If you play baseball—if you love baseball—you are intimately familiar with the term “slump.” We can almost feel that word when we read it or say it out loud. It sounds like what it reflects: hunched over, motionless, unable to carry your own weight.

But in baseball, a slump implies a temporary state. It suggests that it will come to an end with the right approach, with the conquering of a mental army that is firing nothing but friendly fire. We are our own worst enemy. We just need to get out of our own way.

As a player, you always grapple with the possibility that this allegedly short stint may not be short at all. It could simply be who you are. That thought hits you as a young player, before you have had enough success to counter it. With time and experience, the fear changes. You worry that this could be the new normal. Age finally caught up with you. The pitchers finally figured you out. Or maybe you just do not have the edge anymore.

Recently, a fellow Substacker posted that hitters get themselves out more than pitchers do. I responded by saying, “As someone who made 2,864 outs, I concur.”

What I realized in that response is that these outs did not occur consecutively as one giant 2,864-out slump. They came between three-hit games and during 17-game hitting streaks, just as they did when I was hitless in my last 10 at-bats or during the NLDS against the Braves in 2003 when I only had one at-bat to use as evidence.

Slumps are defined by the hole you find yourself in. It is implied that they recur in some way, but there is no Webster’s Dictionary description that draws a black-and-white line around what actually constitutes a slump. Is it 20 at-bats? A month?

I found that the numbers are part of the definition, but they can also distract you from recognizing that there may be nothing particularly wrong with your mechanics. I also found that the slumps that alarmed me most were the ones I could feel. Then, upon watching the replay, I would look the part through my own professional eyes and still had no clear answers.

We cannot forget that we are operating inside the frenetic pace of a big league season, facing elite pitching every day. A train of nightmares that requires you to have an edge from beginning to end, from pitch to pitch. Then you will have a game, or a stretch of games, that matches you up against your kryptonite, something teams do far more often today than when I played. Entire organizations, teams, and pitching staffs have a plan for you. It becomes a collective assault on your weaknesses and tendencies. Today, I would probably face a bevy of sinkerballers every day, which would cause me to wake up in a cold sweat.

So you have to at least address the simpler possibilities first. Maybe you cannot see the ball well out of the pitcher’s hand. Maybe the backdrop behind him blurs your vision for some reason.

I remember playing a series at Fenway Park and not being able to hit anything. Eventually, I realized I had trouble in ballparks where the batter’s eye wall was slanted in some way. The next time through, I changed my stance and closed it off, and I ended up having one of the best series of my careers. Adjustments like that do not often work so quickly, even if those two moments were a year apart.

That is one way to reduce the duration of a slump, or reveal it to be an illusion. By making the adjustment that changes everything. You hope.

Keep in mind, there is a staff of coaches trying to help you through it. The Phillies’ hitting coach from my early days, Greg Gross, used to say that sometimes he would talk to a hitter and just go around in circles until the hitter solved his own problem, or at least believed he did. That is more than half the battle. Until you get into the batter’s box, of course.

I remember talking to Reds manager—and my former manager in Philadelphia—Terry Francona one day. Before the game, there was a parade on the field. Hundreds of kids were out there.

At one point, they formed a ring around the infield, covering every inch of dirt from line to line. Standing in the batter’s box, you could not even see the outfield grass.

Francona looked at it and quipped:

“That is what a slump looks like.”

For a moment, I just stared.

Then I realized that he had captured the best depiction of a slump in all my years of baseball.

It made perfect sense.

Even when you hit the ball on the nose, there are 18 shortstops there to gobble it up. The game feels unfair. The other team seems to know your plan before you do. It was a visual that summed up not just the concept of a slump, but nearly every interpretation of one.

No holes. No daylight. Just outs.

Because that is exactly how it feels.

Not on a stat sheet or in a box score, but in the batter’s box.

The field shrinks. The air disappears. Every defender seems to be on top of you. The holes you normally see feel sealed shut. You begin to expect the ball to find a glove before you even swing.

Despite that feeling, whether it comes in late September after 149 games played or in April during a cold snap in Chicago, you have to believe the state is temporary and that you will figure it out.

But that also requires you to be in good enough standing to have the time to work through it. If the manager runs out of patience, you may not get that opportunity. First, your season may become defined by the slump. Then, perhaps worse, you may become defined by it.

So you hope a long-term contract insulates you from losing the chance to work through it. Or maybe your status as a young first-round pick buys you time while you figure things out.

A slump requires opportunity before it starts to tell your story.

Then you begin filling in the blanks yourself.

Maybe you are getting old.

Maybe the league figured you out.

Maybe that great season was the outlier, and this is who you really are.

Maybe you are carrying something off the field. I remember struggling to focus and be productive while my father was declining and I was not home to help.

That is when the slump truly takes root. Not when you stop getting hits. When you start believing you cannot get them. Or worse, that you do not deserve to.

The home run king from a year ago is Cal Raleigh of the Mariners. Sixty home runs as a catcher—a record. One hundred twenty-five RBIs, and second in the MVP voting. Even without winning the award, he secured a place in history for producing that caliber of offensive numbers at a position that demands some of the hardest defensive responsibilities in the game. He took a beating from foul tips and wild pitches all while managing an entire pitching staff. Given the position he plays, it was one of the most remarkable seasons in baseball history.

But this season, he had been an out until an injury sidelined him.

And that is what makes slumps so humbling.

The game does not care what you did last year. It does not care that you hit 60 home runs, finished near the top of MVP voting, or put together a season that belongs in baseball history. The next pitch arrives with no memory.

A 180-degree turn from last year, and the baseball world is baffled. Even before his injury, his slump seemed chronic. It felt as though it needed a new term. One that captured both its duration and its cruel consistency. Pitchers were attacking him differently. They were making fewer mistakes, and he had yet to find an adjustment that helped. The slump had begun to feed on itself. The injury compounded it. Together, they underscore the difficult truth that greatness is not immune to the slump bug.

So it presents the age-old question:

“How do you get out of one?”

The short answer is, “I don’t know.”

The long answer is, “It varies.”

My ability to know myself helped shorten that window because, over time, I acquired various tools to deploy based on how I felt in that moment. Mechanically, I could take soft toss to make sure I stopped pulling off the ball. Mentally, I could use eye-switching so I was not overly focused on the release point. I could change my stance. I could get more rest. I could capitalize on a pitcher I hit well who was finally coming into town. I could perform rituals. Every hitter develops routines that feel like answers. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they simply buy hope for another day.

In talking to Cubs manager Craig Counsell about slumps, he explained that each player has his own way of getting out of them. With all of the analytics available today, it may be clear that there is an issue, but that is different from knowing how to resolve it.

His third baseman, Alex Bregman, leans into mechanics. He repeats drills until he unlocks the solution. In the meantime, he may stack up a few 0-for-5 games while hoping experience shortens the process, but you never really know.

In that search for answers, it is easy to become consumed by yourself. These efforts can turn into an exclusively self-absorbed exercise. You spend so much time looking for what is wrong with your swing that you forget that there is an opponent on the mound trying everything in his power to get you out. Someone with an impressive baseball résumé of his own.

I had many slumps during my career, most of which I suspect were defined by how I felt in the batter’s box. I am not sure the data would back that up by showing that I was 0-for-some-large-number. Regardless, I had to believe I would get better, lean into my routine, and live to fight another day.

That works until you run out of days, or run out of opportunity.

But until then, a slump is what you make it out to be. The more you know yourself, the more you recognize its inevitability, even its necessity.

It is part of climbing the mountain. Down to go up, up to go down.

The trick is remembering that the slump is not a verdict. It is a necessary detour from the privilege of a direct climb to the top. If you embrace it, it can be a place you are just passing through. And that perspective allows you to appreciate the view more. To appreciate reaching the summit more. To appreciate the simplicity of the air you breathe along the way.

The slump stops defining you. You define what it means.

Because every career, no matter how great, is built on outs. Thousands of them.

You just need to keep honing the tools that keep you climbing

And keep believing that you are still headed in the right direction.

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• What is the biggest slump you've experienced in sports, work, or life, and how did you know you were finally coming out of it?

• When you're struggling, what story do you find yourself telling yourself?

• Is there a slump your favorite player went through that you have never been able to forget?

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Please check out our conversation, joined by the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Josh Rawitch! We include the various ways you can help the cause. Thank you!

There were times during my career when I contemplated fame and what it actually meant. Other times, I thought about the utility fame might have for any given player. For so long, the game was just fun, an outcome more easily accomplished when you were also really good and could keep playing.

As I rose through the levels and the stakes increased, there came a day when I realized someone recognized me because of my game. Every player eventually has that moment. A person I had never met knew who I was and knew things about me. When that first started happening, I was not quite sure what to do with it.

Professional baseball helps normalize it because you are surrounded by tiers of fame. My minor league journey included playing a year in Double-A at the same time Michael Jordan decided to try his hand at baseball. He came to play against us in Orlando, FL, and that was the first time I became conscious of what it was like to play in front of a large audience. I remember feeling like the fans were on top of me, but also that everything I did in the batter’s box was being watched by a mass audience, which it was. This was no longer just a game between brothers in the backyard. I was being watched by hundreds of families and an actual audience.

Thousands of fans at Tinker Field in Orlando was certainly small for Jordan, but it felt like an entire city to me at the time.

Over time, this becomes more manageable, especially since a season earns you currency and comfort with the home fans who accept your ups and downs. They have seen you at your best and at your worst, and they still show up, still want to take a picture. Performance is not a disqualifier to a six-year-old fan seeking an autograph. It is the early taste of loyalty that strikes you, that people stand by you day in and day out. That was when I began to fully realize that the game lives in other people’s memories too.

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One term I hear a lot when covering the game today is “mix and match.” It reflects how, throughout a baseball game, a manager has to find matchups between hitters and the opposing team’s pitchers, and vice versa, that offer even the slightest edge. The hope is that you win enough of those matchups, even if the advantage exists only on paper at first. The game itself decides whether it works, but you are playing the odds, odds that shift constantly because of everything from an injury to a rain delay.

