It’s Opening Day! Or, well, it would have been Opening Day. It was Opening Day? The semantics are still unsettled. In any case, today is a day when I’d normally block off my entire calendar and watch baseball — glorious meaningful baseball — all day long. The global pandemic hasn’t stopped my yearning for that yearly ritual; if anything, the grim reality of our current predicament has made me long for baseball more.

Luckily for me and you, MLB is doing its best to make it feel like baseball is still here. The league has assembled a broad slate of games across several platforms that will let you watch all the baseball you can handle. There are 35 broadcasts in all:

Tomorrow MLB presents #OpeningDayAtHome – a full slate of 30 games nationally available across various platforms, including digital streaming and social media, creating a full-day event on what would have been Opening Day. pic.twitter.com/NGd39zk883

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) March 25, 2020

There are so many games, in fact, that you can choose your own adventure. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can let me choose your adventure. Here are a few slates for various types of fan.

World Series Drama
If you want to watch the highest-stakes games available, you’re in luck. Start your morning off with an appetizer: the 2013 Pirates/Reds Cueto game, which I wrote about here, in Spanish on Twitter. It’ll be early, so brew a coffee, eat some cereal, and listen to awesome announcing and echoing Cueto chants. There are no World Series stakes in this game, but it’s the best of a thin 8:30 ET slate if you want drama.

From there, it’s nothing but the hits. Head to Facebook for Cardinals/Rangers Game 6 (2011 World Series) at 11:00. Knowing what happened doesn’t make it any less ridiculous that the Cardinals were down to their final strike twice — in consecutive innings! — and stormed back to win in 11 innings. The level of play wasn’t pristine — the teams combined for five errors, and that doesn’t count Nelson Cruz’s Family Circus routes in right. But you’re not here for crisp play, you’re here for drama, and this game delivers. Read the rest of this entry »

In a General Managers Meeting Notebook than ran here in November, I related that Kyle Lewis had the highest exit velocity among Seattle Mariners minor leaguers in 2019. Jerry Dipoto, the club’s Executive Vice President and GM, shared that bit of information with me as we conversed beneath bright sunny skies in Scottsdale, Arizona.

That exchange was on my mind when I visited Seattle’s spring training facility in Peoria, Arizona, a few short weeks ago. Curious as to how Lewis thought about his craft, I approached his locker to see what I could learn.

I began by asking the 24-year-old outfielder — No. 8 on our Mariners Top Prospects list — if he’s fundamentally the same hitter whom Seattle selected 11th overall in the 2016 draft.

“I would say for the most part,” responded Lewis. “But I have grown as far as my swing decisions. I’m taking more pitches, and I’m more aggressive on pitches I should be swinging at. I feel I’m better able to make good decisions on pitches in the damage zone.”

Power is Lewis’s calling card. Contact deficiencies are his bugaboo. The uber-athletic slugger had a 29.4 K% in Double-A last season, and he fanned 29 times in his 75-plate-appearance major league cameo. But when he does connect… watch out. Expanding on Dipoto’s information, Eric Longenhagen wrote in Lewis’s scouting profile that the Snellville, Georgia native “averaged 92 mph off the bat last year and hit 53% of balls in play at 95 mph or above.” Moreover, he went on to suggest that Lewis could have big league seasons where he “clubs 30-plus bombs.”

Asked if he’s made any mechanical changes, since signing, the 6-foot-4, 210-pound Lewis said that he’s remained “largely similar.” He described “stepping into [his] legs,” and how he “likes to have [his] hands high.” Noting the latter characteristic led to the following exchange: 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 I write this, the total confirmed cases of COVID-19 has blown past the 400,000 threshold globally and currently stands at just over 420,000, with a hair under 19,000 deaths. What’s unknown at this point is how many are actually new cases and how many are just now being detected because of the continued expansion of testing. That’s probably going to be a job for the historians, and hopefully, a task that as many of us as possible are around to look at.

