Kuzul

OK now, here’s the challenge for the Washington Nationals and everyone else as they scheme against the Los Angeles Dodgers: finding a way to rattle Corey Seager.

But unless you were one of three Dodgers living with the probable NL Rookie of the Year this summer, good luck zeroing in on it.

From the rival manager’s seat, it’s a head-scratcher.

“You look at that Dodgers team on the field and you see all of those veterans,” says recently deposed Arizona manager Chip Hale, envisioning first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, second baseman Chase Utley, outfielder Howie Kendrick and more. “But their best player is their youngest guy on the field.”

From the opposing dugout, it’s akin to playing Stump the Band.

“I know Kris Bryant will get a lot of the MVP votes,” Padres bench coach Mark McGwire says of the Chicago Cubs star. “But to me, if Corey Seager wasn’t playing shortstop and doing what he’s done, I don’t know if the Dodgers would be in the playoffs. I really, really hope people sit down and think about an MVP vote for him.”

From the advance scouts dogging the Dodgers like bloodhounds, the mysteries will not unlock.

Throw your best hook, and Seager will rope it. Drill a ball into the hole, and Seager will close it. Leave the tiniest opening for an extra base, and Seager will take it.

He finished with 193 hits, the most by any big league rookie since 2001, when Ichiro Suzuki had 242 and Albert Pujols 194. He covers ground more efficiently than a Prius.

Yet the way to throw Seager off his game is so simple, it’s child’s play. And until now, only three people in the world have known the secret: his summer housemates in Los Angeles, pitcher Alex Wood and outfielders Joc Pederson and Trayce Thompson.

“As long as you don’t take the last couple of frozen M&M’s from the freezer, or the last of the break-and-bake Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough, you stay on Corey’s good side,” Wood says, chuckling. “Those are his favorites.”

“You got me,” Seager says. “M&M’s are the death of me, I think. Those are my go-tos.”

The All-Star shortstop stocks the freezer with a large bag, just like Mom did back home while he was growing up in North Carolina with two older brothers, Kyle (third baseman for the Seattle Mariners) and Justin (a Mariners farmhand). Always, peanut M&M’s. On a hot summer day, what snack could be better?

So yes, an empty bag in the freezer or an Aroldis Chapman heater? No question which of those would shake him to the core. And his housemates know it.

“They might get an outlashing,” Seager says. “It’s all friendly, even though those are mine. They’re there for the whole house, but if you finish the bag, you’ve got to replace it. That’s one of the house rules.”

At 22, both Seager’s game and poise stretch well beyond his years. He is friendly, polite and smiles easily. He is as fluid off the field as he is at shortstop. Which, a couple of years ago, was a bit of a sore spot. The shortstop part.

He’s a true 6’4″, and starting within seconds of the Dodgers drafting him in the first round in 2012 (18th overall), he listened to the talking heads and even some folks inside the Los Angeles organization predict that he would be moved to third base because of his size.

He answered with cool, consistent steadiness and grace that now have folks understanding it will take an act of God to move him from the position. Aside from the natural rush of being named to his first All-Star team this summer, one of the perks was the sigh of relief he could breathe that all that hard work over the years at short paid off.

He also understands it is still going to be “an everyday thing to maintain it and sustain it, and I look forward to it.”

Alex Rodriguez and Cal Ripken long ago proved that tall plays at shortstop if you’re both nimble and smart, and Seager is both. He is grounded enough to put in the work and reverent enough to acknowledge, “I still get goose bumps, chills, hearing those names. I don’t think you ever get used to something like that.

“It’s a lot of fun, and life’s pretty good.”

McGwire was the Dodgers’ hitting coach last year when Seager first arrived in the majors as a September call-up, and on the shortstop subject, he notes that despite Seager’s height, “his glove never leaves the ground. He’s the total package.”

But it was while he was working with Seager on a hitting tee last September for the first time that the kid made an impression McGwire will never forget.

Amazed at Seager’s short, compact and direct swing path, McGwire finally stopped the drill.

“Who taught you how to hit?” McGwire asked.

“My dad,” came the reply.

“When you get home today,” McGwire instructed, “you call your dad and tell him he did one hell of a job.”

Driving home from his job as an IT specialist for a bank in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jeff Seager, who played baseball at Fairleigh Dickinson University, listened to those words, which his son quickly passed along after McGwire spoke them, and did what a good dad does. He deflected the attention back to his kids.

“Right from the beginning, in a lot of ways, Kyle kind of paved the way for me,” Jeff says of his Seattle-based son, 28, who hit .278/.359/.499 with 30 homers and 99 RBI this season for the Mariners. “What I mean by that is, you kind of discover things with your oldest that you realize you can do with your others at an even earlier age. It was pretty apparent with Kyle’s team that if you teach kids the right things from the beginning and make it fun, you know what, they learn and they will do.

“Right when Corey wanted to play, we worked on doing things fundamentally sound. Believe me, my boys have taught me a lot going the other way, too… As they’ve gotten older and gotten into the professional ranks, I’ve always told them to keep it simple. It’s easier to maintain. That was the goal: Keep it simple, not a lot of movement. It’s easier to make an adjustment to get it back to where you want to.” 

That artful swing produced results week after week this summer. With a .308 batting average (he ranked seventh in the NL) and a .512 slugging percentage (10th), Corey Seager in 2016 became only the fourth rookie in the divisional era (beginning in 1969) to finish in the NL’s top 10 in both categories, following the Braves’ Dusty Baker (1972) and the Dodgers’ Mike Piazza (1993).

Time was, Seager was going to play college ball at the University of South Carolina. Kyle played three seasons at the University of North Carolina before signing with the Mariners when they picked him in the third round of the 2009 draft. Justin, 24, played ball at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte before the Mariners picked him in the 12th round in 2013. Corey committed to USC, but the trappings that accompany being picked in the first round—let’s just say his $2.35 million signing bonus will buy a lot of M&M’s—took care of that.

There were moments when Seager felt like maybe he was missing out by not going to college.

“I used to think about it,” he says. “It’s human nature to wonder. But it’s kind of gone away. Obviously, in the offseason, I would go see some buddies at school. I got a little bit of it. I don’t regret it. It was the right fit for me, the right decision for me at the time. When everything works out like it did, there’s no turning back from it.”

Levelheaded as always, Seager credits his parents, Jeff and Jody, with emphasizing that their sons should be better people than ballplayers.

“You see a lot of people lose themselves off the field,” Corey says. “They get in trouble, and it affects their career, it affects their team, really, it affects their city. It’s always been an important thing to be respectful around the town, inside the clubhouse; these are the kinds of things my parents always talked about. It’s how I was raised.”

And he thanks his brothers for helping to develop his stay-calm-and-carry-on personality.

“When you have two older brothers, you can’t always let them know how you’re feeling,” he says. “It’s always been, from day one, them training me on how to not show emotion, how to not let them know when they get to me, how to calm everything down.”

Of course, there was plenty of teaching by example. Like the time Kyle was in high school and was playing Ping-Pong with his father in the family garage when Corey and Justin wanted to play basketball.

“[Kyle and Jeff] basically told us it wasn’t a good idea,” Corey says. “We told them we’ll be fine, we won’t get mad at each other. One thing leads to another, either he fouled me hard or I fouled him hard, and he threw the basketball at me.”

Jeff, who chuckles at the mention of one of the family’s most memorable brawls, estimates this was when Corey was 10 or 11 and Justin was 11 or 12.

After Corey caught the basketball, he wound up and fired it back at Justin, missed, and nailed the back taillight of Kyle’s Jeep.

“We both got in trouble,” Seager says, grinning. “That was probably one of the most famous fights. I got lucky. Thank God [the taillight] didn’t break, or I would have been in some serious trouble.”

Adds Jeff, “That was a very typical one. The four of us, we’d go out, and whatever sport it was, we’d be throwing footballs around, and it was always me guarding Kyle and Justin and Corey guarding each other. Football was two-hand touch. Soon it became two-hand shove. Then it got to be tackle. Then it got to be a brawl. And I’d have to say, ‘Boys, if you don’t let up a little bit, this is no longer fun and we’re going to have to stop.'”

Kyle developed quite the knack for egging on his two younger brothers, whose quick tempers played right into his hands.

Ten years later, pick a button, any button, push it, and chances are Corey will take a breath, assess the situation and calmly handle it.

“I don’t even know where to start,” says his double-play partner, veteran second baseman Chase Utley, 37. “His ability to slow the game down is probably the thing that impresses me most, especially given that he’s just 22 and it’s his first full year in the bigs.

“Usually it takes a couple of years to figure it out. But he’s figured it out quickly.”

Among the small moments that third baseman Justin Turner treasures each night is watching the many brief in-game conversations involving his two infield mates.

“That’s the small tutelage he’s getting,” Turner says. “For Chase to pass along his years of experience, and for Corey, who already is a superstar, to look up to him…”

Says Utley, “Early in the season, it was essentially me making the calls on coverage depending on the pitcher, the pitch that was supposed to be thrown, seeing how [the batter’s] swing is going.”

They did what middle infielders do—communicate over who’s going to cover second, who goes where on bunt plays, hit-and-run plays, where Utley is playing, where Seager is playing, what they’re thinking about doing with runners on first and third and many other different scenarios. If a ball is hit here, should Seager go home or to second? Strategy.

Except, about a month ago, things slowly began to change. Utley could see Seager making in-game adjustments himself, positioning himself according to situations and who was hitting. So Utley started to seek Seager’s opinion here and there, rather than simply making the call himself every time.

Sure sounds like the old man was administering a test.

Utley simply arches an eyebrow at this and offers a knowing smile.

Yes, the kid who bypassed South Carolina essentially had reached a graduation day of his own.

“[Utley]’s a great guy to learn from,” Seager says. “He’s been on every level, every stage, and he’s performed. He’s definitely a guy you’re thankful to have to your left.”

Through his first 184 games in the bigs, the only time the Dodgers have seen Seager rattled came last Sept. 8, when he committed two errors in the seventh inning. As if that wasn’t bad enough on its own merit, the misplays came in the first game Seager started with Clayton Kershaw on the mound. Seager immediately apologized to Kershaw afterward.

“I don’t even remember that,” Kershaw says. “His personality, his temperament, I’ve never seen him overmatched.”

Moments, whatever they are, do not overmatch him. On the second-to-last Sunday of the season, in Vin Scully’s final broadcast from Dodger Stadium, Seager smashed a game-tying triple in the seventh inning and then walloped a game-tying home run in the ninth. When he pumped his fist and shrieked at third base following the triple, the Dodgers couldn’t believe it.

“Oh my God!” bullpen catcher Josh Bard screamed during the postgame NL West-clinching celebration. “You’re human!”

Back home, Seager and his brothers have moved well past the days of throwing basketballs at one another and taking cover when the fists fly. Corey moved out of his parents’ home last winter, and he and Justin share a place in Charlotte not far from where Jeff works.

Each Tuesday in the offseason, the brothers have lunch with their dad during his work break, and each Sunday, all three brothers make it a point to drive to their parents’ house for dinner. Where, presumably, frozen M&M’s continue to flow.

“That’s very important stuff right there,” Jeff Seager says, chuckling. “We used to tell my wife, ‘You can run out of milk, but don’t run out of peanut M&M’s.'”

So go ahead, put this in the advance scouting report:

Toss that fastball into Seager’s kitchen at your own risk, but whatever you do, stay out of the kid’s freezer.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

I can fly higher than an eagle, for you are the wind beneath my wings…

1. Vin Scully and the Dodgers Match Walk-Offs

One by one, we say goodbye to the greatest summers of our lives.

A man in Pasadena, California, shakes his head, smiles and clicks off the television after the final out.

A Dodgers outfielder pauses on his way to the batter’s box, turns to the press box and waves to Vin Scully high up in Dodger Stadium.

A woman in Camarillo, California, feels a lump in her throat as Scully greets the television picture of two little gap-toothed boys, noting how “we’re happy to have you here, growing boys with growing teeth.”

Thousands across the country settle in so they can hear the great voice one last time on MLB Network Radio or MLB Network television.

And 50,000 people dab their eyes in unison as Scully takes the microphone one last time in Dodger Stadium, following the Dodgers’ NL West-clinching victory Sunday, thanking them, telling them he would be nothing without them, and asking them to indulge him in one last thing, to listen to his recording of “The Wind Beneath My Wings” as he dedicates it to them.

“I know it’s modest, I know it’s amateur,” Scully says. “Do you mind listening?”

And those 50,000 people immediately go library-silent. And on the infield, the Dodgers, who have just clinched the division, delay popping the champagne corks until the final line, “Thank God for you, the wind beneath my wings,” fades into the late afternoon.

We pause here ourselves, both to give thanks and to remind that following Sunday’s weepfest, we still get Scully three more times this weekend from San Francisco.

Savor them.

It’s a strange thing, these long goodbyes. We’ve known all summer that the force of nature that is Scully, 88, will retire following Sunday’s game. We think we’re prepared for it. And then…

“Here’s Joc Pederson, and there’s another pristine helmet. You wonder, what in the world did Josh Reddick do to get that helmet in the mess it’s in? [The television camera cuts to the dugout and shows Reddick’s helmet covered in patches of pine tar.] Yes, there it is [chuckling]. It’s not been condemned by the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, but it’s on the edge. Foul, outside of first base. Two-and-two is the count. Craig Biggio, his helmet was covered. I’ve never forgotten that. It looked infected.”

This was Saturday night, fourth inning, with the Dodgers en route to a 14-1 cruise over Colorado. But it could have been any night over the past 67 years. Vin Scully doesn’t broadcast a baseball game so much as he narrates it. In a world fast losing civility, trust and gentle good humor, the courtly Scully is the epitome of each.

Full disclosure: I’ve spoken to Scully several times over the past three decades, but I cannot say I know him. When Ernie Harwell retired in Detroit, that hit me even harder. Because I grew up in the Midwest listening to Harwell, and then I became well-acquainted with him as I settled into my own career. It is partly because of this that melancholy has seeped in to an almost overwhelming degree this week. I will miss the cheerful voice of baseball’s poet laureate coming through my television screen on summer nights, and next summer will feel a lot lonelier without him. And to those with an emotional connection to the Dodgers through Vin, that’s where the Harwell memories stir in me. I get it.

“The President of the United States has said it is time to go back to work. And so, despite a heavy heart, baseball gets up out of the dirt, brushes itself off and will follow his command, hoping in some small way to inspire the nation to do the same.”

This was on Sept. 17, 2001, on baseball’s first night back following the horror of 9/11. But the thing is, while Vin has been there for so many grand and important moments over the years, it is the accumulation of small moments that he’s narrated that get into your bloodstream. Because, after all, that’s what life is, right? A collection of small, mundane moments punctuated by the sudden flash of a big moment. Just like baseball.

And so while it is the no-hit and World Series calls that stick with us (“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!” following Kirk Gibson’s Game 1 pinch-hit homer in the 1988 World Series), what we fall in love with is the nightly companionship that brightens our lives. Staying home on a summer Saturday night, the family gathered in the front room, and maybe your young son or daughter makes an observation that makes you chuckle, and 10 years later, you still remember it. Maybe that’s not as exciting as the day you graduated or the day you got married or the day your first child was born, but not every night can be a party. Yet it is the collection of those quieter nights that make for a rich life. And so it is with Scully’s unparalleled body of work.

“[Colorado shortstop] Pat Valaika went to UCLA. Anybody know how UCLA did? They were playing Stanford in the Rose Bowl. We’ll find out and we’ll break the news to you. [A moment later.] It’s halftime and UCLA is leading 10-3 over Stanford. Did Christian McCaffrey show up yet? No, I’m only kidding.”

This was Saturday night, third inning, in that same Dodgers-Rockies game. For 67 years, Scully has been the community barbershop. He is where so many have gone to get cleaned up, feel good, catch up on the goings on about town. He’s there with the hard news, and he also consistently dispenses small nuggets of unbelievable information. Fascinating information. He comes up with gems that even those of us in the business full-time don’t know or haven’t heard.

Always, he has been great, and if you think this week’s current river of nostalgia is simply some kind of a lifetime achievement award, go back to his call in 1974 on the night Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s record, in Atlanta. He announced the home run, went silent for 44 seconds, allowing the crowd noise to wash through the radio speakers, and then this:

“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol, and it is a great moment for all of us.”

Like the sun, the grass and ice cream, he’s been with us for so long that he became easy to take for granted. And as the world changes—in many ways, for the better; in some ways, for the worse—what we’re losing with Scully is something we’ll never get back.

“Scully made an art out of baseball broadcasting,” Jim Murray, one of the greatest sports columnists ever, once wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “He also made journalism out of it. In a profession so full of ‘homers’—not the four-base kind, the kind where the guy in the booth root-root-roots for the home team—Scully distanced himself from partisanship.”

