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.

NBA Board of Governors Officially Greenlights Return

There’s more work to be done before the NBA’s tentative July 31 return date, but team owners officially officially approved the pending proposal for the league’s restart. The vote 29-1 in favor, with only the Portland Trail Blazers voting nay because of a disagreement on the structure, and clears the NBA’s next steps: finalizing the COVID-19 safety requirements and getting the final approval of the players. To mitigate the difficulties of traveling in the midst of the pandemic, the games will be played at Disney World at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.

The players will be having a virtual meeting Friday afternoon, but the NBA and the NBPA have consistently kept an open dialogue about the status of the season and what a return would look like.

NHL Playoff Format Agreement

After an agreement between owners and players on this very subject, the NHL officially announced what the league’s playoffs will look like. After five-game qualifiers, teams will play seven-game series, with teams being re-seeded after every round instead of bracketed. An official start date has not been set, but this clears one of the remaining hurdles for the NHL to return to play, along with the NBA. What remains for the NHL is to finalize agreements for training camps, game protocols, and game hubs, the last as the NHL is unlikely to take the same “one location” tack the NBA is. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: And welcome to the chat!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: That’s like asking if it’s more accurate to say that I’m the King of Siam or I’m sexier than George Clooney.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Or whoever people are into these days.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: On a general level, the mediocre teams that needed help to make serious playoff runs.

Read the rest of this entry »

As first reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan in the latest episode of “Let’s Negotiate Through the Media,” MLB ownership will reportedly issue a counter-counter-proposal to the MLBPA’s counter-proposal of a 112-game season with the prorated salaries previously agreed upon in March. This time, rather than the weird pay-scaling or completely dead-on-arrival revenue sharing schemes, the owners proposed a 50-game season, played at the players’ prorated salaries.

The owners didn’t explain how they got to a 50-game season, but it coincidentally averages with the players’ 114-game proposal to come out exactly to the 82-game season that was originally proposed. While a season shorter than 82 games might not be the same bright shade of red flag the we’re-partners-but-only-when-times-are-bad revenue sharing proposal was, there’s a general belief that the players aren’t interested in assuming the risks of playing during a pandemic if they’re not even getting half-season of games in. One priority for the owners is finishing the postseason before a possible second wave of COVID-19 cases hits in order to safe guard lucrative playoff TV contracts — money, it should be noted, that wasn’t fully accounted for when the league claimed $640,000 per game losses in a presentation to the players. Read the rest of this entry »

Ken Griffey Jr. is not a typical candidate for a ZiPS Time Warp. Over his 22 years in the majors, from his time as a rookie phenom in 1989 to his sleepy denouement in his return to Seattle, we accumulated as many memories of Griffey as he did accolades. And unlike Eric Davis and possibly Joe Mauer, the earlier subjects of this series, Griffey’s injury struggles in his 30s did not rob him of a spot in Cooperstown; he was elected easily on his first ballot with 99.3% of the vote.

But we could have gotten even more baseball from Griffey than we did.

In the 80s, when fans talked about “Ken Griffey,” they were still talking about Ken Griffey père, then a veteran outfielder whose career featured stints with the Reds, Yankees, Braves, and Mariners, who was wrapping up his Hall of Very Good career. But by the 90s, it was Junior’s turn. When sportswriters of that decade named batters who could challenge Hank Aaron‘s home run record, Griffey was typically the protagonist, not the eventually successful Barry Bonds. Just as Juan Soto and Ronald Acuña Jr. are phenoms for young baseball fans today, Griffey was the start for younger Gen-Xers like myself and for older millennials. Junior always felt special, a player drafted out of high school with the first pick of the 1987 draft, the son of a famous player, an outfielder blessed with the coincidence of being born in Stan Musial’s hometown, on Musial’s 49th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And so starts the show!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Eric’s the mock draft guy!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: It’s hard to say depending on who goes there, but I expect the team to take a pitcher

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Or at least prioritize a pitcher

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Maybe if someone like Bailey drops to them?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Oakland A’s Make Drastic Cuts to Minor League Compensation

With the odds of any kind of minor league season being played away from team complexes getting increasingly long, the Oakland A’s announced that they are ending the $400 weekly subsidies paid to their minor leaguers effective June 1; all 30 teams had previously agreed to pay such subsidies until the end of May.

