Here are three things to keep an eye on around MLB today…
1. Goldschmidt injury watch:
Yankees first baseman Paul Goldschmidt was unavailable for yesterday’s game after suffering a knee injury in Tuesday’s rout of the Twins. The team announced yesterday that Goldschmidt has a low-grade sprain with some inflammation. Goldschmidt told Bryan Hoch of MLB.com that he’s hoping for a “short-term” absence and thinks there’s a chance he could avoid the injured list entirely. The Yankees are off today, though it’s hardly uncommon for clubs to provide medical updates even on off-days. Goldschmidt, who’ll turn 38 next month, has cooled considerably since a blistering start to the season. He’s still hitting .276/.331/.422 overall (108 wRC+), but nearly all of his production came in April and May. Since June 1, he’s hitting just .207/.259/.340 (63 wRC+) in 203 trips to the plate.
2. Muncy being evaluated for potential injury:
Max Muncy was scratched from yesterday’s game after feeling discomfort in his right side, per Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register. He’ll be further evaluated today. Muncy’s season has been the opposite of Goldschmidt. The 34-year-old slugger got out to a brutal start but caught fire in late April and has been in vintage form ever since. Muncy drew the ire of Dodgers fans when he opened the season with a woeful .167/.283/.231 performance through his first 25 games (92 plate appearances). Since then? Things look a little different. Muncy has turned in a mammoth .294/.427/.592 batting line with 17 home runs and more walks (18.8%) than strikeouts (15.7%) in his past 255 plate appearances. He’s averaging 91.6 mph off the bat in that time and sporting an enormous 53.3% hard-hit rate. By measure of wRC+, he’s been 80% better than average at the plate since late April.
Obviously, an absence of any note would sting terribly for Los Angeles, particularly in light of the team’s recent slide in the standings. The Dodgers have dropped four games in a row and are just 12-21 over their past 33 games. Making matters worse for L.A. is that the red-hot Padres have won five straight games, leapfrogging the Dodgers for sole possession of first place in the National League West.
3. Top Cubs prospect set for debut in home country:
Cubs fans should get their first look at top outfield prospect Owen Caissie today, as he’s reportedly set to be recalled from Triple-A as catcher Miguel Amaya heads to the injured list. As if his first call to the majors isn’t sweet enough, the Canadian-born Caissie will get the opportunity to make his debut in his home country, as the Cubs wrap up a road series against the Jays in Toronto.
Caissie’s name has kicked up in trade rumors both in the offseason and at the recent trade deadline, but the Cubs held onto him — and all of their other most highly regarded prospects — amid a surprisingly quiet deadline. Caissie, a 2020 second-round pick, has slashed .289/.389/.566 (143 wRC+) with 22 homers, 26 doubles and two triples in 404 plate appearances during his second run through the Triple-A level. While his production has improved in his second stint at the level, Caissie’s problematic strikeout rate remains largely unchanged. He fanned in 28.4% of his plate appearances in 127 Triple-A games last year and is at 28.2% through 93 games in 2025.
Along with the Caissie story, let’s not forget the Cubs starting pitcher Boyd was drafted by the Jays and included in the David Price trade with Detroit in 2015
That’s some full circle stuff right there, thank you for sharing! Let’s see how Caissie does against your Blue Jays!
Hey Across, anther little tidbit, Hoffman was drafted by the Jays the following year and included in the 2015 trade with the Rockies for Tulo and is now the Jays closer.
s/o Troy Tulowitzki man, one of my favs
Caissie was drafted by the Padres and traded for Darvish, if Caissie’s numbers translate to MLB I would call it a win-win trade.
“Muncy drew the ire of Dodgers fans ”
SOME Dodger fans.
Imagine drawing your ire
1) about a baseball player’s performance at all. Ever.
2) about a baseball player’s performance in fewer than 100 PA
The ire is real just look at the people giving Michael conforto death threats
Wives in LA are having a rough week
Every team has their bad fans and their ire.
Steingrabber, that lets NO ONE off the hook. It’s a total BS response showing the logic of a 2 year old.
But other than that, let’s go Mets.
stnmf
Yes. The ire is real. But it’s certainly not coming from “Dodger fans” as a whole.
@Boycottsidneysweeney
Yankees need some more payroll too. Maybe $1B isn’t enough to field a proper baseball team, in today’s economy. Maybe it should be $2B or $3B.
Caissie’s strikeout rate has gone down every month this year. 22.5% in August so far. Regardless, he can’t be much worse than the Cubs outfielders currently. Let’s see if he can spark something.
Sucks it comes at Amaya’s expense tho. That was brutal.
Hope it’s just a sprain like they say. From the look of it when it happened, I thought maybe he tore something when he hyperextended. Regardless, hard to watch.
Considering how bad all the outfielders are doing, a couple days off for those guys with Caissie subbing for them is exactly what they need.
It’s what they have needed all season.
Assuming LA stops with the stupid blunders, they will go as far as the health of their staff and the “wisdom” of Roberts takes them.
Well, strikeouts just dont have the negative stigma t they once did. Don’t want to be Get Off My Lawn guy, but back in the day, there was pride in sluggers not striking out 100 times. Now some of them are double that amount. Caissie can join teammate PCA in that regard.
The expectation was that guys would strikeout 100 times or so, and walk 100 times or so. At least that’s how guys like Jim Thome and Frank Thomas did it.