Murray wrote those words in August 1990. And a quarter-of-a-century later, yes, again in Saturday night’s broadcast, with the Dodgers leading Colorado 14-0, the graceful Scully continued to work under that lifelong guiding principle:

“It’s kind of tough to see a big league club get pushed around, but at the same time, although it might be a little embarrassing and frustrating, it’s not too hard to take. It’s a lot easier to lose, oh, 14-0 than 3-2 in the ninth inning. 0-and-2 is the count.”

Listen to Scully and one of the things you heard was empathy. How often do we hear that baseball is a game of failure, that even the best hitters fail seven out of 10 times? Same in our daily existence. Life is a series of small battles—some we win, some we lose. Nobody comes close to going undefeated, although when Scully is on the air, he makes things seem better.

“Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter! If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!”

In one way, his work kept this unbroken bond with each of us: As long as he kept returning for another year, the rest of us could go on feeling as if we were still young. Even when we turned 50, or 60, or 70. Hearing Scully on the business end of the television or radio meant that some things in life don’t change. We could still feel, on some nights, exactly as we did when we were 10, or 15, or 25. Well, almost.

Now, after this weekend, Scully will ease into a life of retirement, and for the rest of us, well, we won’t ease into anything. We will lurch forward, sometimes coughing and sputtering, and we will be forced to find another place to congregate for our fleeting grabs at the Fountain of Youth.

All that’s left is to offer an enormous thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. And, oh yes, to make sure we find a way to listen to him three more times this weekend.

Emotions always flow toward bittersweet near the end of another season, another summer, but this one, oh, this one is tough.

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timer’s game,” he once memorably said, and, man, as if that isn’t being hammered home in this season’s final days.

2. Vin, Part II

A couple of final thoughts:

If you somehow did not see his postgame talk from the press box on Sunday, here it is. Make sure to grab a box of Kleenex. And if you’re at work, well, maybe have a co-worker cover for you for a few minutes:

Also—and yes, this is pure advertisement—but my friend Jayson Stark over at ESPN.com hit one out of the park with this oral history of Scully last week. Do have a look.

3. Tragedy in Miami

The wrenching Trail of Tears this week through Miami in the aftermath of the horrible death of Jose Fernandez, 24, and his two friends in a boating accident overnight Saturday will continue for a long time. And as the Marlins played the Mets on Monday night in Miami in their first game back, emotions were as raw as you’ll ever find in a baseball stadium.

And then Dee Gordon, a close friend of Fernandez, smashed a leadoff home run and could not finish his trot before dissolving into a puddle of tears:

That followed many, many tweets from around the league, like this one:

From pregame tribute to the postgame memorial, if you didn’t see it, make sure to watch this:

4. Nationals Clinch, or National Alert?

Washington barely had time to celebrate its NL East title in manager Dusty Baker’s first season managing before that great Baseball GPS in the sky rerouted the Nationals to a path that could make it very difficult to get past the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL Division Series that starts next week:

• Bryce Harper, already said to be battling a neck injury worse than he and the club are copping to, is out for a few days after injuring his left thumb while sliding into third base the other night. The good news for Washington is that the X-rays were negative, but the worrisome news is that any finger injury can be trouble for a hitter, especially in the near term. And the playoffs begin in the near term.

• Stephen Strasburg’s elbow injury is keeping him as just questionable for the postseason. General manager Mike Rizzo told reporters Tuesday that Strasburg is unlikely to pitch in the NLDS, per Chase Hughes of CSN Mid-Atlantic, which would seriously dilute the rotation and make Tanner Roark a key figure for the Nationals.

• Catcher Wilson Ramos hurt his right knee in the sixth inning of Monday’s game against Arizona, and the Nats’ concern was justified, as MRI results showed a season-ending ACL tear, according to CSN Mid-Atlantic.

So the Nationals will take inventory next week as they prepare to face the Dodgers. Though Washington has won three NL East titles in the past five seasons, the Nats have not advanced past the NLDS.

Of course, last year they were sitting home in October after allowing a good start to melt away. Which is what was foremost in the mind of ace Max Scherzer over the weekend when Washington sprayed champagne, as he told reporters (via Mark Zuckerman of MASN Sports):

This one is personal to me because of last year and how we didn’t finish strong. That really stung the whole offseason. I hated that. I hated last offseason. So for us to be able to come out there and take care of business is huge. It’s huge because this is the stuff that it takes to put yourself in a place to win the World Series. And that’s the goal now, to win the World Series.

5. Olympic Gold and Swimming in Champagne

Great moments from a clincher: The flamboyant and always-entertaining Bryce Harper rocked the swim cap of a certain Washington-area Olympic hero:

6. Weekly Power Rankings

1. Sully: Good flick about a heroic pilot. Tom Hanks was great, but doggone it, I thought I was going to see Scully.

2. Big Papi: Farewell lap this week for David Ortiz. Well, until he takes another farewell lap deep into October.

3. Brangelina: Most emotional split since Derek Jeter and the Yankees.

4. Strep throat: Old-school malady makes a stretch run appearance by knocking Mets ace Noah Syndergaard from Saturday night’s start into this week. WHIP this.

5. Pumpkin Spice: At this point, I hear they’re going to start making throwback uniforms, rosin bags and pine tar that smell like the stuff. I’m totally making this up, but the way pumpkin spice is overtaking the world in the fall, I bet you believed me for a sec, didn’t ya?

7. Boston Pea Party

Talk about hitting peas: The Red Sox, who lead the majors in runs scored, are hot at the right time and turning the AL East into a romp. Before losing Tuesday at New York, Boston had won 11 consecutive games for the first time since Sept. 13-27, 1949.

Last time the Red Sox won 11 in a row, this happened:

Ted Williams is long gone, but David Price, before a lackluster start Tuesday at Yankee Stadium, had been riding a 2.78 ERA and a minuscule 0.85 WHIP over his past eight starts.

And in Sunday’s game at Tampa Bay, Red Sox pitchers set an MLB record by fanning 11 consecutive hitters. The previous record was 10 in a row, set on April 22, 1970, at Shea Stadium in New York, when 10 consecutive Padres struck out against Tom Seaver.

8. Chatter

• To review: The last time the Chicago Cubs won 100 or more games, it was in 1935.

• Beware, Cubs: In 25 seasons since 1990 (not including the 1994 strike season), only four teams that finished with that season’s best overall record have gone on to win the World Series: the 1998 and 2009 Yankees, and the ’07 and ’13 Boston Red Sox.

• Beware, Cubs, Part II: Of the 22 teams to win 100 or more games in the wild-card era (beginning in 1995), only two have gone on to win the World Series: the ’98 Yankees and the ’09 Yankees.

• Read it and weep, Giants bullpen: Through Tuesday, the Texas Rangers bullpen had produced a streak of 25.0 consecutive scoreless innings and had allowed just one unearned run over its past 32.1 innings. San Francisco, of course, leads the majors with 30 blown saves.

• One reason the wild-card chase has become a scramble for the Toronto Blue Jays: Ranked second in the American League in homers with 219, the Blue Jays, through Tuesday, nevertheless ranked 12th in the AL during the month of September with 23.

• Damning comment last week from White Sox slugger Jose Abreu, who said the only thing that separates Chicago from Kansas City is “desire.” White Sox manager Robin Ventura continues struggling to hold on to his job.

• Heralded Detroit rookie Michael Fulmer was 0-2 with a 5.50 ERA in three September starts before Friday night’s gem against Kansas City, when he allowed only one run and eight hits over seven innings, striking out nine and walking none.

• These also are the final days of Ryan Howard in Philadelphia. He will be given a $10 million buyout and sent on his way. No chance the Phillies pick up his $23 million salary for 2017. The question now becomes, is Howard finished, or will an American League team pick him up as a designated hitter?

• De Jon Watson was fired as senior vice president of baseball operations in Arizona when he pressed the issue of his 2017 contract, according to B/R sources. Understandable, in that the later baseball people are fired, the more difficult it is for them to find a job for the following season. The contracts of Watson, president of baseball operations Tony La Russa and general manager Dave Stewart all contained a clause by which a decision was supposed to be made by Aug. 31. La Russa and Stewart agreed to let it pass and keep working.

• Good for the Mariners in reacting quickly and decisively, essentially kicking catcher Steve Clevenger off their team following his offensive tweets about the rioting in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week.

• As SNY pointed out during a Mets telecast the other night, the club has had to use nine different starters in the past 36 games through Saturday and still owned one of the two wild-card slots (as of now).

• Paul Hoynes, an authoritative Cleveland beat writer for the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com for the past four decades, wrote why the Indians are doomed in the playoffs and took a bunch of grief. Increasingly, and instructively, too many people today only want to hear opinions they agree with.

9. Toronto Locked and Loaded

As the Blue Jays lick their wounds from Monday night’s brawl with the Yankees, file this away for your playoff scouting report:

9a. Rock ‘n’ Roll Lyric of the Week

Of presidential debates, the Mariners suspending Steve Clevenger and so much more going on today…

“Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth 

“‘Rip down all hate,’ I screamed 

“Lies that life is black and white 

“Spoke from my skull. I dreamed 

“Romantic facts of musketeers 

“Foundationed deep, somehow 

“Ah, but I was so much older then 

“I’m younger than that now. 

“Girls’ faces formed the forward path 

“From phony jealousy 

“To memorizing politics 

“Of ancient history 

“Flung down by corpse evangelists 

“Unthought of, though, somehow 

“Ah, but I was so much older then 

“I’m younger than that now 

“A self-ordained professor’s tongue 

“Too serious to fool 

“Spouted out that liberty 

“Is just equality in school 

“‘Equality,’ I spoke the word 

“As if a wedding vow 

“Ah, but I was so much older then 

“I’m younger than that now”

—Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

When Jose Fernandez pitched, anything was possible. He was young, vibrant, dominant and passionate.

He was a Rookie of the Year winner, surely a future Cy Young Award winner, a foundational piece of the Miami Marlins organization and a face of the game’s next generation.

That he died overnight Saturday is stunningly tragic.

That it was in a boating accident is utterly unspeakable.

Fernandez, 24, defected from Cuba to chase his baseball dream. It took him four tries. Once, he was caught and tossed into a Cuban prison, just a kid, 15, locked up with steely adults. The fourth attempt was successful but harrowing. His mother, Maritza, was knocked off the boat by a wave, and Fernandez leapt into the ocean and saved her from drowning.

This is American Dream stuff—the best of our cultural melting pot, the part where it was supposed to be smooth sailing for Fernandez from here on out.

Instead, a young life was extinguished far too soon.

And at the most exciting time of the baseball year, with just a week’s worth of drama and cheers left before the calendar turns to October and the volume cranks even higher, the games have been interrupted, and we will pause for a wrenching moment of silence.

Leaves fall, seasons change, but this brings you to your knees.

You think of Thurman Munson and Roberto Clemente and their fatal plane crashes. You’re brought back to the spring of 1993, when Cleveland Indians pitchers Tim Crews and Steve Olin were killed during spring training in a boating accident on Florida’s Little Lake Nellie.

There is no preparation for death when it forces its way into our lives as an unexpected intruder. It shows up unannounced, and we’re reminded once again that all the first-pitch ceremonies and full-count offerings and raucous tailgating can turn hollow by sunrise tomorrow. Maybe it hits us especially hard in the sports world because this is where we turn to forget, even momentarily, the latest difficulties we’re having at work or the most recent absurdity in a world that seems to go more off balance by the day.

Fernandez last pitched Tuesday. He threw a gem against the Washington Nationals, cutting down 21 consecutive hitters en route to striking out 12 and allowing only three hits in eight innings. The Marlins have been on the periphery of the National League wild-card chase all summer, and Fernandez’s dominance helped keep their faintly flickering hopes alive.

Because he was little more than two years removed from Tommy John surgery, the Marlins also continued to keep a close watch over him. He had thrown 111 taxing pitches, and the Marlins came to a compromise while debating whether that would be his final start of the season: They would give him another, but they would also give him an extra day’s rest in the process and push that start back to Monday.

Had he stayed on his regular schedule and started Sunday, he probably would have been home resting Saturday night instead of with friends on that fatal boat ride.

But that’s how fragile life is, and it is moments like this that drive that head-shaking fact home. One decision here. One decision there. And the effects on our lives ripple like waves on the ocean.

When Fernandez won the National League Rookie of the Year Award in 2013, it was announced on a Monday. One day before that, his grandmother, the woman Fernandez once called “the love of my life,” had left Cuba to join Jose and his mother in Miami. Talk about sweet, must-see TV:

Since that suitable-for-framing 2013 season, Fernandez—even with significant time off—had established himself as one of the best young pitchers to come along in years.

At 16-8 with a 2.86 ERA in 29 starts this season, Fernandez at the time of his death was ranked No. 1 among all major league pitchers with a 6.2 WAR by FanGraphs.

By striking out 589 of the 1,888 batters he faced during his career, or 31.2 percent, Fernandez became the all-time leader among starting pitchers in strikeout percentage—ahead of Hall of Famers Randy Johnson (28.6 percent) and Pedro Martinez (27.7 percent).

Fernandez had so much game ahead of him, but more than that, so much joy and so much life. There were times when he angered opponents by crossing some of baseball’s silly so-called “unwritten rules,” showing too much emotion after hitting a home run against the Atlanta Braves in 2013, for example.

There also were times when he even angered his own teammates with his immaturity—a subject I wrote about in December.

But like the rest of us, no matter whether we are 24 or 54, Fernandez was a work in progress. And he played with such passion and joy that you couldn’t wait to see how that work was going to turn out.

As devastated Marlins manager Don Mattingly said during a press conference Sunday:

There was just joy with him when he played…and when he pitched, and I think that’s what the guys will say, too. As mad as he would make you with some of the stuff he would do, you’d just see that little kid that you see when you watch kids play Little League or something like that. That’s the joy that Jose played with and the passion he felt about playing. That’s what I think about.

Even more than the steady diet of strikeouts, what Fernandez leaves us with are vivid memories of that joy and that passion. The Marlins canceled their game with Atlanta on Sunday as baseball hit the pause button to mourn. It will take a long time to get over this one.

But as we all move toward tomorrow, maybe stop and think about this for a bit: If we all could inject some of that joy and passion into what we do, what a fitting tribute it would be as we pay our final respects to a man who still had so much more to do.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

My country ’tis of thee….

1. Sweet Land of Liberty

When the sniper started shooting at the Dallas police on that tragic day in July, Torii Hunter was at his home just outside the city, glued to the television, watching the nearby horror in a state of shock.

When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick first sat and then started kneeling during national anthems as a form of protesting racial inequality, it took Hunter back to his own well-decorated, 19-year career as an All-Star outfielder, hitting just as close to home.

When Baltimore’s Adam Jones and the Yankees’ CC Sabathia both spoke out during the last several days, saying that baseball is “a white man’s game,” it hit even closer to home with Hunter.

“We already have two strikes against us,” Jones told Bob Nightengale of USA Today Sports, explaining why blacks in baseball have been reluctant to become involved in sports’ recent grass-roots protest movement. “So you might as well not kick yourself out of the game. In football, you can’t kick them out. You need those players. In baseball, they don’t need us.

“Baseball is a white man’s sport.”

Now retired, Hunter answered plenty of questions during his career about the diminishing number of African-American baseball players. He fielded probably more than his share of questions about racism, too. He learned a lot along the way, about both himself and about others.

But all of those questions Hunter answered before disappearing into a life with his children and grandchildren, well, the answers have only gotten more elusive.

These are edgy, angry times in our country. And both the edginess and the anger have reached our games, provoking, at times, uncomfortable silences between family members and uneasy discussions among fans.

I called Hunter on Monday to check in, because over the past two decades, I’ve found him to be one of the most thoughtful, articulate, caring and reasonable players I’ve ever known.

“People think of it as racism,” Hunter told B/R of Jones’ comments, echoed by the Yankees’ CC Sabathia a few days later to Mark Feinsand of the New York Daily News. “It has nothing to do with that. It’s just different cultures. You’ve got Asians, you’ve got Dominicans, you’ve got Cubans—it’s different cultures. [Baseball] is diverse, and that’s good.”

Hunter’s point is that Jones and Sabathia are simply stating the facts: Among MLB players in 2016, only eight percent are African American. In the NBA, that number is 74 percent. In the NFL, it is 68 percent.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a white man’s sport,” Hunter says. “Blacks had our own league: the Negro League. We played this sport before football or anything else. It’s our game.

“I know what they mean, though. You’ve got to understand, baseball is dominated by whites. Half the country is dominated by whites. I always say baseball is life, life is baseball….It is [a white man’s game] today as we speak, but blacks used to love baseball.”

The important point that Jones and Sabathia are making, Hunter says, is this: Because of steadily dwindling numbers, blacks in baseball are in danger of losing their voice.

