July 3, 2019 was a pretty typical day for major league baseball. Cody Bellinger hit a walk-off home run in the 10th inning against Arizona to give the Dodgers their league-leading 59th win of the season in their 88th game. Last-place Cincinnati defeated first-place Milwaukee to bring all five NL Central teams within 4.5 games of each other. Stephen Strasburg struck out 14 Marlins without allowing a run. Mike Trout hit two dingers, because of course he did. There were close games and there were clunkers, thrilling displays and frustrating setbacks. You probably forgot about all of it.

This July 3 was, well, different. Temperatures notwithstanding, it might as well have been mid-February, as players from all 30 organizations gathered in their respective ballparks for their first official team workouts in months, after the global COVID-19 pandemic suspended the major league season. Players and staff rejoined their teammates only after first undergoing intake tests for the virus, with several wondering even as they took the field whether they were doing the right thing by attempting to play at all. Those circumstances made for a strange and chaotic first weekend of camp.

Longtime star pitchers David Price and Felix Hernandez announced on Saturday that they would opt out of the 2020 season, one day after veteran catcher Welington Castillo was also reported to have opted out. On Monday morning, Nick Markakis also informed his team he would opt out of the season. Their decisions bring the total number of major league players known to have decided against playing this season to nine. Read the rest of this entry »

As Major League Baseball and the Players Association engaged in tense negotiations to resume play after the season was initially suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the focus was understandably spent on the money players would be paid for competing in games during the crisis. But in addition to the compensation for players on the field, a number of other issues needed to be sorted out, including protections for players who did not wish to play this season out of concern for their own health and safety, or for that of someone close to them. Both sides knew that regardless of the salary agreement and health guidelines passed, there would be players with pre-existing health conditions, ones who live with or care for high-risk individuals, and ones in otherwise uncertain situations who would prefer to sit the 2020 season out and wait for next year.

On Monday, the first wave of such decisions arrived, with four veteran players announcing they wouldn’t play the 2020 season. First was Arizona Diamondbacks right-hander Mike Leake, whose agent released the following statement:

Mike Leake is set to be a free agent after the 2020 season. Here is an explanation of his opting out from his agent, Danny Horwits. pic.twitter.com/dtlZm4OC5E

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 29, 2020

A little while later, The Athletic’s Britt Ghiroli reported that two members of the defending champion Washington Nationals, Ryan Zimmerman and Joe Ross, had also opted out of the season. Zimmerman released a statement, as did Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo.

pic.twitter.com/xlWn1V9sLP

— CAA Baseball (@CAA_Baseball) June 29, 2020

pic.twitter.com/FUwb7zUFHr

— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) June 29, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in March, my colleague Dan Szymborski wrote a piece about how playoff projections changed based on the length of the season. At the time, all we knew was that the season had been suspended, and that whatever season we eventually got was likely to be shorter than the one we expected at the start of the calendar year. How many games we’d ultimately lose was a mystery — Dan ran projections for 140 games, 110 games and, most pessimistically, 81 games. After observing the results, he reached the reasonable conclusion that the shorter the season is, the more margin there is for worse teams (on paper, at least) to sneak into the playoffs, and for supposedly elite teams to fall short.

Three months later, it turns out even 81 games was too ambitious of a dream. After much back-and-forth with the players, owners have officially decided to enact a season of just 60 games, beginning on July 23 or 24 and concluding in the final week of September, when a typical regular season would have also finished. With that number officially in place, our playoff odds have been updated to reflect the dramatic shortening of the season, and the result is a similarly dramatic re-imagining of teams’ fortunes:

This table is helpful because it includes all of the information that forms the base of what we’re discussing here — the changes in each team’s playoff and title odds with a shortened season — but to be honest, looking at each team individually like this doesn’t really drive home the kind of shift that has occurred. On its own, the Rangers moving from a 1-in-100 chance at the postseason to a 1-in-10 chance or the Yankees falling from a nearly 9-in-10 chance to a 3-in-4 chance is interesting, but doesn’t really fundamentally change our thinking. The Rangers are probably out, and the Yankees are probably in. Instead, let’s group teams together by their playoff odds, and see how that distribution plays out under the two season lengths:

This better conveys the heart of the changes — from both the front and back of the spectrum, teams have been pulled into the middle. In a 162-game season, 20 teams had playoff odds of either above 60% or below 20%. In a 60-game season, just 14 teams have such a distinction, meaning that a plurality of teams now fall somewhere between a 1-in-5 and 3-in-5 shot.

