They’re baaaack. If you didn’t get enough of the runner-on-second in extra innings rule or the seven-inning doubleheader games that were introduced at the major league level in 2020, fear not, because they’re part of the package of health and safety protocols agreed to between Major League Baseball and the Players Association for this coming season. Those two breaks with tradition, which received mixed reviews from fans but surprisingly favorable ones in other quarters, were adopted in an effort to reduce the amount of time players and other personnel spend at the ballpark and thus lower their risk of exposure to COVID-19. Their continuation is the most noticeable from among a comprehensive set of practices designed to build upon what the league and players learned in completing the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, both from their own experience and in watching how other leagues completed their seasons.

Developed as a collaboration between the league and the union, and in consultation with medical experts, infectious disease specialists, and experts from other leagues, the agreement keeps major league baseball on track to open spring training on February 17 and the regular season on April 1. It was finalized on Monday night, though it’s subject to adjustment depending upon the circumstances related to the pandemic — including, hopefully, the relaxation of some practices as conditions improve due to mass vaccinations. Most notable among the new rules are wearable technology for the purposes of contact tracing as well as potential fines and even suspension for players who violate protocols, and limited access to in-game video. Left out is the fate of the universal designated hitter, which last year was included within the health and safety protocols but which MLB is intent on reclassifying as an economic matter. Both that and an expanded playoff structure, two issues the league attempted to tie together in previous negotiations, could still be revisited before the start of the season.

Prior to 2020, the extra-innings rule and seven-inning doubleheader games had both been used in the minor leagues to varying degrees. Their adoption not only was intended to reduce potential exposure to the coronavirus but to preventing pitching staffs from being overtaxed, particularly within the context of making up games postponed due to weather or health and safety matters.

The extra-innings rule calls for each half-inning after the ninth to begin with a runner on second base, creating an immediate level of urgency and increasing the chances that extra-innings games end more quickly. In that regard, the rule did what it was supposed to do. As I noted in November while polling FanGraphs readers on their reception of last year’s rules changes, extra-inning games averaged 10.29 innings in 2020, down from 11.14 in ’19 and 11.04 in ’18. The percentage of games going past 11 innings dipped to 0.7%, down from 2.3% in 2019 and 2.8% in ’18. More than three-quarters of our readers who participated in the poll (the full results of which are here) did not want to see the rule retained. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, as is tradition, FanGraphs founder David Appelman went into his garage, turned off all the lights except for some candles, and performed a dark and arcane ritual. Then he went back inside, pushed a few buttons on his computer, and now we have playoff odds for 2021!

Okay, fine, that isn’t exactly how it went down, but it’s close. Our playoff odds incorporate little pieces of a lot of features you’ve already seen on the website. We start with a blended projection that incorporates ZiPS and Steamer’s rate statistic projections. We add in playing time projections from RosterResource, which incorporate health, skill, and team situation to create a unified guess for how each team will distribute their plate appearances and innings pitched.

With playing time in hand, we use BaseRuns to estimate how many runs each team will score and allow per game based on our earlier blended rate statistic projections. That gives us a schedule-neutral win percentage for each team, because you can turn runs scored and runs allowed into a projection via the Pythagorean approximation. From there, we simulate the season 10,000 times, with an odds ratio and a random number generator determining the outcome of each matchup. Voila! Our playoff odds.

Why am I telling you all of this? First, so you can look at them. They’re accessible from the main page, but you can also click here to dive in. Second, because I’m going to walk through some projections I found interesting, as well as a few places where the gap between common perception and our odds merit an explanation. Let’s get started! Read the rest of this entry »

Even against the backdrop of a slow offseason, watching the NL Central this winter has been an exercise in hot stove drudgery. Until the mini-flurry of activity that saw Adam Wainwright and Joc Pederson join the Cardinals and Cubs, respectively, the division’s top signed free agents, at least by ZiPS’s reckoning, were Daniel Robertson and Jace Peterson. Figuring out which team has been the most disappointing has been like an Agatha Christie novel: Bar the doors, everyone’s a suspect!

St. Louis has largely presented a convincing alibi with the Nolan Arenado trade and bringing Wainwright and Yadier Molina back for one last caper. So, whodunit? Was it the Pirates, a team that has become the baseball equivalent of a farm that is paid not to grow crops? Is it the Cubs, a team burdened by the apparent transformation of Chicago from a large-market megalopolis to a tiny town (or so they would have us believe)? Is it the Brewers, who, with Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain at their core, ought to be in full win-now mode? My pick, though, is the Inspector Cincinnati Reds — the division’s hero in the previous two mysteries — going rogue.

The Reds of the last two winters were among the few teams that made an effort to push forward to a division title, acquiring Sonny Gray, Yasiel Puig, Alex Wood, Matt Kemp, and José Iglesias. Not all of these players were good additions, but this initial flurry represented a genuine desire to compete. And when this group wasn’t enough, the organization doubled-down instead of folding, picking up Trevor Bauer from Cleveland and signing Mike Moustakas, Nick Castellanos, Wade Miley, and Shogo Akiyama. The result wasn’t an overwhelming success, but it was enough to get the team over the .500 mark and sneak into the playoffs, both things Cincinnati hadn’t done since 2013.

