Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of baseball. 

There were nine players in the deal — officially, anyway — and there’s no chance William Contreras can name them all.

“No,” he said with a laugh the other day, by phone from the Milwaukee Brewers’ clubhouse. “I don’t think so.”

Contreras, 26, has been one of baseball’s best players this season, a sturdy catcher on a battered team that just keeps weathering punches. Through Thursday, he was hitting .340/.414/.517 with five home runs while leading the Brewers in runs scored and runs batted in.

“We felt like he had a chance to be a frontline catcher, and he’s been everything and more,” general manager Matt Arnold said. “He’s just been a tremendous talent for us — and he’s competing as an MVP candidate, honestly.”

It’s early for awards talk, of course, but not too early to appreciate the roots of the trade tree that brought Contreras to Milwaukee. The player most responsible for his arrival was not even part of the three-way deal with the Atlanta Braves and Oakland Athletics on Dec. 12, 2022.

It was Josh Hader, the four-time Milwaukee All-Star closer whose startling departure to San Diego at the 2022 trading deadline rankled both players and fans. The move backfired initially when Milwaukee missed the playoffs and the Padres made it. But that deal gave Arnold a promising lefty starter — Robert Gasser, who will make his MLB debut on Friday — and the piece he would use to get Contreras four months later: Esteury Ruiz.

Ruiz played only three games for the Brewers, going 0-for-8. But after the season, as the A’s prepared to trade catcher Sean Murphy, they focused on Ruiz as a target. The Brewers got in on Oakland’s deal with the Braves, who traded six players for Murphy.

Milwaukee, for its part, traded just Ruiz, getting Contreras and pitching prospect Justin Yeager from Atlanta, plus reliever Joel Payamps from the A’s. In addition to Ruiz, Oakland got four players from the Braves: pitchers Kyle Muller, Freddy Tarnok and Royber Salinas and catcher Manny Piña.

Hader, though, set the whole thing in motion. He would have been gone from Milwaukee by now, anyway, having signed a five-year, $95 million deal in free agency with the Houston Astros last winter.

“Hader was certainly a huge part of our organization, and anytime you’re trading a good player off a good team, it’s not going to be very popular, both internally and externally,” Arnold said. “That’s a really tough thing to navigate. But we had a strong bullpen, we had Devin Williams, and it was more of a vote of confidence, honestly, in the team. Ultimately we missed the playoffs by one game and we all have to take responsibility for that. But the trade was able to set us up with assets that we liked a lot.”

The roundabout path led them to a catcher who was startled by the move. Less than five months earlier, Contreras had started the All-Star Game as a designated hitter with the Braves. After the trade, he sent a tweet with eight broken-heart emojis.

“It was a little bit of a difficult moment there, because I wasn’t expecting a trade,” Contreras said through an interpreter, the assistant coach Daniel de Mondesert. “Once it passed, you understand this is a business and it was time to take advantage of the opportunity the Brewers gave me and the confidence they put in me.”

Murphy has been on the injured list since straining an oblique muscle on Opening Day, but he was a good get for Atlanta: a former Gold Glove winner, he made the All-Star team last season and is under team control through 2029. But the Brewers are thrilled with Contreras, both for his production at the plate and leadership behind it.

“He’s not warm and fuzzy; he’s not a guy that’s going to go up and hug you or give you a bunch of compliments as a pitcher,” manager Pat Murphy said. “But they figured out that, wow, they really just trust him. They trust his instincts, and they trust what he puts down. They trust that he’s engaged in the game and the scouting report. He keeps you focused.”

Catching is the family business. William’s brother, Willson, is five years older and a three-time All-Star catcher now with the Cardinals.

“One of the best things that’s happened to me in my life is being able to have my brother go through everything that I’ve gone through,” William Contreras said. “I take all his suggestions and all of his recommendations for me.”

Hours after William spoke, the Mets’ J.D. Martinez broke Willson’s left arm with a swing in the Cardinals’ game in St. Louis.

It was the latest and most graphic casualty of teams’ efforts to improve catchers’ framing by moving them closer to the plate.

It also underscored the danger of having an essential player at a precarious position. And there is only so much the Brewers can do to protect a player like Contreras.

“He’s a warrior in that he wants to compete every day,” Pat Murphy said. “He doesn’t want to back off; he doesn’t know how to back off. He just wants to attack. It’s hard, because he doesn’t ever want to be out of there and we need him to stay healthy. But you can’t tell a lion not to hunt.”

A Gubicza scholar graduates to the majors

When Mark Gubicza was growing up in Philadelphia, he expected to go to public high school like two of his older brothers. His father, Anthony, a former minor-league pitcher, arranged for Mark to go to a private school, William Penn Charter, instead. Mark wanted no part of it.