While the Rays and Nationals have been pulled in from the front of the pack, we see many more teams creeping up from what used to be the bottom tier of actual playoff hopefuls. The Angels make a huge jump relative to their peers, moving from 18.3% playoff odds to 27.7%, while the White Sox (28% to 37%), Diamondbacks (17.1% to 23.1%), and Phillies (18.1% to 23.6%) bite similar chunks out of the advantages the teams ahead of them once had.

And if the gap between 20% and 60% playoff odds I mentioned just above still sounds like a big one, it really isn’t in theory. Consider that under our 162-game projections, the Braves were given a 58.2% shot at the playoffs and an expected win total of 86 games. The Angels, meanwhile, had just an 18.3% chance at the playoffs, with an expected win total of 83 games. That’s three measly games separating two teams with a 40% gap in their playoff odds. Now, to be clear, more goes into playoff odds than just win total. The Braves play in a division without a clear-cut favorite, and in a league where just one team was projected to win 90 games, while the Angels’ division does have a clear-cut favorite, and play in a league that includes four teams expected to win 90 games. Context plays a big role here, but the slim difference in their win totals does show you just how little could separate a team with 1-in-5 playoff odds from a team with 3-in-5 odds.

That’s in a 162-game season. Cut that total down to 60, and the projected win distribution invites even more chaos:

Look at that tall bar on the left. That includes the Washington Nationals, who are projected to win their division and finish with the second-best record in the NL, and the San Diego Padres, who have less than a 15% chance to win their division and are projected to have the eighth-best record in the NL. Fewer than two wins, on average, separate them now. That’s how you go from two teams being 26 points apart in playoff odds to them being just 17 points apart.

This extreme parity is most apparent in the NL Central, where the top four teams are virtually indistinguishable from one another:

There was already so little separating the middle three teams, and now the Cubs have nearly been absorbed into that group as well. Whoever wins this division is probably going to be a decent enough club, but they’re also going to inevitably be the beneficiaries of a season determined a lot by luck. And the Central isn’t the only division like that. Let’s check back in with the Nationals, Braves, and the rest of the NL East:

Out of every team in baseball, the Nationals are arguably the most-harmed by the shortening of the season. Their 13.4-point drop in playoff chances is second behind the Yankees for the biggest in the sport, with the Astros and Dodgers close behind, but unlike those other three teams, they aren’t able to escape with a still-comfortable lead over the rest of their division. Their once sizable advantage over Atlanta has essentially evaporated, despite the fact that the Braves’ chances at both the division and the Wild Card took a hit as well.

This is what happens when you try to predict what’s going to happen in a situation where every game will mean more, but their sum total will tell you less. Depending on what kind of fan you are or what team you cheer for, that could either terrify or thrill you. And while this might make you angsty at the idea of an “undeserving” team making the playoffs or even winning the World Series, it’s worth remembering that even full seasons don’t always do a great job of awarding the title to team we think is best. Just for this year, it’s probably for the best if we don’t worry much about who actually makes the playoffs. Let’s just hope we get a postseason at all.

Clearly, it’s been a long time since any of us cared to discuss major league baseball transactions. The most recent post tagged with the “free agent signing” category on this site was a post by Craig Edwards writing up the Boston Red Sox signing of Colin McHugh all the way back on March 5; a pandemic is mentioned nowhere in the body of the text or in the comments section. It was a simpler time, and a lot has changed since then. The schedule is 102 games shorter now. The games themselves are going to look very different. And there isn’t even a guarantee that a full season will be completed.

