12:33

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to the rescheduled, on-the-fly version of my weekly chat. It’s been a rough eight days since we last connected here, for you as surely as it’s been for me, but last night I saw a flicker of hope via a YouTube broadcast from Busan, South Korea, where the Lotte Giants (who employ FanGraphs alum Sung Min Kim) played an intrasquad scrimmage, with former MLB hurlers Dan Straily and Adrian Sampson starting for their respective squads.

12:34

Jay Jaffe: I wrote more about that in today’s COVID-19 roundup, as well as some other developments involving a minor league advocacy group and the use of Marlins Park as a spot for drive-through testing https://blogs.fangraphs.com/covid-19-roundup-flickers-of-hope-and-even…

12:36

Jay Jaffe: The hope for the KBO is that they can start their season in mid-April, in which case I plan to become as well-versed as possible in the league, because baseball.

12:39

Jay Jaffe: Last year I did a bit of poking around KBO stat sites when the Blue Jays brought up Ryan Feierabend, a lefty who remade himself as a knuckleballer while pitching for the Nexen Heroes and KT Wiz https://blogs.fangraphs.com/ryan-feierabend-and-the-disappearing-knuck…

12:41

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, I’m chatting here with my 3 1/2-year daughter and her partner in crime, our mutt Sandy, underfoot. The queue is filling slowly. I’ll start tackling questions but if there’s a delay in my responses, it’s because I’m keeping the apartment from burning down or at least sticking two LEGOs together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Donaldson is one of the game’s elite two-way players, but like the late Ernie Lombardi, he received rude treatment when it came to Baseball-Reference’s latest update to its version of WAR. Last week I began a breakdown of B-Ref’s influx of new data, which resulted in alterations to five different areas of its version of WAR, some aspects of which affect players as far back as 1904 and others as recent as last season. The introduction of detailed play-by-play baserunning and caught stealing data from the 1930s and ’40s, for example, cost Lombardi — a heavy-hitting Hall of Fame catcher who played from 1934-47 — a whopping 7.3 WAR. Donaldson took the largest hit among contemporary players, losing 3.8 WAR via changes in the way Defensive Run Saved is calculated. For the 34-year-old third baseman, the loss adds a bit of insult to the injury of this delayed season, which won’t make it any easier for him to build what is admittedly a long-shot case for the Hall of Fame.

B-Ref’s version of WAR is different from that of FanGraphs, but as bWAR is the currency for JAWS, it’s of particular interest to me. While the Hall of Fame itself is as closed right now as any museum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hall arguments are never out of season, nor is taking stock of greatness, particularly when it provides a diversion from considering stockpiles of toilet paper and shortages of N95 masks. B-Ref’s adjustments are hardly unprecedented for the site, which adds new data annually. The earliest boundaries for game logs and play-by-play data have moved backwards by decades over the years, for example, and last year’s big-ticket addition was a major update to catchers’ defensive statistics for the 1890-1952 period.

Reordered for their chronological effect, this year’s update has incorporated the following:

• New Retrosheet Game Logs (1904-07)
• Caught Stealing Totals from Game Logs (1926-40)
• Baserunning and Double Plays from play-by-play data (1931-47)
• Defensive Runs Saved changes (2013-19)
• Park factor changes (2018)

As I noted last week, the career WAR totals of 11 Hall of Fame position players swung by at least 2.5 WAR, some positive and others negative. Where Lombardi was the biggest loser in that update, shortstop Arky Vaughan was the biggest gainer from among the enshrined; his 5.1-WAR gain was the second-largest swing overall, 0.1 less than that of three-time All-Star Lonny Frey (a teammate of Lombardi’s with the Reds from 1938-41). Because nobody needed 3,000 words from me in the first installment of a series as we await the green light on the 2020 season, I didn’t publish the table of the position-by-position changes or delve into the effects on other groups of players, such as Donaldson and his contemporaries. This time around, we’ll do just that. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after the Boston Globe reported that Chris Sale had resumed throwing following a shutdown, and two weeks after he was diagnosed with a flexor tendon strain but no new damage to his ulnar collateral ligament, the Red Sox have announced that he’ll undergo Tommy John surgery. The going-on-31-year-old lefty joins the Yankees’ Luis Severino on the short list of star pitchers who will miss all of the 2020 season — however long it may be — following UCL reconstruction, and the Astros’ Justin Verlander among players whose decisions to undergo surgery make more sense in light of the delayed opening to the season.

