Culture
Missing Bats, Part 1: How an obsession with strikeouts upended the balance of baseball
Missing Bats, a special series this week in The Athletic, explores how baseball’s profound metamorphosis over the last two decades traces back to one simple idea — maximizing strikeouts at all costs — that became an industry-wide obsession. Explore the entire series here.
As a boy pitching on Little League fields in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Tyler Glasnow fixated on missing bats.
“Ever since I was a child,” Glasnow said, “any time I ever touched the mound, I just wanted to strike everyone out.”
Glasnow, a 6-foot-8, 225-pound starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, grew to be taller than almost all of his teammates, with longer limbs but less control of his frame. Growing up in the first decade of the 21st century, pitchers were taught to value the same things pitchers prioritized in the 20th century, searching for soft contact and quick innings. An at-bat should not last longer than three pitches — a mantra that was harder for someone like Glasnow to apply. When he tried to be precise, bridling his body to control the location of his pitches, he lost his command. He was better served, he realized, trying to throw the baseball past the opposing batter and through the catcher, as hard as possible, as fast as possible, every single time.
He did not need soft contact if the hitters never made contact. In his mind, he conjured up a new ideal to chase.
“The perfect inning for me,” Glasnow said, “is nine pitches, nine strikes, three strikeouts.”
The simple concept Glasnow grasped as a child has come to reshape the game he plays as an adult. Like the embrace of the three-point shot in basketball or the advent of the downfield pass in football, modern baseball’s obsession with strikeouts has led to a jarring transformation.
For baseball to be its most compelling, the battle between hitter and pitcher must be waged on equal footing, and for most of the past century, the game didn’t stray too far from this fundamental stasis. But that balance has been upended by the primacy of the strikeout. The concept of pitching to contact has gone the way of the mid-range jumper. “Three pitches or less” sounds as antiquated as “three yards and a cloud of dust.”
Like the corner trey or the deep ball, missing bats makes intuitive sense. A pitcher who could generate strikeouts was always a valuable asset. What separates this era from its antecedents is that the skill is no longer limited to a small group of outliers, blessed with a god-given talent that can’t be taught. In the past 20 years, the industry has learned instead that it can create pitchers who can pile up strikeouts, with entire organizations churning them out with assembly-line efficiency.
“Pitchers are a lot more malleable than we initially thought,” New York Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake said. “Obviously, if you could strike guys out, that was exciting. But I don’t think we understood the true value of swing-and-miss.”
That realization affected the game’s rules, its best practices and its developmental pipeline. Teams rebuilt pitchers’ bodies to chase velocity, used biomechanical analysis to maximize spin rate, and altered pitching strategies to emphasize attacking with high fastballs as the desperate pursuit of strikeouts spread throughout the league like a virus.
For years, the symptoms of that viral spread have been discussed on nearly every baseball broadcast, and debated by those who fell in love with a different game. This week, The Athletic will explore the root cause of baseball’s metamorphosis: the concept of missing bats, from the origin of the idea, to the recognition of its value, through the widespread application of its importance, and ultimately to the cost of its proliferation.
These stories emerged from dozens of interviews with players, coaches, executives and analysts. The shift predates the so-called “launch angle revolution” of the mid-2010s, in which hitters started to sacrifice contact in search of slugging. The origins of the transformation involve a collection of curious outsiders, enraptured by access to an influx of data, and a handful of desperate lifers, clawing for a foothold in a ruthless game. The curious informed the desperate. The success of the desperate made others more curious. The subsequent feedback loop altered the course of baseball history.
The spiderweb of consequences from that shift reflects a new reality: The sport looks different than it did two decades ago because pitchers know how to miss bats, and strikeouts are now a prerequisite for big-league consideration.
“If you want to be a successful pitcher, you have to have strikeouts,” Arizona Diamondbacks pitching coach Brent Strom said. “You need some semblance of swing-and-miss.”
In 2006, the season before Major League Baseball began installing advanced pitch-tracking systems in all 30 big-league stadiums, the league-wide batting average was .269. By 2011, the year Glasnow was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates, as insight from the data trickled through front offices, the average had fallen to .255. The average plummeted to .243 in 2022. The strikeout rate has followed an inverse path: 16.6 percent of at-bats ended in a strikeout in 2006, 22.7 percent did in 2023. To increase offense and liven up the product, MLB last season introduced a pitch clock and placed restrictions on infield shifts; that helped bring the league-wide average back up to .248.
The rule changes could only do so much. Teams have learned the value of increased fastball velocity and breaking ball movement, wielding technology to heighten those qualities. An obsession with generating spin and velocity led to a reliance upon illegal foreign substances which led to a 2021 crackdown on “sticky stuff” which some players — including Glasnow — believe ultimately led to an uptick in arm injuries. This season, as MLB officials kvetched about another rash of arm surgeries to open the season, there was another round of dialogue about the reasons for all the pitching problems.
The answers all stem back to discoveries made years ago, when the curious began to inform the desperate. The scenes of innovation take place in locations both obscure and understandable: A psychology department in Iowa City. A ballpark office in St. Petersburg, Fla. A garage in the San Francisco Bay Area. A mound in a packed stadium in Houston. Together, they help explain why baseball looks the way it does in 2024.
“You’ll see a lot of people who played in earlier decades waxing poetic about ‘Guys shouldn’t be striking out as much’ or ‘We need to make more contact,’” Chicago White Sox senior advisor Brian Bannister said. “It’s not that the hitters aren’t trying to do that. It’s just really hard to hit a baseball. It was always the hardest thing to do in sports. And then we made it even harder.”
Dan Brooks did not intend to make his surname ubiquitous with strikeout rates. He was just trying to help a buddy struggling with Microsoft Excel.
By 2008, all 30 big-league stadiums featured a tracking system called PITCHf/x. Built by Sportvision, the company famed for generating the yellow first-down lines on football broadcasts, PITCHf/x utilized a triangular camera setup to detect each pitch’s velocity, release point, location, and horizontal and vertical break. The system logged pitches with more detail than ever before, a treasure trove for the burgeoning group of curious baseball fans searching for deeper insight into the game.
The data was publicly available if you knew where to find it. Brooks, an experimental psychologist studying for his PhD at the University of Iowa, knew where to find the data. And unlike his friend, he also knew how to use Excel to scrape the data. This PITCHf/x data would become the foundation for a website featuring sortable charts and tables that cataloged pitch types and their individual characteristics. The site also grew to include a real-time plot of the strike zone for games. It became a destination for enthusiasts. He called it BrooksBaseball.net, which, he mused years later, was “useful from a personal marketing standpoint, to whatever use that is in life.”
The PITCHf/x data offered answers that people in baseball had sought for decades. The usefulness of strikeouts was never a secret. The statistical guru Bill James had evangelized the value of missing bats since the 1980s. Sandy Koufax fanned more than a batter per inning in his five-season renaissance; Nolan Ryan did the same across a 27-season career. Randy Johnson captured five Cy Young Awards while finishing his career by averaging 10.6 strikeouts per nine innings. Before injuries capsized his career, Chicago Cubs phenom Mark Prior punched out hitters at the same rate as Johnson. “I had swing-and-miss stuff,” Prior said. “So I tried to lean into my strengths.” Most games, Prior recalled, “I tried to strike out the side every first inning.”
The conventional wisdom in the industry, however, suggested that only a certain type of pitcher could chase whiffs. The pitcher needed to harness elite weapons like Koufax or boast remarkable stamina like Ryan or pitch from a hellacious angle like Johnson. The average man could not produce those results — even if a studious, dedicated pitcher could figure out how to get into advantageous counts.
