On Wednesday and Thursday, Major League Baseball will hold a drastically abbreviated version of its annual amateur draft. As part of the pandemic-related agreement the players and owners hashed out in late March, this year’s draft will be just five rounds. With the contraction of the minor leagues looming, it’s quite likely that future drafts will be considerably more abridged than the 40 rounds they’ve been since 2012, if not necessarily this short.

Had such conditions been in effect prior to this year, numerous quality major league players would have gone undrafted. While some might have still developed after being signed as free agents, it’s entirely likely that many would have slipped through the cracks, never making a dent in the professional ranks, let alone reaching and thriving in the majors.

What follows here and in Part 2 tomorrow is a round-by-round look at the best players drafted in each round beyond the fifth since the amateur draft was instituted in 1965. With the database help of Ben Clemens, we’ve assembled top-five WAR rankings for rounds six through 25, and I’ve attempted to summarize the career highlights of each player in concise fashion (hat-tip to Baseball America’s Ultimate Draft Book for some of the tidbits on why draftees slipped to later rounds). Additionally, I’ve highlighted one active player who may or may not have cracked the leaderboard yet, but who’s noteworthy, as well as two Hall of Fame relievers who didn’t make their respective leaderboards. Read the rest of this entry »

If the 2020 season does happen — and right now, that’s an open question — it will be without Chris Archer. The Pirates announced on Wednesday that the 31-year-old righty underwent surgery to correct for thoracic outlet syndrome, ruling him out for whatever transpires this season, and perhaps ending his time in Pittsburgh given his contract situation. Given the track record of pitchers who have undergone the procedure, we can only hope that this doesn’t mark the end of the two-time All-Star’s run as an effective pitcher.

As I’ve written before, thoracic outlet syndrome is caused by a compression of the nerves and/or blood vessels somewhere between the neck and the armpit. Symptoms commonly include numbness or tingling in the fingers and hands, or fatigue or weakness that doesn’t go away with physical therapy and rest. Pitchers tend to be particularly vulnerable to TOS because of their repetitive overhand movements and the way their arm muscles build up. The condition is generally remedied by the removal of a cervical rib and two small scalene muscles.

Archer, whom the Pirates acquired from the Rays on July 31, 2018 in exchange for outfielder Austin Meadows and pitchers Tyler Glasnow and Shane Baz (the latter as a player to be named later) — a steal of a deal for Tampa Bay, the way things have gone — endured the worst season of his eight-year career in 2019. Though he struck out a respectable 27.2% of hitters faced, his walk and home run rates jumped significantly from their 2018 levels, the former from 7.7% to 10.5%, the latter from 1.15 per nine to 1.88. Both of those were career highs, as were his 5.19 ERA and 5.02 FIP, which were respectively 20% and 13% worse than league average. Per Pitch Info, his average four-seam fastball velocity fell a full tick from 2018 (95.3 mph to 94.3 mph) and was down 1.5 mph relative to ’17 and 1.9 mph relative to ’15. Read the rest of this entry »

It stands as a threat rather than an official proposal — heaven forbid the owners actually engage the players directly instead of attempting to negotiate through the media — but MLB’s latest thought balloon regarding a 2020 season centers around a 50-game schedule. In the wake of the players’ formal proposal that they receive the full prorated share of their salaries for a 114-game season that would begin on June 30 and end on October 31 (with a postseason to follow in November), the owners have let it be known that they’re not enthusiastic about that idea. Per ESPN, The Athletic, and other outlets, they’ve discussed a 50-game slate as a last-resort option.

The wee season would begin in July, and for it, the players would receive the full prorated share of their salaries, though those would amount to just 30.8% of their full-season salaries. Here it’s worth noting that the 50-game schedule is the same distance from the central 82-game proposal as the 114-game one is; if the two sides were to meet exactly in the middle, we’d be back at the number that’s been floating around since the owners voted to propose a 50-50 revenue split on May 11.