As I detailed three weeks ago, Sale made just 25 starts amid an uneven season last year; he was fantastic in May and June (2.78 ERA, 1.98 FIP in 71.1 innings) but bad or worse on either side of that stretch before being shut down on August 13 due to elbow inflammation. Though he set career worsts in ERA (4.40) and home run rate (1.47 per nine) — both more than double his 2018 rates — his strikeout rate still ranked second in the majors among pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 29.6% K-BB% fourth, and his 75 FIP- 14th. His 3.6 WAR, despite being his lowest mark since 2011, was more than respectable. That said, Statcast data showed that he had the largest year-to-year dropoff in four-seam fastball velocity of any pitcher from 2018 to ’19, 1.8 mph (from 95.2 mph to 93.4), and the second-largest increase in exit velocity, 3.4 mph (from 84.7 to 87.0).

While Sale paid a visit to Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion last August, he avoided surgery, though he did receive a platelet-rich plasma injection. Although many within the industry have been predicting that the wiry lefty would someday blow out his elbow given his violent delivery — you can find armchair pitching coaches calling him “a ticking time bomb” as far back as 2012, if not earlier — there was no public indication at the time that his injection or his injury were related to his ulnar collateral ligament. This spring, the Red Sox continued to give reassurances that his elbow was fine, even as Sale began spring training behind schedule due to a bout of pneumonia. Read the rest of this entry »

Poor Ernie Lombardi. The heavyset and heavy-hitting Hall of Fame catcher, who owns two of the position’s eight batting titles, was the player hardest-hit by Baseball-Reference’s latest update to their version of Wins Above Replacement. B-Ref rolled out a whole series of adjustments, both to current players and long-retired ones, into one big release earlier this week, which it explained via a Twitter thread on Tuesday morning and expounded upon at the site. Thanks to additional play-by-play baserunning and caught stealing data, Lombardi, whose career spanned from 1931-47, saw his career WAR total drop from 46.8 to 39.5. Well, he didn’t actually see it, as he’s been dead since 1977, but you know what I mean.

B-Ref’s version of WAR is different from that of FanGraphs, of course, though you may have noticed that our site also updated its Defensive Runs Saved totals after Sports Info Solutions made major changes to its flagship stat, in part to account for defensive shifting. I’ll get to that aspect in a separate follow-up post, but for the moment my concern is how the B-Ref changes affect my JAWS system for Hall of Fame evaluations. The overall answer is “not a whole lot,” though individual player WAR and JAWS, and thus the standards at each position, have shifted a bit, creating a ripple effect throughout my system. With no new baseball for the foreseeable future, it’s worth taking an inventory of these changes, in part because they give us a chance to dig into some baseball history and provide a bit of an escape from our current realities.

Incidentally, the Hall of Fame itself closed indefinitely as of Sunday, March 15, and has already canceled its 2020 Hall of Fame Classic Weekend, which was scheduled for May 22-24. Among other things, that weekend was to feature a seven-inning legends game featuring Hall of Famers and former major leaguers and a “Night at the Museum” program. Induction Weekend, scheduled for July 24-27, is still on the calendar and will hopefully take place as planned, but right now, there are no guarantees. Given that the advanced ages of many Hall of Famers put them at the highest risk for COVID-19 infections, attendance among the game’s legends could be more sparse than usual. Read the rest of this entry »

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

With thousands of players in major and minor league camps this spring amid what has grown into a pandemic with nearly 170,000 confirmed cases worldwide, it was only a matter of time before professional baseball had its first player test positive for the novel coronavirus. That came to pass this weekend; on Sunday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that a Yankees minor leaguer has done so. The player in question, who did not spend any time this spring at the team’s major league camp a mile away in Tampa, Florida, has not been publicly identified, in accordance with HIPAA Privacy Rules.

Thus far among professional athletes, three NBA players — the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, and the Pistons’ Christian Wood, the last of whom played against Gobert last Saturday and was diagnosed over the weekend — have tested positive. Gobert’s positive test led the NBA to suspend its season and set off a domino effect that led to other leagues and organizations suspending play as well, as governmental authorities moved to limit the size of gatherings well below thresholds that would allow sporting events to take place.

Per The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, the minor leaguer in question was symptom-free as of Thursday, but woke up Friday feeling feverish and fatigued. After tests for influenza and strep throat came back negative, the player in question was quarantined. The team learned that his COVID-19 test was positive late Saturday night. Meanwhile, the minor league camp, which has been used by more than a hundred players on a daily basis this spring, was closed on Friday morning and underwent a “deep cleaning” on Sunday — not its first of the spring, according to general manager Brian Cashman. The major league facility will receive another such cleaning as well. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, welcome to the latest edition of my Monday chat and likely the first under some fairly trying conditions that we’re all facing. It was moments after last week’s chat that my wife howled, “Oh shit!” at an email announcing the sudden closure of my daughter’s school, effective end of day (she’s 3 1/2, in her first year of preschool). At the time, it was one of those “abundance of caution” things but as the week grew progressively — and aggressively — more surreal, it looks like we were merely a few days ahead of the curve.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: I spent the remainder of last week getting up to speed on the COVID-19 virus and its intersection with baseball and other sports, as you may have seen, and I took the lead for our first installment of what will be a daily roundup of the latest news on that front, leading with the news of the first professional player to test positive, an unidentified Yankees farmhand. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/covid-19-roundup-the-first-player-has-test…

12:07

Jay Jaffe: My wife and I already worked from home so that part isn’t so difficult to adapt to, but having our daughter underfoot is a challenge. We’re trying to get a bit of help, babysitting-wise, but it’s understandable if people want to isolate themselves.

