Just past the one-third mark of the abbreviated 2020 season, the Yankees have been steamrolling opponents to the point of compiling the American League’s second-best record (15-6) thanks largely to a league-best offense, but as with last year, they’re having a hard time keeping their regulars healthy. Earlier this past week, they lost Giancarlo Stanton to a hamstring strain, and within a 48-hour span this past weekend, they placed both Aaron Judge and DJ LeMahieu on the Injured List as well, that at a time when the pair collectively occupied the AL leads in the three slash stats. As with last year, when shortstop Gleyber Torres was the only member of the expected starting lineup to avoid landing on the IL at some point, the team’s depth is getting quite a test, but there’s no guarantee that they can replicate the strong performances that kept them afloat in 2019.

Stanton, who after being limited to just 18 games last season due to strains in his left biceps, left shoulder, and right knee — not to mention a right quad strain suffered during the AL Division Series — would have begun this season on the IL as well due to a right calf strain, had it opened on schedule. The delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic worked in his favor, and he began the shortened 2020 campaign with a bang, mashing an Opening Day home run off the Nationals’ Max Scherzer in his first plate appearance, then following up with an major league-high 483-foot shot off Eric Fedde two days later. For a short while, he remained healthy and productive, serving as the designated hitter in 14 of the team’s first 15 games and batting .293/.453/.585 (182 wRC+) with three homers, but he left the second game of the Yankees’ August 8 doubleheader with what was soon diagnosed as a Grade 1 left hamstring strain, an injury that is expected to sideline him for 3-4 weeks.

It’s a frustrating turn of events for the 30-year-old slugger, who has lost significant time to injuries in four out of the past six seasons, though Stanton did play 159 games in 2017 with the Marlins and 158 in ’18 with the Yankees. “I’m hurting for him,” manager Aaron Boone told reporters at the time. “I know what he’s done to be here. His play speaks for itself. Hopefully it’s something that doesn’t end up keeping him down too long.”

Judge, who is off to a .290/.343/.758 start while leading the AL in slugging percentage and home runs (nine, now tied with Mike Trout) and ranking third in wRC+ (191), was lifted from Tuesday’s game against the Rays in the sixth inning, just after hitting the last of those homers. Boone said he wanted to get the slugger off his feet after four straight games on the turf at Tropicana Field, but he hasn’t played since due to what was initially described as “lower body tightness” and has since been diagnosed as a mild calf strain.

She just asked, "Why don't you watch some baseball and learn if Aaron Judge is better?" https://t.co/kCefalSM1o

— Jay Jaffe (@jay_jaffe) August 16, 2020

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After more than two weeks on the sidelines due to the majors’ second large-scale coronavirus outbreak (the Marlins were first), and more than a week of quarantining and daily testing, the Cardinals are finally slated to return to play on Saturday. The plan is for them to drive to Chicago on Friday to play a pair of series against the White Sox and Cubs, during which they’ll begin making up for lost time by playing three doubleheaders in five days. Even so, the math has become daunting as far as fitting the 55 games they have remaining into the 44 days from Saturday until the end of the season.

While the other four teams in the NL Central are between 16 and 19 games into their schedules, the Cardinals have played just five. They began the shortened season by beating the Pirates twice at home, losing to them once, and then losing two to the Twins in Minnesota. Before the start of their three-game series in Milwaukee on the weekend of July 31, two players tested positive, leading to the series’ postponement. Further positive tests have brought the total number of positives to 18 – 10 players and eight staffers, including a coach whose positive result was reported on Thursday — and they’ve had additional postponements of series against the Tigers, Cubs and Pirates, as well as the marquee “Field of Dreams” game against the White Sox in Dyersville, Iowa.

While initial, widely-circulated rumors of the outbreak’s origin centered around players visiting a casino, the team has refuted that allegation, and MLB concurs with that conclusion according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold. Goold reported that the Potawatomi Hotel & Casino in Milwaukee went so far as to check the reservation and membership records it is keeping as part of their heath and safety protocols since reopening and found no record of any Cardinals player visiting. Attempts by the paper to trace any root of the casino report to Minneapolis or St. Louis have proved unsuccessful as well. The casino-based rumor may stem from a July 12 visit to an outdoor drive-in concert venue called the Hollywood Casino Amphitheater by Cardinals players, who were photographed wearing masks and socially distancing. Via Goold, manager Mike Shildt said that the Cardinals have “traced the genesis of the outbreak back to an outside individual who was asymptomatic when he had contact with a member of the club,” bringing the infection into the clubhouse.

