Archive for COVID-19

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.

MLB’s COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines Laid Out In 67-Page Document

On Saturday, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic obtained a lengthy document that meticulously outlines the health and safety measures MLB considers key to holding a 2020 season. Those protocols cover everything from how the game will be played on the field to what the behavior of players and essential team employees should look like away from the ballpark, and serve as yet another glimpse into just how physically and mentally challenging it will be to play baseball in the middle of a global pandemic.

One can read the details of the proposal as a bulleted list in Rosenthal and Drellich’s report, or absorb them in the day-in-the-life example Jeff Passan worked out at ESPN. Both reports paint an image of baseball in 2020 in which the reminders of what’s currently happening in the world are constant, unrelenting, and bleak. During games, non-playing personnel must wear masks in the dugout and may be relegated to the stadium seats, where they must sit at least four seats apart from and two rows behind each other. Once a baseball has been put in play and touched by multiple players, it’ll be tossed aside and replaced with a new one. Between pitches, players are encouraged to be as distanced from one another as possible. 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.

Rob Manfred Lays Out a Testing Plan

On Thursday night, commissioner Rob Manfred released details of the league’s plan for protecting players and personnel upon the start of the baseball season. In an interview on CNN, he laid out some key bullet points of their design:

• Players and on-site personnel will be tested multiple times a week, using an MLB-owned lab that previously conducted PED tests.
• Should anyone show any symptoms, they will be immediately tested, regardless of the regularly planned testing schedule
• Additionally, anyone who has been in contact with any individual who tests positive at any point will immediately be tested as well
• Anyone testing positive will be quarantined, effective immediately, until they have tested negative twice in a one-day span

Further details will likely emerge in the coming days. For now, it represents a meaningful step forward in the league’s planning, at least publicly. Until now, every plan we’ve heard has been couched in hypotheticals: assumptions of testing availability, general assurances that they are considering the issue, and so on. This plan is concrete and covers contingencies. Read the rest of this entry »

As owners and the players discuss ways to start up the 2020 season, we’ve started to see the outline of a possible plan for play become less foggy. 162 games has, of course, long been impossible; now, the owners are proposing roughly a half-season rather than the expected 100-110 games. 82 games starting in early July gives us less baseball than usual, but it could also result in the “baseball year” following its same basic schedule rather than ending in late November. After all, teams normally play about that many games after early July! This likely represents the desire of the owners to play as many games as possible in the home parks rather than the considerably more exotic Super Spring Training plans that have been floated over the last six weeks.

But a shorter schedule isn’t the only proposed change coming for 2020 baseball. Forecasting how the Players v. Owners fight over revenue-sharing shakes out is beyond my abilities as a projectionista, but there are many other new tidbits that do fall within my scope. For one, while the league standings are still likely to be organized along the usual lines, teams would only play their regional division “partners” and the corresponding geographical division of the other league. This has the rather odd result of the Wild Card standings consisting of a lot of teams that would never play each other. But as ugly as that sounds, the main concern is playing the season rather than maximizing its fairness. For the purposes of these projections, I’ve assumed teams will play 52 games, or 63% of the schedule, in their division with 30 games out of division.

The designated hitter is also expected to become universal this year. I’ve long been of the opinion that as soon as interleague play became a daily activity, pitcher-hitting was on borrowed time. When interleague play consisted of special chunks of the season, NL teams could design their rosters to call up a Wily Mo Pena, a competent DH type without a full-time spot on the team, large pitching staffs having mostly killed off the designated pinch-hitter job. Once DH games became sprinkled throughout the system, it put NL teams at a slight disadvantage when planning to have an extra bat on the roster. 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.

The NBA Plans Its Return

The NBA, like the NHL, is in a bit of a different situation than MLB in that its season was mostly already done before COVID-19 reared its ugly morphology. NBA commissioner Adam Silver reportedly conversed with NBA owners Tuesday, providing an optimistic outlook about the resumption of play, and while the exact numbers have not been released, a confidential survey of NBA players taken by NBPA representatives indicated that there is an overwhelming desire to finish the season. And in an attempt not to force the decision right now, the NBA and NBPA also agreed to extend until September the deadline for the owners to trigger the clause that allows them to suspend the CBA.

