Kuzul

The day the Baltimore Orioles first called up Manny Machado, they were in a three-way tie for the American League wild-card lead, and third base was a problem. Wilson Betemit and Robert Andino were splitting the job, and they weren’t getting the job done.

Machado was a shortstop who was one of the best prospects in baseball. He had just turned 20, but the Orioles arranged for him to play two games at third base in the Double-A Eastern League. And then they called him up and handed him the position in the major leagues.

Machado had two hits that first day and two home runs the next. He ended up hitting just .262, but the Orioles went on a 33-18 run that got them into the playoffs.

Four years later, people are comparing Machado to Brooks Robinson.

“He might be better than Brooks,” said one AL scout who watched Machado last week.

Yoan Moncada doesn’t need to be that good to help the Boston Red Sox. But he might be.

Moncada turned 21 in May. He’s a second baseman who is one of the best prospects in baseball, but the Red Sox just moved him to third base in the Double-A Eastern League. The Red Sox are leading the AL wild-card race, but third base is a problem. Travis Shaw and Aaron Hill are splitting the job, and they’re not getting the job done.

Now, Moncada will have his chance with the Red Sox announcing his promotion late Wednesday night after Boston’s 8-6 win over the Rays. 

I’ll trust the Red Sox are making the right move, because Dombrowski has never been shy about pushing talented young players to the big leagues and giving them a shot. He did it already this month with 22-year-old outfielder Andrew Benintendi, who rewarded the Red Sox’s faith with an .850 OPS and outstanding defense after they promoted him Aug. 2 from Double-A Portland.

The Red Sox needed help in left field, and they needed a spark. Benintendi gave them both, but then he got hurt. He went on the disabled list Aug. 25 with a sprained left knee, and while the injury isn’t as serious as feared, he can’t spark them right now.

Perhaps Moncada can.

An AL scout who has seen Portland quite a bit said in an ideal world, Moncada becomes a major leaguer next year. In the world the Red Sox live in, it’s worth a shot now.

“If I was the Red Sox, I would do it,” the scout said. “Look what the Yankees did with [Gary] Sanchez.”

There are no guarantees, but when Baseball America ranked the top 100 prospects in the game last winter, Moncada was third. He was behind Corey Seager and Byron Buxton but well ahead of Benintendi (15) and Sanchez (36).

Moncada ranked first in the same magazine’s midseason update, ahead of Benintendi, Sanchez and a few other players already having success in the big leagues in Alex Reyes, Alex Bregman and Trea Turner. Moncada was the Most Valuable Player of the All-Star Futures Game.

Moncada is younger than all those guys, and the rankings are based on future potential, not instant readiness. But given his speed and baserunning ability—his 45 steals are the most of anyone in the Red Sox organization, including on the big league team—Moncada is an obvious choice for a 40-man September roster.

The question is whether he can be more than that. The Red Sox think there’s a chance, given the recent decision to move him to third base. He wasn’t going to come up and displace Dustin Pedroia at second, but Boston’s third basemen have been among the least productive in the majors.

While the Red Sox have been baseball’s highest-scoring team, their third basemen ranked 27th in the majors with a .712 OPS entering play Tuesday. The recent numbers have been worse than that. Shaw had a .176 batting average and .572 OPS in August; Hill, acquired July 7 from the Milwaukee Brewers for two minor leaguers, had a .194 batting average and .512 OPS in his first 32 games with the Red Sox.

When I wrote about Moncada for Bleacher Report last winter, I reported he wouldn’t be ready for the big leagues this year and might not be ready next year, either. But I also used something Moncada said to reporters then: “I have one goal, and that’s getting to the big leagues.”

Players arrive at their own paces, but they show up faster when they make big progress and their teams have big needs. Both those things appear true now with Moncada, just as they did four years ago with Machado.

“I just wanted to play in the big leagues,” Machado said then, in a story I did for CBSSports.com. “If it would have been catching or playing the outfield, I’d have tried to do the job.”

Machado quickly looked like a natural at third base. Moncada, according to scouts who have seen him, isn’t likely to be as much of a defensive star.

“He’s not going to be a 75-80 fielder [on a 20-80 scouting scale] like Machado is,” the AL scout said. “At second base, he had 60-65 range. But his bat is where his money is.”

The bat and the potential have made Moncada money already, with the Red Sox paying $31.5 million to sign him after he left Cuba. It looks more and more like that investment will pay off.

It might start paying off this week.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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With a good September, the Toronto Blue Jays could repeat as American League East champions.

With a good September, Josh Donaldson could repeat, too.

The Blue Jays moved back into first place with Friday night’s 15-8 rout of the Minnesota Twins, as their rivals in Baltimore and Boston both lost. Donaldson may not have moved into first place in the MVP race with his 30th home run, but he could be setting up for the kind of month that would put him there.

He’s already got a better case than you might think.

His traditional numbers aren’t as flashy as the ones that won him the MVP last year. He almost certainly won’t get to the 41 home runs and 123 RBI he had in 2015 (he’s at 30 and 85 with 34 games remaining).

But Donaldson’s .958 OPS is actually higher than the .939 he won with last year.

As for his value, check this out: Twenty-five of Donaldson’s 30 home runs have come in Blue Jay wins, as have 70 of his 85 RBI. He’s a .343 hitter when they win and a .216 hitter when they don’t.

Obviously, most hitters do better when their teams win. If Donaldson hit better in a few of those games the Blue Jays lost, at all those times when their entire offense stalled, they’d have a much bigger division lead.

The point still holds. When Donaldson hits, the Blue Jays tend to win. If he hits in September the way he hit in June (1.193 OPS) and July (1.019), you like the Blue Jays’ chances in the East.