As Dan Szymborski illustrated in his latest round of ZiPS projections, a lot of strange stuff can happen in just 50 games, including a 28.1% chance of the Dodgers — projected as the best team in baseball over a full 162 games back in March — missing the playoffs and a 0.6% chance of the Marlins winning the World Series. “At 50 games, the ability to meaningfully differentiate between the great and the good, the mediocre and the bad, starts to fade significantly,” wrote Szymborski. “There’s a one-in-five chance that the winner of the World Series will be a team believed to be .500 or worse.” Read the rest of this entry »

While the NC Dinos bolted from the gate by winning 17 of their first 20 games — the best start in the history of the Korea Baseball Organization — the LG Twins have been the league’s hottest team of late. After starting the season 2-4, the Twins have won 14 of 18; through Tuesday, they stood just two games behind the Dinos (18-6). This run has been largely powered by first baseman Roberto Ramos 라모스, who recently homered four times in five games, and leads the league with 10 dingers overall.

Ramos, a 25-year-old lefty swinger who spent 2014-19 in the Rockies chain, began his latest jag with a walk-off grand slam against the KT Wiz’s Min Kim 김민 김민 on May 24, turning a 7-5 deficit into a 9-7 win :

LG's Roberto Ramos wins the game with a walk-off grand slam in the 9th against KT.

?SBS Sports with the call pic.twitter.com/EgcdYeTWFQ

— Dan Kurtz (@MyKBO) May 24, 2020

Two days later, in a 3-0 shutout win over the Hanhwa Eagles, he put the Twins on the board first with a solo shot off reliever Yi-hwan Kim 김이환:

https://twitter.com/AlexMicheletti/status/1265315036630827009

Read the rest of this entry »

To call Foley’s NY Pub and Restaurant a sports bar would be like summarizing Citizen Kane as a movie about a sled. Sure, the bar at 18 West 33rd Street in Manhattan stood out as a place where one could enjoy a beer while watching whatever games were in season — and on some nights, you might find three sports vying for attention on its numerous screens. But for nearly two decades, Foley’s has served as a pillar of the baseball community, a beacon not only for local denizens but for out-of-towners — players, umpires, scouts, celebrities, and writers. “Foley’s was a baseball writer’s Cheers,” wrote MLB.com’s Alyson Footer via Twitter.

Sadly, the occasion for Footer and hundreds of others to share their thoughts about the venerable watering hole on social media was a somber one. On Friday, owner Shaun Clancy posted a video announcing that the bar, which shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 16, will not reopen. “There’s just no way that I can see that we can do it,” he said in the two-minute video, “and I don’t really know what to say except thank you all… This is the end of the inning but not the end of the game.”

A message from @ShaunFromFoleys. Sad news regarding Foley’s. #WeHadBeer pic.twitter.com/i1uimhZQL2

— Foley's NY (@FoleysNY) May 29, 2020

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May 29 marks the 10-year anniversary of Roy Halladay’s perfect game against the Marlins. It’s a bittersweet occasion, alas, because while it shows the two-time Cy Young winner and future Hall of Famer at the absolute pinnacle of his career, Halladay is not here to celebrate. On November 7, 2017, while flying his Icon A5 light sport airplane, he crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, landing upside down in 4 1/2 feet of water. The autopsy published two months later found that he had morphine, amphetamine, Ambien, and alcohol in his system. More recent revelations that he had been in and out of rehab to treat addictions to opiates and to an anti-anxiety drug called Lorazepam deepen the already stark contrast between a player who publicly was known for his exceptional control, both on and off the field, but who privately was battling depression.

The anniversary and the absence of its central figure provides a time for reflection. What follows here are 10 thoughts on Halladay’s career and life, one for each year since that special night in Miami’s Sun Life Stadium — or, if you prefer, one for each of his perfect innings plus one for the aftermath. You can watch the game in its entirety below:

1. Halladay nearly threw a no-hitter in his second major league start, and did pitch a complete game.

Chosen with the 17th pick of the 1995 amateur draft out of a suburban Denver high school (Arvada West), Halladay made solid progress through the minors and cracked Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects in ’97 (23rd) and ’98 (38th). After a strong showing at Triple-A Syracuse in the latter year, the 21-year-old righty made his major league debut on September 20, 1998, throwing five innings of two-run ball with five strikeouts against the Devil Rays. Seven days later, he no-hit the Tigers for 8.2 innings before being foiled by pinch-hitter Bobby Higginson, who homered and also deprived him of a shutout. Halladay did hang on to collect the first of his 203 regular season wins, and the first of his 67 complete games. Read the rest of this entry »

