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

In yesterday’s roundup of COVID-19 news, Dan Szymborksi covered MLB’s fund for ballpark employees and the lack of clarity surrounding pay for minor leaguers, among other topics. The last 24 hours, not unlike every 24 hour period over the last week or so, has brought with it more news, including potential changes to the MLB draft and a Reds employee testing positive for COVID-19.

No MLB Draft?

According to an Associated Press story from Ronald Blum, among the issues the players’ union and MLB are discussing is what to do with the MLB draft, currently scheduled for June. With college baseball shut down and many high school teams following suit, scouting players for the draft is almost impossible, and the June date could come and go before the MLB season has even started. While the feasibility of holding the draft is one issue, the teams might also be angling to reduce costs by eliminating both the draft and international signings, per Blum.

In 2019, MLB teams spent $316.5 million on draft bonuses and another $100 million on international signings, per JJ Cooper. In Ken Rosenthal’s piece on the subject, he mentions the possibility of a combined draft in 2021, though working out the eligibility details could prove difficult, as currently eligible high school seniors will theoretically be freshman in college a year from now, and not ordinarily eligible for the draft.
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Yesterday, I discussed what 2019 might have looked like with a shortened season. At the same time, Dan Szymborski showed us how a shortened season impacts playoff odds. The main takeaway from both posts is an understanding that a shortened season creates more randomness and a greater possibility of teams having a chance to make the postseason. The corollary here is that is that it is much tougher in a shortened season to tell which teams are actually better that their competitors. Ben Clemens showed earlier in the offseason that expanded playoffs as reportedly proposed by the league would actually disincentivize competition. However, in a shortened season in which good teams might be left out of the postseason due to the random variation that usually takes care of itself over 162 games, there’s an argument to be made for getting creative and expanding the playoff field, if only for this season.

When addressing the playoff structure, it’s important to keep certain objectives in mind. Winning the division should be of some importance so that two good teams battling it out still have a reason to play hard toward the end of the season even if both are comfortably in playoff contention. Making the playoffs needs to give teams a chance at eventually winning the title, or at least an easy shot at home games that fans (and owners) enjoy. Both problems were issues in MLB’s expanded playoff proposal as most division winners saw their playoff odds go way down and the additional teams making the playoffs weren’t very likely to have a single home game if they even made the playoffs.

The current playoff format is fine enough, but to ensure that good teams aren’t being excluded from playing for a championship, I am proposing that for this season, the field of teams in the playoffs expands. I have two potential proposals, but both have the same key feature: a round-robin tournament at the end of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB appears to be inevitably headed to a shortened schedule, and at this date, we don’t really have a great idea what that might look like. Fewer games is likely to mean a little more randomness. The 162-game schedule is long by design. With the talent levels of major league teams clustered fairly close together even at the extremes, playing 162 games exacerbates the differences that do exist. In a three-game series where one team has a 65% chance of winning each game, the underdog still wins more games a quarter of the time. If the same teams played a 45-game series, the odds of the underdog winning drop below 2%. That’s an example at the extremes. If a team was favored to win every game 55% of the time, they would still be considered much more talented in baseball terms, yet over 81 games, half a season’s worth, the underdog still wins nearly one in five series.

Dan Szymborski wrote earlier today about how the ZiPS 2020 playoff odds change based on different season lengths. I’m going to take a different approach. To provide some sense of how a different schedule can change outcomes, we can look how things unfolded last season. Here’s what the season would look like if it had ended on September 8, 2019, after roughly 144 games:

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With the announcement last week that MLB would suspend spring training and delay Opening Day by at least two weeks, to say that the season’s future is uncertain would be an understatement. The most optimistic of scenarios — one in which the United States’ response to COVID-19 is suddenly and remarkably better than that of other, similar countries — had major league baseball resuming on April 9. The CDC has now recommended the postponement or cancellation of events with 50 or more people for the next eight weeks, which would prevent even spring training games. Update: MLB has announced further delays with a mid-May start the earliest possible date to begin the season in abiding by CDC guidelines. The two-week delay was merely be the first, with an unknown number of weeks of the season lost. The league’s announcement that spring training facilities would be shuttered, and that many players would be returning home, points to a much longer delay; a second spring training will almost certainly be required to allow players time to ramp back up. Some executives are simply hoping for games at some point in May, per Jon Heyman. We don’t yet know how many games the league will play this season, but we can use potential start dates, with a few October regular season weeks and some summer doubleheaders baked in, and attempt to determine how many games the sport might lose as the country attempts to contain this pandemic.