In those two months, when Donaldson was red-hot, the Blue Jays ranked second and fourth in the major leagues in runs, at more than five a game. This month, which until this week hasn’t been one of Donaldson’s best, the Jays were averaging barely four runs a game (27th in the majors), before Friday night’s explosion.

Jose Bautista missed two weeks with soreness in his left knee, before returning Thursday. Kevin Pillar was out with a thumb injury, before coming back Tuesday.

Their returns should help the Blue Jays lineup, but the most significant return this week could be that of Donaldson’s home run swing. He had homered just once in 16 games before Thursday and drove in only five runs in that span, as he played with a jammed thumb.

He connected off Jered Weaver on Thursday and connected again off Twins starter Pat Dean in the second inning Friday. After never hitting 30 in a season before coming to Toronto, Donaldson has done it two straight years for the Blue Jays.

As of now, he probably isn’t the 2016 MVP. Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels, once again leading the league in WAR (8.0, the way Baseball-Reference.com calculates it), will get some votes. Mookie Betts, who has helped carry the Red Sox into the AL East race, is getting some support.

Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros has a big lead in the batting race. David Ortiz of the Red Sox leads in OPS (1.042). Donaldson’s teammate, Edwin Encarnacion, leads with 102 RBI.

With just over a month to go, it’s a race still to be won—sort of like the AL East.

As I wrote Thursday, the division race is a tough one to call. The Blue Jays aren’t the exciting newcomers, and they didn’t make the big midseason deals like the ones last year for David Price and Troy Tulowitzki.

Still, they’re in first place, with just over five weeks to play.

Donaldson isn’t the flashy MVP choice this year, either. He set a Blue Jays record with three walk-off home runs in 2015; he hasn’t hit any of them this year.

His walk total is up, perhaps because pitchers are showing the defending MVP more respect. His RBI total is down, perhaps because there haven’t been as many opportunities.

“They’re trying to take the bat out of my hand more often this year,” Donaldson told Brendan Kennedy of the Toronto Star.

They don’t want to let Donaldson beat them, and it’s easy to understand why.

But doesn’t that just show how valuable he can be?

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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The American League East doesn’t get enough respect.

Stop yelling back at your computer (or phone or iPad) for a minute and work with me on this.

You’ve heard plenty this summer about the Chicago Cubs, much of it deserved. You’ve heard about the surprising Los Angeles Dodgers and the stumbling San Francisco Giants. You’ve heard about the Texas Rangers and the Washington Nationals.

But when you hear about the three teams doing their summer-long dance atop the AL East, what you mostly hear is how flawed they are.

“We’re a team where people find things to pick on us,” Baltimore Orioles center fielder Adam Jones recently complained to Jon Meoli of the Baltimore Sun. “We’re not doing this well, we’re not doing that well. What are we doing well? I’m just saying, it’s always something.“

Head to Massachusetts, where every other week someone seems to want to fire Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell. Or to Canada, where as recently as Monday Toronto Blue Jays manager John Gibbons was the local critics’ favorite target.

That’s the Blue Jays who over the last eight weeks have the best winning percentage in the American League (.609) and the Red Sox who over the same span have the second-best winning percentage (.604) and are tied with the Blue Jays for first place.

The Orioles are in third place, one game out on 70 wins, and after three straight wins over the Nationals, they hold the second wild-card spot.

With apologies to Jones, we’ll spend a little time here picking on where the Orioles are lacking: starting pitching, particularly with the team announcing it has placed Chris Tillman on the disabled list. We won’t blame everything on Farrell or Gibbons, but we will point out the Red Sox’s big flaw (middle relief) and the Blue Jays’ weaknesses (inconsistent offense, possibly overextended starting pitching).

First, it’s worth pointing out that these are three very good teams, three teams with outstanding lineups and three teams with every chance to win in October. Those records since late June show it, and so do the head-to-head records between the three new Beasts of the East and the other teams holding playoff positions.

Put them together and take out their records against each other, and the Blue Jays, Red Sox and Orioles are a combined 36-25 against the playoff teams from the other five divisions. As limited a sample as that is, it’s still evidence these three shouldn’t be ignored when looking for a World Series favorite.

But which of the three would it be?

There’s no easy answer. When I asked one scout who follows the AL East closely which team will win the division, he first went with the Blue Jays. Five minutes later, he had talked himself into switching to the Red Sox.

“The talent Boston has on the field is really exciting,” said the scout, who works for a National League team. “But I still think it’s going to come down to the last week.”

Let’s hope so for drama’s sake. That final week of the season has the Blue Jays hosting the Orioles and then heading to Fenway Park to close out the regular season against the Red Sox (while Baltimore is up against the dangerous New York Yankees).

By then, perhaps the Red Sox will have figured out the seventh and eighth innings. Maybe Clay Buchholz can be the answer, as both Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald and Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe suggested. Maybe the Red Sox will take a flier on Greg Holland, the one-time Kansas City Royals closer (and free agent) who is already throwing off the mound in his comeback from Tommy John surgery.

The middle of the bullpen is the Red Sox’s one remaining huge flaw now the kids have settled the lineup issues, David Ortiz has overcome age questions and David Price’s rebound (3.17 ERA over his last 20 starts, 2.36 over his last six) has sparked an overall rotation improvement.

The Red Sox will also need to maneuver through two more three-city road trips, including one to the West Coast. Given their 33-28 road record and the way they’ve handled their ongoing four-city trip—7-3 going into Thursday afternoon’s finale with the Tampa Bay Rays—the schedule may not be a problem.

The Blue Jays have a similar road record (34-28) and a rotation that has been more consistent this season. In fact, the Jays are the only one of the three AL East contenders to rank in the top half of MLB teams in overall ERA.

