Manny Machado on the path to 3,000 hits? Plus: Yes, shutouts are up this year

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Manny Machado’s new club isn’t the Hall of Fame, but it does look a lot like the waiting room for Cooperstown.

Plus: One weird trick to making it to the All-Star Game and Ken on Colorado’s hot seat. Also, what’s going on with all the shutouts? Can someone explain? I’m Levi Weaver, here with Ken Rosenthal — welcome to The Windup!

Milestones: Machado gets No. 2,000

It’s been quite a week for nice round numbers. After Clayton Kershaw got strikeout No. 3,000 last Wednesday, Manny Machado got his 2,000th hit last night. In doing so, he became the 17th player to get to 2,000 hits and 350+ home runs by the age of 33. (He turned 33 this week, in fact.)

Check out this list of the others: Hank Aaron, Miguel Cabrera, Orlando Cepeda, Lou Gehrig, Ken Griffey Jr., Vladimir Guerrero, Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Mantle, Eddie Mathews, Willie Mays, Eddie Murray, Mel Ott, Albert Pujols, Jim Rice, Frank Robinson and Alex Rodriguez.

That’s 13 Hall of Famers, two (Cabrera and Pujols) who will be, and Alex Rodriguez.

Of course, the next question is: Could Machado get to 3,000? Dennis Lin offers some perspective:

💬 (Machado) is the 95th player to reach 2,000 hits by age 33, and the 18th to do so this century. Five of the first 17 — Derek Jeter, Rodriguez, Adrian Beltré, Pujols and Cabrera — went on to compile 3,000 hits.

Monday’s pair of initial hits at Petco Park made Machado one of five active players with at least 2,000 hits, and perhaps the one with the best chance of reaching 3,000. Machado is younger than the rest — Freddie Freeman, Jose Altuve, Andrew McCutchen and Paul Goldschmidt — and his 11-year, $350 million contract runs through 2033.

More Padres: The Dads are still looking for the return of their vaunted offense.

Ken’s Notebook: Front-office shakeup looming in Colorado?

From my latest column:

The idea of Colorado moving on from general manager Bill Schmidt is generating chatter within the industry and drawing public acknowledgment from ownership. But before Sunday, the possibility of Schmidt getting dismissed or more likely reassigned before the amateur draft and trade deadline seemed remote.

It might still be remote, but baseball often is a copycat industry. And the Washington Nationals, operating without regard for the baseball calendar, just fired president of baseball operations Mike Rizzo and manager Davey Martinez one week before the draft and less than a month before the deadline.

If anything, the Rockies have even more reason to act. At 21-70, they are on pace to finish 37-125 and break the 2024 Chicago White Sox’s mark for the worst record in modern major-league history. When it comes to the draft and deadline, it would be almost impossible to do any worse than they have for the past decade. Schmidt, 65, ran the scouting department for more than 20 years before becoming GM in May 2021.

The Rockies already have instituted changes, replacing manager Bud Black with Warren Schaeffer on May 11 and installing Walker Monfort, the son of owner and CEO Dick Monfort, as executive vice president on June 26. Schmidt, sandwiched between the two, almost certainly will be the next to go.

Every draft and every deadline is potentially transformative. The Rockies hold the No. 4 pick. Their major-league roster includes players other teams want. But the franchise is so far gone that its decisions over the next month will carry only so much importance.

The Rockies’ next head of baseball operations needs to come from outside their weird little world, but possess a feel for the challenges of building a winner at Coors Field. And the first task for that person should be to gut the entire organization.

Walker Monfort, through a team spokesperson, declined comment Monday on Schmidt’s status. A move in the coming days would be as curiously timed as the Nationals’ firing of Rizzo, not that the Rockies ever seem to care about departing from industry norms. But whether the team would be confident elevating an interim replacement the way the Nats did with assistant GM Mike DeBartolo is not known.

More here.

Trends: A whole lot of, well, ‘nothing’

If it seems like your favorite team has been shut out more often than usual this year, you’re probably right!