I have called a few Detroit Tigers games, and their manager, AJ Hinch, is known for saying he needs to use his “13 to beat your 9.” I first heard him say it in person on Opening Day in 2025 when he was managing against the eventual World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers.

In many respects, mixing and matching is the standard mode of operation for most teams. It is rare to see a club roll out nine starters and leave them in for nearly the entire game. Those teams would have to be exceptionally balanced, with position players able to hit both righties and lefties, and pitchers that neutralize hitters from both sides. There are All-Star caliber players who can do that, but it is rare to see that level of ability from top to bottom on a roster.

So managers are tasked with anticipating how the other team will try to gain an advantage, particularly later in the game. What happens, for example, when the starting pitcher exits and a left-hander replaces a right-hander. Handedness matters in baseball, partly because of the relative scarcity of lefties, partly because of players’ familiarity and experience, and partly because, once it is clear that a particular matchup has been shown to improve the odds of success, there is little reason to stick with the so-called default option, often the player who began the game as the starter. This is specialization, a strategic adjustment designed to counter the opposing manager’s moves.

But a roster has limits. Managers can run out of effective options if they use them too early. The Diamondbacks opened the season without a left-handed pitcher on the roster, then faced the Dodgers and had to rely on right-handers with the stuff to neutralize left-handed batters, hoping it would be enough. They lost all three in LA but responded by sweeping the Tigers in their next series.

Those Tigers, as Hinch described, were walking a balance beam. When each player is fine-tuned for a specific situation, you have to decide how to deploy them even if that situation never arises. Those players may still have to go out there, with the understanding that most big leaguers have enough versatility to succeed in a range of circumstances. Today, it is less about fearing failure in a matchup and more about recognizing that someone else might simply be better suited. Hinch emphasizes this to create buy-in so players understand they are not being replaced because of their weakness, but because of the strength of another option.

That is a much harder sell when it leads to you not being on the team at all.

It raises the question of whether managers today are doing more managing. They are certainly making more moves, with more information to process. They also have to convince players, wired to want to play every day, that they are, at times, categorically not the right choice in a given moment. That is even harder with younger players who still see their upside ahead of them.

For a contending team, mixing and matching is rarely about development or experimentation, it is often about refining every edge to win each matchup. The decisions can be heavily data-driven and justifiable, but they also rely on intangibles a manager and coaching staff understand from eight months of daily interaction with the same group.

So which is better, or easier, having the 13 or the 9? Even teams with established everyday players must manage age, injury, and the long grind of a season to be ready for the postseason. They still need the 13. And teams like the Tigers accept that carrying 13 requires a web of backup plans and contingencies.

When I was drafted in 1991, I had spent a lifetime as a starter. From Little League through college. That continued in the minors, along with the expectation it would carry into the major leagues.

But when you are young, healthy, and standing out, it does not occur to you that time is undefeated. That one day you will slow down. I entered the big leagues as a role player, but by my first full season in 1997, I was getting most of the starts in left field for the Chicago Cubs. For the next six years, I was in the starting nine, day in and day out. Until I was not.

To a manager, the 13-man rotation functions as a collective unit. But as a player, when I moved from the starting 9 into the latter part of the 13, or back then, even the 14th or 15th spot on the roster, my baseball life changed dramatically. I had to be ready all the time. My batting practice group changed. My daily circle of teammates changed. My pregame routine changed. I was managing a hamstring just to stay on the field. I ran with pitchers to remain in shape and hit with fellow bench players off of a batting practice pitcher who would “accidently” mix in a slider or cutter instead of the usual straight, dependable four-seam fastball.

Being in the 9 is a mindset, an expectation. Once I had that, I did not like the taste of any number higher than 9. I was a starter, or at least I believed I was.

The game slowed down once I began to accept my new role. I started to understand why bench players and backup catchers often make good managers. I watched every move, anticipated when I might be used. I began to see the chess match while still being on the board. When would I pinch-hit, pinch-run, or go in for defense? When would I get that occasional start?

As I settled deeper into the role, I felt a shift from “would not” play every day to “could not.” I doubted my legs could handle it anymore, and that realization helped me embrace the importance of being 10 to 13 on the roster.

It turned out the only time I made the playoffs was in that role. Along the ride, I still carried the ego of wanting to play more, but I tempered it as I got a taste of postseason champagne.

Eventually, it became clear that holding onto slots 10 through13 was a heavy lift. I was getting older, maybe wiser, but my body was not executing that wisdom the way it once had. I always knew it was an honor to be on a big league roster, but that was not enough when I had already climbed to the top and wanted to stay there. At some point, looking down became looking forward. Toward whatever was inevitably coming, no matter how much time I spent in the gym.

Every day now, in this post-career life, I roll out my 13, sometimes my 9, and sometimes I think I need 35. Even the Dodgers need more than 9, just as the 1977 Yankees and the 2015 Royals did. It is a team. Some players are out front, some are not, but they are all in the same uniform, waiting for their moment. Then the manager makes a decision, informed by everything at their disposal, and it comes down to one-on-one. Pitcher versus batter. Everyone else mostly just watches.

Thirteen is not necessarily better than nine, despite its size. It brings more options, more variables to consider, more personalities to manage. But if everyone is pulling in the same direction, fully committed to whatever role they are given, that is when it works. A player with a starter’s mentality can still find meaningful ways to contribute even when they are not in the starting lineup.

As someone who became a bench player, I learned how to stay ready, how to be on call at a moment’s notice. The value of that role becomes clearest in the postseason, when ego is supposed to take a backseat. That is when you see how being part of the 13 helps win championships.

In fact, every year, it does.

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Share Your Thoughts…

• Have modern matchup strategies made the game more interesting or less? Why?

• Which matters more in October: having the best 9 players, or the most adaptable 13?

• When in your own life have you had to shift from being “in the 9” to part of the “13,” and how did you handle it?

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One of the staples of my early baseball fandom was watching the weekly show, This Week in Baseball. The host was Mel Allen, and his voice still echoes in my mind to this day. Not to mention the show’s iconic theme music which sets the tone every week.

It caught viewers up on the week’s action, but it also educated through the depth of its content. The show mixed in statistics to back up its observations, yet it was also visual candy at a time when teams embraced the bright colors of 1970s and 1980s baseball. Although I grew up in the New York area and was showered with constant Mets and Yankees coverage, it was still a great place to live if you wanted to learn about the rest of baseball. Every night, those New York teams competed against clubs you could barely find on television unless they happened to be featured as the national Game of the Week. If I went to a game, I often focused on the opponents because of my curiosity and unfamiliarity with them. Who is this guy on the Baltimore Orioles, Lenn Sakata?

Still, This Week in Baseball took things even further by diving deeper into teams that were doing something noteworthy. The show would go around the horn of baseball and summarize series from all over the league. It highlighted excellence wherever it was found, but also the fun and bloopers that made the game human.

In 1984, when the Chicago Cubs traded for Rick Sutcliffe to bolster their pitching, the offense carried them for a stretch, and This Week in Baseball broke down how the Cubs ranked in many offensive categories. Rewatching that episode recently, I realized I had forgotten just how hot a start catcher Jody Davis got off to that season, along with Leon “Bull” Durham and Bobby Dernier, for that matter. The Cubs would go on to make the playoffs that year. The show took viewers around baseball without heavy bias toward one particular market. It simply made you love baseball wherever, and whenever, it was being played.

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There are 162 games in a Major League Baseball regular season. It is a maddening number. When you share it with fans of other sports, they look at you sideways, wondering who landed on such a specific number. Why not 150? Or 200? But 162?

For as long as I was a fan, I knew that number. Then as a player, I came to understand the insanity of what it means in real life. There is a game almost every single day of the season, and when you are not playing, you are usually traveling between cities. The “day off” is often just a way to get from San Francisco to New York for the next series. Not for catching a Broadway show.

By the time you get to the big leagues, you have already endured the baseline of minor league travel. Long bus rides for the most part, and then once we were able to fly, it meant middle seats and connecting flights through St. Louis on TWA, at least back in my day. So flying across the country on a chartered jet in the majors was not something to complain about. Still, by the end of the season, you were delirious.

Somewhere inside that constant movement is the point of it all: the games. Three in one city, three in the next. When I watch footage from a season now, every 30 seconds I seem to be in a new place. How did I get there?

Still, I had a goal my first full season as a starter. Play in all of the games. Every single one. Once you become a starter, a selfish wave of ambition tends to wash over you. It has usually been a long road to get there, full of potholes and naysayers, people you owe, coaches who believed in you, family members who sacrificed and loved you through it. So now it is time. Every inning, every game.

Growing up in Jersey, that is how it worked in Wiffle Ball games with my brother in the driveway. No pinch hitters, no bullpen, no rain outs. Just you, competing relentlessly with yourself. The idea that a backup might be better than you never entered your mind, even when, against a sidearm right-hander, it sometimes was. You were depended on. You had to show up.

In 1998, I was named the starting center fielder out of spring training. I finally had my shot to play every day and chase my goal of playing in all 162 games. As a newcomer to both the organization and the opportunity, I did not want to rock the boat with a new manager. So when he gave me a day off in late July, that goal had to shift to the next season. Still, by early September, I had only sat out twice, the second time coming around my birthday in late August.

September, however, was a disaster. I ended August going 0-for-10, then went 1-for-23 over my next stretch. Not long after, my manager, Terry Francona, delivered his own version of a verbal cease-and-desist. He told me I needed a day off because “the bat was swinging me,” not the other way around. By then, I was exhausted, so I accepted it, pushing me one game further from the goal. I also sat out the last game of the season, the second game of a doubleheader. I finished with 158 games played, a league-leading 678 at-bats, and a staggering 735 plate appearances. Crazy.

Covering the game now, I still see flashes of that ironman mentality. The Braves have carried it across generations. From Chipper Jones to Freddie Freeman to Austin Riley, alongside Matt Olson, who learned from Marcus Semien.