Premier League Considers Possibility of Lost Season

The Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, indicated that he has discussed the possibility of being unable to resume the 2020 season with the teams. The UK has given clearance for the league to resume on June 1 and they were previously targeting a return to play on June 8, but the teams put the kibosh on the possibility of playing games on neutral grounds (this kind of thing is a bigger deal in association football than it is in baseball). There’s another significant roadblock in that the players are not yet officially convinced that it’s safe to resume the season.

The NHL Discussing Resumption

The NHL’s Return to Play committee continued talks on Tuesday. One of the undecided questions is what the NHL playoffs will look like, one scenario being a 24-team playoff that eliminates the need to finish the regular season at all. Prominent players such as Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin have previously expressed a preference for going straight to the playoffs.

Arizona Sports Are Go

Arizona governor Doug Ducey announced on Tuesday that major league sports could resume play in the state when the state’s stay-at-home order expires on Friday. Most of the scenarios in which MLB resumes play in 2020 require games to be played in some combination of Arizona, Florida, and Texas, so Arizona giving the green light to the return of professional sports was a necessary part of these plans. This is especially true in light of news that Los Angeles County envisions its stay-at-home orders remaining in effect into August. Los Angeles may not be alone if there are new COVID-19 peaks in communities with major league parks.

While baseball can resume in Arizona, there are still strings attached in that the teams will have to follow CDC safety guidelines, though one would hope that they would do so even if Arizona hadn’t laid it down as a requirement.

MLB/MLBPA Talks Are in Progress

We’ll have a lot more on this, but in any COVID-19 roundup, it can’t be forgotten that MLB started discussions with the MLBPA on the exact steps needed to start the 2020 regular season. One surprise in the first day was that the owners did not broach the topic of the extremely controversial givebacks they want from the players. And if you’re wondering why there’s been such a push from the league to play at least some of the season in teams’ home parks, it comes down, at least in part, to revenue sources that would not be as readily available at the spring training venues.

Mariners Avoid Furloughs

To avoid any cuts and furloughs through October 1, the Mariners are implementing a 20% pay cut on employees making at least $60,000 per year. Employees who would see a dip under $60,000 with a 20% pay cut will not see their salaries drop below that $60,000 line. Some of the top executives, including general manager Jerry Dipoto, are taking unspecified cuts that are greater than 20%. Personally, I’m mildly surprised to discover that Dipoto isn’t paid by the trade.

Not every teams’ staff is so lucky. There are concerns in baseball that teams will use the shutdown as an excuse to permanently slash some costs and one NL executive told ESPN’s Buster Olney that he expected significant upheaval:

“I bet 40% of those let go never get back in baseball again,” an NL official said. “A lot of these guys have been in the game for their whole adult lives, and they’re making pennies. And you’re just going to throw those guys on the street, into this economy?”

Said another team exec: “Baseball will come back, and I bet teams could make up the cost of keeping these people on within four or five years. It just doesn’t make any sense to me that these [teams] need to dump people making $40,000, $50,000. Those savings are not difference-making” within the MLB context.

In what is now the fourth time readers have answered questions regarding their expectations for the season, respondents have bounced back and forth a bit on the central question of whether there will be baseball this year. I’d like to thank our readers for their continued participation, as we again received over 1,000 responses to nearly every question. As for the return of baseball this year, readers were very optimistic this round.

Coming in at nearly 72% of responses, last week elicited the highest percentage of “Yes” votes so far, after a huge drop-off in confidence in the results from a couple weeks ago:

With that optimism comes an increase in those expecting roughly half a season of games, though nearly everyone who expects baseball has given up hope of more than 100 games:

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.

MLB To Communicate Return Plans Early This Week

Major League Baseball owners and commissioner Rob Manfred will convene over a conference call Monday to approve plans for the league’s return, according to a report by Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic. If approved, a proposal will be passed on to the players’ union on Tuesday.