The clock is ticking on Major League Baseball’s return to play, at least under a proposed timeline that would allow for a three-week spring training in June, an Opening Day in early July, and an 82-game schedule that follows the rough outline of the typical baseball calendar, with the bulk (if not the entirety) of the postseason in October. Over the past couple of weeks, the league and the players have attempted to find common ground with respect to both health and safety issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the financial ones, the latter with considerably more acrimony — so much so that the threat of no baseball in 2020 still looms, even after the owners made a formal proposal to the union on Tuesday calling for the game’s highest-paid players to bear a disproportionate burden of the financial hit.

Via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale:

The plan, three people with knowledge of the proposal told USA TODAY Sports, does not include the same 50-50 revenue-sharing split the owners agreed on two weeks ago that was never submitted to the union…

The proposal instead includes a sliding scale of compensation, guaranteeing players a percentage of their salary during different intervals of the season, while also including a larger share of postseason money. The players earning the highest salaries would be taking the biggest cuts, while those earning the least amount of money would receive most of their guaranteed salaries, with the union determining the exact percentage splits.

Via the New York Post’s Joel Sherman:

One person who had been briefed on the proposal said the expectation is that players due to make $1 million or less in 2020 would be made close to whole on a prorated basis for games played. Thus, if someone were making the MLB 2020 minimum of $563,500 and 82 regular season games (almost exactly half a season) were played, they would receive roughly half their pay, about $282,000.

But players at the top of the pay chain such as Gerrit Cole and Mike Trout would get less. If that were in the 50 percent range — as an example — then Cole, who was due $36 million, this year would receive half of about the $18 million he would be due for half a season or roughly $9 million.

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2:02	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to the second edition of my chat in this Tuesday time slot, which thankfully is working better than Monday did in these pandemic-ridden times.

2:05

Jay Jaffe: Before I dive in, a bit of housekeeping: I’ve been very focussed on the Korea Baseball Organization lately, and at the end of today’s piece on Doosan Bears hitting machine Jose Miguel Fernandez (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/doosan-bears-fernandez-is-tearing-up-the-k…) I noted that I’ll be a guest on tomorrow’s ESPB KBO broadcast. I’ll be joining a Bears-SK Wyverns game, talking with hots Jon Sciambi and Eduardo Perez at around 7:30 AM ET. It’s my first time being part of a game broadcast, even under theses strange conditions, and it should be a lot of fun. I’ll have an Instagraphs post with further details including re-airing times.

2:07

Jay Jaffe: Hmmmm. I haven’t had a ton of them that particularly stand out. The first, though, was when I got Willie Mays’ autograph, which might have been 1981 or ’82. He was appearing at some grocery store expo at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, one of several players (Don Sutton was also on the list) but the one that I somehow convinced my mom to take me to. I had a 1973 Topps card of Mays as a Met, a hand-me-down from my cousin Allan. We stood in line, and he autographed the card without even making eye contact; he was bored as hell and didn’t care who knew it.

2:08

Jay Jaffe: More fun was my Vin Scully interaction, from 1989 at Vero Beach, which I wrote about as part of a 2016 Sports Illustrated piece (https://www.si.com/mlb/2016/09/30/vin-scully-tribute-dodgers-jay-jaffe). When I was a college freshman, my parents took my brother and me to Dodgertown during my spring break, and I had a chance encounter with the great announcer himself. From the piece

2:10

Jay Jaffe: En route to the concession stand before one ballgame, I crossed paths with Scully himself, decked out in a cream-colored golf sweater. I asked for an autograph, then realized I had just a scrap of paper and no pen. Seeing how flustered I was, he agreed to wait while I fetched one from my mother, who was on her way to the restroom. Somehow, I not only got the pen, but Vin waited in place, and signed what might have been a golf scorecard or a ticket stub. I’ve long since lost that piece of paper—inevitable while moving half a dozen times in four years—and I’ve never gotten to meet Scully again despite being now being armed with a credential. But I’ve never forgotten the man’s small gesture of patience and humanity toward a star-struck 19-year-old.

