On August 15, Major League Baseball suspended San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera 50 games after Cabrera tested positive for testosterone, a substance banned under MLB’s Joint Drug Policy.  The suspended began immediately. Including the Giants’ game that day against the Washington Nationals, San Francisco would play 45 games from the time of Cabrera’s suspension through the end of the regular season.

Now that the Giants have clinched the National League West title, they are guaranteed to play at least another three, and as many as five, postseason games in the Division Series. These games will count as part of Cabrera’s suspension. Under the Joint Drug Policy (Section 7.H.), a suspension for a certain number of games includes all regular season and post-season games the player would have been eligible to play. “A player shall be deemed to have been eligible for a post-season game if he was on the Club’s active roster  . . . immediately preceeding his suspension.”

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MLB announced its 2013 schedule last week. On Monday, we looked at the mileage each American League team will log next season traveling from city to city. The Chicago White Sox will have an advantage, as the schedule will require less than 23,000 miles in travel. The Seattle Mariners will be at a disadvantage, as the schedule calls for them to log more than 52,000 miles next season.

In the National League, the disparity between the most and least-traveled teams in 2013 isn’t quite as large as in the American League, but it’s close. Again, the compact geography of the Midwest gives a distinct advantage to teams in the NL Central. The Cincinnati Reds will log only 22, 505 miles next season, while the St. Louis Cardinals will go only 500 more. The San Francisco Giants, on the other hand, will travel just over 45,000 miles, more than double the Reds’ total. The teams in the NL East fall somewhere in between.

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The 2013 MLB schedule was released last week. On Thursday, my colleague Alex Remington addressed several issues raised by the schedule, most notably how season-long interleague play may affect how American League teams use their designated hitter. Alex also touched on the unbalanced schedule issue; that is, that teams within each division will play each other 19 times, thus resulting in an easier schedule for the American League Central teams, if you believe that the American League Central will be as weak in 2013 as it has been in 2012.

The American League Central has another advantage, born of the proximity of its teams to each other, at least geographically. None of the teams in the Central will travel more than 30,000 next season, while every other team in the league — save for the Orioles — will travel more than 30,000 miles. And the disparity between the least-traveled team (the White Sox) and the most-traveled team (the Mariners) is startling: Chicago will travel only 22,695 miles in 2013 while Seattle will travel more than double that, at nearly 53,000 miles.

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Nationals Ballpark sits in the southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C. Take a look at this map of the District and its environs. More than half way down, right of center, is a marker for Washington Navy Yard. That’s approximately where the  ballpark is. As you can see, the area is accessible by highways connecting the District to Virginia and Maryland. There is also a Metro stop at the ballpark. Metro is the subway run by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). Here’s the Metro map. Notice the stop on the Green Line for Navy Yard-Ballpark.

The Nationals encourage fans to take public transportation to the ballpark, but also provide plenty of options and information for driving to — and parking near — the ballpark. The Nationals may keep track of how many fans drive to games, versus take public transportation, but that information isn’t publicly available.

The Metro stops running at midnight Sundays through Thursdays.. Typically, that’s not a problem for Nationals fans traveling to and from the ballpark on the Metro, as the night games start at 7:05 p.m. local time. Unless a game extends well into extra innings, fans usually have plenty of time to take a Metro train home.

But some games have gone well into extra innings, and that’s been a problem for fans who took Metro to the game and expected to take it home. This issue first arose in June, when the Nationals played the Mets on June 5, and the game lasted into the 12th inning. As the game moved toward 11 p.m., ballpark officials announced the Metro would stop running at midnight. That meant that fans had to leave the ballpark with enough time to catch a train at the Navy Yards/Green Line station and get to their destination by midnight. Some fans left, and missed the Nationals’ walk-off victory on a Bryce Harper single in the bottom of the 12th, at 11:20 p.m.

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The Oakland A’s want to move to San Jose, approximately 45 miles south of Oakland and 50 miles southeast of San Francisco. The Giants oppose the move on the ground that the A’s granted the Giants the “territorial rights” to San Jose and the rest of Santa Clara County back in the 1990s when the Giants were trying to build a ballpark in Santa Clara.

Earlier this year, I explained the history of the Giants/A’s territorial-rights dispute over at Baseball Nation.

Territorial rights describes the way Major League Baseball divides the major metropolitan areas of the United States for its 30 franchises. (Well, 29 franchises in the U.S., plus one in Toronto, Canada). According to research done by baseball researcher and writer Doug Pappas in 2002, Major League Baseball amended its rules between 1990 and 1994 to expand the definition of territorial rights to include not just each team’s home city, but also the surrounding counties.

All of the two-team territories but one share the same counties: the Yankees and Mets; the White Sox and Cubs; and the Dodgers and Angels. Only the Giants and A’s split the counties surrounding their home cities. The A’s territory includes Alameda and Contra Costa counties; the Giants’ territory includes San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Monterey and Marin counties, “plus Santa Clara County with respect to another major league team.” San Jose is in Santa Clara county. To get your bearings, look at this map of California counties.

—snip—

[T]he Giants never built a stadium in Santa Clara county, because several voter initiatives to fund such a stadium failed. Instead, [owner Bob] Lurie sold the Giants to a Peter Magowan-led group, who in turn privately financed what is now called AT&T Park, in downtown San Francisco. Nevertheless, the MLB rule granting the Giants “Santa Clara County with respect to another major league team” was never amended.

Under MLB rules, a team can move into the territory of another team upon the vote of three-fourths of the owners, the two ballparks are at least five miles apart; the move results in no more than two teams in a single territory; and the team moving compensates the team already in the territory.

