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:

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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.

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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:

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One of the things you have to get used to when you work with projections is being wrong. Like, All. Of. The. Time. While I’d like to believe that the projections are accurate and it’s just real life that mucked things up, that isn’t quite how they work. There are always events you didn’t see coming, assumptions you made erroneously, and just plain old irreducible error, all of which are going to thwart you.

On a basic level, you’re supposed to be wrong. Imagine a world in which you knew, for an exact fact, that every team was a coin flip to win every game. With this perfect knowledge, you’d still expect nearly a quarter of the league to win either 73 games or fewer, or 89 games or more, through nothing but luck. For the math-inclined, this is a hypergeometric distribution, not a binomial one; the coin flips are not independent because the win totals will still add up to 2,430 and one team’s win invariably is another team’s loss. Here’s a quick table for some of the win totals, showing the probability of a team winning exactly X games and how many of the teams you’d expect to have won up to X games:

As an example, you’d expect 3.4% of those coin flip teams to win exactly 74 games, with 15% of all teams winning up to 74 games.

But we don’t have anywhere near perfect knowledge about how good a team will be. We’re not even in the same zip code as “near perfect”; we just hope to be on the right continent. As a result, our error bars are going to be significantly larger than even the rather erroneous results you still get with omniscient projections. Read the rest of this entry »

1:03	Dan Szymborski: Happy Thursday!

1:03	Dan Szymborski: I don’t specifically spit out a standard deviation, but I do it from the other side: specific events and the probability of those (like a .300 BA, 40 HR, etc)

1:04	Dan Szymborski: And I have projectile percentages in beta right now as I work out the kinks, mainly due to defensive volatility and projections

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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.

While there’s no big MLB update on any start to the 2020 season — nor will there likely be for awhile — the hunkering down of baseball teams, along with the rest of the country, continues. MLB announcing there wouldn’t be any games for at least a couple months has moved the focus, as it ought to be, towards the mitigation of the current situation rather than practical questions about how many games will be played, where, or when.

MLB Clubs Establish a Fund for Ballpark Employees

MLB clubs have committed $30M — $1M apiece — to assist the ballpark employees affected by the delayed start to our season. pic.twitter.com/ZzJOkxGt2e

— MLB (@MLB) March 17, 2020

Ballpark employees are some of the people most affected by the suspension of the 2020 season. There’s no telecommuting or even a skeleton crew still working as you see in many customer-facing businesses, so these employees are suffering de facto layoffs, even if hopefully temporary. With the hospitality industry one of the sectors suffering the quickest in this environment, simply finding another job isn’t an option for many of these workers. These employees tend to make up a very small percentage of a team’s costs, and keeping the team’s trained workforce around is at a minimum an exercise in enlightened self-interest. Read the rest of this entry »

Will there be a 2020 baseball season? How many games will teams play? What will that mean for the 2020 baseball season? Normally, these would be extremely upsetting questions to contemplate; in the world in which we’re currently living, they’re somewhere around the 75,000th most important quandaries facing us. But as someone qualified to serve as a baseball writer rather than an epidemiologist, they’re also the kinds of questions I can actually seek to answer, and the differences between how baseball will eventually look versus what we’re used to are bigger than you might think. Assuming we have a season, that is; if no games are played, the projections will be 100% accurate.

So how much do the playoff races change in a shorter season? To answer this, I spent the weekend reconfiguring ZiPS so that it wouldn’t assume a 162-game season — an eventuality I had hoped not to have to deal with unless or until there was a strike — allowing me to run playoff probabilities for seasons of any length. Let’s start with the baseline projections, how ZiPS saw the races before the world turned upside down:

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