12:03

Dan Szymborski: AND GOT HERE

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I was finishing an article and it was a race against the clock!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: A Bartolo Colon who pitches like Gerrit Cole!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: AND HE WOULD BE ALL OF THOSE THINGS

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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 NBA Plans Its Return

The NBA, like the NHL, is in a bit of a different situation than MLB in that its season was mostly already done before COVID-19 reared its ugly morphology. NBA commissioner Adam Silver reportedly conversed with NBA owners Tuesday, providing an optimistic outlook about the resumption of play, and while the exact numbers have not been released, a confidential survey of NBA players taken by NBPA representatives indicated that there is an overwhelming desire to finish the season. And in an attempt not to force the decision right now, the NBA and NBPA also agreed to extend until September the deadline for the owners to trigger the clause that allows them to suspend the CBA.

Premier League Considers Possibility of Lost Season

The Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, indicated that he has discussed the possibility of being unable to resume the 2020 season with the teams. The UK has given clearance for the league to resume on June 1 and they were previously targeting a return to play on June 8, but the teams put the kibosh on the possibility of playing games on neutral grounds (this kind of thing is a bigger deal in association football than it is in baseball). There’s another significant roadblock in that the players are not yet officially convinced that it’s safe to resume the season.

The NHL Discussing Resumption

The NHL’s Return to Play committee continued talks on Tuesday. One of the undecided questions is what the NHL playoffs will look like, one scenario being a 24-team playoff that eliminates the need to finish the regular season at all. Prominent players such as Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin have previously expressed a preference for going straight to the playoffs.

Arizona Sports Are Go

Arizona governor Doug Ducey announced on Tuesday that major league sports could resume play in the state when the state’s stay-at-home order expires on Friday. Most of the scenarios in which MLB resumes play in 2020 require games to be played in some combination of Arizona, Florida, and Texas, so Arizona giving the green light to the return of professional sports was a necessary part of these plans. This is especially true in light of news that Los Angeles County envisions its stay-at-home orders remaining in effect into August. Los Angeles may not be alone if there are new COVID-19 peaks in communities with major league parks.

While baseball can resume in Arizona, there are still strings attached in that the teams will have to follow CDC safety guidelines, though one would hope that they would do so even if Arizona hadn’t laid it down as a requirement.

MLB/MLBPA Talks Are in Progress

We’ll have a lot more on this, but in any COVID-19 roundup, it can’t be forgotten that MLB started discussions with the MLBPA on the exact steps needed to start the 2020 regular season. One surprise in the first day was that the owners did not broach the topic of the extremely controversial givebacks they want from the players. And if you’re wondering why there’s been such a push from the league to play at least some of the season in teams’ home parks, it comes down, at least in part, to revenue sources that would not be as readily available at the spring training venues.

Mariners Avoid Furloughs

To avoid any cuts and furloughs through October 1, the Mariners are implementing a 20% pay cut on employees making at least $60,000 per year. Employees who would see a dip under $60,000 with a 20% pay cut will not see their salaries drop below that $60,000 line. Some of the top executives, including general manager Jerry Dipoto, are taking unspecified cuts that are greater than 20%. Personally, I’m mildly surprised to discover that Dipoto isn’t paid by the trade.

Not every teams’ staff is so lucky. There are concerns in baseball that teams will use the shutdown as an excuse to permanently slash some costs and one NL executive told ESPN’s Buster Olney that he expected significant upheaval:

“I bet 40% of those let go never get back in baseball again,” an NL official said. “A lot of these guys have been in the game for their whole adult lives, and they’re making pennies. And you’re just going to throw those guys on the street, into this economy?”

Said another team exec: “Baseball will come back, and I bet teams could make up the cost of keeping these people on within four or five years. It just doesn’t make any sense to me that these [teams] need to dump people making $40,000, $50,000. Those savings are not difference-making” within the MLB context.

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.

MLB Explores Revenue-Sharing

One of the trickiest aspects of opening the 2020 season may not be the direct effects of COVID-19 but instead how to divide up what will be a smaller-than-usual pile of cash. MLB and the MLBPA answered one question last month, coming to an agreement on the service time issues. While this decided some things in the event there is no 2020 season and no revenues to divide, the league is arguing this agreement didn’t conclusively answer what would happen if there actually is a season.

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question revolves around player salaries. While the initial agreement involved pro-rating normal salaries for however many games are actually played, there’s a disagreement between MLB and the MLBPA about whether this assumed normal games with fans in attendance rather than fan-free ones. This isn’t just obscure legalese but a serious roadblock.

