There weren’t a lot of bright spots on the 2019 San Francisco Giants. Pablo Sandoval was fun here and there, particularly when he pitched. Alex Dickerson hit a few dingers. Donovan Solano isn’t cooked just yet. For the most part, though, those were marginal. The real splash, the only real splash, was Mike Yastrzemski, who went from feel-good legacy to bona fide major league outfielder in the course of one slugging season.

2019 was already surprising enough for the career minor leaguer. After showing flashes of patience, power, and a feel to hit in previous seasons, he put them all together in Triple-A Sacramento, and there was no one blocking him from the majors. Four hundred plate appearances and a .272/.334/.518 batting line later, he was the best outfielder on the team, and the Giants were constructing their 2020 roster with one spot on the depth chart written in pen.

If the start of 2020 is any indication, however, last year wasn’t Yastrzemski’s ceiling. His ceiling is this year’s white-hot start: .310/.473/.643 with three homers, good for a 204 wRC+. Oh yeah — he’s playing freaking center field every day, too. Twelve games does not a season make, but if you could make his whole season out of the last two weeks, he’d basically be Mike Trout — an up-the-middle defender with a 200-ish wRC+.

Is he a good fielder? It’s unclear. He looked good both by the eye test and by the advanced statistics troika of DRS, UZR, and OAA last year in the corners, and looks at least reasonable in center so far this season. He’s not a long-term premium defender — he’s nearly 30, for one thing, and has only average straight-line speed — but tuck him in a corner, and he’ll be inoffensive at worst and an asset at best.

But the exciting part about Yastrzemski isn’t the fielding, at least not mostly. It’s the offensive value, the leading-baseball-in-WAR offensive explosion that makes Giants fans mostly shrug their shoulders but also rub their hands together greedily when they think no one’s looking. Sure, it’s early. Sure, it’s not our year. But it could be real, right? The team could have found a new superstar, right? Read the rest of this entry »

When I launched this OOTP fan-sourcing project in March, the prospect of an actual season of baseball felt remote. I didn’t give much thought to how I’d feel virtually managing the Brewers while the real Brewers played, because it simply wasn’t an option. The real Brewers weren’t playing, regardless of what we did, so it hardly seemed to matter.

Why bring this up now? Because having both sets of Brewers play at the same time is making it difficult to keep track of the two. In the real world, Lorenzo Cain opted out of playing this season, leaving the Brewers scrambling for center field depth. They resorted to playing Avisaíl García in center yesterday, but they’ll be searching for answers elsewhere. In the Out Of The Park universe, Cain hurt his wrist throwing the ball — he’ll be out a week or more, leaving the team scrambling for depth in the interim.

In the real world, the rotation has some questions. Josh Lindblom left his first start early with back spasms, Brett Anderson looked shaky in his return from injury, and it feels like more arms will be needed. In OOTP, Lindblom missed the first four months of the season with injury, Anderson perpetually looks shaky in his return from injury, and even after an early trade for Kevin Gausman, more arms are surely needed.

Oh, right. There are some big differences. First, the OOTP Brewers are without the services of franchise cornerstone Christian Yelich for the next month or so after he strained his oblique. The team is running out a platoon of Tyrone Taylor and Matt Joyce in left field to replace as much as possible of Yelich’s production — oof. No team could replace Yelich’s production and not miss a beat, but that feels particularly bad, even if Joyce can still hit righties. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries, trades, and ineffectiveness — it’s time to reconstruct a roster on FanGraphs Live. Read the rest of this entry »

To the surprise of no one, COVID-19 continues to affect the baseball season. Plans have changed and re-changed as two teams have seen clusters of positive tests. While this news is, as always, subject to change, here’s our most recent update.

The Marlins In Purgatory

As of now, the Marlins are scheduled for a Tuesday game in Baltimore. There is, as yet, no information on which players will be available, but the Marlins are behaving as if they’ll need some new blood: they’ve acquired Justin Shafer, Josh Smith, Mike Morin, and Richard Bleier in the last week, and signed Logan Forsythe. Given that the league’s testing protocol requires two negative tests more than 24 hours apart before a player can return to the field, they may need even more reinforcements on the hitting side as well.

The Marlins players who tested positive for COVID-19 took the bus back to Miami. That group comprises 18 players, which left 12 of the initial 30-man roster in Philadelphia awaiting their next move — minus Isan Díaz, who opted out of the season over the weekend. Those 11, plus the four new pitchers, will join players from the 60-man player pool to form what passes for a major league roster and play against the Orioles.

The long-term effects of the last week’s postponements will be harder to plan. The Marlins have played only three games this year, which leaves them with a lot of ground to make up. They were originally scheduled to play Philadelphia in Miami this week before the Orioles and Yankees played an impromptu series to minimize cancelations. At some point, the team will be more or less back to its initial form, and they’ll have a lot of games to play. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the beginning of August, and one only one pitcher is on pace for a 6 WAR season. In a normal year, that would be disappointing; there are usually something like four or five of them. In this short year, on the other hand, it’s downright amazing, and I don’t know a better way to say it than that: right now, Shane Bieber is downright amazing.

Through two starts, Bieber is putting up numbers like peak Craig Kimbrel, only he’s doing it as a starter. You’ve seen individual games like this before, so the numbers might not sound completely wild to you, but they’re wild. A 54% strikeout rate and 2% walk rate, a 0 ERA, a -0.36 FIP; that’s all obviously excellent in an abstract sense. To truly understand it, however, you have to take a closer look at Bieber’s stuff. He’s absolutely bullied his way through two straight dominant performances, and there’s no better way to do it than to take a trip through his overpowering secondary stuff. Watch hitters flail, and you can get a better sense of how thoroughly masterful Bieber has been this year.

