Last week, I asked our readers to answer a few questions about what they think this season of baseball might look like. While none of us actually know when or even if the season will be played, your answers provide a window into your expectations and also show how optimistic (or pessimistic) you are about there being more live baseball in 2020 as COVID-19 continues to affect all of our lives.

We received more than 1,000 responses for every question with the first one being the most basic:

A pretty clear majority believes there will be some from of major league baseball this season, though more than a quarter of readers thought the season would simply be wiped out.

Next, I asked how many regular season games would be played this year:

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It’s becoming clear that leaving your jacket behind was a mistake.

The sun has been giving this mid-March day a Fourth of July tint all afternoon, and you’ve been waiting all winter to brave the outdoors free from layers. That sun was still out when you got to the ballpark just before 5 pm, and the air felt mild, so you left your jacket in the car. You should have known better. The high school baseball game you’re watching probably wasn’t going to end until 7:30, when the sun was nearly gone — along with whatever lies it promised you about warmth.

Now, that 7:30 final out is beginning to feel wildly optimistic. One of the starting pitchers had trouble throwing strikes in the first inning, needing 33 pitches to get through it, according to your count. The second inning is shaping up to be even worse. The same pitcher hit the first batter, and has walked three more to force home a run.

Really, it isn’t his fault. He isn’t going to pitch in the majors, or even in college. He isn’t a baseball player at all, really. He’s just playing the part, like so many other kids you’ve seen, happy for any chance to be outside with his friends.

And it isn’t going well. One of the few strikes he’s thrown this inning got laced to left field for a base hit, scoring two more runs. Now the coach is going to the mound, but his options are limited. He doesn’t have many pitchers on this year’s small roster, and tomorrow his team has a doubleheader scheduled. He really needed tonight’s starter to go deep into the game. But he’s already thrown 55 pitches, and made only three outs. The coach attempts to level with the 16-year-old standing in front of him, pats him on the shoulder, and returns to the dugout. Read the rest of this entry »

Pinch hitting is hard. Baseball is a rhythm game, and pinch hitters are denied any semblance of routine. They’re on the bench, swinging a bat back and forth to get the blood pumping in their arms, and then just like that, they’re in the game. They might have been daydreaming about what they plan on ordering from room service, and here’s Jacob deGrom throwing 92 mph sliders. Good luck!

That’s the classical conception of a pinch hitter, and it explains why Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin found a significant pinch hitting penalty in The Book. They found a 24-point wOBA penalty for pinch hitters, which is a large cost. That’s roughly equivalent to the platoon advantage a lefty gets when facing a right-handed pitcher.

That’s a pretty striking difference. When your team gets a lefty batter up against a righty pitcher in a big spot, it feels great. Imagine that pitcher being replaced by a left-hander. Feels pretty awful, right? That’s the same swing in effectiveness you get when a batter pinch hits rather than batting regularly.

You don’t always hear about this effect on broadcasts, because there are other decisions that go into pinch hitting. You’re getting a diminished version of whichever hitter you select, but other advantages can still tip the scales in a batter’s favor. 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.

As more and more Americans find themselves under COVID-19-related stay at home orders, we’ve now settled into an odd pattern of bracing for daily bad news while we wait for the curve to flatten, hopefully sometime in the next two to three weeks. When my colleague Jake Mailhot gave this update on Friday, there were around 82,000 confirmed cases in the United States. As of late Sunday, that number was closing in on 150,000, and may have surpassed that bleak number by the time you read this.

With the MLBPA and MLB having come to an agreement late last week on the basic framework needed to resume baseball (or deal with the fallout of a lost season), the intersection of baseball news and the novel coronavirus will likely shift to stories of individual people in baseball, at least for a while. Until we have a better idea of when the pandemic’s numbers will peak and decline, and when baseball will resume, all we can do is wait.

FanGraphs Needs Your Help!

The sports ecosystem supports a lot of small businesses and one of those small businesses is this very site. Our founder David Appelman’s crazy notion to start a baseball stat site has done much to advance baseball knowledge over the last 15 years, but FanGraphs is not immune to the economic consequences of baseball’s shutdown. We’ve had to make the tough decision to suspend The Hardball Times for the time being and let many of our terrific contributors go; those of us who remain are tightening our belts. If you’ve enjoyed our work over the years and are able to support us in these lean times, we would greatly appreciate it if you would consider a Membership. We’re nowhere without your support, and we want to make sure the site is firing on all cylinders and providing you with great stuff when baseball returns. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday on Effectively Wild, Meg and Ben (Not me! Curse you, Lindbergh, for your recognizable Ben-ness!) answered a question that several readers had asked. How, the readers wondered, might baseball exist if everyone involved in the game were required to remain at least six feet apart at all times?