Last year’s playoff run ended ignominiously, with the Reds failing to score a single run in 22 innings against the Braves. It seemed inevitable that Bauer was headed to another city for an enormous raise (and he did), but free agency left the rest of the team’s core intact. With nobody in the division apparently possessing any burning desire to actually win the division — or so it appeared back in November — surely Cincinnati would find other options than Bauer to fix team holes!

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The Mets missed out on signing Trevor Bauer, and they didn’t sign J.T. Realmuto or George Springer, either. That’s not to say they’ve had an unsuccessful winter — their blockbuster deal for Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco significantly upgraded the team, and they’ve made other solid moves as well, but center field remains an area of need. Jackie Bradley Jr. is clearly still the top center fielder available, and would make for a sensible fit, but the Mets aren’t the only team pursuing him. Over the weekend, they made a smaller-scale addition signing center fielder Albert Almora Jr. to a one-year deal worth $1.25 million plus incentives. The question is whether that constitutes an insurance policy or an all-too-familiar half-measure.

Almora is best remembered as the player who scored the go-ahead run for the Cubs in the 10th inning of Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. Pinch-running for Kyle Schwarber after a leadoff single, he alertly tagged up and took second base on a Kris Bryant fly ball to deep center field, and came home on Ben Zobrist’s double. He was a 22-year-old rookie at that point, a 2012 first-round pick who had arrived in midsummer and made a solid showing as a bench player. After the Cubs won the World Series, they let Dexter Fowler depart as a free agent and handed the keys to center field to Almora.

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I was exposed to many aspects of front office operations during my eight years with the Astros, but one thing I never touched was arbitration.

I consider it one of my greatest career achievements.

With hearings and rulings in the news, I’m reminded of how much everyone hates the damn thing. Teams hate it, players hate it, agents hate it, and maybe that’s actually proof it works in its own way, but the most frustrating aspect is that nobody really understands the logic behind the rulings themselves. In private conversations, some executives have suggested to me that one “might as well flip a coin.” An agent called the entire process “archaic.” Another team executive called it a “colossal waste of time.” Contacts from both sides relayed stories of being quite sure that they had won or lost after the hearing, only to end up with the opposite ruling from the three-person panel. Both sides have stories of waiting for results, dreading them when the last two cases have been in their side’s favor because they fear the next result being a simple make-up call.

The whole thing seems rather, well, arbitrary.

Adding to the frustration is the cost of the hearing itself, in terms of time, money, or both. Many teams utilize outside counsel to handle the hearing process, while others keep it in-house, assigning a group of people within baseball operations to spend weeks of manpower on the process. They travel to Arizona or Florida, staying up until all hours of the night preparing their PowerPoint deck and going on several late-night runs to Kinko’s. They do it because they have to, but does all that work have any effect on one’s chances of winning or losing the hearing? I never saw any direct evidence that it did. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like a long time ago that the Oakland A’s won the AL West. Partially, that’s because everything feels like it lasted forever in 2020 — the last year has been the longest decade of our lives. Partially too, though, it’s because the team has spent the vast majority of the offseason doing nothing.

Marcus Semien, Liam Hendriks, Joakim Soria, Yusmeiro Petit, Mike Minor, and Tommy La Stella all left in free agency. On Saturday, the A’s made their first major transaction of the offseason, trading Khris Davis and Jonah Heim for Elvis Andrus. Later that day, they issued their first (!) major league contract of the offseason, signing Mike Fiers to a one-year, $3.5 million deal, as Ken Rosenthal and Alex Coffey first reported.

Fiers was an important but unsung part of a run-prevention monster in 2020. He made 11 starts for the A’s, who reached the playoffs on the back of a simple strategy: prevent some runs with starting pitching, hold some leads with a phenomenal bullpen, and sprinkle excellent defense around it to make it all play up. Fiers wasn’t an ace, and he didn’t need to be.

That appears to be Oakland’s plan again this year. Their projected rotation is close to unchanged (Minor started a handful of games, but the other five top starters are all back):

Fiers will be the worst everyday starter, like he was last year, but he’ll take the ball every five days, and the A’s would have struggled on that front otherwise. Daulton Jefferies, A.J. Puk, and Grant Holmes are the next three starters up, and all have had serious injury issues in the past few years; the team will likely want to limit all of their innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Amidst the blizzard of free agent deals announced last Friday, Jonathan Schoop re-signed with the Detroit Tigers. It’s a one-year deal worth $4.5 million per Jeff Passan and, as far as I can glean, there are no performance incentives.

The second baseman is coming off of a productive 2020, when he hit .278/.324/.475 (114 wRC+) while racking up 1.4 WAR in just 44 games. Despite that, his salary for the upcoming year is actually a small cut from the $6.1 million contract he signed last winter, though he’ll wind up earning more money in 2021 than the prorated earnings he accrued in last year’s shortened season.

