Baseball is a statistics-heavy game, and that’s true even for those who don’t think of themselves as being part of the saber set. Because the game’s rules have had a relatively high degree of consistency across eras, the sport’s career milestones have also enjoyed a certain constancy throughout its history. That doesn’t mean that 600 homers from a player whose prime came in the 1960s are exactly the same as the 600 homers a player in the Wild Card era hit, but when you’re talking 600 homers, you’re always talking about someone who was really, really good at hitting home runs.

And while we would like to think that Hall of Fame voting is based off deep analysis and not round numbers, the fact remains that milestones still play a large part in who ends up in Cooperstown. Whether a player hits 470 homers or 520 homers still means something.

For precisely how much missed time has mattered in Hall of Fame voting, you should read my colleague Jay Jaffe’s three-part series on missed time and the Hall of Fame. In those three parts, Jay tackled how missed years due to wars and strikes were handled , and how today’s hitters and pitchers might be treated in Cooperstown terms. So go read those first. I’ll wait.

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Meg will probably now inform me that I don’t need to actually insert punctuation that represents foot-tapping, so let’s get to some data! That’s what a projection system is for, after all.

Given the world that we’re in, one of my many research projects this spring has been trying to better gauge how missed seasons ought to be treated. Forecasting those seasons is difficult in the best of times; the missed time is typically due to injury or suspension or war. Now, everyone is hanging out at home trying to not catch the current super-virus or crippling ennui.

And I wasn’t entirely sure whether the long layoff would affect all types of players to the same degree. Re-projecting stars for 1982 and 1995 using ZiPS — I didn’t have ZiPS in 1995 though I assume you’ll excuse me for not having a projection system when I was four — I tried to gauge whether missed time affected players of different qualities in different ways. Together with other data (suspensions, premature retirements, and war), I found that my normal missed time algorithm slightly overrated stars’ “return” projections. Apparently, the elite do have more to lose with lost time.

With those results in mind, and to get an idea of how the projections would change in a missed season, I projected the probabilities of some of the active players with the best chances of hitting major milestones doing so. These projections reflect both the lost season and the slightly decreased projection relative to the rest of baseball upon return. These projections also contain an algorithm that makes it more likely a player nearing a milestone will return for an additional season. Further, I told ZiPS that veterans will finish their contracts:

With a full 2020 season, there was approximately a 57% projected chance that one of these 16 players would finish their careers with at least 700 home runs. A single missed year drops that by more than half, to 26%. A lot of that is Albert Pujols. 44 homers isn’t a lot, but he’s only signed through 2021 and let’s be honest, if he wasn’t a future Hall of Famer with a big contract, he’d have spent his summers playing golf the last three or four years. Losing 2020 washes out most of his probability of hitting 700.

But even for the future immortals with more time remaining, it’s a pretty big deal. To hit 700 homers, a lot has to go right; otherwise, we’d have more than three players in history beyond that threshold. Losing a year is a significant loss, even for a younger player. Lopping 40 homers off the career totals of Cody Bellinger or Ronald Acuña Jr. presents a significant handicap.

For the lighter milestones, it’s less of a kneecapping since you don’t need to be quite as fortunate to hit 500 homers. The exception is Miguel Cabrera. ZiPS was already looking at him askance given that his offensive profile has confusingly become Really Slow Craig Counsell, and sees hitting 500 as being difficult if 2020 is lost. That would have been a surprise a few years ago!

For the 21 hitters listed here, ZiPS projects that, on average, two who would have achieved the 3,000-hit feat will now fail to do so as a result of a lost 2020 season. For players near 2,000 hits like Joey Votto (1,866) and Yadi Molina (1,963), that’s unlikely to matter; Molina might retire in that case, but ZiPS isn’t capable of modeling this decision of his. The larger hits are taken by mid-career players like José Altuve and Manny Machado, players who are in their prime but old enough that the calendar is a concern.

It would be especially bad news for Nick Markakis in his quest to be the worst 3,000-hit player in major league history. Johnny Damon fell short in his quest to sneak up on 3000 hits and no 2020 could dive-bomb Markakis’s quest for the last 600ish hits:

Despite the introduction of the five-man rotation, we’ve been blessed with a surprisingly large number of 300-game winners in our lifetime, most recently the impressive Hall of Fame crew of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Randy Johnson, with Roger Clemens on the outside for non-baseball reasons. We’re now in an era, however, when the careers of our elite pitchers did not brush up against the end of the pre-sabermetric era, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever before.

Right now there are only nine active pitchers with 150 wins and only two, Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke, who have passed 200 wins. Still, ZiPS thought that there was a 79% chance that one of those 11 pitchers would win 300 games, whether because of Verlander or Greinke being durable, Clayton Kershaw getting that last 5% back, Gerrit Cole establishing 2019-2020 as his new baseline, or maybe even Rick Porcello working his way to 300 wins by virtue of eating innings and having amassed 149 wins through age-30 thanks to an early start.

