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Seattle's Brash didn't come out of nowhere--it was actually Kingston

It only seems like Seattle righthander Matt Brash came out of nowhere. The fireballer may go down as one of the PTBNL steals of the decade, but before he became "the guy from the Padres," he was the kid from Kingston.

Ontario.

In a town much better known for its hockey, Brash grew up playing baseball and basketball. The local boy made good last week, becoming the first Kingston product to appear in a major league game. 

Nine Kingston baseball fans, enough to form a team on the field, gathered at the The Brass Pub on Princess Street to watch and support Kingston’s Matt Brash, 23, make his major-league debut with the Seattle Mariners late Tuesday afternoon.

Brash, a graduate of the Kingston Thunder baseball organization and the Bayridge Blazers, was starting his first American League game, in Chicago against the White Sox.

...

Brash also retired three straight in the second inning at Guaranteed Rate Field but caused some concern among the group of six supporters at one table when he took a hard ground ball from Eloy Jimenez off his left ankle before throwing him out for the second out of the second inning.

“Don’t take him out. I just ordered another beer,” one of the patrons at the table said.

Full story from the Kingston Whig Standard

Kwan's cheerleaders looking pretty smart right about now

You can forgive fan sites for pumping up prospects. You know the team-centric blogs that crank out postings on seemingly every minor leaguer in the organization, leaving readers to sort through the hyperbole. You might have seen commentary like "I can’t wait to see Player X get an opportunity to shine. Some of the best baseball players in history don’t have elite tools; they have elite consistency."

When Player X reaches the majors with 15 career minor league home runs and 88 RBIs in 217 games, I forgive you for not completely buying what the fan blog in question is selling.

But when Player X turns out to be Steven Kwan, who starts his big league career on a 9-for-13 tear, after having hit .469 in 32 spring training at-bats, maybe it's time to tip our caps to Covering the Corner, SBNation's Cleveland Guardians community.

When naming Kwan the organization's No. 11 prospect over the winter, the site said this, among many other flattering things:

What I can believe in — slick-fielding outfielders with a knack for contact and an aversion to making outs. Kwan’s career minor league slash line is .301/.380/.438. That includes .328/.407/.527 between Double-A and Triple-A last season. He did not slow down much when he hit Columbus.

I’m going to say this exactly once: stop complaining about the Guardians failing to re-sign Michael Brantley if you cannot celebrate a prospect with a nearly identical skill set. We have become completely obsessed with power in the modern game and it is beginning to kill the sport.

Kwan was not an overly hyped prospect, even for a fifth-round pick (2018). Fangraphs listed him as its No. 49 talent in the Guardians system coming into the 2021 season. That was out of 49 players they bothered to write up. They haven't yet released their 2022 list, though it's a good guess he'll rank a bit higher this time around.

Of 2022 lists available, Kwan didn't appear in Baseball HQ's top 15 for Cleveland, nor Baseball America's top 10. In hindsight, they may wish he had.

Then again, time may prove them correct. Perhaps we ought to slow our roll. It's been four games. But it's a lot of fun to see a guy get out of the gate like Kwan has, even more so if you happen to have spilled some digital ink three months ago trying to convince the skeptics he was worth a look.

Keeping your prospectus during jury duty

I had jury duty this week. My number came up, and it was low, and unlike last time I actually had to report. Tuesday, on short notice, I was summoned.

I reported at 1 pm and was made to wait in a big room full of other potential jurors. Other bored potential jurors. Everyone fixated on their phones, or on whatever books they brought in, and waited. I don't like to pry, but I did notice a guy at the table ahead of mine was reading the 2022 Baseball Prospectus. Hats off to him, it's not a light book, or something most folks would tote to jury duty. I myself brought a novel (A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon, which I'm enjoying to this point).

I wanted to find an excuse to talk to this guy, and ask him if he was prepping for a last-minute fantasy draft. I never found the chance. But I will offer some major props for hauling the big-ass Baseball Prospectus book through security, just to stave off jury-duty boredom.

A history of baseball biographies

Oh, the things you discover when googling other things. Like you search for "on this day in baseball book history" and you land on a fascinating history of baseball biographies in the 1950s and 60s, including a plunge into a lawsuit filed by Hall-of-Famer Warren Spahn against a publisher who just made up a bunch of stuff to make him sound even more heroic than he already was.

Spahn's was just another in a long line of biographies marketed toward kids, because there wasn't any interest in them from adult readers. When you see those old hardbound books and they all sound like cover-to-cover hero worship, know you know why.

So, you may not mean to look for Charlie Bevis' baseball research blog, but you'll be glad to find it anyway.

Bang the Drum Slowly -- and gently at this price

Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly is generally regarded as one of the best baseball novels ever penned. If you're in need of a copy, you can find plenty of them on eBay for a reasonable sum. Or you can invest a bigger chunk in a first edition advance copy from 1956. Yours for a mere $250.

Just make sure you don't drop it in the bathtub while you're reading it.

Ten years on, The Might Have Been remains a debut novel deserving of a wider audience

It was ten years ago this week that Joseph M. Schuster's novel The Might Have Been was released. Six months after Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding pushed baseball into the popular fiction conversation, The Might Have Been made little more than a ripple. Perhaps you missed it altogether. If so, this under-the-radar debut is one worth circling back for.

Here's my review, which ran in Baseball America back in March 2012:

In one of the most quoted lines in Jim Bouton's classic Ball Four, he muses "You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time." This is what makes it so difficult for men to walk away from the game, why men, whose own playing days are well behind them, are willing to ride buses across the heartland, hopping from small town to small town, missing their families, eating fast food at irregular hours, sleeping on lumpy mattresses in a different motel every third day.

The game is a drug many old ballplayers are too weak to resist, its allure perhaps strongest to those whose career didn't follow the course they had mapped out as kids. Edward Everett Yates never envisioned it would take him ten years to reach the St. Louis Cardinals. His long-imagined debut hadn't included being ordered to bunt in his first—and only official—plate appearance. He may have dreamed of hitting for the cycle, but nowhere in that vision was the game washed out of the record books as he hung by his cleats from the outfield fence in Montreal, rain pelting his face as pain pulsed in waves from his shredded knee up through his body until he finally blacked out.

To tab Yates, or Edward Everett as he's called throughout, the hero of Joseph Schuster's The Might Have Been is to upsell his lot in the baseball landscape. There's little heroic about him, next to no glamour in his life once he returns to the bush leagues, never again to sniff major league air. As a young man his self-absorption sows the seeds of the loneliness that will plague him well into middle age when he moves into the coaching ranks. His only constants are baseball and regret, and in many regards the former fuels the latter.

What might have been for Edward Everett had he not leapt for that home-run ball in Montreal? His life, in his reflections, is a series of what-ifs, not all of which date back to that fateful game. When he, as manager, is burdened with informing his players that the organization no longer desires their services, he wants to tell them to find something else to do with their lives. Sell flour. Sell straw. Move on. "Be grateful for the life you have rather than regret over the one you don't."

Through Edward Everett, Schuster illuminates a side of the game utterly devoid of glamour and often even hope. For every young man who dreams of making a living under the lights, or every middle age office worker imagining how things might have turned out differently had he only been able to hit the curve ball, here's a reminder that the game doesn't always romance those who sacrifice their life and heart to it.