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Major League Baseball hasn’t publicly released the tentative schedule for the 2013 season, but it has shared it with teams and the players union. And that means some information about baseball in 2013 has leaked out, intentionally or otherwise. There’s some very good news for some teams and some “what, are you kidding me” news for other teams, if good and bad news is measured by the expected effect on attendance.

First, a few reminders about overall changes coming in 2013. With the Astros move to the American League West, there will be 15 teams in each league. Typically, every team plays on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, with Mondays and Thursdays as travel and off days. That means most days of the season will see at least one interleague game. Fourteen National League teams will play each other. Same in the American League. The odd teams out in each league will play each other.

We’ve also heard rumblings that, with the addition of a second wild card, MLB will move to a more balanced intraleague schedule. The idea is that teams competing for the two wild card spots should be on relatively equal footing when it comes to strength of schedule. But the early news suggests that division rivals will continue to play more games against each other than against non-division teams in the same league.

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Yesterday Jeff Sullivan wrote about the San Diego Padres. If you haven’t read Jeff’s post, go read it now. I’ll wait. Okay, so now you know that since June 10, the Padres have a record of 41-30 and have outscored their opponents by 32 runs. But that’s not all. The Padres are 9-1 in their last 10 games, 13-7 in their last 20, and 18-12 in their last 30. They are outplaying everyone in the National League West other than the division-leading Giants.

The Padres also have new owners. The second and third generation of the O’Malley family — who owned the Dodgers from 1950 until 1998 — now own the Padres, along with San Diego businessman Ron Fowler and a group of minority investors. Fowler has been designated as the team’s control person, but Peter O’Malley and his sons and nephews, with their longstanding baseball pedigree, will be key to the Padres’ efforts to re-energize the team and the fan base.

It won’t be easy.

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Last week, a sport columnist on the local CBS affiliate in Chicago rained down the invective on White Sox fans for failing pack U.S. Cellular Field to capacity for the three-game series with the Yankees. The White Sox lead the AL Central. The Yankees lead the AL East. It was a premiere match-up of two teams expected to play in October. Fewer than 28,000 fans attended the first two games. You want to be a top tier team, then get off your Barcaloungers and put your money where your mouth is, the columnist demanded of White Sox fans.

We’ve heard this type of thing before, many times. Earlier this season, it was Indians closer Chris Perez who took to Twitter to complain about fans not showing up to Progressive Field when the Indians were leading their division. Early in the 2011 season, sports business reporter Darren Rovell’s went on an infamous Twitter spree with a series of “empty stadium” photos.

Baseball writer and White Sox fan Cee Angi took exception to last week’s White Sox-related column, and penned a detailed response at The Platoon Advantage. Cee coined the term “attendance shaming” and called out the local sports columnist and others who rail against empty seats without either looking at actual attendance numbers over the years or understanding the economic and non-economic factors that come into play. She notes that the White Sox’ attendance has dropped less than 1% from 2011, when the Sox finished third in the AL Central, to this year, when they find themselves (perhaps surprisingly) in first place. And with dynamic pricing and other advanced forms of sales and marketing, she argues, it’s entirely unclear whether fewer fans in seats at U.S. Cellular means less revenue for the team. If the team’s revenue is the same or more than expected before the season starts, she says, then fewer fans in seats should have no bearing on a team’s willingness to make trades and take on additional salary as the season progresses.

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In the wake of the Cardinals’ 19-inning loss to the Pirates on Sunday, St. Louis Post Dispatch sports columnist Bernie Miklasz called the Cardinals’ offense phony. He acknowledged that the Cardinals lead the National League in runs scored with 586 and that many Cardinals players line the National League leader boards on offensive statistics. But, Miklasz wrote, “[t]his offense is fraudulent. It can bully teams for a one-night torrent of runs, only to disappear in most close games.”

Is Miklasz right?

Overall, the Cardinals are 65-56 but are 24-11 in games decided by five runs or more.  St. Louis has scored 234 runs in the blowout games and allowed only 142, for a run differential of +92. In other words, the Cardinals have scored 40% of their runs in the 29% of their games that have been decided by five runs or more.

On the flip side, the Cardinals are 13-21 in one-run games. They’ve scored 124 runs in the nail-biters and allowed 132, for a -8 run differential. The one-run games comprise 28% of the Cardinals’ overall record. Their remaining 52 games, or 43% of their schedule, have been neither blowouts nor one-run affairs. And in those, the Cardinals are 28-24, with 228 runs scored and 206 allowed, for a +22 run differential. Overall, St. Louis has scored 106 more runs than they’ve allowed.

Do these numbers mean that the Cardinals’ offense is a fraud? If the Cardinals had either scored ten more runs or allowed ten fewer runs in their 34 one-run games, they’d have five more wins for an 18-16 record in one-run games and a 70-51 record on the season. Ten more runs either way. Does that difference make the offense a fraud?

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Major League Baseball suspended Melky Cabrera for 50 games after he tested positive for testosterone, a substance banned under the league’s Joint Drug Policy. The suspension is immediate, meaning Cabrera won’t be seen in the orange and black, patrolling left field and accumulating hits, for the rest of the season. After their loss yesterday to the Nationals, coupled with the Dodgers win over the Pirates, the Giants fell out of first place in the National League West for the first time since late June. Losing Cabrera will hurt the Giants as they battle the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks for the division title, and try to stay in the hunt for a wild card spot.

Cabrera’s has been the Giants’ second-most productive hitter, behind Buster Posey. His season line is .346/.390/.546 for a .387 wOBA and a 146 wRC+. He was a steady and effective presence as the number three hitter in the Giants’ lineup, where he whacked 25 doubles, ten triples and eleven home runs in front of Posey. It will be impossible to replicate that production. The question is how best to replace it.

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