YBC:
It’s important to remember that baseball’s technology for measuring pitch speed evolved throughout the 1980s. Early radar guns sometimes measured closer to the plate, resulting in lower registered speeds than later technologies that measured velocity closer to the pitcher’s release point. This means that some pitches that might have registered at 95 mph in the early 80s could have been thrown even faster out of the pitcher’s hand.
The average fastball velocity this year is 94 mph and was 88 mph in the 80s/early 90s. It’s a different game today. If hitters today took the same approach today, you’ll see a lot more groundballs and weak pop-outs to avoid strikeouts.
Let’s really try to be a little bit realistic here….and I know that’s tough in this forum.
Sure, it’s a day and bad happening removed, but Caissie is now actually taking Berti’s spot on the roster and not Seiya’s or that of PCA, Tucker or Happ.
I get (and somewhat am part of it) the Chicken Little theory to the Cubs offense, but we shouldn’t expect 30 AB per week (maybe 9-12) per week from Caissie.
I suspect he will be used like Castro was on his arrival to give the OF/DH spot a breather, but let him contribute what he is asked by the Cubs, not the authors of this page.
Watching for the lineup today thinking maybe Caissie at DH and Seiya off against Scherzer.
Having Seiya off the bench late could be a good thing.
San Diego Padres: August Champions.
If the Dodgers don’t get the pen sorted in the next couple weeks, they’ll be battling the Reds for that third wild card spot….
Yankees don’t trust rice at catcher which is why he plays 1st and DH in the big leagues
Also if they put rice at catcher then Austin wells will have no path to playing time
They want better defensive catchers in Wells and JC Escarra behind the dish. Rice could probably catch full-time for half a dozen other teams.
MLB teams shouldn’t have “enough” payroll.
Is this “rachelmaddowishot” again? Come on, man
The Martian looking like another overhyped Yankees prospect.
Nobody was laughing in the offseason. They were crying because of the money teams spent and how the billionaire that owns their team is just too poor of a billionaire. Most fans already gave the Dodgers the WS rings before one pitch was thrown and cried about how it wasn’t fair. Remember the LOLing when these teams are overspending and laugh instead of cry. I’m still laughing that the Mets gave two pitchers that were collectively 90 years old 90 million dollars!!
@larkraxm
Teams are generally not smart.
Agreed! So can we as fans stop anointing the spenders as champions before the season even starts? Just because a team goes full Ellsbury on a contract does not mean they will be able to compete with the Milwaukee Brewers!
At least the Tucker defenders seem to have finally gone away–the self-important wise fools who have assured us that he is actually very good, and urged us to believe in his bWAR and all their other nonsense non-stats and disregard the evidence of our own eyes. The guy stinks. He can’t hit in general. and he hits even worse when there are runners in base. In recent days, he has been reduced to performing frustration after his bad at-bats–the last refuge of the overrated hitter who can at least ACT like he is surprised at his repeated failures. He is as bad as any regular the Cubs have had in the last decade and more. He will get some kind of short-term pillow contact from someone this winter; let’s hope it’s not the Cubs.
Canadians. On top of the AL East, producing players, leading the free world. Is there anything they can’t do ?
Winning the World Series is one.
Joe Carter has entered the chat.
They probably were talking about this year, I’m pretty sure.
It will be interesting to see whether the free-agent contract Kyle Tucker gets this winter reflects his reputation or his performance. Sad to say, he has become a genuine drag on a Cubs’ lineup that can’t afford it.
It feels like the Cubs have begun their final descent toward not making the playoffs, again. Something is simply missing–character, confidence, swag, something hard to define–in addition to the obvious holes, of course. And there is still a quarter of the season left; when 2025 is remembered, it will be remembered as a season when the Cubs didn’t even come particularly close. And the false bravado offered earlier by naive fans, here and elsewhere, will not be remembered at all.
What’s missing is scoring more runs than the other team.
Character, confidence, swag, look important when you win and stupid when you lose. They’re essentially meaningless.
As I said, “in addition to the obvious holes.”
Tucker stopped getting hits weeks ago. Now he has stopped getting walks too. That hurts his OBP, which seems to be the only thing he cares about. I suspect that is why he has started “showing frustration ” as the announcers say.
Have we ever seen a more ineffective player, or one who seems to care less about winning?
Patrick Wisdom and Frank Schwindel were better.
Someone mentioned Brian LaHair as a comp for Tucker. Yes
It’s just a feeling, and I can’t prove it, but I think part of the Cubs’ hitting problems might have to do with this business of batting Busch lead-off. He has his moments, but little consistency, and his batting first leads to other bad things, like Kelly batting fourth, etc.
I know there is NOTHING more old-fashioned and un-progressive than the idea of reverting to the long-ago pattern of having the fast guy bat first, the contact guy bat second, the high-average guy third, the home-run guy fourth, and so on; I am very skeptical of that myself. I understand why the newer plan is usually better. But when something isn’t working, why persist in it?
Back in the days of Kessinger-Beckert-Williams-Santo-Banks, at least there was a PLAN. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it had a rationale. The current lineup, steeped in analytics as it is, seems haphazard, unfocused–it is a lineup hoping that something good will happen. Hoping is not a plan. If I were CC, I think I’d try the old way for a couple of games. That would mean leading off with PCA–and you can fill in the rest.
Padres team is very strong and competitive this year.
Dodgers have taken a step back with injuries etc.
It has become very difficult to repeat as World Series Champions for various reasons.
There is an opening for other very good teams to win it all this year.
I would put the Padres on a list of at least 6-8 teams that could run the table and win it all this year.
All the Division leaders and a few of the Wild Card Times could emerge.
It depends on which team goes on a hot streak in from mid September through October this year.