It’s a silly question, really; they’re not going to play baseball with social distancing. But a question being silly has never stopped me even when there was baseball to write about, so let’s brainstorm. To figure out what would need to change if baseball wanted to be compliant with the new COVID-19 world we’re living in, I decided to choose a game from last year and watch for what we’d need to change. I picked a random date — June 11, 2019 — and selected the first game available, the first game of a Mets-Yankees doubleheader.

As a recap, Meg and Ben took their best shot at figuring out what might happen. They considered ghost runners or Statcast-estimated speed splits to each base. They considered eliminating the running game entirely. They noted that an automatic strike zone would likely be necessary to remove the umpire from his current position. Additionally, they covered some easier spacing dilemmas — only one reliever up in the bullpen at a time, a mostly-empty dugout with players remaining in the locker room until needed, and automatic reviews that would allow an umpire to stay further from the action.

With those ideas in mind, I started watching my random game. Some of the personal contact would be easy to fix. For example:

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Underpinning the agreement between the players and owners about how to approach this season is an acknowledgement that revenues are going to be down in 2020, no matter when this season starts. To start, the season itself is in jeopardy as the country and world deals with the COVID-19 pandemic. And even if games are played, there are likely to be fewer than the typical 162; some of those games might not have any fans in physical attendance at all. Baseball teams are bound to take a huge loss at the gate compared to previous years. Whether MLB and its individual teams will take similar losses with their television partners isn’t as clear.

Before getting to the television money, though, let’s do a quick hypothetical on ticket sales. Forbes estimated thatin 2018, MLB teams took in around $2.8 billion at the gate. If teams play a half slate of games this year, and get half as much money at the gate in those games, we end up with $700 million in gate receipts and roughly $2 billion in revenue losses over a typical season. Now, if players receive only half their salaries, those losses basically even out. That isn’t to say that there aren’t a large number of associated revenue losses that will keep MLB teams from turning a profit, but even a massive loss at the gate wouldn’t create huge losses for MLB teams by itself. It’s losing television money that would create those losses.

MLB has three relevant national television contracts that amount to around $1.7 billion in yearly revenues, which are split among the 30 teams. There is roughly another $1 billion that comes from the central offices that is split among teams, per Forbes, but that revenue comes from MLB-owned properties like MLB Network, MLB.TV and MLB.com. The television deals are with FOX, TBS, and ESPN. While FOX and TBS air regular season games, most of the value in those contracts for the networks comes in the postseason, as well as the All-Star Game. FOX puts many games on FS1, but those games are on FS1 to gain the network subscribers rather than for advertising; the network suffers very little in terms of actual losses. In addition, FOX’s contract with MLB has already been extended through 2028, providing both groups incentive to work well together. TBS also airs some regular season games, but the bulk of the contract comes from air playoff games, which have yet to be impacted. Read the rest of this entry »

Zach Davies threw a lot of changeups last season. Taking the hill for the Milwaukee Brewers, the now-27-year-old right-hander relied on the pitch an eyebrow-raising 31.3% of the time. In 2018, that number was 12.2%. In 2017, it was 14%.

Why the notable uptick in change-of-pace pitches?

“I was getting guys out in any way possible,” explained Davies, who was dealt to the San Diego Padres this past November. “Going into last year, I was coming off injuries [rotator cuff inflammation and lower back tightness] and wasn’t guaranteed a starting spot. I wasn’t able to go into spring training and work on pitches, and best way for me to get outs was fastball-changeup. That’s why the numbers were skewed. This year there will be a lot more of a mix.”

Not having a feel for his curveball, Davies threw his bender just 3.5% of the time last year, down from the 15-16% range he’d been accustomed to. His cutter usage was also down, albeit by only a few percentage points. I asked the command-artist what returning to more of a mix will entail.

“It’s really just going into games with the desire to throw different pitches,” said Davies. “It’s forcing myself to throw curveballs and cutters, everything, in every count. Coming here — them trading for me — I have the sense of having a job. I can work on things without feeling like I might be sacrificing my season.” Read the rest of this entry »

There’s never really a bad time to “remember some guys,” but with baseball’s return date still up in the air, now seemed like an especially good moment to geek out on some of the best lineups of the past few decades, with a focus on how the groups were assembled. I initially wanted to create a “Top 10 of the Decade” series that would include rankings that were well-balanced between both leagues. But after running the numbers for lineups in the 1990s, I found that the majority of the best lineups were concentrated in the same few teams, mostly led by a core group of hitters performing at an elite level over the course of multiple seasons. The 1998 Houston Astros were the lone National League team that even managed to crack the Top 10 in wOBA, wRC+, or offensive WAR.

Not only did I determine that it would be tricky to rank them relative to each other, it also became clear that one team — the Cleveland Indians — stood out over the rest. Not for one particular season, but for an eight-year run of dominance that began in 1994 and continued into the following decade.

Cleveland’s pitching staffs were typically very good during this period, but the offensive firepower was really something to behold. As I walk you through how these lineups came together, you’ll recognize some Hall of Famers, maybe another future Hall of Famer or two, and a lot of other very good players.

By the time John Hart was promoted to general manager in September 1991, many of the players who would eventually become a core part of the team’s great lineups were either in the minor leagues or just getting their feet wet in the majors. But he certainly had his hand in maintaining the group’s dominance by consistently pulling the right strings when it came to trades and free agency.

Heading into the 1994 season, the Indians were trying to avoid their eighth consecutive losing season. They hadn’t been to the playoffs since 1954, when they lost the World Series in a four-game sweep by the New York Giants. But just as the tides turned for Cleveland in the fictional Major League, which first appeared in movie theaters in 1989, things were about to turn around in real life, too.

While they would fall short during the strike-shortened season — they were 19 games over .500 and one game within the first place Chicago White Sox when the season was called off — the Indians were finally done being a laughingstock around the league. They would go on to win the division in six of the next seven seasons while reaching the World Series in 1995 and 1997. It’s a shame that a team this good could not bring home a championship. A note on the below: overall league rankings are listed in parentheses next to the year.  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.

Yesterday, the United States overtook China and Italy in terms of the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, becoming the world leader. While there are over 82,000 confirmed cases, the true number of infections in the U.S. continues to be underreported due to testing deficiencies. As the U.S. domestic situation continues to worsen, things are seemingly under better control in parts of Asia. A locally transmitted infection was reported for the first time in three days in China, and the country’s government has decided to bar the entry of foreign citizens in a continued effort to combat the spread of the virus. It highlights a stark difference in the response to this crisis by the two countries.

A Deal Is Reached Between MLB and the Players Association

With much of the baseball world watching the classic games included as part of the Opening Day at Home festivities, MLB and the MLBPA continued negotiations over what to do in the event of a cancelled season, with a deal reportedly reached in the afternoon:

Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have a deal, sources tell ESPN. The players have voted on it already. MLB owners are expected to ratify it tomorrow. An excellent sign that draws a path forward as baseball tries to figure out when it will return.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 27, 2020

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Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association have spent the past few weeks working through a long list of issues brought about by the coronavirus pandemic-driven delay to the 2020 regular season. On Thursday night — on what would have been Opening Day — the two sides announced a deal that settles several key questions that have hung in the balance since MLB postponed the start of the season. In general, the deal gives the league a great deal of flexibility in its attempt to salvage as much of the season as is feasible, and protects the players against the possibility that the season could be canceled entirely by addressing the thorny question of service time. However, it not only sells out amateur players with regards to this year’s draft and international signing period, it does so in ways that hint at more permanent and controversial changes sought by the league, such as a contraction of the minors and the institution of an international draft.

Despite the often-contentious relationship between the union and the league in drawing up the battle lines related to the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (the current one expires following the 2021 season), this deal represents an effort by both sides to avoid prolonged public bickering over billions of dollars in the face of an international crisis. Each side made key compromises that will leave some parties unhappy. The union voted to accept the deal on Thursday, and the owners ratified it via a conference call on Friday. With the ratification, a roster freeze is now in effect, barring teams from signing free agents and making trades, waiver moves, minor league assignments, et cetera, until both sides agree such transactions can resume. Towards that end, on Thursday dozens of players were optioned to the minors.

Per the deal, whose details were first reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan and additionally fleshed out by the Associated Press, The Athletic, and the New York Post, MLB will advance the players $170 million in salary for April and May. At this point, it’s a virtual certainty that no games will be played during those months so long as the league adheres to the Center for Disease Control’s guidelines, which called for the cancellation or postponement of events consisting of 50 or more people through at least May 10. That best-case scenario, which may be a pipe dream given that the U.S. has now overtaken China in terms of the most confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections and is on an ominous trajectory as far as its further spread, would allow for a three-week resumption of spring training and the start of the season in June. Read the rest of this entry »