“Unfortunately, considering all of the circumstances affecting the organization at this time, we have decided not to continue your $400 weekly stipend beyond May 31,” Athletics General Manager David Forst wrote in an email to the organization’s minor league players. “This was a difficult decision and it’s one that comes at a time when a number of our full-time employees are also finding themselves either furloughed or facing a reduction in salary for the remainder of the season. For all of this, I am sorry.”

Given the minimum salaries in the minors, which range from $290 a week in rookie ball to $502 in Triple-A, the team could have paid all of their minor leaguers the minimum for just over $1 million. (Note that this comes at the same time MLB is trying to effectively memory hole $1 billion in revenues in their public battle with the MLBPA.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the difficulties that need to be hammered out before a theoretical 2020 season gets going, probably the easiest to sort out is the universal DH. Baseball has been inching closer to this outcome — which I’ve felt was inevitable as soon as daily interleague play became a thing — for a while now, and instituting it for an oddball 2020 season is probably the least controversial decision to make. But while it registers as easy when compared to the other issues facing players and league decision makers, for projections, it opens up a whole new can of worms.

When ZiPS projects pitchers, it knows the team and (so it believes) the general league structure. Every club plays 162 games, mostly against teams in their own league, and in interleague play in AL parks, the NL uses the DH. Those things have been thrown into disarray by most of the proposed 2020 changes. 82 games instead of 162 is fairly easy to deal with; you just have to realize you’re going to be inaccurate. Swapping out pitchers for designated hitters is a little different.

To get an idea of what offense will look like and who it would affect, which is important for both real life and fantasy purposes, let’s start by looking at non-pitcher offensive numbers for both leagues from 2008-2019:

Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And the chat has begun, sayeth the clock.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And as powerful as I like to imagine I am — though I am not — I cannot stop time.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And it’s really hard to even break a watch!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I don’t have the context, but before divisions, contenders and non-contenders were widely called first division and second division in the vernacular

12:02

Dan Szymborski: so a second division regular, if Eric is using it as I would expect him to, is a starter on a bad team who wouldn’t really push a contender towards the playoffs.

Read the rest of this entry »

This spring, one of the stickiest issues in the negotiations between the owners and the MLBPA was that of service time credit, a subject that has long caused labor friction. If the 2020 season occurs, the issue of service time credit will largely take care of itself. But what if there is no 2020 season? The lost salaries are hard enough, but the lost service time would have made those losses even greater. Using ZiPS to consider just 15 prominent free agents-to-be after the 2020 and 2021 seasons, I estimated that those players alone would lose roughly $316 million on their next contracts.

In return for $170 million in guaranteed money — an advance if play happened to recommence this year — and agreeing not to sue for their lost salaries, the players struck a deal. If 2020 is not played, the free agents-to-be in 2021 will still hit the market this winter, as players will be credited for the same amount of service they accrued in 2019.

MLB’s system of arbitration and free agency is based on bright lines; five years and 171 days and you have to go through salary arbitration, while one more day lets you hit free agency. The agreement between players and owners benefits them collectively, but inevitably, some individuals will find themselves on the wrong side of one of those new bright lines. And in this case, a few dozen young players, many of whom are among the brightest young talents in baseball, would still be under an additional year of team control if 2020 is lost. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

The Rent-is-Too-Damn-High Team

The Oakland A’s and the county stadium authority are in a dispute over ballpark rent. This isn’t the first time there’s been such a dispute at the stadium sometimes known as the Oakland Coliseum. In 2014, the lease-extension negotiations between the A’s and the county stadium authority broke down over a dispute over withheld payments. The Oakland Raiders also withheld rent payments in 2015, part of an ongoing dispute that ended with the Raiders leaving for Las Vegas thanks to a sweetheart deal in their new city.

What’s new this time, of course, is the effect of pandemic economics. Citing the force majeure clause in the contract between the Athletics and the stadium authority, A’s general counsel D’Lorna Ellis referenced the unavailability of the stadium for play to justify the team deferring payment “until [they] have a better understanding of when the Coliseum will be available for use.”

The Coliseum Authority Executive Director made the issue a bit more confusing with contradictory statements, first saying that “because they haven’t used it, they were not able to generate revenue and they have no ability to pay,” before assuring the San Francisco Chronicle that the A’s never suggested revenue was an issue.

Coliseum Authority board member Ignacio De La Fuente, a former president of Oakland’s City Council, was less conciliatory than Gardner. Read the rest of this entry »