For years after the Los Angeles Dodgers hired him as a pitching coach in 2006, Rick Honeycutt experienced a consistent aggravation with young pitchers. The prospects arrived in the majors equipped with the physical capacity for success but deficient in the strategic acumen necessary to thrive. “Most of the time,” Honeycutt said, “they just didn’t have the ability to put guys away.” Teams searched blindly for answers, and as Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen said, “You would go through cycles of guys throwing the wrong pitch.”
PITCHf/x offered a better road map and Brooks was far from the only outsider to dive into the data. The legion of the curious included a semiconductor engineer with the serendipitous name of Mike Fast. He wrote a blog called Fast Balls and pioneered research into pitch framing, the skill exhibited by catchers for convincing umpires that balls were, in fact, strikes. (The idea proved so influential that one big-league analyst suggested you can study the spread of analytics across baseball by charting when teams improved their framing.) A math professor in West Virginia named Josh Kalk used the data to break down prominent starters and diagnose when pitchers might be injured.
The summer after PITCHf/x debuted during the 2006 postseason, a web developer and tech consultant in Chicago named Harry Pavlidis read a column in Slate about the emergence of “the new technology that will change statistical analysis forever.”
“It was before I even got to the end of the article when I realized what that meant,” Pavlidis said, “and pretty much immediately started my adventures with tracking data.” Brooks and Pavlidis connected at a conference held by Sportvision in 2009. Together they designed BrooksBaseball’s first batch of player cards, offering thumbnail tables of each individual player’s tendencies. By then, Brooks was fielding calls from reporters: A player told me about your site — how do I use it?
“It became clear that not only were baseball nerds on the Internet looking at PITCHf/x data,” Brooks said, “but actual major-league pitchers were doing it.”
But the teams noticed first.
In the fall of 2008, Josh Kalk received an email from James Click, then a staffer in the baseball research and development department of the Tampa Bay Rays. The unexpected message contained an assignment. The Rays were about to face the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series. Click wanted Kalk, who taught at Bluefield State College, to answer some questions related to the release point of Phillies starter Jamie Moyer. Click had been reading Kalk’s work at The Hardball Times and on his own blog. He figured the academic might have some answers.
Kalk turned around a tidy and helpful response. The insight did not lead to the Rays defeating the Phillies. But Kalk’s analysis still impressed Click and his colleagues. By then, Rays general manager Andrew Friedman had begun to assemble a front office filled with over-educated obsessives. Click worked in a cubicle at Tropicana Field near fellow future chief baseball executives Chaim Bloom and Erik Neander. (Both Bloom and Click had written for Baseball Prospectus, as had another future top baseball executive, Peter Bendix, who was hired as a Rays intern in 2009.) The group studied the latest research from outsiders like Kalk and Fast while spending hours wading through the data themselves.
To win a baseball game in regulation requires the collection of 27 outs. The prospect of how to collect those outs had fascinated and vexed players, coaches and executives for decades. The PITCHf/x data that Brooks had made more accessible helped answer some of the questions. “We found out that the difference between no contact and contact was much greater than the difference between bad contact and good contact,” Click said.
James Click during his tenure as GM of the Houston Astros, a decade after he sent his email to Josh Kalk. (Tim Warner / Getty Images)
That was not exactly a secret. In “Moneyball,” published in 2002, the author Michael Lewis had highlighted the work of sabermetrician Voros McCracken, who discovered that pitchers had little control of the results once a ball was put in play. As that theory took root, pitchers used the PITCHf/x data to hone the most direct method to regain some measure of control.
“If you want to be an effective pitcher at the major-league level, what’s the most effective thing to do? Don’t let guys get on base,” Click said. “What’s the most effective way to do that? Don’t let them hit the ball.”
To miss more bats, though, you had to answer a more fundamental question: What is an effective pitch at the major-league level? For that, they turned to Kalk. The team invited him to spring training in 2009 and convinced him to leave academia. “I remember all of us sitting around, saying, ‘This guy’s doing some pretty cool (stuff),” Click said. “We should probably see if he’s interested.’”
Like his new teammates, Kalk was a curious fellow. He disdained attention; he declined an interview request for this story. He held a master’s degree in physics from Michigan State. In his day job as a physicist, he studied the so-called “top quark,” once described as “an ephemeral building block of matter that probably holds clues to some of the ultimate riddles of existence.” In baseball, there were similar, if less existential, depths to the influx of pitch-level data.
For much of the sport’s history, a pitcher’s repertoire often stemmed less from his physical capabilities and more from his organization’s preferences. Some teams emphasized changeups and curveballs. Others favored sliders and sinkers. The Rays tended to instruct pitchers to attack hitters on a vertical plane rather than a horizontal plane, because the strike zone was taller than it was wide. But one size did not fit all. Anyone who has attempted to fit a square peg into a round hole can understand why this paradigm was not ideal. Yet few challenged it, in part because it was unclear how to formulate a precise plan for an individual.
While poring through the information, Kalk applied the Nash equilibrium, a game-theory concept gleaned from the world of mathematics, which posited that an individual could formulate an optimal strategy no matter the strategies of the opponents. (The concept was memorialized in the film “A Beautiful Mind” during a scene in which Russell Crowe as the mathematician John Nash asked, ‘What if no one goes for the blonde?’”) Applied to baseball, the principle suggested each pitcher possessed an ideal, individualized mixture of pitches. The percentages depended on the strengths and weaknesses of each pitcher. The proximity to equilibrium would appear in the data if the results of each different pitch were identical. Because of PITCHf/x, the analysts could now measure the effectiveness of each individual offering.
What Kalk discovered was that very few, if any, big-league pitchers approached this equilibrium. One of the first to come close was James Shields, a pitcher with a plethora of weapons. Shields could throw three different types of fastballs and an elite changeup. After a rocky season in 2010, though, Tampa Bay officials suggested he throw his curveball more often. Shields raised his curve usage from 13.5 percent to 21 percent in 2011 and achieved the best results of his career, making the All-Star team and leading baseball with 11 complete games. “Every year, we were always making adjustments to be able to pitch in (those) ideal pitch sequences, so that you’re not predictable,” Shields said. The Rays ranked 15th in baseball in strikeout rate in 2011 (7.11 strikeouts per nine innings); across the next three seasons, the team zoomed to first (8.47 strikeouts per nine).
With help perfecting his pitch mix, James Shields emerged as a front-line starter for the Tampa Bay Rays. (Al Messerschmidt / Getty Images)
Kalk worked remotely from West Virginia. After a few years, the Rays asked him to venture into the field more often. The team wanted to spread his wisdom across the organization. Friedman introduced Kalk to Kyle Snyder, a towering former first-round pick who Tampa Bay hired as a class-A pitching coach in 2012. A year later, when Snyder was promoted to coach at Double-A Bowling Green, Kalk sat him down. Kalk had prepared a PITCHf/x plot culled from Snyder’s own career, which ended in independent ball in 2011. The analyst showed the former athlete all the ways in which he could have pitched differently, had he known about the data. “It was one of the more powerful things for me in terms of not just my buy-in,” Snyder said, “but realizing how powerful this information was about to become.”
Kalk flipped past the page dedicated to Snyder and unveiled similar plots for Tampa Bay minor-league pitchers like Dylan Floro, Taylor Guerrieri and Jesse Hahn. Each plot contained clues for optimizing pitchers — not just which of their pitches were best, but why. “I’m like, I cannot believe what I’m looking at and how powerful this is in terms of just understanding physics and how the balls move,” Snyder said.
A year later, Snyder became the organization’s minor-league pitching coordinator. He reveled in his trips to the team’s Appalachian League affiliate in Princeton, W. Va., because the site was near Kalk’s home. Like so many in his profession, Snyder sought clarity on the most effective way to procure 27 outs. Kalk shined the light.