The bullpen could be a question, and so could health (Jose Bautista will return from the disabled list as a designated hitter), but the biggest issue for the Blue Jays could be that three of their starting pitchers are nearing career highs in innings pitched. The Jays have gone with a six-man rotation and optioned ace Aaron Sanchez to the minor leagues as he skips a start, but the workload could be a concern.

And the Orioles?

With more apologies to Jones, it’s easier to find things to pick on with them. Even with Tillman, their rotation has easily the highest ERA (4.92) and fewest innings pitched (684.1) of the three contenders. Now Tillman (15-5, 3.76) is on the DL with shoulder bursitis, and Ubaldo Jimenez (5-9, 6.72 as a starter this year) will go in his place Thursday night in Washington.

Only two teams have made the playoffs with under 900 innings from starting pitchers in a non-strike season. The Orioles are on pace for 880.

Only six teams have made it to October with a rotation ERA over 5.00, all between 1995 and 2001. The Orioles are just under that mark.

In Zach Britton, they have a closer in the midst of a historic season. In Buck Showalter, they have the best manager in the division, a man who can work a bullpen.

In Mark Trumbo, they have the AL home run leader (38). In Manny Machado, they may have the division’s best overall player.

In October, they’d have a chance, and it’s more than possible they’ll join the Blue Jays and Red Sox with a chance to prove it. Heading into Wednesday, the Orioles were two games ahead in the race for the second wild-card spot, with the Red Sox and Jays tied for both the top spot and the AL East lead.

The arguments will go on. The search for flaws will continue.

For one of these three teams, it could continue all the way into November.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. Advanced stats courtesy Baseball-Reference.com.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

The days Rick Porcello doesn’t start for the Boston Red Sox, they’re barely a .500 team.

It’s true. The Sox are 19-6 in Porcello‘s 25 starts, after their 10-2 win over the Detroit Tigers on Friday night. They’re 49-47 in their other 96 games.

So maybe that four-year, $82.5 million contract wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

The Red Sox have a real chance to go worst to first. Their win Friday alongside Toronto’s stunning loss in Cleveland left the Sox just half a game behind the first-place Blue Jays in the American League East.

Porcello has already made just as dramatic a turnaround, going from “What were they thinking?” to “Where would they be without him?” in the space of a year.

A year ago Friday, he was still on the disabled list with a 5-11 record and 5.81 ERA. In 33 starts since then, he’s 21-7 with a 3.20 ERA. He’s tied with J.A. Happ for the major league lead with 17 wins this year, and while that has a lot to do with Porcello and Happ also being one-two in the American League in run support, it’s a reminder of how important his starts have been to Boston.

As the Red Sox were pulling away from the Tigers on Friday night, bouncing back after Thursday’s tough loss, Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe tweeted another way to look at it:

Yes, it helps that the Sox score a lot of runs when Porcello pitches. They’ve been in double digits his last two starts, and they’ve scored eight or more in eight of his 17 wins.

But it helps just as much that Porcello has seven starts in which he has gone at least seven innings while allowing no more than two earned runs. He’s done it in each of his last three starts, helping spark a run in which the Red Sox have won seven of their last eight.

Their starting pitching has been outstanding this month, with David Price improving and Drew Pomeranz starting to look like the pitcher they thought they traded for last month. But Porcello is the one who has been most consistent, the one who has most resembled an ace.

He’s also the one who has been spectacular at home, with a 12-0 record and 2.96 ERA in 13 Fenway Park starts.

Friday’s start was sort of at home, too, because Porcello spent his first six major league seasons with the Tigers. He hadn’t pitched at Comerica since 2014, before the Tigers traded him away because they didn’t want to give him the contract he eventually signed with the Red Sox.

“I think the one thing was that we weren’t sure as time went on if he would take the jump to be a top-of-the-rotation guy once we had him,” Dave Dombrowski told Rob Bradford of WEEI.com. “We looked at him maybe as a middle-of-the-rotation type.”

Dombrowski was the Tigers general manager who traded Porcello away, and now he’s the Red Sox GM who has watched Porcello take over that top-of-the-rotation role.

That’s one thing that gave Friday’s start added significance. The other was that Porcello was matched up with Michael Fulmer. As Mario Impemba pointed out on the Fox Sports Detroit telecast, the Tigers basically traded Porcello for Fulmer in December 2014, because they got Yoenis Cespedes and two minor leaguers for Porcello and later traded Cespedes to the New York Mets for Fulmer and Luis Cessa.

Fulmer gave up the first six Red Sox runs Friday, but he’s been a minimum-salary bargain and a strong Rookie of the Year candidate. He’s also just 23 years old.

But Porcello is only 27.

People tend to forget that, because he debuted with the Tigers when he was 20 and already has 233 major league starts and 102 big league wins. In fact, as a Fox Sports Detroit graphic showed, Porcello has the most career wins of any major league pitcher 27 or younger, ahead of Madison Bumgarner (97) and Chris Sale (71).

Among those not on the list are Stephen Strasburg and Jacob deGrom, not just because they have fewer wins but also because they’ve already turned 28. Porcello‘s 28th birthday isn’t until December.

By that time, he will likely have pitched in his fourth postseason. The first three came with the Tigers, who only used him as a starter for two games, both in 2011. His last postseason appearance came in relief in Game 2 of the 2013 ALCS, against the Red Sox at Fenway.

Assuming the Red Sox get there this year, you can bet Porcello will be a starter. He might not be the Game 1 starter, but the way he has pitched this season, that might not be the worst idea.

You know what else wasn’t the worst idea: Trading for Porcello and immediately signing him to a $20 million-a-year contract.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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A little after 1 p.m. Sunday, a Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher not named Clayton Kershaw took the mound.

Fifteen minutes later, the Dodgers were down 5-0, and the pitcher not named Clayton Kershaw was done for the day.