Shorter regular seasons in baseball have been incredibly rare. While the work stoppages in 1994 and 1995 might be fresh in the minds of some, 23 MLB seasons have been played since then. Ronald Acuña Jr., Cody Bellinger, Rafael Devers, Jack Flaherty, and Juan Soto weren’t even born when the start of the 1995 season was delayed. The graph below shows the total number of MLB games played in every year since 1903, the year of the first World Series:

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The three-batter minimum rule is coming to a regular season game near you in just a couple weeks. The stated desire of the rule is to reduce those time-consuming and action-relieving breaks late in games as a parade of relievers come in to get just a couple of outs. (The rule, for those who need a refresher, requires pitchers to either face a minimum of three batters in an appearance or pitch to the end of a half-inning, with some exceptions allowed for injury and illness.) If pitchers are forced to stay in games, then we’ll end up with fewer pitching changes and fewer breaks. That’s the idea, anyway. Ben Clemens took a look back in December and found that the number of times the rule would have actually come into effect in 2019 was actually pretty minimal. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be an effect on strategy.

Over at The Athletic, Jayson Stark talked with multiple managers to get a handle on how much they’ll have to plan, and to figure out how the new rule could affect deployments when it comes to lineups, pinch hitters, and when to use relievers. It seems the rule will invite intentional walks and, as Buster Olney had previously mentioned, mid-batter pitching changes as pitching the last ball to a batter in a walk gets a pitcher credit for facing a batter. In some cases, this could even result in the return of pitchers using four actual pitches to intentionally walk a batter in order to set up the next reliever to come in before the intentional walk is complete.

While the resulting strategy will be much-discussed and analyzed in the context of a number of game-states, there is one situation that interests me the most: two outs, late in the game, with runners on base and a good lefty hitter coming to the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

With David Price shipped off to Los Angeles with Mookie Betts and Chris Sale’s spring beset by arm issues, the Red Sox rotation looks incredibly weak. With questionable internal alternatives, the Red Sox have added a potential solution from the free agent market in Collin McHugh, who will earn a base salary of $600,000 with incentives based on innings and active days on the roster that could push his earnings to a bit above $4 million.

Of course, McHugh was still on the market because he wasn’t cleared to throw until recently. He began last season in the rotation, but after four quality starts to begin the year, his performance went downhill in a hurry. Four ugly outings followed those four good ones and after two relief appearances, the latter a two-inning, four-strikeout performance, elbow soreness (but a clean MRI) meant time on the injured list. McHugh missed more than a month, then returned in a bullpen role at the end of June. He pitched well out of the pen, putting up a 3.65 FIP and 2.70 ERA through the end of August. Unfortunately, the elbow soreness returned; McHugh returned to the injured list and was eventually shut down for the season.

McHugh’s best years came as a reliable member of Houston’s rotation from 2014 to ’16. He made 90 starts and pitched at an above-average level, putting up an average of three wins per season. Elbow issues at the beginning of 2017 limited him to 12 starts at the end of the season before he was given a long relief role in the playoffs, where he made two appearances. He pitched the entire 2018 season in the bullpen before his up-and-down 2019 campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s pretty easy to see the Brewers locking up Christian Yelich through the 2028 season as a win-win. (Indeed, we might even be able to add an extra win for Brewers fans.) Christian Yelich gets a high salary for a long period of time and the Brewers retain one of the best players in baseball for nearly a decade. Jay Jaffe went through the contract yesterday, noting the very good ZiPS projections for Yelich as well as the lack of spending on players in their 30s in free agency over the last few seasons. The three seasons Yelich had remaining on his previous deal meant he wasn’t going to get the $300 million contract he would have if he had been a free agent now, but the Brewers’ $215 million commitment (roughly $175 million beyond his previous deal) represented a good compromise. Just how well the contract plays out depends on how Yelich plays in his 30s. So let’s see how players like Yelich have fared in the past.

To find players like Yelich, I looked at outfielders going back to 1969 with between 20 and 30 WAR between the ages of 24 and 27 years old, with Yelich’s 25.4 in the middle. I took out the players who weren’t within 25 runs of Yelich’s -5.4 defensive runs. Then, I removed players with fewer than six wins in their age-27 season to keep them in range of Yelich’s 7.8 WAR season last year. Here’s how those players compare to Yelich, from 24 to 27:

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While getting good performances from players in spring training is nice, it’s really more of a bonus. The most important part of spring training is getting players healthy for Opening Day. For the Red Sox and Yankees, injuries are piling up. The most recent bit of news for the Yankees comes in the form of trouble for Aaron Judge, who felt pain in his right pec while swinging, putting his status for Opening Day in doubt. On the Red Sox side, Chris Sale, who was already under a slower throwing program that would put him on the injured list to start the season, has a sore elbow after throwing and is being sent for an MRI. While we wouldn’t want to go overboard on the impact of these injuries given the timelines are very much unknown, everything we think we know about the AL East could go sideways.

The Yankees’ rotation has already been hit hard, with Luis Severino set to miss the season recovering from Tommy John surgery and James Paxton out until at least May and potentially longer after back surgery. Domingo Germán is also out for the first 63 games of the season due to a domestic violence suspension, but Gerrit Cole at the head of the rotation followed by Masahiro Tanaka gives the team some wiggle room to stay afloat and rely on a potent offense. But that potent offense isn’t quite as potent without its two best hitters.

Here are the projections for Yankees hitters this season. Read the rest of this entry »