“I started peppering him with questions after I realized the asset that he was,” Snyder said. “I’m like, ‘Wait a second, man. Let’s start talking about this.’” The conversations opened Snyder’s eyes. There was no out more effective than a strikeout. “I’m like: OK, other than a ball getting to the backstop on a wild pitch or a passed ball, if a guy swings at strike three, he’s out!”
From his home office, located in the garage of his ranch-style house outside San Francisco, Brian Bannister played a little game with himself. After his career as a big-league pitcher ended in 2010, Bannister hoped to get into player development. But first he wanted to conduct some research. He logged onto BrooksBaseball and pulled up the PITCHf/x powered player cards built by Brooks and Pavlidis. They featured information on the frequencies with which players threw certain pitches and how effective they were. Bannister set a timer for 30 seconds. He had to scan each card and figure out how to make the player better. He spent hours each day studying the site.
“As I looked,” he said, “there was just some obvious, low-hanging fruit there.”
Bannister was the consummate insider. His father, Floyd, pitched for 15 years in the majors. Brian played at USC with Mark Prior. He reached the majors less than three years after the Mets drafted him in 2003. Yet he harbored the curiosity of someone willing to challenge baseball’s shibboleths. He considered Mike Fast his “original inspiration” for delving into pitching design.
Bannister was one of those players using BrooksBaseball while still in uniform. He embraced the data because he was desperate. After the Mets traded him, Bannister had a solid rookie season with Kansas City in 2007 before posting a 5.76 ERA the next season. Unable to generate strikeouts, Bannister tried to soften the contact he allowed. He ditched his four-seam fastball for a cutter and attempted to model a changeup off James Shields. Neither adjustment proved that fruitful: in 2009 and 2010 Bannister pitched to a combined 5.46 ERA.
He funneled his curiosity into one of his teammates: Zack Greinke. Greinke possessed the physical tools that Bannister lacked; he could make the baseball do whatever he desired. Together, they put together game plans and engaged in side quests, like seeing how slow a curveball Greinke could throw or how many different ways he could manipulate a changeup. In between innings, the duo would check out the results on BrooksBaseball’s real-time tracker. “We would go run in and see what our movement was,” Bannister said.
Royals teammates Zack Greinke and Brian Bannister worked together to unlock pitching secrets; it worked for Greinke, if not for Bannister. (John Sleezer / Kansas City Star / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
In retirement, Bannister could apply that same inquisitiveness in a more targeted way. For two years, he logged onto Brooks’ website and timed himself trying to fix 50 different pitchers each day. He was not sure exactly what he was looking for, but he wanted to train his mind. “I was scanning things, like, ‘What are pitchers doing that they’ve been doing forever but actually doesn’t make a lot of sense?’” he said. He followed a principle espoused by famed investor Charlie Munger that most problems could be solved by looking backward. He studied elite pitchers like Greinke, Clayton Kershaw and Justin Verlander and compared them to lesser players.
“I would look at one pitcher whose fastball had a certain shape and I’d look at another pitcher whose fastball had the exact same shape,” Bannister said. “But this pitcher was horrible and this pitcher won the Cy Young Award. So I was like, ‘There’s got to be something more to this.’”
What Bannister decided was that conventional wisdom had led pitchers astray. They chased outdated ideals rather than utilizing their own individual gifts. They pocketed excellent offspeed pitches while using shoddy ones to excess. And most importantly, to Bannister, they threw far too many fastballs. “My mission for years has been to reduce fastball usage,” Bannister said. (Consider the mission accomplished: The league-wide fastball percentage fell from 57.8 percent in 2011 to 48.1 percent; for the past two seasons, for the first time in the pitch tracking era, hitters were more likely to see an offspeed pitch than a fastball.)
Bannister thought more pitchers should follow a philosophy culled from video games called “min-maxing.” It made sense on an intuitive level: Throw your best pitches as much as possible and your worst pitches as rarely as possible. “What do you do best? Let’s do more of it,” Bannister said.
In 2013, Brooks invited Bannister to speak at the analytics conference Saber Seminar. A year later, Bannister gave a demonstration using a radar system called TrackMan that had been popular in golf. The audience included Boston Red Sox analyst Tom Tippett. Boston hired Bannister to work in scouting and player development. Bannister soon learned he much preferred the latter to the former.
Late in the summer of 2015, Bannister crossed paths with Rich Hill, a journeyman pitching for Triple-A Pawtucket. Hill had recently turned 35. He had flamed out as a starter and then again as a reliever. He wanted to give starting one last try. Bannister studied the data on Hill’s arsenal and discovered his curveball was excellent. Hill already threw the pitch quite often. Bannister wanted him to throw it even more. They sat together for an hour before a game as Bannister outlined how Hill could use his curveball like Greinke used a changeup, varying speeds and grips to alter its movement.
“All I said was, ‘I think you have one of the best curveballs in the world,’” Bannister said. “He was ready to almost quit the game and retire. And I said, ‘Go throw a curveball until you can’t throw it anymore. And throw it a bunch of different ways.’
“Almost $100 million later … he did that and he took my advice and ran with it.”
The Astros saw something in Collin McHugh that even he didn’t realize was there. (Adam Hunger / Getty Images)
In December of 2013, soon after the Houston Astros pulled him off the scrap heap, Collin McHugh received a phone call from Astros assistant general manager David Stearns.
“We’ve targeted you for a while,” Stearns said, as McHugh recalled.
The sentiment may have sounded far-fetched, the sort of well-meaning pabulum any team feeds a new addition. McHugh had spent much of the previous season in the minors after getting whacked around in short stints with the Mets and the Rockies. He was not eager to spend another year as a member of the Colorado Springs Sky Sox.
“I wanted to get out of Colorado so badly,” said McHugh, who had been desperate enough to follow his own curiosity. He ventured to the Venezuelan Winter League to experiment with new sequences and rebuild some confidence. He was an open book when he met with Astros pitching coach Brent Strom that first spring. Strom had a simple suggestion: Throw your curveball more often.
The advice was rooted in data. The Astros were run by Jeff Luhnow, a former McKinsey consultant and St. Louis Cardinals executive hired by Houston owner Jim Crane in 2011 to resuscitate a moribund franchise. As Luhnow tore down the big-league roster, he populated the front office with a collection of curious outsiders. He brought Sig Mejdal, the director of decision sciences, from St. Louis and he brought Kevin Goldstein, the pro scouting coordinator, from Baseball Prospectus. One of the first people Luhnow hired was Mike Fast.
Fast, who declined an interview request for this story, was “a brilliant guy,” said Strom, who pitched for several seasons in the majors before beginning a lengthy coaching career. Strom overlapped with Luhnow in St. Louis before following the executive to Houston. Strom worked closely with Fast. Strom kept his mind open and excelled at relaying the granular insight to players. “What I realized quickly — and I’d always known it — but you didn’t have to have played this game to know what the f—- you were talking about,” Strom said. “They dove into a lot of things that a lot of us as players never even realized.”
So when Strom told McHugh to throw more curves, it was not just because the pitch looked good to the naked eye. Fast had studied the PITCHf/x data and found McHugh’s bender contained similar characteristics to elite curveballs thrown by All-Stars Felix Hernández and Adam Wainwright. In time, as McHugh established himself as a solid big-league starter, he received more suggestions. “They always wanted a harder curveball,” McHugh said. “And I told them, ‘I can’t throw it any harder. I’m trying.’”
