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 »

Clayton Richard has been busy preparing for a 2020 season that won’t be starting any time soon. He’s done so without a team — the 36-year-old southpaw remains a free agent — and in a manner to which he’s not accustomed. Fifteen years after being drafted out of the University of Michigan, and with 275 big-league appearances under his belt, Richard is endeavoring to revamp both his arsenal and his delivery. To say that he’s doing so in a meticulous, scientific fashion would be an understatement.

What you’re about to read is the result of multiple exchanges with Richard, as well as abbreviated reports (used here with permission) from his offseason visit to Driveline. We’ll start with Richard giving an overview of what he’s dubbed “Project 2020.”

“Before the baseball world came to a screeching halt, I was frequently asked ‘What are you doing now?’ by friends and family alike,” Richard told me. “Although the question was simple enough, I didn’t feel comfortable delving into exactly what I was doing with my time – mostly due to the fact that I didn’t think the majority of people really care where my spin axis was that week. It’s much easier to say, ‘Just throwing every day and waiting for the right opportunity.’
 
“The reality is that I’ve been up to a lot more than simply throwing a few baseballs. I’ve used the last few months to make significant changes. The effectiveness of my repertoire had changed for the worse over the past two seasons. Based on that, I could choose to continue down the same path — one with an aim to execute pitches at a higher rate but likely be relegated to a left-handed bullpen role — or I could veer headfirst into changing how my pitches profiled to right-handed hitters in an effort to level out the platoon splits for longer outings.

“I debated the choice many times over. My wife likely got sick of my asking her, or talking to myself. Ultimately, I came up with a plan to revamp my arsenal to return in time as a starting pitcher, the role I have worked to become since first pitching in my backyard with my dad squatting behind the plate and my mother standing in the box. 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 »

Who was better, Jim Edmonds or Andruw Jones?

I asked that question in a Twitter poll earlier this week, expecting that it would be a close call. Centerfielders both, they played 17 seasons each and finished with similar WAR totals (Jones 67, Edmonds 64.5). Making the comparison especially intriguing was the fact that one was clearly the better defender, while the other was clearly the better hitter.

Instead of a nail-biter, I got a landslide. A total of 4,017 people voted, and a resounding 71.4% opted for Jones. Edmonds, despite having a huge edge in wRC+, garnered a meager 28.6%.

My eyebrows raised a full inch when I unearthed these statistical comps:

Edmonds had a career 132 wRC+. So did Wade Boggs, George Brett, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, Todd Helton, and Billy Williams (among others).

Jones had a 111 wRC+. So did Russell Branyan, Bernard Gilkey, Geoff Jenkins, Adam Lind, Hal Morris, and Neil Walker (among others). 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 »

When Harold Baines was elected to the Hall of Fame via the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, the argument that he would have reached 3,000 hits had he not lost substantial parts of the 1981, ’94 and ’95 seasons to player strikes must have weighed heavily on the minds of voters. How else to explain the panel shocking the baseball world by tabbing a steady longtime DH who never led the league in a major offensive category and whose advanced statistics equated his career value to good-not-great players such as Paul O’Neill or Reggie Sanders? That time missed was a major talking point for Tony La Russa, who managed Baines in both Chicago and Oakland and was one of several key figures in the slugger’s career who not-so-coincidentally wound up on the committee. Baines finished 134 hits short of the milestone, while his teams fell 124 games short of playing out full schedules in those seasons (never mind the fact that he missed 59 games due in those three seasons due to injuries and off days). On this particular committee, he received the benefit of the doubt regarding what might have been.

Baines was neither the first player nor the last to gain such an advantage in front of Hall voters. As you might imagine, the topic has been on my mind as we confront this pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and I’m hardly alone. In chats, article comments, and on Twitter, readers have asked for my insights into what the current outage might mean with regards to the Hall hopes for active players. I’ve spent the past four years weeks ruminating on the matter, but for as tempting as it may be to dive headfirst into analyzing the outage’s impact on Zack Greinke, Yadier Molina, Mike Trout et al if the season is 100 games, or 80, or (gulp) zero, the more I think about it, the more I believe that it’s important to provide some historical perspective before going off half-cocked.

According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, at least 69 Hall of Famers — from Civil War veteran Morgan Bulkeley, the first president of the National League, to Ted Williams, who served in both World War II and the Korean War — served in the U.S. Armed Forces during wartime. Fifty-one of those men were elected for their major league playing careers, and six more for their careers in the Negro Leagues, the rest being executives, managers, and umpires. Some players, such as Yogi Berra, Larry Doby, Ralph Kiner, and Red Schoendienst, served before they ever reached the majors, and others, such as Christy Mathewson, did so afterwards, but many gave up prime seasons to wars. Williams missed all of the 1943-45 seasons and was limited to just 43 games in 1952-53. Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize, Pee Wee Reese, Phil Rizzuto, and Warren Spahn all missed the entire 1943-45 span as well, with Greenberg missing most of ’41 and half of ’45, too. Several other players missed one or two years. Read the rest of this entry »

With another week in the books, our digital Brewers aren’t any easier to figure out. In fact, it’s been much the opposite. Today, we’ll take a deep dive into the pitching staff, which has already seen a good deal of turnover 12 games into the season, and see if we can settle on roles for a mixed and largely interchangeable group.

First, there’s the Injured List contingent:

Knebel was the only pitcher to start the season on the shelf, but he’s got company now. Brett Anderson is ready to return, having missed only a single turn in the rotation, but the prognosis on the other two is decidedly worse. Lindblom will be back sometime in July at the earliest. And Claudio won’t be back — his rotator cuff injury is a season ender.

Anderson’s imminent return creates an interesting decision. The starting rotation is full of question marks and maybes. The top two feels relatively set; Brandon Woodruff and Adrian Houser are both staying in the rotation unless they get hurt. After that, we have some decisions to make. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where in the player ranks do MVPs come from? As unpredictable as baseball can be, this particular question has a very simple answer for the most part. If we go back through the years, there aren’t too many award winners whose origins deviate too much from a few common paths. MVPs largely are who we thought they were: established superstars, former top prospects, former first round draft picks. In some cases, all of the above are true.

But the stories of how those MVPs ended up with their particular teams can still be intriguing. Some were drafted by the team with which they won the award, including a few, like Bryce Harper and Joe Mauer, who were drafted first overall. Others were traded away only to find success (and some shiny hardware) on another squad.

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

Barry Bonds was just one several college baseball stars being considered for the first overall pick in the 1985 draft. Despite his obvious talent, there were some questions about his makeup — his reputation for being cantankerous didn’t begin when he arrived in the major leagues — which may have contributed to him slipping to the Pirates, who held the sixth pick in the draft. Read the rest of this entry »