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Over the weekend, in addition to stocking up on food and cleaning supplies, I sprung for a lot of LEGO to help keep us entertained. Maybe that will help. Anyway, I hope you all are managing out there. Now, onto the questions.

12:10

Jay Jaffe: That’s a good question. Both schedule-wise and injury recovery-wise, the stoppage will have an impact that differs from team to team. We’ll be looking at the latter issue in some systematic fashion, I think (it’s been discussed internally), and I know that Dan Szymborski is examining it from a ZiPS playoff odds standpoint as well. That might even be up today.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, Major League Baseball caught up to the rest of the world of U.S. sports in its response to the novel coronavirus, conceding that public health is the priority by shutting down its spring training schedules in both Arizona and Florida. The start of the regular season, which was slated to begin on March 26, will be delayed by at least two weeks, and if the responses from local officials are anything to go by — such as Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker banning gatherings of more than 1,000 people until May 1 and urging that those of 250 or more people be postponed — that period could run longer.

It’s the governmental restrictions on large gatherings — first in Seattle an San Francisco, and since put into effect in Illinois, New York, and Ohio — that forced the hands not only of MLB but other leagues and organizations when it came to canceling games. As previously noted (this bears repeating), such social distancing measures have been proven to slow the spread of a virus — to “flatten the curve” in order to avoid overwhelming health care systems and force grim decisions on triage — that has shown a 33% daily rise in the cumulative number of cases, and that may ultimately infect 70 million to 150 million people in the U.S. amid this pandemic.

At this point there are still more questions than answers as to where things go from here for MLB, which like just about everybody else, is working without a roadmap. Per the New York Post’s Joel Sherman, the league passed along the recommendation of health experts that players remain in camps:

1/MLB sent a memo to teams stating that both minor and major league players should not leave their spring locales through Sunday except for extraordinary reasons and with MLB knowledge/permission. MLB told me this was the recommendation of its health experts. That keeping

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

2/players under care of club physicians that know them and away from affected areas was the best short-term course of action. How many players will stay working out at club sites beyond the weekend, especially if they don't truly believe the season will start up again on 4/9?

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

After a whirlwind 24-hour period in which the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer all announced suspensions of their regular season games in the wake of local restrictions on the size of mass gatherings as a means of slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus, Major League Baseball has followed suit. Following a conference call involving commissioner Rob Manfred and the 30 team owners, the league has shut down its spring training schedules in both Arizona and Florida and will delay the start of the regular season, which was scheduled to begin on March 26, by at least two weeks.

Here’s the statement from MLB:

This is the first time since 1995 that the start of the season has been delayed; that year, following the resolution of the strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series, the schedule was shortened to 144 games. MLB’s two-week assessment should be taken with a grain of salt given the fluidity of the situation; just two days ago, the aforementioned leagues banded together to issue a joint statement regarding the closure of locker rooms and clubhouses to the media, a comparatively minor deviation from business as usual. The situation escalated rapidly on Wednesday, as the World Health Organization officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic and a top U.S. health official (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) recommended against the assembly of large crowds for sporting events. It took around two hours between the revelation that an NBA player (Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert) had tested positive and the league’s decision to suspend play due to the need to quarantine players or advise those who had been exposed to Gobert to self-quarantine. The NBA reportedly told teams on Thursday that its suspension would last for a minimum of 30 days.

Via the New York Post’s Joel Sherman, the expectation is that MLB teams will ask players to remain at spring sites, where they have access to team medical personnel and can continue to work out; however, players can go as they please. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters that players will be allowed to continue training at their Camelback Ranch facility but that the pace of workouts would be dialed back, and players could go home if they choose. The Brewers are hosting optional workouts for players on Friday and Monday but not over the weekend, and there will be no media availability until Monday. Meanwhile, the Yankees’ current plan is to remain in Tampa, and potentially play intra-squad or simulated games, though that may also change.

Schedule-wise, while nothing official has been announced, The Athletic’s Zach Buchanan reported via Twitter, “Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall said the idea now is to pick up the season at whatever point on the schedule play resumes. If only a short time has been missed, MLB could add those games on the back end.” Such a situation would be similar to how MLB handled the 2001 season following September 11, when a week’s worth of games was postponed and then made up after the previously scheduled end of the regular season, such that all teams except the Yankees and Red Sox completed 162-game schedules.