It could obviously come undone due to someone balking or a certain someone with a poor filter posting on Twitter, but it appears that the Senate and White House have agreed on a $2 trillion stimulus package. While it’s not directly baseball or even sports-related, sports need an economy to return to, hopefully sometime later this summer. The bill’s expanded unemployment coverage won’t help minor leaguers, but at least it may help fill in some of the gaps the people who are part of the sports economy but aren’t beneficiaries of some of the aid packages given by teams and leagues.

Some Service Time Questions Answered

We’ve talked a lot about service time and we’re necessarily going to continue to do so; it’s a massive ingredient in baseball’s revenue recipe. The tireless Ken Rosenthal reported in the witching hours that the MLBPA and MLB have a partial agreement on some of the outstanding service time issues. If there is in fact baseball in 2020, it appears players will still be credited with their full service time, no matter the total number of games played:

The players do not want their service time reduced by a shortened season, knowing it would impede their ability to reach salary arbitration and free agency as quickly as possible. MLB has agreed to grant a full year of service to players who remain active for the entire 2020 season regardless of how many games the schedule includes, according to sources familiar with the discussions. Read the rest of this entry »

The exact date of this season’s Opening Day is still unknown, and what with the negotiations between the players and the owners over what to do should there be no baseball played at all this year, it wouldn’t be a surprise if 2020 proved to be a lost season entirely. Given that uncertainty, having our readers guess when the season will begin might be of little utility. And of course, the subtext of guessing when the season will start involves taking a guess at when the COVID-19 pandemic will end, or at least subside sufficiently for us to attempt a return to something resembling normalcy; that’s a tricky, and potentially insensitive, question to contemplate, particularly in service of something as relatively trivial as baseball.

However, it does seem to be of some utility to determine how you, our readers and fellow baseball fans, are feeling about this baseball season. Normally, this time of year is marked by us coming together to share our hopes for individual players and teams. Optimism abounds. But players and teams are at home. So instead, we can share our hope for baseball being played at all. To that end, here is a series of questions meant to gauge your thinking on what this year will look like — or not look like — for baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball news is coming in drips and drabs these days, which makes sense — we’ve all got bigger things to deal with at the moment than contract extensions and teams with unsettled rotations. Unfortunately, that means that when there is baseball news, it’s likely to be bad, and yesterday was no exception: per Jeff Passan, Noah Syndergaard has been diagnosed with a torn UCL and will undergo Tommy John surgery tomorrow.

Regardless of when or if the season starts, this is obviously terrible news for the Mets. The NL East is nasty and brutish, and the 2020 season, should it happen, will be short. Every win is — well, baseball is never a matter of life and death, and that’s never been more clear than in recent weeks. But every win is monumentally important. Over a full season, replacing Syndergaard’s 4.6 WAR projection with Michael Wacha’s 0.6 WAR projection would be a tough blow, and that’s before considering which minor leaguer will be picking up Wacha’s innings.

Those four wins hurt; over the full year, they drop the Mets from roughly even with Atlanta and Washington to roughly even with the Phillies, turning the division into a two-tiered race. In fact, now that the Mets are without Thor’s services, they’d prefer a shorter season, because they’re decidedly underdogs at this point. As Dan Szymborski recently illustrated, a half-season gives underdogs a fighting chance.

Whatever your feelings towards the Mets, this is a disastrous stroke of bad luck. The team is built to win in 2020; Marcus Stroman will hit free agency after this year, Syndergaard will follow him the year after, and many of the team’s veterans are most useful in 2020. Robinson Canó isn’t getting any younger, Rick Porcello and Wacha are only in the fold this season, and Jacob deGrom is only invulnerable to decline until he isn’t. Without a stacked farm system, this might be the team’s best chance for another World Series berth in the near future. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball adjusts to the realities of the novel coronavirus, many decisions concerning the upcoming season loom. Yesterday, my colleague Craig Edwards discussed the service time issues likely to bedevil the sport’s return to normalcy, whenever that (hopefully) occurs. It’s nearly impossible to underrate how big of a kerfuffle this could cause. Service time is one of the most significant drivers of how a large percentage of baseball’s revenue pot ends up being divvied out. This ain’t a pot of delicious chili, but one that amounted to nearly $11 billion in 2019. Players and teams have a lot invested in this fight. For teams, those cost-controlled years mean massive profits. For players, accruing service time is essential to moving up the incline from pennies to cash windfall they might enjoy in free agency.

If, in the worst-case scenario, the 2020 season isn’t played at all, baseball will be in uncharted waters. This year’s revenue won’t be coming back, and the negotiations between owners and the union are, for all practical reasons, a hashing-out of who takes the biggest economic hit for that year of missing dollars. If they prove to be unsuccessful at gaining a whole year of service time after a lost season, players nearing free agency will see large reductions in their next contracts, simply by virtue of being a year older when they hit the market.

How much would hitting free agency a year later affect baseball’s best upcoming free agents? To get a sense, I took some of the biggest names anticipated to hit free agency for the first time over the next two offseasons and projected five-year contracts based on their “normal” free agent entry season, along with the projections if they hit free agency a year later:

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to escalate, with the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. alone above 46,000, and the worldwide total approaching 400,000. For the first time, the single-day death toll in the U.S. topped 100 on Monday, pushing the country’s tally past 500, and already as of Tuesday morning, it’s closing in on 600. Even so, President Trump and his administration spent its time on Monday downplaying the pandemic’s deadliness, expressing impatience with the advice of health experts, including those of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and musing about lifting the guidelines for Americans to stay at home and reopening the country in order to stimulate the economy — advice that could further overwhelm hospitals, expand the outbreak, and have deadly consequences for millions.

The news around the country is grim at just about every turn. For glints of optimism, one must look to Italy, where the count of new cases and the daily death toll have both decreased for three straight days — thanks to lockdowns that are much more strict than the patchwork of orders in place across the U.S. That said, the grim tallies in Italy, a country of over 60 million that has reported nearly 64,000 confirmed cases (but perhaps 10 times as many cases overall, with the balance going uncounted due to asymptomatic cases and a shortage of tests) and over 6,000 deaths, are still sobering.

On the baseball front, the quiet from the weekend that Tony Wolfe covered in Monday’s installment has continued, at least as far as MLB is concerned. But roughly 7,000 miles away from New York City, it was another story on Monday night…

Live Baseball in Korea

As was the case with the U.S. and MLB, the novel coronavirus pandemic in South Korea forced the Korea Baseball Organization to postpone its Opening Day, which was scheduled for March 28, that after canceling all of its preseason games. Thanks to the country’s success in flattening the curve through quick intervention, widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation, and surveillance — the last at a level that certainly would not be deemed acceptable in the U.S., to say nothing of the feasibility of the other measures — just 64 new cases were reported on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives and careers. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers —David Bednar, Brandon Brennan, and Tony Gonsolin — on how they learned and developed their changeups/splitters.

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David Bednar, San Diego Padres

“I never really had a great feel for a changeup. In 2017, after I first got drafted and was in instructs, I was kind of toying around with it when one of our pitching coordinators pushed me towards Hideo Nomo, who was one of our special assistants and helping out. The coordinator got me throwing in front of Hideo. He gave me a few pointers, and kind of switched up my grip in a way that worked better for me.

“The grip is a slight variation [from Nomo’s splitter]. My two fingers are kind of offset on the seams, so that I have something to pull down on. There’s a little bit of slider action to it at times, but for the most part it’s either straight down, or has a little bit of cut. Read the rest of this entry »

While the long-term financial implications of a pandemic for baseball players and owners might not be top of mind for many of us right now, discussions between players and owners on the myriad issues resulting from the season’s delay are taking place right now, and those discussions will have considerable effects on the sport’s future. Last week, among reports of the league potentially skipping June’s amateur draft, service time emerged as the most significant potential baseball issue resulting from COVID-19, particularly if the 2020 season is lost.

The problem is not a simple one, as players generally receive service time for being on a major league roster, with the resulting time accrued inching players closer to larger salaries in the form of arbitration and, eventually, free agency. If a partial season is played, some sort of service time pro-ration based on the actual number of days in a season seems likely. If the season goes 100 days instead of 186, starting every player who sees major league time with 86 days is another potential compromise. Likewise, salaries don’t seem to be a big issue, per Jon Heyman, with pro-ration also likely in that case. But what might happen should no season take place is more difficult to say.

Joel Sherman reported the MLBPA has proposed a full year of service time if players had a certain amount of service time accrued in 2019, with Ken Rosenthal reporting the time period was 60 days, essentially pushing forward service time for players who were on rosters for a significant portion of last season. MLB, for obvious reasons, does not want to provide such credit. Unfortunately, the framing of this issue has been somewhat problematic. In his tweets, Sherman said the following:

Pretty much certain MLB would not give full service without games played/revenue taken in. Remember service time is an MLB lifeblood impacting arbitration, free agency, pension.

While Rosenthal framed the issue in this manner:

The owners, after losing an entire year of revenue, would want relief in a variety of areas, including service time. They would not simply grant a year of service to every player who appeared in a single major-league game in 2019. The union, likewise, knows a certain threshold of service in ’19 would be required, and its proposals reflect that understanding.

Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Donaldson is one of the game’s elite two-way players, but like the late Ernie Lombardi, he received rude treatment when it came to Baseball-Reference’s latest update to its version of WAR. Last week I began a breakdown of B-Ref’s influx of new data, which resulted in alterations to five different areas of its version of WAR, some aspects of which affect players as far back as 1904 and others as recent as last season. The introduction of detailed play-by-play baserunning and caught stealing data from the 1930s and ’40s, for example, cost Lombardi — a heavy-hitting Hall of Fame catcher who played from 1934-47 — a whopping 7.3 WAR. Donaldson took the largest hit among contemporary players, losing 3.8 WAR via changes in the way Defensive Run Saved is calculated. For the 34-year-old third baseman, the loss adds a bit of insult to the injury of this delayed season, which won’t make it any easier for him to build what is admittedly a long-shot case for the Hall of Fame.

B-Ref’s version of WAR is different from that of FanGraphs, but as bWAR is the currency for JAWS, it’s of particular interest to me. While the Hall of Fame itself is as closed right now as any museum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hall arguments are never out of season, nor is taking stock of greatness, particularly when it provides a diversion from considering stockpiles of toilet paper and shortages of N95 masks. B-Ref’s adjustments are hardly unprecedented for the site, which adds new data annually. The earliest boundaries for game logs and play-by-play data have moved backwards by decades over the years, for example, and last year’s big-ticket addition was a major update to catchers’ defensive statistics for the 1890-1952 period.

Reordered for their chronological effect, this year’s update has incorporated the following:

• New Retrosheet Game Logs (1904-07)
• Caught Stealing Totals from Game Logs (1926-40)
• Baserunning and Double Plays from play-by-play data (1931-47)
• Defensive Runs Saved changes (2013-19)
• Park factor changes (2018)

As I noted last week, the career WAR totals of 11 Hall of Fame position players swung by at least 2.5 WAR, some positive and others negative. Where Lombardi was the biggest loser in that update, shortstop Arky Vaughan was the biggest gainer from among the enshrined; his 5.1-WAR gain was the second-largest swing overall, 0.1 less than that of three-time All-Star Lonny Frey (a teammate of Lombardi’s with the Reds from 1938-41). Because nobody needed 3,000 words from me in the first installment of a series as we await the green light on the 2020 season, I didn’t publish the table of the position-by-position changes or delve into the effects on other groups of players, such as Donaldson and his contemporaries. This time around, we’ll do just that. Read the rest of this entry »