It’s difficult to wrap your brain around roster moves under the weight of everything else that’s happening, and fortunately, we haven’t had to. Shortly after it suspended the season, Major League Baseball enacted a transaction freeze, prohibiting teams from trading or signing anyone to their roster. That freeze will be lifted Friday at noon, freeing front offices up to put the finishing touches on their rosters ahead of what’s going to be a very short, strange season. It’s a big step toward normal baseball activities resuming, but it’s also difficult to know how much organizations will actually try to accomplish. Even before the legitimacy of the season itself could be called into question, teams already showed some reticence to maximize their competitiveness and front offices have a lot to figure out about a very unique and potentially dangerous situation and not a lot of time.

Still, there has to be some incentive to win, right? Teams like the Dodgers, Reds, and White Sox have already committed a lot of resources to the 2020 season. Then there are the teams that didn’t expect to be competitive this year but, because of a dramatically shortened season, suddenly see only about five or six games separating them from the playoffs instead of 15-20. The banners teams hang for winning this year will be just as big and colorful as they are for any other season, and for the clubs that have decided to go for it, every little bit is going to help. And though the offseason was very nearly over by the time play was initially suspended, there were still a few players on the market waiting to potentially make a difference for someone. Here’s a refresher on some of the better names available:

Yasiel Puig

Yasiel Puig is the best available free agent left, someone we’ve already covered at length several times here at FanGraphs. There’s no need to go in depth again, but to recap very quickly: Puig is still just 29, and is coming off a year during which he was traded twice in eight months. The 2019 season was his worst in three years from both a WAR and wRC+ perspective, but even then he remained average with his bat. The 1.8 WAR ZiPS projected him for (in the case of a 162-game season) is higher than the total right field projection of 17 teams. Whether it’s a true contender like St. Louis or a rebuilding team that could benefit from some extra jersey sales like Detroit, there are plenty of fits for Puig to play baseball in 2020.

Russell Martin

At 37, Russell Martin doesn’t pose the same threat in the batter’s box he once did, but that isn’t to say he’s done being a valuable player. His glove — boosted by framing metrics that placed him in the 95th percentile of all catchers last year according to Baseball Savant — was still good enough that he was worth 1.2 WAR for the Dodgers despite playing in just 83 games (he did respectably by our metrics as well). His days of 15-20 home run power are over, but he’s walked in at least 12% of his plate appearances every year for four seasons now, a rate that makes him a credible on-base threat regardless of his batting average. Teams carrying active rosters of 30 players to start the year makes it very likely most, if not all, will hold onto three catchers, and Martin would make a lot of sense for a team like the Mets or Cubs that lack a really impressive glove behind the dish.

Aaron Sanchez

A rethinking of Aaron Sanchez’s arsenal to emphasize his hard four-seamer and high-spin curveball did nothing to reverse what is now a three-year tailspin after his breakout in 2016. That season, he held opponents to a 3.00 ERA and 3.55 FIP in 30 games to amass 3.5 WAR, but since then, he’s been hit with a 5.29 ERA and 5.12 FIP in his last 55 games. He’s a former 34th overall pick who has flashed success in the majors and July 1 will be just his 28th birthday, so it seems more likely than not that a team will step forward and try to fix him — a club like the Reds, a team with a new pitching regime, makes sense here. But if a team were going to buy into him as a project, one would think they would have done so before spring training, and before the number of games they had to work with in 2020 (not to mention minor league opportunities) got severely cut down. (Update: I failed to note that Sanchez underwent shoulder surgery in September and was likely to miss most of this season.) There’s a good chance he gets passed over until 2021.