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The defending champion Doosan Bears are merely in third place in the Korea Baseball Organization standings, but through the season’s first three weeks, nobody in the league has been hotter than their designated hitter, Jose Miguel Fernandez 페르난데스. Through Sunday’s games, the 32-year-old Cuban defector is batting .500/.531/.764, leading the league in the first two categories as well as wRC+ (240, via Statiz) and trailing Roberto Ramos 라모스 by a mere three points in slugging percentage. His performance has led the Bears’ powerhouse offense, which alas had trouble papering over the team’s pitching issues.

When you’re hitting .500, everything is by definition hot streak, but Fernandez closed the past week in exceptional fashion even as the Bears did not. After going hitless for just the second time all year on May 20 against the NC Dinos, he rebounded to go 3-for-4 with an RBI in a 12-6 loss the next day, then 3-for-4 with a double, a homer, and six RBI in a 12-7 win over the Samsung Lions on Friday. He followed that up with two more multi-hit games against the Lions, first a 4-for-5 performance that included a solo homer (his fourth) in a 10-6 win on Saturday, then a 2-for-4 showing in a 13-0 loss on Sunday. That’s a 12-for-17 spree, and 12 multi-hit games so far this season, including three apiece of the three- and four-hit varieties. Whew.

Known more for his bat-to-ball skills than his raw power, Fernandez has never homered more than 17 times in a season. But thus far in 2020, the lefty swinger — who lists at 5-foot-10, 185-pounds — has been launching some titanic blasts. Here’s his first homer of the year, off the KT Wiz’s Min Kim 김민 on May 10:

Don't know that you guys are keeping track but Jose Miguel Fernandez has another multi-hit game on his hands. Currently 3-3 on the day with this 3 run shot. His 1st HR of 2020. #KBO #DoosanBears pic.twitter.com/1f551qrQgQ

— KBO Collections ? (@kbocollections) May 10, 2020

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If the NC Dinos are the Korea Baseball Organization’s hottest team — and at 12-2, with a three-game lead over the second-place LG Twins, that’s the case — then the SK Wyverns are its coldest. Through Friday, they’ve gone 2-12, a skid that includes a 10-game losing streak, one game shy of the longest in franchise history.

Based in Incheon, South Korea’s third-largest city after Seoul and Busan, the Wyverns — those are two-legged dragons, in case you’ve forgotten — have been particularly successful in the past couple of years, finishing second in the regular season standings twice in a row. After going 78-65-1 in 2018 under former major league manager Trey Hillman, they beat the Nexen (now Kiwoom) Heroes three games to two in the best-of-five Playoff Series, then beat the Doosan Bears four games to two in the best-of-seven Korean Series for their first championship since 2010 and fourth since joining the league in 2000. Last year, they went 88-55-1 but finished tied with the Bears, that after holding a 7 1/2-game advantage over them as late as August 24. Since the Bears held a 9-7 advantage in head-to-head competition, they won first place and automatically advanced to the Korean Series, while the Wyverns suffered a three-game sweep at the hands of the Heroes in the Semi-Playoff Series.

Per Dan Szymborski’s rough KBO projections, the Wyverns were forecast to be the league’s third-best team behind the Heroes and Bears, with a 17.0% chance of finishing first and an 83.3% chance of making the playoffs. Instead, after splitting their first two games against the Hanhwa Eagles, they lost 10 straight: the series rubber match against the Eagles, then two to the Lotte Giants and three to the LG Twins (both on the road), three to the Dinos at home, and the series opener agains the Heroes in Seoul. They finally got off the schneid by beating the Heroes on Wednesday, 5-3, then lost to them again on Thursday, a game in which they blew a 5-0 lead and suffered this final indignity, a walk-off infield single that deflected off shortstop Sung-hyun Kim 김성현. Read the rest of this entry »