With a lost season, that becomes a coin flip (46%). The two best candidates, Verlander and Greinke, see the calendar flip unfortunately. It could still happen, but a lot more good fortune is needed.

The one thing the modern era is good for is strikeout records, because there are a lot of punch outs. What does a lost year do for those chases?

Nobody has established even a 1% chance of catching Nolan Ryan’s 5714 — and nobody will because of the almost 5,400 innings Ryan needed to reach that mark. The odds of catching the 3,000 and 4,000 strikeout marks, still relatively exclusive thresholds, aren’t as impacted as some of the other milestones.

Starting yesterday, I began a hunt through old World Series games for strange tactical decisions. Things were weird in the early ‘90s — MVP candidates bunting, intentional walks so thick they blocked out the sun, and raft-loads of pitchers overstaying their welcome. How did things go in the next half-decade? Better. But not that much better — the event that inspired this project, Byung-Hyun Kim throwing 61 pitches and then pitching the next day, wasn’t until 2001. We’ve still got plenty of weirdness going on. With 1994 lost to the strike, we’ll jump back in in 1995.

1995

The Braves were back with a retooled roster — Chipper Jones, Fred McGriff, Ryan Klesko, and Javy Lopez headlined the new crop of hitters. Marquis Grissom manned center, put up a .317 OBP, and — you guessed it — led off. Mark Lemke (79 wRC+) batted second, and just… come on, Bobby Cox, stop messing with my mind.

Ryan Klesko hit .310/.396/.608 and batted sixth — sure wouldn’t hate getting him a few more at-bats. Even Charlie O’Brien, Greg Maddux’s personal catcher, was better with the stick this year than Grissom and Lemke — he hit seventh. Cleveland was just as bad — they had Omar Vizquel hit second while Manny Ramirez, in a season where he hit .308/.402/.558, languished in seventh. In fact, Vizquel was the worst regular hitter on the Indians, period.

Game 1 was a buttoned-up affair — there aren’t a lot of tactics to talk about when Greg Maddux throws a complete game in 95 pitches. The only real points of interest were two Cox pinch hitting decisions — he pulled Klesko for journeyman Mike Devereaux, then pulled O’Brien for light-hitting Luis Polonia. Both over-valued platoon edges relative to talent levels. The pinch hitting penalty wasn’t commonly known then, which doesn’t help. Read the rest of this entry »

Zac Lowther was described as having “vexing funk” when he was profiled here in August 2018. That hasn’t changed. The 23-year-old southpaw — now No. 12 on our Orioles Top Prospects list — still disrupts timing with his delivery. Moreover, he continues to flummox hitters. In 148 innings last year at Double-A Bowie, Lowther logged a 2.55 ERA, fanned 154, and allowed just eight gophers.

Prior to last season, Eric Longenhagen described how Lowther “hides his arm behind his body… and has nearly seven feet of down-mound extension.” Last week, the 6-foot-2, 235 pound lefty shared that his recent developmental strides have been more mental than physical in nature.

“A lot of it is working on consistency and how I approach everything,” Lowther told me. “I’m not throwing 96 [mph] — I’m that funky guy who kind of goes against the scouting reports — so I have to place to ball and rely on all three pitches. I need to stay within myself; I need to be in the present, but also know how that pitch takes me to the next pitch.”

Lowther’s repertoire consists of a fastball, a curveball, and a changeup. The first of the three is his best weapon, despite its pedestrian (88-93) velocity. And more than deception is at play. The erstwhile Xavier Musketeer gets good carry, and as Longenhagen pointed out, sometimes sinking and tailing action. Read the rest of this entry »

In the four years since I last attempted to determine major league teams’ local television revenue, much has changed in the Regional Sports Network landscape. Four years ago, FOX was the dominant player, owning a majority of the channels, with NBC and AT&T having their own shares as well. Last year, Sinclair completed the purchase of FOX’s RSNs, bought into the Yankees’ YES Network, and partnered with the Cubs to help create them their own network. That big FOX RSN purchase came at a price half that of the initial estimates; Sinclair also attempted to purchase the AT&T RSNs up for auction before AT&T determined the potential selling price was too low.

In addition to the network ownership changes, seven of the 30 teams’ contracts have been up for renewal, with substantial changes to what we previously knew about the broadcast situations of the Braves, Nationals, and Rockies. As was the case four years ago, these numbers are estimates and do not include money from ownership stakes in networks. For the former, I’ll go into a little more detail where I had to speculate the most. For the latter, I’ll illustrate how an ownership share can be incredibly important. For all long-term deals, I assumed a 4% annual increase across the length of the contract. And while much is uncertain regarding this season and its duration, the estimates here are for a full, standard season (2019), both for ease of comparison and their utility in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, April 15, is Jackie Robinson Day, though with MLB’s season postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the celebration has taken on a different form. So has my observation, albeit not quite by choice.

