Adam Ottavino matched up against Paul Goldschmidt more often than he did any other hitter. The now-retired right-hander faced the still-active slugger 32 times, surrendering six hits — including three home runs — and issuing half a dozen walks. He set him down on strikes 13 times.
What does Ottavino most remember about his battles with Goldschmidt, who over 16 seasons has logged 905 extra-base hits, a 135 wRC+, and 58.8 WAR in what is arguably a Hall of Fame-worthy career?
“He was usually the best player on his team, and because of my righty-matchup ability I faced him a lot,” said Ottavino, who has smoothly segued from data-savvy reliever to insightful broadcast analyst. “At the beginning it was as many sliders as I could throw, but then he kind of figured out that the best approach against me was to not try to pull the ball. If you look at his three home runs, they were all to the opposite field. I realized that I had to switch up from only staying on the outside corner and start coming inside a little bit.
“When I developed the cutter, I used it a lot in mid-counts, because I knew he wasn’t hunting that pitch,” Ottavino went on to say.” It became a lot more cat-and-mouse over time. I mean, it was never a comfortable matchup. He had a really good approach, and I felt like he was very calculated coming to each at-bat. Sometimes I was able to stay a step ahead, and sometimes not.”
As for the baker’s dozen strikeouts, the Northeastern University product recalls the majority of them coming on takes, mostly in their later matchups. When he sensed that Goldschmidt was looking slider on a two-strike count, and thus “open for a freeze,” he would throw a backdoor sinker.
A memorable punch out came on a swing-and-miss.
“I remember striking him out in a high-leverage spot when he was on the Cardinals and I was with the Mets,” said Ottavino, who took the mound for five teams across the 2010-2025 seasons. “I was closing a game in St. Louis and beat him with a four-seam fastball up that he wasn’t looking for. I had thrown him a sinker earlier in the at-bat, and the four started in that same lane, but instead of being a sinker it stayed true. He ended up chasing it. I was getting pretty close to blowing that game, and fortunately was able to dial up a strikeout.”
Another four-seam yielded a far different result.
“It was the first pitch I threw in an outing,” Ottavino recalled. “This is when he was with Arizona and I was with Colorado. I thought I could sneak that first pitch in there, but that wasn’t the case. He ambushed me for a homer.
“It was a four-seam fastball,” Ottavino elaborated. “I tried to hold back my best two pitches, my sinker and slider, and get ahead with a pitch that I didn’t want him to swing at. Again, I was thinking he would take. I misread the situation and his swing swung the game. I remember feeling, ‘Man, I miscalculated that one pretty bad.”
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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS
Kevin Cash went 2 for 8 against Matt Garza.
Ozzie Timmons went 2 for 2 against Roy Halladay.
Chad Mottola went 2 for 3 against Tom Glavine.
Carl Crawford went 2 for 4 against Kyle Snyder.
Corey Dickerson went 2 for 7 against David Price.
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Joe Ariola went unmentioned when our 2026 Arizona Diamondbacks Top Prospects list was published prior to the season. There is a pretty good chance you will be hearing about him in 2027. A 22-year-old left-hander who was drafted 213th overall in 2025 out of Wake Forest University, Ariola debuted professionally this summer to the tune of a 1.56 ERA and a 45.7% strikeout rate over 34.2 innings across multiple levels. No pitcher who tossed more than 15 frames fanned a higher percentage of batters.
I asked Ariola about his outlandish strikeout rate, which was accompanied by a 10.0% walk rate, at the onset of the Arizona Fall League season.
“I kind of just had a simple approach that I needed to fill up the zone,” reasoned Ariola, who has registered six Ks over five innings with the Salt River Rafters. “That was step one. If you get yourself in good counts, you’re in good positions to get outs. It just resulted in strikeouts. I didn’t put too much thought into it, but yeah… I mean, it’s a good number, but I wasn’t overly focused on that”
Ariola’s best pitch is his curveball — “I get a lot of whiffs with it” — while his other primary offering is a four-seam fastball. Rounding out his repertoire are a splitter, which he learned this past season, and a a slider.
His track record makes his breakout especially intriguing. Ariola threw just 51 collegiate innings, registering a 5.47 ERA with 42 walks and 75 strikeouts. While the Ks stood out, his other numbers were nothing to write home about. Why was he so much better this year than he’d been as a Demon Deacon?
“It’s a different environment,” said the Long Island native, whose final two regular season appearances came with Double-A Amarillo. “It’s different people, different priorities, a different space for sure. In college, you need to win immediately — it’s a little bit less on the development side — and here it’s they want to develop you, because they want to win in the big leagues. The past year has been eye-opening. I’ve learned a lot of things [and] feel that I got better.”
