I think it might be time.
I woke up in the most pain I’ve ever been in.
Shooting pain raced through my back, and despite trying to take deep breaths and relax, the pain wouldn’t go away. It took about an hour, but the pain dissipated enough for me to fall asleep.
Given that I had an eight-month old, I figured the pain had come from holding said child. The pain had gone away by the next morning, and I decided to be more careful about how I picked him up. The pain didn’t return.
Until it did. My wife will now say that I’m a complete moron, and she’s probably right. But it happened again in the middle of the night. It took about an hour for the pain to go away enough for me to fall asleep, but I got there. We were back in the cycle.
At this point, I was more curious as to what was causing it, but we were in the middle of a sleep regression, two bouts of RSV in about 3 weeks, and trying to get through the holidays. My temporary (thought excruciating) back pain was low on my priority list.
Until a few months later when it was bad enough to last a few hours. This time, I made it to the bathroom to get some ibuprofen, and after a half hour or so (it’s hard to tell at 2 in the morning on an already sleep-deprived body), I realized the pain wasn’t in my back. It was in my side, just below my right ribcage.
I Googled (as one does), and everything popped up with the same results – gall bladder. I already had a physical scheduled a couple weeks from then, so I waited until I saw my PCP.
When I brought it up to her, she wasn’t convinced it was a gall bladder issue, but she also didn’t like that the pain woke me out of my sleep. Even if it wasn’t my gall bladder, it was something, and she was willing to at least let me get an ultrasound to see if it was. If not, she had a couple other theories.
Turns out … it was my gall bladder. I scheduled surgery for a week or so later, but I didn’t make it. After nearly vomiting everywhere at a First Watch, we made it to the ER where my surgeon happened to be working that Saturday morning. He took it out that afternoon.
I could try to ignore the warning signs, but it didn’t make it go away.
Two months ago, we took a look at Ozzie Albies. After a few years of subpar (for him) performance for the Atlanta Braves, there were troubling signs, but where are we now?
At the time, his Statcast was …
And now it’s …
That … is not better. The exit velocities are down. The bat speed is down. The strikeouts and whiffs are up. But we are walking more, so there’s that?
His 110 wRC+ has plummeted to 84, and ZIPs (normally bullish on Ozzie) has adjusted to a 100 wRC+ for the rest of the season. Other projection systems have stayed around 110, so I guess there’s that.
Baseball Prospectus has a set of Deserved metrics, and it takes a look at the underlying items behind Ozzie’s .232/.310/.339. It gives him a line of … .244/.323/.356. That’s … better? … but it’s also still behind last season’s performance.
The other thing that’s worse is that, after looking like a net positive defensively earlier in the year, he is back to being a below-average defender at second. The gains we were hoping he actually made with the glove seem to be deteriorating back toward where he has been recently.
One of the interesting things in looking at all of this is that second base performance is down league-wide. Among the 9 primary positions (DH included), second basemen are hitting .241/.313/.364, good (?) for a 92 wRC+. It is the worst hitting position on the diamond in 2025. It’s worse than catchers and center fielders. The days of Dan Uggla appear to be behind us.
Now, that doesn’t really have much to do with how Ozzie is playing. There’s no discrimination against second basemen happening. Honestly, even understanding the replacement level for second basemen appears to be lower, it doesn’t make me feel any better about where our fun-loving second sacker is offensively.
We’ve been looking at the warning signs. We can probably ignore them for a little longer.
But it won’t make them go away.