This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Rob Manfred Lays Out a Testing Plan

On Thursday night, commissioner Rob Manfred released details of the league’s plan for protecting players and personnel upon the start of the baseball season. In an interview on CNN, he laid out some key bullet points of their design:

• Players and on-site personnel will be tested multiple times a week, using an MLB-owned lab that previously conducted PED tests.
• Should anyone show any symptoms, they will be immediately tested, regardless of the regularly planned testing schedule
• Additionally, anyone who has been in contact with any individual who tests positive at any point will immediately be tested as well
• Anyone testing positive will be quarantined, effective immediately, until they have tested negative twice in a one-day span

Further details will likely emerge in the coming days. For now, it represents a meaningful step forward in the league’s planning, at least publicly. Until now, every plan we’ve heard has been couched in hypotheticals: assumptions of testing availability, general assurances that they are considering the issue, and so on. This plan is concrete and covers contingencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Should baseball return in 2020, it will likely do so with a DH in both leagues. That makes sense — given shorter training times and an increased prevalence of interleague play, getting pitchers ready to bat wouldn’t be easy. Losing sacrifice bunts is no great sacrifice, either; no one is tuning into the game to watch Johnny Cueto try to get a bunt down against Zac Gallen.

But there’s one thing I’ll greatly miss about pitchers hitting: the moments where the opposing pitcher decides to play a little unfair. Pitchers are terrible hitters — terrible! The standard way to pitch to them is generally by throwing them fastballs until they take a seat in the dugout. But sometimes, that’s not how it goes. Sometimes the pitcher on the mound is a little cruel. Sometimes, they throw a pitch that moves.

The results of throwing a tough-to-hit pitch to a bad hitter should be pretty obvious — they don’t hit it. That’s not to say there are no downsides; breaking balls and offspeed pitches miss the zone more often than fastballs, and batters are less likely to put them in play, which means longer at-bats. No one wants long at-bats against the opposing pitcher. Leashes are short enough these days without a six-pitch battle against a guy who might as well be up there holding a ham sandwich instead of a bat.

Still, it happens more often than you’d think. Pitchers saw 18,502 pitches last year as batters. Exactly 6,200 were some variety of funky; curves, sliders, cutters, splitters, change-ups, and even eephuses. That’s a low proportion, even taking into account that Statcast couldn’t classify every pitch; only 33.5%, as compared to 47.3% for hitters as a whole. But it’s noticeably higher than zero. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you. The World Series tactics series has been getting less and less wild as time goes on. That’s not to say it’s getting less and less fun — I’m actually having more fun writing it, because we’ve passed into an era where I remember the games.

It’s a lot more interesting to look for hidden gems when it’s games you’ve already seen, because they’re truly shocking. I’m not surprised that managers were calling for weird bunts in 1990 — the internet barely existed in 1990! A weird bunt or baffling pitching decision is more fun to me in 2005 than 1995, even if there are fewer true howlers. So while these three series might seem dry, remember: these weren’t that long ago! Managers really should have known better.

2007

The Red Sox assembled a lineup that would look right at home in 2020. Two on-base machines, Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis, occupied the top two spots, feeding David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, and Mike Lowell. The Rockies weren’t quite with the times — they batted Kaz Matsui, one of their worst hitters, second. But the rest of the lineup was stacked, with Matt Holliday and Todd Helton hitting 3-4.

The last act of Rocktober was nasty and short. Did Colorado leave starter Jeff Francis in too long in the first game? Maybe! But he gave up three runs in the first, trusted reliever Franklin Morales gave up seven in the fifth, and the offense only put up a single run. Maybe you can argue with intentionally walking Manny Ramirez (man on second, two outs, down three in the second), but it hardly matters when you lose by 12 runs.

Okay, fine, maybe the intentional walks were bad. In the fourth, still down three runs, the Rockies intentionally walked Mike Lowell — the man they’d walked Ramirez to face earlier in the contest. Jason Varitek doubled in two runs in the next at-bat. The walks didn’t make the difference in the game, and they weren’t even hugely consequential, but don’t intentionally walk people to face other batters you’re willing to intentionally walk! Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday afternoon’s FanGraphs Live stream features happier days for the OOTP Brewers. The offense has woken up — at least a little bit. The pitching has stabilized for now. Freddy Peralta is hitting bombs. Let’s keep the magic going!
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Rafael Devers was an absolute stud last year. He amassed more than 700 plate appearances, the first full season of his career, and put up career highs in pretty much everything. Each of the three slash stats, ISO, wRC+, WAR, defensive value, baserunning runs — seriously, pretty much everything. But I’m not here to talk about that today; we get it, Rafael Devers is great. Instead, let’s talk about another career high: eight times caught stealing.