“It has nothing to do with [racism],” Hunter says. “I can say right now that football and basketball are a black man’s sport because [a greater percentage] of African Americans are playing those.

“It’s less in baseball, so when we take a stance for an injustice or anything else going on in the world, we get scrutinized because we are in the minority in baseball. You have more of a voice in basketball and football.

“In baseball, you can say something crazy, but you might be out of the game. So yeah, guys are afraid.”

Today, Hunter and others see baseball losing African Americans to other sports for many reasons, including the explosion in popularity at the youth level of travel baseball.

“It’s so expensive,” Hunter says. “Just be real. Don’t look at my reality, that I played baseball 19 years and made good money. That’s not reality. CC, Adam Jones, what they make is not reality. What the reality is, is that a lot of African Americans live under the poverty line. Under. How do you live under the poverty line? Why does this happen in America?

“Traveling baseball, it costs $3,000 to $5,000 to play. To get great instruction, you can’t do that [if you are poor].”

Hunter has a unique perspective in that, as he said, his life is not reality for so many of any color: During his 19-year career, he earned roughly $171 million, according to Baseball-Reference.com. Yet, he also has been a firsthand witness to racial tension in our country throughout his life, from growing up in a poor part of Arkansas to a 2012 incident in which the police came to his home in Newport Beach, California, when an alarm accidentally was tripped while he was playing for the Angels.

Hunter was home at the time, watching a movie, when he heard someone trying to open his front door. Next thing he knew, he was surrounded by police with their guns drawn.

“It was terrible,” Hunter says. “This is home. This is my house. They walked me upstairs with a gun out to get my license. What if they accidentally shot that thing? Then I’m dead, I got no voice and nobody hears anything.

“That’s not just one incident. I had many growing up. I’m not angry, though. I got through it.”

So yes, at home in Dallas in July, watching the horror unfold with the sniper, you bet many, many thoughts were threading their way through Hunter’s head.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Hunter says. “Violence on violence creates a war. Nothing gets done…I think everybody in Dallas was shocked, in their homes, keeping up with it, watching the news.

“It’s something you don’t see happen. A sniper shooting cops…all cops are not that way, all blacks are not that way. We need to have more dialogue and understanding. Cops need to know that not all blacks are thugs, militant, aggressive. And more blacks need to understand that all cops are not bad.”

Hunter watches Kaepernick and other athletes protest during the national anthem, and there are some things he agrees with and others that he doesn’t. Like many of the rest of us.

“My dad served in the military in Vietnam, so I would never [not stand for the national anthem]. I would take a stand, but not that way. You would hear my voice; I would say it. I don’t know if that’s really going to do anything.

“But guess what? Kaepernick did it and he stood up for it. And I would never fault a guy for standing up for what he believes in.”

There are those who would prefer athletes just shut up and play. But what about private citizens who protest for a cause they believe in while they work? It’s OK for some citizens in this country to pipe up with their opinions, but not for others? So athletes are just zoo animals and not human beings?

Agree or disagree with Jones, Sabathia, Kaepernick and others, but in this big, messy democracy, if politicians can offer public opinions on sports, and actors and musicians can speak out on politics, why should thoughtful athletes with passionate beliefs be muzzled?

“What they’re doing is powerful,” Hunter says. “That’s a big stance right there. It’s about freedom. I respect them for doing it.

“[The national anthem stance] is not what I would do, but I understand and respect it…They’re trying get a dialogue going. It’s not that they hate America or hate the flag. They just want you to hear them. They want to talk about it and break it down.

“Racism is learned behavior. You’re not born with it. I love America—love it, love it, love it. But [it’s OK] to talk and debate and make a stand.

“And guess what everybody is talking about.”

2. MLB Torpedoes A.J. Preller and the Padres

On the surface, San Diego Padres’ general manager A.J. Preller being slapped with a 30-day suspension without pay over the length of a five-year contract might not seem like that big of a deal.

Symbolically, however, it is a colossally damning statement regarding Preller and the Padres: a public humiliation and repudiation.

Historically, there is precious little precedent for an executive to be censured this drastically.

According to sources within the league office, the closest parallel is way back in 1912, when Philadelphia Phillies owner Horace Fogel was tried in New York on Nov. 26-27 by the National League for making disparaging remarks questioning the integrity and intentions of NL President Thomas Lynch and some of the NL umpires during the 1912 pennant race. Among other things, he called that year’s pennant race “crooked.”

Fogel was found guilty on five of seven counts and banned for life.

Otherwise?

There was another Phillies owner, William Cox, who was banned for life in 1943 by commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Judge Landis for gambling.

There was Cardinals president Sam Breadon, who was suspended for 30 days in 1946 for his part in a dispute with the Mexican League (Jorge Pasquel, the Mexican League president, was bribing American players, and Breadon flew to Mexico to try to take care of the problem himself rather than going through proper channels).

And there was Joseph Creamer, who was a New York Giants’ team doctor who offered umpire Bill Klem $2,500 to ensure a playoff victory in 1908. Creamer was banned for life by the NL.

None of those examples are an exact comparison to Preller’s case, which tells you just how rogue he and the Padres went in deceptive practices regarding their medical records exchanged with other clubs during trade talks this summer.

And even given these other extreme examples, none of them occurred after 1946.

It is at least the third censure for Preller, who was suspended when he was with Texas over scouting practices in Latin America and who was GM last summer when the Padres were fined for holding an illegal workout in Aruba.

3. MVP! MVP! MVP!

Mike Trout? From a last-place American League club?

Believe it. He is making a strong case. The Angels might stink, but Trout remains angelic to watch. And while you can make an MVP case for Houston’s Jose Altuve, Boston’s Mookie Betts, Toronto’s Josh Donaldson and others, Trout remains the single best player in the game today and, from here, should win the award.

He was leading the AL in on-base percentage through Tuesday night’s games (.438) and ranked among the AL’s top five in batting (.318), runs scored (113) and steals (26). He also led the AL with a 10.0 WAR (per Baseball-Reference.com), out-distancing Betts (8.9).

The only negative on Trout’s resume is that he is not pushing his team into the playoffs. Though, truth be told, a combination of Babe Ruth and Roberto Clemente couldn’t push these Angels into October.

But he remains the best overall player in the game in so many ways, highlighted by this outstanding slide:

4. This is No San Diego Padres Stunt

While the real Padres were busted for cheating, the fake Padres are about to make history by employing the first female player in MLB history.

OK, stretch your imagination: This is for the new Fox television show called Pitch, debuting Thursday night, in which the “beautiful, tough, gifted athlete” Ginny Baker (played by Kylie Bunbury) becomes the first woman to play Major League Baseball.

Some of the series was filmed at Petco Park in San Diego, and former major leaguers Gregg Olson, Chad Kreuter and C.J. Nitkowski are working as consultants. Olson, who pitched for nine clubs over 14 seasons, is working with Bunbury to make sure she throws properly. Kreuter, who caught for seven different clubs over his 16-year career, is working with Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who plays catcher/love interest Mike Lawson, on catching etiquette.

Nitkowski, who pitched for eight big league clubs over his 10-year career, is consulting with the large lineup of writers.

“Mostly being available for text messages, phone calls—is this believable, would this really happen?” says Nitkowski, who today is an analyst for Fox Sports and MLB Network Radio. “Answering questions from executive producers and writers. Throwing stuff out, giving them ideas here and there.”

The show premiered at the West Los Angeles Little League fields, where the original “Bad News Bears” was filmed. Early reviews from the critics have been favorable.

The most valuable advice Nitkowski has offered so far?

“I think making sure they don’t go down the wrong path with some language that some people might perceive as corny,” he says. “You’re making sure that when a TV person says something, the average fan might think it’s OK, but it might be something that others might think is said only in TV or in the movies. I remember thinking ‘That’s too TV-ish, let’s go further here.'”

An early scene, for example, revolves around the catcher and pitcher going over scouting reports, and some of the original script dialogue wasn’t in authentic baseball language. So Nitkowski suggested ways to say what needed to be said.

The baseball players/consultants also have a cameo or two in the show. Nitkowski is not awaiting an Emmy nomination.

“Probably not,” he says, chuckling. I was in 42 (the Jackie Robinson film) and got no nods for that, and I’m pretty sure that streak will continue.

“It’s such a stretch, the first time I played a baseball player, and now I’m playing a baseball player-turned-broadcaster. My range has really been tested.”

5. Breaking It Down

File away some of these interesting numbers for the playoffs:

6. Weekly Power Rankings

1. Chicago Cubs: More powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet.

2. Brian Dozier: The most home runs by a Twins player since Harmon Killebrew. Somewhere, Kent Hrbek is belching in delight.

3. Clayton Kershaw: He’s back and more scary than Jack Nicholson in The Shining, too.

4. Madison Bumgarner-Yasiel Puig: They go at it for a second time in three seasons in Los Angeles on Monday night. Can we just schedule a winter charity bout and be done with it?

5. The Emmys: In the latest example of it’s pointless to compare today’s ratings to those of the past, “TV’s biggest night” hits an all-time low in the television ratings. What is this, the World Series?

7. Giants Bullpen Creates Its Own WikiLeaks

When Javier Lopez, Hunter Strickland and the Giants coughed up San Francisco’s carefully built 1-0 lead in a key game in Dodger Stadium on Monday night and lost 2-1, it probably was the death knell for them in the NL West.

Question is, can they hang onto a wild-card slot?

There are many reasons why the Giants have fallen from owning the best record in the majors at the All-Star break to nearly playing themselves out of the playoffs—chief among them a disappointing bullpen:

The Giants lead the majors with 29 blown saves.

Their 57.97 save percentage ranks 27th in the majors. Only the Angels (56.82 percent), Twins (53.49 percent) and Reds (52.08 percent) rank lower.

Santiago Casilla is tied for the MLB lead with nine blown saves. Strickland (five), Cory Gearrin (four) and Will Smith (four), who started the season in Milwaukee, can be found on the leaderboard, too.

It is not even close to the bullpen that manager Bruce Bochy had when the Giants won it all in 2010, 2012 and 2014.

And it is why their even-year magic is about to come to an end in 2016.

8. Chatter

• How about this: Anthony Rizzo has become only the second Cubs lefty to rack up at least 30 homers and 100 RBI in multiple seasons, following in the footsteps of Hall of Famer Billy Williams, who did it in 1965, 1970 and 1972.

• Yes, Max Scherzer will be vital to the Washington Nationals’ hopes in October, but the most important man on Dusty Baker’s staff will be Tanner Roark. With Stephen Strasburg’s effectiveness questionable given his elbow issues, Roark has to pitch well. So far, he’s been up to the challenge: He claimed the top spot with nine starts this summer in which he’s pitched seven or more scoreless innings. Next is the Cubs’ Jake Arrietta with seven.

• Washington’s Trea Turner scorched the Braves over the weekend with eight hits in 12 at-bats. Great line from Atlanta catcher Tyler Flowers to B/R’s Danny Knobler, in case you missed it:

It’s tough to be back there catching with him hitting. You really start to question if you know what you’re doing. But you know what? To this point, he really presents no weaknesses—at least, none that anybody has found yet, us included.

As Danny notes, the Braves swear Turner Field is not named for him. Nevertheless, with Turner on deck to star for the Nationals over the next few seasons, maybe it’s a good thing Atlanta is leaving Turner Field for new digs next season.

• And so it goes: When Jason Heyward homered for the Cubs Monday night, Cincinnati’s pitchers set an MLB record by allowing 242 home runs. The previous mark was 241 set by the 1996 Detroit Tigers.

• You’ve got until Thursday to enter a cool charity contest sponsored by the Giants’ Jake Peavy: The “too grateful to be hateful” pitcher has launched a “Grateful for San Francisco” campaign that will give the winner and a guest the chance to attend the Giants’ final regular-season game Oct. 2 against the Dodgers and watch from a suite with basketball legend Bill Walton and former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. Details in this video and here.

• Prayers for Padres infielder Yangervis Solarte and his family after Solarte’s wife, Yuliett, died of cancer on Saturday. So, so sad.

• Purely personal: I just want to wish all the best to Marly Rivera, the talented journalist and longtime friend, who has been named as a co-host of ESPN’s new Spanish language talk show entitled Nacion ESPN.

9. Streets of Oakland

Noted (and cool! Feel free to start humming Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family”):

9a. Rock ‘n’ Roll Lyric of the Week 

This one goes out to the beleaguered Giants’ bullpen:

“She fired up my old hot rod
“Ran it in the pond
“Put sugar in my John Deere
“I can’t even mow my lawn
“And I got nobody to blame but me
“She built her a bonfire
“With my old six string
“Took all my good whiskey
“And poured it down the drain
“And I got nobody to blame but me
“I got nobody to blame but me

— Chris Stapleton, “Nobody to Blame”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. All quotes obtained first-hand, unless otherwise noted.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball. 

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Just a Labor Day reminder that the return of football is far more of a downer than the annual exuberance baseball brings for this simple reason: The start of football means back to school (ugh). Baseball means summer is here (hum babe!). Though that still didn’t stop me from being glued to the flat-screen TV on what was a great opening weekend of college football…

1. Boston’s Road Dogs Chase the Blue Jays

Tuesday in San Diego was the same as Monday in San Diego for David Ortiz: not much to do. Playing in a National League park with no designated hitter, Ortiz had plenty of time on his hands.

Let’s see…He could count the well-traveled Boston Red Sox fans around San Diego, scoreboard-watch as the Red Sox slug it out with the Toronto Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles in the AL East, even pay rapt attention to Donald Trump’s campaign.

“I’m not talking about that,” Ortiz good-naturedly told a Boston radio reporter here Tuesday. “I already said what I have to say on that.”

He sure did, telling USA Today‘s Jorge L. Ortiz in a wide-ranging interview that Trump’s declaration that Mexico is sending rapists and criminals to the United States “didn’t sit well with me. When you speak like that about us, it’s a slap in the face. … As Latin people we deserve respect, no matter where you’re from. And especially our Mexican brothers, who come here willing to do all the dirty work. Latin people here in the United States are the spark plug of the country’s economy.”

The only wall Ortiz wants to see is Fenway Park’s Green Monster. But considering 30 of their final 46 games were/are on the road, these are interesting times for the Red Sox as they thunder down the stretch.

Ortiz is sitting (other than pinch-hit appearances) until this weekend’s showdown in Toronto. They’ve summoned Cuban phenom Yoan Moncada from Double-A Portland because Travis Shaw and Aaron Hill weren’t producing at the plate (Boston’s third-base production ranks 28th in MLB with a .710 OPS). And Clay Buchholz has been resurrected from the boneyard just in time.

Since the All-Star break, Boston’s pitchers have the lowest road ERA in the majors at 2.66. Good timing for that, given the Red Sox’s spate of road games this month. Buchholz, following 6.2 one-run innings Tuesday night, has produced a 2.20 ERA over his past 12 outings (four starts) beginning on July 27.

Among other things, Buchholz has moved his arm slot up a little higher than it has been during the past two seasons, back to where it was when he went 17-7 in 2010. Injuries and wear and tear had caused it to drop. The better arm slot, according to manager John Farrell, “has helped him to stay in his lane [with pitches] in or away, and it’s added depth to his two-seam fastball and cutter.”

Plus, Buchholz has pitched exclusively from the stretch in each of his past three starts.

The comeback is a credit to Buchholz, who, at 32, was getting pummeled on both the mound and in the public arena earlier this summer and could have mentally checked out. He was 3-9 with a 5.91 ERA at the All-Star break.

“It says a lot about him,” Farrell said. “There was a lot of speculation [early in the year], a lot of wondering about his status. Externally, people were wondering whether his days in Boston were numbered.”

Instead, with knuckleballer Steven Wright’s shoulder injury, Buchholz might be just what the doctor ordered for Boston. Wright got a second opinion on his shoulder Tuesday, and though Farrell said it was consistent with the first exam in that no structural damage was found, he said the Sox still do not know whether Wright will pitch again this year.

So Buchholz is enormous, as is the potential emergence of Moncada, who Baseball America rated the game’s No. 1 prospect at midseason. But after going 4-for-10 with three runs scored and a double in his first three games in Oakland, Moncada was 0-for-7 with seven strikeouts in the first two games in San Diego. Still, the Sox see plenty they like.

“He’s got a pretty good swing, and I don’t think he’s scared,” Boston hitting coach Chili Davis says. “He got upset after one at-bat [Monday]. He didn’t walk back to the dugout timid; he walked back mad.

“And hitters like that are going to do something about it.”

The AL East has been a jumble all season, and it’s only lately that Toronto has threatened to clamp down. The Jays spent 22 days alone in first place this season, including nine of the past 10 days until Tuesday’s loss in Yankee Stadium. Now, Toronto and Boston are tied for first, and Baltimore trails by only a game.

The Jays team that awaits Boston at Rogers Centre this weekend has allowed the second-fewest runs per game in the American League (4.18), is watching second baseman Devon Travis become a breakout star in the season’s second half and is fueled by Josh Donaldson’s bid for a second consecutive MVP award.

The Blue Jays also pushed back knuckleballer R.A. Dickey’s next start to line up their top three starters for the Red Sox this weekend: Marco Estrada, J.A. Happ and Aaron Sanchez.

By then, Boston again will be able to utilize the DH and Ortiz, who leads the majors in OPS (1.030), slugging percentage (.625), extra-base hits (76) and doubles (44).

“That’s the schedule,” Sox outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. shrugs. “We’ve known that’s the schedule since before the season started.”

And despite all of the road games, if it comes down to the season’s final weekend, there’s this: Boston hosts Toronto.

2. Backing into the NL Wild Card

Only one of the top five teams in National League wild-card contention—the New York Mets—had a winning record from July 30 until Tuesday night. Then the Cardinals took it to Pittsburgh again, and now, since July 30, this is what it looks like:

In this turtle’s-pace race, keep an eye on the Mets for this reason: Of their remaining 23 games, only three are against a team with a winning record (Washington Nationals). Otherwise, Terry Collins’ club gets a steady diet of losers: Cincinnati, Atlanta, Minnesota and Philadelphia.

3. Of Managers, Slumps and October

Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus and Chicago Cubs skipper Joe Maddon each went to the “Clear Their Heads” page of the playbook a couple of weeks ago in attempting to ignite struggling outfielders Justin Upton and Jason Heyward, respectively.

Results?

Since his three-day mental break last month, Upton, the erstwhile Tigers slugger, has hit .330 with eight homers and 21 RBI in 16 games.

Since his four-day mental break last month, Heyward, the slumping Cubs slugger, has responded some, but not quite to Upton’s specs: .271, one homer and 10 RBI in 15 games.

4. Tim Tebow, and Quarterbacking the Atlanta Braves

The clubhouse leader to sign Tim Tebow following his workout at the University of Southern California last week is the Atlanta Braves, multiple sources tell B/R.

Makes sense on several levels: As an undrafted free agent, Tebow’s contract will count against a club’s 2016 draft bonus pool, and the Braves have a little money left. And in that regard, Tebow is not expected to sign for much because he is such a project.

As it will not demand a big cash outlay, and given that Tebow will start at the Single-A or Double-A level, there isn’t much risk involved. And with Atlanta’s farm teams in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia—smack in the heart of SEC football country—you bet Tebow will sell some extra tickets.

The fascinating thing to consider, of course, would have been if Tebow started his baseball career far younger than his current age of 29. As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Angels tried to draft him in 2009 but, as Red Sox scout and then-Angels scouting director Eddie Bane told B/R, “They hid that phone number better than any phone number has ever been hidden. Probably, it was Urban Meyer [Florida’s coach at the time]. You couldn’t get any info on Tim Tebow. As hard as we tried…we couldn’t get the info.”

Bane said the Angels tried to get an MLB draft information card to Tebow so he could fill it out, but they couldn’t find him.

When I relayed that story to Tebow last week at USC, he grinned in amusement and confirmed that no MLB draft card ever reached him. He laughed when I told him that Bane figured Meyer was the one who hid Tebow.

“This is the first I’ve heard of any of that,” the former quarterback told B/R, laughing.

Whether the Braves or someone else signs Tebow, expect him to play for a club’s Instructional League team this fall. Then, as B/R reported last week, he is expected to play winter ball in Venezuela to prepare for his first spring training.

5. Of Clayton Kershaw, Awards and Chavez Ravine

Los Angeles Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw is slated to rejoin the rotation Friday in Miami. Now the biggest question for the rampaging Dodgers becomes: Will Kershaw screw them up?

Anybody would be thrilled to get Kershaw back, but everyone from industry insiders to seamhead pundits expected the Dodgers to fold this year if Kershaw was out for an extended period of time. Instead, the opposite has happened. The Dodgers are 37-24 in Kershaw‘s absence.

So while not diminishing Kershaw‘s dominance on the mound, it does make you wonder about his overall value to the team. Kershaw is no mere Cy Young Award winner—he’s also the 2014 AL MVP. Granted, that was two years ago, but given the always-fierce debate regarding whether starting pitchers should be considered for an MVP Award when they already have the Cy Young Award, it does make you wonder.

As the anti-MVP argument goes, starting pitchers, even those as great as Kershaw, only play once every five days. Watching this year’s Dodgers, it does deflate the seemingly automatic tie-in between the Cy Young Award and MVP that Kershaw usually carries with him.

And now, as HBO’s John Oliver might say, this:

That would be Jesse Chavez and Josh Ravin, who pitched in relief on Sunday in Chavez Ravine. Beautiful.

6. Weekly Power Rankings

1. Chicago Cubs: Ripped through a 22-6 August, most victories in a month since they won 22 games in September 1945—one month after V-J Day. Next thing you know, the Cubs will be kissing nurses in Times Square.

2. Stranger Things: Netflix has greenlighted a second season of the show, which features the supernatural developments of Yasiel Puig bouncing between the Dodgers and Triple-A Oklahoma City. Wait, what? That’s not what the show is about?

3. Ubaldo Jimenez: Orioles starter throws his first complete game since 2011 and Baltimore’s first of the year in a 7-3 triumph over Tampa Bay on Monday. Look out: Jimenez has a 2.70 ERA over his past four starts and could be just the wild card the Orioles need to earn a wild-card slot.

4. Taco trucks: Mmmmm!

5. Zack Greinke: Surrenders a career-high five homers in his return to Dodger Stadium on Monday, including four in one inning. The only other pitcher in Diamondbacks franchise history to give up five homers in a game was Casey Daigle in 2004, and he, um, didn’t sign for $206.5 million.

7. Whoosh!

Biggest swing-and-miss relief pitchers? Maybe not who you think. File this away for your stretch-run scouting:

8. Chatter

• Former Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos has emerged as a candidate to replace Terry Ryan in charge of the Minnesota Twins’ baseball operations, according to Jon Morosi of MLB Network. Industry speculation has the Twins going outside of the organization to make the hire, with former Boston GM Ben Cherington, Cubs senior vice president Jason McLeod and Texas assistant GM Thad Levine also in the mix. The headhunting company the Twins hired to aid in the search is the same company the Milwaukee Brewers used last year that led them to hire David Stearns.

• When the going gets tough, Texas usually wins: The Rangers lead MLB in both one-run wins (30) and winning percentage in those games (.769, 30-9). Thanks in no small part to how well they’re playing in those games, the Rangers continue to own the best record in the American League and, thus, the edge for home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.

• Two weeks ago, Cleveland was going 2-5 on a trip through Oakland and Texas. The Indians had scored a total of just four runs combined in six of those games, and Detroit had chopped their AL Central lead from 7.5 to 4.5 games. How the Indians answered that skid speaks to the resiliency of Terry Francona’s club: They opened their current 10-game homestand with six consecutive wins against Minnesota and Miami before losing Monday and Tuesday to Houston to maintain that 4.5-game lead despite the Tigers winning 11 of their past 15 games.

• Three Boston Red Sox—Dustin Pedroia, Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts—are on pace to collect 198 or more hits. Only three clubs in the past 75 years have had three players with 200 or more hits each: The 1991 Texas Rangers (Rafael Palmeiro, Julio Franco and Ruben Sierra), 1982 Milwaukee Brewers (Cecil Cooper, Paul Molitor and Robin Yount) and 1963 St. Louis Cardinals (Bill White, Dick Groat, Curt Flood).

• Seattle’s sinking ship: On Saturday, Taijuan Walker surrendered three home runs while obtaining only two outs before departing in the first inning. The last starting pitcher to yield that many homers while failing to make it through the first inning? Cincinnati’s Phil Dumatrait on Sept. 9, 2007, per ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark.

• Minnesota’s All-Star second baseman Brian Dozier has cracked 39 home runs, bringing him within sight of the MLB record for homers by a second baseman, set by Davey Johnson (43) in 1973. Dozier’s 39 homers are the most by any Minnesota player since Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew’s 41 in 1970.

• The ongoing adventures of Gary Sanchez: The Yankees catcher has reached base in 21 consecutive games, and he had hits in 18 of those games.

• Blue Jays closer Roberto Osuna, 21, on Sunday became the youngest player ever to reach 30 saves in a season, dating back to when the save was invented in 1969.

• Pittsburgh has lost eight in a row and lost catcher Francisco Cervelli to a left thumb injury. Rough times for the Jolly Roger.

• The Aug. 31 deadline for Arizona to exercise contract options for general manager Dave Stewart and assistant GM De Jon Watson passed without a decision, other than club president Derrick Hall telling the Arizona Republic that the Diamondbacks have decided to wait until season’s end to make any decisions. That’s all well and good, but scouts and those working in player personnel generally work under contracts that expire Oct. 31, and if Arizona does opt to make leadership changes in October, it will be terrible timing for the scouts and player-development folks to start looking for jobs.

9. I Read It on the Coconut Telegraph

Uttered during the Giants-Cubs series over the weekend, this gem from San Francisco starter Johnny Cueto:

9a. Rock ‘n’ Roll Lyric of the Week

Stretch run, adrenaline gets you through…

“Everyone I know, everywhere I go

“People need some reason to believe

“I don’t know about anyone but me

“If it takes all night, that’ll be all right

“If I can get you to smile before I leave

“Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels

“I don’t know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels

“Look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through

“Looking into their eyes I see them running too”

—Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball. 

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

PEARL, Miss. — Hang tight, because this is a happy story. Really. You wouldn’t think so, not when someone loses an eye. Not when the pool of blood on the ground looks like something out of CSI: New York. Not when an emergency medical helicopter swoops in and rushes the man off to a nearby hospital, a life hanging in the balance.

Five years later, sitting in his office, that man looks across his desk at a visitor. Watch this, he says. My prosthetic eye moves right along with my good eye.

You look, and doggone if it doesn’t. Talk about the subtle miracles of modern medicine. Looking across that desk, Luis Salazar’s right eyeball moves to his right. The left eye trails along with it. He looks the other way, and the prosthetic left eye, now leading the dance, goes left with his good right eye following along.

It is a beautiful sight.

Tonight, he will manage the Double-A Mississippi Braves in another midsummer game. He will coach third base. He will help young Braves get better. He will suck in the baseball oxygen that has been his lifeblood for most of his 60 years, and then he will exhale a contented, healthy man.

And, oh, yes: He will spend part of the evening standing on the top step of the dugout, leaning against the railing while he works. Just like on that spring day in 2011, in another dugout, when a foul ball came screaming and crashed into his face.

“Man, you know what?” asks New York Yankees catcher Brian McCann, in another ballpark in another city. “A ball went into the stands the other night, and any time that happens, it takes me right back to that moment. Super scary.

“When balls are traveling into the stands, into the dugouts, man, it’s scary.”

You might call McCann an expert witness. He was the man at the plate that March day in Orlando, Florida, the lefty who swung early on a two-strike changeup and blasted that foul ball into the dugout. Nobody blamed him for the accident—least of all, Salazar. Goodness, no. It was just baseball. Things happen.

Tell that to McCann. If only it were that easy to accept when your bat is Point A and a man’s eye is Point B and the line between is a baseball rocketing so fast there is no time to react.

Yes, five years later, McCann still flashes back with horror to that moment every single time a hard-hit baseball lasers its way into the stands or a dugout. He still finds himself apologizing to Salazar whenever the baseball schedule brings them back together, usually during spring training in Florida.

Their dance is always the same.

Don’t worry about it, Salazar says.

Yeah, I know, McCann answers, but it’s always in the back of my mind.

I feel good, Salazar assures him. I’m back to work.

“When things get tough, we get tougher,” Salazar says on this impossibly humid Mississippi late afternoon. “I never give up. I try my best to reach the point where I can do anything I want.”

This story ends well, but it doesn’t start that way. It begins with a baseball lifer in his first spring with the Atlanta Braves organization, standing on the top dugout step, leaning against the railing. He is jawing with several players early in the game. Outfielder Nate McLouth is on his right, the side closest to right field in Atlanta’s first base dugout. Which is why the coach is glancing away from the plate at the exact split-second when the baseball comes calling.

“I thought he was dead,” Atlanta’s Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox says. “I was in a booth upstairs, and I saw him go down and he wasn’t moving. There was blood everywhere.

“He went backwards down the steps. That’s a five-foot drop, let alone the ball crushing him.”

Atlanta pitcher Julio Teheran was in the dugout, a few feet away.

“He was facedown on the dugout floor,” Teheran says. “It was really scary. The players, coaches, we wanted to help, but we couldn’t. His breathing was getting slow. He was losing blood.”

Jonathan Schuerholz, son of Braves president John Schuerholz, was also in the dugout. He was beginning his first season as manager of the rookie-level Gulf Coast League Braves.

“It was crazy how quick it was,” says Schuerholz, who today is the organization’s assistant director of player development. “You fall four-and-a-half, five feet, regardless of whether or not you’re conscious, it’s going to bang you up pretty good.”

The way he fell back, Albert Pujols, who was playing first base for St. Louis that afternoon and was not more than several feet from the Atlanta dugout, was more worried about his neck.

Inside the clubhouse at that instant was Dr. Joe Chandler, the Braves’ longtime orthopedic surgeon. The sudden, urgent screaming and hollering caused him to sprint from that clubhouse straight into the dugout.

And this is where we’ll step away from the blood and gore to begin to fulfill the pledge that, yes, indeed, this is a happy story. A very happy story.

“You know, I’ll tell you, when I listened to your voicemail, it was a reminder to me what is wonderful about the 30 years I spent in baseball with the Atlanta Braves,” Chandler, now retired, says from the other end of the cellphone not long after my Mississippi stop.

“It is not about any individual game or winning a World Series. It is about the individual players, coaches and their families. When you say, ‘Luis Salazar,’ I think of strength. I think of the incredible strength his family showed during that whole ordeal. His wife, his son, his daughter, they didn’t leave his side during that whole thing.”

Graciela, Salazar’s wife of 36 years, was as graceful as her name. Son Carlos, now 34, and daughter Viviana, 32, were rocks.

“It was just amazing to me,” Chandler says. “People say, ‘He gave you a lot of credit for being with him.’ I didn’t do anything. I was amazed, sitting with his family…They go together and worked very well through this tragic, horrible thing. Never once was it ‘Woe is me, why me, what am I going to do now?’ It was, ‘What’s the next step? Let’s move on.'”

Look, they say. Watch this. It is as if the man is about to perform a magic trick: Salazar gives the baseball a good whack with his fungo bat, rifling a ground ball to top Atlanta prospect Dansby Swanson at shortstop, or maybe skying a pop fly to catcher Willians Astudillo, as part of infield work.

Repeatedly, his coaches and other managers throughout the Southern League watch this and cannot believe what they are seeing.

“They say it’s a miracle,” Salazar says, proudly.

How can he consistently put the bat on the ball? How can he regularly slap ground balls to each position that are so true to his targets?

Where does the depth perception come from?

As Salazar repeats these small miracles each night, let’s pause. Because these little, everyday tasks should not be taken for granted.

Listen to the eye surgeon who was waiting on the other end of that helicopter lift to the hospital on that day five years ago.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, his was an 8 to a 9,” Dr. Kourosh Nazari, Salazar’s eye specialist in Orlando says. “What happened was, the ball basically shattered his socket with multiple fractures of the orbital bone and also smashed the eye.

“The eye was kind of split open. I had to put it back together, repair it. The eye was back to its shape, but he had no vision because of the damage. The structures—the retina, the nerve—were not working.”

It was a lost cause from the beginning. But in an accident this catastrophic, knowing that the psychological damage can be devastating, Nazari’s first move, almost always, is to put the eye back together. Patients need at least some hope, however flickering it may be. And in the worst cases, they need time to assimilate that the curtain has been permanently closed on one of their two windows to the world.

It was a week later, with Salazar still unable to see from the eye and suffering from chronic pain, when Nazari performed a second surgery to remove the eyeball.

Then a year later, after he had given the seven fractures in the orbital bone sufficient time to heal, Nazari performed a third surgery to fix the parts of the socket that didn’t properly come back together after the trauma.

Because he lost consciousness immediately, Salazar does not remember the accident. Maybe that’s nature’s way of helping a person steel himself to, as Salazar says, get tougher when life demands it.

He remembers waking up in the hospital. And he especially remembers the kindness of so many.

“Bobby Cox, he’s one of the classiest guys,” Salazar says. “He came by the hospital every day. The coaching staff—Fredi Gonzalez (in his first year as Atlanta manager that spring), Terry Pendleton, Eddie Perez, (the late) Bobby Dews…every day.”

Phone calls lit up the switchboard. Tony La Russa. Pujols. Dusty Baker. Joe Torre. Davey Lopes.

The baseball family quickly mobilized with the Salazar family, pulling together tightly, like the webbing of a glove. When the New York Mets showed up to play the Braves that spring in Orlando, manager Terry Collins wanted to bring his entire team by the hospital to show them the courage of his friend. As you might expect, the hospital folks said, eh, maybe that’s not the best idea to crowd that many people in. The man is still in recovery.

“And Chipper Jones,” Salazar says of the Atlanta legend. “Every time he sees me now, he gives me a hug. And he tells me, ‘I got that picture in my mind. I thought you were dead.'”

There were others, too, who lifted his spirits. So many others.

“Fans in Atlanta wrote letters,” he says. “A lot of kids in middle school. I got at least 600 letters wishing me well, saying, ‘I know you’re going to get back on your feet and do well.’

“I really appreciate it.”

As he works today, others tell him they have tried to put themselves in his cleats. It’s easy, right? And human nature. To close one eye after meeting a man with one eye, to see what it might be like for him. It is a challenge the rest of us can replicate, if only for a minute or two. Close one eye and…

“I tried to hit a ground ball with one eye when I hit infield,” says Mississippi Braves coach Barbaro Garbey, who played with Detroit and Texas during a brief three-year career in the mid-’80s.

“I said, ‘Let me see what it’s like with one eye,’ and I could not do it.

“I missed the ball. And he does it so easy.”

That’s the thing. Salazar has made so much look so easy. The accident happened in early March 2011, and he was back in camp before the Braves headed north that spring.

“Usually, people who lose an eye go through depression,” Nazari says. “They don’t do anything, they feel sorry for themselves. Most people take two or three months off from work.

“But two or three weeks later, he was on the field again. He was back like nothing happened.

“That was amazing.”

If only that swing and its aftermath could be wiped from the hard drive of Brian McCann’s brain. While Salazar draws blanks from the moment of impact until the moment he woke up in the hospital, McCann remembers far too much. And you cannot help but feel for him, even all these years later.

He lights up at the mention of Salazar’s name: Really, you’re going to visit him? Say hello. Give him my best.

But he also goes dark at one specific question: Obviously, Brian, it wasn’t your fault, and there is nobody anywhere who would ever think of blaming you. Yet, even at that, all these years later…do you carry guilt?

“Now why do you have to ask that?” McCann snaps.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe it is one question too far, or too awkwardly phrased, or simply something that pokes just a little too deeply into the worst moment of a goodman’s well-decorated career.

He is Georgia-bred, which means he pretty much grew up with the Braves. They picked him in the second round of the 2002 draft, plucking him from Duluth High School in Georgia. Baseball always was a way of life: His father, Howard, coached at Marshall University. His older brother, Brad, was a first baseman in the Marlins and Royals organizations.

In the spring of 2011, the then-27-year-old was coming off his fifth National League All-Star appearance, and he was still three seasons from becoming a free agent and cashing in with the Yankees on a five-year, $85 million deal.

In other words, all he knew at the time was the Atlanta Braves.

“I’m just thankful that…you know, I think about it,” McCann, now 32, says quietly, sitting in the Yankees clubhouse this summer. “I think about it.

“It’s tough, man.”

Vividly, the Braves remember this part of Salazar’s accident, too. The McCann part, where the poor guy felt so horrible that he would have given anything he could to take that swing back. Is there a more helpless, or desperate, feeling than in the moments after a devastating accident?

Chandler has known McCann since the catcher was 18 years old, all the way back to those days after the draft when the world of professional baseball was still new and bright. He knows him to be tough and strong. But he also knows the sensitive side that McCann allows few others to see.

After the ambulance carried Salazar toward the helicopter, McCann settled back into the batter’s box to finish what now was a horrific at-bat. Two-strike count, McCann quickly waved at a pitch for strike three, then took himself out of the game and hustled back into the clubhouse.

“I remember this very well,” Chandler says. “Well-meaning people were telling Brian to stay away from the hospital. Well-meaning, because you don’t know what is going on there. ‘Don’t go to the hospital,’ they said. ‘Please don’t go to the hospital.’

“Brian came to me and said, ‘I’ve got to go.’ And I said, ‘Get in the car. Let’s go.'”

Says Teheran: “He left the game, and the next day he didn’t show up at the ballpark because he was really, really worried about Luis.”

To McCann today, so much of it is all still a blur. He remembers rushing to the hospital. Recalls sitting there praying for good news, waiting for any news.

“People were coming back and giving information,” McCann says. “At that point, you’re hoping for the best.”

Knowing this was a high-profile accident involving a Major League Baseball team, the folks at the Orlando Regional Medical Center set aside a special, private waiting area outside the emergency room for McCann, Chandler, the Salazar family, Cox, Braves president John Schuerholz and a few others.

First thing McCann did upon arrival was walk straight up to Graciela and, through his tears, wrap her in the biggest hug he could muster.

“It was powerful,” Chandler says. “His sensitivity to it, the power of Luis’ wife. Granted, she was upset, but she was so strong and full of grace that you just don’t see every day.”

Around this time, the first bit of good news arrived: Doctors knew Luis would live. That was the first enormous deep breath. Then came news that though there was severe damage to his eye, Salazar’s brain was OK.

You can do all of the extra pregame work you want, but there is no preparing for a baseball moment like that. And while those well-meaning people were warning him against racing to the hospital, McCann would change nothing about that decision.

“It was the right thing to do for Brian,” Chandler says.

“Even if he didn’t get to see Luis, he was going to see Luis’ wife and kids and express his concern. That’s another part of this story, to me, that goes unnoticed. He is a sensitive young man who obviously felt horrible, and instead of going to the corner and crying and feeling sorry for himself, he said, ‘I’ve got to do the right thing.'”

Even though he no longer plays in Atlanta, the affinity the Braves family has for him is clear. And vice versa.

“Brian is a really good guy,” Salazar says. “We stay in touch.

“Every spring training, he comes looking for me.”

And every time the Yankees play the Seattle Mariners, McCann goes looking for Franklin Gutierrez. The outfielder, you see, is Salazar’s son-in-law. Gutierrez began dating Viviana in 2003, when he was a Dodgers minor leaguer and Salazar was coaching at Vero Beach, then Los Angeles’ High-A affiliate. They married in 2007 and delivered Luis and Graciela their first grandson, Xavier, in 2013.

Usually, McCann will hit Gutierrez with a quick question from behind the plate when the outfielder steps in to hit. How’s Luis? Still doing well?

“Always, he says, ‘Tell him I said hi,'” Gutierrez says.

There is no psychological blueprint on how to handle the destruction when you’re the one who drives a baseball into another human being. Pujols, who phoned Salazar multiple times after the accident, knows this all too well.

Three seasons earlier, Pujols smoked a line drive up the middle during the third inning of a game in San Diego that crashed into pitcher Chris Young’s face. Young suffered a fractured skull and broken nose. Badly shaken when he batted again in the fourth with the bases loaded, Pujols struck out on three pitches and later was removed from the game by La Russa.

“It’s tough,” Pujols says. “The last thing you want to do is hit anybody.”

The next day, as the Cardinals traveled up the freeway to Los Angeles, a concerned Pujols, still unable to shake off the night before, phoned Young. As with McCann, it’s nobody’s fault; it’s just a bad part of the game. Maybe the most horrible part of the game. But still, guilt worms its way into the psyche.

“You care,” Pujols says. “Even though the guy was wearing a different uniform in my case, you’re talking about a life.”

Pujols echoes what McCann says: Thank God it wasn’t worse.

“I think about Luis quite often,” McCann says. “You’re playing a game, and next thing you know a ball travels in the dugout.

“You go back and, at this point, you’re thankful that it wasn’t more serious.”

See? A happy story.

“Most people have forgotten about this by now, but some, including me, got life lessons from it,” Chandler says. “I’ve learned to appreciate people more. I’ve learned not to take anything for granted.

“I don’t think about it as often now, but not a month goes by where I don’t think about Luis Salazar and his family. It’s a part of baseball that’s special.”

Salazar was a survivor long before this accident, a fact that is easily evident from scanning the 13-year career he built from 1980 to 1992 as a shortstop, third baseman and outfielder with the San Diego Padres, Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs.

During that time as a super-utility man, Salazar rapped 1,070 hits, thumped 94 home runs, stole 117 bases and was acquired by then-Padres general manager Jack McKeon on three—count ’em—separate occasions.

McKeon traded for him from Pittsburgh in 1980, then shipped him along with Ozzie Guillen to the White Sox in December 1984 for starter LaMarr Hoyt. Signed him as a free agent in April 1987. Let him go after the season as a free agent but reacquired him in March 1989 in a trade with the Tigers. Then traded him to the Cubs in August 1989.

He once told McKeon, per Dave Distel of the Los Angeles Times, “Jack, you’re like my daddy. You always take care of me.”

From his current first-place perch in the Southern League’s South Division, Salazar smiles.

“I guess I was his favorite player,” he quips.

Yes, McKeon, now 85 and a special assistant to Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, phoned the hospital in Orlando a couple of times from his home in North Carolina. So, too, did front office representatives from each of the four teams Salazar played for during his career. And Tony Perez and Dave Concepcion. “I cannot tell you how many people called,” Salazar says, still visibly touched. Hundreds, he figures.

In a moment he will never forget, he was invited to Robins Air Force Base outside of Macon, Georgia, in 2013 to receive an award for courage and was presented with a United States flag that flew over Afghanistan.

Maybe that was all preparation to thicken his resolve for the biggest battle that was still up ahead. And though he’s made it look remarkably easy, it isn’t. Salazar is just back from five days away from the team because Graciela fell ill, developing pneumonia and suffering a minor heart attack.

“She passed out and I don’t know what to do,” Salazar says. “I was very scared.”

Afraid of the time it would take an ambulance to arrive if he called 911, he picked her up himself, put her in the car and raced to the hospital. Thankfully, all is good now, but how many challenges must one man face, anyway? Last year when he was managing High-A Carolina, the team bus flipped over at 3:45 a.m. on a North Carolina highway, injuring seven players, shattering windows and producing another harrowing escape.

Sitting in the front seat, Salazar lost his cellphone and his glasses in the accident, but miraculously emerged unharmed.

Then, last February, he had a fourth surgery on the eye. He had developed a sinus infection. It traveled into the eye and the socket was beginning to collapse anyway, so Nazari went back in to build it back up.

“It happens with injuries that have a lot of bone damage,” says Nazari, who put more support behind the socket so the prosthetic eye stayed in place.

At first after the injury in 2011, the Braves didn’t want him coaching third base (as most minor league managers do), but Salazar insisted. On the advice of Nazari, he always wears shatterproof glasses to make sure to keep his good eye protected. He owns five pairs, each shaded a little differently for different times of the day or night.

Otherwise, as Nazari told him before turning him loose, the only thing he cannot do is fly a plane. Salazar thinks this is funny, given that he never had a pilot’s license anyway.

So off he went, taking Nazari’s words to heart. When he and Graciela traveled home to Boca Raton, Florida, from Orlando after he was released from the hospital? He drove. He is a hands-on manager, throwing batting practice, coaching third, hitting fungoes, doing everything as if nothing of the foul-ball sort ever happened to him.

“He’s doing great,” Cox says. “He can drive like always. That’s hard. I tried it. Five-hundred feet. I couldn’t do it.”

Worst thing that can happen, Graciela told Braves president John Schuerholz as her husband laid in that hospital bed, is if he cannot go back to work.

Don’t worry, Schuerholz told her. He’s going to manage again.

“He’s been remarkable,” Jonathan Schuerholz, the assistant director of player personnel, says. “Awesome. A true pro. He cares about the players. He works his tail off. His work ethic is unmatched.”

And, inspirational. Two weeks after his most recent eye surgery in February, he was back in the hospital when a blood clot developed in his lung. He bumped into a woman there who wanted to know if she could ask him something.

Are you, she wondered cautiously and politely, the baseball man who lost his eye?

“I said yes, and she started crying,” Salazar says. “She said, ‘I have a son who lost his left eye and I read your story and it’s unbelievable.'”

The boy, 13 or 14, was in middle school and he plays baseball. Of course, Salazar was happy to talk with him, and now the boy is back on the baseball field. Just like Salazar was happy to speak with the man from Texas who wrote him a letter detailing his depression after losing an eye.

“So I called him,” Salazar says. “And then when I talked to him later, he said, ‘Thanks to you, I’m back to work. I’m playing golf.'”

In so many ways, even from a catastrophic accident, the human spirit can ascend.

“It makes me feel good to help others,” Salazar says. “Others sometimes think it’s over, but it’s not over.

“God has me here for a reason.”

Says Gutierrez: “I’m very proud of him, because he shows a lot of courage. He’s a really strong man.”

As you would expect, both Salazar and McCann follow with great interest baseball’s ongoing dilemma regarding the installation of more safety netting in ballparks throughout the land. Not that it would prevent every accident, but both men know all too well the sickening reality of unintended consequences.

So does every other person who was in the ballpark on that spring day.

Teheran says he doesn’t even like standing in the dugout anymore, that he now prefers to sit on the bench where he feels more protected.

“It’s one of those visions you never lose, no matter how many years it’s been,” says Chandler, who knows that, like clockwork, he will receive a phone call each Thanksgiving or Christmas, and it will be Salazar checking in on him and his family. “You never lose that incredible, gut-wrenching feeling when the ball hit him.”

It is 80 degrees here in Mississippi, down significantly now that an afternoon rainstorm has moved through. Stifling humidity has been downgraded to simply thick humidity. It’s how it is in this part of the country as summer flexes its muscles, but one thing hasn’t changed all season: The view is crystal clear, and it is gorgeous.

“I don’t worry that I lose one eye,” Salazar says. “I look at it like it was an accident. It happened. And when I look in the mirror now, it looks like normal. I see better now than I did with two eyes.”

In so many ways.

“People look at me as if nothing happened,” Salazar continues.

And perhaps that is the best ending possible.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

LOS ANGELES — Where this Tim Tebow Fantasy Camp ends is not in the major leagues. Not in Yankee Stadium, or Fenway Park, or heck, whatever they’re calling the ballpark in Oakland these days.

But judging from a sunny Tuesday showcase workout at the University of Southern California, he’s going to be swinging away for quite some time.

Why is he picking up a baseball bat for the first time in more than a decade at the wizened old age of 29?

“Because I love it,” he said after working out for two hours in front of representatives of 28 major league clubs. “Since I was four or five years old, the two things I’ve loved the most are, one, playing quarterback with 10 guys looking at you and depending on you to win a ballgame and, second, hitting a baseball.”

What you can see, easily, is this: an organization taking a flier on Tebow, sending him to Class A or even Double-A, because he’s an athlete, and he’s way strong, and he will be a positive role model to young prospects. And, if that minor league team happens to play in SEC territory, can you imagine the ticket sales? Cha-ching!

“I think he put a lot of work into it,” one veteran scout said after watching a well-practiced Tebow run a 60-yard dash, throw from right field, take fly balls in center field and hit for some 40 minutes. “But he doesn’t do anything easy.

“He doesn’t run easy. He doesn’t throw easy. He doesn’t hit easy. His bat is strong, but he had trouble making adjustments.

“I can see someone giving him a chance to go to spring training and maybe Double-A, but then you’re taking at-bats away from some 23-year-old kid.”

Tebow hasn’t played competitive baseball since his junior year of high school. Remember when folks thought Alex Rodriguez would find it impossible to produce in 2015 after sitting out one full season because of his suspension for performance-enhancing drugs? That was elementary compared to this.

The last time Tebow swung a bat in a baseball game, George W. Bush was president of the United States. It was 2005.

Which is probably why, in some ways, he exceeded expectations in front of the 46 scouts (some organizations sent multiple representatives) at Rod Dedeaux Field. The Chicago Cubs and Oakland Athletics were the only two clubs to pass.

“I can tell you this: He’s way further advanced than I thought he’d be at this stage,” one veteran (and previously skeptical) scout said. “Obviously, he’s crude. No question the biggest thing is his bat.”

Another said: “He shows power. He shows all the tools. He can run. He can throw. He has raw arm strength. It’s just not transferred to baseball.”

Tebow started his day with a 60-yard dash, clocked somewhere between 6.6 and 6.8 seconds, depending on which scout’s stopwatch you believed. On the MLB scouting scale that runs 20 to 80, it was a solid 60.

Though, as one scout noted about the sprint, which ran from center field toward the left field line, “The field is crowned, and they were smart; they had him run downhill.”

Next he took balls in right field, and for a guy who spent so much time at quarterback, he was not a natural with the throws. There were only a few ropes and several loopy throws. Fielding one bouncer in right, Tebow awkwardly took three shuffle steps before firing a throw to third base.

“He throws like a quarterback,” one of the scouts said. “You throw a football different than you throw a baseball. As a quarterback, you don’t spread your feet, and you throw the ball up. In baseball, you throw the ball down. Throwing to third, he should have had a longer stride.