In 2018 and 2019, Bieber’s calling card was his wipeout slider. He threw it 23% of the time in 2018 and 26% of the time in 2019, and hitters simply couldn’t do anything with it. They whiffed on roughly 43% of their swings against the pitch in both years, often looking foolish:

Read the rest of this entry »

In case it wasn’t clear from the fact that six different teams, a full 20% of the league, have already faced cancelations due to positive COVID-19 tests on the Marlins, Phillies, and Cardinals, Rob Manfred put it in plain terms today:

BREAKING: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told MLBPA executive director Tony Clark on Friday that if the sport doesn’t do a better job of managing the coronavirus, it could shut down for the season, sources tell ESPN.

Story at ESPN: https://t.co/o0OL7JzowN

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 31, 2020

While the specifics of his call with Clark haven’t been made public, the broad strokes are known. If positive tests jump, and particularly if there is another Marlins-like outbreak, the season will likely end. Given that the second round of Cardinals’ testing hasn’t come back, that could happen as soon as Monday.

There’s no sugar coating it: everyone has to do better. Public health officials have confronted the league about players ignoring its own protocols. Watch a game, and you’ll see a hodgepodge of masked and unmasked players, plenty of finger-licking, and about as much spitting as you would see in the pre-pandemic world. It’s fair to say that players also haven’t taken social distancing and self-enforced isolation as seriously as many hoped when the plan for the season went ahead. Passan quotes one high-ranking official as saying, “There are some bad decisions being made.” Meanwhile, Bleacher Report’s Scott Miller reported that Marlins players went out and visited the hotel bar while in Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday evening, Beau Taylor hurt his hand. That is, of course, an occupational hazard of catching; pretty much everything a catcher does hurts their hands. Johnny Bench might be able to hold seven hamburgers in his hand, but have you seen that paw? Yikes!

In any case, Taylor didn’t hurt his hand in any of the more normal ways that catchers do. He didn’t jam it into the ground trying to smother a ball in the dirt, or take a foul tip ricochet off the base of his palm. No, he caught Edwin Encarnación’s bat with the tip of his glove, and though he tried to play it off, this has to have stung:

That will smart for a few days, and the situation was a tough one as well. It’s painful (see what I did there?) to advance a runner to third with only one out, particularly in a one run game in the ninth inning. The difference between needing one and two runs to tie is a big deal; it roughly halves your chances of a comeback. That isn’t to say that Taylor’s catcher’s interference cost Cleveland the game — they didn’t score in the bottom of the frame, so it hardly mattered. But it was a bit of foreshadowing of what was to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday night, Michael Wacha made a cathartic first start with the Mets. Over five solid innings, he struck out four while allowing only one run on a Mitch Moreland solo shot. He walked away with the win, his first in more than a year, and gave Mets fans hope that they might cheat the injury gods and assemble an acceptable rotation. But wait! Michael Wacha was last seen being terrible. It’s time to do some digging. The game is afoot!

We start this investigation, like so many others of sudden pitching competence, with the fastball. But alas, there’s nothing to be gleaned from it. Wacha averaged 94.3 mph on the pitch, a hair higher than last year’s season-long average but only a hair higher than last July’s mark. Allowing for the fact that the switch to Hawkeye might come with some calibration errors, we can rule out a newly lively fastball accounting for the fact that the Red Sox looked flummoxed.

Or can we? Why not spiral deeper, hunt further for fastball clues? His spin rate is up by nearly 150 rpm. Mayhap that’s the culprit. Mayhap indeed — but in my opinion, it’s not likely. Spin is one of the things to be most skeptical about in the new system. Perhaps skeptical is the wrong word; maybe we should be skeptical of the old measurements. The Hawkeye system measures spin directly with high-speed cameras, while the old radar-based system imputed spin from other factors. The point is, spin is going to be a tricky thing to tackle for a good while. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Cardinals got some bad news. Miles Mikolas, the team’s second-best pitcher and a valuable source of bulk innings, suffered a setback in dealing with the arm injury that had bothered him all year. He’ll need surgery to repair his flexor tendon, which will keep him out for all of 2020.

After a scintillating 2018 (2.83 ERA, 3.28 FIP, and a sixth-place finish in Cy Young voting), Mikolas came back to earth slightly in 2019. Even then, his pinpoint control and ability to coax grounders out of opposing batters gave him an excellent floor. While a 4.16 ERA might not sound impressive, it was better than league average in this homer-crazed era, and 184 innings of average pitching is hugely valuable.

The Cardinals came into this season with a competition for starting spots, but Mikolas wasn’t one of the competitors. He and Jack Flaherty would provide the guaranteed quality atop the rotation, while Adam Wainwright, Dakota Hudson, Carlos Martínez, Daniel Ponce de Leon, and Kwang Hyun Kim battled it out for the remaining three slots.

If there’s good news in Mikolas’s injury, it’s that deep bench of starting options. They’re all worse than Mikolas — all worse by a decent margin — but all five look to be quality major league options, which softens the blow. Ponce de Leon, who will take the hill today, made spot starts in 2018 and 2019 with solid results. We project him to be roughly 0.25 runs of ERA worse than Mikolas, which is hardly an unbridgeable gulf.

The real trouble begins if another Cardinals starter goes down. Kim is still an option, but he currently serves as the team’s closer, which is still a pretty wild sentence to write. The bullpen is already a little short-handed, though that should change as Giovanny Gallegos settles in and Alex Reyes and Génesis Cabrera return to the team. At the moment, however, Kim probably can’t stop closing, which leaves St. Louis in a bind. Read the rest of this entry »