The Baseball Gods Are Real

Bottom of the ninth. Game 7 of the 2025 World Series. Tied 4 to 4, bases loaded, one out, the infield playing in. Daulton Varsho hits a grounder to second base, and Miguel Rojas, who had tied the game with a home run in the top of the same ninth inning, starts toward it.

Then he stumbles. A brief stumble backward, and he is a half step from falling over. He gathers himself and throws home anyway. The throw pulls catcher Will Smith's foot off the plate for a moment, and it gets back. The Blue Jays challenged, and the call stood.

From my couch it looked like an inch. One inch between a season ending and a season going on. And I said out loud what I say every time I see a play like that: that inch is where the baseball gods live.

I will be straight with you about the inch. In March 2026, MLB's own review concluded the runner was out by feet, not inches. Fine. I am keeping the line anyway, because it is how the play felt, and because the part I care about is the stumble. Rojas did not get the easy hop. He got a bad one, and he still made the throw.

What I mean by the baseball gods

Every baseball player knows they are real. Ask one. He will not laugh. He will tell you about the bloop that fell in, the ball that took a hop nobody could have planned for, the pitch that got called a strike in the ninth because the umpire felt the whole game lean that way. I wrote about the person making that call in Everybody Thinks the Umpire Is Bad.

Here is what I believe, and I want to say plainly that this is a belief and not a measurement. The baseball gods give the calls to the people who have earned them.

How do you earn them? Passion for the game. Playing it the MADE way, which is how I coach and what MADE Baseball is built on. Doing the little things right when nobody is clapping. Character. Champion habits. Humility. Grit. Never expecting anything and earning everything.

I teach this to my players. It takes young kids a while to get it. That is fine. Habits take time.

Beyond spin rate and exit velocity

I like the numbers. I am not one of those coaches who thinks they are noise. Spin rate and exit velocity tell you real things.

They do not tell you how a kid wears his uniform. They do not tell you how he plays.

Here is something I notice. Youth baseball copies the big leagues too much. Oven-mitt sliding gloves. Batting armor. I understand why a pro wears them. But watch a Perfect Game tournament and count how many ten-year-olds are dressed for a big league game. It goes right along with three $500 bats in one bag for a kid who cannot do ten push-ups. I wrote about that in Big Travel Ball, and I still mean every word.

Some of those kids are grinders. Real ones. Many are not, and a lot of them have very little humility. It is off-putting to the coaches who are true baseball people. You know the type. They respect the game, they bleed it, they are grateful to be on the field, and they play one way. The MADE way.

That is not a knock on the kids. Most of them are copying what they see on TV, and that part is on the adults.

The thing I cannot stop doing

I am past forty and I still cannot help running 100 percent to first base on a routine ground ball, even when I am the pitcher and it is the third inning.

I know the other side of that. A professional has to weigh the risk of getting hurt against the tiny chance the fielder boots it. Preserving the body is a real part of the job. Late in a close game, that math changes and everybody sprints. But in the third inning of nothing, a pro might jog it, and I get why.

Me, I cannot. It is ingrained. My legs go before my brain gets a vote. That is what I mean by habit.

The total package

Here is my honest view of the top of the sport. Talent gets you in the room. It does not keep you there.

To have even a shadow of a chance at the highest levels, you need the total package on top of elite ability. Humility. Likability. Coachability. Drive. Passion. A great teammate. Without those, in my experience you do not make affiliated ball, you do not make independent ball, and sometimes you do not make college. Teams want you around. They are picking people they will spend 162 games with, and a bus.

I am not going to tell you who is a good guy and who is not. That is not my job and I do not have the receipts. What I can do is put some public numbers on the table and let you think about them.

These are career MLB ejections, from the records I could find:

• Shohei Ohtani: none that I could find. Close Call Sports, which logs MLB ejections, has no entry for him.
• Mike Trout: listed among players who had never been ejected (as of February 2025)
• Manny Machado: 11 through June 2024, and none that I could find since
• Jazz Chisholm Jr.: 7 as of June 28, 2026

For scale, as far as I can tell the most ejected player of the last ten seasons is Bryce Harper. By my count of Close Call Sports' records, he was ejected 16 times from 2016 through 2025, and the next active player on BetMGM's list has 11 for his whole career.

Two honest caveats. An ejection is not a character test. Plenty of good teammates get tossed standing up for somebody. And these tallies come from public trackers, so a miss is possible. But when you line the numbers up, I know which kind of player I would want my kid to study.

Now add the money. Machado's contract is 11 years and $350 million, about $31.8 million a year. He played 158 games this season. Do the math and it is roughly $200,000 for every game he plays. My gut said it would be double that. It is not, and it is still a number that makes you think about what a team is paying to have a player in the lineup and in the dugout.

Iron men

Cal Ripken Jr. played 2,632 games in a row. Derek Jeter played 2,747 games over 20 seasons, and 13 of them at 150 games or more. Those guys wanted to play every single day, and the clubs let them.

As of Aug. 5, 2026, the longest active streak belonged to Matt Olson, who played his 896th straight game that day. That is real, and it is about a third of Ripken. Meanwhile, the league just proposed cutting the season to 154 games in 2029, and its spokesman called a weekly day off "good for player health."

My opinion, and only that: clubs rest players now to protect an investment, even when the player would rather be out there every day. I understand the business. I still love the player who hates to sit.

Back to the stumble

Rojas did not get a clean hop. He got a bad one at the worst time, and he made the throw. I cannot know what his reps looked like. I do know what a play like that usually comes from: ground balls nobody watched, and a mind that does not quit on the play.

Then one throw, one foot, one call, a World Series. I do not know how the baseball gods work. I know who they seem to like.

Where the game connects

This is why I am building CageList. The game I am talking about gets made in small rooms and backyards and on dirt fields, long before anyone watches. It gets made by a coach who cares about the little things, and a kid who shows up for the extra rep.

If you want that for your player, start with a coach who teaches it the right way. If you want the place where the reps happen, find a cage near you. The gods are watching the work, not the gear.

Isaac Hess is a coach, a former pro player and the founder of CageList.

Cover photo: Joe Kennedy, Los Angeles Times, UCLA Library Special Collections, CC BY 4.0. Steve Garvey scores over catcher Vic Correll, 1976.