Olson once told me, when I asked if he would accept a day off from his manager, “Some players get really mad about it. Semien would want to fight you. I would not go ‘Semien’ on my manager.”

Semien became a verb meaning: “I am playing every day until I’m dead. And you can’t stop me unless you make me dead.”

Cal Ripken Jr. holds what may be the most unbreakable record in baseball, maybe in all of sports, because it was nearly impossible then and even more so now. Injuries, intensity, preparation, social media, distractions, analytics telling you to sit before that hamstring explodes. It all adds up. As Braves manager Walt Weiss said on our podcast the other day, “162 then is like 155 today.” The warriors now are often going against what is recommended in terms of best for your recovery and even best for the team. A tired starter versus a rested replacement can be a wash, or even an advantage for the next man up. Meanwhile, that starter is thinking about that game three years ago when he came back from paternity leave on 27 minutes of sleep and still got four hits.

A player who performs at a high level while playing that often has enormous value. It gives a manager flexibility late in games, especially against today’s endlessly versatile bullpens. It also sets a tone. Show up. Stop complaining. Find a way. Compete when you are bone on bone. It may not always be quantifiably wise, but it carries real intangibles, like a runner finishing the Boston Marathon with a quad on fire. The data may say otherwise, but the example is infectious.

There is something exhilarating about being an everyday starter. You are the one. When people thought of the starting center fielder for the Philadelphia Phillies from 1998 to 2002, they thought of my era. That was my mark, in part because I refused to come out of the lineup, and for a stretch of four years, I rarely did. And for the most part, I did the job well.

Today, with all the late-game maneuvering, players can maintain streaks without necessarily starting the game. They might come in for a big pinch-hit or a defensive upgrade. There is a way to “be in there” every day without playing nine innings. And in some ways, that may be harder. Staying loose on the bench for six innings on a cold April day in Chicago is not easy.

Baseball demands that you show up. The games keep coming for seven months with barely a break. Loyal, relentless, exacting like no other sport. It teaches you what it means to be dependable, which is what made Ripken’s streak so extraordinary. He did it as the game evolved around him, across generations. It was like crossing changing landscapes—weather, habitats, ecosystems—always at risk, always moving forward. And he kept walking.

We set our clocks by him. Ripken was the alarm. A statue in motion. Immovable, constant.

That is as close to baseball immortality as you can get. Not in the way Jackie Robinson changed the game, but in what the game represents at its core: showing up.

I did not get my 162. But I learned what it meant to come close. How much I wanted to be out there, and also how valuable it can be to step back and watch. To remember what you love about the game when you do not have to step into the batter’s box and face 95 mph.

And then time moves on. Those 162 games are no longer an option. The sore arm. The slowing bat. The athleticism that is not quite yours anymore. You become more spectator than participant, caddying for the starter, passing along wisdom, pinch-hitting against a closer with ungodly stuff. You wonder how you ever did it. How did you show up every day, knowing your mid-to-late 30s were coming for you, ready to trip you on the way down?

Now, 162 now feels like a dream. I can tune in when I want, check a score on an app, re-engage on a whim. No bad rotator cuff.

I do not know how Ripken did it. I am not sure how Olson is doing it now. But I take the lesson and apply it elsewhere.

Show up. Play hard. Be there.

No matter what.

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• What’s more impressive to you: playing all 162 games or performing at a high level over fewer games?

• Is Cal Ripken Jr.’s streak truly unbreakable or just unlikely?

• Should teams protect players from themselves when they want to play every day?

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Every time I see Paul Byrd, I do not just see a former teammate or a man I shared a clubhouse with, I remember an incident we experienced as teammates.

I see the bottom of a pile.

More specifically, I see myself at the bottom of a heap of bodies during a bench-clearing brawl with Ozzie Guillén, then a player on the opposing side of this brawl attempting, unhelpfully, to extract me from the weight of humanity by pulling me out by my head.

It did not work.

That moment was the chaotic climax of a fight between our 1999 Phillies team and the Atlanta Braves. It had been brewing for months, mostly centered around tension between former Braves teammates and Bible study partners, Paul Byrd and Eddie Pérez.

Paul Byrd had a great run with the Phillies, including an All-Star appearance, but leading into this game, his command had been eluding him for a while. It felt like he was hitting four batters a game, and in one game against the Braves in Philadelphia, he hit Eddie Pérez.

Then he hit him again in Atlanta, and Pérez’s countryman, Ozzie Guillén, decided it was time for Pérez to get even.

Pérez did not want to go after Byrd, at least not at first, so he channeled his frustration towards our second baseman, Marlon Anderson, during a double play. This mattered because, in 1999, the lead runner was allowed, more like mandated, to do everything possible to break up a potential double play. Usually, that meant sliding hard into the infielder attempting to turn one out into two.

Pérez came hard into second base, and in his effort to flatten Anderson, Anderson got the best of him with a forearm shiver to the helmet. Pérez was not happy.

Guillén kept chirping at Eddie, needling him with a constant refrain, “Are you gonna take that?”

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I cannot claim to know MLB umpire C. B. Bucknor well, but I know him well enough to remember brief conversations we shared over the years on a Major League Baseball field. He was friendly, respectful, and serious about the game.

But that is not why I feel a sense of sadness about what was happening to him just before a foul ball knocked him out of a game (he has not been back on the field since). He had become the umpire caught in the crosshairs of a volatile mix of hot takes, half-information, accelerating technology, our thirst for accountability, and the collateral damage that comes with a disingenuous pursuit of perfection.

I have long been fascinated by how we evaluate umpires. In many ways, they function like judges, trained to make decisions within a framework of rules shaped by tradition, culture, technology, and even history itself. They may not have to hit a 100 mph fastball, but they do have to track it at the edges of an invisible strike zone while also anticipating an 82 mph knuckle-curve that could break unpredictably at any moment. Inevitably, they make mistakes.

Yet the way we judge them is often more flawed than the calls themselves. Most of us bring inherent bias. We are fans wearing team colors or competitors unwilling to concede the slightest edge. I played the game for a long time, and I cannot recall a single instance when a team benefited from a bad call and said, “No, that was the wrong call. Please reverse it!”

And still, these biased voices tend to be the loudest in criticism.

Now, we are armed with technology that gives us the illusion of complete objectivity.

But it is just that. An illusion.

The latest development is the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system, now in use at the major league level. Each team is allotted two challenges on pitches called by the home plate umpires. If the challenge is successful, the call is overturned, and the team retains that challenge. Within moments, the result flashes on the scoreboard, reinforcing the sense that the game can now be measured, and corrected, with precision.

It is kind of fun to watch it play out in real time.

I generally like the system, and I think it has been fairly smooth, at least in the games I have called as an announcer. It is another case of the audience having technology that enables them to see with their own eyes, making it hard to go back to an analog version of the same experience. Not implementing it has come to look like denial, like avoiding oversight, even when that may not be the entire story. The pressure becomes too great.

When challenged, from what we are seeing so far, umpires are still right about half the time, but they are also in a tough spot. Calls get overturned, and the system serves as much as an evaluator as it does a corrector. And in sports, we are all evaluators. Albeit biased ones.

But let me take you back in time.

In 1992, I played my first full season in professional baseball. It was a monumental lift to go from playing 40 games at Penn to 144 games in the smoldering heat of the Carolina League when I was assigned to the Chicago Cubs’ High A-Ball club to play for the Winston-Salem Spirits.

I called everyone on the Winston-Salem staff “Coach” and I called all umpires “Blue.” That was based on respect, but it did not last long. The manager told me to add his name to “Coach” or just call him “Billy” or “Hayes-y,” and one day an umpire said, “We have names!” So I crossed what I thought was a bright line and started to talk to the umpires. That umpire who called me out is still in the big leagues today.

There was one umpire who was especially nice. He was also really worried about getting the call right, so he would literally ask the players. He would get upset if we told him he missed one and would press for more detail. I was surprised at those exchanges, and I got the sense that too many people on that field felt this was not helping him advance. He was too worried about what everyone thought. He needed more of a chip, it was said, more armor, because it left him open to manipulation or heartache. You can never get every call right, but he still wanted to get them all.

The umpires go through the minors just like the players. Bus rides in the middle of the night, bad hotels, mosquitoes, and humidity. I know the minor league conditions are much better than they were in my day, but they are still far from the big leagues.

As I adjusted to the blur of competing against new teams and organizations every day, one at-bat cut through the noise.

I stepped in the batter’s box and noticed the umpire behind home plate: C. B. Bucknor. I had probably seen him before, but something about the moment made me pause. In the frenetic climb toward the Show, days tended to run together as you moved from game to game without much reflection. But on this day, I tilted my head and took notice. There were not many Black umpires in professional baseball, and he looked like someone who could have been a cousin at my family reunion.

From center field, I often had a clear view of how umpires worked the zone, calling balls and strikes. Like any young player, I had opinions. But they were shaped by limited experience. College baseball in the Ivy League and what I had absorbed from watching MLB games on TV. In truth, I was not in a position to evaluate any umpire fully. Still, like players and fans alike, I had the instinct to judge, to sort calls into right and wrong, fair and unfair. Over time, those judgments accumulate, reinforced by conversations in dugouts and across the field. Reputations take shape.

That instinct is easy. It is also incomplete.

What stands out to me now is not whether a call was right or wrong, but how quickly those judgments can harden into something else. Something personal, something disproportionate. Especially when perfection is expected.

That at-bat brought it into focus.

When I came to the plate, tension was already building. The catcher had been jawing with Bucknor, some of it lingering from earlier, some of it unfolding in the moment. I do not remember the exact sequence. I might have fouled off a pitch or two or taken a pitch the catcher thought should have been called a strike. But I do remember what happened next.

During a brief window when it was just the two of us in the batter’s circle—C. B. had stepped away to get more baseballs and was out of earshot—the catcher turned to me and said something I have never forgotten:

“This ump is terrible. Watch what I’m going to do to him.”

I did not understand what he meant. What could you do to an umpire? In my early experience, most umpires felt like part of the same ecosystem, quasi-colleagues in the grind of A-Ball. By then, I even knew some by names. They understood the climb. We were all just trying to advance. Anything beyond a comment or a complaint seemed unthinkable.

I got back in the box. The pitcher threw a fastball up and in.

The catcher moved his glove down—and deliberately missed the pitch. He did not even try to catch it.

The ball hit C. B. Bucknor square in the chest. A 90-plus-mile-per-hour fastball. As a hitter, you follow the ball in when you are not swinging, and all I remember is the thunk and him grunting in pain, stumbling back like he had been shot.

I was completely stunned.

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When I first arrived in this league, I respected umpires so much I hesitated to use their names. Now I was seeing a player show such disdain for an umpire that he set one up to be physically hurt over a strike zone. The cruelty was breathtaking.

And I felt complicit. Should I have warned someone? Asked what he meant? Maybe I did and just did not believe him. I do not know. But the moment stayed with me. Every time I saw C. B. over the years, I thought about it, and never said a word, especially since that catcher made it to the big leagues too.

Did the pitcher know, too?

When we get new technological tools, we expect them to improve our lives, increase accuracy, and by extension, raise the standard. With ABS, we now have a new version of perfection to measure against. At least until the next one comes along. We convince ourselves we are advancing toward something. Every umpire is now directly measured against that standard. Calls can be “corrected,” but just as easily, shortcomings can be cataloged. Every game, every pitch.

There is little upside for umpires in the court of public opinion. On one hand, they receive feedback that, taken objectively, can be useful. On the other hand, we have quietly come to realize that anecdotally, they miss fewer calls than we once believed, and when they do miss, the margin is often slight. That should count for something.

But the harsher impact shows up elsewhere, especially for someone who already carries a reputation. Perhaps an umpire is seen as inconsistent or simply as not well-liked. Now, the machinery of public opinion can use the system to reinforce that perception, pulling together every mistake into a single, condemning reel. It may be true that an umpire falls below average. It is also true that failure can now be curated, looped, and amplified. Until it feels definitive. Not a moment to learn, but a pattern to punish. Not a career in progress, but a verdict already delivered.

Of course, we want the game to get better. We want the officiating to improve. And now we have tools that expose what used to be invisible. But exposure is not the same as understanding, and it certainly is not the same as fairness.

We still have a responsibility in how we use it.

No highlight package tells the full story. If an umpire has six calls overturned in a game, that sounds brutal, but what about the hundreds he got right? And what about the pitches no one challenged? Are those omissions evidence of confidence in calls, or simply the reality that most pitches live on the margins, too close to risk a challenge? That ambiguity matters. It speaks to the excellence of the umpire, and about how human all of this is.

I cannot help but wonder what this environment does to someone like C. B. Bucknor. We have seen how this kind of sustained scrutiny can wear a person down. How it can follow them beyond the field, shaping how they are seen, talked about, and treated. Some will celebrate when a figure like Ángel Hernández exits the game.. But it is worth asking what, exactly, is being celebrated, and at what cost.

The pile-on is real. Mass media, instant reaction, and a narrative that hardens quickly into inevitability. Technology becomes the vehicle that informs that process. And accelerates it.

What we often forget is that the strike zone itself is a construct. It is not perfect. It never has been. It is an agreed-upon space, shaped over time by interpretation, adaptation, and feel. This new ABS-based version does not even fully align with the rulebook definition. And that tension is part of what makes sports compelling: the human element, the constant negotiation between precision and judgment. Strip that away entirely, and you do not just change the calls, you change the nature of the game. Push it far enough, and we risk a future of robots playing robots, officiated by robots.

For me, the answer is not to reject the technology, but to approach it with restraint. Let evaluators use it with patience and perspective, guided by experience. Let it inform, not inflame. There is an important conversation still to be had about umpiring standards, the limits of chasing perfection, and the care required to avoid losing something essential in the process—our sense of proportion and our capacity for empathy.

Yes, umpires should improve. Yes, tools can help. And yes, accountability matters.

But so does how we carry it.

Do we need to get better, too?

We cannot accept cruelty.

Not from a crowd armed with replay in slow motion.

Not in the name of getting it right.

And we should avoid becoming the kind of people who call for a fastball—and then choose not to catch it.

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Share Your Thoughts…

• Does having better technology actually make us more fair?

• If we can see every mistake, are we obligated to react to every mistake?

• What’s more important: getting the call right, or getting the moment right?

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The piece is distinct from my poem First, which was also featured on ESPN’s broadcast, though it grows out of that same reflection. Where the poem captures a legacy, this essay explores Jackie Robinson’s legacy through a sense of connection, deepened by my periodic encounters with the Robinson family. It considers his courage to enter spaces that were never meant for him and to carry more than his own dreams, bearing the weight of history, resistance, and expectation every day. The strength required to make it to the peak of the sport, despite the many obstacles placed in his path, is difficult to fathom. Yet he drew on the strength and support of his family, especially his remarkable wife, Rachel Robinson.

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His story has profoundly shaped how I see the world, how I engage with others, and the values I strive to uphold. His legacy feels personal.

This essay reflects on that kind of courage. The kind that changes everything. I am grateful to have spent this past week honoring a legacy that continues to challenge and inspire.

Special thanks to ESPN editor Andrea Haimindra for bringing these words to life through the accompanying video.

As I share these words, I invite you to consider not only what it meant for him to be first, but what it asks of those of us who follow. His story did not end at home plate. It continues in every boundary we challenge, every barrier we refuse to accept, and every step we take toward something greater than ourselves.

Special thanks to ESPN editor Andrea Haimindra for his exceptional work in bringing my words to life through beautiful visual poetry.

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FIRST
by Doug Glanville

It takes a giant of a man to cross
A line while also trying to erase it.

To turn barriers into stairs and
Borders into erasable boundaries
Redrawn by the hand
Of his undeniable excellence.

His game was recognizable
Instantly,
A proxy for determination
As evidenced by his hard slides, tactical genius
And his patience to wait for the right pitch.

He was the first to take first,
First to steal second,
First to round third,
And first to reach home,
A place where he became the personification
Of a promise made
Which allowed us all to fully belong.

Yet he did not stop there
Nor wait for his next turn at bat.
He was daring.
Dancing off of first
Until the last out
Of his career was recorded.

Then he added new ways to get to first.

He built a bank,
Wrote a column,
And helped run a corporation
For economic, editorial, and administrative power
Because being first only mattered
To him
If there was a second, third and fourth.

I could only meet this man in my imagination
As a young baseball player
Reading his biography
Long before I set foot in Dodger Stadium.

I embraced his example to color
Outside the lines,
Empowered that I could
Blow the chalk lines out of my way
And shun anyone who tried to draw chalk outlines around my future.

Soon I achieved my own first
Merging some of the virtues
He inspired between
Education and baseball
From UCLA to Brooklyn
From Penn to Chicago.

I felt his presence.

He showed me that I could be more than baseball.
That I had to be more than baseball
To honor those who left
The footprints in the basepaths
For me to follow.

It is hard to come behind
Someone
Who had the kind
Of courage that dreamed of and worked relentlessly
Towards a future
That if realized
Would exist
After he was gone.

42
Taught us what we can reach for
When the stakes are highest
And he inspired the will
To steal home
For equality if necessary.

He was evidence that
Courage overshadows color.
That standing tall also means
Refusing to sit in false harmony
With inequality.

Today we remember
What it means to finish first
Because to reach that pinnacle
Someone first
Had to be first.

Thank you to everyone who joined us in real time. Your presence, comments, and thoughtful engagement made the conversation even more meaningful. Special thank you to our guest Bob Kendrick, President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

For those who couldn’t attend, or if you’d like to revisit the discussion, we’re sharing the video replay here. We explored Jackie Robinson’s historic impact on baseball and the broader lessons his courage and resilience continue to offer today.

I hope you’ll take some time to watch and reflect with us.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to view.

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I get asked this question a lot:

“Who was your favorite team to play for?” This quickly turns into:

“Who is your favorite team?”

My answer is usually layered, depending on how the question is framed.

For one, there is childhood. I became a baseball fan at the urging of my big brother, a devoted fan who needed a sidekick. My birth conveniently filled that role. I dove in as the ultimate teammate, playing some combination of Wiffle ball, stickball, Strat-O-Matic, and improvised neighborhood games where kids would slide on asphalt. It was baseball in some form, year-round.

Then, when it came time to choose a team, I chose the Philadelphia Phillies. Their powder blue road uniforms seemed to sparkle in the night.

It was the mid-‘70s when I began to understand team loyalty and the power of color. I also wanted to have my own identity in that mix, so although I followed my brother’s passion, I did not plant a flag in his favorite teams’ territory. Unless I was invading it. So the Reds and Astros were rivals to me, and the local Yankees and Mets were just conduits to watching other teams that I could only see on Strat-O-Matic baseball cards (or to see the Phillies when they were in town).

Soon I had my favorite players too. Cash, Schmidt, Maddox, Carlton. And not long after that, the Phillies became really good.

Then I received the gift of being able to play professionally, and now I would wear a different uniform than the one I wore as a fan. I was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1991. The good news was there was a period when the Cubs were nicknamed “Phillies West” because of all the trades they made with the Phillies. Guys like Keith Moreland, Manny Trillo, and Bob Dernier gave the Cubs a Phillies connection that made it easy to like them.

This week, the Cubs and the Phillies are tangled in a three-game series in Philadelphia, which my colleague and play-by-play teammate, Jon Sciambi, affectionately calls the “Glanville Bowl.” Both teams are really talented and have real playoff chances, so it is nice to see them playing for stakes.

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It is springtime, and besides baseball, it means chipping away at some wayward boxes that need to be opened and reorganized. Spring cleaning. You would think that after retiring over 20 years ago, I would have unboxed everything from my baseball history, but somehow, in baseball, history keeps renewing and growing back.

Maybe that is what we love about baseball.

Although we are months away from the draft, I stumbled across my first baseball card from the 1991 draft. Classic was the company that made a draft pick set, and it was surreal to have a card while I was still in college. Pretty cool business card, for sure.

Once the set was printed, I signed a ton of cards as part of an agreement. I learned quickly how hard it is on your hands to sign that many cards. After putting only a small dent in the hundreds I was tasked with signing, I decided to change my signature. My full name is not for the faint of heart when it comes to autograph signing. Either I would take an eternity, carefully forming every letter, or I would make an in-game adjustment and turn my signature into more of a mark, a sigil of sorts.

I did imagine standing with a group of fans, people waiting for me to sign my full name like I was applying for a mortgage. Way too much time. Something had to give.

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The season is here, and amid the accelerating evolution of data and analytics, we sometimes forget that baseball still has a robust language. It is one that keeps players and everyone on and around the field in their own linguistic world. The lingo is a special brand of communication, and some of it is only understood inside the clubhouse.

It can resemble inside jokes and stories only known to a select few. And it is more than vocabulary. It is one-liners, mottos, adages, even substitute words that would make Webster cringe.

And even as I notice myself getting older while the players in the locker room seem to stay the same age, they are still holding on to many of the same clichés from when I played. I find that comforting—especially as a parent.

I always found the term “professional hitter” to be a classic. No one really knows what it means, but when you hear it and see it, you know it. In fact, one late evening at ESPN while prepping for another Baseball Tonight show, we decided to do a segment on it. We could barely define it, so we just showed it. Up popped guys who fit the mold like Matt Stairs, Daniel Murphy, Edgar Martínez, Juan Pierre, and Jason Kendall.

They are scrappy. They grind out at-bats until the bat turns to sawdust. They never say never, and they always know the situation. It has nothing to do with batting average or Hall of Fame potential. He is a pro. He looks like a pro. He gives nothing away. He probably eats dessert after the game on an iron plate.

Now, do not mistake this term for “ballplayer,” often used in the following sentence:

“He’s a ballplayer.”

I heard that a lot while I played, but as a member of the media asking about a new player on the roster, I hear it even more. Sometimes I wonder if “ballplayer” is a placeholder for the unknown, like he is a lump of clay, still TBD. Other times, it is very clearly an extension of a “professional hitter,” except it covers more ground. The way he plays the infield, the way he runs through walls, the way he wears his uniform—or that it is always dirty. No glory needed. No diss track. You can spot him immediately. He is the one you see in the training room with the ultrasound needle cranked to max, working out a knot in his leg. Of course, he is never actually in the training room, so maybe it is a paradox.

These guys also do something we hear all the time. They play the game…

“The Right Way”

Ah, one of my favorites. I do not know the origin of this phrase, but it does echo the way the Apollo astronauts were described as having “the right stuff.” It is more than an adjective. It is a way of life, an approach universally understood as the gold standard for how baseball is honored by those who play the game. I like to imagine it is written on a tablet somewhere in a mountain north of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. If not, it is buried in the sands beneath the paws of the Sphinx.

“The right way” can also be used to call someone out for drifting from the mission. They stole a base when their team was up 10-1. They stood too long admiring their home run. They did not tuck their pockets back in after pulling out their batting gloves, leaving them hanging while searching for the oven mitts everyone now wears. Wait, can you play the game the right way while wearing oven mitts? Quandary alert.

It carries its share of controversy because it is cultural. After playing two years of winter ball in Puerto Rico, I know our team would have failed the “right way” test from time to time. We had a band in the stands, a salsa dance team, kids running around during batting practice. We trash-talked our own teammates to inspire, and we won the championship over the Puerto Rican Dream Team.

But then again, bat flipping is now accepted, so even “the right way” has had to adapt.

In MLB, “the right way” frames an instinctual, know-it-when-you-see-it set of unwritten rules (I will save that for another column). It is respect. It is code. It is understood without speaking. It looks right. It acts right. It is right.

But still, they have to pass…

“The Eye Test”

Whenever a player is being evaluated and we want to put some old-school drip on him to push back on the analytics gods, we underscore that his play is validated by a special standard only those inside the game’s soul understand. A player “passes” or “does not pass” the eye test. It is the gut check. It is the feeling down your spine that says this player is a big leaguer—or he is not. You sense it. You smell it. And baseball players better have good eyes if they want to last.

This term also doubles as a catch-all for weak explanations. It might apply to an umpire’s call, a player claiming he was late to the ballpark because of a flat tire, or a hyped prospect someone is not quite buying. It has wide-ranging uses, but it is binary. You pass or you fail. Like the astrophysics course I took in college. Too risky to try for a grade.

They say he is a 10-tool prospect, but he does not pass “the eye test.”

But still, he might just be…

“An Athlete”

In reality, all major league players are athletes, but some more so than others. Pitchers, especially, chase this label because they are often viewed as goofy or uncoordinated beyond their lightning-bolt arm. But when you see a player who moves like a snake, hits the ball 450 feet, makes defensive plays that shimmer, and can practically lift a small car in the weight room, he earns the name “an athlete.” The metrics love him. The “eye test” wants to love him. And when those two agree, it is the closest thing baseball has to a peace treaty.

You will also hear it as a quiet aside: “He is a better athlete than you would think.” That is inside information, so take note.

Now, if he puts it all together and starts dominating both statistically and visually, he can graduate to…

“A Beast”

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Baseball loves its spirit animals. A pitcher who carries a staff is a horse. We are cat-like. We are dawgs. We are flying squirrels. Heck, I was “the gazelle” in Puerto Rico. But one term cuts through all of it: “a beast.” This player is a scaled-down Godzilla. Wreaking havoc on opponents, shredding through lineups and pitching rotations. Untethered, untamed, and taking no prisoners. Once you get the label, it sticks. You have crossed into another realm, especially when there is a full moon. A dominant force. On a hot streak. The kind of player who can beat you single-handedly.

But there is a term that might sit above “beast.” It is…

“Elite”

When you are “elite,” you are no longer a pickup truck running over opponents. You are a Porsche, a limousine of excellence that sets the gold standard for refined greatness. We hear it most often with defense. An “elite defender.” He may not be much of a hitter, but it does not matter. “Elite” gives you a hall pass to focus on one skill at the highest level. An “elite” game caller, an “elite” pitch framer, an “elite” baserunner. “Elite” stuff. “Elite” pitch recognition. If you are in the top one percent of the one percent, you will stick around. Teams will cover for your weaknesses because you are singular in a way that both wows and helps them win.

Baseball is a game of words as much as it is a game of inches, despite its deep-rooted relationship with numbers. We describe it. We communicate through it. Players and fans share a language. Coaches have to speak it, too, to reach every generation of ballplayer in their care. It helps to have a common dictionary. An agreed vernacular that lives within a team but also across teams. It bonds the game and makes evaluating talent more universal, especially when teams may be trading for you one day. Or trading you away.

I think back to my years with the Cubs, Phillies, and Rangers. These phrases were everywhere. And then there was the internal, team-specific language that built itself over 162 games. Letter by letter, moment by moment, inside our own world.

Sure, the numbers endure. They keep us connected to the game’s story. We still use batting average and ERA. The dimensions of the game remain. 60 feet, 6 inches. 90 feet. The historic numbers still echo: 1.12, 56, 2131.

But it is the words that ultimately tell the story. They help you understand it and earn your way into it. And once you are in, they let you speak it, pulling others in around the baseball campfire to be part of it all.

Baseball has changed through the years with pitch clocks and mound visits. But it is also the same.

We are “beasts,” “professional hitters,” and “ballplayers.”

And that is how the game endures. By keeping us all speaking the same language, even if it is in code.

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Share Your Thoughts…

• What is a baseball phrase you heard growing up that still sticks with you today?

• Is the “eye test” still valid in today’s game, or have analytics replaced it?

• What is one baseball phrase you would add to the dictionary that I did not mention?

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As Opening Day arrives, I accept that this day no longer involves my putting on a freshly cut uniform as a big leaguer. I am now preparing for a season of calling games on ESPN Radio, TV, and other platforms around the baseball world. My Opening Day is still exciting, still beautiful, and thankfully, I no longer have to rely on my hamstring to do my current job.

In my role on ESPN Radio, I call games every Saturday and Sunday. Often, we meet with the managers from both teams as part of our preparation, and we are afforded the time to ask questions we hope will inform our broadcast once the game begins.

Yankees manager Aaron Boone is always fun for me to engage with, in part because his father was the first autograph I ever received in the mail after I wrote him a letter when he was with the Phillies. But Boone is also my contemporary. He played in the same era and may see things in a similar way.

When you are asking questions of any manager or player, you are often trying to contextualize aspects of your research that need perspective. It is not enough to know that a team is not hitting with runners in scoring position. You need to understand how the team perceives that data point. It could be that they hit ten balls hard that just did not fall in one week. It could be that a poor approach at the plate has left them off balance. Or maybe they just ran into some difficult pitchers who made key pitches at crucial times.

But what does the manager think?

Because so many of today’s managers are from my playing generation, I have another curiosity that I want to explore.

One important aspect of calling a game is being aware of your own bias. You cannot eliminate it, but it helps to know where you are coming from, even if you are in denial about it. I played for the Phillies, Cubs, and Rangers. Those experiences define me. Those cities, those fan bases, even some of the staff who are still around. We all come from places that provide connection, love, support, and pain. Places where we lived through pivotal moments in our personal and professional lives. Some of that will come through in our commentary. Some of it is relevant to what you know. Content you need to convey in a way that the audience can feel and receive.

Keeping in mind that bias is human, and that embracing it allows you to show who you are. There are positive and constructive ways it can add color to your commentary.

Yet there is another way bias creeps in, one that has less to do with the team you cheered for as a kid or played for as a big leaguer. There is a generational bias that is quieter but ever-present. It shows up when trying to reconcile the value placed on certain players, strategic decisions in a game, how bullpens are used, or why a player hits in a certain spot in the lineup. It stirs as you watch the modern game, knowing you have not picked up a bat in two decades.

When you played in an era that responded to those aspects of the game differently than they do today, it is easy to want to understand why, but also tempting to defend your time. Because in some ways, if what you did and how you played the game during your career is no longer relevant, you begin to feel a sense of irrelevance about your own career.

I was a speed guy and was good at putting the ball in play. Being fast, making contact, and being a decent hitter put me in a leadoff role. In fact, I batted leadoff for 615 games in my career, the most of any spot in the lineup.

One day, I asked Boone about having speed at the top of the order, a staple of my playing days. And he broke out a favorite phrase of his that I have come to appreciate in today’s game:

“It’s not a thing.”

Wait. So what was I doing all those years?

Today, the priority for the first hitter is simply to get on base. Speed is no longer required. You get on so the hitters behind you can drive you home. As Boone qualified, speed is nice to have, but it is no longer essential at the top. Then he went on to describe all of the other spots in the lineup where speed can be just as valuable.

I dare not ask him where he would have hit me, or whether I would have been in the lineup at all.

I have gone down the line trying to understand what aspects of today’s game value what I brought to the table 25 years ago. Partly to gain insight into the game’s evolution, but also to see what might have once been a universal virtue of baseball strategy. Something I, or my contemporaries, did well.

One fun discussion that comes up is about hitting today’s pitchers versus the pitchers we faced in the past. Boone will often tell Yankees hitters, when a very hittable pitcher enters the game, that this guy would have been in the pitching rotation every fifth day back in his playing days.

Which means my playing days.

We could go into defense. I loved playing shallow because it played to my strength—going back on the ball and sprinting to the fence. Today, that would be frowned upon because it is far more damaging for a ball to be hit over your head as an outfielder. Those turn into doubles or triples rather than bloop singles in front of you. It is much better to give up that bloop single, especially when a big power hitter is up, than to let him drive one over your head.

But don’t you want to catch every ball?

Yes, but not every ball is equally valuable (or equally damaging to your team’s chances). So you trade lower-damage hits for higher-damage ones.

With each week, I wonder if I would have been able to play today, not as a 55-year-old, but more whether how I approached the game still holds value. Sure, it is important to hustle and work hard, but skill-wise, making contact is nice, but is it hard contact? Playing defense and catching everything with a good arm is nice, but are you positioned correctly and making the right trade-offs? Being fast is wonderful, but do you use it to go first to third, or first to home, when the player paid to drive you in hits the ball? Stealing a base here or there is a bonus, but not a necessity.

Baseball is a game that loves its history. It connects the dots across generations. It remembers well. Within that history are small arcs that represent a player’s time in the game. Some arcs are longer than others, but they all mattered for just a fraction of the time the game has entertained us.

I was one of those arcs. And I recognize that the game changes constantly. Through rules, technology, and athleticism. That is no revelation. Yet for those of us fortunate enough to have our time, we all yearn to matter eternally. We were part of something majestic, historic. We lived a dream. We want some sense of permanence, even knowing that change is inevitable and the river never stops flowing.

Fans tend to remember your time from perspectives you never considered. A photo day on the field. A gesture in the parking lot. A letter answered, just like Aaron Boone’s father gave me decades ago. I remember that card more than I remember the World Series he won in 1980. That card stayed on my bulletin board from the day I received it until I graduated from high school.

Still, when you cover the game closely and watch how the questions around how it is played evolve right before your eyes, you cannot help but feel parts of yourself being erased. It is more than a rookie wearing your old number, or your former team changing the font on the back of the jersey.

It is within the game itself. Its shifting priorities, its new definitions of winning baseball, the metrics that now define player value. All of these forces collide and reshape how we see the past. It is not a stretch to question how the game was played “back then.”

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We understand eras, that was just the time. And many players today once looked up to their managers or coaches because when they were kids, those coaches were the players. This still carries weight, even as data slowly devalues how you played the game.

But eventually, there are no longer players who saw you play.

It is not personal. It is just time.

So in my questions, I often ask the philosophical question of the day, wondering when someone will tell me that my skills would still play well in today’s game, that my contributions were timeless, that the game will remember me not just in a library, but on the field, through someone still playing my style and winning with it.

Of course, that is a selfish desire, and ultimately an unrealistic one, even for some of the greatest players of my generation. The game changes. And deep down, we hope to discover which elements of playing are truly timeless, immutable, and permanent. They likely are not rooted in data or tactics, at least not for long. They must be something more universal. Something qualitative.

Until then, let this Opening Day affirm what I still believe are the timeless marks of baseball at its best. Values I tried to carry with me every time I took the field.

Play hard. Work hard. Hit the cut off man. Have fun. Be grateful for the fans, the staff, and especially your teammates. And above all, do not forget to stop and smell the roses.

Because the truth is, those roses do not last forever.

They bloom, they fade, and sometimes they are gone before you realize how much they meant. If you are lucky, though, they are planted again, maybe even years later, by someone chasing the memory of what the game once gave them. A memory that renews your part in it.

And if you are luckier still, you will be there when they bloom again, ready to take it in together.

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• What’s one part of the game you miss, and one part you’ve learned to appreciate?

• What’s your favorite Opening Day memory?

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My first day working for ESPN was in 2009. The same year my book was released. These two professional milestones collided on my first day on the job. New job, book tour. Exciting and chaotic.

Not to mention, my oldest daughter was also about to be born.

Even on that first day, I was encouraged by the strong sense of team within my new baseball group. For example, Eduardo Pérez was openly sharing all his cheat codes to make the job easier, whether it was how to use the server or different research techniques.

Back then, our meetings and research time took place in a building far from the studio, so you had to prepare for a trek across campus just to get anywhere on time. You always dreaded that moment when you realized you forgot something—a charger, a set of gloves—anything that forced you to turn around and walk all the way back which involved going up and down many flights of stairs.

These were also the days when Baseball Tonight was on daily, so we often had late afternoon meetings to prepare for the slate of shows. Since it was my first day, I had no idea where to go. For all the parents reading this, think about going to a tournament for your kid on some sprawling campus. The coach just gives you the address to the campus entrance, and from there you are supposed to find soccer field #8. The maze of side streets and nonsensical building and address numbers are baffling, but I digress.

Given that image, my first meeting at ESPN involved a lot of shortcuts, building basements, and what felt like secret staircases. At some point, I hitched a ride on Buster Olney’s speed walking journey to the meeting.

Except, little did I know, Buster was not going straight there.

Now keep in mind, Buster was a huge voice in baseball reporting, and continues to be a true baseball insider, so I deferred to him. Still, I had the sneaky suspicion I was about to be late for my first meeting.

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It is hard to believe it has been a year since we launched Welcome to Glanville!

This anniversary arrives just as a new baseball season begins. A reminder that baseball, like the stories it gives us, is a game of constant renewal.

Soon I’ll be back on the road calling games for ESPN Radio and TV, traveling from ballpark to ballpark. The season always brings new conversations, unexpected encounters, and fascinating people connected to the game. Those experiences often become the stories I most look forward to sharing with you each week!

Before the season gets underway, I would love to hear from you.

I have created a short reader survey (2-3 minutes) to help shape the future of Welcome to Glanville—what stories I tell, how I tell them, and how this community grows. I will share the results with you in an upcoming post.

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Over this first year, I have been grateful for the thoughtful comments, emails, and conversations many of you have shared. Your insights and encouragement have meant a great deal as I have begun this writing journey on Substack. Now I am curious what you would like to see more of going forward.

Should we explore big questions around the game, like the looming labor situation at the end of the season? Reflect on the timeless magic of Opening Day? Examine how technology is changing strategy and player development? Or even track down the best peach cobbler at a stadium somewhere along the road?

Your responses will help guide what comes next.

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This year, I also hope to expand the ways we connect around these stories. Perhaps reader Q&A sessions, collaborations with other writers, conversations with interesting people in the game, video or podcast discussions, or revisiting classic moments from baseball history. We will experiment together and see what resonates.

In the meantime, thank you for reading in a world that moves very quickly. I am grateful that the slower rhythm, the quiet poetry, of baseball still has a place, and I appreciate you sharing it with me.

Here’s to another great season!

P.S. If you are tuning in for Opening Day, I will be on ESPN Radio calling the Dodgers- D-Backs game on March 26, and then back on the air that Sunday, March 29, in Seattle for the Guardians-Mariners. And get ready for another season of our Starkville podcast with my pal, Jayson Stark.

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Teammates.

We learn to speak one language around sport, shaping it into a private dialect. Code. Shorthand. Clubhouse slang specific to our team, sometimes even to the position we play.

In my time with the Phillies, cheap hits were “saucy.” We smiled, seemingly at random, when we thought about that players’ meeting in Florida when Rhéal Cormier stood up and criticized everything in his French accent. We share memories that only we could know. Ones that were formed on plane rides, in rain delays, across seasons.

If you play long enough, every day becomes a family reunion. A small circle who can transport you back to a dugout in ‘98 or a bullpen in 2002 as if you never left. Yet even with that power to drop into old footage, we have accumulated a post-career reel that challenges what we thought we knew about our teammates, and about ourselves.

As with any workplace, there are topics to avoid.

It mattered who we became when we put the uniform on. It mattered just as much which parts of ourselves we silenced to wear it well. And when we took it off, whether for a single night after a game or for good once age, performance, or injury finally caught up with us, we wrestled again with identity. Were we the same in street clothes? Were we freer? Or was this simply what time does?

A uniform carries its own superpower. Some players disappear inside it. Others feel invincible. It still binds you to something collective. Clear goals, measurable outcomes, and a finite number of innings and teammates with which to chase them.

The opponent was always obvious. They sat in the other dugout. Our internal disagreements about music, food, or when to throw the slider dissolved into a single purpose: beat the other team.

Color drew the line. It told us who the good guys were. It was a powerful, uncomplicated way to unify a cause. And also a blunt, divisive way to separate people.

Now those uniforms from my time hang in closets. They are more memory than fabric, and memory, with time, becomes selective. Even fallible.

In this fragile post-career space, it is fair to ask how well I knew these men, and how fully I let them know me. They stood beside me through my father’s illness and my own recovery from surgery. I loved these guys. I was there for their highs and lows as well. Many of those stories remain unrepeated, sealed by an unspoken code that endures even in retirement, shared only anonymously or with permission.

The disconnect between then and now may be that the subjects once considered taboo are the very ones that matter most once the games end. You are no longer fighting to hit .300. You are fighting for your children. For your health. For a better world. These slippery, immeasurable pursuits make baseball’s tidy measurements feel almost trivial by comparison.

Navigating this qualitative world makes me question whether I can fully share the real-time experiences shaping my life with those same teammates. Those experiences that held the topics we once avoided. It becomes harder when a culture dismisses those realities outright, or reframes pain as a competition. My instinct, though, has always been to let those challenges inform the change I try to make. To improve things for everyone. That instinct is rooted in the spirit of a game built on rules of fairness, on the idea that the best should prevail without advantage or bias. A worthy standard beyond the diamond.

When I revisit stories of racial inequity, it is in pursuit of that same fairness, the way we would respond if a teammate were cheated or targeted by an opponent. We would not debate his worthiness. We would defend him.

So who divided us along immutable lines like color? Taken literally, the answer is embedded in our nation’s history. A better question is this: When did standing up for fairness for everyone stop being a team instinct and start becoming a fault line?

I think of my teammate from A-ball whose sister was tragically electrocuted in his hometown in the Dominican during the season. We gathered on the field to hear the news, unsure of what to do. We learned it was not uncommon where he was from. Issues with downed power lines, fragile infrastructure, limited disaster response. That was his reality. It came from a world I had never known, but he was one of us. We did not think about his accent, his imperfect English, or that he was only nineteen.

In today’s tornado of hot takes and misinformation, it can feel impossible to have real conversations about yesterday’s taboo subjects. Where can you engage those brothers with the truth of your life? How do you deepen those relationships without risking rupture?

I live in a predominantly Black community, and after the last presidential election, our town was targeted with despicable spam emails telling residents, “You have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation,” a cruel reference to the era of slavery. They reached town leaders, school board members, and even children sitting in class. Whatever doubts linger about who sent them or why, the hatred landed directly on our families and our community. Do we still have the empathy to unequivocally condemn the targeting of Black people? And why does saying so risk offending someone eager to manufacture a false equivalence?

Since I hung up the uniform, there have been countless reminders of the pendulum swing that defines Black life in America, moments of empowerment, acceptance, and unity, followed by moments of outright racism and abuse. The uniform was never a shield against any of it. Not that I expected it to be. I understood early the duality of being Black in uniform versus being Black without one.

Should I share my uncles’ pride in their military service? And the quiet truth that service did not shield them from second-class treatment at home?

Should I talk about serving on an effective police council for the state helping shape policy toward a more fair and impartial system of enforcement, and leave out that my appointment came only after I was stopped by a police officer in my own driveway and accused of shoveling snow for money? After two years of legal and legislative advocacy to address what happened? After never receiving a simple apology from the chief of police in that officer’s department?

Should I describe, in plain terms, the ominous record-skipping sound of certain moments of my life when it became clear the only uniform that mattered was my Black one, invoked to justify discrimination? Even with the uneasy privilege of being labeled “one of the good ones,” and with more tools at my disposal to navigate around it or through it—long before I reached the big leagues?

Should I revisit the conversations with my mother who grew up under Jim Crow? Or my late father, who immigrated from Trinidad & Tobago, a nation of color? Or our family discussion the summer my brother, our local baseball star, was benched after bringing his White girlfriend to a game?

Should I admit that my mother’s family boycotted the Phillies over their treatment of Jackie Robinson, and that forty years later I sat across from that same family as a member of that same team?

Should I share that when I committed to the University of Pennsylvania to play baseball, my family felt a deep pride in seeing their son attend an Ivy League school, knowing some would reduce my entire experience as the worst of affirmative action? Or that when I declined another Ivy League offer, the coach went on a minutes-long racist tirade before hanging up on me? I was seventeen.

Is it possible to tell one part of the story without telling the rest? And why does it feel as though I must water it down to meet the standards of some imaginary review board?

All of us encounter unfair barriers in our lives, but there is something especially pernicious about constraints imposed because of something you cannot change. It is one thing to be insulted by someone with no power; it is another when the person hurling the insult has the power to weave that bias into policy, law, hiring, housing, education, shifting from hurting one person’s feelings to impairing everyone who looks like them in a single stroke. That is one difference between a racist—person—and racism—an institution.

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I grew up at a busy, joyful table in a diverse town where setbacks were seen as opportunities to help make our country better, not reasons to abandon it. And that “better,” like any good teammate, was meant for everyone.

On the police council, I learned that fairness cannot be selective. Policies designed to reduce discrimination, violent encounters, reckless pursuits, or arbitrary use of force must also protect officer safety. Equity that shields only one side is not equity at all. Fairness has to hold for everyone, or it does not hold.

I learned something similar serving as a representative for the MLB Players Association in the wake of the replacement-player saga. You defend every member, even those whose choices we may have felt undermined us. The commitment is to principles, not personality.

But that kind of fairness requires something difficult. It demands letting go of unfair advantage, acknowledging how it came to be, and trusting that leveling the field, especially for those who were never allowed on it in the first place, will take time. Overcompensation may occur, policies will need adjustment, and the field will remain tilted in some respects even as progress is made.

I understand that people grow tired of hearing the stories of injustice. Some feel accused. Others feel powerless to repair what they did not create, even if they continue to benefit from it, quietly and at times, overtly. But many of us are even more weary of still living new chapters that add to those stories.

The backlash to the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd has been real. What began as a season of statements, pledges, and a sense of public solidarity slowly shifted as the intensity of the moment faded. When the good will wore off, it hardened into resentment in some corners, where equality began to feel less like a moral aspiration and more like a personal cost. For some who have long worn the uniform the right way, that insistence on equality feels like a threat to team order, as if they have been sent down to the minors and fairness itself were a demotion. A loss. A setback.

I used to think we were simply playing to win. But how you win, and what it took to get here, should matter. But if winning means outperforming the other team while quietly expecting that certain teammates should appreciate living in an unspoken identity-based hierarchy off the field, then maybe our definitions were never quite aligned.

Still I struggle with the idea of “us versus them” when we are supposed to be on the same team. If we are all Americans, how does my presence replace, or even diminish, yours?

Are we still on the same team once the uniform comes off? And if we wear the same one again, in different arenas, on job sites, in boardrooms, in town halls, will you stand for equality if it feels like you are being asked to share something you once believed was yours alone?

I wish I could say I do not spend a great deal of time trying to give my children hope in a moment when they may be even more negatively targeted for their skin color than I was at their age. They are growing up in a time when rhetoric from leaders can cast them as undesirables, even as freeloaders, in their own country. When they earn a job, it may be assumed that they did not deserve it. That they are unqualified. That they could lose it to someone less skilled but considered more acceptable in optics or power.

It has become fashionable to invert that story and plant a flag in victimhood. Yet, how can anyone claim to be the victim of a reversal of injustice without first acknowledging the long existence of the original injustice? That claim often comes from a place of feeling displaced, yet never having borne the true weight of exclusion.

It is easier to frame oppression through distant anecdotes, to point to a secondhand story about someone’s child who supposedly lost a job to DEI, beginning with the assumption that the job was theirs by default. It is harder to sit across from someone for whom injustice is not abstract or distant, but immediate and unavoidable in their daily life.

Maybe it was never a teammate’s job to hear those truths. We were young. We stuck to sports. We stayed silent, even though silence so often protects the status quo. We told ourselves it was for self-preservation. We told ourselves it was for the greater goal. Greater for whom?

In the end, you may not fully know me. And I may not fully know you. I think about something my college coach told me after I went to him with complaints following a practice my sophomore year. He said, “You have to understand where everyone is coming from. They did not have your diverse upbringing.” I remember asking, “Why don’t they have to understand where I am coming from?”

I understand how a default American culture is assumed. Dominant, centered, and treated as the baseline. And too often, it is presumed to be superior to the rest of America, as though the other America exists separately, even though all of our culture has been shaped by influences from everywhere and everyone. I grew up celebrating Columbus Day and absorbing other incomplete narratives that went largely unquestioned. Later, in a Black history class, I learned the names Lewis Latimer, Garrett Morgan, Charles Drew, engineers and scientists whose ingenuity shaped everyday life. As a future engineer, I wondered why their contributions had been absent from my earlier education. Was this not American history, too?

It is like having people contribute to the team but never counting their stats, yet taking the win, or worse, crediting their efforts to someone else you deem worthy.

It also revealed something unsettling. Too often, history is told in ways that manufacture winners and losers, rather than in ways that tell the whole story. One that reminds us that, time and again, we have a lineup that reflects us all, every color, every voice, every position a source of strength. I have seen this in teams I have been a part of, where embracing everyone’s contributions is what often makes the team so successful. Color is not the obstacle. But when the lens is muted or the prism is fractured, we stop seeing the full field. Unified, color is a power we have long carried but too rarely unleashed to its greatest potential.

But we are still teammates. And we are better teammates when we recognize that all of us helped build this team.

I would still take the field with you again. Hope insists that I do.

This time, we could all benefit from wearing each other’s uniforms off the field as well, walking in each other’s shoes, trying on each other’s jerseys.

Many of you have worn the color of power for generations, a jersey passed down through time, shaping how the field is defined and who is allowed to play.

So I ask: Will you let me take the field?

Forget about me.

What I really want to know is this…

Will your children let mine play at all?

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• When you think of your favorite teams, what made you feel that the players were close to each other?

• What is the risk to a team when certain off limits topics are discussed between players? Or avoided?

• What are the keys to good team chemistry?

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As the off-season for Major League Baseball players comes to a close, I am reminded of how I spent those final days as both a fan and as a player. One thread that connects those different eras is the development and evolution of baseball video games.

My parents were early adopters into video games with a purchase of Pong, a simple back-and-forth version of tennis. The game system was firmly planted in their bedroom, most likely to limit game time, which I understand more than ever now as a parent of four.