According to MLB.com’s Anne Rogers, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak told reporters via Zoom on Thursday that the 18th positive test is a coach whose positive test “comes after several days of inconclusive results. He is asymptomatic and has been in isolation for the past week.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the run-up to the 60-game 2020 season, colleagues Craig Edwards and Dan Szymborski were among the many writers in the industry who weighed in on the possibility of a player hitting .400 or better. They used lots of fancy math and projections to do so, but it’s already clear that both laid down on the job by failing to estimate the odds of a player hitting .500, as Rockies right fielder Charlie Blackmon was through Tuesday night. Can’t anybody here play this game?

Blackmon’s 3-for-4 performance against the Diamondbacks on Tuesday extended his hitting streak to 15 games, which is tied with the Giants’ Donovan Solano for the major league high this year; during that span, he hit .567/.591/.817. The three-hit game also marked Blackmon’s sixth straight with multiple hits, tied with the Mariners’ Kyle Lewis for the big league high; over that span, he hit .739/.778/1.174 — that’s 17 hits in 23 at-bats, and without a single strikeout, to boot.

Blackmon entered Wednesday afternoon’s game against the Diamondbacks — in which he went 0-for-4 with a walk, but don’t let that tangle my yarn — at .500/.527/.721, with 34 hits through 17 games. As best as I can tell using Baseball-Reference’s Stathead service (the updated version of the Play Index), that’s tied for fourth since 1901:

That’s some company, with four Hall of Famers — one a repeat customer, topping the list in the American League’s inaugural season (expansion alert!) — and the all-time hits leader, plus the Rockies’ original right fielder (Bichette) as well as the already-counted Hall of Famer who bumped him to left field upon arriving in 1995 (Walker). The one you don’t know about is Reynolds, a well-traveled outfielder from a high-offense era; he played for five teams in 13 years from 1927-39, batting as high as .359 for the White Sox in 1930, the year that offense was off the charts. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, key players on two American League playoff contenders made mistakes pertaining to COVID-19 protocols that will cost them significant chunks of the shortened 2020 season. Cleveland starting pitchers Mike Clevinger and Zach Plesac — two key members of what has been the majors’ most effective rotation thus far — were both placed on the restricted list by the team and ordered to self-quarantine for three days after sneaking out of the team hotel in Chicago. Meanwhile, Oakland center fielder Ramón Laureano was suspended for six games by Major League Baseball for his part in a bench-clearing incident that occurred in Sunday’s game against Houston.

The two situations are different in their particulars, but they share some commonalities. In a normal season, the actions of these players might not have generated more than a series of stern lectures behind closed doors, and whatever suspensions they led to would have been blips on the radar amid a 162-game schedule. However, the pandemic has necessitated new rules and regulations — over 100 pages of them in MLB’s 2020 Operations Manual — and all three players crossed lines that not only violated those rules but increased the risk of infection for themselves and their teammates. Their punishments have been amplified, perhaps disproportionally, albeit as a warning to other players.

The saga of the Indians’ starters unfolded in stages. On Sunday, the team sent Plesac, a 25-year-old righty with 24 major league starts under his belt, back to Cleveland after he left the hotel without permission and went out with friends on Saturday evening. As innocuous as it sounds, that’s now prohibited under the revised protocols MLB issued last week in the wake of outbreaks on the Marlins and Cardinals; any player wishing to leave the hotel on a road trip is required to obtain permission from the team’s compliance officer.