By day’s end, the Dodgers—without Clayton Kershaw—had lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 11-3. Sunday starter Brett Anderson had a sprained left wrist. Rich Hill, acquired at the non-waiver trade deadline because the rotation needed help, had his Dodgers debut pushed back for a third time because of blisters.

It would be funny if it weren’t so predictable. I wrote them off six weeks ago, and I wasn’t the only one.

On second thought, don’t click on that June 30 column. The one where I said the Dodgers’ season could fall apart because of the back injury that sent Kershaw to the disabled list. The one I wrote when the Dodgers were seven games over .500—14-2 in Kershaw’s 16 starts and 30-35 in the 65 games he hadn’t started—and six games behind the first-place San Francisco Giants in the National League West.

The Dodgers have gone 21-15 since then and are tied with the Washington Nationals for the best record in the National League over that span.

As of Monday morning, they were one game behind the Giants in the West and a 93.6 percent bet to make the playoffs one way or another, according to Baseball Prospectus.

So the season didn’t fall apart when Kershaw went down. It didn’t even fall apart when Jon Heyman wrote last week on Today’s Knuckleball that Kershaw might not come back at all this year.

It hasn’t fallen apart, even though the Dodgers have used nine different starting pitchers since Kershaw was hurt. They’ve used 13 starters this season, second-most in MLB behind San Diego, Atlanta and Cincinnati.

Overall, the rotation has been as mediocre as you’d expect since Kershaw went down, posting a 4.82 ERA while averaging fewer than five innings per start. The offense has been good, but six teams in baseball have scored more runs than the Dodgers in that span.

So how are they doing it? How are they playing at what amounts to a 96-win pace without the great Kershaw, who was touted for much of the first half as an MVP candidate?

1. Building the Bullpen

As Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci first pointed out, the Dodgers are on a record pace in one significant category. Their opponents have a .202 batting average in innings 7-9.

That’s not just the best of any team this season, it’s the best of any team in any season over the last 113 years, according to Baseball-Reference.com’s play index, beating the 1968 Detroit Tigers (who won a World Series) and the 2001 Seattle Mariners (who won 116 games).

The Dodgers have used 20 different relievers this year, and they’ve regularly carried an eight-man bullpen. They’ve needed it, because their starters pitch so little and their bullpen pitches so much (only the Reds have more bullpen innings). First-year manager Dave Roberts has maneuvered it so well that only 35-year-old Joe Blanton is among the top 17 in the majors in relief innings pitched.

No Dodger is among the top 12 in relief appearances—proof that Roberts understands he can’t rely on just two or three bullpen arms.

Give Roberts credit, but also remember that a strong, deep bullpen is a trademark of Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers president of baseball operations, dating back to his best Tampa Bay teams.

2. Doing It with Depth 

Fox Sports‘ Ken Rosenthal played up this angle, another one borne out by the numbers.

Unheralded catcher Yasmani Grandal has a .710 slugging percentage since Kershaw went on the DL, the best in baseball. Third baseman Justin Turner is in the top eight in the National League with 29 RBI in that time and has been key in a lineup where so many of the big hitters swing left-handed.

The Dodgers have dumped some big names since Friedman arrived 22 months ago, including Matt Kemp (Grandal was acquired in that deal), Carl Crawford (released with about $35 million left on his contract) and Yasiel Puig (sent to the minor leagues with a $7.2 million salary).

They’ve also played most of this season with Anderson ($15.8 million) and Andre Ethier ($18 million) on the disabled list and the last six weeks with Kershaw ($34.6 million) on the DL.

The current 25-man roster makes only about $113 million this year—more than Friedman ever had to spend with the Rays but hardly a big-market number. It’s working.

3. Managing Matters

Roberts works the bullpen and the depth but also gets high marks for the tone he has set and the clubhouse he has run.

Friedman told Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times:

“He’s been challenged as much as I can imagine someone being challenged in year one, just with the sheer volume of injuries. To handle it the way he has, in his first year, is incredible. I know manager-of-the-year banter doesn’t really pick up yet, but I don’t know how he’s not front and center in that conversation.”

4. Giant Problems

The Giants had the second-best record in the National League (49-31) when Kershaw went on the DL. Had they kept up that .613 pace, they’d have 72 wins and the Dodgers would be seven games behind.

Instead, the Giants opened the door. Because of injuries and poor play coming out of the All-Star break, they’re 17-20 since the Kershaw DL announcement.

Credit the Dodgers for taking advantage.

5. Semi-Soft Schedule

This one isn’t as much of an explanation as you’d think, given how top-heavy the National League is this season. The Dodgers’ 21-15 run includes 12 games against teams that are currently in playoff position (Baltimore, Washington, St. Louis and Boston).

They went 7-5 in those games.

Still, with the injuries that have hit the Cardinals, Miami Marlins and New York Mets, it’s hard to find five worthy NL playoff teams. The Dodgers have played at a 96-win pace with Kershaw on the DL, but they shouldn’t need to keep up that pace to make it to October.

They may need to have a shot at passing the Giants, who they meet for three games next week at Dodger Stadium (just before the Cubs come in) and six more times in September and October.

Even a playoff spot would be an accomplishment, given the challenges the Dodgers have faced and the forecasts of doom when they lost Kershaw. But for a franchise that has played in October seven times in the last 12 years but hasn’t been back to the World Series since winning it with Kirk Gibson in 1988, the goal will always be higher.

No matter what they’ve done over the last six weeks, it’s awfully hard to see them winning in October with the team they have now.

There’s no way they’re a World Series team without Kershaw. This time, I’m sure of it.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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NEW YORK — With most guys, the retirement announcement comes before the ceremony.

No, not with most guys. With everyone.

