Remember back on March 1, when Rob Manfred canceled Major League Baseball’s March 31 Opening Day and the first week of games? And the week before that, when a league spokesperson threatened that canceled games would not be rescheduled, saying, “A deadline is a deadline. Missed games are missed games. Salary will not be paid for those games”? Apparently that wasn’t the real deadline to fit a full 162-game season into the calendar. No — and we’ll pause here so as to be heard over the sound of goalposts being dragged — that deadline was apparently Tuesday, and it’s been extended yet again. After lawyers for the league and the union huddled on Monday, MLB offered its latest formal proposal, and the two sides went back and forth for over 17 hours on Tuesday before pausing around 2:30 AM ET on Wednesday morning so that the union could speak to its board and respond with a counterproposal.

The two sides have converged on monetary issues, but significant gaps remain both there and on other matters, most notably the international draft. It’s possible that a deal could come Wednesday… or that the whole thing could fall apart, with more finger-pointing, and Manfred announcing the cancellation of more games.

Before digging into the details, it’s worth noting again that the length of the season and the ramifications that carries for salaries, incentives, and service time isn’t something that Major League Baseball can decide unilaterally. It’s subject to negotiation, which was why the passage of the March 1 deadline felt so significant, as any attempt to shorten the season would add another layer of complexity to the already contentious proceedings. Complicating matters — or calling the league’s bluff, depending upon how one looks at it — the union has indicated that anything less than pay and service time based on 162 games could mean that they won’t approve an expanded playoff format for 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

The Competitive Balance Tax threshold has been central to the contentious collective bargaining agreement negotiations and the ending of the owners’ self-imposed lockout. The league and the players union have been further apart on that issue than on any of the other major ones, which helps to explain why last week’s optimism regarding a last-minute deal proved to be unfounded. Even with the owners’ offers to raise the minimum salary and improve the lot of pre-arbitration players — albeit not to the levels that the union was seeking — the minimal growth of the CBT threshold meant the owners’ final pre-deadline proposal was dead on arrival. Yet according to The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, four of the 30 team owners objected even to those threshold levels.

As noted several times in my coverage of the negotiations, the CBT threshold has not kept pace with revenues over the past decade and has increasingly been treated as a salary cap by owners. Recall this oft-circulated graph from The Athletic”

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s small potatoes in the context of what’s going on (or not) in the baseball industry and the rest of the world, but so far as the Hall of Fame goes, the problem in a nutshell is this: Half of the starting pitchers who are in the Hall and were born in the 1950s are named Jack Morris. While there’s no need to relitigate the polarizing battle that forestalled his eventual election — been there, done that — the real issue, to these eyes, is that the gruff ex-Tigers workhorse is the only starter in the Hall born after 1951 and before ’63. When stacked up against other enshrined starters, his credentials are modest at best, and so his presence in the plaque room feels like an indictment of the quality of his peers.

The reality is that Morris won battles of attrition, first against the forces that reshaped the role of the starting pitcher following the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973, and then against the voting bodies that were slow to recognize the strength of those forces. He was a throwback, and in the arguments over his merits he became a symbol for a bygone era. Backed by strong offenses, he piled up innings while having less success preventing runs than his the best of his peers, but more success avoiding injuries or replacement by pinch-hitters and relievers. Plus, he won a few big games in October.

For all of that, I did not have Morris or any specific pitcher in mind when I began exploring ways to modernize JAWS to better account for the changes in starting pitcher workloads that have occurred over the past century and a half. After nearly two decades of using my Hall of Fame fitness metric, I know the contours of the position-by-position rankings reasonably well, and so I had a pretty good idea in advance which ones would be helped by whatever adjustments I settled on — that while knowing that those changes wouldn’t be so radical as to upset the entire system. That said, I suspected that shining a brighter light on some of those players would particularly resonate with fans of a certain age, particularly as I worked my way through history and reached the frame of reference of players I’m old enough to have watched. I don’t cross paths with a lot of fans of Jim McCormick or Wes Ferrell these days, but Luis Tiant is another matter. Read the rest of this entry »

So much for commissioner Rob Manfred’s stated desire to avoid a “disastrous outcome,” and so much for the urgency of the owners’ “defensive” lockout, which was supposed to jumpstart negotiations towards a new collective bargaining agreement — albeit in a most curious manner, with 43 days of radio silence and just one formal proposal to the players over a 71-day span. On Tuesday evening, the commissioner canceled the first two series of the regular season — a total of 91 games, constituting five to seven for each team — after the players union and the owners failed to meet his artificially-imposed deadline for a new CBA in time to preserve the season’s scheduled opening on March 31.

“I had hoped against hope I wouldn’t have to have this press conference where I am going to cancel some regular season games,” said Manfred on Tuesday. Citing the two sides meeting in Jupiter, Florida for nine straight days, he added, “I want to assure our fans that our failure to reach an agreement was not due to a lack of effort by either party.”