In my opinion, teams have very real concerns about league revenues without fans in attendance, more real than the general complaints about revenue in normal seasons. The problem is, owners don’t exactly have a long history of good-faith negotiations with players. It’s not unreasonable for players to be suspicious given the games played by team owners over the years despite players seeing a declining share of the revenues while team valuations skyrocket. Read the rest of this entry »

With so much uncertainty surrounding the “when” and “if” of a 2020 MLB season, it’s not surprising to see a constant progression of new plans. What it comes down to is that there’s no obvious one-size-fits-all solution that maximizes player and staff safety, baseball quality, the number of baseball games, and league revenue simultaneously. It’s only in such an odd year that things like playing in spring training parks, Arizona/Florida leagues, neutral playoffs, fanless games, and Thanksgiving baseball actually seem plausible rather than falling in the category of whimsical skylarkings.

While states re-opening for business seems like a dubious decision, often running counter to the advice of public health experts, it appears inevitable that many jurisdictions will resume much of their pre-COVID-19 economic activity, though with additional precautions and wariness of others. We’re far from being able to expect normal game conditions, with fans and hot dog vendors, but increasingly, there’s a push to play a large percentage, if not all of the season, in teams’ home parks.

With travel likely to be both more difficult and more perilous, CBS Sports’ RJ Anderson reported a proposal for a three-division alignment for the 2020 season. This would likely involve teams at least starting in just a few stadiums before an eventual move to their home cities depending on the course of the virus. Read the rest of this entry »

If we didn’t know it was real, Joe Mauer’s career with the Minnesota Twins might strike us as being more like a fairy tale than an actual story. That is, until August 19, 2013. That was when Mets first baseman Ike Davis hit a foul tip that hit Mauer square in his helmet.

The moribund Twins, coming off a 69-93 season, had the first overall draft pick in 2001 for the second time in franchise history. The first time the Twins had the No. 1 pick, they drafted Tim Belcher, who didn’t sign when the team wouldn’t pay the going rate for a top selection. Minnesota also failed to sign their second round pick, Bill Swift; none of the players they actually did sign ever played a game in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

2020 hasn’t quite gone as planned for anyone or anything, including baseball, but US audiences got to taste an amuse-bouche with the start of the season for the KBO (Korea Baseball Organization). Naturally, 2020’s gonna 2020 — the NC Dinos and the Samsung Lions dealt with a rain delay early, while the Kia Tigers and Kiwoom Heroes had to wait through a fire delay. But in the end, we had five real, live baseball games go off successfully.

I’ve spent the last four days cloistered within my quarantine, running ZiPS projections for KBO players and their teams. While ZiPS has always been able to project the MLB performance of players who come over from South Korea, I’ve rarely used the feature that allows me to run KBO-specific projections. But with KBO one of the only games in town (let’s not forget the CPBL!), this was a good time to whip out something new.

Many of the typical caveats that apply to projections for MLB players apply to KBO projections. There are also a few additional issues, like the lack of some advanced data and the dude running the projections having less familiarity with team construction. Without advanced data, ZiPS defaults to a simpler model, with results it has less confidence in. I’m still not happy with anything defense-related on an individual level — the team level is easier — so no wins above replacement will be present here.

And having less familiarity with team construction means it’s harder for me to construct depth charts to run simulations, an important aspect of projecting team results. The wonderful MyKBO, run by Dan Kurtz, is an absolutely indispensable site. (My colleague Jay Jaffe has a two-part, in-depth interview with Kurtz you should be sure to read.)

The league’s own site also provides a lot of information, as do the Google gremlins. But even with these sources, it’s not as easy for me to understand the contours of, say, a third base position battle on the Kia Tigers the same way I would on the Detroit Tigers. 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.

Tampa Bay Rays to Furlough Employees

In order to save money, the Tampa Bay Rays have reportedly furloughed some of their full-time employees; the furloughs will take effect on Saturday. The furloughs will involve less than half of their staff, with other employees in baseball operations receiving pay cuts. Teams have unsurprisingly been happier to trumpet the employees they’ve kept on than the cuts they’ve made, such as the already reported news of the Pirates halting 401k contributions for baseball operations staff or the Mets cutting front office salaries after June 1, even if a partial season is played.

The Rays are the first team known to have furloughed employees, but they’re unlikely to be the last; the A’s have reportedly discussed what Ken Rosenthal and Alex Coffey described as “extensive layoffs.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 »