Week 22 ass hDLes - Oprah style bean balls

There are only a couple of teams playing this week, so it makes sense that there arent very many entries in to the ass hDLes portion of the blog this week.  I am not going to do a great big introduction for this one because I am going to end up writing way way too much in the entry on TMGS, so...I'll hit up David Wright and then move on to Giancarlo.

New York Mets on behalf of 3b David Wright - MBHB - Shoulder injury, shut down for season
Dear New York Mets-
Why you gotta decide to shut someone down on Tuesday afternoon?  Waviers run on Tuesday morning, so your decision to wait an extra 12 hours basically eliminated any chance I would have had to pick up a replacement from waivers for next week's matchup (should I make it there with a lineup that already includes Wright who will provide no stats this week) and forced me into a terrible trade where I had to give up 25 year old up and coming, soon to be perennial MVP candidate 1b Anthony Rizzo for the 36 year old android hitting machine Aramis Ramirez (I will get into this trade on Tuesday as part of the normal waiver adds, but just know that I wasnt terribly pleased about having to make it).
Thanks,
The Commish

Overall, Wright has been pretty average this year, which means, in a 10 team fantasy league, that he has been pretty terrible.  His .324 on base percentage and .374 slugging percentage are both the lowest marks of his "hall of very good" worthy career (that means not quite hall of fame, but definitely someone who will be remembered as a great player...his #1 comp on B-R is Scott Rolen, which is an apt comparison.  Its tough to remember that Wright, finishing his 11th year in MLB is only 31 years old (and is signed with the Mets through 2020, his age 37 season).  With the down year and the high salary, Wright is not in the keeper discussion and will likely hit the waiver wire this coming Tuesday).


OF TMGS - UCCMA - Broken Face, likely shut down for the season
There was an epidemic of bean balls last night.  Chase Headley took one off the grill. Carlos Gomez got one.  Mike Trout got a pair.  Andrew McCutchon just missed getting one.  But the worst, and probably the one with the largest impact in fantasy and in real life, was the one suffered by Giancarlo Stanton. I am guessing that, by now, most if not all of you have seen the play where Brewer (and MBHB) pitcher Mike Fiers throws one up and in on Giancarlo that just keeps running all the way in until it hits Stanton in the face.  I am not going to link it, if youve seen it, then you know that you dont need to see it again.  If you havent seen it, you should know that you are probably better off not seeing it.  The ball made contact squarely with Stanton's cheek and fell straight down the first base line.  I have seen something like this live.  When I was in college, we were playing a game against Southwest State (before they were SW MN St.) and one of the pitchers on our team threw a high and tight heater in the upper 80s that connected with the batter's face...the ball bounced all the way back to the mound.  Neither player was ever the same.  Our pitcher could no longer through a fastball on the inner half of the plate because he feared what he could do to another person.  The batter, who we saw again in each of the next couple of seasons, bailed out on almost every pitch thrown on the inner half.  Baseball players, both pitchers and hitters, have to train their bodies and minds to react to things in the shortest amount of time imaginable (a 90 MPH fastball goes from the pitchers hand to the catcher's mitt in 0.42 seconds.  If a hitter wants to make contact with that ball, he needs to see the pitch, determine the pitch type and the location, decide if he wants to swing or not, then start his swing in about .25 seconds from the time the ball leaves the pitchers hand). 

Great MLB hitters like TMGS have hand eye coordination skills that the average person cannot begin to comprehend.  That is one of the reasons why it is so surprising to me to see the approach and partial swing that Stanton took at the pitch.  He never once tried to get out of the way of the ball.  Now, I have no idea what that means, and I certainly dont think that he was trying to get himself hit in the face, but it is strange that he so terribly misjudged the path that the ball was going to take (it almost looks like he thought the pitch was going to be a curve ball or something that changed directions and ended up out over the outter half of the plate).  Hopefully, that miscalculation isnt career altering. 
In addition to teaching oneself to react extremely quickly and to have your body respond to those directions, both hitters and pitchers have to teach themselve to ignore the very real possibility of either seriously injuring someone else or getting seriously injured themselves.  Pitchers have to be able to put out of their head that, on any given pitch they have the potential to kill another person.  Advances in protective equipment for batters have rendered the possibility of that happening rather slim (these arent the days of Ray Chapman and the batters who wore their hats up to the plate), but the potential for that, and the other more likely injuries like broken bones, are real.  If you have seen the way that Mike Fiers reacted when the ball hit Stanton and TMGS fell like a sack of potatoes, you could see the realization wash over Fiers.

