If someone asked you what Mike Trout’s signature skill is, what would your answer be? You might say it’s his power, even though he’s never led his league in homers, or his elite approach, even though he still strikes out a little more often than he walks. If you watched him in person when he was much younger, you might say it isn’t even his steady hitting that defines him, but the way the 6-foot-2, 235-pound mammoth of a man moves, sprinting with top-line speed to steal bases and gliding to field balls hit to center field. The correct answer, of course, isn’t any of those things. What separates Mike Trout from the pack is that he is one of the best, if not the best, at virtually everything. He is the sum of several staggeringly impressive parts.

Still, it feels a bit odd that the player we think of as the best in the game wouldn’t have any specific skill that stands far above the rest of the competition. But while it’s true that Trout has never cruised to a batting title, or demolished the field in homers or walks, the baseball community is constantly coming up with new statistics and methods through which we can evaluate players. Trends, trials, and technology help those new tools grow and improve, and with each one that sticks, we have a new chance to discover a player’s distinctive traits.

In recent years, many of those new revelations have come along because of Statcast, which has introduced an increasing number of statistics into even the casual fan’s lexicon, a technology that gives us a peek into data and visuals we didn’t previously have access to. One of the more recent additions to Statcast’s suite of tools is Swing/Take value, which sorts each pitch into four attack zones based on where it crosses the plate — the heart of the plate, the shadow of the plate, chase pitches, and waste pitches — as well as whether the hitter swung or took the pitch, and uses Tom Tango’s RE288 table to assign the result of each pitch a run value. The result is sort of a hybrid set of data, a glimpse at the particulars of a hitter’s plate approach, as well as his impact when he does decide to swing. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

MiLB Is Closer to Accepting Contraction in Wake of Pandemic

Small baseball communities around the country were delivered a bit of a gut punch on Tuesday, when Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper reported that Minor League Baseball is nearing an agreement with Major League Baseball that would result in the loss of 40 affiliated teams. The Associated Press put out a similar report Tuesday, while Minor League Baseball itself released the following statement.

Minor League Baseball statement pic.twitter.com/FCi67U9kUw

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) April 21, 2020

The statement seems intended to temper public reaction, though it doesn’t exactly reaffirm MiLB’s commitment to keeping the total number of affiliated teams at 160 (MLB’s proposal would reduce the number to 120). MLB’s proposal was first introduced back in October, with the league claiming it would help teams boost minor leaguers’ pay, as well as improve their quality of life by reducing travel distances and guaranteeing higher-quality facilities. Public reaction to the plan, however, decried it for what it more appeared to be — a money-saving move for the league and the owners. But advancing that goal would result in far fewer players having a place in affiliated professional baseball, not to mention the millions of Americans who would find themselves without reasonable in-person access to the sport itself, as Meg Rowley and Ben Clemens wrote about for this site in November.

But the entire professional baseball landscape looks much different now than it did a few months ago. The impact of the lost revenues of months, and possibly an entire season, of baseball is making itself felt at the major league level. The circumstances are much more dire for minor league teams, which are suddenly under threat of extinction not only from the commissioner’s office but the COVID-19 pandemic as well. As a new Professional Baseball Agreement is negotiated, MiLB could place enough value in insuring the long-term security of existing teams that it is willing to accept contraction for those on the chopping block. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a regular series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

MLB players, team employees comprise enormous COVID-19 study population

Players and other employees from 27 of the 30 teams have elected to take part in the first and largest study of COVID-19’s spread in the United States, according to stories by ESPN and The Athletic. The study has no intention of assisting a return to baseball in 2020.

