We need to talk about Gunnar Henderson. Plus, the price of pitching progress

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Gunnar Henderson is on pace for history. Plus: Ken on the Blue Jays, Sam Blum has an exclusive interview with Eric Kay and part four of Missing Bats tells us what happens when the bill comes due. I’m Levi Weaver, here with Ken Rosenthal, welcome to The Windup!

History? We need to talk about Gunnar Henderson

Here is a list of every shortstop (minimum 50 percent of games played at the position) to hit 50 home runs in a season:

1. Alex Rodriguez (2002): 57
2. Alex Rodriguez (2001): 52

In fact, the list of shortstop seasons with 40 homers is only 13 long. Only two of them — Fernando Tatis Jr. (42 in 2021) and Rico Petrocelli (40 in 1969) — were by someone other than Rodriguez or Ernie Banks.

That sentence seems unlikely to remain true for long. Gunnar Henderson hit his 26th home run of the year last night in a 4-2 win over the Guardians. No other shortstop has more than 14. 

With the Orioles playing their 80th game of the season last night, it makes “on pace for” a pretty easy projection. Even if he takes tonight off, Henderson will be on pace for history: .282/.383/.607 (.989 OPS), 52 home runs, 32 doubles, eight triples, 140 runs and 110 RBI.

If you value Wins Above Replacement, here’s some context: Rodriguez’s 2002 season was worth just 8.8 bWAR, since, uh, everyone was hitting more home runs then (wink, wink). Rodriguez’s best season by bWAR was 2000 (10.4). Banks peaked at 10.2 bWAR in 1959.

The record? 11.5, set by Honus Wagner in 1908 and tied by Cal Ripken Jr. in 1991.

Henderson is on pace for 11.8. Last year, Henderson won the AL Rookie of the Year and the Silver Slugger. It’s possible that he’s following it up with the greatest season by a shortstop in the history of baseball.

Ken’s Notebook: The Blue Jays’ looming question

Back in December, during the Blue Jays’ surprising pursuits of Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto, we posed the question: What has gotten into Toronto?

Six months later, with no Ohtani, no Soto and a 14 1/2-game deficit in the AL East, the question becomes: “Now what?”

• The Jays look like certain sellers, but almost certainly will wait as long as possible to choose a direction.
  
• The Astros, Mets, Cardinals and Red Sox are among the clubs that seemingly have turned around their seasons. Jays officials, operating with a franchise-record $225 million payroll, want to give their underperforming roster every chance to do the same.

At the moment, such a reversal is difficult to imagine. The Jays entered Wednesday ranked 22nd in the majors in ERA and 26th in runs per game. And it’s not as if they’ve been unlucky. Their projected win-loss record, based on run differential, was actually one game worse than their actual 36-43 mark.

So, if the “Now what?” question is not yet appropriate, it soon will be, with the trade deadline five weeks away. And if the Jays turn out to be sellers, the questions will only multiply. Which players will they purge? How quickly can they retool? And what will the concession of failure mean for the futures of team president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins?

Last October, after the controversial removal of José Berríos from a shutout in the fourth inning of an elimination game, Shapiro defended Atkins, telling reporters, “When evaluating, you’re not evaluating on a series or even a season, and in Ross’s case, the body of work to me is undeniable.”

Shapiro also said, “We need to get better. Ross needs to get better, but he’s done a good job and put us in a good position next year to be a very good team.” Well, the biggest acquisitions of the no-Ohtani, no-Soto offseason were infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa and designated hitter Justin Turner. And the free-agent departures included third baseman Matt Chapman and right-hander Jordan Hicks.
The Jays were coming off their third playoff appearance in four years under Shapiro and Atkins, who arrived in 2015. Their tenure has included a number of successful moves, including trades for Berríos, Chapman and Robbie Ray and signings of Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt and Yusei Kikuchi. But their overcorrection for defense after the 2022 season, when they parted with veteran outfielders Teoscar Hernández and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. along with top young catcher Gabriel Moreno, continues to haunt this team.

Exclusives: Eric Kay speaks

It would be simple — maybe lazy is a better word — to resort to easy platitudes when writing about Sam Blum’s exclusive interview with former Los Angeles Angels communications director Eric Kay. Kay is in prison, serving a 22-year sentence for his involvement in the drug overdose death of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs in 2019.

But nothing about this story is easy.

• On one hand, yes: Kay’s actions were indefensible. A team employee providing players with opioids is about as reckless as you can get — not just with a high-profile job, but with the human beings with whom you interact on a daily basis.
• On the other, Kay was an addict himself, and Blum highlights some aspects of the trial that appear to have been grossly mishandled by his lawyers. Kay has three children, and 22 years is an incomprehensible amount of time to be separated.
• On the other-other hand: for Skaggs’ family, that amount of time is forever.
• Fourth: Skaggs’ death can never be reversed. Kay is still alive; does justice truly require mutual destruction, or is there a better bad outcome?

It doesn’t take long to veer into some much bigger fundamental conversations about justice, rehabilitation and incarceration as a whole. It’s an important piece of sports journalism, requiring deeper thought about how the world works.

So the only hot take I’m prepared to offer is this: I think Sam Blum is one of the best sports journalists in the world. This one isn’t easy, but it’s worth your time.

Missing Bats: The price of gas

If you missed parts 1-3 of our Missing Bats project, you can catch up on those here, and learn how we got from “the old days” to where we are now (there’s also a podcast!) In part four today: a shift in tone, as Stephen Nesbitt examines the cost of all this progress — pitcher injuries have more than doubled since 2010.

There are a lot of theories as to why, but Nesbitt digs into a few specific ones:

• If strikeouts are the most foolproof way to avoid runs, of course training and data will be geared toward swing-and-miss. Unfortunately, the best way to do that seems to be throw every pitch as hard as possible, and with as much spin as your human body can muster. Both of those things require maximum effort, and — surprise — with more exertion comes more injury.
• For pitchers, it’s a choice handed down by a malevolent genie: I can give you 10 years of health, but you never make it past Double A, or I can give you big-league stuff, but you might blow out your arm once or twice. Caveat: If you’re on the big-league roster by the time you get hurt, you still get paid at least the league minimum ($740,000/year), and earn service time. Quite simply, for athletes who have sacrificed everything else for this dream, it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
• Similarly — and perhaps a bit cynically — for budget-minded baseball teams, which investment makes more fiscal sense? An endless stream of short-lived pitchers at the peak efficacy during their pre-arbitration and arbitration years? Or guys who might eat through a decade of free agent years, but with a middling ERA and reduced strength?

I don’t mean to imply that front offices don’t care about the human cost of arm churn — by all accounts, they do. But as peak training becomes more widely accessible, it is at least worth noting that the arm crisis is one of prioritizing success over longevity, and not one of finances.

I can almost imagine the innovators we covered in parts 1-3 looking over a baseball field, pondering “changing the game forever” with a thousand-yard stare as they mutter “I think we did.”

Handshakes and High Fives

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(Photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA Today)