Last month, in more normal times, we tested the Yankees to see how injury-resistant the 2020 roster actually was in light of the then-recent news that Luis Severino would miss 2020 with Tommy John surgery. While this year’s Yankees roster wasn’t quite as deep as 2019’s, it took a lot of key injuries to seriously affect the team’s 2020 chances. But even as they remained the favorites to win the East, losing James Paxton until at least May, Aaron Judge‘s broken rib, and Giancarlo Stanton’s sore calf muscle increased the team’s downside risk.

ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported late Monday night that MLB and the MLBPA were discussing the particulars of a plan that would see workouts resume in May with the season beginning soon after. Passan is as dependable as they come, and I have little doubt about the story, but the chances of the season starting that quickly strike me as fairly small. As Ben Clemens wrote for FanGraphs earlier today, the logistical lift involved with such a plan is enormous. From what I’ve heard doing the rounds — and I’ve yet to have a colleague form a drastically different impression — MLB’s more realistic targets involve June workouts and a start sometime in early-to-mid July.

Obviously, teams would rather be playing right now, regardless of their roster’s injury status. Reality is terrible! But with reality’s timeline in mind, instead of injuring all of the Yankees, what if we healed them? It’s not quite as preposterous as it sounds thanks to the delayed start to the season. Severino wouldn’t return no matter how late Opening Day ends up being, so my headline is a bit of a cruel lie. But a midseason start to the 2020 season leaves a very real chance that the Yankees kick things off with Paxton, Judge, and Stanton all on the active roster; Stanton was likely to return in April, but the outlook for Paxton and Judge was a bit foggier. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

IHME Projections Continue Positive Trend

The daily projections for COVID-19’s impact in the U.S. have continued to trend in a positive direction, whic is good news in a world currently starved for it. In its latest model run, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington again projects the peak stress on the American health system as less than in the previous day. From nearly 90,000 projected fatalities in the United States last week, the latest run knocks almost a third off that number.

There’s a lot of hardship and heartbreak still ahead of us, and all of this dependent on continued aggressive social distancing. But if the virus truly peaks on April 11 as projected, we could start to see more detailed road maps for the slow transition out of quarantine mode. It likely won’t happen as quickly as MLB’s ill-received plan to return as early as May would require, but this kind of planning will necessarily accelerate once we appear to be on the right side of the curve. For more on the challenges attendant with baseball’s reported Arizona Plan, check out Ben Clemens’ piece for FanGraphs from earlier today. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 season will be unlike any other we’ve seen before. Indeed, there may not even be a season. The COVID-19 pandemic has already altered baseball to an even greater degree than the World Wars did. While finding a way to resume play has become a rare point of common interest for MLB and the MLBPA, a contagious illness that spreads easily and is more dangerous than the seasonal flu presents a whole host of problems that need to be solved before a new Opening Day can be announced. Do you quarantine players? How long do you play without fans? What happens if a player tests positive in mid-August?

But let’s assume for a moment that the IHME model is on target. The model predicts that if we can keep up our current social distancing efforts (and the straggler states join in), the worst effects of the virus will be behind us by early-to-mid June. The return of baseball would be a welcome symbol of normalcy, and a baseball season that starts in July could largely be played without too many compromises other than the number of games. But I think it would be a mistake for baseball to just go back to the regular structure. The game will be returning against the backdrop of an international tragedy. In this dark time, baseball should focus on the enjoyable parts of the sport, even if things get a little…weird. 2021 can return to normal business, but let’s make 2020 fun.

United we stand, divided we Fall…Classic

Divisions have been a part of baseball for a half-century — even longer if you consider leagues to be de facto divisions. They’re a convenient way to group teams engaged in competition for playoff spots and to create additional meaningful races beyond simple seeding. But one of the problems with divisions is they just don’t make all that much sense in a severely shortened season. Whether the season is 80 or 100 or 120 games, it will provide less of an opportunity for teams to prove themselves superior to their division rivals. And the shorter the season, the less likely it is that a team will run away with a one-division league and make things boring. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

IHME Roadmap

One of the most detailed COVID-19 projections out there is produced by the The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, a research instituted founded in 2007. The IHME model endeavors to project how long until states reach peak resource use, including hospital and ICU beds, as well as ventilators. That the model breaks things down state by state is crucial because given the size of the United States, it seems likely that we’ll face two months of individual hot spots that peak at different times rather than one uniform disaster. It’s important to note that the IHME model assumes both that current social distancing measures will remain in place and that the remaining straggler states will enact similar measures as well.

This kind of modeling isn’t just important for policymakers and citizens, but for businesses like Major League Baseball that are attempting to map out their return to normalcy. If these projections turn out to be accurate, it could provide baseball with a lot of useful information as to which places will be safer to hold games sooner (fanless or otherwise), and which dates to look to for an apex to the virus’ trajectory. If states start missing their projected peaks, it will tell everyone that the road ahead will be harder than previously expected, and plans can be made (or adjusted) accordingly. Again, all of this is predicated on the assumption that we continue to practice social distancing. So for the sake of your family and neighbors (and to hasten baseball’s return), please stay home as much as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball, like the world around it, has been flooded with bad news for the last couple of weeks. Normally, losing one of the game’s most exciting 20-something pitchers to Tommy John would create a splash on the level of Dan-doing-a-cannonball-into-a-kiddie-pool. But in these times, the ripples created by the news of Noah Syndergaard’s surgery (along with Chris Sale’s) were relatively minor. What are UCLs compared to the concerns of COVID-19?