“I said, ‘I’m gonna run away from home’ — so he literally gave me my suitcase,” Gubicza said by phone from the Angels broadcast booth before a game in Pittsburgh. “I packed it up, walked downstairs, walked out of our row home, went about two feet and looked back and said, ‘Eh, I’ll go.’

“And it was probably the best decision ever, not only to be in that environment — I played three sports initially — but just how hard I had to work academically. You’re not just coasting through. It made me a hard worker like my dad was, as a mailman.”

Gubicza went from Penn Charter to the Royals as a second-round draft choice in 1981 and soon began a long career as a two-time All-Star starter for Kansas City and the Angels. After his father died in 1991, Mark established a scholarship in his honor for a student from Roxborough, his Philadelphia neighborhood.

Michael Siani, a fleet outfielder for the Cardinals, is the first of those scholars to reach the major leagues. He’ll play in front of Gubicza next week when the Cardinals visit Anaheim — the same setting as his call-up last season with the Cincinnati Reds, who took him in the fourth round from Penn Charter in 2018.


Michael Siani catches a Shohei Ohtani fly ball in an early-season game against the Dodgers. (Kelvin Kuo / USA Today)

“It’s a huge part of why I’m here,” Siani said. “He has helped me out so much. Coming from where we come from, baseball isn’t the biggest sport, so it’s cool to have someone that’s been there and done it. Getting to meet him and talk to him, understanding what he did and how successful he was, it’s so cool. It was a great situation and I was lucky to have the chance to be there and have that scholarship.”

When Siani made his debut in 2022, he joined Gubicza, Ruben Amaro Jr. and Jack Meyer as big leaguers from Penn Charter, which now has an annual high school tuition of $47,200. His father, Ralph, runs a barber shop — a family business since 1922 — where guests wait in seats from Veterans Stadium, the former home of the Phillies and Eagles.

Siani is eager to play for the first time in Philadelphia at the end of May and improved his chances by hitting safely in six straight starts recently, bringing his average over .200.

“I text Chip Caray all the time: ‘Take care of my boy!’” Gubicza said, referring to the Cardinals broadcaster. “He said, ‘The dude is so fast, plays unbelievable defense, and if he hits a little bit, he’s gonna be here for a long time — and by the way, he’s a great kid.’ And that’s the most important thing for me.”

Gimme Five

Five bits of ballpark wisdom

Living on the roster’s edge, with Houston’s Tayler Scott

For Major League Baseball players, job opportunities have never been more plentiful. The past three years are the only ones in history with at least 1,450 different players seeing action in a season. Sticking around, though, is a whole lot harder. Just ask Tayler Scott of the Houston Astros.

Scott, 32, has appeared for seven teams in four MLB seasons, sandwiched around a two-year detour to the Hiroshima Carp in Japan. He’s an alumnus of the Mariners, Orioles, Padres, Dodgers, Red Sox and Athletics — and all of their Triple-A affiliates. None of those teams gave him more than an eight-game look.

Simply reaching the majors was a notable achievement for Scott, the first pitcher in MLB history who was born in South Africa. (The first position player, infielder Gift Ngoepe, played for Pittsburgh and Toronto in 2017 and 2018.) Scott showed such skill as a boy that he moved to the United States at age 16 to enroll in high school in Arizona.


Tayler Scott reacts after getting an out against Toronto earlier this season. (Troy Taormina / USA Today)

“I was playing every sport I could when I was a kid, and I saw kids throwing a baseball around,” Scott said. “I liked any ball sport, so I went and checked it out to see what they were doing — playing catch, catching with a glove. I started playing it, and it was intriguing. I kind of had a natural ability for throwing and catching it, and it just progressed.”

The Cubs drafted Scott in the fifth round in 2011, but the Astros, he said, are the team that has “fully understood how to use my arsenal effectively and properly.” A low-arm slot righty with an excellent changeup, Scott has a 2.76 ERA in 16 games — his career high for any team. Here are five insights on the world of an itinerant ballplayer:

1. Uncertainty is a way of life. Coming over from South Africa, I’m just used to traveling and moving and stuff. And eventually you understand how the business side works and kind of see the moves coming. But you’re just never in any sort of comfort zone. You’re kind of always on the edge of: Am I staying or am I going? Am I going to get called up or am I going down? Staying with one team for a longer time basically feels a little odd, when you’re not moving around and stuff.

2. Hurry up and wait. When I was with the Dodgers, I was called into the office with the manager, but usually the GM or someone will call you. Then you kind of go into limbo for about a week and just sit around and wait to see what’s going to happen. Are you going back to Triple A? Is a team going to pick you up? During those times I don’t go back home (to Arizona); I stick around where the team is, because I usually have an apartment there and I have to wait to see where I’m going and pack up.