Andrew Cashner

For the first half of 2019, Andrew Cashner was the lone bright spot of a woeful Baltimore Orioles rotation. Then he got traded to Boston, where he was moved to the bullpen and got rocked. During his time with the Orioles, he held a 3.83 ERA and 4.26 FIP by basically doing Andrew Cashner things — he struck out just over six batters per nine innings, but walked fewer than three per nine, and limited homers well by generating lots of groundballs. Cashner has played for six different organizations over the past 10 years now, and he’s rarely been bad. Over the past seven years, he’s failed to throw 150 innings just twice, and owns a 4.08 ERA and 4.24 FIP. He’s 33, but if you’re looking for a durable, inning-eating starter you could plug and play in the back half of nearly any rotation, Cashner is a good bet. Jason Vargas (4.51 ERA, 4.76 FIP, 1.8 WAR in 149.2 innings in 2019) is also available and has similar characteristics, though at 37 he’s considerably riskier.

Scooter Gennett

Also previously covered in depth on this site, Scooter Gennett was dreadful coming off a groin injury in 2019, playing 42 games and finishing with -0.5 WAR a 44 wRC+, a 1.4% walk rate, and a 29.5% strikeout rate, and he lacks the defensive capabilities that can give some other infielders a high floor. Before the groin injury, though, he’d been worth 6.7 WAR over his previous two seasons with a 124 wRC+. Assuming he’s healthy now, he’d make a fine left-handed bench bat for a lot of teams.

The Relievers

Fernando Rodney is 43 now, but his fastball velocity is still in surprisingly decent shape, declining by less than a tick and a half over the last four seasons and clocking in at 94.4 mph on average. His World Series line (2 IP, 2 R, 2 H, 6 BB, 0 K) left something to be desired, but overall, his time in the regular season with the Nationals (33.1 IP, 4.05 ERA, 3.71 FIP) went over pretty well. Baseball’s more fun with Rodney in it, so let’s hope someone takes a flyer.

Sam Tuivailala is a weird story. The good news: Three straight seasons of sub-3.50 ERAs between St. Louis and Seattle, more than 10.5 strikeouts per nine last year, and he’s still just 27 years old. The bad news: Lots of time missed due to injuries, the most concerning of which is an Achilles injury the recovery from which hasn’t been seamless. Usually mid-to-upper-90s with his fastball, he reportedly had yet to throw harder than the upper 80s in camp this spring with the Mariners, who released him a week after the season was postponed. I’d imagine a few teams will be willing to work him out once they get the opportunity.

Arodys Vizcaino sat out nearly all of 2019 with shoulder inflammation, which is certainly concerning. Since 2017, however, he has just a 2.53 ERA in 99.2 innings while striking out nearly 10 batters per nine. He won’t turn 30 until November, so it might not be a bad idea to invest a little cash and a spot on your taxi squad in him.

Danny Salazar last threw meaningful big league innings in 2017, as a once-exciting career has been derailed by shoulder, elbow, and groin injuries. When he finally returned for four innings in 2019, his fastball was nearly 10 mph slower than it was the last time we’d seen him. He’d be a reclamation project for a rebuilding team like Baltimore with innings to give.

Blake Wood hasn’t pitched since being diagnosed with a right elbow impingement in April 2018, but carried favorable peripherals as a workhorse reliever in 2016-17. He’s 34, but there might be something left in the tank.

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.

Players Agree to Health Protocols, Will Report to Camp by July 1

Major League Baseball and the Players Association reached an agreement Tuesday regarding the health and safety guidelines that will govern the 2020 baseball season amid the coronavirus pandemic, officially clearing the path for a season to begin. Owners acted on Monday to implement a 60-game season at full pro-rated pay for players, after the union rejected a proposal over the weekend that, among other things, would have expanded the playoffs and asked players to waive their right to file a grievance. Players will begin training camp by July 1, and the start of the regular season is expected July 23 or 24.

My colleague Craig Edwards already wrote up the agreement here, so I’ll just briefly note some of the highlights. Games will be held in each team’s home stadiums without fans. Teams will play only against teams inside their division as well as teams in the other league’s corresponding geographic division, in an effort to lessen travel. There will be a designated hitter in both leagues, a new extra innings format in which each team starts the inning with a runner at second base, and 30-man active rosters that gradually shrink as the season progresses. The trade deadline will be August 31, and the deadline for a player to be eligible for the postseason roster is September 15. Pitchers will be allowed to, well, here, you read it.

