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 »

Two weeks ago, I asked our readers a series of questions about what the season might look like as a means of showing our relative optimism (or pessimism) about the state of things in our country and in baseball. We are now a few more weeks down the line, so I’d like to see if your perceptions have changed. Feel free to answer the questions even if you did not participate in Round 1. The questions below mirror those asked two weeks ago. Thanks for your time. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Zimmermann stood out in Orioles camp this spring. That wasn’t entirely by accident. The 25-year-old left-hander had begun opening eyes last season, and he reported to Sarasota having visited Driveline over the winter. No wheels were reinvented during his week at the Seattle-area facility, but his mechanics did undergo some fine-tuning. And not from scratch; Zimmermann had already started down that road thanks to Baltimore pitching coordinator Chris Holt.

Last year was Holt’s first with the Orioles, and Zimmermann was fairly new himself. The Baltimore native joined the organization in July of 2018, coming over as part of the trade-deadline deal that sent Kevin Gausman to Atlanta. The Braves had taken Zimmermann in the fifth round of the 2017 draft out of the University of Mount Olive, where he earned a degree in business management.

Asked about his course of study, Zimmermann told me that he considers himself a good problem solver, and if baseball didn’t work out he’d have laid the foundation for a career in project management. Analogy in mind, I posited that being a pitcher tends to lend itself to problem solving.

“Hopefully not, but yes,” responded Zimmermann, who logged a 3.60 ERA in 140 innings last year between Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk. “That’s one way to look at it, but I prefer to see it more as critical thinking and processing things in the moment. When you’re on the mound, you don’t really think in an analytical way; it comes across more as intuition. But you are creating a strategy for certain hitters, and whatnot, before the game. That follows along the lines of problem solving.”

The juxtaposition — intuition on one side, critical thinking on the other — prompted me to ask if he considers pitching to be more of an art, or more of a science? Read the rest of this entry »

Trying to predict how a reliever will perform from one season to the next can be a pretty frustrating exercise. Some amount of uncertainty surrounds all players, but being a pitcher makes things a little more difficult and being a pitcher who is often asked to throw with max effort with little to no rest complicates further still. And even after we move past those factors, we’re faced with a smaller sample of outcomes for bullpen arms. A 60-inning season is a complete season for a reliever, considerably fewer innings than a starter throws and many fewer batters faced than the number of times most starting position players come to the plate. Trying to predict reliever performance in half a season is even more difficult; attempting to put a value on relievers in a potentially condensed, shorter season becomes quite challenging.

Consider that last season, there were 158 qualified relievers with at least 48 innings pitched. Ken Giles produced 1.9 WAR, ranking 10th in baseball among his bullpen brethren. Brett Martin ranked 60th among relievers with a 0.8 WAR and Matt Albers ranked 130th as a replacement-level reliever. Now, let’s cut those seasons in half. Giles still ranks 10th with just under a win, but he’s now closer to Matt Albers in half a season than he was to Brett Martin in a full season. It is considerably harder to tell, in terms of results, the difference between a good and bad reliever under those constraints. This is further complicated by the fact that the smaller the sample size, the less likely that the results will match the actual performance.

I separated pitchers into three groups from last season: pitchers with at least 100 innings, qualified relievers, and pitchers with at least 20, but less than 40, innings on the season. Then I ran some correlations between WPA, which shows how the actual results on the field mattered to the team, and ERA, FIP, and WAR, to show some measures of performance.

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you’ve been living under a rock — and if so, good for you, great distancing, take a bow — there’s been one major development in baseball in the past few days: per Jeff Passan, the league is reportedly in the early stages of formulating a plan that would see games played in empty stadiums in Arizona as soon as May or June. (MLB has said it is not committed to any specific plan at this time, and will prioritize public health and safety in its decision-making.)

This is a bold plan, one that feels very out of line with how other sporting events are reacting to COVID-19. Wimbledon, which takes place in July, has already been canceled. The Olympics, scheduled for August, have been delayed a year. A plan to start up a major sports undertaking months before those dates will be fraught with hurdles. Let’s cover some of those, along with the potential workarounds, while keeping in mind that the entire plan is subject to forces well beyond MLB’s control.

How Many Personnel Would Be Isolated?
The first sticking point in the plan is the sheer number of people the league would need to isolate. In his piece on the plan, Ken Rosenthal reported that league and MLBPA officials are discussing rosters in the 50-player range to allow for the injury- and performance-related promotions and substitutions that teams normally make. That’s 1,500 people in isolation right there, and that’s only players.

Would players with families be allowed to bring their loved ones with them? It’s hard to imagine union approval if families aren’t allowed into whatever housing facility the league uses. The alternative — leaving spouses, partners, and children completely cut off from players — sounds terrible right away, but it’s even more unthinkable given the strained state of national resources. Read the rest of this entry »

Few players have ever been more closely identified with a single team than Al Kaline. A bonus baby who debuted at age 18, and the youngest batting champion ever at 20, Kaline played every single one of his 2,834 professional games as a member of the Tigers, and remained part of their organization for 67 years. While he didn’t always have an easy time adapting to the expectations placed on him at such a young age, he aged with grace and humility, and became “Mr. Tiger.” In a career that ran 22 seasons, from 1953-74, he collected 3,007 hits and 399 home runs — yes, there’s a story to that missed milestone — and won 10 Gold Gloves as a right fielder. In 1980, he was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, and became the first Tiger ever to have his uniform number (No. 6, chosen in honor of Stan Musial) retired. After his playing career ended, he moved into the broadcast booth and then into an advisory capacity, most recently as a special assistant to general manager Al Avila.