That sounds bad, right off the jump. Eight times? The rule of thumb with stolen bases is a 75% success rate; succeed any less often, and you’re costing your team value. Take a look at the caught stealing leaderboard, and you can see that most baserunners implicitly get this tradeoff:

Going 50% on your attempts clearly isn’t that. Take a look at this one, from a May 8 game against the Orioles:

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So far this season, my OOTP Brewers updates have followed a familiar cadence. Every Monday or Tuesday, I write about some new disaster for the team. Josh Lindblom is out for the year, maybe, or Lorenzo Cain isn’t hitting. Maybe the Mets put up six trillion runs on us, or Luis Urías broke his foot rehabbing his broken hand. You get the idea — these articles has been a struggle to keep a team on the field, serialized.

This week is going to be about whatever the opposite of that is. The Brewers have played six games since my last update. They’ve won all six, taking them to 23-18 on the year. The contributions have come from everywhere — the team allowed only 15 runs in those six games while scoring 32. Josh Hader faced 20 batters and struck out 12. This is the Brewers team the Milwaukee brass hoped for in the offseason; pitching lines that look like this:

Oh yeah — Corey Knebel is back. The above game was his first one back in the majors, but he looked fine during his rehab assignment as well. In the meantime, we’ve added Tony Cingrani on a minor league contract, and after a few tune-up appearances, he’ll be ready to bolster the big league bullpen whenever needed. Mystery man Sam Pierron is still going back and forth with me about money, but between Knebel and Cingrani, the reinforcements have arrived. Read the rest of this entry »

The start of the KBO season this week has been a joyous occasion for me. The opening night broadcast reminded me of what I’d lost: the crack of the bat, the delightful feeling of not knowing what will happen next, and the thrill of a sudden defensive gem in an otherwise stately-paced game.

But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I’ve been vocal about my desire to see Dixon Machado play; shortstop defense is my favorite flavor of baseball, and he’s a wizard with the glove. The Lotte Giants weren’t scheduled for any English language games all week. Something had to give.

Luckily, if you’re willing to hunt around a bit, the English programming schedule is no barrier. The KBO broadcasts all of their games in Korean on Twitch, and so I set out to watch the Giants take on the KT Wiz and enjoy a game that was both very like what I know and utterly foreign.

My initial impression, after fast-forwarding through the pregame show, was one of emptiness:

But of course, that’s simply baseball’s new reality. I’d encountered it already in the opening broadcast, and in the time of COVID-19, it isn’t strange to see empty spaces designed to seat thousands. It was comforting, almost, a reminder that I wasn’t watching to see what was different. It’s all different. Life’s all different. I was watching to see what was the same, to see the central thread of baseball with different trappings. Read the rest of this entry »

When we last left this series, the Marlins were running the Yankees out of the stadium and Craig Counsell was bunting up a storm. Baseball tactics continued to creep inexorably forward: lineups looked more modern, pitchers threw fewer innings, and platoon advantages were seized left and right. It wasn’t all seamless — the entire 2001 series was a study in strange decision-making — but things were looking up. Did that continue?

2004

As a Cardinals fan, this is a painful series for me. But it certainly wasn’t painful due to the Cardinals’ roster construction, which was excellent. Edgar Renteria was perhaps a weak leadoff hitter (88 wRC+ in 2004), but he ran a career .343 OBP and had been downright excellent in 2003 — the Cardinals were betting that 2004 was just a blip. Past that, it was a slew of fearsome hitters: Larry Walker batted second, Albert Pujols third, Scott Rolen fourth, and Jim Edmonds fifth.

On the Red Sox side, things weren’t quite as smooth. Orlando Cabrera was an under-qualified number two hitter. But the rest of the lineup followed sabermetric orthodoxy, and quite frankly, both of these teams were so stacked with good hitters that it’s hard to find much fault with the lineups.

In the second inning of Game 1, Edmonds even busted out a very modern contrivance; the bunt for a hit into a shifted infield. Reggie Sanders followed with a walk, always a potential outcome with a knuckleball pitcher on the mound. Then Tony Womack, of 2001 World Series fame, came to the plate — and bunted. This wasn’t some attempt to sneak a bunt by a still-sleeping Red Sox defense. Womack showed bunt on each of the four pitches of the at-bat, and the corner infielders were at a full charge as the pitch was thrown. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday afternoon’s FanGraphs Live stream, starting at noon ET, will feature a discussion of our OOTP Brewers, who have some crucial decisions to make. The bullpen is barely holding together. Lorenzo Cain is improving. What can we do to improve our fortunes without mortgaging the future? Tune in and help me decide. Read the rest of this entry »