3. In Japan, it’s a whole different ballgame. Japan was a tough experience because it was during COVID. But obviously the style of baseball is different, so you have to change the way you throw. It’s not like in the big leagues here where you’re going for strikeouts, swings and misses. In Japan, they’re making contact and not striking out, so you have to pitch to contact, rely on groundballs more, that style of pitching. It takes a while to get used to that, because you waste your time trying to get swings and misses, and they just don’t do that. So you kind of get into trouble when you try and do that.

4. It would have been fun to stay a while in … San Diego, Petco Park. That stands out to me. I love the stadium. Obviously the city’s great, right? It’s just something about the way the stadium’s set up. It’s a little different than usual baseball. Others were cool in a historical sense, but in San Diego, just the feel of the mound, it was different.

5. Take some souvenirs. You get to keep all the stuff you’ve worn — shorts, shirts, jerseys, hats. I don’t think they want your sweat on anybody else’s jersey (laughs). I just keep the jerseys and the hats; I give them to my dad and he takes them back to South Africa. He has them on display there.

Off the Grid

A historical detour from the Immaculate Grid

Howard Battle, Toronto Blue Jays/third base

Howard Battle played six games at third base for Toronto in 1995, making him one of 134 possible answers for a square on the Grid last Sunday. This is about a much smaller club.

Battle played for Atlanta in the 1999 World Series — except, he didn’t actually play. Bobby Cox, the Braves’ manager, announced him as a pinch hitter for John Rocker in the eighth inning of Game 1. Joe Torre, the Yankees’ manager, countered by replacing Mike Stanton with Mariano Rivera.

The right-handed Battle was then pulled for a lefty, Keith Lockhart, who grounded out. Battle never got into another game in the World Series (or in the majors, as it turned out). With that, he became just the second player ever with a phantom World Series career: officially playing, but never actually seeing the field.

The next to do it was Mike Fontenot for San Francisco in 2010. But the first to do it was a hallowed name in sports history: Jim Thorpe.

Thorpe, the Olympic gold medalist and Pro Football Hall of Famer, played six MLB seasons in the 1910s, mostly with the New York Giants. In Game 5 of the 1917 World Series, against the White Sox, he played without playing. Here’s how the Oakland Tribune breathlessly described it:

Thorpe, the paper wrote, “yesterday made one of the most unique records ever made by a World Series player. When Reb Russell was announced as the Sox pitcher, Thorpe was told he would have his chance in right field for the Giants, for Dave Robertson is weak against left-handed pitchers. But listen!”

Listen, folks, to Thorpe’s full Fall Classic experience: Listed sixth in the batting order, he watched as the Giants dinged Russell for a walk, single and double in the top of the first inning at Old Comiskey Park. At that point, the White Sox switched to righty Eddie Cicotte, later to become one of the notorious “Eight Men Out” for his role in throwing the 1919 World Series.

And out went Thorpe. Giants manager John McGraw, a master tactician, did not build his legend on sentimentality. He inserted Robertson, who singled in a run and had two more hits off Cicotte that day. The White Sox won, though, and took the series in six games. Thorpe did not play in the finale, and after a second-place finish with the Giants the next season, he finished up with the Boston Braves in 1919.

Classic Clip

“Last Comiskey”

Matt Flesch interviewed three dozen people for “Last Comiskey,” his three-part documentary about the final season of the original Comiskey Park in Chicago. Flesch, a lifelong White Sox fan, talked to many players he cheered as a teenager in that summer of 1990, but other interview subjects were even more thrilling.

“I really enjoyed the beer vendors,” Flesch said. “They don’t get enough credit.”

The film is so intoxicating, you can practically taste the Schlitz. With vintage fan footage supplementing the many voices, Flesch brings to life a ballpark and a season when the White Sox were basking in nostalgia and brimming with hope.

They had Hall of Famers young and old (Frank Thomas and Carlton Fisk), the superstar organist Nancy Faust, a beloved clubhouse manager named “Chicken Willie” Thompson, a spicy rivalry with the brawny Oakland A’s, the first-ever “Turn Back The Clock” promotion and one last pennant race in their 80-year-old South Side jewel box.

“Sitting in the upper deck, you were still so close to the field,” Flesch said. “The noise was something else, it was like a theater. And the team was a ton of fun that year.”

Three former White Sox — Ron Kittle, Jack McDowell and Donn Pall — are scheduled to join Flesch at the Chicago History Museum on Thursday for the launch of the book companion, also called “Last Comiskey,” by Ken Smoller. In a mostly dreary season for the current White Sox, it should be a fun occasion to celebrate the deep roots of the franchise.

(Top photo of William Contreras: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)



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