This is the second installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Given the speed with which national guidelines on COVID-19 are changing, you could be forgiven for not keeping up with its implications for baseball. Since last Friday, the CDC has recommended avoiding gatherings of 50 or more people for the next eight weeks and the White House asked the country to avoid groups of 10 or more, keep kids home where possible, and avoid eating and drinking in public for the next 15 days.

Meanwhile, major metropolitan areas are settling in for the long haul. The Bay Area announced a Shelter In Place policy on Monday, and New York closed restaurants, bars, and schools until at least April 20; Washington state has announced similar closures of gathering places, with schools set to remain closed until at least April 24. The state of Ohio did the same on Sunday, and Oregon has already followed suit.

So what’s a roundup of baseball news items against that backdrop? It’s insignificant, really. But here we are, on a baseball website, and COVID-19 continues to affect the game. Here are the baseball-related coronavirus stories from the past day. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday night, the day before MLB shuttered spring training and delayed the start to its season, I was texting with a baseball operations employee in a National League front office. We discussed the likelihood of cancellations, the chaos that would inevitably follow, and the repercussions for players and teams. At one point in the conversation he speculated, “minor leaguers will be absolutely shafted.”

It appears that he was right. With one notable exception, minor leaguers, already unpaid during spring training and the offseason, will not collect paychecks for any games missed due to the spread of COVID-19. So far only one team, the Tampa Bay Rays, has announced plans to pay their minor league players during the delay. While not covering anyone’s salary directly, the club plans to give everyone $800 to help with expenses while they’re unable to play ball. It’s a step in the right direction, even if $800 is considerably less than the monthly salaries these players were set to earn before the disruption.

Still, it’s money that players elsewhere around the league would love to have. Most minor leaguers were just weeks away from solidifying their in-season accommodations, and now find themselves without a place to go or a buck to pay for it once they arrive. The situation has caused affected players considerable distress.

“It sucks,” says one pitcher in a National League farm system who, like other players interviewed for this piece, preferred to remain anonymous. “I’m fortunate enough that I can come home and live with my parents and not pay any rent. But I have a lot of teammates who either have a kid or are married and don’t have the opportunity to go home and have their parents pay for everything.” Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Chavis enjoyed a solid rookie season with the Red Sox in 2019. Primarily playing first and second base, the 24-year-old former first round pick slugged 18 home runs while putting up a .766 OPS and a 96 wRC+ over 382 plate appearances. Power was his calling card. Per Statcast, Chavis’ taters traveled an average of 419 feet, and his longest was jettisoned a prodigious 459 feet.

He rode a bit of rollercoaster on his way to Boston. Drafted 26th overall in 2014 out of Marietta, Georgia’s Sprayberry High School, Chavis scuffled in his initial professional seasons. Struggling to find his swing, he put up high strikeout rates, and tepid offensive numbers, casting doubt on his future. Then he began to find himself. Buoyed by a 2017 reunion with his old hitting coach, Chavis regained his stroke, turned a corner, and within a few years was once again propelling baseballs far distances.

Chavis discussed his power-packed swing — including how it was lost, and then rediscovered — at the tail end of last season.

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David Laurila: Is hitting simple, or is it complicated?

Michael Chavis: “It depends on the day you’re asking me. When things are going good, it’s as simple as could be — it’s easy — but when things aren’t going well, you start trying to find an answer. You start searching for a difference in your swing. Even though you know you should keep things simple, it’s not like you can be, ‘Oh, I just don’t care; it’ll figure itself out.’ It’s kind of… I guess the weird thing about hitting is you’re constantly making adjustments and changes in order to stay consistent.”

Laurila: You’re changing in order to stay the same…

Chavis: “Yes, which obviously doesn’t make sense. But that’s what it is. One day you can think — this is a random example — ‘swing down,’ because maybe you’ve been getting long and loopy. So you think about swinging down, and your body — just how the body works — is going to make an adjustment. But at some point your body is going to make that adjustment without you being aware of it. All of a sudden, thinking ‘swinging down’ is going to become physically swinging down. Then you have to make an another adjustment.”

Laurila: Basically, one of your mental cues needs to be adjusted. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you describe a batter’s plate discipline? I sometimes struggle with it. I might describe their walk rate and strikeout rate, maybe add in something about how often they swing. I’m never sure how much to weight walk rate and how much to care about strikeouts. How does someone with a 25% strikeout rate and 10% walk rate compare to someone with a 20% strikeout rate and a 7% walk rate?

What about Anthony Rizzo? He gets on base without swinging the bat fairly often, but it doesn’t show up in his walk rate, only in bags of ice and bruises. Getting hit by a pitch is marginally more valuable than a walk if you listen to our linear weights (because walks happen more often when there are bases open, while HBP tend to be random), but it doesn’t show up in the “plate discipline” numbers we’re used to looking at.

I’ve danced around this concept a few times here at FanGraphs. When I wrote about Joey Gallo’s new approach, I touched on how his strikeout and walk rates related to how good he needed to be on contact to succeed. When I wrote about Luis Arraez’s unique talents, I framed his walks and strikeouts in terms of what it meant for the rest of his contact. Behind the scenes, I’ve been using a standardized version of this calculation for quite a while. Today, with no baseball coming to save us, it’s time to explain my method.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first installment of what we plan to make a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

With thousands of players in major and minor league camps this spring amid what has grown into a pandemic with nearly 170,000 confirmed cases worldwide, it was only a matter of time before professional baseball had its first player test positive for the novel coronavirus. That came to pass this weekend; on Sunday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that a Yankees minor leaguer has done so. The player in question, who did not spend any time this spring at the team’s major league camp a mile away in Tampa, Florida, has not been publicly identified, in accordance with HIPAA Privacy Rules.

Thus far among professional athletes, three NBA players — the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, and the Pistons’ Christian Wood, the last of whom played against Gobert last Saturday and was diagnosed over the weekend — have tested positive. Gobert’s positive test led the NBA to suspend its season and set off a domino effect that led to other leagues and organizations suspending play as well, as governmental authorities moved to limit the size of gatherings well below thresholds that would allow sporting events to take place.

Per The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, the minor leaguer in question was symptom-free as of Thursday, but woke up Friday feeling feverish and fatigued. After tests for influenza and strep throat came back negative, the player in question was quarantined. The team learned that his COVID-19 test was positive late Saturday night. Meanwhile, the minor league camp, which has been used by more than a hundred players on a daily basis this spring, was closed on Friday morning and underwent a “deep cleaning” on Sunday — not its first of the spring, according to general manager Brian Cashman. The major league facility will receive another such cleaning as well. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020, we estimate that the Dodgers will pay out $236 million in salary. That’s 10% more than any other team in baseball except the Yankees, and over $40 million more than their closest National League competitor, the Cubs. The Dodgers have been big spenders for some time now, and one of the ways they’ve chosen to use their money is to ensure that every position on their roster is stocked with two capable big league players at the very least, and sometimes more than that. It’s not spoiling our upcoming Positional Power Rankings series to note that Los Angeles falls into the top half of every single position on our depth charts, and in the top five of six. Most of those positions are filled with well-paid veterans. The purpose of this piece is to investigate the one position on their roster that isn’t: catcher.

In fact, not a single likely Dodgers’ starter at catcher will be paid more than $1.1 million in 2020. Last year’s starting duo of Russell Martin ($20 million, $16.4 million of which was paid by the Blue Jays) and Austin Barnes ($575,000 in 2019, and $1.1 million this year) morphed, over the course of the 2019 season, into Will Smith and Friends. Although Martin and Barnes caught more games overall last year (61 and 52, respectively), 38 of Smith’s 45 starts came in the Dodgers’ last 57 games of the season, and he enters 2020 — whenever that begins — as the favorite to start the lion’s share of games this year. At 25, with less than a year’s service time under his belt, he’ll make $555,000 in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

With the announcement last week that MLB would suspend spring training and delay Opening Day by at least two weeks, to say that the season’s future is uncertain would be an understatement. The most optimistic of scenarios — one in which the United States’ response to COVID-19 is suddenly and remarkably better than that of other, similar countries — had major league baseball resuming on April 9. The CDC has now recommended the postponement or cancellation of events with 50 or more people for the next eight weeks, which would prevent even spring training games. Update: MLB has announced further delays with a mid-May start the earliest possible date to begin the season in abiding by CDC guidelines. The two-week delay was merely be the first, with an unknown number of weeks of the season lost. The league’s announcement that spring training facilities would be shuttered, and that many players would be returning home, points to a much longer delay; a second spring training will almost certainly be required to allow players time to ramp back up. Some executives are simply hoping for games at some point in May, per Jon Heyman. We don’t yet know how many games the league will play this season, but we can use potential start dates, with a few October regular season weeks and some summer doubleheaders baked in, and attempt to determine how many games the sport might lose as the country attempts to contain this pandemic.