Pong led to the next step in gaming, which I mostly experienced by watching friends dive into the world of Atari. While I enjoyed it, my attention was always drawn to those cool Intellivision commercials. Those early console wars between Atari and Intellivision would be decided in my mind by one criterion: who made the best baseball game. I saw what Intellivision was doing with sports, creating games good enough to be licensed by the leagues. I was sold.

Atari’s baseball game featured just three defensive players, all tethered together. Move right, and they all moved right in lockstep. Intellivision, on the other hand, offered a full field of players. Outfielders, infielders, a catcher and a pitcher. There was even the voice of an umpire making the call. In its licensed MLB game, you had to press the button for the correct position to make a play. You worked the corners while pitching, timed your swing, and had to run the bases wisely to be successful. (Ironically, in 2024, Atari acquired Intellivision, officially ending the early ‘80s console wars and leaving this former Intellivision snob conflicted.)

I have a big brother, which meant these baseball games became another arena where I might actually beat him at something. Inside that virtual world, size and strength did not matter. It was quick fingers and practice. Eventually, I notched a few victories, briefly upending the natural order of brotherhood and birth order, if only for a blip.

Intellivision continued pushing the envelope by adding a voice simulator called the Intellivoice. Soon after came a baseball game called World Series Major League Baseball. It featured revolutionary camera angles, an announcer, and their signature screaming fans. Pitchers tired. Organists blasted rally songs. At the time, there was nothing like it on a home system. Arcade graphics were still superior, but Intellivision closed the gap and created a statistics-based model, truly revolutionary for the time.

Although I was still playing in my analog Strat-O-Matic baseball leagues and rooting hard for the Phillies, I became a fan of the players in that Intellivoice baseball game—players whose last names belonged to the people who created the game itself, a group known within the gaming industry as the Blue Sky Rangers. The team rosters within the game included their last names paired with fictitious first names like Duke Daglow, Tatum Ettinger, Smokin’ Breen, and Rocky Tran. When I later learned this was a deliberate way to honor the programmers and engineers behind the game, it deepened my love for the game. I also truly appreciated that some of the players had darker faces. I saw myself in the game.

As consoles battled for dominance in the early ‘80’s, personal computers began to flourish and games grew more advanced, opening new doors for baseball gaming. On my Apple II, I built a library of PC baseball games that included Computer Baseball, Hardball!, Star League Baseball, MicroLeague Baseball, Tony La Russa Baseball, and others. The games were becoming more realistic, and more complicated. Just the way I liked it.

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It stood out to me that the newest members of the Hall of Fame Class of 2026 are both center fielders, a position I not only played but came to love deeply.

My love for the position began in the ‘70s when I became an early Phillies fan watching Garry Maddox patrol center field. This was before I transitioned to center field in high school. In my Little League days, I mostly played infield or pitched (and even caught). But there was something so graceful about Maddox’s game I found utterly magnetic. He seemed to glide effortlessly, almost floating around on the field.

The ‘70s and early ‘80s were a golden era for center fielders. It was not just Maddox. There were so many outstanding defenders in the position. Rick Miller, César Gerónimo, Omar Moreno, Paul Blair, César Cedeño, Chet Lemon, Willie Wilson, Amos Otis, Fred Lynn, and many others. It was an era when great defense was expected, and the bat was not the primary focus.

When center field became my position, I drew inspiration from these players.

Over the course of my nine-season career, I had the opportunity to play against the newly inducted Hall of Famers, Andruw Jones and Carlos Beltrán.

Jones burst onto the scene at just 19 years old, and his only real adversary seemed to be boredom. He had it all. Power, speed, defensive prowess, and a cannon of an arm. But it was his defense where he truly separated himself, earning himself a reputation as a generational player.

As a frequent Phillies opponent, Jones, a member of the Braves, was a nightmare, particularly because his team boasted a Hall of Fame-caliber pitching staff. But it was Jones in center that made everything extra difficult. Even when their pitchers made a mistake, you knew Jones would be there, ready to clean it up.

I always considered myself a strong defensive center fielder, applying the defensive lessons I learned from the great, late Jimmy Piersall. I took pride in my jumps, my hustle, and my relentless effort to back up my teammates. It was about more than spectacular catches. It was about doing the little things right. Backing up bases, supporting my corner outfielders, even on routine plays. Piersall demanded this standard and soon it became mine. Watching old videos, it is cool to see my best catches, but I am just as proud of the times I sprinted across the field to back up a shortstop on a routine grounder.

By the time I wrapped up my career in 2004, I ranked in the top 25 (now top 30) for fielding percentage among center fielders, and had finished with 293 consecutive games without an error. Given that track record, I thought I might have had a shot at snagging a Gold Glove or two. But there were hurdles. Jim Edmonds was a formidable competitor, another was multi-time winner Larry Walker, but the biggest challenge of all was Andruw Jones.

In one particular game, with John Smoltz pitching for Atlanta, I hit a line drive toward the gap with the bases loaded. I was thinking it was a sure double, maybe even a triple. But then, out of nowhere, Andruw Jones appeared. I figured he would at least need to dive to make a play, but instead, he caught it effortlessly at head height, almost overrunning the ball. At that moment, I had to admit it. He was the best.

I recently spoke about Jones on the Adam Gold Show in Raleigh, NC, and Adam asked me about how shallow Jones played in the outfield. Jones regularly positioned himself incredibly shallow, a strategy that would likely be rejected in today’s game, where outfielders are expected to cover more ground to extra base hits. Today the focus is on preventing doubles and triples. But in Jones’s case, playing shallow worked. His aggressive positioning allowed him to take calculated risks, while his pitching staff helped minimize damage from any mistakes.

One random tidbit about Jones that sticks with me was how sometimes during batting practice, he would switch to batting left-handed, and to my amazement, he would hit balls halfway up the stands in right-center at Turner Field. It was unreal.

Carlos Beltrán, on the other hand, is another story. I had no idea who he was when I first played against him in July 2003. I was with the Rangers and he was with the Royals. I had just returned from an injury and was finding my stride again when we faced Kansas City.

I have told this Beltrán story before, but it was not until recently that I revisited the stats from the series we played against him. I started to wonder if my memory had inflated his performance over time. After all, these three games happened over 22 years ago.

But when I looked at the box scores, I realized that my recollection was not exaggerated. He was that good.

In the first game, which I did not play, Beltrán proceeded to get two hits, going 2-for-4, with a home run, and a stolen base.

In the second game, which I did play, Beltrán single-handedly destroyed us. He did not make an out. He hit a home run, a double, stole a base, threw someone out at the plate, and even robbed a home run. This all happened in one game. I remember looking into our dugout and asking, “WHO IN THE WORLD IS THAT?!”

He was the best player on the field that day, and we had A-Rod.

The box score I revisited recently confirmed what I saw with my own eyes. Beltrán went 4-for-4 with a double, a home run, a stolen base (his 25th), and an assist. Home run robberies do not show up in the box score, which is a shame. Reading it again made me relive it as if I was reading the early script for “Superman: The Movie.”

In the third game of the series, he only went 3-for-4.

So, that is 9-for-12 in three games for those counting.

The next year, Beltrán was traded to the Astros, and I was with the Phillies. Before our first series against him, I warned my teammates, “Watch out for Beltrán. He’s a beast.” At the time, Beltrán was not a household name. But when we faced him in Philly, Beltrán went 6-for-12, proving that my concern was valid.

Then we played against him in Houston, and I gave the same warning to one of our catchers, Todd Pratt.

Beltrán only went 3-for-11, but with three home runs, including at least one from each side of the plate. Unbelievable.

Both Jones and Beltrán were exceptional defenders as well. Complete players who could do everything to prevent runs—throw, run, catch. Watching them play was a joy, and it is great to see them both get the call to the Hall of Fame.

The 2025 season saw dynamic defensive plays by center fielders across the league, with modern outfielders, playing so deep, robbing home runs left and right or making incredible plays at the wall. The athleticism, timing, and preparation we see today are impressive, but it often overlooks the evolution of the position. The players who paved the way for what it means to be a center fielder.

Andruw Jones and Carlos Beltrán were two of the best to ever do it, and their offensive numbers only added to their greatness.

Their inductions into the Hall of Fame are more than a testament to two players who surpassed some statistical threshold. They are a celebration of the essence of center field. And a reminder that at the heart of the center field position is anticipation, instinct, leadership, adaptation, and the ability to make a difference on every play. These players had to want the ball regardless of the stakes, ready to step up and make that crucial play on the one ball hit their way all game. For those of us who have played the position, it has been a long journey from the early days of Garry Maddox in the ‘70s to today’s modern-day starters.

Center field is a special position. I have always felt it is passed down like an old heirloom. A legacy where pride and tradition merge with modern sensibilities, shaped by coaching and time.

As the game moves forward, we should remember that playing center field demands more than covering ground. It insists on completeness. Someone who can change the course of a game with one swing, one throw, one catch. Just as Jones and Beltrán did for their teams, they did for the position itself, reshaping the standard for what it means to play the position. And as we look at the new talents emerging every year, it is clear that the evolution of center field continues, perhaps more exciting than ever.

*** This essay marks the beginning of a deeper exploration into what I am calling “The Year of the Center Fielder.” Over the coming season, I will dive into specific plays and players who define the position, exploring the technical aspects as well as the mental and physical preparation that go into becoming a top-tier center fielder. From diving grabs to jaw-dropping throws to the often-overlooked moments that make all the difference, I will take a closer look at the plays that highlight why center field is still one of the most demanding and exciting positions in baseball. And just as Jones and Beltrán redefined what it means to be great in center field, today’s players are pushing the limits of what is possible on the field. Stay tuned as we dive into the plays that are shaping the future of center field and keeping the position as thrilling as ever.

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Share your thoughts…

• Who is your favorite center fielder and why?

• How do you think the center field position has evolved in the modern game?

• In your opinion, what makes a great center fielder? Should the bat be weighed equally to the glove for Hall of Fame consideration?

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