If indeed those games are lost, they would be the first regular season games missed due to a work stoppage since the 1994-95 players’ strike, and the first due to a lockout by the owners. When the owners locked the players out of spring training for 32 days in 1990, the resulting settlement included an Opening Day pushed back by a week, a season end date extended by three days, and all but two of the 26 teams playing 162 games. The 91 games would instantly leapfrog the 86 missed at the start of the 1972 season due to a players’ strike. As in that year, Manfred has said that games won’t be made up, even if that means competitors playing uneven numbers of games — a situation that helped to decide the AL East that year, with the Tigers (86-70) finishing half a game ahead of the Red Sox (85-70). Read the rest of this entry »

On the day that commissioner Rob Manfred set as a deadline for the completion of a new collective bargaining agreement that would end the owners’ self-imposed lockout and keep a March 31 Opening Day on schedule, no deal was reached. For the eighth consecutive day of negotiations, representatives for the owners and the players’ union met at Jupiter, Florida’s Roger Dean Stadium, going back and forth so many times over the course of 16 1/2 hours that the calculations of steps traveled strained FanGraphs’ servers, to say nothing of the brains of the handful of reporters staked out outside the gates. Enough progress towards a deal was made before the two sides broke for the night at 2:30 AM ET that Manfred agreed to extend the artificially-imposed deadline to 5 PM ET on Tuesday.

While nothing has been finalized, the reports of where the key components are heading do not paint a particularly pretty picture for the players’ side. After a decade in which they have largely been shut out of massive revenue growth, with new television deals falling into place, they appear to be improving the lot of their rank and file — no small matter in an industry where 47% of all service time went to players making the minimum salary — but while achieving only modest gains in areas where they initially sought more radical change.

Based upon the drips and drabs that have emerged from various reports, the battle to expand the postseason has loomed large, with MLB presenting alternative proposals based on whether it’s 14 teams (their preference) or 12 (the union’s preference).

Sources: Deal not close, but not impossible. CBT thresholds, prearb pool big issues, among others. MLB has proposed two choices:

A: 14-team expanded postseason, minimum of ~$700k, ~40m into prearb pool

B: 12-team expanded postseason, ~$675k minimum, ~$20m into prearb pool

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) March 1, 2022

The 12-team format appears to be the route this deal will take, though according to the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand, the gap between the two formats amounts to only a $15 million difference in what ESPN is offering ($100 million for a 14-team format, $85 million for a 12-team one). Whether the “ghost win” concept — giving the division-winning team that does not receive a first-round bye a one-game-to-none advantage in a best-of-five series — survives is unclear at this writing. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s February 28, the deadline set by commissioner Rob Manfred to have a new collective bargaining agreement in place that would end the owners’ self-imposed lockout and allow the season to open as scheduled on March 31 following an abbreviated spring training. To the surprise of no one, there’s no deal yet, even after seven straight days of negotiations between representatives for the owners and the players union in Jupiter, Florida, talks that have stretched into Monday. Negotiations have yielded incremental progress regarding some core economic issues and other matters, but the two sides remain far apart nonetheless. While a league official characterized Sunday’s talks as “productive” after both sides voiced considerable acrimony on Saturday, it would take something on the order of a miracle to have a deal in place by the end of the day.

What’s more, if the league intends to treat the February 28 deadline as a hard one, living up to its threat to cancel games without making them up, and not paying players for a full 162-game season, a deal may become even harder to reach. That would create another issue to settle via negotiations, because the length of a season is subject to collective bargaining; the league can’t unilaterally reduce it. One need only to dial back to 2020 to recall what a fiasco that can become once service time and contract incentives come into play. What’s more, the cancellation of games would raise the possibility of the players answering with some hardball of their own by not agreeing to expanded playoffs for the 2022 season. The union indicated that was possible earlier this month, when the specter of cancellations arose. The value of those expanded playoffs is estimated at $100 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Though the owners could end their self-imposed lockout of the players at any time and allow the baseball season to proceed on schedule, the first week of spring training games has been scrubbed. Odds are that more cancellations are to come, and commissioner Rob Manfred’s February 28 deadline to reach an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement that would preserve Opening Day is fast approaching. With a newfound sense of urgency that stands in marked contrast to Major League Baseball offering one formal proposal in the lockout’s first 10 weeks, representatives for the owners and the players union have been meeting on a daily basis in Jupiter, Florida this week to discuss core economic issues — and those meetings have lasted more than 15 minutes at a time! But even with the more frequent back-and-forth and some minor movement here and there, including a formal proposal from the players on Tuesday, the two sides still appear to be far apart on the most central issues.

If there’s optimism to be had, let us know, because we could sure use some. In the meantime, here’s an attempt to capture where things stand as of Wednesday morning.

Competitive Balance Tax

The lack of optimism regarding an impending resolution to the lockout centers on the players making the tax “the lodestar” of negotiations, to use Jeff Passan’s term, and so far this week, neither side has budged from where things stood as of the owners’ February 12 proposal. I broke down the recent history of the CBT — the threshold for which has not kept pace with the growth of revenue over the past decade — in my previous analysis in the wake of that proposal.

