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.

Owners Seek Salary Cuts

If you were wondering why the talk surrounding fanless games was a bit on the vague side when MLB and the MLBPA came to an agreement on service time issues, you now have your answer. With the prospect of games with no live fans becoming increasingly likely, MLB reportedly wants players to take a pay cut because of lost gate revenues. The players believe the agreement reached last month that would pro-rate salaries for the number of games actually played in 2020 already reflects the possibility of fanless games, while the owners believe the agreement about salaries contained the basic assumption that the games would be of the “normal” variety.

This friction between ownership and player interests can be seen by the latest exchange of public comments by Andrew Cuomo and Scott Boras. Per Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich’s report for The Athletic:

The prorated formula Boras references is for a shortened season — a player, for example, would receive half his salary if the schedule consisted of 81 games rather than the customary 162. The agreement also accounts for a canceled season, awarding players a collective advance payment of $170 million over April and May, money they keep if no games are played.

A separate section of the deal, listing the conditions for games to resume, says the commissioner’s office and the union “will discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators or at appropriate substitute neutral sites.” Similar phrasing exists in other parts of the agreement as well.

One person with knowledge of the deal said the clause was not intended to signal any willingness by the players to reopen salary discussions. Others said the issue was left undecided, and that the league made it clear to the union that economic adjustments would be necessary if games were played in empty parks.

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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 »

Picking up where we left off in my series on the impact of missed time on Hall of Fame candidates, we turn to the active pitchers whose shots at Cooperstown might be harmed most due to the loss of a significant chunk or even the entirety of the 2020 season. In Part 1, I noted that whether we’re talking about the effects of military service during World War II and the Korean War or the strike-shortened 1981, ’94 and ’95 seasons, it appears that fewer pitchers were harmed in their bids than was the case for position players. Even so, lost time can prevent hurlers from reaching the major milestones — most notably 200, 250, or 300 wins, and 3,000 strikeouts — that so often form the hooks for their candidacies, and right now, there exists a cohort of starting pitchers whose electoral resumés are coming into focus.

As with the position players, I’ll focus on that group rather than younger hotshots who not only have more time to make up ground but also, inevitably, will probably face some kind of injury-driven challenge along the way (hello, Chris Sale). I’ll spare a thought for a trio of closers as well. As with the other pieces in this series, all WAR totals refer to the Baseball-Reference version. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout is going to be fine. Yes, for all kinds of reasons it would be a complete and total bummer if the 2020 season never gets started due to the the current pandemic, but Trout would hardly be the first elite player in his prime to miss at least a full year due to reasons far beyond his control. Ted Williams, Willie Mays, and Joe DiMaggio were just a few of the dozens of major leaguers who lost entire seasons due to military service, but given their elite performances throughout their careers, their absences didn’t cost them when they became eligible for election to the Hall of Fame.

Which isn’t to say that missing a full season, or even a significant chunk of one, in such fashion comes without cost. For the 28-year-old Trout, who already ranks fifth among center fielders in JAWS, major milestones could be at stake, though it’s far too early to suggest that a lost season will cost him a shot at 600 homers (as service in World War II and the Korean War did Williams) or even 700 (as the Korean War did Mays), or 3,000 hits, or whatever. For other players whose chances to reach Cooperstown are less secure, however, the loss of even a partial year could make a difference — at least temporarily — particularly if it leaves them short of certain plateaus.

That’s one of the take-home messages from my previous piece, which looked at the ways that time lost to military service during World War II and Korea, or to strikes in the 1981, ’94 and/or ’95 seasons, delayed or derailed certain players. Aided by additional chances in front of the voters, both with longer eligibility windows on BBWAA ballots and more frequent appearances on those of the Veterans Committee, it appears that the vast majority of borderline candidates who lost time to wars are in, leaving only a small handful of what-ifs. On the other hand, players who missed time due to strikes and fell short of notable hit and homer plateaus — not just 3,000 of the former or 500 of the latter, but also 2,000 or 2,500 hits, and 400 homers — have seen their chances take a hit. The much-derided 2019 election of Harold Baines, who fell short of 3,000 hits while missing time in all of the aforementioned strikes, suggests that voters have begun reckoning with that era’s impact on career totals, not that doing so will automatically make for strong selections; both Baines and Fred McGriff, who missed time in 1994-95, finished with 493 home runs, and could benefit similarly on the 2022 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, are well below the JAWS standards at their positions. Read the rest of this entry »

While we don’t yet know for sure whether there will be a 2020 baseball season, any resumption of baseball will likely involve a year that looks like nothing that has come before. Among the many proposals out there, ranging from the tinkering to the radical, is one to eliminate the traditional AL/NL league structure for this year in the so-called Arizona-Florida plan. Teams would play at their Cactus and Grapefruit League spring training facilities (along with Chase Field, Tropicana Field, and Marlins Park), facing off against the teams in that state. Basing teams in the spring training leagues has the benefit of working with existing team facilities, and, as Ben Clemens wrote for the site earlier today, addresses some of the broadcast and climate difficulties, though of course it is as dependent on the widespread availability of testing as the Arizona plan.

Assuming that we go with the highly unusual Cactus/Grapefruit season, the races will naturally look very different than we’re accustomed to. The spring training league assignments adhere more generally to an east/west alignment than an AL/NL one, so many of the traditional rivalries would take on a very different character in 2020.