Such policies have not been announced officially, however, and a host of other unanswered questions involving salaries for major and minor leaguers (none of whom get paid during spring training, except per diem meal money), and service time, also loom. Per the Associated Press’ Ronald Blum:

If regular-season games are lost this year, MLB could attempt to reduce salaries by citing paragraph 11 of the Uniform Player’s Contract, which covers national emergencies. The announcement Thursday said the decision was made “due to the national emergency created by the coronavirus pandemic.”

“This contract is subject to federal or state legislation, regulations, executive or other official orders or other governmental action, now or hereafter in effect respecting military, naval, air or other governmental service, which may directly or indirectly affect the player, club or the league,” every Uniform Player’s Contract states.

The provision also states the agreement is “subject also to the right of the commissioner to suspend the operation of this contract during any national emergency during which Major League Baseball is not played.”

Ugh. Obviously, this is sad news for the sport we love and the season we’re hotly anticipating, but those concerns are secondary in the face of a public health crisis during which schools and other institutions have been closed and people have become sick or died; the worldwide confirmed case count as of Wednesday is upwards of 127,000 as of Wednesday, and the death toll is approaching 5,000. We can hope that the games return to us in short order, but right now, nobody really knows what’s in store.

On Wednesday, the dominoes began falling across the landscape of US sports with respect to the spread of the novel coronavirus. A day that included the World Health Organization officially declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, and a top U.S. health official telling a Congressional committee, “Bottom line, it’s going to get worse,” saw leagues and organizations take unprecedented steps in order to comply with governmental restrictions on large gatherings. Such social distancing measures have been proven to slow the spread of a virus — to “flatten the curve” in order to avoid overwhelming health care systems and force grim decisions on triage — that has shown a 33% daily rise in the cumulative number of cases, and that may ultimately infect 70 million to 150 million people in the U.S. alone, one for which a vaccine is at least a year away.

Where on Tuesday Major League Baseball’s closure of locker rooms and clubhouses went into effect, by late Wednesday that measure and the concerns that surrounded it looked like small potatoes compared to the NCAA’s announcement that its signature basketball tournament would proceed without spectators, and the NBA’s indefinite suspension of its season following a player testing positive for the virus. While MLB began addressing its most acute situations in Seattle and San Francisco on Wednesday due to decisions made by local authorities, it’s now quite apparent that the league will soon need to move beyond piecemeal solutions and be forced to make a choice between delaying its March 26 Opening Day or playing games behind closed doors. Reporters such as ESPN’s Jeff Passan and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman have suggested that spring training could soon be suspended.

[UPDATE: Via Passan, MLB is expected to suspend spring training after a conference call among owners on Thursday afternoon, and the league “likely will delay the beginning of the regular season as well.” Passan quoted Dodgers pitcher David Price, “”It’s gotta happen. This is so much bigger than sports. I’ve got two kids.”]

As noted previously, such measures are hardly the biggest sacrifice to be made at a time when schools and other institutions are being closed and people are becoming sick or even dying amid an epidemic whose worldwide confirmed case count is upwards of 127,000 as of Wednesday, and whose death toll is approaching 5,000. Read the rest of this entry »

Like a fast-moving prospect, the novel coronavirus — or rather, concerns about what precautions to take in order to protect players amid the epidemic caused by its spread — has reached the majors. No games have been canceled yet, but on Monday, after a conference call with all 30 team owners, Major League Baseball announced its plans to join forces with the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer in limiting media access to players due to concerns about the COVID-19 outbreak. As of Tuesday, locker rooms and clubhouses have been temporarily closed to news media and any non-essential personnel, with media access to uniformed personnel shifted to designated locations, and barriers have been put in place to enforce a minimum distance of six feet between reporter and subject.

A barrier area has been set up for reporters outside the Yankees clubhouse: pic.twitter.com/rTmftoDa94

— James Wagner (@ByJamesWagner) March 10, 2020

Admittedly, this is hardly the biggest sacrifice to be made at a time when schools and other institutions are being closed, and people are getting sick or even dying amid an epidemic that has infected over 113,000 people in 110 countries and appears to be rapidly advancing in the US, with 647 confirmed cases and 25 deaths spread across 35 states as of Tuesday afternoon (the estimated total number of people infected in the US may be an order of magnitude higher, but a shortage of tests is slowing the pace of confirmations). Yet it’s a move that should hit home to anybody reading this, not only because the quality of the coverage will suffer but because the decision highlights the tension between for-profit leagues and public health concerns. It also raises questions about the steps that the league has not yet taken and what could happen if even more drastic measures are required. Read the rest of this entry »