With players set to report to camp on July 1, yesterday was the day teams submitted their 60-man player pools to MLB. While there is certainly going to be considerably more maneuvering as teams set up their own camps (plus a satellite camp for those pool players not invited to major league camp), teams’ initial rosters can tell us a little about how clubs plan to operate over the next few weeks and potentially into the season. Here’s what we can say so far.

A 60-Man Player Pool is Not a 60-Man Player Pool

While we were perhaps expecting a 60-man player pool for every team, many clubs fell far short of that number. You can check every team’s initial selections on our Roster Resource Opening Day Tracker; those pages also project Opening Day rosters. Overall, teams put out rosters averaging 53 players. The Indians, Tigers, Royals, Astros, Angels, Yankees, Mariners, Rays, Rangers, Blue Jays, Braves, Reds, Marlins, Phillies, Pirates, Padres, and Nationals were all at capacity or were a handful of players away from reaching the 60-player limit. The Diamondbacks, Twins, and Giants didn’t even release rosters yesterday, while the Orioles, White Sox, Brewers, and Cardinals were all at 45 players or fewer. We will have to wait for full roster information on about half the teams.

Placement in the Player Pool is Pretty Permanent

Later this week, Jay Jaffe is going to analyze the roster rules contained in the 2020 Operations Manual and how they will affect the season, but one wrinkle in particular caught the attention of twitter yesterday, including The Athletic’s Levi Weaver. That wrinkle concerns how players are moved in and out of the 60-man pool depending on their 40-man status. Per the Operations Manual:

In the event a Club is at the limit and wishes to add a player to its Active Roster or its Alternate Training Site, the Club must select a player to be removed from the Club Player Pool by means of a bona fide transaction, as follows:

• 40-man roster players may be removed from the Club Player Pool by an approved trade, waiver claim, return of Rule 5 selection, release, outright assignment, designation for assignment, placement on the 60-day Injured List, placement on the COVID-19 Related Injured List, or placement on the Suspended List (by Club), Military, Voluntarily Retired, Restricted, Disqualified, or Ineligible Lists.
• Non-40-man roster players may be removed from the Club Player Pool by an approved trade, release, placement on the COVID-19 Related Injured List, or placement on the Military, Voluntarily Retired, Restricted, Disqualified, or Ineligible Lists. Injured non-40-man roster players will continue to count against the Club Player Pool limit unless removed through one of the permitted transactions listed above.

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Throughout the last few months of hectic, sometimes nasty negotiations between the players and the owners to resume the 2020 season, one issue operating in the background was the expiration of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement at the end of next year. For those who watch, cover, and love baseball, losing the 2020 season would be sad, but understandable; there’s a global pandemic. To turn around 18 months later and lose all or part of the 2022 season because the players and owners can’t agree to a new CBA would be considerably less so. Still, while MLB and the MLBPA’s inability to agree to modify their March agreement in such a way as to provide mutual benefit (and more games) is frustrating, no deal today doesn’t mean no deal after 2021.

The recent negotiations offer a preview into the tone, tenor, and general degree of trust (or lack thereof) both parties are likely to bring to the table as they work toward an agreement for 2022, but achieving a different result is possible because 2022 is going to be much different than both 1994 and 2020. There will be a lot of issues to resolve, as Dayn Perry laid out at CBS Sports in May and Andy Martino examined yesterday for SNY, and the process will be contentious. But the owners will also be looking to maximize profits after 2021 rather than minimize losses. And while the negotiations over the last month didn’t result in a new deal, they might actually prove to have been fruitful practice for the next time the two parties come to the table. Read the rest of this entry »

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On Monday, the cautious optimist in all of us got to hope there would be major league baseball in 2020, with Rob Manfred implementing a 60-game season contingent on the players confirming that they would report to team camps on July 1 and agree to the health and safety protocols required to move the season forward. Although the 5 PM deadline for the players to respond passed without word on Tuesday, the MLBPA later confirmed that “All remaining issues have been resolved and Players are reporting to training camps.” While there is still a pandemic to contend with, one that will alter the game and could still cause it to stall out, it appears the disagreements between the players and the owners over economic questions will not further impede a 2020 baseball season.

MLB also made its own announcement, revealing a July 23 or 24 Opening Day, with some additional information about the potential schedule:

MLB has submitted a 60-game regular season schedule for review by the Players Association. The proposed schedule will largely feature divisional play, with the remaining portion of each Club’s games against their opposite league’s corresponding geographical division (i.e., East vs. East, Central vs. Central and West vs. West), in order to mitigate travel. The vast majority of Major League Clubs are expected to conduct training at the ballparks in their primary home cities.

