Sliders: A tribute to Scott Miller, a master storyteller who was ‘good to the core'

New York Times

27-06-2025

Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of baseball.
The bulletin marked a sobering division, a before-and-after moment that could not be erased. Tom Kelly remembers it well from his friend Rick Stelmaszek, his longtime coach with the Minnesota Twins.
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'He calls me and says, 'I got a problem,'' Kelly said by phone the other day. 'I said, 'What's that?' He says, 'I've got cancer.' And then he said, 'Pancreatic.' I about dropped the phone. I said, 'Oh, Jesus.' I know that's not a good one.'
Pancreatic cancer took Stelmaszek in 2017, at age 69. Last week it took Scott Miller, one of the best baseball writers of his generation, at 62. His friends in the press box feared the news from his awful diagnosis nearly two years ago. But Scott never seemed too down about it. While fighting cancer, he wrote a book.
'Skipper: Why Baseball Managers Matter (and Always Will)' is a lasting tribute to Scott's spirit. Grand Central Publishing released it a month before Scott died.
Kelly was the manager Scott knew best, as the Twins' beat writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1994 to 1999. The team was in decline. It could have been tense for Kelly, but not with Scott. He brought such humanity to the job that the people he covered rewarded him with more.
'He wanted to know the ins and outs of it,' Kelly said. 'Where most of the others were, 'Hey, that's great,' he'd put on that quizzical look, like, 'No, come on.' You do your initial five, 10 minutes, whatever it is, and there might be seven or eight people in the room. You sort of give them what they sort of want and they get out. And he would come back for the real answers.'
The baseball world lost Scott Miller today.@Ken_Rosenthal talks about Scott Miller, and our hearts go out to the Miller family ❤️ pic.twitter.com/2VTSiegLiu
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) June 22, 2025
It is one thing for fellow writers to laud a fallen colleague, and Scott was warmly hailed by many of us on social media. It is another for the people in uniform to feel the same kind of connection. For the best of us, like Scott, interacting with players, coaches and managers is not the adversarial jousting you might think.
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'We can't really ask for more from you guys than to be fair and write what you see — if I stunk, I stunk,' said LaTroy Hawkins, the retired pitcher. 'But I also know that, the closer he and I became, it became a lot easier to read it if I wasn't doing well, because I understood that he had a job to do.
'We just always talked. Wherever I was playing, if Scott's there, we're gonna kick it for 35, 40 minutes in the clubhouse. And if he needed to talk to somebody else — 'Hey, go talk to Scott. Scott's a good dude. He's not just good on the outside, he's good to the core.''
It's hard to foster meaningful one-on-one relationships while also needing other voices, all to be collected in a limited access period. The best insights might be off the record, but you also need usable quotes for the story of the moment.
Nobody balanced that like Scott, said Dave Roberts, the Los Angeles Dodgers' manager and a pivotal figure in 'Skipper.' Roberts let Scott shadow him for a late-season stretch in 2023, then met with him again for coffee last fall, in the post-World Series frenzy, so Scott could have up-to-date material before publication.
'He understood what a relationship meant, for not only the short-term — getting something on paper — but also the long-term,' Roberts told The Athletic's Fabian Ardaya. 'So for me to offer up my time with him was a no-brainer. I just thought that Scott had a different perspective on the game, in the sense of, he loved the game but he loved the people within the game.'
Miller's book is an ode to personal relationships, a reminder of their value in an era saturated with data. If that sounds like an old-time sensibility, consider that his first book, 'Ninety Percent Mental,' with Bob Tewksbury in 2018, examined a side of the sport that went largely unexplored for decades.
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'It goes back to his curiosity,' said Tewksbury, an All-Star pitcher who became the mental skills coach for the Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants. 'He wanted to learn more about psychology and mental skills and what players go through. I think he knew how important it was because he'd been around the game so long, he saw players struggle and knew that this is an important field.
'I would get emails from people that read the book and would say how much it helped them — whether a player or a firefighter or somebody in law enforcement — and I'd send them to Scott and he would always be so happy. Like, 'That's why we wrote it.' It had an impact.'
I knew Scott best at the New York Times, where we covered the majors together early this decade. His archive is filled with richly detailed profiles and sharp takes on the news. I was proud to work with Scott, both at the Times and at SiriusXM, and will never find a friendlier, more upbeat or reliable teammate. I miss him terribly.
But the piece I remember most, the one that defines Scott, was a story he did for Bleacher Report in 2017 on Carl Crawford, a longtime outfielder who had been released the year before by the Dodgers with more than $30 million left on his contract.
The topic was inherently touchy — a reclusive, once-great player being paid a fortune to go home. Why would he open his home to a writer? Because that writer was Scott.
'It's the word trust,' said Jim Tracy, the former Dodgers manager. 'I guarantee you: Carl Crawford implicitly trusted Scotty Miller to sit down with him and have that conversation. And not everybody garners that type of respect when it comes to situations like that. In order to do the real, real tough story, there has to be trust and respect.'