“His arm strength is probably below average. Then again, a lot of guys playing in the big leagues throw below average.”

Which pretty much brings us to why both Tebow and the scouts were here: hitting. Tebow is enormous—6’3”, 255 pounds and sculpted, which was eye-poppingly accentuated by the spandex workout clothes he was wearing. The biography sheet distributed by his agent noted his low, 7.3 percent body fat.

He took several rounds of batting practice, crushing several baseballs well over the fence and into the trees over the Dedeaux Field scoreboard in right field. There was the big-time power that makes scouts salivate.

Then he took live batting practice against a couple of former big league pitchers, David Aardsma and Chad Smith. Here, he had no idea what was coming—fastball? slider? changeup?—and here was where he struggled. Batting left-handed, he swung late on several fastballs, fouling them away down the third-base line. And he swung way early on several changeups, sometimes fooled enough that he finished his swing with one arm.

Best-case scenario, he’s a project. A very big project. But former major league catcher Chad Moeller, who has been working as Tebow’s private tutor since May, spoke of how far his pupil already has come in three months. The biggest challenge, Moeller said, is pulling the bat out of the workaholic Tebow’s hands.

“Taking away his football mindset of more, more, more,” Moeller said. “At a certain point, you stop getting benefit.”

That statement speaks volumes: What’s going on, quite literally, is Tebow is trying to make up for lost time.

In many ways, he is still a neophyte baseball player trapped in a football player’s body. He acknowledges his knee-jerk reaction to work harder and more often than everybody else, and he held up his callus-covered batting-practice hands as proof.

His goal, he said, isn’t simply to make the big leagues but “to have a career in the big leagues.”

To that end, his agent, Brodie Van Wagenen, said representatives for five clubs stayed after the workout to meet with Tebow and get a feel for him personally. What they no doubt saw was a friendly, earnest guy who is drop-dead serious about making this baseball thing work.

Van Wagenen said his ideal scenario would be for Tebow to agree to a contract and start playing with an organization’s instructional-league team by late September. That way, he could quickly begin to assimilate into baseball, continue the process of refining his skills that started this summer and then perhaps play winter ball before heading to spring training. One source, in fact, told B/R that Tebow already has a slot this winter playing in Venezuela.

As for Tebow, he’s just working it one day at a time. And Tuesday, he copped to a ton of nerves.

“At the NFL combine, you’ve got your body of work for four years,” he said, not to mention dozens and dozens of other players performing for the critics. “Here, you haven’t seen me play baseball since I was 17 years old.

“There was a lot of pressure, a lot of nerves.”

Still, he said, it was easy to put aside the fact his baseball future was at stake Tuesday because baseball “is something I love and am passionate about, but it’s not my identity. When you have that mindset, it helps you to be free.”

His identity lately, since the Philadelphia Eagles sent him packing during training camp last summer, has been as a college football analyst for ESPN and the SEC Network and as a contributor to ABC’s Good Morning America. Besides, as he noted, he’ll be taking a pay cut to follow this baseball dream.

But while his motives seem pure, the game itself decides who stays and who goes. There will be a team that will sign him. Always, in these cases, there is someone. Some think that team will be the Atlanta Braves, given the combination of their rebuilding program (Tebow can be a positive role model), need for sluggers (see the trade for Matt Kemp) and location of many of their minor league affiliates right near the epicenter of the SEC.

Whoever it is, Tebow’s bat will dictate the rest from there. It’s all about whether he can hit as a corner outfielder. If he can’t, the Denver Broncos, New York Jets, New England Patriots and Eagles will not be the only professional clubs to say, “See ya.”

At this point, the most impressive thing in his game is his stamina (stronger men would have wilted before he was finished hitting after 40 minutes Tuesday) and his attitude.

“I want to be someone who pursues what I believe in, what I’m passionate about,” Tebow said. “People who ask what if you fail, guess what? I don’t have to live with any regrets.”

As far as life philosophies go, it’s difficult to argue with that.

And as far as hardball realities go, it’s also difficult to argue with the scout who told me, “The percentages obviously are against him making the major leagues. But he is Tim Tebow, and if he makes it, it would not surprise me.

“But it’s going to be a hell of a sacrifice for him for the next two years if he’s going to make it.”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Ah, the dog days of August. Woof…

1. Sweltering Days in the AL East

One last summer ice cream break, anyone, before the stretch run cranks up to an inferno? Look out, while Baltimore (4-6 in its last 10 games into Tuesday) apparently is tempted by the Blue Moon and Cherry Vanilla double-scoop cones, Boston is gearing up for last licks.

The Red Sox face a brutal final part of their schedule, playing 30 of their last 46 games on the road. But so far, Mookie Betts and Co. are up for the challenge: Boston won 10 of 12 games into Wednesday to grab a share of first place in the division for the first time since July 21.

Since July 3, Boston’s 28-17 record is third-best in the majors, behind the Chicago Cubs (28-16) and Toronto Blue Jays (27-15). The Sox are 10-3 against AL East opponents during July and August (including 6-1 on the road), and best of all, ace David Price is beginning to find his groove.

Price, over his past 10 starts, owns a 2.86 ERA and has averaged seven innings per. His ERA post-All-Star break is down more than a run a game, to 3.21 from 4.34.

It’s all trending in the right direction, finally, for Price and the Red Sox, and just in time. Already, so much else is going so well for the Sox: Betts, for instance, is shifting early AL MVP talk away from Houston’s Jose Altuve. Check out the company he’s keeping, per Baseball-Reference.com:

And if you missed the sensational catch Boston left fielder Andrew Benintendi made in Tampa Bay on Monday night to rob Steven Souza Jr. of a homer, it’s a must-see:

As for Boston’s stacked-up road games, its 33-27 record away from Fenway Park is the second-best road record in the AL, behind Toronto’s 34-28. The Red Sox are close enough to Toronto to sniff Josh Donaldson’s cologne. Maybe manager John Farrell and his Toronto counterpart, John Gibbons, can discuss.

Temperatures (and emotions) are up, and sometimes the dog days can downright smell. Donaldson and Gibbons got into it the other day when the reigning AL MVP slammed his equipment in the dugout following an at-bat and Gibbons reprimanded him.

What could have turned out ugly, though, became amusing.

“Gibby asked me what kind of cologne I was wearing,” Donaldson quipped, per the Associated Press‘ Mike Fitzpatrick (via the National Post).

Both men quickly moved past it, which is what winning teams do. As opposed to, say, ahem, Donaldson’s old team in Oakland (see item No. 2).

Meanwhile, Baltimore just needs to keep getting the ball to closer Zach Britton, who now is 38-for-38 in save opportunities. He hasn’t surrendered a run since April, and into Tuesday he had allowed just three hits over his past 15 appearances.

Britton’s sinker is as devastating a pitch as there is in the game right now; just like with Mariano Rivera’s cutter, rival hitters know what’s coming and they still have no chance. Research by STATS LLC reveals that Britton’s current saves streak is the longest by a left-handed pitcher to start a season in MLB history. Furthermore, according to ESPN Stats and Info, Britton’s 43 consecutive appearances without surrendering an earned run is the longest such streak since earned runs became an official statistic.

So all manager Buck Showalter and pitching coach Dave Wallace must do(!) is find enough pitching to cover the first eight innings every night. Especially given that Orioles hitters routinely treat opposing pitchers with the disdain so many have for the end of summer (Mark Trumbo’s last seven consecutive hits into Tuesday were home runs, for crying out loud).

Speaking of which, before he finally got a break on Saturday night, Orioles second baseman Jonathan Schoop, according to STATS LLC, was the last player in the majors this year to play in every single inning and every single out of his team’s games this summer.

Which, of course, brings us right back to where we started: One Schoop or two on your cone? C’mon, summer’s dwindling!

2. Good Thing They Weren’t Shopping for School Shoes

An embarrassing season turned downright humiliating in Oakland when third baseman Danny Valencia went all country breakfast on Billy Butler, scrambling the designated hitter’s eggs with one punch. Butler landed on the seven-day concussion disabled list and both men were fined.

The dispute was over shoes, according to Oakland beat reporter Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle: A shoe company representative was meeting with Valencia in the clubhouse before batting practice on Friday when the rep asked about a different, off-brand pair of cleats in Valencia’s locker. When Valencia said he only uses them for batting practice, according to Slusser’s sources, Butler piped up and said that wasn’t true, that Valencia uses them in games.

So Valencia confronted Butler after the rep left, and maybe you would, too, given that typical shoe endorsement deals can be worth between $10,000 and $20,000 or more. As tempers flared, Butler reportedly told Valencia, “I can say whatever I want and your bitch ass isn’t going to do anything about it.”

Aside from snagging the quote of the year, Slusser noted that the two have always had an edgy, boisterous relationship dating back to when they were teammates in Kansas City.

Though inflammatory, the incident is just another pile in the ongoing mess in Oakland. The A’s long since have been an also-ran this summer at 53-72 into Tuesday’s games. Poor chemistry inside the Oakland clubhouse is a poorly kept secret around the game, and one source close to the club tells B/R that this summer’s Athletics are stocked with some of the most selfish players he’s ever seen.

3. It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity

Atlanta called up uber-prospect Dansby Swanson last week, and not a moment too soon: Had the Braves waited any longer, the poor kid might have melted into a puddle, just like that witch in The Wizard of Oz.

Kidding, of course, but only sort of. One of Swanson’s biggest issues this summer at Double-A Mississippi, seriously, was trying to keep weight on. During a visit with him there a couple of weeks ago, Swanson told me he had lost 10 pounds in the Mississippi humidity and could not stop losing weight.

Not that he had much to lose: He’s listed at 6’1”, 190 pounds. He was dutifully setting his alarm clock following night games daily at 9 a.m., waking up to eat and then going back to sleep. Still, the weight kept melting off.

It was a charming reminder that life in the minor leagues, no matter what level the prospect, is vastly different from life in the bigs. Say this for Swanson now that he’s with the Braves: At least his biggest challenge now won’t be counting carbohydrates and grams of protein.

4. Summer School 101 for the Diamondbacks

Here’s a vote for Arizona as the most disappointing team in the game in 2016.

We all know how much was expected of the Diamondbacks after they handed Zack Greinke the keys to the state ($206.5 million over six years) and gave Atlanta a gold mine in exchange for starter Shelby Miller (Swanson, solid pitching prospect Aaron Blair and defensive whiz outfielder Ender Inciarte).

Then when the Diamondbacks went an MLB-best 24-8 this spring, expectations were ratcheted up even higher.

Yet, amid swirling rumors that Arizona owner Ken Kendrick is seriously considering major changes, from general manager Dave Stewart to president of baseball operations Tony La Russa to field manager Chip Hale, here’s also a vote that that’s the worst thing the Diamondbacks can do.

As USA Today’s Bob Nightengale pointed out the other day, if Arizona does make a change, it will be the seventh GM the club has employed in the past 11 years. Granted, two of those GMs were interim (Jerry Dipoto and Bob Gebhard). Still, the point remains the same: If you run a shop with a revolving door to the office making key baseball decisions, you only increase the difficulty of winning.

At some point, continuity is important in this game. Kansas City didn’t win a World Series last year by impatiently pulling the trap door from under GM Dayton Moore two years into his tenure. Instead, the Royals gave him enough time to implement a plan. So, too, with Texas and Jon Daniels, Detroit and Dave Dombrowski, the Chicago Cubs with Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer, Pittsburgh with Neal Huntington and the Milwaukee Brewers with Doug Melvin (before he hung up his GM cell phone last year to step into an advisory role with the Crew).

Even Stewart’s predecessor, Kevin Towers, didn’t make all the wrong moves: Kendrick and Co. should be sending him expensive bottles of wine every Christmas as thanks for signing Paul Goldschmidt to a five-year, $32 million deal in March 2013. There is no contract more club-friendly for a superstar in this game than that one. It’s so weighted in Arizona’s favor that it’s embarrassing.

La Russa, Stewart and Hale all deserve another year to make things right. But there is no question things are ominous in the desert, especially for Hale. When midseason rumors popped up that he may be fired and replaced with Phil Nevin, manager of Arizona’s Triple-A affiliate in Reno, there were two days of silence before Stewart finally backed him.

That’s not good.

5. Just Throw the Damn Ball

Feel free to write your local political representatives, petition MLB or telephone your favorite local sports radio show to demand that these guys begin to work more quickly:

Why? Don’t take it from me. Take it from a Hall of Famer:

Amen, amen.

Here is one big reason why:

And, fielders absolutely despise playing behind a pitcher who makes them stand out in the field for all of those extra minutes.

Can you blame them?

6. Weekly Power Rankings

1. Dodgers-Giants: They’re playing in Dodger Stadium this week, the first three of nine head-to-head games left. Will San Francisco’s free fall continue? Well, Madison Bumgarner is here, but Clayton Kershaw isn’t.

2. Farewell, Olympics: Ryan Lochte, the Yasiel Puig of swimming.

3. Chicken-scented sunblock: Seriously. As a Kentucky Fried Chicken gimmick. Somewhere, you just know Hall of Famer Wade Boggs is all lathered up.

4. Tim Tebow: Showcase for MLB clubs set for Tuesday. Hut, hut!

5. Stephen Strasburg: Nationals ace lands on disabled list with a sore right elbow, a screaming reminder of why he was smart to take the seven-year, $175 million deal rather than step into free agency this winter and take quizzes regarding his durability.

7. Tuck This in the Back of Your Mind

Cleveland in October? Hmm, maybe Tyler Naquin, Mike Napoli, Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez are the secret weapons:

8. Chatter

** MLB continues to move through its investigation into trade-deadline accusations surrounding medical disclosures and now is looking at San Diego’s trade of Drew Pomeranz to Boston, sources tell B/R. Pomeranz has not missed a start this season so there is some mystery as to what Boston’s gripe is. Yet Red Sox owner John Henry confirmed that MLB is investigating charges that the Padres might not have disclosed all necessary medical information. The Padres and Marlins already agreed to rescind part of their deal from last month, and Colin Rea was returned to San Diego (and now will undergo Tommy John ligament transfer surgery). Tampa Bay complained that minor league shortstop Lucius Fox, 19, had a bone bruise in his left foot when San Francisco traded him for starter Matt Moore, but the Rays and Giants resolved that issue without compensation. Among other things, MLB is reviewing whether to standardize certain protocols in the exchange of medical information before a trade is consummated.

** The Yankees’ youth movement continues to move in the right direction: Catcher Gary Sanchez this week became the first player in Yankees history (and one of only seven major leaguers in the modern era) to slam at least eight homers in his first 19 career games. He also became one of only five players in Yankees history to produce at least 15 RBI in his first 19 games, joining Hideki Matsui (19), Joe DiMaggio (17), Mickey Mantle (16) and George Selkirk (15).

** Clearly, the Dodgers’ Adrian Gonzalez eagerly anticipates facing Cincinnati starter Homer Bailey as much as a five-year-old looks forward to a visit from the tooth fairy: After homering against Bailey again Monday, Gonzalez now is 11-for-25 (.440) against the Reds starter with six homers in his career.

** Cubs manager Joe Maddon’s advice to Jason Heyward upon the outfielder’s return following four days off over the weekend as a mental break to try to snap out of a season-long slump: “Just go play. Go play. I want to see a smile on his face. I’d rather he cut back on his workload. He can’t work any harder.” Heyward homered Monday night in San Diego in his first game back.

** Before landing on the disabled list this week, Nationals starter Stephen Strasburg had surrendered 19 runs in his last 11.2 innings pitched, and his ERA has swelled from 2.63 to 3.59.

** Biggest hope this week is that the whispers going around the game that Doc Gooden is not doing well in his battle against drug dependency are exaggerated. But Darryl Strawberry confiding that he is worried for his friend, and then Gooden telling the New York Post‘s Joseph Staszewski that he’s done with Strawberry as a friend, are not painting a good picture.

** Surest thing this winter: That right-hander James Shields (5-15, 5.98) will not exercise the opt-out clause in his current deal, in which he’s still owed $42 million over the next two seasons, plus a $2 million buyout or $16 million club option (riiiight) for 2019.

** Loved the line from Giants pitcher Jake Peavy last week upon his demotion from the rotation to the bullpen. Was he angry? “I’m too grateful to be hateful,” Peavy quipped to reporters, per the Marin Independent Journal‘s Paul Liberatore, on Grateful Dead appreciation night at AT&T Park.

** Summer reading before you run out of time: Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball and the Secret Society That Shocked Depression-Era Detroit by Tom Stanton. Intriguing look at mid-1930s Detroit, when the Tigers, managed by Mickey Cochrane, were winning and a secret group called the Black Legion was running amok terrorizing people they believed were communists—as well as Jews, blacks and Catholics.