Everyone but Alex Rodriguez.

It’s always complicated with him, so of course it was complicated on the night that should mark the end of a brilliant if also monumentally flawed career. Of course the skies roared with thunder Friday, just as Yankee Stadium public address announcer Paul Olden said, “Alex, you’ve spent 12 of your 22 seasons with the Yankees.”

“It was certainly, like, biblical,” Rodriguez himself said later. “You can’t make that up. I guess we went out with a bang.”

Great line, and if you’d like, you can take it as a hint. You can take a hint from him saying “it’s going to be tough to top that.”

Or maybe you can take the biggest hint of all from the last thing he said in his press conference after the New York Yankees‘ 6-3 win over the Tampa Bay Rays: “I saw [rookie catcher] Gary Sanchez have a [big] series in Boston and I looked at him and said, ‘I can’t do that anymore.’ And I was happy about it. I’m at peace.”

Is it possible A-Rod knows he’s done as a player, that no matter what he has said over the last few weeks he knows he’s not good enough anymore? Or is this going-away game going to look even stranger when it’s followed in a few weeks by his comeback game in Miami or Chicago or who knows where?

Just remember, he still hasn’t said he’s retired.

He showed in his first at-bat Friday that he can still get it done if all the conditions are right. He lined a run-scoring double to right-center off Rays starter Chris Archer, and it went all the way to the wall. It even came off a 96 mph fastball, with Katie Sharp of RiverAveBlues.com quickly tweeting how unusual that was:

The fact is Rodriguez struggles with major league fastballs these days. The fact is he can’t play in the field, even if he did make an emotional return to third base for one batter in the ninth inning Friday.

Sure, he’s only four home runs away from 700, and it’s tough to leave so close to an historic milestone. But Al Kaline and Andres Galarraga both retired with exactly 399 home runs, so it wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented.

Perhaps A-Rod’s refusal to answer the retirement question is simply an acknowledgement he can’t be sure another team will want him. Or maybe he just wasn’t sure if he wanted this to be the end.

The uncertainty is perfect A-Rod, and so was Friday night.

It went beyond the thunder and lightning during the Yankees’ understated pregame ceremony. There was also the oddity that Mariano Rivera was the only one of his ex-teammates who was invited to take part, even though many others will be in town for the Yankees’ 1996 reunion Saturday afternoon.

The sellout crowd didn’t seem to mind, because it was clear from the start it only cared about Rodriguez. The fans booed manager Joe Girardi’s name during the pregame lineup announcement, then cheered at the news that A-Rod was batting third for the first time in more than a month.

The Girardi-Rodriguez relationship has become a big storyline all week, as Rodriguez admitted that he wanted to play all three games in Boston and that the manager told him no (A-Rod pinch-hit Wednesday and started Thursday). Girardi also turned down his request to play third base Friday.

The tension clearly bothered Girardi, and he seemed determined to make Friday the best A-Rod day possible.

“Some people think I wanted to make negative decisions,” Girardi said after the game. “That’s not the case. I have a huge heart.”

With that, the sometimes stoic and often combative manager broke down in tears.

“If this is the last time he plays, I wanted it to be something he’d never forget,” Girardi said.

But even that vow wasn’t iron-clad. Despite their trade-deadline sell-off, the Yankees remain on the fringe of the American League wild-card race (3.5 games behind the Boston Red Sox for the final playoff spot).

Because of that, Girardi said he would only play Rodriguez in the field Friday night if the Yankees led by three runs or more. Aaron Hicks’ seventh-inning home run gave them a three-run lead.

He told Rodriguez of the plan, and said it was A-Rod’s wish that it only be for one batter. So after Starlin Castro made the final out of the bottom of the eighth, Rodriguez took the field for the ninth. And after Dellin Betances struck out Mikie Mahtook for the first out, Ronald Torreyes replaced him at third base.

Rodriguez didn’t leave the field immediately, first going over to hug his teammates, then stopping in front of the dugout to salute the fans who had serenaded him all night.

It looked, for all the world, like a star saying goodbye for good.

“With all the things I’ve been through, and to have an ending like that tonight, I don’t know what else I can ask for,” Rodriguez said later.

Take that as another hint if you wish. Write in his final career numbers, the 3,115 career hits and the 548 doubles and 2,086 RBI, to go with those 696 home runs.

Just write them in pencil, at least for now.

Remember, too, that as the Yankees and Rays waited out a half-hour rain delay before Friday’s game could begin, Billy Joel’s song “Miami 2017” played over the sound system.

Take that as a hint. Or take it as just one more perfectly odd A-Rod moment on what may or may not have been the last night we’ll ever see him play.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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Aaron Sanchez has one of the best ERAs in the American League, and his Toronto Blue Jays have one of the best records in baseball.

And all anyone wants to talk about is whether the Jays should keep starting him.

On the surface, the discussion is nuts. This isn’t to say the Blue Jays are crazy to look for ways to protect a kid who just turned 24 and is just starting to fulfill his potential as a first-round draft pick in 2010. The Jays weren’t necessarily wrong when they hatched a plan to move Sanchez to the bullpen at midseason. They’re not necessarily wrong now either, as they experiment with a six-man rotation designed to answer their big Sanchez question.

“It’s not for you or me to say what the Blue Jays should or shouldn’t do,” said Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and a career full of studies related to the pitching arm and how to protect it.

The problem with that, of course, is we all want to have a say—just as we did when the Washington Nationals shut down Stephen Strasburg in 2012 or when the New York Mets didn’t shut Matt Harvey down a year ago. We want to learn from those decisions, even though there’s no way to really know if the Strasburg shutdown kept him healthy (and helped make him one of MLB‘s best) or if Harvey’s continued play had anything to do with the injury that did shut him down this summer.