But it is bad news. Bad for the Mets and bad for Syndergaard himself. How bad? For a change of pace, let’s start off with the long-term projection rather than finish with it. The projection is notable in this case as there’s a key difference in the model. With no actual game-related news to distract me, I’ve been able to complete work on one of my ongoing data projects: better long-term playing time projections for players with injuries, especially serious ones that cause entire seasons to be missed.

While ZiPS has had a generalized model for injuries — both specific and, well, general — for some time, the focus was mainly on projecting how well the player would play upon returning and the long-term qualitative impact on their play. So long-term, pitchers with bum shoulders would fare worse than those taking a trip to Dr. Andrews’ Magic Elbow Factory, and speedy infielders with leg problems would see their aging curves accelerate. Less of the focus had been the long-term effect on playing time itself, something I’ve been able to work on a lot recently. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And it has begun.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I went through all my pictures to find the weariest looking one.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Now this is the most frightening one.

12:03

Dan Szymborski:

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

As more and more Americans find themselves under COVID-19-related stay at home orders, we’ve now settled into an odd pattern of bracing for daily bad news while we wait for the curve to flatten, hopefully sometime in the next two to three weeks. When my colleague Jake Mailhot gave this update on Friday, there were around 82,000 confirmed cases in the United States. As of late Sunday, that number was closing in on 150,000, and may have surpassed that bleak number by the time you read this.

With the MLBPA and MLB having come to an agreement late last week on the basic framework needed to resume baseball (or deal with the fallout of a lost season), the intersection of baseball news and the novel coronavirus will likely shift to stories of individual people in baseball, at least for a while. Until we have a better idea of when the pandemic’s numbers will peak and decline, and when baseball will resume, all we can do is wait.

FanGraphs Needs Your Help!

The sports ecosystem supports a lot of small businesses and one of those small businesses is this very site. Our founder David Appelman’s crazy notion to start a baseball stat site has done much to advance baseball knowledge over the last 15 years, but FanGraphs is not immune to the economic consequences of baseball’s shutdown. We’ve had to make the tough decision to suspend The Hardball Times for the time being and let many of our terrific contributors go; those of us who remain are tightening our belts. If you’ve enjoyed our work over the years and are able to support us in these lean times, we would greatly appreciate it if you would consider a Membership. We’re nowhere without your support, and we want to make sure the site is firing on all cylinders and providing you with great stuff when baseball returns. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Here is Dan, with #PanicDoritos

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Favorite: Sandlot

12:03

Dan Szymborski: LEast: Field of Dreams. I find it treacly and overwrought.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

As I write this, the total confirmed cases of COVID-19 has blown past the 400,000 threshold globally and currently stands at just over 420,000, with a hair under 19,000 deaths. What’s unknown at this point is how many are actually new cases and how many are just now being detected because of the continued expansion of testing. That’s probably going to be a job for the historians, and hopefully, a task that as many of us as possible are around to look at.

It could obviously come undone due to someone balking or a certain someone with a poor filter posting on Twitter, but it appears that the Senate and White House have agreed on a $2 trillion stimulus package. While it’s not directly baseball or even sports-related, sports need an economy to return to, hopefully sometime later this summer. The bill’s expanded unemployment coverage won’t help minor leaguers, but at least it may help fill in some of the gaps the people who are part of the sports economy but aren’t beneficiaries of some of the aid packages given by teams and leagues.

Some Service Time Questions Answered

We’ve talked a lot about service time and we’re necessarily going to continue to do so; it’s a massive ingredient in baseball’s revenue recipe. The tireless Ken Rosenthal reported in the witching hours that the MLBPA and MLB have a partial agreement on some of the outstanding service time issues. If there is in fact baseball in 2020, it appears players will still be credited with their full service time, no matter the total number of games played:

The players do not want their service time reduced by a shortened season, knowing it would impede their ability to reach salary arbitration and free agency as quickly as possible. MLB has agreed to grant a full year of service to players who remain active for the entire 2020 season regardless of how many games the schedule includes, according to sources familiar with the discussions. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball adjusts to the realities of the novel coronavirus, many decisions concerning the upcoming season loom. Yesterday, my colleague Craig Edwards discussed the service time issues likely to bedevil the sport’s return to normalcy, whenever that (hopefully) occurs. It’s nearly impossible to underrate how big of a kerfuffle this could cause. Service time is one of the most significant drivers of how a large percentage of baseball’s revenue pot ends up being divvied out. This ain’t a pot of delicious chili, but one that amounted to nearly $11 billion in 2019. Players and teams have a lot invested in this fight. For teams, those cost-controlled years mean massive profits. For players, accruing service time is essential to moving up the incline from pennies to cash windfall they might enjoy in free agency.

If, in the worst-case scenario, the 2020 season isn’t played at all, baseball will be in uncharted waters. This year’s revenue won’t be coming back, and the negotiations between owners and the union are, for all practical reasons, a hashing-out of who takes the biggest economic hit for that year of missing dollars. If they prove to be unsuccessful at gaining a whole year of service time after a lost season, players nearing free agency will see large reductions in their next contracts, simply by virtue of being a year older when they hit the market.

How much would hitting free agency a year later affect baseball’s best upcoming free agents? To get a sense, I took some of the biggest names anticipated to hit free agency for the first time over the next two offseasons and projected five-year contracts based on their “normal” free agent entry season, along with the projections if they hit free agency a year later:

Read the rest of this entry »