The short version is that the players believe the CBT functions as a salary cap. With teams’ total payrolls down 4.6% from 2017 (from about $4.25 billion to $4.05 billion), and with most of the biggest-spending teams pulling up just short of the threshold in 2021 — the Phillies, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Astros were all within $4 million of the $210 million bar, with only the Dodgers and Padres paying the tax — one can understand their frustration. In Tuesday’s proposal, the players didn’t budge from their previous position from January 24. While generally preserving the previous CBA’s tiered penalties for teams exceeding the thresholds by more than $20 million and more than $40 million, they’ve sought an increase in the base threshold from $210 million to $245 million, growing to $273 million by 2026. That jump in part makes up for the threshold’s meager growth over the life of the last CBA (from $195 million to $210 million over five years, an average of 2.1%), while revenues grew at a quicker rate. The only real difference in that aspect of their proposal is that there’s no draft-related penalty involved, where the previous CBA bumped the draft place for the highest pick of any team with a payroll at least $40 million above the threshold down by 10 spots (unless it was a top-six pick). Read the rest of this entry »

Our story so far: It is a dark time for recognizing Hall of Fame starting pitchers. While the 300-wins-or-bust barrier has fallen, starters born in 1950 or later have become significantly underrepresented in Cooperstown. The cream of the crop within that demographic has been honored, with a couple of notable exceptions whose own actions wounded their candidacies, causing them to age off the writers’ ballot. With falling workloads illustrating that the time of the 250-inning starter is behind us, it makes sense to reframe expectations for what constitutes a Hall-worthy hurler.

Enter S-JAWS, the experimental version of my Hall of Fame fitness metric, introduced during the past election cycle. As an attempt to reduce the skewing caused by the impact of 19th-century and dead-ball era pitchers, S-JAWS prorates peak WAR credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings. The new metric — which is now the default at the starters’ Baseball Reference page — can help to illuminate some candidates throughout history who deserve a closer look even after being passed over so many times, though from a practical standpoint the oldest pitchers of the group could be a decade away from actual placement on an Era Committee ballot.

Before taking a breeze through those candidates — the part of this series many of you’ve been waiting for — here once again is the graphic summary of Hall of Fame representation rates for starting pitchers by birth decade, expressed as a percentage of “qualifiers” who reached 2,000 career innings. It’s a handy practical cutoff that includes every enshrined pitcher from the NL, AL, and bygone white leagues except Dizzy Dean (who fell 32.2 innings short), plus relievers Hoyt Wilhelm and Dennis Eckersley, who aren’t included in the counts of enshrined starters.

And here’s an aggregation of longer-term representation rates that I find most helpful:

Before we dive in, I’ll note that there just aren’t enough eligible pitchers of quality that we can level the representation rates entirely. That isn’t even my goal here, but I am looking to boost the rates of more recent pitchers while keeping in mind that the somewhat looser standards make it apparent that a few guys from the more ancient eras look even stronger in the light of S-JAWS than in JAWS. We shouldn’t leave them by the wayside, but the staggered Era Committee process — with Early Baseball candidates (those who made their marks before 1950) not yet eligible for reconsideration before 2032, and Golden Days candidates (1950–69) not until 2027 — already defaults to making them lower priorities anyway.

With that, I’ll break this down into the top starters for each period who are outside the Hall, identifying those who fall within the top 100 of the rankings — about 43.0 S-JAWS, which captures shorter-career guys such as Félix Hernández, who’s an electoral longshot, to Sandy Koufax, who’s enshrined despite the brevity of his career. This is not to say that all of the pitchers on the outside that I’m highlighting here are Hall-worthy or that S-JAWS should be the only consideration for anointing them. The hope is that by appreciating what their candidacies do offer, we can come up with an appropriate list of pitchers whose elections should be prioritized. Read the rest of this entry »

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, good afternoon and welcome to my chat! I’m running a few minutes behind here as lunch just arrived and I had a home appliance situation to tend to . Gonna need 5-10 minutes to get settled

2:02	Jay Jaffe: your patience is appreciated

2:06	Jay Jaffe: OK, I’m back

2:06	Jay Jaffe: My piece on the Juan Soto extension offer went up earlier today https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-nationals-350-million-extension-offer-….

2:07	Jay Jaffe: Yesterday, we published my piece on S-JAWS and the dearth of Hall of Fame starting pitchers from recent decades https://blogs.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-notebook-the-incredible-shrink…

2:08	Jay Jaffe: And earlier this week I had a look at the owners’ CBA offer from last Saturday https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-owners-latest-offer-gets-us-no-closer-…

Read the rest of this entry »

Amid a dearth of baseball news, the Nationals took a starring role this week, not only via the retirement of franchise cornerstone Ryan Zimmerman but also the report that before the lockout, the team offered Juan Soto a 13-year, $350 million extension. While we’ve now seen nine deals of at least $300 million in recent years — not to mention a report of a pending extension offer to Soto in the wake of Fernando Tatis Jr.’s $340-million deal last March — the price tag produced the usual sticker shock on social media, as well as incredulity given that the slugger declined it.

Via ESPN Deportes’ Enrique Rojas, the 23-year-old Soto confirmed the news, saying, “Yes, they made me an offer a few months ago, before the lockout. But right now, my agents and I think the best option is to go year by year and wait for free agency. My agent, Scott Boras, has control over the situation.” Read the rest of this entry »