Sanchez is different, because unlike Strasburg and Harvey, he’s not coming back from Tommy John surgery. But Sanchez is also similar. He’s a young pitcher heading for a big innings jump on a team with World Series aspirations, and that team is debating how much he should pitch.

The Strasburg question only mattered to us because he was so good and his playoff-bound team depended on him. The Harvey question mattered to us for the same reason.

We hadn’t faced the issue at that level before. Not because teams didn’t shut pitchers down (they did), but because either the pitchers weren’t overwhelmingly good at the time or their teams weren’t. When the Nationals shut down Jordan Zimmermann in 2011, they were 22.5 games out of first place in the NL East.

The Blue Jays took over the AL East Wednesday. Sanchez, with his 2.85 ERA and 11-2 record, is a big part of the reason they’re that good.

The problem is that before this year, Sanchez had never pitched more than 133.1 innings in a season. He’s already at 145.1 this year. If he pitched every fifth game the rest of the way and continued to average 6.6 innings per start, he’d be well over 200 innings before the playoffs began.

There’s plenty of debate over how risky a big innings boost is for a young pitcher who doesn’t have any other obvious warning signs (previous injury, fatigue, velocity drop, etc.). Whatever the risk is, though, the Blue Jays want to mitigate it.

“I did make one absolute statement, this guy is not going to pitch 220 innings this year, he’s not going to pitch 230 innings,” Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro told MLB Network Radio (via Shi Davidi of Sportsnet.ca) last week.

The original plan—one the Blue Jays had been quite open about since spring training—was that at some point during the season, they would move Sanchez to the bullpen. Relievers don’t pitch as many innings as starters, and Sanchez was effective out of the pen last year, so it seemed like a way to let him keep contributing without overdoing his innings.

The Sanchez-to-the-pen plan played into the Jays’ July trading strategy—they acquired starting pitcher Francisco Liriano from the Pittsburgh Pirates just before the Aug. 1 deadline. That acquisition turned the Sanchez question into one that required an immediate answer. Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins joined the team in Houston on Aug. 4 to provide it.

The answer, at least for now: Sanchez stays in the rotation. The Jays use a six-man rotation, and if they keep it through the end of the season, Sanchez will likely drop from 10 more starts to eight. Meanwhile, they keep a close watch for signs of fatigue and also consider skipping starts.

“The most likely scenario is that he stays in the rotation for some time to come,” Atkins said, according to Gregor Chisholm of MLB.com.

That seems perfectly reasonable given what we know now. The problem is that we know so little.

Fleisig said that while studies have been done on usage risks to high school pitchers, there hasn’t yet been enough research of the effects on professional pitchers.

“I wish I had a better answer,” he said. “But the good news is that we are working on it.”

Fleisig was referring to a five-year study being conducted in cooperation with MLB and the MLB Players Association. They began with pitchers chosen in the 2014-16 drafts, doing MRI imaging, physical exams and biomechanical analysis of pitching mechanics, and closely monitoring their usage and health. The plan is to determine how all of these factors together predict risk of injury in professional pitchers.

Until then, we have opinions and what amount to educated guesses. We have another team in another pennant race trying to keep another young pitcher healthy for the future while also trying to win now.

I wish I had a better answer, too.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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Right from the start, there were those who believed in Ichiro Suzuki. And there were those who didn’t.

Bobby Valentine was a believer. He managed against Ichiro in Japan, and in the fall of 2000, he told people Ichiro was one of the five best players in the world.

Randy Johnson was not. The former major league infielder (not the Hall of Fame pitcher) played the last two years of his career in Japan and later scouted Ichiro in an All-Star series.

“I didn’t think the Japanese style of hitting would work [in the major leagues],” he said. “Wrong again.”

He wasn’t the only one. There may not have been 3,000 questions about Ichiro in the Seattle Mariners’ 2001 spring training camp, but there were probably 3,000 doubters.

For all the batting titles he won in Japan (seven in seven years) and for all the money the Mariners spent to get him (a $13.125 million posting fee, plus an initial $14 million, three-year contract), even Seattle wondered if he could handle a real major league fastball.

“It’s a tough adjustment, because big league players throw harder,” said Lou Piniella, Ichiro’s first major league manager. “That was the only concern.”

Three-thousand hits later, we have our answer.

We actually had it a lot sooner, because Ichiro became an instant star, a pure hitter who was also a spectacular outfielder and great baserunner. On a Mariners team that won 116 games, he was so good that he was named both the Rookie of the Year and the Most Valuable Player in the American League.

“Ichiro became the face of the franchise in a very short time,” Piniella said.

It’s interesting to look back now, in a season that has seen an Ichiro revival and now his 3,000th career hit. It’s interesting there was ever a concern whether he could handle the heat, because he’s 42 years old now and can still handle it.

His 2,990th hit, on July 4 against New York Mets reliever Hansel Robles, was a line-drive double into the right-center field gap—on a 95 mph fastball. 

The 3,000th came Sunday in Colorado on a Chris Rusin cutter, a triple pulled to deep right field.  

Jim Colborn was right.

Colborn was the Mariners scout who followed Ichiro in Japan. In the spring of 2001, when so many others still had so many doubts, Colborn told Ross Newhan of the Los Angeles Times Ichiro would hit .300 every year, make an All-Star team, challenge for a batting title and maybe win a Gold Glove.

“No one is expecting him to hit .350, which was his career average in Japan, but I think he might,” Colborn said.

He hit .350 that first year, winning the first of two batting titles. He hit .300 in 10 straight years (and is doing it again in his revival season this year). He made 10 straight All-Star teams and won 10 straight Gold Gloves.

“He’s had a wonderful career,” Piniella said. “And I look forward to the time he’ll be inducted into the Hall of Fame.”