The full schedule is expected within 72 hours, though Jon Heyman has reported there will be 40 games in-division (10 games vs. each division opponent) and 20 games against teams in the opposite league’s corresponding geographic division. Ronald Blum of the Associated Press reports that teams will play four games each against their interleague opponents and will make just one visit to all of their opponents during the season.  Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, for the seventh and final time, I asked readers how they thought the season would go. While we don’t know for sure how many games will actually be played this year or when the season will end, should the two sides settle on health and safety protocols, the current plan is to play 60 games and have a standard postseason that concludes at the end of October. In addition to looking at the last round of results, we’ll take a look at how the reported season compares to the results over time.

First, this is how readers answered regarding whether there would be a season (voting closed Monday morning):

Here’s how the responses have gone since late-March:

For the first five surveys, two out of every three readers believed there would be a 2020 season, but the negotiations over the last month turned it into a 50/50 proposition. While it certainly seems that we will get a season, there’s still a month to go before a potential Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »

Following a flurry of activity last week between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association as the two sides volleyed to resume the 2020 season, this past weekend was marked by inactivity. After an in-person meeting between Rob Manfred and Tony Clark spurred an owners’ proposal for 60 games on Wednesday and a 70-game counter-offer from the players on Thursday, the owners opted to wait the players out. While they were waiting, the schedule for a potential season got a little bit shorter, and positive coronavirus tests for five players and three staff members in Phillies camp forced some re-evaluation of the viability of Florida as a training site ahead of the upcoming season. With other positive tests popping up around the sport, all of the spring training complexes were temporarily closed for deep cleaning, and to establish new, more stringent safety protocols; in all, 40 players and staff have tested positive for the virus over the last week. Even with that news, the players were expected to formally vote on the owners’ 60-game proposal on Sunday, but a last-minute modification by Rob Manfred pushed the vote back.

In an email obtained by the Associated Press, Rob Manfred indicated to Tony Clark on Sunday that the season would not be able to begin on the July 19 date previously proposed by both sides, pushing the start of the season back to July 26:

“I really believe we are fighting over an impossibility on games,” Manfred said in the email, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “The earliest we will be ready for players to report is a week from Monday, given the need to relocate teams from Florida. That leaves 66 days to play 60 games. Realistically, that is the outside of the envelope now.”

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On Tuesday, Rob Manfred and Tony Clark met in Arizona. On Wednesday, MLB made an offer to the MLBPA that would give players pro-rated salaries for 60 games and a $25 million postseason pool. It also included $33 million in salary relief from the $170 million in advances players received, and a universal designated hitter. In exchange, the owners would get expanded playoffs for the next two years, and the players would agree to waive any grievance the MLBPA might otherwise have brought against MLB for failing to make its best effort to schedule as many games as possible, as is required by the March agreement. The players have countered that proposal; the two sides, it would seem, are very close.

As first reported by Jeff Passan and Jesse Rogers, the player proposal is for 70 games at pro-rated pay, with the same or similar salary advance forgiveness as the owners proposed, $50 million in playoff money, and a 50/50 split of new postseason TV revenues in 2021. The deal would include grievance waivers from both parties over the March 26 agreement, as well as the universal designated hitter.

The major differences the players propose are as follows:

• The regular season would end on September 30 instead of September 27.
• Ten extra regular season games, which would provide players with $252 million in additional pay, and, even using only local revenue, provide around $155 million in revenue to the owners.
• $25 million more in postseason pool money.
• Fifty percent of 2021 expanded playoff money, which could amount to $100 million or more for the players, though it would also mean corresponding increases for owners in 2020 and 2021, given that they stand to receive roughly 75% of those rights.

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With 2020’s amateur draft consisting of just five rounds, much of the strategy teams typically use related to shifting bonus pool money around was rendered moot. There were no high schoolers to woo with big bonuses after the 10th round, no saving money on a seventh rounder to sign a better first rounder. This served to decrease the incoming talent pool by quite a bit, with many good players going undrafted or unsigned, but it also makes an immediate analysis of the exercise a little bit easier.

With just 160 picks, we can evaluate a team’s decision to take a lesser player early in the draft in order to use the money saved on picks later and vice versa. With less scouting time and fewer looks, there might have been a bit more variation in terms of the quality of the players taken on draft day. Likewise, determining who might improve and surprise is trickier. As such, we shouldn’t consider this analysis ironclad. However, using Eric Longenhagen’s rankings and the selected players’ actual draft positions, we can compare how well each team did with their picks based on those rankings. To determine the value of each player and each pick, I’ll be using my draft pick valuation research from last year, which examined expected production from every draft slot. Read the rest of this entry »

I was hoping the last round of polling would be our last, but here we are. Thanks again for your time. For consistency’s sake, all questions have remained the same since the end of March. Read the rest of this entry »