Starting the season after a long layoff and an abbreviated training camp was bound to put players in different positions of readiness in the season’s early going. When a season starts in late March or early April, teams enjoy a full spring training but weather can have an effect on hitters. Better weather means better offensive production, so it seemed possible that a late-July start might help hitters skip some of the early-season struggles we typically see; the universal designated hitter also seemed likely to help move things along. So far, it has been a bit of a mixed bag.

Through yesterday’s action, teams are scoring 4.5 runs per game, which is down from last year’s 4.8 full-season mark despite the addition of the designated hitter in the National League. Of course, the first week of the 2019 season saw teams score an average of 4.3 runs per game, so there are more runs than the beginning of last season. Runs alone probably aren’t going to tell us if pitchers have a bigger advantage than they normally do, though, particularly when changes to the ball over the last few seasons have had a pretty dramatic effect on scoring. To get a sense of the last few seasons, here are some end-of-season numbers since 2017 (excluding pitchers hitting), along with the start of this season:

Home runs are certainly down from last season, but compared to the last three seasons, the dip isn’t huge. We have seen an increase in the rate of infield fly balls, walks, and strikeouts. The power numbers are down some, but the big drop from previous seasons’ numbers concerns BABIP. The increase in walks isn’t enough to offset the greater number of strikeouts, the lack of power resulting in weaker contact, and considerably worse overall offensive numbers. Before we compare these numbers to typical early-season numbers, let’s add in some plate discipline stats as well:

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Through one start, the 2020 version of Justin Verlander somewhat resembled the Verlander of a year ago. He threw six innings of seven strikeout, one walk, three hits ball, allowing two solo home runs, a stat line not too dissimilar from his Cy Young 2019 season. Sadly, a repeat of that fantastic campaign, even in abbreviated form, looks to be very unlikely as on Sunday, manager Dusty Baker announced Verlander would be shut down from throwing for two weeks with a forearm strain. When the season is only two months long, a two-week shutdown likely means half a season lost, potentially more.

Verlander has been one of the more durable starters in the game. Since the start of the 2017 season, he has averaged 38 starts and 244 innings when including postseason. Last season, it was 258.1 innings and 40 starts, as the Astros made it to the seventh game of the World Series for the second time in three years. That’s a lot of innings for any pitcher to throw, and for the 37-year-old Verlander, it might be catching up to him. This isn’t even the first time Verlander has been shut down this year. Back in March, Jay Jaffe wrote about a lat strain that caused the Astros to press pause on his season:

The results of the MRI showed what general manager James Click called “a mild lat strain”; Click portrayed the news as “on the positive side.” Even so, Verlander has been shut down, with no timetable at the moment, and the fear is that he could be in for a repeat of 2015. Through the first 10 seasons of his major league career, he had never landed on the disabled list, but triceps cramping, followed by a triceps strain as he ramped up his activity level, kept him out of action until June 13 of that year. Reviewing reports of his problems that spring, it appears that the Tigers and the pitcher were slow to take his initial discomfort seriously, and it was subsequently noted that Verlander also suffered a lat strain at some point during rehab, which prolonged his absence. In all, he made just 20 starts totaling 133.1 innings in 2015, the only time in 14 full seasons that he hasn’t gone to the post at least 32 times.

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Just ahead of the start of the season, MLB and the MLBPA announced an agreement to add an additional round of playoff games to the postseason, eliminating the Wild Card as we knew it for this season only. While they were reportedly part of several of the proposals to resume play, when the players and owners didn’t revise the March agreement, expanded playoffs fell to the wayside. But the lead-up to the regular season apparently gave the sides more time to work out a deal (any changes to the playoff structure have to be collectively bargaine), so here we are. As detailed last night when we frantically changed our playoff odds page, there will be:

• 16 Playoff Teams
• Division winners will receive the top three seeds in each league
• Second-place division finishers will receive the 4-6 seeds in each league
• The two teams in each league with the best records apart from those six will be the seventh and eighth seeds
• The top four seeds in each league will host every game in a best-of-three Wild Card Series to advance to the division series

In terms of the agreement, players will receive a playoff pool totaling $50 million; competitive balance tax money will not be collected this season, which should save the Yankees $8 million to $10 million. The television rights to seven of the eight first-round series will go to ESPN, with the other series going to TBS. The revised 60-game regular season schedule ended up giving FOX and FS1 the same number of televised games, with TBS missing out on a handful of games and ESPN losing a significant part of their regular season schedule. Providing TBS with an extra game or two and ESPN with somewhere between 14 and 21 playoff games (they were previously paying $27 million for a single Wild Card game) likely allows MLB to recover the bulk, or potentially all, of the lost national television revenue for the 2020 season despite the shortened schedule.

