Unusual situations create interesting problems for analysts to solve. While it’s still not clear just what the 2020 season will look like — if indeed there is a 2020 season — the one thing that’s guaranteed is that baseball this year will probably look very different than any season in living memory. (Incidentally, I won’t say all-time: 19th century baseball saw a team disband during warmups because no one was in attendance and some of the home squad left with the visiting team.)

Interesting challenges are usually fun to tackle, though admittedly I much prefer those that don’t involve a lack of baseball. The general belief around the game is that we will get some baseball this year, making the challenge of the moment figuring out what a shortened season will mean for the projections; regardless of what form this season takes, come 2021, I’ll have to churn out ZiPS projections, which should prove to be a trickier-than-typical offseason task.

The natural hypothesis is that in the short-term, the projections will be worse than usual, due to greater uncertainty and simply fewer games played by the players in question. If the season opens in late June or early July, it’s likely that teams will play somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 games. The good news is that while we haven’t had a lost season, we have two strike-shortened seasons, in 1981 and 1994, that can help guide us. They’re not 100% comparable — 1981’s strike was in the middle of the season and 1995 was slightly shorter as well — but they’re the main historical comps we have to look at.

ZiPS projections didn’t exist during these seasons, as I was in high school in 1994 and was just figuring out how to use a toilet in 1981. So to get an idea, I ran some very simplified projections, using only the basic data and simple aging, a stripped-down projection that’s similar to Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey forecasting system. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And here we go!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Heh, no little league stats in ZiPS

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I have, though I do tend to play HS the most.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the world’s strongest professional baseball leagues, the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) starts their 2020 on May 5, bringing us high-level baseball in a world that’s currently experiencing a shortage. If you haven’t watched a KBO game, it’s a different atmosphere than MLB, one I would love to see MLB take a few cues from. The fans are loud, the bat flips are fierce, and players have customized theme songs.

And thankfully, it’s looking like American fans will get to see more of it. The KBO and ESPN are apparently close to a broadcast deal to televise KBO games on this side of the Pacific. (A deal had previously been reported as close, but fell through when ESPN wanted to give KBO no money up-front.)

For fans, there are a lot of new names to know. But even without indepth knowledge of the KBO, some will be vaguely familiar already, as Korea is one of the frequent landing spots for Triple-A journeymen to get a real opportunity to play highly competitive baseball at considerably more enticing salaries. To acclimate ourselves to what the talent levels are like in KBO, I fired up the ZiPS supercomputer to get the 2019 MLB translations for KBO players. After all, many fans understand baseball relative to MLB. That’s not to suggest that the KBO shouldn’t be enjoyed on its own terms; many of its difference from MLB are what make it so engaging. Next week we’ll have ZiPS projected standings and player projections put in a KBO-context for the league’s Opening Day. 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.

Preliminary results from a recent study of antibody tests among New York City residents revealed that 13.9% of tested people came back positive for COVID-19 antibodies. That’s good news in a couple of ways. It’s another test that suggests that, at least preliminarily, the actual fatality rate may be lower than the observed case fatality rate (CFR). This happened with H1N1 in 2009, which also saw the estimated fatality rate, post-outbreak, come far below the observed CFR.

It also suggests the health care system might be able to continue to treat patients, if not in ideal fashion, at least avoiding the worst of experiences of countries like Italy, though reports of the experiences of front-line health care workers across the US, and particularly in places like New York City, serve as a grim a reminder of why it is so important to stay home.

What it means for the return of activities like organized baseball, however, remains to be seen, as such a return is obviously far more dependent on widely available tests for current infection and a decline in fatalities and hospital resource usage in states like Arizona and Florida.

And please, do not inject yourself with bleach or Lysol, whatever the president says!

MLB The Show is MLB The Show

Perhaps one of the only businesses thriving right now, at least of those that don’t make toilet paper, is Sony Interactive Entertainment San Diego, the developers of MLB The Show 20 for the PlayStation 4. Without much real baseball, you’ve seen a lot more exposure for the game than I can ever remember. We now have major league players streaming games against each other live, with ESPN and other networks set to broadcast select games from the MLB The Show Players League. The first broadcast was last night, with the next one coming Sunday night.

Korean Baseball Organization, ESPN at an Impasse

One of the bits of news that excited me last week was the prospect of seeing more KBO games broadcast live in the United States. If you haven’t watched one of their broadcasts before, the energy and excitement the crowds bring is quite refreshing, even if you do not speak the language (I don’t). What comes across is a league in which fun appears to be the priority, a sometimes sharp contrast with what is often an over-serious sport here. Theme songs, chants, bat flips — anything goes!

So it was disappointing to hear that there were hiccups in ESPN’s attempts to broadcast KBO games in the United States to help fill the programming void. Unfortunately, the catch appears to be that ESPN wanted the rights to the games for free. KBO baseball is established in South Korea and while a whole new audience is tempting, it’s a business and a league that is far beyond the point of needing to “work for exposure.”

COVID-19 Outbreak in Venezuela

While individual major league players have largely been spared from the effects of COVID-19 (though not always their family members), not everyone in baseball has been so fortunate. In Nueva Esparta, a small state consisting of three islands off the northern coast of Venezuela, there have been 93 reported cases of COVID-19, 83 of which are connected to the Roberto Vahlis academy. This makes up nearly a third of Venezuela’s reported coronavirus cases. The Phillies signed an outfielder, Yhoswar Garcia, out of the academy just last month.

More Teams Extend Benefits

In Wednesday’s COVID-19 roundup from my colleague Tony Wolfe, there was a handy-dandy reference chart of which teams have extended non-player employee salaries and for how long. Since Wednesday, the Texas Rangers have reiterated that there would be no layoffs or furloughs until at least the end of May. The Mets are at least formulating a plan for June and beyond, past their previous May 31 commitment. And the Pirates extending their employment guarantee to May 31 also just missed our publication time.

NHL Moves Closer to Reboot

There’s safety in numbers (well, maybe not), and MLB now has more company when it comes to leagues trying to find creative ways to continue their suspended seasons. The NHL is exploring their own version of baseball’s Arizona/Florida solution. The NHL initially tried exploring a neutral site plan, but found the logistics too difficult to overcome, so the current plan under consideration involves a number of regional “hubs” at which teams would play.

How Taiwan Restarted Baseball

This isn’t really new news in itself, but there was a highly detailed piece describing the steps that Taiwan needed to take in order to make starting the season practical. It’s going to take a lot more to get baseball going than just confining players to hotels. Hygiene will be especially important, and could present a challenge for a sport known for so much spitting and licking of hands.

When you see the “we said, they said” press release exchanges in the media between MLB and the MLBPA concerning salaries in a fanless baseball world, it serves as a reminder that baseball’s biggest fight is actually the one on the horizon. By comparison, that fight might make the COVID-19 policy squabbling look like a nursery school shoving match.

Baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2021 season, and long before the novel coronavirus altered the 2020 baseball landscape, players had real grievances they wished to see resolved in the next labor agreement. After two tepid winters of free agency — it did thaw a bit this last winter — and teams treating luxury tax thresholds as soft salary caps, players have expressed varying degrees of unhappiness with baseball’s current economics. Service time shenanigans like the Cubs swearing that Kris Bryant’s services were needed exactly one the day after a call-up would have otherwise resulted in free agency following the 2021 season are not conducive to good-faith negotiations between equal parties.

The players are no doubt going into these talks with a wish list of things they want. Some they’ll get, others they won’t. But the negotiation on both sides will be hard-fought; dealings between owners and players usually only go smoothly when the subject is taking away money from people with no voice at the table.

If I were the evil dictator of the MLBPA — I made myself the evil dictator of MLB last week when mixing up some new divisions — here are what my priorities would be for the next CBA. (I’ll let someone else answer the question of why I always label myself an evil dictator.) Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: And we are LIVE from pandemic house arrest!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Very much show, for a projection system to put him 30th in the prospect ranking based on rookie ball, is impressive.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: A bit aggressive with BA — nobody’s real ability ever spikes that high today — but ZiPS (and I and all the scouts) think that’ll come

12:06

Dan Szymborski: He had like 40 XBH total as an 18 year old and playing above rookie ball

Read the rest of this entry »

On a purely objective level, Eric Davis had a solid major league career. He played parts of the 17 seasons in the majors, hit 282 homers, and collected 1,430 hits. Davis received MVP votes, made All-Star appearances, and earned three Gold Glove awards. Of a group of three childhood friends consisting of Davis, Darryl Strawberry, and Chris Brown, he’s the one who came out of baseball seemingly the least affected by personal setbacks and tragedy. Davis is still involved in Major League Baseball and has worked with underprivileged kids, something he knows about having grown up in South Central Los Angeles.

But as accomplished a player as Davis was, he was capable of being more. Like another All-Universe athlete from the 1980s who made the majors, Bo Jackson, baseball wasn’t Davis’s best sport in his youth. At John C. Fremont High School, he was considered a basketball player before a baseball player, but at the time, baseball had the quickest path to playing professionally. While the NBA’s policy disallowing anyone to play in the league within four years of high school was struck down by the US Supreme Court, no high schoolers made the NBA between Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby in 1975 and Shawn Kemp in 1989.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, what kept Davis from approaching a Cooperstown career wasn’t personal or legal troubles or a lack of talent; it was a flurry of injuries. From a knee injury suffered as a rookie while sliding to the torn rotator cuff with the Cardinals, Davis was a veritable encyclopedia of maladies. (For a comprehensive listing of his dings and scrapes – and for a great look back on Davis’ career – be sure to check out Norm King’s SABR Bio of Davis.) Some of them were of the ordinary variety, such as an assortment of leg injuries that cut short almost every one of his age 24-28 peak seasons, a broken collarbone diving in the outfield, and multiple shoulder ailments.

Others were less typical, as when Davis lacerated his kidney and ended up in intensive care and endured a month-long hospital stay. Spinal problems, which ruined his 1994 long before the strike ended the season, initially led Davis to announce his retirement at age 32. Just a year after his extremely successful 1996 comeback with the Cincinnati Reds (.287/.394/.523, 26 homers, 3.4 WAR in 129 games), he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Davis spent the second half of the 1997 season recovering from having a portion of his colon, along with a tumor the size of a baseball, removed but still returned to the Baltimore Orioles and hit .327/.388/.592 in his last real full season in the majors. By this point, he was a part-time right fielder/designated hitter, with his days in center field wisely consigned to the past. Read the rest of this entry »

Life isn’t fair, as it continually reminds us, but we try to keep sports as far from the harsh light of reality as we can. The New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays certainly don’t start in the same place when creating a roster, but when those players are on the field, everybody has to play by the same rules. Whether you’re facing Gerrit Cole or whatever fifth starter the Baltimore Orioles Mad-Libbed onto the roster, you have to get actual hits, score actual runs, and make actual Statcast-blessed defensive plays.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to keep the schedules teams face fair. Ideally, we’d want every team to face the same strength of schedule. With complete discretion over the design of the season, that’s still a nearly impossible task, without knowing which teams will be the best and worst ones ahead of time. And it becomes definitely impossible with unbalanced division schedules, series played mostly in three or four-game chunks, and a need to avoid having teams travel thousands of miles every day, like some character in the final season of Game of Thrones.

And even if you avoid all these things using some dark magics from the Necronomicon or Carson Cistulli’s personal notes, you’re still bound by the laws of the physical universe. Teams can’t play themselves, so even if every team played every other team the same number of games each season, the Yankees get a bonus by not having to play the Yankees, while Orioles’ hitters never get the opportunity to feast on Orioles pitching. 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.

Owners Seek Salary Cuts

If you were wondering why the talk surrounding fanless games was a bit on the vague side when MLB and the MLBPA came to an agreement on service time issues, you now have your answer. With the prospect of games with no live fans becoming increasingly likely, MLB reportedly wants players to take a pay cut because of lost gate revenues. The players believe the agreement reached last month that would pro-rate salaries for the number of games actually played in 2020 already reflects the possibility of fanless games, while the owners believe the agreement about salaries contained the basic assumption that the games would be of the “normal” variety.

This friction between ownership and player interests can be seen by the latest exchange of public comments by Andrew Cuomo and Scott Boras. Per Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich’s report for The Athletic:

The prorated formula Boras references is for a shortened season — a player, for example, would receive half his salary if the schedule consisted of 81 games rather than the customary 162. The agreement also accounts for a canceled season, awarding players a collective advance payment of $170 million over April and May, money they keep if no games are played.

A separate section of the deal, listing the conditions for games to resume, says the commissioner’s office and the union “will discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators or at appropriate substitute neutral sites.” Similar phrasing exists in other parts of the agreement as well.

One person with knowledge of the deal said the clause was not intended to signal any willingness by the players to reopen salary discussions. Others said the issue was left undecided, and that the league made it clear to the union that economic adjustments would be necessary if games were played in empty parks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is a statistics-heavy game, and that’s true even for those who don’t think of themselves as being part of the saber set. Because the game’s rules have had a relatively high degree of consistency across eras, the sport’s career milestones have also enjoyed a certain constancy throughout its history. That doesn’t mean that 600 homers from a player whose prime came in the 1960s are exactly the same as the 600 homers a player in the Wild Card era hit, but when you’re talking 600 homers, you’re always talking about someone who was really, really good at hitting home runs.

And while we would like to think that Hall of Fame voting is based off deep analysis and not round numbers, the fact remains that milestones still play a large part in who ends up in Cooperstown. Whether a player hits 470 homers or 520 homers still means something.

For precisely how much missed time has mattered in Hall of Fame voting, you should read my colleague Jay Jaffe’s three-part series on missed time and the Hall of Fame. In those three parts, Jay tackled how missed years due to wars and strikes were handled , and how today’s hitters and pitchers might be treated in Cooperstown terms. So go read those first. I’ll wait.

[…]
[…]

Meg will probably now inform me that I don’t need to actually insert punctuation that represents foot-tapping, so let’s get to some data! That’s what a projection system is for, after all.

Given the world that we’re in, one of my many research projects this spring has been trying to better gauge how missed seasons ought to be treated. Forecasting those seasons is difficult in the best of times; the missed time is typically due to injury or suspension or war. Now, everyone is hanging out at home trying to not catch the current super-virus or crippling ennui.

And I wasn’t entirely sure whether the long layoff would affect all types of players to the same degree. Re-projecting stars for 1982 and 1995 using ZiPS — I didn’t have ZiPS in 1995 though I assume you’ll excuse me for not having a projection system when I was four — I tried to gauge whether missed time affected players of different qualities in different ways. Together with other data (suspensions, premature retirements, and war), I found that my normal missed time algorithm slightly overrated stars’ “return” projections. Apparently, the elite do have more to lose with lost time.

With those results in mind, and to get an idea of how the projections would change in a missed season, I projected the probabilities of some of the active players with the best chances of hitting major milestones doing so. These projections reflect both the lost season and the slightly decreased projection relative to the rest of baseball upon return. These projections also contain an algorithm that makes it more likely a player nearing a milestone will return for an additional season. Further, I told ZiPS that veterans will finish their contracts:

With a full 2020 season, there was approximately a 57% projected chance that one of these 16 players would finish their careers with at least 700 home runs. A single missed year drops that by more than half, to 26%. A lot of that is Albert Pujols. 44 homers isn’t a lot, but he’s only signed through 2021 and let’s be honest, if he wasn’t a future Hall of Famer with a big contract, he’d have spent his summers playing golf the last three or four years. Losing 2020 washes out most of his probability of hitting 700.

But even for the future immortals with more time remaining, it’s a pretty big deal. To hit 700 homers, a lot has to go right; otherwise, we’d have more than three players in history beyond that threshold. Losing a year is a significant loss, even for a younger player. Lopping 40 homers off the career totals of Cody Bellinger or Ronald Acuña Jr. presents a significant handicap.

For the lighter milestones, it’s less of a kneecapping since you don’t need to be quite as fortunate to hit 500 homers. The exception is Miguel Cabrera. ZiPS was already looking at him askance given that his offensive profile has confusingly become Really Slow Craig Counsell, and sees hitting 500 as being difficult if 2020 is lost. That would have been a surprise a few years ago!

For the 21 hitters listed here, ZiPS projects that, on average, two who would have achieved the 3,000-hit feat will now fail to do so as a result of a lost 2020 season. For players near 2,000 hits like Joey Votto (1,866) and Yadi Molina (1,963), that’s unlikely to matter; Molina might retire in that case, but ZiPS isn’t capable of modeling this decision of his. The larger hits are taken by mid-career players like José Altuve and Manny Machado, players who are in their prime but old enough that the calendar is a concern.

It would be especially bad news for Nick Markakis in his quest to be the worst 3,000-hit player in major league history. Johnny Damon fell short in his quest to sneak up on 3000 hits and no 2020 could dive-bomb Markakis’s quest for the last 600ish hits:

Despite the introduction of the five-man rotation, we’ve been blessed with a surprisingly large number of 300-game winners in our lifetime, most recently the impressive Hall of Fame crew of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Randy Johnson, with Roger Clemens on the outside for non-baseball reasons. We’re now in an era, however, when the careers of our elite pitchers did not brush up against the end of the pre-sabermetric era, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever before.

Right now there are only nine active pitchers with 150 wins and only two, Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke, who have passed 200 wins. Still, ZiPS thought that there was a 79% chance that one of those 11 pitchers would win 300 games, whether because of Verlander or Greinke being durable, Clayton Kershaw getting that last 5% back, Gerrit Cole establishing 2019-2020 as his new baseline, or maybe even Rick Porcello working his way to 300 wins by virtue of eating innings and having amassed 149 wins through age-30 thanks to an early start.

With a lost season, that becomes a coin flip (46%). The two best candidates, Verlander and Greinke, see the calendar flip unfortunately. It could still happen, but a lot more good fortune is needed.

The one thing the modern era is good for is strikeout records, because there are a lot of punch outs. What does a lost year do for those chases?

Nobody has established even a 1% chance of catching Nolan Ryan’s 5714 — and nobody will because of the almost 5,400 innings Ryan needed to reach that mark. The odds of catching the 3,000 and 4,000 strikeout marks, still relatively exclusive thresholds, aren’t as impacted as some of the other milestones.