The insistence on adding velocity to offspeed pitches stemmed from an organizational failure. In March of 2014, the same spring in which the Astros welcomed McHugh to the team, Houston released an unremarkable outfielder named J.D. Martinez. When Martinez broke out later that season with the Detroit Tigers, Luhnow wondered where his team had erred. In reviewing the decision, Astros officials realized they had ignored data gleaned from their own TrackMan radar systems, which demonstrated that Martinez had begun to hit the baseball much harder. The Astros hadn’t heeded the data’s insight.
“It created this idea in our mind that this data is valuable and we’re ignoring it,” one former Astros official said.
As Martinez blossomed into an All-Star in Detroit, Luhnow and Crane received a presentation about the value of the TrackMan system from Fast and Brandon Taubman, a former investment banker hired as an analyst in 2013. Taubman had researched the system and learned that the most prolific investor in it was the Rays. He requested enough money to surpass Tampa Bay and install TrackMan technology at every level of Houston’s developmental pipeline. The Astros decided to prioritize studying the new information gleaned from the machines.
The reason the Astros wanted McHugh to increase his curveball velocity stemmed from Fast’s research. Using TrackMan, Fast and Mejdal created a model that could effectively place a grade on each individual pitch. The research unearthed a series of conclusions that bucked conventional wisdom. The two-seam fastball has a platoon split, while the four-seam fastball does not. The changeup didn’t just have to be thrown against opposite-handed hitters. And most crucially, breaking balls with heightened velocity were more effective than slower breaking balls with more movement.
“That’s why you see these guys throwing 87 mph sliders now,” one big-league executive said. “It might have fringe-y spin and movement. But the fact that it’s hard makes it miss bats.”
McHugh could not generate that sort of velocity. No matter how hard he tried, his curveball was always going to clock in around 75 mph. But someone like Lance McCullers, a first-round pick in 2012, was a different story. In the coming years, the Astros would use the data to turbo-charge aces like Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole, rearrange the arsenals of future All-Stars like Charlie Morton and Ryan Pressly, and shape the careers of unheralded Latin America signees like Bryan Abreu and Framber Valdez. Taubman traversed the minor-league affiliates to spread the gospel.
“When we got an idea and believed in it, we did it everywhere,” one former Astros official said. “We did it with the big-league team. We did it with the minor leagues. We did it with amateur scouting. We did it with international scouting. We did it everywhere.”
The Astros front office eventually collapsed in infamy. Taubman was fired in October of 2019 for an outburst directed at female reporters in a pennant-clinching celebration. Luhnow was fired three months later after an MLB investigation determined Houston used an illegal sign-stealing system en route to the World Series in 2017. Fast left for the Atlanta Braves. Mejdal followed fellow Astros alum Mike Elias to Baltimore’s front office. Goldstein returned to writing for a brief period before joining the Minnesota Twins. In the years since, Astros executive alumni have lamented that the scandals have overshadowed the innovations shepherded by the organization, like how the team secured the final outs of the 2017 American League Championship Series.
Facing the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS, Lance McCullers Jr. min-maxed his team to the World Series. (Cooper Neill / MLB via Getty Images)
Up four runs in the sixth inning of Game 7, Astros manager A.J. Hinch asked McCullers to tame the Yankees. In 2015, the season McCullers debuted, Houston pitchers ranked 12th in the sport in strikeout rate, with 7.99 per nine innings. By 2017, the Astros were striking out 9.91 batters per nine, better than every team but Cleveland, another franchise on the forefront of the game’s obsession with supercharging pitchers. McCullers was part of the difference. Facing the Yankees, he yielded a single to the first batter he faced before mowing down the rest of the opposition. He leaned on his breaking ball. By the eighth inning, with the team’s first pennant since 2005 within sight, he simply stopped throwing anything else.
The final 24 pitches McCullers threw were knuckle curveballs, hammers that approached 88 mph. As Fast’s research from years before had suggested, the pitch was further weaponized by added velocity. “I remember watching it,” McHugh said, “thinking: This is unbelievable. They cannot hit it.”
The Yankees lineup was not attempting to string together singles. No team had homered more in 2017 than the Bronx Bombers. The lineup had joined the launch angle revolution, a movement spurred by the improvements in pitching that had started years earlier in Tampa Bay. McCullers wielded the sort of weapon capable of putting down a rebellion, min-maxing in the most pressurized moment of his career.
The Yankees swung and missed seven times during McCullers’ finishing flurry of two dozen curveballs. They put the ball in play precisely twice.
“Houston doing what they did,” Bannister said, “was finally leveraging it at scale.”
In the summer of 2018, Tyler Glasnow was floundering. He demonstrated enough talent to impress scouts but struggled to throw strikes. The Pirates instructed pitchers to locate the ball down in the zone and try to pitch to contact. Glasnow couldn’t do it. After three seasons in Pittsburgh, his ERA was 5.79. Pittsburgh used him as a middle reliever before bundling him into a prospect package to acquire Tampa Bay starter Chris Archer.
Tampa Bay had bigger plans for Glasnow. He was desperate enough to be curious when Rays officials approached him. The Tampa Bay pitching coach was Kyle Snyder, the former big-leaguer who had learned so much from Josh Kalk. The team wanted to turn Glasnow loose as a starting pitcher. Snyder asked Glasnow to reconnect with the spirit and skill that buoyed him in boyhood. He instructed Glasnow to throw the baseball down the middle, through the catcher, as hard as he could. His fastball and his curveball were good enough to beat hitters in the zone. There was no need to waste time trying to hit corners.
In time, Glasnow absorbed insight gleaned from the previous decade, from all the trial and error of the curious and the desperate. The Rays prescribed him a plan that fit his profile rather than their stylistic preferences. His fastball velocity increased as he replaced two-seam sinkers with elevated four-seam heaters. He reoriented his pitching axis to north and south, rather than east to west. He junked his changeup and eventually swapped it for a slider, which allowed him to use his fastball less often. He started throwing his curveball harder and harder.
The alterations improved Glasnow’s command while maintaining the quality of his arsenal. In his first start with Tampa Bay, Glasnow punched out five batters in three innings. Six days later, he set a new career-high mark for strikeouts with nine — in only four innings. During his six seasons as a Ray, he struck out 12.5 batters per nine innings. Despite his inability to stay healthy, Glasnow’s potential enticed the Dodgers, now run by former Rays general manager Andrew Friedman, to acquire him last winter. The Dodgers lavished Glasnow with a four-year, $115 million extension.
On May 10, in his ninth start as a Dodger, Glasnow flirted with his ideal inning. It came against the San Diego Padres. Manny Machado fouled off a pair of fastballs before staring at a slider. Jurickson Profar could not catch up to an elevated, 96-mph heater. Xander Bogaerts whiffed on a pair of fastballs. Fourteen pitches. Nine strikes. Three strikeouts.
“I don’t think,” Glasnow said, “I’ll ever pitch to contact.”
With reports from The Athletic’s Zack Meisel and Chad Jennings.
(Top illustration by Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic. Photos of Bannister, McCullers and Glasnow: by Sarah Stier / Getty Images; Rob Tringali / Getty Images; Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
In 1982, George Halas reached into Chicago Bears history to find a head coach and hired Mike Ditka.
In 2025, the team Halas founded needs to consider its history again.
There are candidates with no ties to the Bears who deserve consideration.
Foremost among them is Mike Vrabel, who never should have been fired by the Tennessee Titans and can win Super Bowls — plural — in the right situation. If Ben Johnson of the Detroit Lions is as dazzling as a head coach as he is as an offensive coordinator, he will transform an organization. His defensive counterpart in Detroit, Aaron Glenn, seems to have leadership and coaching qualities that few have. Steve Spagnuolo’s long history of building defenses and relationships may be evidence he could thrive with a second chance. The way Joe Brady has easily lifted the Buffalo Bills offense suggests he can handle more plates on the bar.