As for the ramifications on the field, the extra round of playoffs blends multiple purposes with respect to the season. A shortened regular season means more variation and makes it more difficult to determine who the best teams are. There’s a much greater chance of an otherwise good team missing out on the playoffs due mostly to dumb luck. Take the Dodgers as an example. In a 162-game season, our playoff odds put their chances of making the playoffs at 97%. When the season is shortened to 60 games, those odds go down to 86%. There’s no change in talent between those two situations, but the shorter season makes it so that talent mixes more with luck, resulting in the Dodgers not making the playoffs as often. Adding an extra round and three more teams per league puts the Dodgers odds of making the playoffs back up to 95%. Good teams missing the playoffs because of a shortened season is something probably best avoided if we want the best possible showcase in October. Read the rest of this entry »

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This morning, Ben Clemens assessed left field. Now Craig Edwards examines the position the best player in baseball calls home.

Mike Trout is the best player in baseball. Mike Trout plays center field. Ergo, Mike Trout is the best center fielder in baseball. After Trout, we have another genuine star in Cody Bellinger, a very good player in George Springer, and then a whole lot of maybes. There’s a lot of youth and athleticism here, as one might expect from a position that requires covering a lot of ground, but there aren’t a lot of guarantees when it comes to production. Byron Buxton, Ramón Laureano, and Luis Robert are all in the top 10. So are Lorenzo Cain and Aaron Hicks, both coming off down years. While we could see some breakouts, the projections are fairly conservative, only anticipating three teams above 1.5 WAR, which would be a four-win campaign in a full season. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve read the intro. You’ve read about first basemen and second basemen. Now, as our positional power rankings continue, it’s time to examine the state of third base.

If you scroll through the first half-dozen names on this list, you might note that there are a lot of good third basemen. Of the 10 position players projected for at least 2.0 WAR this year, four are third basemen. In fact, the hot corner accounts for six of the top 14 projected position players, while the top 10 third basemen all rank among the top 30 position players overall. There are so many good third basemen, it probably isn’t useful to quibble too much about each team’s exact placement in the rankings below. It’s a tightly bunched group with a lot more positives than negatives. It’s also a veteran-laden group, but young players like Yoán Moncada and Rafael Devers provide considerable hope for the position’s future. Read the rest of this entry »

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While most of the attention yesterday rightly went to the potential deficiencies in MLB’s testing protocol as delays prevented multiple teams from getting ready for the season and left many players unaware of their own test results, the league did release this year’s schedule. The season begins with a doubleheader featuring the Nationals against the Yankees followed by the Dodgers against the Giants on July 23, with a full slate of games the following day. If all goes well, teams will have finished the full 60-game season on September 27.

The Schedule is Going to Look Weird

As the league decided to limit travel this year in the hopes of containing the coronavirus, teams are playing games in their own division as well as the corresponding geographical division in the opposite league, with 40 games played in-division and 20 games against the opposite league; six of those interleague games are against each team’s so-called natural interleague rival. So, this serves as your official reminder that Atlanta actually lines up pretty close to the Indiana-Ohio border going from North to South!

Breaking down every @mlb teams updated 2020 travel schedule… Pretty cool looking at the divisional separation of the schedule this way. pic.twitter.com/ht2Bg3qBnj

— Daren Willman (@darenw) July 6, 2020

The Central is clustered together in the middle and the East is all in the same time zone, while the West has some outliers with the Mariners and the two Texas teams a considerable distance apart and Colorado off on its own. Where the schedule gets even weirder is that teams in the division don’t play an equal number of home and road games against their opponents. Teams will play every team in their own division 10 times, but instead of playing five home games and five road games, the number of home games will range from three to seven. That being said… Read the rest of this entry »

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The 2020 season, assuming it happens and is completed, is sure to have some quirky statistics that will be tough to wrap our heads around. The home run leader might not even get to 20 dingers this year. A three-win season might lead all of baseball. And while batting average has fallen out of favor as the be-all, end-all of a hitter’s talent at the plate because walks matter and getting a double is better than getting a single, hits are an undoubtedly good pursuit for batters. As such, the aura of batting average still maintains some glow when contemplating the history of baseball. The pursuit of a .400 batting average in a shortened season due to a pandemic will not and should not be viewed with the same historical significance as Ted Williams’ run in 1941, or even George Brett’s 1980 campaign or Tony Gwynn’s strike-shortened 1994 season, but it would make this season a little more fun.

Ty Cobb, George Sisler, and Rogers Hornsby all put up batting averages above .400 nearly 100 years ago, while Ted Williams was the last player to hit that mark nearly 80 years ago. The list of players who have even hit .375 since then is a short one: Stan Musial’s .376 (1948), Williams’ .388 (1957), Rod Carew’s .388 (1977), George Brett’s .390 (1980), Tony Gwynn’s .394 (1994), and Larry Walker’s .379 (1999). The last player to hit above .350 was Josh Hamilton, who hit .359 in 2010. History has shown that if a very high batting average is your goal, the odds are very much stacked against you in a full season. Shrink the season down to just 60 games, though, and we might get a fighting chance. Read the rest of this entry »