According to reports, as many as 10,000 people have volunteered for the study, in which participants use at-home test kits to find out if they have COVID-19 antibodies in their blood. Within 10 minutes, a person will know whether or not they have contracted COVID-19 at some point in the past, and will then send a photograph of their results to a team health specialist, along with a survey asking a range of questions about the participant’s age, gender, and race, as well as where they’re from, what their social distancing practices are, and whether they’ve knowingly been in contact with anyone infected by COVID-19. The finger-prick test is not the same as those being used by health care providers on the front lines, as it is not intended to identify active infections. All volunteers will be anonymous, and MLB says it will not identify the three teams that chose not to take part.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who will be examining the results of the study and writing a paper on his findings, says that MLB’s participation will be “unbelievable for public health policy.” Once the results are compiled, medical professionals should have a much better idea of the true infection and death rates across the country, and better understand how the virus spreads, all of which will be crucial to knowing how and when it will be safe to re-open the country. Read the rest of this entry »

As strange as it sounds right now, a day will come when baseball people start thinking about how to win baseball games again. That might not be until spring 2021, if COVID-19 forces Major League Baseball to sit out an entire calendar year. But there is still a chance it happens sometime in the next couple of months, and if that’s the case, teams will be preparing for a season unlike any they’ve played before. In addition to all of the structural changes that might be necessary for games to proceed, the simple fact of the season being considerably shorter than normal could change the way teams approach the games. In light of this, one strategy for teams to consider is a return to the four-man starting rotation.

Four-man rotations — or at least, the concept of throwing your best arms on three or fewer days rest — used to be fairly commonplace in the majors. In a piece by Russell A. Carleton at Baseball Prospectus from 2013, he found that around 40% of starts occurred on what we’d now call “short” rest as recently as the early 1970s. Soon after reaching that recent peak, however, the practice nosedived, with short rest starts happening less than 10% of the time by 1984 and continuing to free-fall until reaching a point of near-extinction over the last two decades.

The point of Carleton’s study was not to find out when the four-man rotation died out, but why it did. To that end, he came up with little statistical reasoning. Pitchers who threw on short rest did not seem to perform any worse than they’d be expected to on full rest, nor did any cumulative effects seem to wear them down faster over the course of a full season. This was true regardless of the time period, too, which means it didn’t seem to have anything to do with whether a pitcher was more or less conditioned for it. The best explanation for why teams broadly and swiftly shifted to a five-man rotation was simply fear of injuring arms, and hoping that more rest might prevent that.

Carleton’s piece didn’t take the extra step of actively calling for the four-man rotation to return, but plenty of others have. Major league teams, however, have been taking steps to limit the responsibilities given to starting pitchers, not expand them. In 2014, David Price led the majors with 248.1 innings pitched, while 34 pitchers reached 200 innings, and 65 reached 180. In 2019, Justin Verlander’s league-leading innings total was just 223, with 15 pitchers reaching 200 innings, and 33 pitchers reaching 180 innings. Over a full season, a four-man rotation could add as many as eight starts to a pitcher’s workload, amounting to 40-50 extra innings of work. It would be rather shocking to see a team take that kind of step over 162 games. Read the rest of this entry »

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

MLB Is Pursuing A Return To Baseball In May

Despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread throughout the United States and the rest of the world, Major League Baseball is reportedly attempting to move forward with a plan that would open the 2020 season as early as next month. According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the plan clearly has numerous potential hiccups, but is also being advanced with the support of “high-ranking public health officials.”

As one might expect, this version of the 2020 season would look very different from any we’ve seen before. Games would be relegated entirely to Arizona, with teams playing at Chase Field — the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks — as well as the 10 spring training complexes, and other nearby fields. Only essential personnel would be allowed inside the stadiums, which means no fans in the ballparks. The league has discussed potentially forgoing dugouts in favor of players and coaches sitting six feet apart from each other in the stadium seats, in order to promote social distancing. Passan’s report also mentions the elimination of mound visits from pitching coaches and catchers, seven-inning doubleheaders to make up for lost time in April and early May, and the use of an electronic strike zone, so that umpires can maintain a six-foot distance from the batter and catcher. Once teams report to their respective facilities, there would be another two-to-three week spring training period, followed by the start of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Hello everyone, and thank you for continuing to read these daily updates. This is the final day of March (or so I’m told!), the month in which everything plunged from its typical state of unrest into a total global nightmare, and we aren’t yet close to a point when these updates can relay good news. The total number of COVID-19 cases worldwide will eclipse 800,000 today, with the United States housing more than 160,000; more than 3,000 Americans are now dead from the virus. Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. all issued stay-at-home orders on Monday, with some of those expected to last into at least June.