As a writer who grew up a third-generation Dodgers fan and who has lived in Brooklyn for the past 12 1/2 years, I’ve generally greeted the day as an opportunity not just to acknowledge Robinson’s bravery and the pivotal moment of integration but to further our understanding of the man and the context that surrounded his career. That effort now extends to my own 3 1/2-year-old daughter, Robin (her name is not a coincidence). She already owns a Robinson shirsey (her second one, actually) and both my wife — Emma Span, managing editor of The Athletic’s MLB vertical — and I have made efforts to tell her a version of his story that she can understand.

In late February, we visited Robin’s preschool and gave a presentation on the basics of baseball as part of a “Family Traditions” series during which we touched upon Robinson. As it turned out, learning about him dovetailed with the class’s recent learning about Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and other civil rights heroes, and as a result, a picture of Robinson was soon posted to the wall alongside them. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I learned an astonishing fact while listening to Effectively Wild. In the 2001 World Series, Byung-Hyun Kim blew a save while throwing 61 pitches. The next day, Bob Brenly sent Kim right back out there, and he blew another save. I knew the back-to-back blown saves part, but 61 pitches! Imagine the uproar if that had happened last year.

This got me wondering: just how weird were baseball tactics 20 or 30 years ago? What else were teams doing that would shock a modern audience? While we wait for real baseball, I decided to find out. Starting with the 1990 World Series, I’m going to hunt for tactical decisions that would look out of place today, and see just how different baseball is.

1990

Tony LaRussa is the father of modern bullpen management, but he also had a new-looking batting order; his best four hitters in Game 1 by wRC+ batted 1-4. Lou Piniella, meanwhile, batted 92 wRC+ Billy Hatcher in the two spot. Chris Sabo, a career 110 wRC+ hitter who posted a 121 wRC+ in 1990, languished in sixth. That’s nothing too wild for the time — the second spot in the lineup was long given to “bat control” guys — but it looks antiquated next to the A’s lineup.

The first game wouldn’t look out of place in 2020. LaRussa pinch hit for ace Dave Stewart after only four innings, looking to spark a rally in a game the A’s trailed 4-0. Piniella and the Reds used only three pitchers, because ace Jose Rijo went seven strong innings, and even up 7-0, they used their top two relievers to get the last six outs. Boring! 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 »

On Monday, we projected what the Cactus/Grapefruit standings could look like given baseball’s radical proposal to base the 2020 season in team’s Arizona and Florida spring training complexes.

In my first piece, I went with division-less leagues, since I am the ZiPS Dictator — faber est suae quisque fortunae. With travel distances relatively limited compared to a normal season and many of the traditional divisional rivalries gone topsy-turvy, I felt there wasn’t any real need to have divisions. No divisions doesn’t mean that fewer teams make the playoffs, after all.

But being the ZiPS Dictator doesn’t make one the MLB Dictator, and there’s a very good chance that any Arizona/Florida league will have makeshift divisions. First, let’s re-project our temporary leagues using the divisions that Bob Nightengale laid out in his piece initially reporting the paln. For the number of games, I’m going with the proposed 108, consisting of 12 games against each team’s division rivals and six games against each of the non-division teams. We’ll start with the Florida teams:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I revisited how the National League MVPs of the 1990s were acquired. Six were either signed as free agents or acquired via trade, which is in stark contrast to the American League list. Of the eight different AL MVPs, six were homegrown and one of the other two had been re-acquired by his original team at the time he won. Only one of those six homegrown players, however, remained with their respective team throughout their entire career, as Chipper Jones and Barry Larkin did on the NL side.

Here’s a look back at how the AL MVPs of the 1990s were acquired.

Rickey Henderson won his lone MVP award during his second of four stints with the A’s; the team originally drafted him out of Oakland Technical High School in the fourth Round of the 1976 amateur draft. Traded to the New York Yankees in December 1984 after six stellar seasons to begin his big league career, the A’s brought their former leadoff man back home four-and-a-half-years later. Read the rest of this entry »

Not long after Opening Day was originally postponed, I asked our readers for their thoughts on how and whether the 2020 season would play out. I wanted to get a sense of everyone’s expectations. Those results were published on the last day of March. At the time, some in the comments wondered how the results might change in the weeks to follow, given the speed with which new information on the pandemic was becoming available. To see if perspectives had changed, I asked the same set of questions again last week. In the first round, we generally ended up with 1,000 to 1,500 responses per question. This time around, we received about 500 more responses per question. Here are those results.

First, I asked whether there would be a 2020 season:

Overall, there was still a considerable amount of optimism, but the number of people who believed we will get a season dropped about three percentage points from late-March.

In looking at the number of games played, 76-100 remained the most popular response:

This is what the responses look like side-by-side:

Read the rest of this entry »