You probably haven’t thought all that much about Schoop lately. If he wasn’t on your fantasy squad or real-life team of choice, you may have a vague impression of him as a once-promising Oriole who gradually faded into irrelevance. At a glance, that’s about right. He had a breakout campaign as a 25-year-old back in 2017, when he made the All-Star team, notched 3.7 WAR, homered 32 times, and posted career highs in just about every offensive category. A slow start the following year spiraled into a miserable summer after a mid-season trade to Milwaukee. Minnesota picked him up for 2019, where he played a competent if forgettable second base before ultimately losing his job to Luis Arraez. Soon after, he signed on with the Tigers and all of the obscurity that that implies. Read the rest of this entry »

Garrett Richards has an uncanny ability to spin a baseball. Per Statcast, the 32-year-old right-hander — recently signed to a free-agent contract by the Boston Red Sox — was 99th percentile in curveball spin last year, while his four-seam spin ranked in the 97th percentile. Moreover, the most-effective weapon in his arsenal, a 2,746-RPM slider, was topped only by Sergio Romo’s 2,913 RPMs among hurlers who threw the pitch at least 200 times.

Richards’s least-effective offering in 2020 was a two-seamer that’s hard to put a positive spin on. The erstwhile San Diego Padre threw 66 of them, and the ones that were put into play tended to get punished. Opposing hitters whacked them to a tune of a .467 batting average and an .867 slugging percentage. And it was even worse in 2019. While a 28-pitch sample obviously needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt, numbers like .500 and .875 stand out like a sore thumb. I asked Richards about his plans going forward, anticipating that the pitch might be going into mothballs.

Au contraire.

“It’s definitely not a pitch that I’m not going to throw,” said Richards. “I’ve always been able to cut the ball to both sides of the plate, but it’s nice to have something moving in the other direction. I need to get it back to sinking, or even having some more arm-side run. Come spring training, I’ll be back on the mound, trying to figure it out.” Read the rest of this entry »

The top free agent pitcher in baseball is no longer a free agent. After an interminable PR tour, Trevor Bauer has signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, as Jon Heyman first reported. The deal, a three-year, $102 million pact with opt outs after each year, bolsters an already-stout Dodgers rotation and ups the NL West arms race after the Padres’ busy offseason.

It would hardly be honest to write about Bauer without mentioning who he is as a person, so let’s do that first. For lack of a better way to say it, he’s a jerk, a troll. That’s not harsh enough, but it points in the right direction. “Troll” undersells it: time and again, Bauer has stepped up to the line and then gone past it, lashing out and inducing his fans to harass someone before acting shocked at the fallout, claiming innocence.

I won’t detail each individual incident, but suffice it to say that this goes beyond your typical Twitter sniping. The pattern is shockingly similar each time: Bauer takes offense at some perceived slight on social media, berates and otherwise insults the source of that slight (sometimes at great length), and then with a quote tweet, points his fans and followers in the woman’s direction (and it’s almost always a woman), who then proceed to harass her.

Eventually, Bauer issues a banal non-apology about how he never intended to harm anyone and doesn’t believe he did anything wrong, despite the glib falsity of that statement. This isn’t an isolated incident, a poor decision made in his rash youth. It’s a pattern, and a well-documented one.

I’m not here to legislate how you feel about that. I’ll simply invite you to consider how it feels to root for someone who repeatedly takes advantage of his popularity and power to make life worse for people without those things; how it feels to be one of those people. For the remainder of this article, though, I’m going to talk about what this means on the field, on the days where Bauer is pitching, though that hasn’t always been without conflict either. Read the rest of this entry »

After sitting idly by for most of the winter, the Phillies suddenly sprung into action last week. They finally got their long-term deal done with J.T. Realmuto, emphatically answering one the biggest lingering questions of their offseason. They re-signed Didi Gregorius, addressing another major area of need at shortstop. But those moves overshadowed two smaller ones aimed at shoring up the back of their starting rotation, with Philadelphia signing Matt Moore to a one-year, $3 million deal with additional performance bonuses last Friday, then adding Chase Anderson on Thursday on a one-year contract worth a guaranteed $4 million. It’s no secret that many teams are worried about the workload of their pitching staffs after the abbreviated season last year, and a number have already committed to using six-man rotations to lighten the load on their starters. It appears the Phillies could be pursuing a similar strategy.

With Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler leading the way, the Phillies’ rotation was actually a strength in 2020. That duo accumulated a combined four WAR last year, and both are returning for 2021. Zach Eflin’s revamped curveball, meanwhile, translated into a breakout season for the 26-year-old, making him a solid mid-rotation starter if those adjustments hold.

But the rest of the starting five is filled with question marks. Jake Arrieta’s three-year deal expired this offseason, so he’s out of the picture. Vince Velasquez continued to be an unpredictable enigma, posting an ugly 5.56 ERA that far outpaced his 4.16 FIP. Top pitching prospect Spencer Howard made his MLB debut in 2020, but it was an experience he’d like to forget. Poor conditioning and the delayed start to the year sapped him of his stamina during the season, with his fastball velocity noticeably dropping as the innings wore on in each of his starts. With two shoulder injuries in his recent past, it’s hard to say what to expect from Howard in 2021.

So while neither Moore or Anderson are projected to be better than back-end starters at best, they do give the Phillies some options when filling out their rotation.

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