A more-consistent arm slot related to a move back to the third base side of the rubber has contributed to Cole Ragans’s success this season. The raw stuff was obviously already there. As Ben Clemens wrote back in March, the Kansas City Royals left-hander “looks like an absolute terror on the mound.” My colleague went on to say that if he “were designing a pitcher in a laboratory, he’d look a lot like Ragans.” When I talked to the 2024 American League All-Star on the eve of the break, he told me that going into full attack mode following last year’s oft-reported velocity jump played a huge role in his emergence as a front-line starter. As he put it, “I kind of had to teach myself that I could get away with a little more of a miss compared to when I was throwing 90-91 [mph]. I have a good arsenal in my opinion, so I can just go after hitters.” And then there’s the work he does in the laboratory. “I use TrackMan in my bullpens, especially with the slider and the cutter, to kind of see where I’m at,” said Ragans, whose heater is now mid-to-high 90s. “The biggest thing for me is my release points, making sure that my pitches are in a tight cluster. I want everything coming out of the same tunnel. I don’t want to be throwing a fastball from this release height, and my slider from a lower release height.” Ragans has “gone through phases” where that has happened, including earlier this year where he found himself dropping his arm slot “three or four inches” when throwing his slider. A change to where he stood on the rubber contributed to the undesirable difference. He moved from the third base side to the first base side during the offseason and remained there throughout spring training and for his first few regular-season starts. “What I’d wanted was more horizontal approach angle, especially versus lefties with the curveball,” explained Ragans, who has a 3.16 ERA and a 2.67 FIP on the season. “Left on left, I’d kind of be coming from behind their ear. But doing that kind of messed up the feel of certain pitches, especially the slider; I was yanking it, making sure that it didn’t stay middle. We decided to move back to the third base side, and from there the slider got back to where it needed to be.” Where it needed to be was coming out of the same slot as his high-octane fastball and other pitches, which makes one of baseball’s best arsenals even better. With the issue identified on video and subsequently corrected, the southpaw was back to looking like Cole Ragans. ——— RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS Angel Pagán went 0 for 14 against Brad Ziegler. Brett Gardner went 0 for 16 against Darren O’Day. Julio Franco went 0 for 17 against Dan Quisenberry. Marquis Grissom went 1 for 17 against Byung-Hyun Kim. Ivan Rodriguez went 1 for 18 against Chad Bradford. ——— I ran a Twitter poll on the afternoon of Tuesday’s All-Star Game, asking how much of it people were planning to watch. There were four options, and the results strongly suggested that the Midsummer Classic — this year’s was the 95th — isn’t nearly the attraction it once was. Only 19% of respondents selected “all,” while another 15.9% went with “most.” The lesser-interest options fared much better. “Some” garnered 29.4% of the votes cast, and “none” topped the poll with 35.7%. Viewership numbers were nothing to write home about. Per the Associated Press, “This year’s All-Stars drew 7,443,000 viewers on Fox, up 6% from the 2023 game but the second lowest for the event.” Moreover, the “3.8 rating and 12 share were down from a 3.9/12 last year.” None of this is surprising. For a variety of reasons — inter-league play and regular access to most every game/team/player are the primary ones — the game has clearly lost much of its luster. The days of Pete Rose running over Ray Fosse (in 1970) and Carl Hubbell striking out five consecutive Hall of Famers he’d never before faced (1934) are long gone. As B.B. King famously sang, the thrill is gone. ——— Jerry Izenberg’s Larry Doby in Black and White: The Story of a Baseball Pioneer is one one of the best books to come out this year. Within its pages, the author tells of Doby, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Jackie Robinson all playing in the 1949 All-Star Game, which was held at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. “No Black man had ever been in an All-Star dugout before,” Izenberg wrote. “All four had been signed off Negro League rosters, but Doby was the only one whom baseball general managers had paid to sign; [Branch] Rickey and the Dodgers refused to negotiate or pay for their three. [Bill] Veeck, of course, paid the [Newark] Eagles for Doby.” A not-unimportant part of baseball history that most fans probably aren’t aware of. ——— A quiz: Of the 34 players to have hit 400 or more home runs since the start of the 1980 season, only three played exclusively for one team. Who are they? The answer can be found below. ——— NEWS NOTES The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announced on Friday that Kim Ng has joined its board of directors. The official announcement can be found here. Jerry Walker, who pitched for the Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Athletics, and Cleveland Indians in a career that spanned the 1957-1964 seasons, died earlier this week at age 85. The right-hander went 11-10 with a 2.92 ERA for the Orioles in 1959, a year that saw him throw 16 scoreless innings to earn a 1-0 win over the Chicago White Sox. Nelson Chittum, a right-hander who pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1958, and for the Boston Red Sox in 1959 and 1960, died this past week at age 91. His career ledger includes a 3-1 record and a 3.84 ERA over 68 innings. ——- The answer to the quiz is Jeff Bagwell, Chipper Jones, and Cal Ripken Jr. ——— Back in June, I put together a piece titled Player’s View: The Best Game of My Life in which a dozen current big leaguers shared memories of their greatest individual performances to date, and not just at baseball’s highest level. Included were games from the minors, college, high school, and even youth leagues. I’ve since begun procuring accounts from other players, with plans to sporadically include them here in Sunday Notes. I’ll start with Cleveland Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan, who shared one each from MLB, NCAA, and Little League. “It would probably be my third big-league game [on April 10, 2022],” said Kwan, “We were playing Kansas City and I had a 5-for-5 day. I couldn’t even explain how it all happened. There were maybe two barrels out of the five hits, but everything was falling. That was a big day for me in affirming that I could play in the big leagues. We won the game, as well. It was exciting. “When I was [at Oregon State University] we had a game my junior year, against LSU, who had knocked us out of the tournament the year before. I ended up working a nine or 10 pitch at-bat to lead off the game and hit a home run to give us a 1-0 lead. I don’t remember how the rest of the game went, but I remember that being awesome. That one really sticks out to me. “When I was 12 years old, we were playing on a Little League field, my home ballpark, and I went 4-for-5 with four homers. On the fifth one, I flew out to the warning track and my teammates were cheering because I got out. That was a funny one, although I remember being a little bothered that my teammates were cheering that I got out. I was obviously just trying to win the game, but they were somewhere else with all that.” ——— FOREIGN AFFAIRS Hiroto Takahashi had yet another overpowering outing as he continues to be NPB’s most-enthralling pitcher…