** Summer reading II: Shop Around: Growing Up With Motown in a Sinatra Household by Bruce Jenkins, the longtime sports columnist from the San Francisco Chronicle. Only this small paperback isn’t about sports, it is about growing up with music in the house of a father who was a composer and arranger who worked closely with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash and others. Great stuff.

9. “Bring Me a Burger, Some Cheesecake and, Ouch, a Splint! Room 1201”

Turns out, not only is room service expensive, it’s dangerous.

The Dodgers were without outfielder Josh Reddick on Monday after he injured a finger holding the door open for room service.

“I’m at rock bottom,” he moaned, per the Los Angeles Times’ Andy McCullough.

9a. Rock ‘n’ Roll Lyric of the Week

Quick, before summer fades away for good, make sure to squeeze every bit out of it…

“Wrote a note said be back in a minute 

“Bought a boat and I sailed off in it 

“Don’t think anybody gonna miss me anyway

“Mind on a permanent vacation 

“The ocean is my only medication 

“Wishing my condition ain’t ever gonna go away

“’Cause now I’m knee deep in the water somewhere 

“Got the blue sky breeze blowing wind through my hair 

“Only worry in the world is the tide gonna reach my chair 

“Sunrise there’s a fire in the sky

“Never been so happy 

“Never felt so high 

“And I think I might have found me my own kind of paradise”

—Zac Brown Band (feat. Jimmy Buffett), “Knee Deep”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

One punch

Flashpoints arrive frequently and violently as young Texas second baseman Rougned Odor spars his way through the early stages of a career that teammate Elvis Andrus swears will lead him one day straight into the Hall of Fame. Baseball or boxing Hall of Fame, Andrus doesn’t specify. For now, it’s probably safer that way.

Even at that, the sledgehammer blow Odor delivered to the face of Toronto slugger and bat-flipper Jose Bautista one simmering hot May afternoon in Texas was stunning both in its rapid delivery and brute force.

One punch.

Everyone knew there was no love lost between the Rangers and Blue Jays dating back to their emotional playoff series last October, when Bautista emphasized his crushing Game 5 home run with the flamboyant flip. Everyone knew it wasn’t over. Texas doesn’t cotton to being messed with, no matter the time, place or circumstances.

But when Bautista, still smarting from taking a fastball to the ribs from Rangers reliever Matt Bush a batter earlier, answered with a hard, late slide past second base as Odor turned a double play, nobody could have seen what would come next.

Bautista and Odor started to jaw, the benches emptied and instead of the usual milling about and gentle pushing that normally accompanies an empty-calorie bench-clearing incident in baseball…ka-pow! Odor landed a right hook that undoubtedly made Manny Pacquiao proud.

Even now, as the dog days of August slowly lead toward the stretch run, Odor’s punch remains a signature moment of this season.

Many rival players are wary of Odor (pronounced “ROUG-ned oh-DORE”) and many view him as a punk who undoubtedly will get his. They figure it’s only a matter of time.

“He plays with a lot of emotion. He’s a really good player, and I think that’s why he [rubs] people the wrong way,” Oakland catcher Stephen Vogt says.

“He has a little flavor to his game,” Texas third baseman Adrian Beltre added. “I understand from the other side sometimes it doesn’t look too good. But here, we embrace it.”

Odor’s notorious reputation precedes him. Last summer against Houston, at the beginning of an at-bat, Odor and Astros catcher Hank Conger became engaged in a debate heated enough to, yes, clear the benches.

When he was playing for Class-A Spokane in 2011, Odor ignited another bench-clearing brawl that was so wild it led to a Northwest League-record 51 players being fined.

Through all of this, there is a common theme: While many rivals view him as a punk, Odor’s teammates have his back. Many opponents (and their fans) hate him, but he is beloved in his own clubhouse.

“I don’t think in any part of his play he goes too far,” Rangers manager Jeff Banister told B/R.

“I take offense at those who think that playing too hard is offensive; I really do…A lot of people talk about playing hard for 27 outs; our guys go out and do it. That’s because they choose to. Each one of them. They’re accountable to each other.

Banister says because physical play isn’t part of the game the way it is in other team sports—blocking, setting picks, checking someone into the boards—baseball players have to help their teammates in other ways.

“In baseball, the reality is, hitting is individual. Pitching is individual. Fielding is individual, right?

“Once you put the ball in play, the only gift you can give back to your teammates is what? To run your ass off down the line as hard as you can so you have an opportunity to be safe, so the next guy has an opportunity to drive you in.

“For a guy like Rougie Odor, people call it a chip because it’s not what has become the norm. Our game needs guys who will play the game hard….Why fault him for his style of play?”

Some think Odor carries that chip on his shoulder because he is only 5’8″ and has spent his entire life, 22 years, fighting to measure up to everyone else.

Some think it evolved because he was so determined to battle and scrap his way out of his native Venezuela.

Some think it ossified as he’s risen to become the youngest player in whatever professional league the Rangers placed him in, up to and including his major league debut on May 8, 2014. He was 20 years and 94 days old, the youngest man to appear in the majors that season.

What has become as clear as one of those ringside girls at a championship fight is Odor is as volatile as a lit stick of dynamite and as controversial as a split decision.

That day in Texas, Toronto saw red. Bautista saw stars. And the biggest shock from that dusty infield scene was that, as Bautista’s sunglasses flew off, his knees didn’t buckle and he didn’t crash to the canvas, er, dirt, immediately.

In the end, the Rangers’ veterans banded together to pay Odor’s $5,000 fine, Texas sources tell B/R (he also was suspended for seven games after his initial eight-game ban was reduced on appeal).

“It wasn’t cheap,” Andrus said, grinning. “But it wasn’t crazy, either.”

Justice usually has its price.

One family

Baseball always has been the sweet science to Odor. His father, Rougned, played community college baseball in New Orleans and worked in the Cleveland Indians organization for nine years. His grandfather played in Venezuela. Four uncles also played. And his brother is a minor leaguer in Texas’ system, though he is not considered a prospect.

“I’ve been playing baseball since I was three years old,” Odor says. “I come from a family that’s played baseball. I was always playing baseball.

“That’s why I love this game.”

He was raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela, the country’s second-largest city behind Caracas. Maracaibo is stocked with fisherman, given its location on the western shore of the strait that connects Lake Maracaibo to the Gulf of Venezuela.

“It’s hot, like Texas,” Odor says.

Although he enjoys fishing, it never got in his blood. Not the way baseball did.

“I saw him in a tournament when he was five years old,” remembered his uncle Rouglas, now in his 29th season with the Indians organization. Coaches were pitching to kids and he was representing the state of Zulia. The opposing team had the bases loaded, and a kid hit a line drive to Rougned, who was playing second base.

“He caught the line drive and, obviously at that age, kids run when the baseball is hit. So Rougned caught the ball, stepped on second base and then threw to first base to complete a triple play. At five years old.

“I said, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that in my life.’ We always said, ‘With that kind of confidence, did he get lucky, or did he know what he was doing?’ Obviously, he knew what he was doing because of watching family members.

“That was the first time I said, ‘Whoa, maybe he will have a bright future if he develops and continues to get better.”

Rouglas had a front-row seat during his nephew’s formative years because, among other things, he was the field coordinator in charge of Cleveland’s Venezuelan baseball academy from 1996 to 2001. He remembers his father—Rougned’s grandfather, Douglas—becoming upset with the coaches because he wanted Odor to play shortstop, but the coaches played him at second base.

The reason was simple: Most of the hitters were right-handed, and at that age they were swinging late and producing a steady stream of ground balls toward second base. I want my best infielder to play where most of the ground balls are going, the coach told Douglas. Doesn’t matter, Douglas would shoot back, shortstop is where the best player should be.

“They went back and forth,” Rouglas says, chuckling. “But the coach had an idea what he was doing.”

Odor just wanted to play.

“All my life, baseball,” he says. “I would go to school in the morning, then after that I would go home and then go to the stadium.”

His English is serviceable, though he often uses a translator to make sure he gets his thoughts across properly. Especially since the Bautista incident made him infamous, he’s leaned more on translators, people around the Rangers say. And the club itself has become more protective. When we speak, it is just Odor and me, no translator, and he is accommodating, friendly and unfailingly polite.

But only to a point. He cuts off the interview after a bit, pleading that he has to go hit in the batting cage. He wonders if we can continue our discussion after that. Which is fine, except later he says he is too pressed for time, and so we agree that I will return the next day to finish the interview.

Then the next day arrives and he continues to make excuses over the course of two hours, stalling until the coast is clear and he safely avoids any of the hard questions about his hot temper and brawling reputation.

“The only times his style of play got him into trouble was because of playing the game hard,” Rouglas says. “There were players who didn’t read that the right way. He always played hard and all out, similar to the way people used to play.”

At times, yes, it would anger his opponents. But Rouglas doesn’t remember his nephew fighting much as a youth.

“Not that I know of,” Rouglas says. “As a kid, I’m sure he had a few in school, but nothing major that I know of.”

On the field, though, sparks could fly.

“If you knew him, you knew that was his style of play,” Rouglas says. “It happened when they were playing a new team from out of state, and the team had no clue. When they were playing in the same state and everybody knew who he was, they knew his style, they accepted he wasn’t being dirty; it was just him playing hard.”

It also was him playing the way he was schooled to play.

“Being around professional people, we always were telling him to respect the game and play the game right way no matter what,” Rouglas says. “You hit a ground ball, a pop fly, you run the bases the right way. You’re down by 10, winning by 10, you run the bases. It’s the way the game is. Respect the game.”

Says Mike Daly, Texas’ director of international scouting when it signed Odor and now the club’s senior director of player development: “He knows how to play the game. He knows how to get a base. He knows how to do a ball read. He knows how to line up on a double cut. He knows a lot instinctually, and I think a lot of that was growing up with his dad, his uncle and his grandfather.”

The edge with which he plays appears to come naturally. At least, he says, it doesn’t emanate from where many believe: his short physical stature.

“I think I’m like everybody else,” he says. “I don’t think I’m a little guy.

“When I play the game, I think everybody is the same.”

One chip

When the major league scouts came calling, Odor was a switch-hitting shortstop. Now, he’s a left-handed-hitting second baseman. For good, it seems.

“I really like it,” Odor says of second base. “I like it more than shortstop. It’s more fun. I like turning double plays.”

He had just turned 15 when A.J. Preller, now San Diego‘s general manager but then Texas’ senior director of player personnel, first saw him at a tryout in Venezuela.

“The more you got around him, you noticed that he was a highly competitive kid,” Preller says. “He was a great kid, he loved to play, loved the game, he was a great teammate. Those things made it easier, as we went to sign him, to go to [Rangers general manager] Jon Daniels and tell him this is a guy we really wanted.”

By then, Odor was a high-profile international prospect. He also played in some tournaments in the United States in 2010 as his father and Rouglas worked to get him in front of as many scouts as possible. What Preller and others saw was a young, skilled and versatile kid burning with desire. A kid who played much bigger than his size.

That became evident quickly whenever the Rangers’ scouting contingent strategically placed him in tryout games.

“He always seemed to raise his game, always seemed like he had something to prove,” Daly says.

When the Rangers finally signed him in January 2011, a month before he turned 17, he actually was considered a late sign. Some clubs had concerns regarding whether he could survive at shortstop long term in the majors because of his size, according to several scouts. And because of that, clubs weren’t enamored with the money he was asking for at the time.

“Obviously, you look back on it now, and he’s worth every penny, but at the time, his bat was much better than probably we as an industry gave him credit for,” Daly says. “Certainly, he has enough bat to play second base.

“His running times, he was a below-average runner then, too. To his credit, he worked very, very hard. We saw him just after Christmas and he dropped his 60-yard dash time from 7.3 to 6.7, and you asked him, ‘Dude, how do you do that?’

“He said, ‘I kept running and I kept running and I kept running and I kept running. That’s how I got faster.”

With his future about to be decided by the evaluators, Odor worked with his uncle every day in Winter Haven, Florida, where the Indians trained at the time.

“That was a big clue to his makeup; he took something that was a limitation and turned it into a strength by running every day as hard as he could,” Daly says. “He dropped his 60 time, and now you see that bat and the speed and the edge that he played with, and we were lucky enough to be the highest bidders on him.”

Right before Texas signed him, Preller and Jayce Tingler, then the club’s coordinator for instruction in the Dominican Republic and now Texas’ minor league field coordinator, worked Odor out in the Dominican complex, where the ball doesn’t travel much. They flipped well-used (read: dead) baseballs to him. Odor, using a bat made from composite wood material, blasted several balls over the fence.

“He’s swinging a 35-, 36-ounce bat, which is a big bat for anybody, and me and Jayce look at each other and it was like, ‘OK, this guy’s a little different,” Preller says. “We don’t have anybody like this,'” Preller says.

“You could see his work ethic, and as he kept getting better and better you could see he was a hungry player; he wanted to keep proving people wrong.”

The Rangers signed him for $425,000.

Six months later, barely into his first season at Texas’ short-season Class-A affiliate in Spokane, Washington, he threw the punch that started the worst brawl in Northwest League history.

It was similar to the blow he landed on Bautista, though this time it was Odor who was thrown out at second base when things became testy. After sliding past the bag while attempting to break up a double play, he exchanged words with Vancouver Canadians shortstop Shane Opitz as he started to run back to the dugout. Words led to an exchange of shoves and then, ka-pow! Odor connected with a right hook and wound up with a four-game suspension for instigating the melee.

As in Texas following the Bautista punch, Odor’s teammates rallied around him.

“He’s not afraid to stick up for himself or his teammates,” says now-demoted Rangers first baseman Ryan Rua, who was in a Spokane uniform with Odor that day. “He felt the other player did something wrong, and he took it into his own hands.”

The Rangers immediately sent people from the front office to Spokane to see whether they had a problem on their hands. Conclusion: They didn’t.

“Anything like that that happens in the minor leagues, you want to make sure,” says Preller, who went to Spokane. “Were our guys on the up and up? It’s development. You want to make sure you’re not missing a teaching moment or anything like that.

“When we got through with it, we were sure this isn’t a character issue or a character flaw or anything like that. This is a competitive kid who ultimately, we felt…knew the difference between right and wrong and he’s going to be fine and develop the right way.”

Normalcy returned quickly, and Odor, whose time in the Northwest League was fleeting (58 games that summer before moving on the next season), faded back into the picture with everyone else. Bob Richmond, Northwest League president for 30 years before retiring following the 2012 season, says he recalls no other incidents with Odor.

“You never want to condone fighting,” says Daly, “but at the end of the day, you saw all his teammates out there with him and you could tell it was a very close-knit team, and they respect Rougie and it’s just part of baseball.

“These guys are very competitive and they want to win, and he wants to win, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in the major leagues or in a rookie ball game in Spokane; he’s always played with that edge.

“It’s something he learns from, but that edge is something we never want him to lose. That’s something that separates him, something that makes him such a special player.”

Even during winter ball at home in Venezuela, Rouglas says, things have become heated.

“I had a couple of players tell me, ‘Tell your nephew to take it easy,'” Rouglas says. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘He needs to slow himself down.’ I said, ‘You don’t know him. This is the way he plays. We’re not going to tell him to change it.’

“He’s the type of player you want to have on your ballclub. If you’re on the opposing team, you’re not going to like him because he will find ways to beat you and do things the right way.”

Says Preller: “Great kid. One of my all-time favorites.”

One demotion

Where is the line between punching the accelerator and easing up ever so slightly?

Here is where that line is for Odor: Round Rock, Texas, home of the Rangers’ Triple-A affiliate.

Racing through the Texas system, Odor debuted with the Rangers in May 2014, less than three years after instigating the brawl in the short-season Class-A league. Over 114 major league games in ’14, playing as the youngest man in the majors, Odor tied for eighth in the American League in triples (seven) and was selected as the Rangers’ rookie of the year.

But in 2015, after just 29 games, he was hitting .144 with a .252 on-base percentage.

Banister was in his first season as Texas’ manager, and this certainly wasn’t the player he had heard so much about. The only thing Banister’s predecessor, Ron Washington, wanted from Odor was fewer strikeouts. In ’14, Odor fanned 71 times in 386 at-bats.

But this?

“I’d heard a lot of different things,” Banister said. “They talked about the energy he played with, how tough he was as a player. There’s no give-in. He’s hard-working. And as I watched him in spring training [in ‘15], he had gotten away from that.

“I’m not going to say he was passive, but he was not as described. Things didn’t seem to work out for him. He was not aggressive at the plate at times, and things kind of spun out of control for him, [as far as his] numbers. And you could see it start to affect him defensively. You could see it start to crumble as far as his focus and determination.”

So the Rangers unceremoniously shipped their 2015 Opening Day second baseman to Round Rock.

When they sent him down, Banister and the Rangers did so with one order: Go find Rougie Odor. Go summon that edge. Go tap back into that passion.