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And there are others. Maybe in the final analysis, one of them is best suited for the job.
However, only one person has had a football role on both Bears Super Bowl teams. Ron Rivera was a linebacker on the 1985 champions. On the 2006 Bears that lost to the Indianapolis Colts, he was their defensive coordinator.
Now he should be first in line to interview.
Rivera’s 2006 defense allowed the third-fewest points in the NFL. Without justification, he was fired after that season, and the Bears took a cold plunge. In the 19 seasons since, they have made the playoffs three times and have a .439 winning percentage.
Drafted by Jim Finks, built up by Ditka and mentored by Mike Singletary, Rivera, more than any potential candidate, comprehends what it means to be a Bear. He knows where Chicago’s potholes are. He understands the organizational strengths and limitations, the fan base and the local media.
There is no doubt Halas would have endorsed interviewing Rivera. Same for Walter Payton, who sat across from Rivera on plane rides to and from games.
Ditka was not the only former Bears player to become their coach. In their first 54 years, every one of their coaches except Ralph Jones was a former player for the team. Halas himself played for the Bears. The other Bears players who became the franchise’s head coach were Luke Johnsos, Hunk Anderson, Paddy Driscoll, Jim Dooley and Abe Gibron.
The Bears have been criticized — justifiably — for not considering former Bear Jim Harbaugh as a head coaching candidate. Ignoring Rivera would be making a similar mistake.
History is not the only reason Rivera should be considered. Like Harbaugh, Rivera is a proven coaching commodity. His coaching journey began humbly as a quality control coach for his Bears in 1997. Two years later, he went to work for Andy Reid in Philadelphia as a linebackers coach before returning to Chicago to coordinate the defense in 2004.
Ron Rivera returned to the Bears as defensive coordinator from 2004 to 2006. (Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)
When he was head coach of the Carolina Panthers, Rivera’s teams made it to the playoffs four times and the Super Bowl once. He was voted coach of the year twice, which makes him one of 13 to be honored more than once. Seven of the 13 are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, with Halas and Ditka among them.
After new Panthers owner David Tepper fired him in 2019, Rivera was unemployed for less than a month when he agreed to lead Dan Snyder’s Washington Redskins, who became the Football Team and then the Commanders in Rivera’s tumultuous tenure as their coach. And he wasn’t just their coach. He was their de facto general manager. Then he became Snyder’s frontman/shield when workplace culture transgressions and financial improprieties came to light and Snyder went underground.
Rivera arguably was the most sought-after coach in the 2020 cycle. The four regrettable years he spent with Snyder, arguably the worst owner in the NFL’s history, changed perceptions. Rivera was not the first to have his reputation diminished by the association.
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In his tenure with Washington before Snyder, the great Joe Gibbs won 67 percent of his games and three Super Bowls. After retiring and returning with Snyder as owner, he went 30-34. As a college coach, Steve Spurrier won 71 percent of his games and a national championship. With Snyder, he won 37 percent of his games. Mike Shanahan, who should be on his way to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, had a .598 career winning percentage and two Super Bowl rings as a head coach before partnering with Snyder. In Washington, his winning percentage was .375.
Rivera’s winning percentage before Snyder was .546, one percentage point better than Vrabel’s. In Washington, it was .396.
Some will question if a defensive-minded coach like Rivera is right for the Bears because of the presence of quarterback Caleb Williams, as if a coach without an offensive background should be disqualified. Hiring a head coach with one player in mind when 53 need to be led is an absurdity.
Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, John Madden, Don Shula, George Allen, Bill Parcells, Marv Levy, Dick Vermeil, Tony Dungy, Bill Cowher and Jimmy Johnson have busts in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Almost assuredly on their way to Canton are Bill Belichick, John Harbaugh and Mike Tomlin. None of them had offensive backgrounds before becoming head coaches.
In 2011, when Rivera was hired in Carolina, there were similar concerns about his ability to handle an offense. With the first pick in the draft, the team chose a quarterback, Cam Newton. Rivera sent offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski, quarterbacks coach Mike Shula and offensive quality control coach Scott Turner to Auburn to meet with the school’s offensive coordinator, Gus Malzahn, and try to understand what Malzahn did with Newton in helping him win a national championship and Heisman Trophy.
Panthers coaches implemented concepts Newton succeeded with at Auburn, including RPO plays that weren’t widely used at the time. Newton was named offensive rookie of the year. Four years later, Newton was voted the NFL’s most valuable player — while playing for a defensive-minded coach.
Rivera connects with players. He earns respect with authenticity, class and toughness. And apparently, these Bears need a coach who will hold players accountable.
The year after Newton was the league’s MVP, Rivera benched him because he refused to follow a team rule requiring players to wear ties on the plane. When Newton showed up tieless, Rivera tried to give him a tie to wear. Newton said it didn’t match his outfit. Rivera told him there would be repercussions, and Newton subsequently was held out the first series of a game. Newton later apologized to the team.
Rivera, who learned about aggressive strategies from Buddy Ryan and his Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Johnson, never has been afraid to take a chance. Before they called the head coach of the Lions Dan “Gamble,” they called Rivera “Riverboat Ron.”
In his first training camp in Washington, Rivera was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer in a lymph node. That season, he had 35 proton therapy treatments and three chemotherapy treatments. Rivera lost 25 pounds and grew so weak he had to be brought into the office with one arm around his wife’s shoulder and one around the team trainer’s. He never stopped coaching and leading, though, and his team rallied, winning five of its last seven games to make the playoffs.
Rivera eventually rang the bell and is cancer-free. For his perseverance, the Pro Football Writers of America voted him the recipient of the George Halas Award, which is given for overcoming adversity.
The significance of Rivera winning the award named after the founder of the Bears should not be lost on those entrusted with maintaining the Halas legacy.
(Top photo: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
Culture
‘A long road. A big mountain to climb’: Inside Matt Murray’s emotional journey back to the NHL
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Matt Murray looked up to the scoreboard above him, counted down the seconds as they disappeared and finally pumped his fist.
It had been 638 days since Murray last felt the feeling washing over him.
Bilateral hip surgery forced the Toronto Maple Leafs goalie out of the entire 2023-24 season, the final of a four-year contract. There was no guarantee the oft-injured Murray would play in the NHL again. A one-year contract offered him a lifeline to continue grinding far out of the spotlight in the AHL, with only one goal.
And over a year and a half later, Murray was back to where he had fought to be: in the NHL win column after stopping 24 shots in a 6-3 win over the Buffalo Sabres.
“A long road. A big mountain to climb. But I kept this moment in the front of my mind on the days it felt tough,” Murray said.
The 30-year-old’s eyes grew more red with every word he spoke after the game. His voice quivered.
“A big release,” he said, struggling to find the words to put nearly two years away from the NHL into perspective. “A rush of emotions.”
The typical goalie hugs with teammates after the win were tighter, longer. In a physical game where a player’s career can turn on a dime, Murray’s return resonated far more heavily than the 2 points the Leafs also added on the day.
“It’s good to see (Murray) smiling,” Steven Lorentz said, “because you know he’s back doing what he loves.”
In the dressing room, Max Domi immediately handed Murray the team’s WWE-style wrestling belt as player of the game. Murray’s up-and-down performance was secondary.
“He was getting that thing, 100 percent, he deserved it,” Domi said. “The ability to stick with it mentally, out of all those days that I’m sure he had a lot of doubt, it’s a long road to recovery. We’re all super proud of him.”
It’s easy to quantify just how long Murray’s road back to the NHL was in days: 628 of them between his last two appearances.