The details of the proposal, Rosenthal says, are likely to address many of the questions that have been batted around in the public sphere over the last few weeks. Spring training would get rebooted for three weeks in mid-June, setting up a regular season that begins in early July and lasts between 78 and 82 games. Teams would open in their home ball parks where possible, and play regionalized schedules that include only teams in their typical divisions and those in opposite league’s corresponding division (AL East teams would face AL and NL East teams, and so on). Teams whose home cities are not containing the virus at the level the league requires could temporarily locate to their spring training sites. Rosters could be expanded to include 45 to 50 players.

This proposal would also expand the playoffs from five to seven teams in each league. Each No. 1 seed would get a first round bye, while the other two division winners and the top Wild Card team would host the three other Wild Card teams in a best-of-three Wild Card round. 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.

MLB Explores Revenue-Sharing

One of the trickiest aspects of opening the 2020 season may not be the direct effects of COVID-19 but instead how to divide up what will be a smaller-than-usual pile of cash. MLB and the MLBPA answered one question last month, coming to an agreement on the service time issues. While this decided some things in the event there is no 2020 season and no revenues to divide, the league is arguing this agreement didn’t conclusively answer what would happen if there actually is a season.

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question revolves around player salaries. While the initial agreement involved pro-rating normal salaries for however many games are actually played, there’s a disagreement between MLB and the MLBPA about whether this assumed normal games with fans in attendance rather than fan-free ones. This isn’t just obscure legalese but a serious roadblock.

In my opinion, teams have very real concerns about league revenues without fans in attendance, more real than the general complaints about revenue in normal seasons. The problem is, owners don’t exactly have a long history of good-faith negotiations with players. It’s not unreasonable for players to be suspicious given the games played by team owners over the years despite players seeing a declining share of the revenues while team valuations skyrocket. 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.

Cleveland Tells Players to Prepare For Season To Start July 1

Speaking to players and other members of their organization via Zoom, officials with the Cleveland Indians provided a target date of July 1 for the start of MLB’s regular season, according to a report by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal. According to the story, that July start date would follow a three-week “Spring Training” period beginning around June 10. Both of these dates are “fully expected to change,” but are supposed to act as placeholders for members of the organization as they plan for what this season could have in store.

While this is just one team, these dates mirror those communicated in a somewhat controversial tweet sent by former major league infielder Trevor Plouffe on Monday. Because it was sent by a former nine-year big league veteran, the tweet gained some steam, even getting corroborated by Plouffe’s former teammate Phil Hughes. Meanwhile, some established MLB reporters such as The Athletic’s Keith Law disputed the reports, saying no date has been proposed. 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.

Miguel Marte Passes Away

Former A’s minor leaguer Miguel Marte passed away last week due to complications from COVID-19. Marte played in Oakland’s system from 2008 to 2012 and topped out in Low-A Vermont. After leaving baseball, Marte settled in New Jersey and worked as a truck driver. He was only 30.

The A’s have helped to promote a GoFundMe to support Marte’s family — he and his wife had two children. It’s a cruel reminder that when they’re done playing baseball, many minor leaguers go back to living regular lives, and that COVID-19 can touch us all, no matter our age or situation in life.

Summer Leagues Postponed

Two college summer leagues, the Coastal Plain League and Western Canadian Baseball League, have both announced that they will delay the start of their seasons in response to COVID-19. Both leagues showcase college players over the summer, and are targeting a start date around the beginning of July — July 1 for the CPL and a broader late-June/early-July target for the WCBL. 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.

Tampa Bay Rays to Furlough Employees

In order to save money, the Tampa Bay Rays have reportedly furloughed some of their full-time employees; the furloughs will take effect on Saturday. The furloughs will involve less than half of their staff, with other employees in baseball operations receiving pay cuts. Teams have unsurprisingly been happier to trumpet the employees they’ve kept on than the cuts they’ve made, such as the already reported news of the Pirates halting 401k contributions for baseball operations staff or the Mets cutting front office salaries after June 1, even if a partial season is played.

The Rays are the first team known to have furloughed employees, but they’re unlikely to be the last; the A’s have reportedly discussed what Ken Rosenthal and Alex Coffey described as “extensive layoffs.” Read the rest of this entry »