On Monday, Kaline, who had recently suffered a stroke, died at the age of 85 at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

“In my book he’s the greatest right-handed hitter in the league,” Ted Williams said of Kaline in 1955, the year he became the youngest player ever to win a batting title.

“I have always referred to Al Kaline as ‘Mister Perfection,’” Tigers manager Billy Martin, who managed Kaline from 1971 to late ’73, once said. “He does it all — hitting, fielding, running, throwing — and he does it with that extra touch of brilliancy that marks him as a super ballplayer.”

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.

MLB Is Pursuing A Return To Baseball In May

Despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread throughout the United States and the rest of the world, Major League Baseball is reportedly attempting to move forward with a plan that would open the 2020 season as early as next month. According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the plan clearly has numerous potential hiccups, but is also being advanced with the support of “high-ranking public health officials.”

As one might expect, this version of the 2020 season would look very different from any we’ve seen before. Games would be relegated entirely to Arizona, with teams playing at Chase Field — the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks — as well as the 10 spring training complexes, and other nearby fields. Only essential personnel would be allowed inside the stadiums, which means no fans in the ballparks. The league has discussed potentially forgoing dugouts in favor of players and coaches sitting six feet apart from each other in the stadium seats, in order to promote social distancing. Passan’s report also mentions the elimination of mound visits from pitching coaches and catchers, seven-inning doubleheaders to make up for lost time in April and early May, and the use of an electronic strike zone, so that umpires can maintain a six-foot distance from the batter and catcher. Once teams report to their respective facilities, there would be another two-to-three week spring training period, followed by the start of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 season will be unlike any other we’ve seen before. Indeed, there may not even be a season. The COVID-19 pandemic has already altered baseball to an even greater degree than the World Wars did. While finding a way to resume play has become a rare point of common interest for MLB and the MLBPA, a contagious illness that spreads easily and is more dangerous than the seasonal flu presents a whole host of problems that need to be solved before a new Opening Day can be announced. Do you quarantine players? How long do you play without fans? What happens if a player tests positive in mid-August?

But let’s assume for a moment that the IHME model is on target. The model predicts that if we can keep up our current social distancing efforts (and the straggler states join in), the worst effects of the virus will be behind us by early-to-mid June. The return of baseball would be a welcome symbol of normalcy, and a baseball season that starts in July could largely be played without too many compromises other than the number of games. But I think it would be a mistake for baseball to just go back to the regular structure. The game will be returning against the backdrop of an international tragedy. In this dark time, baseball should focus on the enjoyable parts of the sport, even if things get a little…weird. 2021 can return to normal business, but let’s make 2020 fun.

United we stand, divided we Fall…Classic

Divisions have been a part of baseball for a half-century — even longer if you consider leagues to be de facto divisions. They’re a convenient way to group teams engaged in competition for playoff spots and to create additional meaningful races beyond simple seeding. But one of the problems with divisions is they just don’t make all that much sense in a severely shortened season. Whether the season is 80 or 100 or 120 games, it will provide less of an opportunity for teams to prove themselves superior to their division rivals. And the shorter the season, the less likely it is that a team will run away with a one-division league and make things boring. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 4, 2019, Ian Miller made his major league debut. With his Twins down 6-0 with only two innings left to play, he replaced Max Kepler to give Kepler a break in the field. Miller’s spot came up eighth in the batting order; he wasn’t guaranteed his first major league plate appearance, but the odds looked good.

But a funny thing happened on the way to his batting debut. Nelson Cruz led off the top of the eighth with a single. Eddie Rosario followed with a home run. The Red Sox went through two pitchers and frittered away a third of their lead — a 6-2 deficit felt less than insurmountable against a shaky Boston team now deep into its bullpen.

So when Miller’s turn to bat came up, with one out and the bases empty in the top of the ninth, Rocco Baldelli made, by some criteria, the best pinch hitting decision of 2019. Rather than have the left-handed Miller face southpaw Darwinzon Hernandez, he brought in Mitch Garver. In addition to being right-handed, Garver was one of the best hitters in baseball last year, full stop. The decision worked: Garver walked, though it didn’t end up mattering — Brandon Workman eventually induced a double play to escape a bases-loaded jam. Read the rest of this entry »

Al Kaline was not only a great player, he had a reputation of being both humble and personable. Both qualities came to the fore when I interviewed the Detroit Tigers legend several years ago in Lakeland, Florida. Sitting on a stool inside the Tigers’ spring training clubhouse, Kaline not only took the time to answer my questions about his career, he did so graciously. One day after his death at age 85, here is our conversation.

———

David Laurila: What kind of hitter did you consider yourself?

Al Kaline: “I was basically a line drive hitter. I was a put-the-ball-in-play hitter who tried not to strike out. I moved the runners along if the situation called for it. I tried to be patient and get a good pitch — I didn’t want to get myself out by swinging at bad pitches — and I didn’t worry about getting two strikes on me. I felt that I could handle the bat well enough to hit with two strikes.”

Laurila: Not striking out was more important in your era than it is now.

Kaline: “Absolutely. Striking out was something… some of the power hitters were striking out 100 times, but otherwise very few guys were striking out 100 times. It was about putting the ball in play and making the other team make plays. So yeah, we didn’t strike out nearly as much.”

Laurila: Why do you think that was? Read the rest of this entry »