Check this out, from near the bottom of Jayson Stark’s “What we’ve learned in the first half of the MLB season” story yesterday:

“… this year, this sport is on pace for about 100 more shutouts than we saw in (2019). At this pace, we’ll see 365 shutouts, the most in a full season in the history of baseball. The current record of 359 was set in the dead-ball era, in 1915, when there were only 16 teams. But in the live-ball era (1920-present), the full-season record is 357, in 1972.”

Well, that’s weird. What’s going on?

My first theory: The White Sox and Rockies are tipping the scales. Seems obvious, right?

Nope. The Rockies have only been shut out nine times — one more than the Brewers and Giants. The White Sox are at six (tied with the Yankees, Phillies and others).

The league “leaders” are the Pirates, at 13. That’s a lot, but it’s not on pace to top the 1908 St. Louis Cardinals (33). And anyway, the Diamondbacks are offsetting them: They’ve only been shut out twice this year. Twenty-two of the 30 teams have been shut out between five and nine times. It’s league-wide.

Theory 2: Maybe it has to do with the case of the mystery ball drag?

You’d think, but home runs and runs scored are each down by only a very small amount from last year. And if you look at the year-by-year averages, hits and walks are up, while strikeouts are at the lowest rate since 2017. So … what gives?

I’m down to theory No. 3:  Nicolas Cage is somehow involved.

Figure It Out: One weird trick to become an All-Star?

It’s a phrase nearly as old as “Play Ball!” and it goes like this: “If _____ could just figure out _____, he could be an All-Star.”

You can probably think of a lot of frustrating examples when a guy never did figure it out. But today, we have two examples of guys who did, becoming All-Stars this year.

Player No 1: Kyle Stowers
Thing he figured out: the high fastball. After being traded from the Orioles to the Marlins last year, Stowers hit just .186 (.556 OPS) in 50 games. Scouting reports don’t take long to spread around the league, and everyone seemed to know: high heat works against this guy.

But as Britt Ghiroli tells us today, Stowers spent the offseason focused on solving that hole in his swing, tweaking his stance and hoping the Marlins would give him one more shot at playing every day. They did, and the changes worked … now he’s an All-Star, posting an .861 OPS and hitting 16 home runs.

Player No. 2: Randy Rodríguez
Thing he figured out: his command. In 35 games with the Giants last year — his first in the big leagues — he walked 3.1 hitters per nine innings. That’s not awful, but it was also kind of an aberration. In the minor leagues, he walked 5.2 hitters per nine.

This year? Try 1.8 walks per nine. Throw in a 0.69 ERA, a WHIP of 0.77 and 12.5 strikeouts per nine, and that’s an All-Star, baby.

Player No. 3: Your favorite player

Thing he figured out: Check back in 2026. He’s gonna do it. Don’t give up hope. You never know, right?

Handshakes and High Fives

The MLBPA is investigating an agent — Yasser Mendez — after accusations of financial misconduct. The details aren’t entirely dissimilar to the lawsuit that Fernando Tatis Jr. filed recently. Britt Ghiroli has more here.

Our trade deadline big board is now in phase 2.0. Meanwhile, Keith Law’s mock draft is up to version 3.0

The Yankees are calling up 24-year-old pitching prospect Cam Schlittler to replace Clarke Schmidt in the rotation. Law scouted Schlittler and others recently.

Bench coach Miguel Cairo — who played for nine teams in his 17-year MLB career — has been named the interim manager of the Nationals.

Daniel Palencia has been nails in the ninth for the Cubs. Hey, where did he come from, anyway?

How about an All-Star squad of guys who never made an All-Star squad in the 21st century?

On the pods: “The Roundtable” discussed All-Star snubs, and “Rates & Barrels” took a look at Brandon Woodruff’s long-awaited (and impressive) return. Both also addressed the Nats’ big firings.

(Photo: Denis Poroy / Imagn Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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