Instead of pouting or getting angry about his demotion, that is exactly what he did. And six weeks later, in mid-June, Texas called him back.

“We saw a completely different player,” Banister says. “I saw the guy that was described. A tough out in the batter’s box. He would bunt, he would hit balls out of the ballpark, he’d hit balls the other way and he ran hard on everything.

“He was aggressive, and there was no quit in anything he did. That’s the guy we’ve got today. I think he’s going to continue to be that way. He helps bring the energy that the veteran core needs.”

Odor batted .292/.334/.527 with 15 homers and 52 RBI over the Rangers’ final 91 games in 2015. He also helped them storm back from a nine–game deficit to pass Houston and win the AL West.

And he hasn’t stopped since. This season, through Sunday’s games, he was batting .273/.295/.492 and produced 23 homers and 62 RBI.

And, yes, one walloping punch.

“Great teammate, man,” Andrus says. “He’s like my little brother. How much he’s grown up in such a short time, it’s unbelievable. You can see how hungry he is to be a good player. He plays with a lot of passion, and a lot of people take it wrong, but I don’t see it that way.”

Says Beltre: “He’s smart. He’s been awesome for us. He’s the main reason we are where we are right now.”

Back when the scouts were flocking to see him in Venezuela, one of them predicted Odor was either going to be in the big leagues in three or four years or he would be out of baseball completely, depending on how he handled that chip on his shoulder.

Really, the scout said, Odor is reminiscent of one of his Venezuelan countrymen, Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez, who has closed for the Angels, Mets, Brewers and Tigers now for 15 years. Like a young K-Rod, the scout figured, Odor’s edge either was going to rub people the right way or the wrong way. No in-betweens.

One horse

Specifically, a cutting horse. Odor owns four of them, two male and two female, and keeps them at Alex Cabrera’s La Pelotera Ranch in Valencia, the third-largest city in Venezuela, some 107 miles from Caracas.

The horses are used in a popular Venezuelan sport called toros coleados, which, loosely translated, means “bull tailing.” It is a descendant of bull fighting. In this case, cowboys riding the horses work to grab the bull by the tail and flip the animal in competition. The bull is considered flipped when all four legs are sticking up.

Odor loves toros coleados.

“He’s a Venezuelan cowboy now playing for Texas,” Rouglas Odor says of his nephew, chuckling. “That’s what he is. A Venezuelan cowboy.

“He likes horses. He likes cows. He likes bulls. He likes animals. That’s a lot of the reasons why he loves Texas, because you can find cowboys in Texas, and he loves hanging around them.

“He has some friends who will take him around their ranch.”

Cabrera, 44, is a close family friend and played on the same Venezuelan team as another of Odor’s uncles, Eddie Zambrano, years ago. He spent the better part of a decade bouncing around the farm systems of the Cubs, Rays and Diamondbacks. At his baseball peak, Cabrera played in 31 games for the 2000 Diamondbacks. His son Ramon is a backup catcher with the Cincinnati Reds.

“Rougie rides every single day; he enjoys the ranch all day long in the winter,” says Cabrera, who estimates right now he keeps 95 horses at La Pelotera and about 1,000 head of cattle.

During his years playing baseball, Cabrera also came across Bautista several times. Though they were never teammates, their teams played against each other in winter leagues, and when Bautista was playing for the Dominican Republic and Cabrera for Venezuela, they faced each other in the Caribbean World Series.

“Let me tell you something,” Cabrera says over the telephone from his Venezuelan ranch. “I tell Rougned this guy is big in the major leagues. I tell him I’ve known Bautista for a long time, and he’s a big man, and you have to respect him. I say, ‘You’re a rookie.'”

Cabrera pauses and laughs.

“He’s crazy,” he continues. “Rougned said, ‘In the major leagues, we’re the same. I had to do something—he tried to break my ankle.’ I watched—the slide was so hard. Rougned is lucky Bautista did not hit him. If he hit him in the knee, he’d be hurt.”

Still, Cabrera advised caution. He told Rougned he shouldn’t have clocked Bautista. But he understands that in the moment, things happen.

Just as it became the Punch Seen ‘Round the Baseball World, it also became quite the topic for family conversation.

“We all saw what happened,” Rouglas says. “I’d rather talk about Rougned as a person.”

Odor is so adept with his fists that some have wondered whether he boxed as a kid. Even Andrus asked. No, Odor told him. No boxing.

“It was a great punch,” Cabrera says. “But no power. If he had a strong hand, Bautista would be on the ground.”

Still, the Venezuelan cowboy playing for Texas now has a reputation that precedes him. His Rangers teammates get asked about him by opponents during breaks in games, maybe during pitching changes or idle moments on the bases.

“Yeah, guys ask because of the perception from the outside,” Beltre says. “Guys ask, ‘What’s going on with Odor?’ He’s a good kid. He plays hard and he means well. He’s popular because he plays hard.

“He’s a good teammate. He can steal a base, play defense, hit, hit for power. He’s the complete package.”

Says Andrus, “A lot of guys ask me how it is dealing with him every day. I tell them I’m lucky to be playing next to him. He’s a future Hall of Famer, for sure.”

Again, to those who know him, whether on his Texas teams or from his area of Venezuela, Odor poses no problem.

“I don’t know that Odor,” Ramon Cabrera, Cincinnati catcher and son of Alex, says when the Bautista punch is mentioned. “The Odor I know, he’s a nice guy.”

Says Oakland’s Vogt: “He’s kind of in the new wave of baseball player, playing with a lot of passion and a lot of emotion. I like his style.”

In Texas, he lives in the same apartment complex as Rua. Though there are no horses in the residence, there is a pool, and sometimes the two will hang out there or at the mall. They share dinners and sometimes carpool to the ballpark together—especially for day games, so Rua’s wife can sleep in rather than serving as their own personal Uber driver.

This season, Nomar Mazara, 21, has replaced Odor as the youngest player on the Rangers’ roster, and if you look hard enough, there are signs that Odor is getting older. Even at 22, he’s beginning to lose some of his hair, and you can bet that the Rangers give him some heat for that.

Well, not too much.

“He’s 5’8″, 5’9″, but he walks around like he’s 6’4″, 6’5″,” Rua says.

As Odor himself says, when he plays he doesn’t think he’s a little guy. He thinks he’s like everybody else.

“Now that I make it, I want to stay here for a long time,” Odor says.

As long as this Venezuelan cowboy provides this kind of horsepower, energizing the Rangers’ veterans and immobilizing their opponents, he appears on the fast track toward doing so.

As Banister says, “We can talk for hours on the whys—why incidents like those happen—but everyone just sees the incident and wants to talk about it, and yet they don’t understand what led up to any of them.

“So criticize how you may, just understand who the man is.”

Each day, Odor walks by the manager’s office in Texas, and on most of those days he veers in and plops down to chat with Banister.

“I’ve never seen him have a truly bad day. He’s always got a smile on his face,” the manager says. “It’s engaging. It’s captivating. And it’s real.

“That’s a favorite part of Rougie for me, because no matter what you see or what you think you see on the field, this guy just loves to show up to the ballpark. It’s his favorite place to be. And he wears that every day. No matter what happened yesterday.”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

The man who drafted Mike Trout had his sights set on Tim Tebow, too.

True story.

Tebow, who says he will conduct a workout for all 30 Major League Baseball clubs later this month, was a year removed from becoming the first sophomore in history to win the Heisman Trophy while playing quarterback at the University of Florida.

Eddie Bane, now a special assignment scout for the Boston Red Sox, was the scouting director of the Los Angeles Angels.

“Tom Kotchman is probably the best area scout in the country, and probably more than any area scout, he can always get information on anybody available,” Bane says of the preparation leading up to the 2009 MLB draft. “He wanted to get information on Tebow, and he couldn’t get it.

“They hid that phone number better than any phone number has ever been hidden. Probably, it was Urban Meyer (Florida’s coach at the time). You couldn’t get any info on Tim Tebow. As hard as we tried, and a couple of other teams did, too, we couldn’t get the info. You can’t draft anybody unless you have info.”

What Bane is speaking of is the information needed to fill out the draft cards that clubs file with MLB before every draft. Height. Weight. Contact information.

“You can always get a phone number and then find something, at least talk to somebody about a kid,” says Bane, who starred at Arizona State University then played three seasons for the Minnesota Twins in the 1970s before launching his scouting career. “Usually, almost always, you can talk to the young man. And you couldn’t get it with Tebow. He was too big a deal in Florida.

“We laughed about it. We understood.”

What piqued the Angels’ interest in Tebow at the time was, of all things, a scouting mission that led Kotchman to an unexpected meeting with Tebow.

“I happened be at a game at the University of Florida, the baseball team, and he was throwing out the opening pitch,” Kotchman, who now manages Boston’s rookie-level Gulf Coast League team in Fort Myers, Florida, says. “Most people throwing the first pitch come up to the plate a little, but he stood 60 feet, six inches away, on the mound, and he happened to throw a wild pitch.

“He threw it hard, but he told the catcher to go get the ball, he wasn’t going to be satisfied with that. Then he threw a bullet right down the middle of the plate.

“And you saw a couple of things: A 6’4”, physical guy. You saw attributes from the football field, a competitor; he wasn’t satisfied with his first pitch. He made an adjustment and throws a perfect strike with some velocity.”

Under Bane, the Angels drafted Trout (2009); All-Stars Jered Weaver and Mark Trumbo (2004); Peter Bourjos (2005); and Tyler Skaggs, Patrick Corbin, Garrett Richards and Randall Grichuk (also 2009). Many in the industry regard that ’09 draft as the best in at least the past 25 years.

For that, you’d think Bane would have been rewarded with, say, a lifetime contract. Or a Corvette. Or maybe, at least, a fruit basket.

Instead, he was fired in 2010 as a fractured and dysfunctional organization raged on under owner Arte Moreno.

Kotchman still vividly remembers watching Tebow throw that ceremonial opening pitch. Or, rather, two pitches. It was enough to stoke the imagination.

“Maybe I should have put a radar gun on him,” Kotchman jokes. “You see him do that, and then to draft a guy you’ve got to get all of his legal information. I just never received the information card back.

“Who knows? I would bet the house that Eddie Bane would have drafted him had we gotten that information card back.”

In fact, Bane and the Angels eventually did draft a different quarterback: Jake Locker, from the University of Washington, in the 10th round in 2009. They signed him for $300,000.

“We were battling with [then-Washington head coach Steve] Sarkisian with what we could do, when he would be available for us,” Bane recalls. “We would ask Jake, ‘Do you want to fly down to Tempe [Arizona, the Angels’ spring base] so you can work out with our guys?’ But if he had a meeting with his offensive line, he wasn’t available. He was hard to get. I had known Steve Sarkisian from some other stuff.”

The reason Bane and many other clubs take a flier on quarterbacks is simple: Generally speaking, they’re athletic, smart and have good arms.

“It’s something where you wouldn’t draft him until Round 30 or 40 or 50, it could have been your last pick,” Kotchman says. “But there was definite interest in drafting Tebow to see where it would lead.

“You don’t know. Let’s say he hurt his leg in football. Throwing and pitching, you can correlate a little to a catcher converting to become a pitcher. Troy Percival was a catcher for me in Boise, Idaho, in 1991 and obviously went on to have a great career as a closer.”

Under that strategy, the Angels drafted University of Louisville quarterback Browning Nagle, who would go on to play for the New York Jets, Atlanta Falcons and Indianapolis Colts, in the 51st round of the 1991 draft. Nagle had played high school baseball at Pinellas Park High School in Largo, Florida, Kotchman’s area when he was scouting for the Angels at the time, but did not play baseball at Louisville.

The list of bridge-building opportunities from MLB clubs to quarterbacks is star-studded. Most recently, Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks, who did not play baseball in college, has spent time in the past few spring trainings with the Texas Rangers.

When current Diamondbacks scout Bill “Chief” Gayton was with Colorado, the Rockies took Michael Vick as an outfielder in the 30th round in 2000.

“He hadn’t played baseball since junior high, I don’t think he ever played in high school, but he was an athlete,” Gayton says, chuckling as he recalls a legendary story involving a visit to Vick’s house by Danny Montgomery, currently a special assistant to Colorado general manager Jeff Bridich but formerly the Rockies’ East Coast cross-checker (a high-ranking scout acting as the central clearinghouse through which all of the area scouts’ information flows).

Montgomery, it seems, was at Vick’s house when a contingent of West Virginia football coaches came visiting, and as they entered through the front door, Montgomery was scrambled out the back door. The Rockies were afraid that if West Virginia discovered they were trying to woo Vick to play baseball, the Mountaineers would work hard to box them out. Regardless, Vick never signed.

Gayton also was with the New York Yankees in 1995 when they drafted Daunte Culpepper in the 26th round. Though Culpepper went on to have an 11-year NFL career with the Minnesota Vikings, Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders and Detroit Lions, he never played a day of baseball—despite the Yankees’ efforts.

Culpepper was from Ocala, Florida, a place where late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner kept some of his horses.

“I was in the room that draft day,” Gayton says. “They wrote his name really small on the draft board, because they knew George Steinbrenner always looked over the board. He came in that day, looked and said, ‘Who’s this?’”

Bill Livesey, the highly respected talent evaluator who oversaw the Yankees’ 1992 draft in which the club picked Derek Jeter, answered: “Mr. Steinbrenner, sir, that’s Daunte Culpepper, the football player out of Ocala. He’s going to be a difficult sign….”

Sometimes, it’s all in the approach. Challenged like that, instead of asking his baseball people what they possibly could have been thinking by drafting a football player, Steinbrenner stayed calm.

“It never hurts to take guys late,” Gayton says.

But, in Tebow’s case, this late?

More than a decade after he last played baseball, during his junior year at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Florida, in 2005 (watch him homer below, courtesy of Chris Fischer of Tampa Bay’s WTSP)? He didn’t even play as a senior because, by then, he was already at Florida, prepping for his college football career.

And as far as that information card the Angels or anybody else needed, remember, there weren’t a lot of early details regarding Tebow because he was home-schooled before college.

Jaymie Bane, Eddie’s son, was one scout who saw him play baseball in high school.

“The athleticism stuck out,” remembers Jaymie, who was an area scout for the Chicago White Sox at the time and currently scouts for the Red Sox. “He looked like he was 6’9” in the outfield compared to the other kids. He looked like a much older kid playing with younger guys.”

Now, if Tebow does follow through with his workout later this month and finds a team to sign him, he literally will be a much older kid playing with younger guys in some minor league outpost.

“There are so many teams tanking right now, you never know,” one veteran scout says. “Somebody might take [a] chance.”

“This may sound like a publicity stunt, but nothing could be further from the truth,” Brodie Van Wagenen, co-head of the baseball division at CAA Sports, said in a statement Tuesday. “I have seen Tim’s workouts, and people inside and outside the industry—scouts, executives, players and fans—will be impressed by his talent.”

Van Wagenen continued: “Tim’s tool set is real…He knows the challenges that lie ahead of him given his age and experience, but he is determined to achieve his goal of playing in the major leagues.”

Former slugger Gary Sheffield also weighed in Tuesday, supporting at least part of the tool-set idea:

“As much grief as he’s gotten, this guy is an unreal athlete,” Jaymie Bane says. “And he’s huge. We talk about [Miami’s] Giancarlo Stanton being a physical presence, you put him in [an NFL locker room], he’s the size of a kicker. You put Tebow in a baseball uniform, it is a little different.”

“For me, if he was pitching it would be an easier transition for him than trying to become a position player,” Kotchman says. “Not that I’ve ever bet, but I would not bet against Tim Tebow on anything. I’ve never met him, but as a person who watches sports and has scouted, you see that competitive stuff. Plus, there’s nothing phony about him. He’s a guy you want on your side.

“If he did get a minor league contract with somebody, what an example for young players to be around. Not only as an athlete and competitor, but more importantly as a role model. When you’re in the spotlight that he was in, be it at Florida or in pro football, has anyone ever come up with anything on this guy negative? I’ve never heard it. What better example could you want?”

So we’ll see where this all leads. Seven years after the Angels seriously considered drafting him, Tebow is a free agent looking to make a career change.

All these years later, Eddie Bane laughs.

“They wanted to protect their guy,” he says of the Gators. “I don’t blame them. He was a superstar college football player and they wanted to make sure nobody was going to take him away.

“They didn’t want anything to happen to Tim Tebow. He was superhuman. Still is, from everything I’ve read about him.”

As for Kotchman, as he manages the Red Sox kids in the state once electrified by Tebow, he wonders whatever happened to that old information card that he worked so hard to deliver.

“I’d be curious if he ever got it,” Kotchman says. “If he would have filled it out and I’d have gotten it back, Eddie Bane would have drafted him.

“That’s one person, whether we signed him or not, you’re proud to put your name next to.”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com