As has been the case for weeks, there remain many more questions than answers with regards to what the coming months will look like, and they are very, very tough questions. We’ll get into a couple of those below, as well as a major news development from the NCAA. But first, if you’re able to and haven’t yet, please consider supporting FanGraphs with a membership today.

NCAA Grants Extra Year of Eligibility to Division I Spring Athletes

On Monday, the NCAA’s Division I Council granted an extra year of eligibility to spring athletes whose seasons were lost due to COVID-19 cancellations. Divisions II and III, as well as NAIA, had already taken similar steps, but because of the financial implications of such an action for Division I, it was previously unclear if this measure would be adopted at the highest level. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s becoming clear that leaving your jacket behind was a mistake.

The sun has been giving this mid-March day a Fourth of July tint all afternoon, and you’ve been waiting all winter to brave the outdoors free from layers. That sun was still out when you got to the ballpark just before 5 pm, and the air felt mild, so you left your jacket in the car. You should have known better. The high school baseball game you’re watching probably wasn’t going to end until 7:30, when the sun was nearly gone — along with whatever lies it promised you about warmth.

Now, that 7:30 final out is beginning to feel wildly optimistic. One of the starting pitchers had trouble throwing strikes in the first inning, needing 33 pitches to get through it, according to your count. The second inning is shaping up to be even worse. The same pitcher hit the first batter, and has walked three more to force home a run.

Really, it isn’t his fault. He isn’t going to pitch in the majors, or even in college. He isn’t a baseball player at all, really. He’s just playing the part, like so many other kids you’ve seen, happy for any chance to be outside with his friends.

And it isn’t going well. One of the few strikes he’s thrown this inning got laced to left field for a base hit, scoring two more runs. Now the coach is going to the mound, but his options are limited. He doesn’t have many pitchers on this year’s small roster, and tomorrow his team has a doubleheader scheduled. He really needed tonight’s starter to go deep into the game. But he’s already thrown 55 pitches, and made only three outs. The coach attempts to level with the 16-year-old standing in front of him, pats him on the shoulder, and returns to the dugout. Read the rest of this entry »

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

This is the beginning of our second week of daily updates on the COVID-19 pandemic, and around the world things have only continued to escalate. Just on Sunday, it was reported that Rand Paul became the first United States senator to test positive for the virus, news he apparently received just after going to the gym while awaiting test results; four other Republican senators, including Mitt Romney, were forced to self-isolate because of recent contact with Senator Paul. Later in the day, a $1.8 trillion stimulus bill stalled in the Senate, pushing back any action until early this week. Meanwhile, according to The Washington Post, cases in the United States jumped by 38% on Sunday, with the new total exceeding more than 34,000 positive tests and 470 deaths nationwide.

Inside the baseball world, however, it was a strangely quiet weekend. After last week saw a steady flow of news regarding how teams will compensate the most vulnerable people in their employ during the outbreak — that is, stadium workers and minor league players — the weekend was one largely spent watching the dust settle. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t take the time to speculate a bit more about the consequences of what’s to come in the baseball world, as well as some developments on sports overseas.