Piniella can laugh now about that first spring training, but those who were there remember the Mariners weren’t laughing then. They’d committed what seemed then like big money, in part because of those reports Colborn sent but in larger part because their Japanese ownership pushed for it.

Only three other major league teams even put in bids, although agent Tony Attanasio told reporters (including Murray Chass of the New York Times) that he scared some teams off by telling them Ichiro didn’t want to play in a city without a significant Japanese population.

Other teams just weren’t sure he could handle major league pitching. Remember, before Ichiro, no Japanese position player had come to the major leagues.

And in that spring of 2001, he seemed to be confirming all those doubts, with soft grounder after soft grounder to the left side of the infield.

“He didn’t really do anything in spring training,” then-Mariners pitcher Jeff Nelson told Larry Stone for a 2011 story in the Seattle Times. “People were thinking, ‘This guy might be overmatched.'”

Piniella seemed to be one of those people, and at one point, he asked Ichiro whether he could pull the ball. That day, Ichiro pulled it, for a home run onto the bank behind right field at the Mariners’ spring ballpark.

“He rounded the bases, stepped on home plate and looked at me and said, ‘Are you happy now?'” Piniella remembered.

That spring training home run didn’t count in the record books, but Ichiro has hit 113 since then that did count. And while many of us wonder how many hits he would have had if he had begun his major league career earlier (he was 27 when he joined the Mariners), Ichiro himself has sometimes wondered how many home runs he would have hit.

“My skills were born playing in Japan, and I developed there,” he told me for a story I did three years ago for CBSSports.com. “Maybe it would have been different if I played here.

“Maybe I would have been a power hitter.”

He laughed as he said it, but one of the secrets about Ichiro was that he did show off home run power regularly in batting practice. He topped 20 home runs a couple of times in Japan.

“Safeco [Field] was one of the toughest places to hit home runs, and we didn’t expect that,” Piniella said. “We expected what we got, a young man who led off, got on base, stole bases and scored runs. He was our table-setter.”

He was fun to watch, but the truth Ichiro himself told later was that he wasn’t really having fun at the start.

“To be honest with you, I did not feel comfortable,” he told Stone in 2011. “Our team won, and that solved everything. But being a rookie, I felt very desperate. I needed to perform as the first Japanese position player. I represented a lot of people, and I needed to perform so they would have a chance.”

Others have now had a chance, and some have had decent success. But it’s Ichiro, the guy who started it all, who will eventually go in the Hall of Fame.

Cooperstown is a certainty now, based on his major league numbers alone. But that can’t happen until Ichiro retires, and he keeps telling anyone who will listen that he wants to play until he’s 50.

“At least 50,” he told Craig Davis of the South Florida Sun Sentinel this spring.

Why not? He’ll probably be able to hit a major league fastball then, too.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball. 

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NEW YORK — If you try something once and it works, you’re going to try again.

Jay Bruce isn’t Yoenis Cespedes. The 2016 New York Mets are not the 2015 Mets, and the National League East isn’t the same as it was last year, either.

But on another deadline day, the Mets could dream. Mets fans could dream. Mets players could dream.

“There’s been a lot of talk in our clubhouse the last few days: ‘Are we going to get someone?'” Mets manager Terry Collins said. “Well, we did.”

Well, they did. They got Bruce from the Cincinnati Reds, a year to the deadline day after getting Cespedes from the Detroit Tigers.

Now they have too many corner outfielders and no real center fielder. They have too many injuries and not enough certainty.

They know that. They admit that.

But even with Matt Harvey out for the season, the Mets have a starting rotation they can win with. They may not have a great chance at catching the Washington Nationals in the NL East (Baseball Prospectus put it at 5 percent as of Monday afternoon), but even if this is just about the wild card, they owed it to themselves to give it a shot.

It’s about more than that, of course.

The Mets weren’t going to give up on this year, and they certainly weren’t going to give up on next year. Finding offense was going to be an issue this winter, too, which is why Mets general manager Sandy Alderson kept emphasizing they have Bruce under control in 2017 (with an affordable $13 million club option).

“We would not have done this deal without an extra year of control,” Alderson said.

The extra year means this isn’t as much of an all-in move as the Cespedes trade was last year. So does the cost, because even though the Mets liked second baseman Dilson Herrera (“He’s a little like Devon Travis,” a National League scout said Monday), he’s not as exciting as Michael Fulmer, the pitcher they gave up for what could have been two months of Cespedes.

This one was Herrera and 19-year-old left-hander Max Wotell for a year-and-a-half of Bruce. Alderson acknowledged the deal changed at one point Monday (Marc Carig of Newsday reported Brandon Nimmo was taken out of the trade because of medical concerns), but the price wasn’t prohibitive for a player who leads the National League with 80 RBI.

“He’s been a run producer,” Alderson said. “His presence in the middle of the lineup changes things. It wasn’t clear to me how long Cespedes was going to get pitches to hit with the rest of the lineup around him.”

Some people question the concept of protection in a batting order, but Alderson obviously doesn’t. Neither does Collins, who was quick to say Bruce will hit right behind Cespedes.

“I’m telling you, I think he’s going to make a huge impact here,” Collins said.

Bruce can be an impact guy, as he has shown in eight-plus years with the Reds. He’s been an impact guy this season. He’s always been streaky, but when he’s going good, he’s one of the most dangerous hitters in the game.

He also has months like August 2015, when he hit .150 with 29 strikeouts in 113 at-bats.

Bruce is hot right now, with six home runs and 14 RBI in his last seven games. Compare that to the Mets, who as a team have 17 RBI in their last seven games.

“Had we been able to score some runs this week, we’d be in better shape right now,” Collins said.