Shorter regular seasons in baseball have been incredibly rare. While the work stoppages in 1994 and 1995 might be fresh in the minds of some, 23 MLB seasons have been played since then. Ronald Acuña Jr., Cody Bellinger, Rafael Devers, Jack Flaherty, and Juan Soto weren’t even born when the start of the 1995 season was delayed. The graph below shows the total number of MLB games played in every year since 1903, the year of the first World Series:

Read the rest of this entry »

MacKenzie Gore struck me as a straightforward sort when I talked to him in San Diego Padres camp last Sunday. Polite but not loquacious, the 21-year-old southpaw perfunctorily answered each of my inquiries about his repertoire and approach. This is something he’s used to doing. As baseball’s top pitching prospect, Gore gets more than his fair share of media attention.

I didn’t walk into the conversation expecting to glean a boatload of fresh insight. I’m familiar with the scouting reports — all glowing — and as a FanGraphs reader you likely are as well. Even so, an opportunity to hear directly from the horse’s mouth wasn’t something I wanted to pass up.

A look at some numbers before we get to his words. In 20 starts last year between high-A Lake Elsinore (this in the hitter-friendly Cal League) and Double-A Amarillo, Gore logged a 1.69 ERA and won nine of 11 decisions. Moreover — this is the eye-popping part — he had 135 strikeouts, and allowed just 56 hits, in 101 innings.

“I’m a guy who attacks the zone with his fastball,” Gore told me. “I’m going out there looking to throw a lot of innings, so I’m trying to get people out early. I’m trying to throw the least amount of pitches possible.”

Fair enough. But given his explosive fastball and multiple plus secondaries, Gore is clearly blessed with the ability to overmatch. Is he ever on the mound hunting strikeouts? Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Major League Baseball delayed the start of the regular season. The decision, in retrospect, was an easy one: every major sport is now shut down. It’s a public safety concern in addition to a player safety issue, and the combination made it impossible to wait. Opening Day has been postponed by at least two weeks, and May might be a more realistic start date.

In their understandable haste to delay the season, MLB left some loose ends. Today, they’ve started to address those. Yesterday, players were simply waiting at team facilities, unsure of next steps. Some spring training games were played even after the announcement that the season would be delayed indefinitely. Teams had no games, but there was no official announcement of what their players would do.

Today, the league eliminated the confusion. Spring training facilities league-wide will be shuttered by mutual agreement of the commissioner and the player’s union:

https://t.co/VTXLnDTZsH spring training facilities shut, players allowed to return home means it is going to be quite a while until MLB games are played.

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, Major League Baseball caught up to the rest of the world of U.S. sports in its response to the novel coronavirus, conceding that public health is the priority by shutting down its spring training schedules in both Arizona and Florida. The start of the regular season, which was slated to begin on March 26, will be delayed by at least two weeks, and if the responses from local officials are anything to go by — such as Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker banning gatherings of more than 1,000 people until May 1 and urging that those of 250 or more people be postponed — that period could run longer.

It’s the governmental restrictions on large gatherings — first in Seattle an San Francisco, and since put into effect in Illinois, New York, and Ohio — that forced the hands not only of MLB but other leagues and organizations when it came to canceling games. As previously noted (this bears repeating), such social distancing measures have been proven to slow the spread of a virus — to “flatten the curve” in order to avoid overwhelming health care systems and force grim decisions on triage — that has shown a 33% daily rise in the cumulative number of cases, and that may ultimately infect 70 million to 150 million people in the U.S. amid this pandemic.

At this point there are still more questions than answers as to where things go from here for MLB, which like just about everybody else, is working without a roadmap. Per the New York Post’s Joel Sherman, the league passed along the recommendation of health experts that players remain in camps:

1/MLB sent a memo to teams stating that both minor and major league players should not leave their spring locales through Sunday except for extraordinary reasons and with MLB knowledge/permission. MLB told me this was the recommendation of its health experts. That keeping

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

2/players under care of club physicians that know them and away from affected areas was the best short-term course of action. How many players will stay working out at club sites beyond the weekend, especially if they don't truly believe the season will start up again on 4/9?

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »