The Freeman slam, Buehler’s FA, and MLB TV: A Trio of…
While we wait on today’s announcement that Shohei Ohtani will win his third MVP award, here are some Dodgers and baseball stories to start your Thursday.
The ball Freddie Freeman hit for the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history to beat the Yankees in Game 1 landed in the hands of Zachary Ruderman, a 10-year-old fan. The ball is now going up for auction at SCP Auctions, running December 4-14. The company’s press release cited Ohtani’s 50-50 ball selling for nearly $4.3 million including fees last month in saying the Freeman grand slam ball “easily worth seven figures.”
Walker Buehler is worthy of the Dodgers re-signing, and David Adler at MLB.com laid out three reasons why. Among them was the right-hander finding life on his fastball, with a 29-percent whiff rate in the postseason.
Evan Drellich at The Athletic wrote about MLB and commissioner Rob Manfred’s grand plan of creating national streaming packages by 2028, which will require changes to the league’s revenue-sharing plan, and how this will all affect negotiations with the MLBPA on the collective bargaining agreement by the 2026-27 offseason.
You know how when news is leaked after a signing or trade that another team who did not get said player were in fact interested in acquiring them, but it didn’t work out for whatever reason? Davy Andrews at FanGraphs is fascinated by these, and has ventured to create the “We tried” tracker. Godspeed.
You might think Baseball Prospectus is all about statistics, but I very much enjoyed this piece from Timothy Jackson, reflecting on the baseball season and being present in enjoying each moment, even the smaller ones.
“When everything swirls together just right everyone goes dead silent again. Again, it’s not for reverence, or sanctity, or respectability, or even for the sake of being objective,” Jackson wrote. “Instead, it’s a moment of witness. No chart or table could ever capture it, and no chart or table should ever try.”