Plesac’s actions greatly upset both the Cleveland brass and his teammates. Mindful of the possibility that he had been exposed to someone with an infection and could trigger an outbreak, the team quickly moved to isolate him from the rest of the traveling party, arranging a car service to send him back to Cleveland. According to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Zack Meisel, both Plesac and the driver were given instant tests to ensure they were not already infected. Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of my weekly chat. First off, here’s my piece from today about Fernando Tatis Jr.’s statistical dominance and the joy he’s bringing https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fernando-tatis-jr-enters-the-stratosphere/

2:02	Jay Jaffe: And here’s yesterday’s dispatch about the Marlins’ unlikely — and likely unsustainable — success amid a massive coronavirus outbreak https://blogs.fangraphs.com/despite-outbreak-marlins-skate-to-the-top-…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show

2:04

Jay Jaffe: I took a stab in a 3-part series here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/missed-time-and-the-hall-of-fame-part-1/ (change the last digit in the URL) I have a couple stray thoughts that might lead me to revisit that down the road. It’s also worth noting that old friend Travis Sawchik did some of the heavy lifting for a piece on players missing time for WWII https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-year-off-might-do-to-baseb…

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Fernando Tatis Jr. is the superstar baseball needs in 2020. Countering the multitude of anxieties that come with enjoying baseball amid the coronavirus pandemic, his towering home runs, bat flips, and celebratory dancing are as pure a distillation of the joy and excitement as the game can provide right now. Limited to 84 games in his rookie season due to injuries, the buoyant 21-year-old shortstop is off to a red-hot start, propelling an engaging Padres team to a 10-7 record while lighting up social media along the way. Unless you’re an opposing pitcher, it’s nearly impossible not to break out in a smile watching Tatis play.

On Sunday, Tatis crossed paths with a hanging curveball from the Diamondbacks’ Madison Bumgarner. Left fielder David Peralta couldn’t even be bothered to turn around to view the damage:

Admittedly, it wasn’t Bumgarner’s day — he served up a career-high four home runs in just two innings before departing due to back spasms — but it ran Tatis’ streak of consecutive games with a homer to four. The streak ended on Monday night at the hands of the Dodgers, who held him to 1-for-4 with an infield single, but the Padres’ 2-1 victory pulled them within 1 1/2 games of the NL West lead. Read the rest of this entry »

“They already have their own helmets.” — NASA recruiter, The Right Stuff

When word arose that the Marlins were so desperate for players in the wake of a coronavirus outbreak that sidelined more than half of their Opening Day roster — and threatened the viability of the remainder of the 2020 season — that they were calling up an Olympic speed skater, it felt like the scene in The Right Stuff where Jeff Goldbum and Harry Shearer pitch President Dwight Eisenhower, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, and NASA bigwigs on the possibility of using race car drivers, circus acrobats, and other daredevils as astronauts. “Besides turning left, I don’t think there’s much similarity,” said 30-year-old second baseman Eddy Alvarez of the similarity between baseball and short track speed skating, the sport in which he won a silver medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics as part of Team USA’s 5,000 meter relay team.

One of 17 players added to the Marlins’ active roster at various points last week as the team returned to play following the postponement of seven games due to the outbreak, Alvarez debuted on Wednesday against the Orioles, becoming the first Winter Olympian ever to reach the majors, and the first non-baseball Olympian to play in the majors since Jim Thorpe (1913-19). He entered Sunday having gone 0-for-9 with five strikeouts, but collected his first big league hit off Met ace Jacob deGrom, a hot smash that third baseman J.D. Davis could only stop. It was one of his three hits in the game, accompanied by another infield single off deGrom, and a double off Edwin Díaz; Alvarez reached on an error in his other plate appearance, and also added a stolen base and a great diving play at second base. Have a day, Eddy.

Despite Alvarez’s banner day, the Marlins lost, 4-2, but even so, a team that went 57-105 last year finished the weekend with a 7-3 record, putting them into a tie with the Braves atop the NL East. Just what in the name of Don Mattingly’s sideburns is going on?