A year ago, the Mets were 28th in baseball in runs scored before the All-Star break. They were third in baseball in runs scored after the break. It wasn’t all Cespedes, but there’s no question adding him changed their lineup and changed their season.

Can Bruce do the same thing?

For the Mets, it was worth finding out. It was worth trying to fit him into their lineup, even though he’s a corner outfielder and the other guys they want to play (Cespedes, Curtis Granderson and Michael Conforto) are also corner outfielders.

Collins will have to figure it out. Maybe Conforto can handle center field. Maybe Cespedes’ sore right quadriceps (which kept him out of the lineup again Monday) will heal enough that he can return to center field.

Maybe it works out. Remember, Cespedes wasn’t a center fielder when the Mets acquired him a year ago, but he ended up starting there 39 times and 10 more times in the postseason.

It’s worth the chance again. Outfield defense could sink the Mets in these final two months, but a lack of offense was the bigger problem they had to solve. Once the Milwaukee Brewers weren’t interested in what they had to offer for Jonathan Lucroy, Bruce was by far the best option they could get.

“All we can do is acquire as many good players as we can to maybe have that magic again,” Alderson said.

It’s not a perfect fit. It’s not a perfect deal.

But for a team still good enough to dream, it was a trade worth making.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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Choose your numbers carefully when evaluating what Chris Archer has become this season for the Tampa Bay Rays and what he could become in the future.

The bloated ERA (4.42) tells you he hasn’t been nearly as good as he was the previous three seasons. He’s also giving up more hits than he ever has (8.6 per nine innings), more home runs than he ever has (1.5 per nine innings) and the most walks since he was a rookie (3.5 per nine innings).

Win-loss records have less significance than they once did, but Archer’s 5-14 mark isn’t exactly an illusion. He’s not having a good year.

So if and when the Rays hold him out as an ace on the trade market, with ESPN.com‘s Jerry Crasnick suggesting this week it would take “a monster package” for the Rays to even consider moving him, it figures that no one will take that gamble.

But maybe someone should.

If it takes a monster package now, that only means it would take a monster package-plus if Archer goes back to being an ace-in-waiting. Giving up a monster package may not feel like buying low, but if the alternative is waiting and then paying monster-plus, well, perhaps now is the time to act.

His numbers aren’t all bad. While Archer leads the American League in losses, he also leads the league in strikeouts (155 in 130.1 innings). His strikeout rate (10.7 per nine innings) is exactly what it was last year. His fastball velocity, according to FanGraphs, is 94.1 mph, a tick below last year but basically in line with his career average.

“The stuff is still there for him to be a horse,” said one National League scout who has seen Archer multiple times this season. “Can he be an ace again? I would bet on that.”

It would be a big bet in terms of prospects surrendered, but not in terms of money. Archer makes $2.9 million this year, and the contract he signed with the Rays in 2014 runs through 2021, if you include two club options.

When he signed, it was the biggest deal ever for a player with less than a year of service time ($25.5 million guaranteed). If he becomes an ace, he’ll become an absolute bargain ace.

The bigger question is why he’s not close to being an ace now and whether he can become one soon.

Not everyone is convinced.

“It’s tough to say with certainty what’s causing his issues this year,” said a scout from another National League team that needs pitching. “It’s at least worth noting not only how much he used his slider last year, but that those sliders were typically 90 mph.

“How taxing is that on the arm?”

According to FanGraphs, Archer threw his slider 39.2 percent of the time last season and has used it almost as often this year (38.0 percent). The velocities are similar (as high as 92 mph, with an 88 mph average), but the results aren’t as good.

Archer told Tim Brown of Yahoo he’s been “this close,” and he suggested that after starting off poorly, he may have shied away from contact and lost some confidence.

“I think people have been very critical of me, and I’m fine with it,” Archer told Brown.

There’s room for criticism, but there’s also room for comparison. Detroit’s Justin Verlander had a similarly bad season early in his career, leading MLB with 17 losses in 2008, with his ERA spiking to 4.84.

A year later, Verlander was back on the All-Star team, with a season good enough that he finished third in Cy Young voting.

Verlander didn’t have to deal with the possibility of being traded, something that is ever-present when you play for the Rays. Last week, ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark put this on Twitter:

It’s hard to say how much any of that has affected Archer. His last two starts have been two of his best this season. Tuesday night, he gave up just one earned run in seven innings against the Dodgers, with no walks and eight strikeouts (but still lost 3-2 on two unearned runs).

We can’t know exactly what happened, but the National League scout who has seen Archer multiple times has a few theories.

The scout thought back to spring training, when there were stories (including this one by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports) about Archer’s commitment to visiting schools and hospitals and his dedication to the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program. He remembered Archer’s public criticism of two young Rays pitchers who showed up later than others for workouts (as chronicled by Roger Mooney of the Tampa Bay Times).

“I think he put more pressure on himself,” the scout said.

Even without that, the season could have been a challenge. The Rays worked to improve their offense this season, but they’re no longer a strong defensive team.

“The catcher was Hank Conger, and he doesn’t throw anybody out,” the scout said. “The shortstop, Brad Miller, has limited range. They don’t get big outs. A lot of times, he had to get the fourth out in an inning.”

It’s easy to say a true ace should be able to work through the distractions and work around the poor defense. But when a 27-year-old comes into a season with Cy Young expectations and finds himself with a 5.16 ERA in the middle of May, it can make for a tough season.

As long as he’s still healthy and his stuff is still good, there’s no reason to think he can’t rebound and even go forward. Three years after that poor 2008 season, Verlander was the American League’s Most Valuable Player.

Archer may not be Verlander, but he could become an ace. On a trade market that offers little in top-level starting pitching, even a monster package for him could turn out to be a bargain.

In fact, I would almost bet on it.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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