Five years ago, gimmick defenses were bush league. I don’t just mean that in the pejorative baseball sense, though of course I mean that too. Rather, I mean that when Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh were running the Sonoma Stompers, they toyed with adding gimmick defenses to their indy ball team, and the team rebelled. The players tolerated it — not without reservation — but the reason the wild defensive alignments merited mention in the book is because they were wild.

That was 2015, however, and sensibilities have changed since then. Strange defensive alignments are hardly unusual now. Joey Votto faced a four-man outfield in 2017, and it’s gotten weirder from there. Joey Gallo faces four-man outfields with some frequency. Five-ish man infields have sometimes been a thing in do-or-die late game situations, but the Dodgers rolled one out against Eric Hosmer in the middle innings last year.

I know what you’re thinking. Ben’s going to talk about the “seven-man outfield” the Royals used against Miguel Cabrera. I’m not exactly sure that’s a novel defensive alignment, though. Backing up when somebody slow is batting isn’t the same as forfeiting a right fielder or inventing a new position. It was funny, no doubt, the ultimate mark of disrespect for someone’s speed, but teams have been doing something similar to Albert Pujols for years.

Even though the shock of novel positioning has mostly worn off, I did do a double take on Monday night. With the Pirates attempting to lock down a 5-1 win against the Brewers (about that…), Justin Smoak came to bat. The Pirates checked their laminated positioning cards, shuffled around, and presto! Four in the outfield:

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Here’s something you hear a lot that also has the benefit of being true: baseball is a sport of haves and have nots. There are super teams scattered around the league, the Dodgers and Yankees and Astros of the world. There are plenty of teams that aren’t trying to compete this year; the Tigers and Royals spring to mind, but it’s not like there aren’t others.

In a technical sense, however, the league achieved a rare degree of parity over the weekend — and as we all know, being technically correct is the best kind of correct. After each team played three games, the entire league stood at either 1-2 or 2-1, with fifteen teams apiece in each camp. In that odd, specific sense, this is one of the best years ever for parity in baseball.

Come again? Per no less an authority than MLB.com, this is the first time in the last 66 years that no team started 3-0 in their first three games. In that contrived sense, then, this is the most parity since 1954. Given that it was far easier to have no team start 3-0 then (there were only 16 teams), you would even be justified in saying that this was the most balanced start of all time.

That sounds, without putting too much thought into it, very impressive. 1954! Man hadn’t landed on the moon. The LOOGY hadn’t been invented, or the personal computer. It was a very different time.

As fun as it would be to leave it at “Wow, that was crazy,” I thought I’d spoil the fun with a little math. First things first — what if we think every team is evenly matched? Let’s leave home field advantage out for now — we’re just approximating anyway, and that makes the math cleaner. The math for a single series is easy; if each game is a coin flip, all we need to do is find the odds of getting either three heads or three tails in a row. Read the rest of this entry »

The first few days of baseball have brought us our first taste of this year’s new extra innings rules. Sure, the rules were around in the minor leagues before now. Sure, teams theoretically care about their prospects winning. But for the most part, this is new — high stakes games with untested rules to try out. There have now been five extra inning games. Let’s walk through the decisions in each of them to see whether teams are playing the odds or acting rashly.

Angels at A’s

The game between the Angels and A’s was the first extra innings contest of the year. In the top of the 10th, the Angels played it by the book. With first-ever ghost runner Shohei Ohtani on second, Jared Walsh swung away. Whoops:

What can we say tactically, other than that you shouldn’t do that as a runner? Not much. Matt Olson made an excellent read, Matt Chapman made an excellent scoop, and it’s probably a bad break for the Angels that their first automatic runner was the player who had the most on his plate in summer camp, between rehabbing from Tommy John and the usual rigors of two-way work. Read the rest of this entry »

Truthfully, it’s hard to overstate what a mess yesterday’s expanded playoffs announcement was. Changing the rules of engagement for an entire league mere hours before the season starts is as weird as it sounds. Announcements made in haste lead to confusion, which is how the baseball world spent a few hours trying to figure out whether top seeds would draft opponents, how the eight teams would be decided, and what the travel schedule would look like.

Even without the last-second shenanigans, however, it’s safe to say that the expanded playoffs aren’t universally popular. Heck, I wrote an article earlier this year decrying them. Today, I’d like to present a contrary opinion. Expanded playoffs are weird! They feel wrong. A team with a record below .500 is fairly likely to get in this year. But hear me out: I think they might work better this year than you think.

It doesn’t take some great leap of logic to understand why expanded playoffs feel weird. Baseball is a sport with a unique relationship to randomness. Every individual game feels like a coin flip. Jacob deGrom can have an off day, or Jacob Waguespack can look untouchable for seven innings.

At the same time, baseball feels like one of the least random sports. The season stretches across the better half of the year, and by the time 162 games have passed, those one-game coin flips don’t feel so random anymore. Gerrit Cole isn’t Gerrit Cole because on every day he pitches exactly to a 2.50 ERA, or anything like that. He’s Gerrit Cole because over the fullness of the season, on average, he’ll get to that 2.50 ERA, through a string of 0’s and 4’s and 1’s and 5’s. Something in our brain knows that — a game of baseball is wildly random, but a season of it is intensely skill-testing. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great unknowns in this season of great unknowns is what 2020 means for salaries. Not 2020 salaries, mind you: we’ve already figured that one out, give or take some J.A. Happ corner cases and Jacoby Ellsbury grievances. This offseason, however, is an entirely different ball of yarn. Will teams commit as much money to free agency and arbitration this year as they did last year, knowing all the while that fans in stands might be an iffy proposition in 2021? Heck, even with fans back in 2021, would teams avoid free agency to recoup the losses, real or imagined, that they suffered in 2020?

Today, the first new data point is in: per reporting by Jeff Passan, the Dodgers have signed Mookie Betts to a massive extension, totaling $392 million over 13 years. His 2020 arbitration salary ($27 million, of which he’ll receive a prorated $10 million) is in that mix; the new part of the deal is 12 years and $365 million. Per Ken Rosenthal, the deal will include salary deferrals totaling $115 million. Also per Rosenthal, there’s some financial tomfoolery on the front end; a $65 million signing bonus that confers some tax benefits and a salary structure that pays him only $17.5 million per year in 2021 and 2022, shielding the Betts from any loss due to prorating of salaries over the next two years should something unforeseen happen. Depending on how you feel about the specifics of Mike Trout’s extension and deferred money in general, it’s either the biggest or second-biggest contract in MLB history, and it takes the biggest name out of the upcoming offseason’s free agency market.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that money will flow like wine this offseason. The contract Betts signs doesn’t have all that much bearing on what a mid-tier veteran will get, or whether teams will be more aggressive about non-tendering arb-eligible players to save money. Top tier free agents have hardly been the ones getting pinched in free agency in the past five years.

The biggest point of interest from an economic side, in my opinion, is the length of the deal. Everyone knows that Mookie Betts is wildly valuable. Still, I wondered if he might be forced to accept a short but lucrative contract while teams sorted through the long-term fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Will stadiums fill to quite the same capacity ever again? Likely, but it’s no longer a certainty. Owners off-lay risk onto players wherever possible; short-term deals leave the risk of a fall in baseball revenue squarely on the guy taking the field every day. They also, of course, give the player upside should baseball’s economic fortunes improve, but that’s not at the forefront of anyone’s mind at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Think of the stereotypical curveball thrown to start an at-bat. Picture it in your mind’s eye. It’s big and loopy, starting high and then swooping into the zone to steal a strike from the incredulous batter. It’s an optical illusion, a strike disguised as a ball. It’s probably more or less 12-6 when it comes to break; a perfect rainbow from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s mitt. And if it’s an active player throwing it, you’re probably picturing Rich Hill.

In some ways, you’re not wrong. Rich Hill does throw a ton of curveballs, and first-pitch curveballs are in the strike zone far more often than hooks thrown on every other count. Hill isn’t the foremost practitioner of the art, however. Of the 359 pitchers who faced 100 batters and threw at least one curveball last year, Hill had the 41st-highest first-pitch curveball rate at 32.4%. He was just outside the top 10% of the league, not out front by a mile.

In fact, relative to how often he throws his curve, Hill is one of the least likely pitchers to throw it on the first pitch. On non-first-pitches, Hill threw it 44.4% of the time, 12 percentage points more often. Only 12 pitchers had a bigger negative differential when it came to starting batters off with curveballs relative to the rest of their pitch mix.
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Deadline deals, streaking Pirates, and more — it’s time to decide where to improve the team in this week’s look at the OOTP Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week, noted fast boy Chris Taylor made an out at second base in a Dodgers intrasquad game. That’s hardly news; players run into outs all the time, particularly in games that don’t matter, while they get used to when they should and shouldn’t gamble. There was just one notable thing about this out, however:

#DontRunOnChico

Chris Taylor tried tagging up & got thrown out by the Dodgers' clubbie ?

(via @SportsNetLA)pic.twitter.com/kdei3zYdJl

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) July 12, 2020

That’s right; the fielder on the play wasn’t an active roster Dodger, or a minor leaguer, but clubhouse attendant Francisco “Chico” Herrera. As if that play wasn’t enough — gunning down a runner from deep left field in Dodger Stadium is no joke — he doubled up on impressive plays by doubling Gavin Lux off of first base after a spectacular outfield catch:

Chico does it AGAIN! ? pic.twitter.com/MoFCwQXeKS

— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) July 15, 2020

Chicomania is in full swing in Chavez Ravine. Justin Turner wore a #LetChicoHit t-shirt for batting practice one day, and questions about Chico are a mainstay in Dodgers press conferences at this point. The excitement led play-by-play announcer Joe Davis to ask for a statistical assist:

Just chatted w/ @CespedesBBQ, who posed this question: would the Dodgers make the playoffs w/ Chico in LF? I would love to see an actual analytical breakdown, @fangraphs.

— Joe Davis (@Joe_Davis) July 16, 2020

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This morning, we concluded our review of the outfield with Jay Jaffe’s look at right fielders. Now we wrap up the position players with designated hitter.

It’s hardly a secret that the era of the dedicated slugger at designated hitter is over. The hulking, positionless behemoth that so many think of hasn’t been the norm at the position for years. The “new-school” model is a whirring mass of position players getting rest while still playing. A second baseman here, a left fielder there, sprinkle in a dash of good-hitting catcher on an off day, and bam, you’ve got a modern DH.

The top of our list, however, shows the inadequacy of that DH model. That’s something that many AL teams do these days, and it’s something that most every NL team will do this year without the benefit of a roster built around the position. But the teams that get the most value out of designated hitter aren’t doing it in parts. They’re tabbing single players — in many cases players who could play the field if necessary, but not always — and giving them the lion’s share of the at-bats. Yordan Alvarez, J.D. Martinez, Nelson Cruz — give me any of them over the best time-share DH situation in the league, the Cubs and their Kyle Schwarber and Friends model.

There are still many ways to build a DH. You can feed many mouths, or let the big dog eat. And there’s no real need to stand out at the position to be a great team; the Astros have Alvarez, but that’s a happy accident of his development, not a long-term plan on their part. Think of DH as a fancy dessert after a great meal; a standout one sticks in your mind, but it’s certainly not integral to the experience. Read the rest of this entry »