It’s far more difficult to accurately describe just how arduous that road is.
Injuries have dogged Murray throughout his career after winning back-to-back Stanley Cup titles in his first two seasons in the NHL with the Pittsburgh Penguins. His games played tapered off every season from 2018 to 2022. After he was traded to the Leafs in summer 2022, he struggled through his first season. It was fair to wonder whether hip surgery would be the final dagger in his NHL career.
But Murray would still hang around teammates at the Leafs’ practice facility during his rehabilitation last season, feeling so close but so far away from the league he once conquered.
“The fact that he’s just on his way back here says a lot about his character, his dedication to the game,” Lorentz said.
Murray kept a stall full of his gear at that facility that was never used. An important and humane gesture from the Leafs organization, but still a reminder that Murray was not playing NHL games.
Even after re-signing with the Leafs on a one-year, $875,000 deal, he felt like the organization’s No. 4 goalie. When the Leafs needed a netminder to replace the injured Anthony Stolarz, they called up Dennis Hildeby. The lanky Hildeby is seven years’ Murray’s junior.
How could Murray not wonder whether his NHL return would ever come?
“There were definitely times when it felt really difficult,” Murray said. “But whenever I felt like that, I had a great group of people around me. That’s the only reason why I’m here.”
All Murray could do was work his tail off, far away from public sight, quietly hoping for the return that finally came Friday night.
“The emotions were high today,” Murray said.
Those emotions perhaps ran highest before the game. The typically stoic Murray allowed himself to stop and appreciate how far he’s come.
“I was able to take a moment in warmups and during the anthem and look around and appreciate the long journey that it’s been and think of all the people who helped me get here,” Murray said.
It was the kind of game that reminded onlookers of the fragility of an NHL career. Just a few short years separated Murray from being a Stanley Cup winner to being largely written off from the NHL, all essentially before the age of 30.
“You feel for a guy like that because he works so hard and he wants it so bad,” Lorentz said. “We’re all rooting for him.”
Matt Murray saved 24 shots in a 6-3 win over the Sabres, earning his first NHL win in 638 days. (Timothy T. Ludwig / Imagn Images)
Murray moved well enough in his return. He swallowed most of the 27 shots the Sabres threw at him, looking every bit the veteran he is. Murray had two goals against called back upon video review. His sprawling save on Sabres forward Alex Tuch was a reminder of the athleticism he can provide now that he’s fully healthy, too.
They’re all qualities Leafs fans might have forgotten. But they’re qualities that are still front of mind for Murray’s Leafs teammates.
“It hasn’t been forgotten in my mind what he’s accomplished in this league in his career,” Leafs forward Max Pacioretty said, himself no stranger to debilitating injuries that threaten a career. “It’s hard to almost remember what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished because it seems like all the noise is always in the moment, whether it’s the injury or what has happened lately.”
Perhaps the Leafs win could have been predicted ahead of time. Sure, they were playing a reeling Sabres team that has now sputtered through 12 losses in a row. And they were buoyed by an upstart, white-hot line of Max Domi, Bobby McMann and Nick Robertson. They’re the third line in name only: The trio combined for three goals and 6 points against the Sabres.
But the opponent shouldn’t denigrate what was front of mind not just for Murray but also for the Leafs in Buffalo. They wanted to do right by a player who has done everything in his power to return to the NHL. You didn’t have to squint to see a defenceman like Jake McCabe throwing Sabres out of Murray’s crease with a little extra gusto.
“It gives you some incentive to go the extra mile because you know (Murray) has gone that extra mile just to get back to this position to where he’s at right,” Lorentz said. “It’s not like he half-assed it to get back to this point and he expected to be here. Surgeries and injuries like that, that he went through, that can stunt your career for a long time. You might never be able to recover to your old form.”
But Murray is working on getting back to the Matt Murray of old. And the Leafs’ need for Murray won’t end when they head north on the QEW back to Toronto.
The earliest Stolarz will likely return from a knee injury will be mid-to-late January. Hildeby doesn’t exactly have the full confidence of the Leafs organization right now after allowing a few soft goals during a recent call-up against the Sabres at home, combined with a less-than-stellar AHL season so far. He’s likely going to be an NHL player down the road, but there’s room for him to grow and develop more confidence in his game.
But Murray has what no other goalie in the Leafs organization has: experience. And that matters to Brad Treliving and Craig Berube: Both value games played and would rather lean on veterans whenever possible.
They’ll lean on Murray because of everything he’s done, and gone through, in his career.
After Friday night, that career looks drastically different.
“In reality, you’ve got to take each day as it comes and you never know when it’s going to be all over,” Pacioretty said. “So you don’t want to take days for granted.”
After Murray had dried his eyes and slowly taken off the pounds of goalie gear heavy with sweat, he sat on his own in the dressing room. The Leafs equipment staff all stopped unloading bags from the dressing room to give him a quiet pat on the back.
Murray looked up to see a note written on a whiteboard in the dressing room. The Leafs bus would be leaving in 20 minutes. There was another NHL game on the horizon.
He could smile once again knowing it certainly won’t be 628 days between being able to do what he loved.
(Top photo: Timothy T. Ludwig / Imagn Images)
Beyond the dust of Liverpool’s dock road and the huge lorries rolling in and out of the city’s port, the glass panels of Everton’s new home at the Bramley-Moore Dock sparkle impressively, radiating ambition.
The site, expected to open next year, is a feat of engineering considering the narrow dimensions of the fresh land below it, where old waters have been drained to create a 52,888-capacity arena that has been earmarked to host matches at the 2028 European Championship.
The Everton Stadium, as it is currently known, has been nearly 30 years in the making and nothing about its construction has been straightforward. There were three other proposed sites — including one outside Liverpool’s city boundaries, in Kirkby — which never materialised; a sponsorship deal collapsing due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; three owners, Peter Johnson, Bill Kenwright and Farhad Moshiri, departing; and several flirtations with relegation.
Ultimately, Dan Friedkin, a Texan-based billionaire, will have the honour of being in post when it is inaugurated after his group’s long-awaited takeover was completed on Thursday.
Everton’s new waterfront home (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
It has been a momentous week for Everton, and for the region as a whole. The Friedkin Group’s takeover means both of Merseyside’s Premier League clubs are now controlled by Americans. Meanwhile, a third, League Two side Tranmere Rovers, could join them if the English Football League (EFL) ratifies a takeover by a consortium led by Donald Trump’s former lawyer Joe Tacopina.
In football terms, Liverpool is on the verge of becoming the USA’s 51st state — the name of the 2001 movie starring Samuel L Jackson and Robert Carlyle, which was filmed in the city and used Anfield, the home of Liverpool FC, as a backdrop.
It is a huge cultural shift from the days — back when that film was released — when Liverpool and Everton had local owners and an American takeover of the city’s most celebrated sporting organisations seemed unthinkable.
And for all the excitement that Everton and Tranmere’s takeovers have generated, there remains an underlying caution — born of years of fear and frustration over the direction their clubs have taken — over what U.S. ownership will mean.
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Everton is a club of contrasts.
Much of their mainly local support comes from some of the United Kingdom’s most economically challenged districts in the north end of Liverpool, near Walton where Goodison Park is located, and the ‘People’s Club’ — as former manager David Moyes christened them — has long taken pride in not being connected to big business, particularly in comparison to their near-neighbours Liverpool.
“One Evertonian is worth twenty Liverpudlians,” said former local captain Brian Labone, who led the team he supported as a boy in the 1960s.
Yet it hasn’t always been this way. At that time, it was Everton — not Liverpool — who were the city’s big spenders under their chairman John Moores, the founder of Littlewoods Pools. Then, their nickname was the ‘Mersey Millionaires’ and the club’s modus operandi was unapologetically ruthless: one manager, Johnny Carey, was sacked in the back of a taxi.