Without Update on Scheduled Start to Season, Service Time Concerns Increase

Crises such as this one render most other things insignificant. Someone you know or a famous face you recognize gets sick, and suddenly a mortality rate that once seemed low to you is now made real. Big words like “recession” start getting tossed around as even the healthy among us begin losing their jobs en masse. We refresh our news source of choice even more frantically than we already had been, looking for any sign of hope, but every update carries with it more uncertainty, a reminder that the place we’ve wound up in is one we have never been before. Read the rest of this entry »

For someone who has spent his life in Ohio and West Virginia, I have a surprising number of friends who are fans of the Baltimore Orioles. Those friends have spent a large portion of their baseball-attentive lives waiting for the team’s catcher of the future. Toward the end of the 2000s, that seemed to be Matt Wieters, the fifth overall pick in the 2007 Draft and Baseball Prospectus’ No. 1 prospect in baseball before he debuted in 2009. After Wieters briefly lived up to his lofty expectations in 2011-12, fans waited for him to reach those heights again. Now, with the Orioles in the middle of another rebuilding cycle, the future of the organization rests on the shoulders of another catcher, Adley Rutschman, the first overall pick in 2019 and the No. 5 prospect in the game, according to Eric Longenhagen’s rankings.

Those are the most high-profile examples, but another top catching prospect existed between those two, and is entering an important season in his big league development. It wasn’t long ago that Chance Sisco, a second-round pick by the organization in 2013, was rising quickly through the system and turning into one of the best catching prospects in the game. Before the 2017 season, he was the top prospect in the organization and a consensus Top 100 prospect around baseball. That year, he was usually the only Orioles player ranked in the Top 100, a signal of how much he stood out in an otherwise listless farm system. That would be an acceptable development if the big league roster were teeming with youth and recently-graduated prospects, but instead, the club was anchored by aging veterans such as Chris Davis, Mark Trumbo, Adam Jones, and J.J. Hardy, and on the cusp of its first losing season in six years. It was time for the team to start thinking about its future, and that future started with Sisco.

Just three years later, Sisco, now 25, doesn’t inspire the same buzz he once did. Part of that is slow development at the upper levels, which is pretty typical for catchers. Last season was Sisco’s third in a row getting major league experience, but he’s still yet to reach 200 plate appearances in a season at the big league level, with the Orioles shuttling him back and forth from Triple-A. His first extended look at the majors in 2018 was a rough one — in 184 plate appearances, he hit just .181/.288/.269, running a 58 wRC+ and striking out almost 36% of the time. Combined with 38 games in Norfolk that were merely okay, it was the worst season of Sisco’s professional career. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tough to imagine how the final few weeks of the 2019 regular season could have gone worse for the Chicago Cubs. Just two games back in the National League Central division on September 17, the team finished the year by losing 10 of its final 12 games, plunging not only out of the division race but out of the Wild Card hunt as well. It was a nightmarish run for the Cubs, but for one player on the team, that stretch represented the height of his season. Ian Happ, the young switch-hitting utility player, made 39 plate appearances in the final 14 games of the season and hit an astonishing .405/.436/1.000, crushing six homers and four doubles in that span. In the Cubs’ only two victories of that stretch, Happ went a combined 6-for-10 with three homers and two doubles.

It’s appropriate that it was Happ who enjoyed this success to close the season; it seemed like no one else on the team needed to finish the year on a high note as much as he did. He was the one who, just one year prior, had such a poor finish to the season that despite being one of the most exciting young players on his team, he went into the following spring training fighting for a job. Over the final two months of 2018, Happ hit just .192/.298/.333, with a wRC+ of just 72. Those two months tanked what had been a promising campaign, and had carryover effects well into the following year. In 56 spring training plate appearances in 2019, he ran on base and slugging percentages both south of .200.

This spring, it seems to be a different story, at least so far. Now carrying on his success, not struggles, from a previous season, Happ did this on Monday:

Kyle Hendricks CAN'T CONTAIN HIMSELF watching Ian Happ's solo shot.

( ?: @ESPN) pic.twitter.com/7QW5S14TR5

— Cubs Talk (@NBCSCubs) March 2, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »