Baseball in Korea and Taiwan is in full swing — my apologies for the pun — and a third major professional league is set to join them on Friday when NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) starts up its delayed 2020 season. The novel coronavirus has shown that it has little care for the vagaries of baseball scheduling, so as with other leagues, NPB will naturally play a shortened slate.

Unlike a certain other league – it would be far too gauche of me to identify it by name – NPB is trying to fit as much baseball into the summer as it can. By virtue of being able to start in June, each team is scheduled to play 125 games, with the main change being the suspension of interleague play. (Normally, each team plays three home games against three teams in the opposite league, and three road games against the remaining cross-league competition.)

So with Japanese baseballing imminent, it’s time to run the ZiPS projections for the league, as I did last month with the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). With a league closer to MLB in quality, slightly better data, and more personal experience working with said data, I’m more confident about ZiPS’ NPB projections than the KBO ones.

Without interleague play, both leagues will have .500 records, helpful for the Central League, which has lost the interleague battle against the Pacific League 14 times in 15 seasons. Ties aren’t something ZiPS normally has to account for, but after doing research on the topic, I’ve found they’re even more random than one-run wins in MLB (as we all would have expected). On to the projections!

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Everyone likes to compare young, phenom centerfielders to Willie Mays and/or Mickey Mantle. Mike Trout is, of course, the most deserving, but people have also made those comparisons to Ken Griffey Jr., Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto, Andruw Jones, Josh Hamilton, and many others.

In many cases, these types of comparisons are either early, ambitious, or downright wild. Josh Hamilton was only Mickey Mantle in terms of his personal struggles; Ed Rogers was just a bit worse than Alex Rodriguez. At one point, though, the Mays/Mantle comparisons were fresh, and long before it became a cliche, a young outfielder named César Cedeño was compared to Mays by by future Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher.

Durocher was not one to be overly sentimental; Cedeño’s early performances did evoke Mays. At age 21, Cedeño broke out for the Astros, hitting .320/.385/.537 (wRC+ of 163) while winning a Gold Glove as a center fielder, his first of five. Rather than falling prey to the dreaded regression to the mean, he basically did that again the following season, hitting .320/.376/.537 (wRC+ of 155). There were obviously no wins above replacement stats to look at in 1972, FanGraphs and other sites like it being decades away from existence, but we can look back at Cedeño’s phenom years with even more certainty about his place in baseball’s pantheon than they could at the time. 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.

Second Wave of COVID-19 Infections

The biggest sports news of the week, affecting everything from baseball to tennis, isn’t sports-related at all. Wrapped up in some of the economic turmoil between MLB and the MLBPA is the concern of many owners over a second wave of COVID-19 derailing the playoffs. (The bigger worry is the risk that a second wave will derail a 2020 season in its entirety.) Americans have largely moved on from peak coronavirus watchfulness and cities that didn’t bear the brunt of the initial wave, such as San Antonio and Houston, are seeing new case count peaks in recent days. Even if a second wave proves not to be severe enough to cut down the 2020 season, MLB may need to re-think things like game location on the fly, meaning it’s crucial they reach an agreement on the economic issues quickly.

Commissioner Rob Manfred said on Day 1 of the draft that he was 100 percent sure that there would be baseball in 2020. This should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, given that the commish and the owners also claim that every game plays loses them $640,000.

The NFL Officially Suspends Minicamps

In a move that was long expected, the NFL officially suspended minicamp through the end of June and extended the “virtual offseason” to June 26. Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the Titans, was optimistic about training camp opening early in July, enough so that he ended the team’s virtual offseason two weeks before the June 26 deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Yes

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Dan Szymborski: Oh yeah, chat go start now.

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Dan Szymborski: LIkely the young elite players of today plus a few names that we don’t know yet

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Dan Szymborski: Or, more accurately, we don’t know if they’ll be good or not

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Baseball’s most famous unsigned draftee is arguably J.D. Drew, who along with superagent Scott Boras, waged a summer-long battle against the Phillies and the MLB draft itself back in 1997. I’d describe that conflict as a draw, for while Drew didn’t win freedom and earned the eternal enmity of Phillies fans, he did get the signing bonus he wanted the following year with the Cardinals.

There are a lot of reasons a player can go unsigned. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of money. Players at the bottom of the pecking order, without a significant signing bonus, have to figure out how to subsist for years on a paltry minor league salary just to take the long shot at having a major league career. Sometimes they just don’t want to play for the team that drafted them. Players with family connections to a team are sometimes drafted in late rounds as a courtesy even though the org knows they won’t sign. Other times, players are hoping for a better draft position in a future year or want to honor a promise they made to their college program, either out of a desire to play ball there or take advantage of getting an education.

From J.D. Drew to Aron Amundson, baseball’s only 100th round pick ever, the stories of why a player doesn’t sign can vary. Thousands of players have gone unsigned only to eventually resurface and end up playing in the major leagues anyway. In 2,584 cases covering 1,983 different players, a draft pick has gone unsigned and later made it to the majors. 439 players didn’t sign at least twice, with the record for a future major leaguer being Luis Medina of the Cleveland Indians. Medina remained unsigned his first five times (MLB had a January draft at the time), getting drafted as high as eighth overall on his fifth refusal. Medina eventually signed the sixth time he was drafted, in the ninth round, his lowest draft position since the first time he was selected.

In the early 1990s, baseball’s owners attempted to short-circuit the whole concept of negotiating with amateurs — not for the last time — by increasing the number of years a team retained control of a player’s rights from one year to five. The players objected and it was ruled in arbitration that owners had to negotiate draft changes with the Major League Baseball Players Association. Read the rest of this entry »

At this point, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that Major League Baseball is highly adept at saving money on the backs of people without a seat at the table. Amateur players often bear the brunt of those machinations, and without a real voice in the collective bargaining process, they’ve seen their negotiating rights and earning potential limited by bonus pools, restrictions on major league contracts, and shrinking negotiation windows. Sometimes, these measures have seemed almost gratuitous, like when the Phillies, unable to sign Ben Wetzler in 2014, decided to report him to the NCAA for having legal representation.

The March agreement between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association on how to resume the season (and what to do if there isn’t one) cut the amateur draft to the bone. The draft was reduced from 40 rounds to a maximum of 20 (MLB later settled on the minimum of five), slot values remained at their 2019 levels, signing bonus payments were deferred to July 2021 and 2022, with a maximum of $100,000 due to each player in 2020, and undrafted players had their bonuses capped at $20,000 (previously, players could receive $125,000 without it counting against a team’s draft pool).

The question is: What kind of talent will this cost baseball long-term? Baseball’s draft is an uncertain exercise compared to the NBA’s or the NFL’s. While those leagues have their own share of undrafted stars — in much shorter drafts — baseball has a long history of franchise stalwarts who weren’t in the top 300, 600, or even 800 players taken.

With the bonus restrictions on undrafted players, baseball is sure to lose a piece of its future. Many of these players will still end up in baseball eventually, but with only minuscule bonuses, which many players desperately need to justify seeking baseball careers because of the anemic minor league salaries, a lot of players will not. 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.

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!

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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.

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Dan Szymborski: Or whoever people are into these days.

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

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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 »