The story lives online, with a Houston dateline and an opening paragraph so divinely poignant that it breaks your heart.
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'The big iron gates swing open,' Scott Miller wrote, 'and from the front door on the other end of the long concrete driveway a voice cheerfully hollers, 'Come on in!''
It's been a tough season for Atlanta Braves center fielder Michael Harris II, who finished Thursday hitting .215 with a career-low .564 OPS. Even so, Harris has managed a positive bWAR because of his outstanding defense.
'You have a lot more slumps on offense than you do defense,' Harris said this week. 'As long as you're saving runs for the team and still doing the little things outside of where you're struggling at, I guess it makes things a little easier. But on the defense side, I definitely feel like I can always have an impact there.'
Harris, the National League's Rookie of the Year in 2022, won a Gold Glove in the minors and is still a highlight waiting to happen. He does some of his best work on the road against the rival Philadelphia Phillies, with catches like this one last August to rob Austin Hays of a homer …
… and this one last month to keep Max Kepler in the park.
Here are five insights from Harris on what it's like to steal a home run.
Study your surroundings: You have to. In BP, you go check out the warning track, how many steps it takes you to get to the fence while you're on the run. A lot of it comes down to what you do in BP and how you prepare and know the field before the game.
Defensive backs make great outfielders: I've got a little bit of a background playing cornerback (in high school), so I feel like that (when) I try to go up and get some balls from the offense. It's sort of the same thing, I mean, you're facing towards the offense and you've got to have good footwork and use your hips to get to the right angle. Try to get it to a spot and know where it's at, where it's going to be and try to minimize runs.
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Timing is everything: I guess the hardest thing is not jumping too early or too late. I guess I think a lot of people make the mistake of getting to the wall too early and trying to jump then and they get stuck against the wall. That's why I like to run with the ball, because if you get stuck to the wall, you have no chance to even make the play. So I'd rather just run with the ball and then take the momentum, or if it comes back in, I'm running to a stop.
Almost any wall can be a robbery site: I like Philly, because you can get back there and actually get a chance to get a lot of them. With some of them, it depends on the material of the wall because sometimes you can use the pad on the wall to get higher. So I guess it all depends — Kevin Pilar did climb up that tall wall in Toronto back in the day. I guess any fence is possible just depending on the athleticism of the player.
Examples abound: I like any Andruw Jones catch. Denzel Clarke's catch this year against the Angels was nice. I liked Pillar's in Toronto. And who was the guy who robbed him in the dead center and he wasn't looking — like, over the back shoulder? Gary Matthews Jr. That was one of my favorites.
The A's broke ground on their new ballpark in Las Vegas this week. But it will take generations for the new place to house as many Hall of Famers as its predecessor in Oakland.
The Coliseum was practically a required stop on the way to Cooperstown. Sure, there were longtime A's like Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, Rickey Henderson, Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson. But look at all the other greats who dropped by for a brief stay.
All of these future Hall of Famers logged time with Oakland: Willie McCovey, Dick Allen, Joe Morgan, Don Sutton, Dave Parker, Goose Gossage, Tim Raines, Frank Thomas and Mike Piazza.
But the trend started with Billy Williams, who arrived from the Chicago Cubs in a trade for Darold Knowles, Bob Locker and Manny Trillo on Oct. 23, 1974. Williams — who qualified for the A's/40-WAR square on Tuesday — had never reached the playoffs in 16 seasons with the Cubs. The A's had won three consecutive World Series and were adding a six-time All-Star who would soon hit his 400th homer.
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'Well, that settles it,' Pat Kelly, a White Sox outfielder, told the Chicago Daily News. 'Those (guys) are gonna get their four in a row.'
The 1975 A's did get Williams to the postseason. But they fell to the Boston Red Sox in the ALCS, and Williams went hitless in a three-game sweep.
Thirty-two years ago at Milwaukee County Stadium, ballpark entertainment changed forever. As the visiting Toronto Blue Jays casually warmed up before the bottom of the fifth inning of a win over the Brewers, three cased meats burst through the left field wall for a bumbling journey into our hearts.
The racing sausages, who had existed only as crude scoreboard animation, had come to life as a bratwurst, hot dog and Polish sausage. As the footage shows, Bratwurst was the winner, with costume creator Michael Dillon inside. The race became a daily staple of Brewers games the next spring, with Hot Dog and Chorizo now part of the gang.
These days, you'll find presidents, pierogies, power tools and other oversized, spindly-legged characters dashing around your local warning track. The Mets are the latest to join the craze, with a pizza slice, ferry boat, skyscraper and subway car competing to see who will beat the hapless Bronx giraffe every game. It's all lots of fun, but remember … Milwaukee's best.
(Top photo of Tyler Kepner and Scott Miller in July 2024: Courtesy of Tyler Kepner)