Proposed MLB rule changes for 2020:

* Implementation of DH in both leagues
* Extra innings start with runner on second base
* No limits on position players pitching
* Pitchers can have wet rag in pocket as substitute for licking fingers
* Three-batter minimum still stands

— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) June 23, 2020

If you’ve been suffering through three months of public finger-pointing over economic distrust, dead-on-arrival proposals, and general dread over what the future of baseball holds, all of this qualifies as good news to some degree. But while it is a positive development that salary disagreements won’t cancel the 2020 season, that’s not what suspended it in the first place — a pandemic did. And that pandemic is still very much a threat. States like Florida and Texas, which host multiple MLB teams and were among the first to loosen stay-at-home restrictions, are still seeing a catastrophic increase in their new daily cases. And as extensive as MLB’s safety protocols are, there is still a troubling amount we don’t know, from how the league will enforce its guidelines to how many positive tests it would take to result in a ballpark or team getting shut down. Read the rest of this entry »

In baseball terms, eight years ago doesn’t seem that long ago. Last season, the American League Cy Young winner was Justin Verlander. In 2012, the AL Cy Young winner was David Price, but it definitely should have been Justin Verlander. A number of the guys who were good eight years ago are still good today, and some of the most modern baseball advancements were already being implemented around the game. Some sentences, though, do a lot of work in telling you just how much time has passed. For example: “Hello, would you like to watch a live major league baseball game?” Remember when people said things like that? Ah, to be young again. Here’s another: Eight years ago, R.A. Dickey was the best player in baseball.

Don’t be alarmed if you don’t recall such a time, as it lasted only a brief while. But it surely did exist, for a month-long stretch that reached its height on June 18, 2012. Dickey was coming off four straight outings of no earned runs allowed in at least 7.1 innings, including two complete games. In his most recent start, he’d allowed just one hit while striking out 12 batters in nine innings against the Rays, giving him the best start of his career.

It took him five days to outdo it.

…

“He has been the story in baseball this year,” Keith Hernandez said of Dickey as the Mets’ home broadcast team hyped him up entering his June 18 start against the Orioles. They were hardly alone in their admiration. The day before, a lengthy profile of him authored by Tyler Kepner was published in The New York Times. A couple of days before that, he was covered by Shane Ryan at Grantland, and a couple of days before that, he was officially christened a Cy Young candidate by David Schoenfield at ESPN. A day after his start against the Orioles, Jay Jaffe — then of Sports Illustrated — would join the chorus of writers enthralled by Dickey, as would former FanGraphs editor Dave Cameron on this site. 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.

Players Are Through Negotiating With MLB

I won’t delve into this in too much detail, as my colleague Craig Edwards already published a typically comprehensive story this morning on Major League Baseball’s battle with the players over the 2020 season (I would eagerly point you to his work on the subject in general), but to very quickly sum up the events of the weekend:

On Friday afternoon, MLB offered the Players Association a 72-game season at 70% prorated salary, with the potential for the players to receive 83% if a full postseason is played, and an expanded postseason field of 16 total teams. That offer represented little to no movement from MLB’s previous two offers, which made it especially rich to find out that the offer came with a five-page letter from deputy commissioner Dan Halem chastising MLBPA negotiator Bruce Meyer and the rest of the union for negotiating in bad faith.

The players’ response came quickly, with MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark indicating that the union was finished negotiating with the owners, and is now only interested in receiving a date to report to camp.

Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director Tony Clark today released the following statement: pic.twitter.com/d1p3Oj4K70

— MLBPA Communications (@MLBPA_News) June 13, 2020

Meyer responded to Halem the same day, demanding that MLB “inform us of your plans by close of business on Monday, June 15.” That, you might notice, is just a few hours after this roundup’s publication. Whether MLB actually adheres to that deadline remains to be seen, but assuming a dramatically different offer than those it has made up to this point isn’t on its way, there’s a good chance we’ve reached the point of negotiations where the Commissioner unilaterally imposes a season of fewer than 60 games, with players receiving full pro-rated salary. Read the rest of this entry »

It fell several steps short of a rally, but it was the closest Hanwha had gotten to one in weeks. Down 5-0 against the Doosan Bears in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Eagles finally showed life with a pair of singles, the second of which resulted in an error in left that allowed the first to score. A wild pitch, a walk, and a fielder’s choice later, the Eagles had a second run. The tying run was in the on-deck circle, and one of the KBO’s most volatile bullpens was about to use its fifth reliever. Sometimes, this is how the improbable happens. But Hanwha was in the process of defying a much different set of odds — one that is far less fun than prying victory from the jaws of defeat.

The Eagles fell to Doosan 5-2 on Friday, giving them their 18th loss in a row, a stretch of futility with no end in sight and nearly no precedent. In the history of the Korean Baseball Organization, only the 1985 Sammi Superstars have lost as many games consecutively; one more loss would place Hanwha in a class by themselves. In over 150 years of Major League Baseball, an 18-game losing streak has happened just 22 times, with only two of those occurring in the last 40 seasons. 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.

MLBPA Proposes 89-game Season With Full Prorated Salaries, Expanded Playoffs For Two Years

The Major League Baseball Players Association has submitted to ownership a proposal that includes an 89-game 2020 season at the full prorated salaries the two sides agreed to in March, according to multiple reports.

The players’ intended regular season would begin on July 10 and finish on October 11, followed by an expanded playoff field that includes 16 teams — eight from each league — instead of the usual 10. That expanded playoff field would also be used in 2021 under the players’ plan. Tuesday’s proposal also mentions the players providing “broadcast enhancements” throughout the year including in the playoffs, which would seem to include things like wearing microphones on the field during play. Finally, the proposal includes opt-out rights for all players that would allow any player to forgo the season while also forfeiting the year of salary and service time. Players designated as high-risk due to conditions with COVID-19 comorbidity however, or those co-habitating with a high-risk person, could opt out without losing any salary or service time.

Previously, the players had offered a 117-game season with full prorated salaries, along with similar modifications made to the next two postseasons. MLB countered on Monday with a 76-game season that would pay players just 50-75% of their prorated salary. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were one of the enthusiastic baseball fans who got an early start on tuning into ESPN’s first several broadcasts of the Korean Baseball Organization, there’s a good chance you’re already somewhat familiar with the Samsung Lions. The network carried their games four times in their first week of coverage, and the Lions spent a good amount of that time losing. A 4-0 loss to the NC Dinos on KBO Opening Day quickly turned into a three-game sweep, during which the Lions were outscored 16-5. They bounced back with two series wins against the Kia Tigers and Kiwoom Heroes, but that was undone by a stretch of seven losses in eight games, which set the Lions’ record back to 5-12.

The sluggish start was an unwelcome one for an organization that went from winning four straight Korean Series championships from 2011-14 to missing the playoffs entirely in each of the last four seasons. With a 60-83-1 record in 2019, the Lions are coming off the second-worst season by win percentage in the history of the franchise. Fortunately for them, however, the last couple of weeks have seen them trending in a much better direction. They’ve won seven of their last 10 games, including two series victories against the Dinos and Twins — the top two teams in the KBO by record. And the difference in that turnaround has been the team’s starting rotation.

Through the Lions’ first 17 games, they allowed 106 runs, the second-highest total in the KBO. During their 7-3 run, they’ve allowed just 43 — the second-fewest in that time frame. That’s a significant improvement, and the team’s starters have been the driving force behind it. In fact, the rotation was already beginning to turn the corner two full weeks ago. Here’s a breakdown of the team’s starter and reliever splits from the first 13 games, compared to their last 14:

Read the rest of this entry »