April Madness: Friday Fun with Statcast™

Druw Jones, son of Andruw Jones, made his professional debut for Class A Visalia and, what do you know, he made a ridiculous catch in his very first game. He went way, way back on a long fly ball, his hat flew off, he caught it over his shoulder. I actually get goosebumps watching him make that catch.

I can’t help it. I love baseball moments that celebrate both the past and the future.

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Before we get to the rest of today’s April Madness, I’d just like to remind everyone one more time that you can now preorder my new book, WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, pretty much wherever books are sold. And if you preorder from our good friends at Rainy Day Books, I will inscribe the book with anything you like, up to 130 characters! What a deal!

New rules update

We had our first three-hour game in three days on Thursday — the Braves’ 7-6 victory over the Padres went three hours, 14 minutes. There were 20 hits and 14 walks in the game (10 pitchers in total), which helps explains it. For the season, games are averaging two hours and 39 minutes. You have to go back to 1985 to find games played that crisply.

A quick time note: The Colorado Rockies played their home opener against Washington on Thursday. Coors Field has become somewhat infamous for its length of game times, so we watched a bit more closely to see how the new rules would impact the game there. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn much because, as mentioned, they were playing the Nationals. So basically nothing happened. The Nationals’ 3-4-5 hitters were, in order, Jeimer Candelario, Joey Meneses and Dominic Smith.

The Rockies won 1-0 in 2 hours and 18 minutes, the 37th-fastest nine-inning game played at Coors Field in the team’s history.

Stolen base update: In six games on Thursday, there were only five stolen base attempts — four were successful. Boston’s Masataka Yoshida successfully stole his second base, which is not a lot, but still kind of interesting because he was not a stolen base threat in Japan. He stole only four bases last year and didn’t steal a single base in 2021.

A belated salute to Dan McGinn

I have a friend named Dan McGinn — we have done some incredibly cool projects together, such as the Tip Your Cap project for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the Honor Your Hometown project, which is still very much happening.

In any case, my friend Dan McGinn talks often about the former baseball player Dan McGinn. He will almost daily say something like: “I saw you wrote about baseball again but didn’t mention Dan McGinn. It is a travesty how you continue to ignore Dan McGinn.” Some of you may have noticed that every now and again, I have slipped a Dan McGinn reference into JoeBlogs.

Well, it completely eluded my attention that Dan McGinn, the pitcher, died in Omaha about a month ago at age 79. In his honor, here are five Dan McGinn facts.