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The first regular-season series is over! Now time for … more spring training!
Plus: The Aces Project is back, Ken reveals an unlikely connection between Max Scherzer and Jake Burger — and what on earth is the Department of Defense doing? I’m Levi Weaver, here with Ken Rosenthal. Welcome to The Windup!
While You Were Sleeping: Dodgers sweep Tokyo Series
You knew he was going to hit one, right?
First things first. It was Roki Sasaki’s MLB debut, and here’s how his first inning went: four pitches in triple digits, then two at 99 before breaking off an 85 mph slider. Back to 100, 99 before unveiling the disgusting splitter (which broke arm-side for ball one to Kyle Tucker). One more pitch — 99 mph — resulted in a Tucker fly-out to end the inning.
By the third inning, Sasaki’s adrenaline may have worn off a bit. With one out (and the fastball now sitting around 97 mph) he went single, walk, walk, walk to allow the Cubs’ first run. He ended his day with this line: 3 IP, 1 run, 1 hit, 5 walks, 3 strikeouts. Mixed results, but the Dodgers bullpen picked him up.
The first two home runs of the 2025 season? No surprise they came from two Dodgers, but Tommy Edman (9.83 HR/season in his first six seasons), and Kiké Hernández (10.9/year in 11 seasons)? Obviously. Number three was a bit more predictable, though. Shohei Ohtani (32.14 HR/season, ha ha) did what everyone came to see, hitting a wall-scraper in the top of the fifth to make it 6-2 Dodgers.
The Cubs did make it interesting in the ninth. With the score 6-3, Kyle Tucker doubled, then Justin Turner walked to bring rookie Matt Shaw to the plate as the tying run. But Miguel Rojas — playing shortstop because Mookie Betts’ illness kept him out of the series altogether — made a nice sliding catch in the hole and a great throw to beat Shaw by a step at first to end the game.
More Tokyo Series: MLB wants Japan to cheer for more than the Dodgers and Ohtani. The prize could be billions.
Ken’s Notebook: Scherzer, Burger have fluky history
From my latest column:
For once, Max Scherzer had little to say.
“It’s cool,” the Toronto Blue Jays’ right-hander acknowledged. “And I feel old.”
Scherzer wasn’t talking about entering his 18th major-league season, or turning 41 in July. No, he was referring to a far more jarring reminder of his baseball mortality: His sixth-grade social studies teacher, Shannon Burger, is the mother of a fellow major leaguer, Texas Rangers first baseman Jake Burger.
Yep, Shannon taught Scherzer world cultures and geography and one rotation of English at Parkway Middle School in Chesterfield, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. Jake, the oldest of Shannon’s two children, was born on April 10, 1996, shortly before Scherzer became her student during the 1996-97 school year.
Baseball fans know Scherzer as a three-time Cy Young winner, eight-time All-Star and two-time World Series champion. They also know him as one of the game’s most outspoken players, opining on sticky-stuff enforcement, the automatic ball-strike system and other topics that stir his emotions.
As a 12-year-old, though? Like any boy, Scherzer had his opinions, Shannon said. But it wasn’t as if he was constantly getting into arguments and winding up in the principal’s office, as some fans might expect of a young Mad Max.
“People loved Max and obviously his eyes made him stand out immediately, his two different-colored eyes,” Shannon Burger said, referring to a condition, heterochromia, that left Scherzer’s left eye dark brown and his right one light blue.
“He was a very smart kid. And obviously, he was athletic. I don’t recall him being gone a lot for baseball, traveling for baseball. But I do remember him being able to throw a softball or dodgeball-type ball really far. He was just a good kid. People liked being around him.”
Jake Burger said he probably was in high school the first time his mom told him about being Scherzer’s teacher. By then Scherzer was an established major leaguer. Shannon didn’t make a big deal out of knowing the star pitcher. She just mentioned Scherzer had been in her class, and was one of the students she chaperoned to a four-day residential outdoor camp for sixth graders about 90 minutes from school in Potosi, Mo.
More here.
Rankings: Aces Project, Year 6
I love a good recurring column. It gives an annual mile-marker for how the game has changed, year over year. Today marks the sixth year of The Aces Project, a panel of 20 executives, scouts and analysts who anonymously rank a list of 80 current starters — FanGraphs’ top 50 in fWAR in 2024, plus 30 others deemed worthy of inclusion.
It’s no surprise to see names like Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes at the top of the list, but every year, I use it as a little internal calibration on guys I might be over- or under-rating in my personal estimation.
Like Cleveland’s Tanner Bibee, for example. Our panel rated him the 29th-best starting pitcher in the game, ahead of names like Milwaukee’s Freddy Peralta (T-40) and Seattle’s Bryan Woo (T-30).
Cole Ragans of Kansas City is another. I’ve kept a close eye on Ragans’ career — to make the big leagues at all was a heck of a story — but sometimes it takes hearing it from the experts for it to fully sink in. He’s just outside the “ace” tier, but he’s knocking on the door.
Excellent work by our crew to put this together.
Really? Government site erases Jackie Robinson page
I was first tipped off to this by Craig Calcaterra’s “Cup of Coffee” newsletter.
Until recently, the Department of Defense’s website included a page titled: “Sports Heroes Who Served: Baseball Great Jackie Robinson Was WWII Soldier.” That page is no longer on their site.
You can click here for evidence if you like, but you may notice something unusual about the URL. The phrase “deisports” has been added to the front of it. (I know this because the Wayback Machine has an archived version, and the URL was obviously devoid of that term in the original).
I sent an e-mail to the Department of Defense, asking for an explanation as to why the page was taken down and why “DEI Sports” was added to the URL. Their response:
“Thank you for flagging –
“We will look into it and get back to you.”
I certainly have my thoughts on the reasons why, just as you might walk by a bit of graffiti and immediately have a pretty good sense of the vandal’s motivation. But I’ll let the reader make up their own mind, based on the evidence we have, and I’ll keep you posted if the department gets back to me with more details.
Handshakes and High Fives
If you click one link today, let it be this one: Our Michael Salfino helped authenticate a 1952 Mickey Mantle card, won in a game of pinochle in 1980.
Our series of articles on the five-year mark after COVID-19 continues with this thought exercise by Tim Britton: Which teams and players lost the most with the shortened 2020 season?
Lance McCullers Jr. made his first start — albeit a spring one — since the 2022 World Series. That’s a layoff of 868 days.
For years, David Stearns succeeded despite a small-market budget in Milwaukee. Will Sammon looks at how Steve Cohen’s budget has made Stearns “dangerous.”
A couple of veterans signed late-spring deals yesterday: Craig Kimbrel has returned to the Braves, and Patrick Corbin signed with the Texas Rangers.
From our friends at MLB’s site, meet the Blue Jays prospect with the game’s new best nickname: 6-foot 5, 255-pound Peyton Williams, aka “The Iowa Meat Truck.”
Tyler Kepner lays bare the truth in Pittsburgh: Paul Skenes is a star, and there are other good players. But ownership is, as of yet, unwilling to invest in a supporting cast to help the Pirates climb into true contention.
Skenes also joined “Starkville” to talk about a broad variety of topics, including pitch shapes and names, being on the cover of MLB The Show 25 and how life has changed for him since his big-league debut.
Most-clicked in our last newsletter: Brendan Kuty’s story on Alex Verdugo’s lingering free agency and his former Yankees teammates’ reactions.
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(Top photo: Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
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