In that exact moment, he recognized the power and responsibilty that he was holding as a pitcher.  His body language, his post game comments, and the fact that the next pitch hit the batter who came on for Stanton (though both the ball that hit Stanton and the one that hit Reed Johnson were called strikes on swing attempts...Casey McGehee disagreed) show me that Fiers might not be able to successfully come back from this experience.  I hope that he does, in part because he is on my fantasy team but moreso because he is the type of player who gets passed over by most of the MLB organizations today.  He has a below average fastball velocity for a right hander.  He has never been highly regarded as a prospect despite a career minor league WHIP of 1.01 with 537 strike outs over 484 innings pitched (10.0 K/9) with only 120 base on balls (2.2 BB/9).  If you looked at the numbers, and not at the person or the pitch movement/velocity, you would have assumed that the player in question was an MLB superstar who was injured a lot and spent a ton of time on rehab assignments, not a journeyman minor leaguer praying to get one more shot in the Bigs. 

Fiers just knows how to pitch in the way that someone like Trevor Bauer or Archie Bradley or Tuijuan Walker, who have all the "stuff" scouts look for, never will.  MLB needs more people like Fiers.

As hitters, people arent born ith the ability to ignore/be ok with a baseball moving at 90 MPH traveling directly at you.  Its the reason that curveballs and sliders are so successful at the lower levels of competitive baseball; your body's normal reaction is to get the fuck out of the way.  When Stanton makes it back to a batter's box over the winter, or in spring training next season, his reaction to the first pitch that comes inside is going to be very telling.  A player can get over being hit in the thigh, or the back, or the arm, or even in the helmet.  Bruises and the sound of the plastic thump go away and can be forgotten easily.  I used to get hit so often than my teammates used to joke that I had a baseball magnet in my helmet and I dont recall a single one of them in any detail (though I, and the scars on my leg) do vividly recall getting spiked in the knee).  But getting hit in the face is a different story.  There is a different kind of pain associated with that, and overcoming the body's natural urge to protect itself from that kind of pain is tricky.  There is also the danger for permanent damage to something like TMGS's eye.  Look at the case of Tony Conigliaro.  Conigliaro was a Bo Sawks OFer in the 1960s.  He came up in 1964 as a 19 year old and hit a still standing MLB record 24 HRs as a teenager, which he followed up with a league leading 32 in his second season (at 20, he became the youngest player to ever lead his league in HRs).  During the first half of the 1967 season (his 4th), he became the second youngest player ever to hit 100 HRs (behind Mel Ott).
His age 21 most comparable player per BR is Mickey fricken Mantle.  In short, he was a breakout superstar in his early 20s playing for one of the most storied and tourtured franchises in professional sports.  In August of the '67 season, he was hit in the left cheekbone by a fastball from the Angels journeyman pitcher Jack Hamilton and had to be taken off the field on a stretcher.  Tony C missed all of the 1968 season and made  a decent comeback in '69 followed by a career year in '70 (266/324/498 with 36 HRs and 116 RBI).  But after 1970, he played in only 95 career games and hit only 6 more HRs due to increasingly poor vision in his left eye that was a direct result of the beaning.  You wouldnt have to change much to be describing Stanton.  Stanton came up as a 20 year old and hit 22 HRs in his first half season, then hit 34 in his second (giving him 66 through 2 seasons, exactly the same number as Tony C).  Stanton also hit his 100th HR in his 4th season, though he was a year older than Conigliaro because he started a year later.  This year, Stanton has blossomed into an all around superstar, hitting a league leading 37 HRs, flashing great defense and even stealing 13 bases in 14 attempts.  The early reports are that Stanton will not need surgery to repair anything (just some dental work and some stitches) and that he even hopes to return before the end of the season (hopefully the Marlins are smart enough to keep him out, they are 5.5 games out with 17 to play).  If we're lucky, Stanton will return to being a once in a generation talent who can hit baseballs further than many of us can dream that a baseball can be hit.  Hopefully there is never another Ray Chapman or Tony Conigliaro.  Hopefully Mike Fiers recovers and we can all move on from this and forget that it ever happened (other than Jim, whose playoff hopes took a serious hit when you remove TMGS even for a couple games).