By now, the contours of the Marlins’ mess, the largest outbreak on any team to date, are at least somewhat familiar. Just before their Opening Day game against the Phillies on July 24, they placed catcher Jorge Alfaro on the Injured List for undisclosed reasons. Then, just before playing the Phillies two days later, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that starting pitcher José Ureña was scratched due to a positive test, and soon afterwards, he added first baseman/designated hitter Garret Cooper and right fielder Harold Ramirez to the list of positives. Even so, the team went ahead with the game; it was initially reported that they did so after deciding to play via a group text centered around shortstop Miguel Rojas (Phillies general manager Matt Klentak clarified that the decision came from MLB). A day later, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that eight more players and two coaches had tested positive, and the hits kept coming; by July 31, the count included a staggering 18 total players — more than half the active roster. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re two weeks into the long-delayed 2020 season, and one thing that sticks out thus far, beyond the schedule mayhem caused by COVID-19 outbreaks and the rule changes regarding extra innings and doubleheaders, is the plight of starting pitchers. Between the lengthy shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, during which players had no direct supervision, the abbreviated summer camp buildup, a flood of injuries, and expanded rosters, starting pitchers are pitching less than ever. Whether this is simply a continuation of a more long-term trend, an aberration founded in the unique circumstances of this season, or the start of a bigger paradigm shift, the numbers are worth tracking.

During the 2019 postseason, I noted that the period from 1998 to 2015 was fairly stable when it came to starting pitcher usage, even given a wide range in scoring environments and a whole lot of change within the game — expansion, the height of the PED scandal, the advent of PED testing, and the adoption of loose pitch count standards and innings limits on young pitchers. Since that time, we’ve seen starting pitchers throw fewer innings with each passing season, while at the same time generally improving their performance relative to the league.

Bang! Already what sticks out is that this year, for the first time, starters are averaging fewer than five innings per turn, and their per-start average is down more than one full inning since 2015. What’s more, if this trend continues, it would be the biggest year-to-year drop in innings per start in the span, more than double the drop from 2018-19, and more than triple the other year-to-year drops within that span.

Over the years, a number of factors have driven that decrease, starting with deeper pitch counts, which are a byproduct of higher strikeout rates, as you can see in the table. There’s also the increased understanding of a few sabermetric concepts: starters are generally less effective facing batters for the third time in the game than prior; relievers are generally more effective facing batters for the first time than starters are in any of those appearances; and batters are less effective when they lack the platoon advantage. As starters’ workloads have decreased to account for those factors, their run prevention relative to the league has improved ever so slightly.

The drop-off from 2019 to ’20 is even steeper by a couple other measures:

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Dustin May is ready for prime time. The 22-year-old righty wasn’t even supposed to be part of the Dodgers’ rotation at the outset of the season, but he’s taken the ball three times thus far, including an emergency start on Opening Day. So far, he’s not only shown why he’s one of the game’s top pitching prospects but why he’s already worth making time to watch, and not just because the 6-foot-6 righty with the distinctive ginger mop top and the high leg kick is one of the most instantly recognizable players in the game.

On Tuesday night against the Padres in San Diego, May delivered the longest start of his young career, a six-inning effort; he fell one out short in each of his first three turns upon being called up last August. He allowed just three hits and two runs, the first in the third inning after hitting Francisco Mejía with a pitch and then surrendering a two-out double to Fernando Tatis Jr., and the second via a fourth-inning solo homer by Jake Cronenworth. At that point, he was in a 2-0 hole, but the Dodgers’ offense bailed him out, scoring three runs in the sixth and seventh innings en route to a 5-2 win.

May collected a career-high eight strikeouts against the Padres, the second of which — against Manny Machado in the first inning — set Twitter ablaze:

Dustin May, Ungodly 99mph Two Seamer. ? pic.twitter.com/uUeINZbKBq

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 5, 2020

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The list of things that haven’t gone according to plan in 2020 is long enough to reach to the moon and back, and to that, we can add the return of Shohei Ohtani to competitive pitching. After more than a year spent recovering from Tommy John surgery, the 26-year-old wonder’s reacquaintance with the mound was hotly anticipated, but after two brief and miserable outings, he’s injured, and Angels manager Joe Maddon said on Tuesday that he doesn’t expect to see Ohtani pitch again this year.

On Sunday, Ohtani made his second start of the season, and it began with promise, as he retired the top of the Astros’ lineup — George Springer, Jose Altuve, and Alex Bregman — in order on a total of eight pitches. He topped 95 mph a few times with his four-seamer, struck out Springer swinging at a splitter, and induced Altuve to pop up a bunt foul. Here’s the Springer strikeout:

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