Gammons said that sentence, the room understood it as the line. The pun is good. The gravity is calibrated precisely to the size of the moment. The proportion between the significance of a Krispy Kreme partnership and the solemnity with which Gammons delivered the announcement is exactly right — slightly more solemn than the announcement warrants, and that slight excess of solemnity is the joke, and the joke lands because Gammons has been landing sentences for fifty years and knows how it is done.

The spokesperson announcement is coming. I do not know who it is. Gammons told us to consider it a spoiler for the day, and then he stopped talking about it, which is exactly how you announce something you want people to keep thinking about. The deli container is on Bob Monaghan's table in Branchburg. The Polecats' Isaac Collins is going to take the extra base in August when it matters. And the TSL-Krispy Kreme spokesperson is coming, and it is not something to be glazed over. Write all three down.

The eighth thing I wrote down — which I have been saving because I wanted to write it carefully — is about the Rampage. Twenty-one and thirty-nine. Hunter Brown at one-point-nine-five ERA. Quinn Priester at two-point-two-eight. Yoshinobu Yamamoto at two-point-six-three. Corbin Burnes at two-point-five-one. Four pitchers in the top twelve ERA qualifiers in this league, on a team that has twenty-one wins.

I have looked at this from every angle I can think of and I cannot make it make sense. The closest I have come to a theory is that the runs are not arriving in the innings when the pitching needs them most — that Mookie Betts at nine-fourteen OPS and Royce Lewis at eleven home runs and Marcus Semien at thirty-five RBI are producing in the wrong order, in the innings when the game is already decided rather than the innings when the game is close enough that a run matters. But that is not a theory. That is a description of the problem in different words.

What I know is this: Brian Lyons in Cedar Rapids is watching his rotation pitch at an elite level and receiving twenty-one wins in return. That gap — between what the pitching deserves and what the record shows — is not sustainable in either direction. Either the wins come, as probability and the underlying quality of the rotation suggest they should, or something structural about how this club scores runs will keep the wins away even as the pitchers continue to produce extraordinary numbers. I am betting on the former. I am writing it down now. September will tell us which side of that bet was right.

The ninth thing, briefly: Seth Lugo posted a zero-point-two-oh ERA in June. Zero. Point. Two. Zero. I keep writing that number down because I cannot quite believe it and writing it down makes it feel more real. It is real. It happened. Look it up if you don't believe me.

The tenth thing: I am glad this league exists and I am glad to write about it. Somewhere behind all of these numbers are people who have been doing this for eleven seasons and twelve seasons and more, thinking about the sixth inning of games that start in seven hours, eating cold food from deli containers, writing down the names of players nobody else is writing about yet. I will be back in August with more things I wrote down that didn't fit anywhere else. Keep watching.

One last thing, because I said ten things and I have written eight and the other two are short. The eleventh thing I wrote down is that the June Wire exists and it is the place where all of this gets written down and distributed and remembered, and that is not nothing. The numbers will mean something in September. The September numbers will mean something in October. None of that meaning is possible unless someone writes it down in June. I am glad to be doing the writing. I will be back.

The twelfth thing, which I am adding because I got to eleven and realized I was not quite done: the Krispy Kreme partnership is real and Peter Gammons announced it and said "not something to be glazed over" and then stopped talking about it, which is the correct way to announce something you want people to keep thinking about. The spokesperson is coming. I do not know who it is. I know the pun lands. I was in the room. Consider that your spoiler for the day, and consider also that I have now written twelve things that didn't fit anywhere else, which is two more than I planned and exactly as many as the month produced. I'll be back in August.