It’s hard to argue with a 45.7% strikeout rate. Ariola clearly got better, and now it’s a matter of what comes next. Lefty relievers who miss bats are valuable assets, which is why he is no longer flying well below prospect radar.
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A quiz:
Aaron Judge has the most home runs (382) over the past 10 seasons, while Freddie Freeman has the most doubles (373), and Corbin Carroll the most triples (60). Which player has recorded the most singles? (A hint: he has the second highest hit total.)
The answer can be found below.
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NEWS NOTES
Todd Benzinger, a first baseman/outfielder who played for five teams — most notably the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds — from 1987-1995, died earlier this week at age 63. A member of Cincinnati’s 1990 World Series-championship team, the switch-hitter is probably best known in Boston for a 10th-inning, three-run walk-off homer he hit during 1988’s “Morgan Magic” surge that saw the Red Sox win 19 of 20 games and capture an AL East title.
Mike Edwards, an infielder who played in seven games for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1977, and in 310 games for the Oakland Athletics from 1978-1980, died on September 22 at age 74 (per Baseball Player Passings). The Fort Lewis, Washington native batted .250 for his career, with two of his 220 hits leaving the yard. Fergie Jenkins and Jim Slaton were the pitchers he took deep.
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The answer to the quiz is Trea Turner, with 1,045 singles.
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Nick Franklin never quite lived up to expectations. An infielder whom Seattle selected in the first round of the 2009 draft, he ultimately saw action in just 301 MLB games, the bulk of them with the Mariners and Tampa Bay Rays. When his playing days came to end in 2022, the final three seasons had been in in indie ball.
He is now being entrusted to help aspiring big-leaguers get better. Last winter, the Detroit Tigers hired him as a bench coach for their Double-A affiliate, the Erie SeaWolves.
Franklin is currently with the Scottsdale Scorpions, tutoring prospects in the Arizona Fall League. I caught up to him prior to a recent game to learn how he’d hooked on with the Tigers organization.
“With the winter meetings going on, I got put in touch with Travis Chapman, who is our field coordinator with Detroit,” Franklin told me. “We had a conversation, and ended up setting up an interview. It went from there.
“I believe they had a couple of spots to fill, with Double-A being one of them, to be a development coach, or potentially a fourth coach,” added Franklin. “With all the interviews they had, they didn’t know exactly where they were going to go, or who they were going to choose. I just stayed through the interview process. I spoke with [director of player development] Shane Farrell and infield coordinator Mike Rammazzotti. Right around January, they hired me.”
How would the 35-year-old assess his first year as a coach at the professional level?
“I think it went pretty well,” opined Franklin, who primarily worked with infielders, outfielders, and on base running. “The goal is obviously to help guys get to the big leagues, so to get a couple of them [Brett Callahan, John Peck, and Andrew Sears] there this year was a success. I’m looking forward to doing it again.”
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Peter Gammons’s new book, It’s All About the Players includes the story of how Barry Zito ended up with the Oakland Athletics and not the Texas Rangers. As Gammons explains, the Rangers took the southpaw in the third round of the 1998 draft, but then weren’t willing to “fork over the $300,000 necessary to sign him.” Zito returned to college and was subsequently drafted ninth-overall by the A’s in 1999.
Gammons recalled having this exchange with a Rangers cross-checker during the summer of 1998:
“We don’t give a guy who throws ninety to ninety-one [mph] three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Nobody hits his fastball, curveball, or changeup. He leads the [Cape Cod] league in strikeouts and earned run average. Isn’t that what pitching is about?”
“Ninety to ninety-one.”
Four years later, Zito won the AL Cy Young award after going 23-5 with a 2.75 ERA. Over eight seasons with the A’s, he went 17-5 against the team that felt he didn’t throw hard enough.
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FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The Kia Tigers and Samsung Tigers are set to begin a five-game series to determine who will face the KT Wiz, who earned a bye to the finals, in the Korea Series. Kia advanced by ousting the LG Twins, a matchup that included (per Yonhap News Agency’s Jee-ho Yoo) Keisho Shirakawa becoming first Japanese pitcher to win a KBO postseason game.
The best-of-seven Japan Series got underway yesterday with the defending champion Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks edging past the Yokohama DeNA BayStars 3-1 in 11 innings. Yudai Shoji doubled home the deciding run.
The Yomiuri Giants have hired Hideki Matsui as their new manager. The 52-year-old former MLB and NPB outfielder starred for the Tokyo-based team from 1993-2002 before coming stateside to play for the New York Yankees.
The NPB draft took place Thursday in Tokyo, with Shoki Oda’s first-round selection by the Yomiuri Giants coming as a surprise — the highly-touted 18-year-old right-hander recently announced that he plans to either sign with an MLB organization or play collegiately in the United States. Yuri Karasaw discussed Yomiuri’s decision, and other notable draft picks, for World Baseball Network.
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Left on the cutting room floor from Tuesday’s feature with Caleb Bonemer was his response to a not-so-serious question I’d begun our AFL media day conversation with: What was the best question they asked you?
“Gosh, there were a lot of them,” replied the Chicago White Sox prospect, who’d just been interviewed by our friends at MLB Pipeline. “I guess it would probably be ‘Who are the top three hitters in the Fall League that are underrated?’”
And those would be…?
“I pretty much just named a few of my buddies,” Bonemer admitted with a smile.
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Which TV broadcast duo — Joe Davis and John Smoltz, or Brian Anderson and Ron Darling — would you prefer for the World Series? I asked that question on social media a few days ago — in poll format — and while the sample size was small, the margin of victory was anything but. A whopping 89.7% of the votes went to Anderson/Darling. Make of that what you will.
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A random obscure former player snapshot:
Willie Mueller made a lone appearance for the first Milwaukee Brewers team to reach the postseason. A right-hander from West Bend, Wisconsin, Mueller toed the rubber on September 20, 1981 and tossed a pair of relief innings in an 8-2 loss to the Orioles at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. The Brewers went on to finish the strike-shortened season with a record of 63-47, then fell to the New York Yankees in the ALDS.
All told, Mueller’s MLB career comprised six games and 14-and-two-thirds frames. In 1978, he took the mound for Milwaukee five times, earning a win over the Cleveland Indians in his second-ever appearance. His big-league debut had come at Fenway Park, the highlight being a strikeout of Butch Hobson, the first batter he faced. Another highlight came a decade later. Mueller was cast as “Duke,” in the movie Major League. Per his SABR BioProject bio, Mueller was recommended for the role by his former Brewers teammate Pete Vuckovich, who named him when the film’s director asked if he knew someone who was big, kind of ugly, and could throw the ball.
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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE
Sportsnet Canada’s Ben Nicholson-Smith talked to a number of Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays players about their childhood rooting interests and World Series-watching memories.
CBS Sports’s Dayn Perry takes us to school with MLB Lockout 101: An in-depth guide to the likely work stoppage and what it means for free agency, the 2027 season, and more.
Does MLB have a competitive balance problem? The Athletic’s Eno Sarris and Evan Drellich ran the numbers to find out.
The Minnesota Twins hired Brian Reith as their new pitching coach earlier this month. Cody Schoemann wrote about Pete Maki’s replacement at Twins Daily.
At Grinnell.edu, Adam Sodders wrote about how Baseball-Reference founder Sean Foreman went from small-town Iowa to the sports data big leagues.
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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS
Cincinnati Reds pitchers issued 26 walks with the bases loaded this season, the most of any team. Per The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans, the unwanted single-season record belongs to the 1999 Seattle Mariners, who walked home 28 runs.
CJ Abrams and Miguel Vargas each hit 33 home runs this season. Abrams scored 93 runs and drove in 106 runs. Vargas scored 106 runs and drove in 93 runs.
Bob Uecker started 217 games behind the plate over the course of his six-year career. The opposing pitcher in the first and last of those contests were Juan Marichal and Bob Gibson.
On today’s date in 1977, the Milwaukee Brewers sent Gorman Thomas to the Texas Rangers as the PTBNL in August deal for Ed Kirkpatrick. The Brewers then reacquired Thomas for cash in February 1978, with “Stormin’ Gorman” going on to slug 175 home runs over the next five seasons.
The Minnesota Twins won the World Series on today’s date in 1987, beating the St. Louis Cardinals 4-2 in a deciding Game 7. Frank Viola went eight innings for the win, while Jeff Reardon hurled a one-two-three ninth for the save.
The Chicago Cubs traded Fergie Jenkins to the Texas Rangers in exchange for Bill Madlock and Vic Harris on today’s date in 1973. Jenkins, who had won 20 or more games for the Cubs in six of the previous seven seasons, went 25-12 in his first year as a Ranger. Madlock won NL batting titles with the Cubs in 1975 and 1976 before being dealt to the San Francisco Giants as part of a five-player swap that also included Bobby Murcer.
Players born on today’s date include Tony Torcato, an outfielder who batted .298 while appearing in 43 games for the San Francisco Giants across the 2002-2005 seasons. Drafted 19th overall in 1998 — Cleveland subsequently selected CC Sabathia with the 20th pick — Torcato recorded eight of his 14 MLB hits against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Also born on today’s date was Joe Siddall, a native of Windsor, Ontario who caught for three teams — the Montreal Expos, Florida Marlins, and Detroit Tigers — over parts of the 1993-1998 seasons. Now a broadcast analyst for the Toronto Blue Jays, Siddall swatted his lone big-league dinger off of Seattle Mariners southpaw Jeff Fassero in a game played at Tiger Stadium.