With a little bit of work, I was able to realign ZiPS to project the outcome of these new league races. Naturally, there’s a little bit of speculation required to formalize this strange new 2020 MLB. I’ve engaged in such speculation because, well, that’s my job!

For the new 2020, I’m assuming that both leagues use the designated hitter, as Bob reported. While the DH/Pitcher hitting battle still rages among baseball fans, in such an unusual season, when pitchers are already having a very odd training schedule, there’s a lot to recommend a universal DH rule, at least temporarily. Without pre-existing divisions, I’m also going to assume that we’d be seeing division-less leagues in 2020. Also, no interleague play, given that the whole idea of spring training leagues is to avoid lots of travel. 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.

Latest Florida-Arizona Plan Revealed

On Friday, Bob Nightengale reported a potential regular season plan that would divide teams not along American and National League lines, but instead by spring training site. Ben Clemens discussed the proposal at FanGraphs:

But short of that, I think it’s far better. The Florida weather is a smaller problem, in my eyes, than the difficulty of playing so many games in the desert heat. Any of several plans could handle the scheduling requirements, and all of those plans would make for better viewing than the Arizona-only plan. Some of the plans would also have their own weirdness; strange double headers or one team constantly resting or unbalanced leagues. But they’d all deliver on the key thing we need: baseball, and live baseball at times when people could watch it. Solve the non-baseball issues, and this Arizona-Florida plan could handle the rest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, two competing plans for an alternate-site baseball season were leaked. The first was the so-called Arizona Plan: Send all 30 teams to Arizona, rotate games between the available fields, and play an abbreviated major league season with no in-person audience. That plan has its logistical pitfalls, but one of the few things the plan doesn’t alter is the existing divisional structure of baseball. Aside from a shorter season and its attendant complications, baseball would mostly work the way it always has: the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees would attempt to club each other into submission, the AL Central would be full of rebuilding teams, and so on.

The second plan, the so-called Arizona-Florida plan, would be something else entirely. Instead of recreating the exact structure of the league in one city, this plan would place each team at their spring training facility. Many of the logistical issues from before would still need to be answered. Assuming those can be handled, however, there’s still one major twist: instead of existing divisions, the teams would be grouped by geographic proximity — and, of course, given that the existing setup isn’t 15 AL teams in one location and 15 NL teams in the other, the leagues would be scrambled.

Per Bob Nightengale, the divisions would look like this:

That’s quite the scramble. Dan Szymborski is running the new divisions through ZiPS to get an idea of what it does to teams’ playoff odds, but I thought I’d consider the mechanics of playing with 15-team leagues, as well as highlight some interesting matchups, to give you some sizzle to go with your steak, as it were. 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.

Good morning, and thank you for visiting FanGraphs! We here at the site hope that you and yours stay safe this weekend. Here’s the latest news on COVID-19 as it relates to the game:

Will Americans Return to Live Sports after COVID-19?

If there’s been any consistent messaging from major sports institutions like MLB over the course of this crisis, it’s the assurance that live sporting events will eventually return. But a new poll from Seton Hall University is raising some questions about the nature of that assumed return — will anyone show up? Per the poll, 72% of respondents wouldn’t attend games before the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, and only 13% would feel as safe attending as they had before the pandemic; 74% believed that live sporting events would remain canceled through the end of 2020.

A study published in the medical journal The Lancet, using modeling based on the outbreak in China, suggested that social distancing measures will need to continue until a vaccine is developed in order to avoid a second wave of cases. An unwillingness to attend sporting events with thousands of other people in the absence of one thus seems entirely reasonable. That doesn’t exactly track with some of MLB’s more ambitious contingency plans for getting the Show back on the road this year, and seems likely to have repercussions well beyond 2020. This pandemic has been a life-altering crisis for so many people; it’s no wonder that it might cause people to re-evaluate their relationship to sports and sporting events. 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.

Following South Korea and Testing for COVID-19

South Korea could provide a roadmap for a return to play for major league baseball. According to the AP, the KBO is hoping for an early May restart.

On Wednesday, the country recorded 53 new infections, marking the third consecutive day that has seen new cases around the 50-mark. The downward trend from a Feb. 29 peak of 900 is increasing the chances of the 10-team Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) League not only starting in May but also playing a full 144-game season.

“If the situation continues to improve from here and on, teams will start facing each other in preseason games beginning on April 21, and we should be able to get the regular season started in early May,” KBO secretary general Ryu Dae-hwan said after a meeting with club general managers in Seoul.

While a lot can happen in a month, that’s certainly some promising news on the baseball front as well as for South Korea. One of the key factors for success in South Korea has been testing:

Dr. Angela Caliendo said Tuesday that South Korea’s experience “shows you the importance of testing.”

“I do think the testing they did in South Korea was very important in controlling their outbreak,” said Caliendo, an infectious diseases professor at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School.

With their widespread testing program, South Korean authorities were able to identify infected people, isolate them and trace their contacts with other people, who then also could be tested.

If the United States had adequate testing, “you could consider areas of the country that are at different points of the virus” spread progression, Caliendo said during a call with reporters arranged by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

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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 »