Moores would detail several innovations that would grow the sport, making it more attractive to business. They included the creation of a European Super League (sound familiar?), the rise of television, as well as the removal of the maximum wage, leaving a free market in which the best players would go to the richest clubs.
When Liverpool started to dominate English football and Goodison Park experienced a dip in gates, Moores tried to raise more cash. One of his solutions was to bring corporate hospitality to Goodison, as well as more advertising boards around the pitch but the move experienced pushback.
“Fans didn’t like it,” says Gavin Buckland, who recently published a book entitled The End, which looks at some of the longer-term causes of Everton’s struggles. “They felt the boards intruded on their match day routine — an in-your-face commercialism.”
Attitudes haven’t changed much since, in part because successive Everton owners haven’t been able to expand Goodison which is hemmed into Walton’s warren of terraced streets. Under Kenwright, Everton played on that reputation of the plucky underdog punching above its weight; it was only when Moshiri, a Monaco-based British-Iranian steel magnate, arrived as co-owner in 2016 that the waters were muddied.
Goodison Park – with Anfield visible at the top of the picture – is sandwiched into terraced streets (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Under Moshiri, Everton became two clubs in one. Like Kenwright, Moshiri operated from London but unlike the theatre impresario, he had no natural connection with Merseyside. While Moshiri aimed for the stars, spending big on players and managers, Kenwright — who remained chairman and still had influence until his death last year — had a more corner-shop mentality. There was a lack of clarity over decision-making.
Enter Friedkin. Perversely, Everton’s fallen state is a major reason they represent such an attractive proposition to the San Diego-born businessman, who identified them as one of, if not the last, purchasable English football club where there is room for significant growth.
On Merseyside, there is some concern about what this might mean: Americans have tended to develop dubious reputations as owners of English football clubs due to their appetite for driving non-football revenues and seeing their investments as content providers.
Will the new stadium, for example, become a shopping mall experience, complete with hiked-up ticket prices? Buckland speaks of a “cliff edge”, where Everton are moving into a new home, necessitating new routines for matchgoing fans, while a new foreign owner with a reputation for keeping his distance gets his feet under the table. For some, all of this at once might be too much.
Given that Friedkin cannot claim to have played a leading role in the stadium move, he is likely to be judged quickly on the team that he delivers. Any new revenue-driving schemes will only float if fortunes improve on the pitch, otherwise his priorities will be questioned.
For proof, simply look across Stanley Park. In 2016, thousands of Liverpool fans walked out of Anfield in the 77th minute of a Premier League game against Sunderland after FSG announced that some ticket prices in the stadium’s new Main Stand would be priced at £77.
Liverpool had won just one trophy in six years of FSG ownership at that point and local fans, especially, felt like their loyalty was being exploited, given the organisation’s policy of investing its own money in infrastructure but not the team. The protest led to an embarrassing climbdown.
Liverpool was once described by the Guardian newspaper as the “Bermuda Triangle of capitalism”. It has since been framed absolutely as a left-wing city even though voting patterns suggest it should be described as a dissenting one. Its football supporters, whether blue or red, tend to confront perceived injustices, especially if it involves outsiders making money at the expense of locals, and even more so if they are not delivering on the pitch.
Liverpool have retained their working-class feel (Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
FSG were only able to buy Liverpool at a knockdown price, which its former American owner Tom Hicks described as an “epic swindle”, due to the response of the supporters who unionised themselves in an attempt to drive both Hicks and his partner George Gillett out following a series of broken promises, as the club veered dangerously towards deep financial problems from 2008.
“The missteps of Hicks and Gillett put power in the hands of the fans,” reminds Gareth Roberts from Spirit of Shankly, the fans group which is still active 16 years after its formation and which now has members on the club’s official supporters board. The latter became enshrined in Liverpool’s articles of association after FSG apologised for its leading role in the attempt to create a European Super League in 2021.
This came after several other high-profile PR blunders that eroded trust. It remains to be seen whether figures like John W. Henry, FSG and Liverpool’s principle owner, will listen to the board rather than pay lip service and carry on regardless with his own plans. Roberts says the ongoing challenge is “getting them to understand the culture”, and it does not help the relationship when Henry’s business partner, Tom Werner (Liverpool’s chairman), speaks so enthusiastically about taking Premier League fixtures away from Anfield and potentially hosting them in other parts of the world.
There was a time when either Everton or Liverpool’s local owner not showing at a match would dominate conversations in pubs and get reported in the local paper. Now, that only happens if they actually turn up.
Leading FSG figures usually fly in from Boston, Massachusetts, attending a couple of games a season — Werner was at Liverpool’s recent game against Real Madrid, while Henry was in the stands for the first home game of the season against Brentford. They appoint executives and dispatch them to Merseyside, or London, where the club has long had an office, to run the business on their behalf. Such individuals are under pressure to drive revenues as far as they can, in theory improving the economic possibilities of the team.
John W. Henry visits Anfield for the Brentford game in August (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Roberts says ticketing is an especially thorny issue at Liverpool due to the popularity of the club. It feels like locals are under attack: that there is a race to get the richest person’s bum onto a seat.
As far as Roberts is concerned, a club that markets its image from the energy that Anfield occasionally creates is treading on dangerous ground. “The Kop still has power,” he insists. “But if you squeeze the fans and they drop off, there is a risk that the place gets filled with spectators rather than supporters and with that, you kill the golden goose.”
This, he adds, should act as a warning to Evertonians as they embark on their own American adventure.
Like Roberts, Liverpool metro mayor Steve Rotheram is a season ticket holder at Anfield and he understands such anxieties. In October, he spent a fortnight in North America exploring trade opportunities and the experience made him realise how powerful a brand Liverpool has abroad due to its connections with football and music, as well as its central role as a port in the movement of the Irish diaspora that spread across the Atlantic in the 19th century.
He says such history helps start conversations with American businesses from sectors like bioscience and digital innovation, which are now interested in investing in Merseyside due to the availability of land near the waterfront on both sides of the Mersey river, a hangover from the harsh economic measures of the 1980s and the decline that followed.
Rotheram says football, especially, plays a significant role in the visitor economy to the region, which in 2018 was worth £6.2billion. A thriving Everton playing at a stadium that does a lot more than host football matches every fortnight has the potential to add to that pot. The site at Bramley-Moore promises to regenerate the area around it and, currently, there are small signs of that change. Now Everton’s immediate financial concerns have gone away, perhaps businesses hoping to move in can proceed with more confidence.
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To reach the third professional football club on Merseyside attracting American investment, you have to cross the river.
If Rotheram gets his way, a walkable bridge will connect Liverpool to Wirral, the home of Tranmere Rovers, and potentially boost the peninsula’s economy. But for the time being, there are just two transport options: a tunnel under the Mersey or, more pleasurably, a ferry which takes less than seven minutes to sail from the Pier Head, beneath the famous Liver Buildings, to Seacombe.
In the middle of this journey, as the ferry juts north, there is a different view of Everton’s new stadium, positioned between a scrapyard and a wind farm, both of which are in the shadow of a brooding tobacco warehouse that is the biggest brick building in the world. Everton’s new home is much closer to the city and might seem enormous from the land, glistening from whichever angle you look at it, but it does not dominate the skyline from the brown, scudding channels of the Mersey.
Everton’s new stadium, as viewed from Birkenhead across the Mersey (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
When the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne sailed across the same stretch of water in 1854, he recalled a scene that he thought neatly captured the personality of the Liverpudlians he’d encountered over the previous six months, having been sent to the city as American consul.
There, on the ferry, was a labourer eating oysters using a jack knife taken from his pocket, tossing shell after shell overboard. Once satisfied, the labourer pulled out a clay pipe and started puffing away contentedly.
According to Hawthorne, the labourer’s “perfect coolness and independence” was mirrored by some of the other passengers. “Here,” Hawthorne wrote, “a man does not seem to consider what other people will think of his conduct but whether it suits his convenience to do so.”
Hawthorne did not specify whether the labourer was from Liverpool or the piece of land to the west now known as Wirral. To any outsider, the places and their residents tend to be viewed as one of the same.
On Merseyside, however, distinctions are made: Liverpudlians tend to identify themselves as tougher and sharper, while those from “over the water”, tend to have softer accents and are once removed from the struggles of the city.
In truth, both areas suffered in the late 1970s and 80s when unemployment ripped through its docks and shipyards. Whereas Liverpool’s city centre has been transformed in the decades since, the Wirral’s waterfront feels less promising. Whereas Liverpool has the Albert Dock, museums and a business district punctuated by glassy high rises, Wirral has very few distinguishable features from the river beyond its scaly, grey sea wall.
Three miles or so from the terminal in Seacombe lies Prenton, the home of Tranmere, a football club that returned to the Football League in 2018, having fallen on hard times since the early 1990s when it threatened to reach the Premier League.
Tranmere’s homely but ageing Prenton Park ground (Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
That history is one of the reasons why an American consortium led by Tacopina has an application with the EFL to try and buy the club from former player, Mark Palios, who later acted as the chief executive of the English Football Association.
The Athletic reported in September that Tacopina was attempting to “harness the power of his celebrity contacts” to try to propel Tranmere up the divisions from League Two. In a report the following month, it was revealed on these pages that rapper A$AP Rocky and Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby were two of the investors.
According to a source involved in the deal, who would like to remain anonymous to protect working relationships, there is a belief the takeover will be completed in early 2025. While the source suggests it has taken longer than expected to reach this point after an unnamed investor dropped out, The Athletic has been told separately that an unnamed investor’s application was rejected by the EFL. This led to the buying group trying to source a replacement. The EFL declined to comment.
Tacopina has been involved in Italian football for a decade, with mixed success. He knows Tranmere is not a sexy name but neither was Wrexham before they were taken over by the Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2021. While Tranmere has a fight this season to retain its Football League status, Tacopina would be taking on a club that more or less breaks even.
Palios is naturally cautious. For years, he’s wanted to find a minority partner but interested parties have tended to find there isn’t much up-side for such investment. Palios has since been able to convince Tacopina that Tranmere has significant potential with a full takeover, that the club has geography on its side and could become the region’s third wheel.
Joe Tacopina, sat next to former U.S. President Donald Trump, wants to buy Tranmere (Andrew Kelly-Pool/Getty Images)
More than 500,000 people live on the Wirral but the majority cannot get tickets for Liverpool or Everton. There is an interest in Tranmere but many Wirral residents are only would-be fans. That would surely change with an upwardly mobile team, as Tranmere were in the 1990s when it tried to reach the top flight and a packed Prenton Park witnessed a series of exciting cup runs.
Tranmere is worth around £20million in assets. Even if the club reached the Championship, the gateway to the Premier League, the value would increase significantly, potentially leaving Tacopina with a profit if he decided to sell. Importantly, the stadium is owned by the club and Tacopina would be inheriting that. Tacopina takes confidence from the stories of clubs like Bournemouth and Brentford, who are now established in the Premier League despite playing in similar-sized stadiums to Prenton Park (Bournemouth’s is actually considerably smaller) and with little history of success at the top level.
Prenton Park, however, does not have the facilities to generate much revenue outside of matchdays. In the boom of the early 90s, the venue was rebuilt on three sides but that did not include the main stand, which remains a relic of corrugated iron and brick. Lorraine Rogers, the chairperson before Palios, suggested the stand was costing Tranmere £500,000 a year to maintain. In 2021, a League Two game with Stevenage was postponed after a part of the roof flew off during a storm.
Palios has explored other stadium options. From the Mersey, the West float slipway leads to Bidston, where a site has been discussed but diehard fans are not enthusiastic about a move three miles away which would take the club away from its roots and potentially position it next to a waste plant, and where there are few pubs and transport links are limited.
Last summer, Palios suggested the zone was ripe for redevelopment in an interview with Liverpool Business News. “I advise my children, if ever they invest in property, invest in the south bank of the river,” he said. “As sure as apples fall from trees, this place is going to get developed.”
Any relocation, however, would need assistance from Wirral Waters as well as a council that for a decade has carefully been trying to manage its budgets due to cuts from central government. At the start of December, the Liverpool Echo reported that the council will be asking the government for a £20million bailout to prevent it from having to declare bankruptcy.
Tranmere’s ground rises out of the streets in Birkenhead (Lewis Storey/Getty Images)
While it is generally accepted the Palios era is near an end and Tranmere needs to find a way to move forward, there is a wariness and some Tranmere supporters are questioning whether they want someone who has represented Trump in a rape trial running their club.
Matt Jones, the presenter of the Trip to the Moon podcast, speaks of “excitement, curiosity and fear”. Two years ago, he tracked down Bruce Osterman, Tranmere’s previous American owner (and the first in English football), to San Francisco.
Osterman told Jones that in 1984, he was able to complete a takeover because Tranmere were “days away from shutting its doors”. Yet Osterman was humble enough to admit that he was ill-prepared for the challenges that followed, despite investing £500,000 in cash. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he admitted. “I had no experience in this area. I was a trial lawyer… I had no understanding of the history, or where we were going.”
Osterman says that if he had his time again, he “would probably have paid more attention to the team’s relationship with the community”. Over the next three and a half years, Tranmere’s financial position became bleaker and he ended up selling the club at a loss to Palios’ predecessor Peter Johnson, the son of a butcher who became a millionaire businessman in the food industry.
Johnson ended up buying Everton where he was much less popular. His story is a reminder that it is not just American owners who move around clubs, as Friedkin has. Johnson grew up a Liverpool fan, an inconvenient factoid which put him on the back foot at Goodison, where he encountered suspicious minds and hardened attitudes.
Cynicism is deeply embedded among Everton fans, who might wonder how long it will take for their club to see the benefits of being at a new stadium and under new ownership.
Yet Friedkin’s arrival potentially draws a line under much of the uncertainty. Simon Hart, a journalist and author who has written extensively about the club, speaks about the last few years being battered by “existential concerns relating to the club’s future to the extent you are largely numb, hoping just to survive. The impression that Friedkin seems reasonably sensible and hasn’t destroyed Roma is something to grasp and be grateful for.
“At the moment, the thing that needs answering is whether Everton can go into the new stadium as a Premier League club that is secure. There is a sense that anything that keeps the club alive is acceptable.”
Excitement is not the right word but relief might be. Hart thinks Goodison is irreplaceable, a venue where the terraces hang over the pitch and some of the timberwork dates back to the Victorian era. It is as much a part of the club’s identity as the Liver Buildings are to Liverpool. A departure inspires mixed emotions that swirl around the freezing reality that Everton has not won a trophy of any kind since 1995.
As the years pass and the record extends, it becomes harder to escape. Hart describes Goodison as his “special place”, but it feels like “disappointment is soaked into every brick now”. He attended the 0-0 draw with Brentford in November when the visiting team were down to 10 men and it felt as though Goodison was weighed down by negative emotion.
Perhaps their new home allows the club to embrace a fresh start and, as he puts it, “allow Evertonians to look forward rather than back.”
(Top image: Getty Images/Design: Eamonn Dalton)
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