Mack’s Apples - Brennan Malone, Astrubel Cabrera, Portrait of Baseball, Most Dangerous Sport, Saebyeolbe Jong-ryeol

MLB Draft 2019  -

            Brennan Malone, RHP, Porter Ridge (N.C.) HS

Considered the best prep player in his home state of North Carolina, Malone has great size at 6-4 and 210 pounds, and the stuff to match it. His fastball sits in the low-90s, but has topped out in the mid-90s, and he compliments the offering with a solid curveball that he’ll occasionally throw with true 12-6 break. Though he has a changeup, it’s inconsistent and below average as it stands now. The thing that entices scouts about Malone is his upside. They believe with time, coaching and weight gain, his repertoire will develop into that a front-of-the-rotation big leaguer. He’s committed to the University of North Carolina and should draw dozens of scouts to each of his outings between now and next June, giving big-league clubs ample opportunity to make a decision on the rising

MLBtr.com’s top list of trade candidates at the All-Star break –

5. Asdrubal Cabrera, MLBTR INF, Mets (LR: NR): The switch-hitting Cabrera has been a consistently strong offensive producer since coming to the Mets. He’s showing more power than ever before at the moment, with 17 home runs and a .215 isolated slugging mark. Cabrera could be tasked with playing at second or third, though metrics have not smiled upon his glovework. With Jed Lowrie set to stay in Oakland, the Mets should receive some added interest in Cabrera.

An Incomplete Portrait of Baseball and America –

        

   When my brother was 12, the traveling baseball team he played on competed at a tournament in Cooperstown, New York. This place, he and his teammates were told, was baseball mecca—not just the home of Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame, but also the site where the future Union general Abner Doubleday organized the sport’s first-ever game in 1839.

You won’t find any mention of Doubleday at the Library of Congress’s new exhibition, Baseball Americana, for a very simple reason: The story, despite its prominence over the decades, isn’t true. Still, surveying the rich trove of historical documents and artifacts on display, it’s easy to see why organized baseball embraced the myth. Baseball Americana illustrates how the game has benefited from the wealth of storytellers clamoring to burnish its all-American image over the years—even as the exhibit itself presents a polished view of the sport.

Baseball: The Most Dangerous Sport In America? –

         

   4) In the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of the shoulder and elbow, nothing prepared the human arm for the ability to throw a ball 100 times a game at high rates of speed. 25% of major league pitchers have undergone Tommy John surgery. Even though starting pitchers pitch fewer innings than they did in the early days of baseball, they also throw at heightened speeds putting extreme pressure on the arm.

New York Excelsior's Saebyeolbe Jong-ryeol throws out first pitch at Mets game –

         

  To the right of the main entrance to the stadium was Overwatch League player Park "Saebyeolbe" Jong-ryeol, hanging out with his wife and friends and chatting in Korean. Saebyeolbe made his way from Los Angeles to throw out the first pitch for Wednesday's game between the Mets and San Diego Padres. If he had any pre-pitch jitters, he hid it well, despite saying so.