Earlier in this interminable offseason, I set out to find the best bunters of 2019. Why? Partially it’s because with no major league games, digging through old ones is an acceptable substitute. Partially it’s because it highlights some interesting and undervalued skills. And partially it’s because I love a good bunt for a hit.
There was one disappointing problem with the 2019 bunts, however: none of them were that momentous. The best bunt of 2019 was worth .326 WPA; in other words, the batting team’s odds of winning the game went up by 32.6 percentage points. That’s a big play, but it’s only the 12th-most valuable bunt in the last 10 years.
How does a bunt improve one team’s odds of winning by 32.6%? Like this:
So yes, a bunt needs some help from the opposing team to be worth so much. There’s no way around that; a bunt gets the defense involved in the play, so the best ones are going to involve a combination of good bunting and bad fielding. The most valuable bunts swing entire games — in this game, both runners scored and the Phillies won 6-5. Again, that’s not even one of the top 10 biggest bunts. Read the rest of this entry »
As first reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan in the latest episode of “Let’s Negotiate Through the Media,” MLB ownership will reportedly issue a counter-counter-proposal to the MLBPA’s counter-proposal of a 112-game season with the prorated salaries previously agreed upon in March. This time, rather than the weird pay-scaling or completely dead-on-arrival revenue sharing schemes, the owners proposed a 50-game season, played at the players’ prorated salaries.
While the NC Dinos bolted from the gate by winning 17 of their first 20 games — the best start in the history of the Korea Baseball Organization — the LG Twins have been the league’s hottest team of late. After starting the season 2-4, the Twins have won 14 of 18; through Tuesday, they stood just two games behind the Dinos (18-6). This run has been largely powered by first baseman Roberto Ramos 라모스, who recently homered four times in five games, and leads the league with 10 dingers overall.
Ramos, a 25-year-old lefty swinger who spent 2014-19 in the Rockies chain, began his latest jag with a walk-off grand slam against the KT Wiz’s Min Kim 김민 김민 on May 24, turning a 7-5 deficit into a 9-7 win :
LG's Roberto Ramos wins the game with a walk-off grand slam in the 9th against KT.
Jacob Cruz played with some great hitters from 1996-2005. Teammates bookending his career included Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr., and in between he shared the field with stalwarts such as Manny Ramirez and Larry Walker. Ever studious, the Arizona State University learned from them all.
Cruz’s now teaches hitting. He’s done so for the past decade, beginning with a six-season stint in the Arizona Diamondbacks system, followed by two seasons — the second of them as a minor-league hitting coordinator — with the Chicago Cubs. Cruz then spent 2019 as the assistant hitting coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which is the role he now has in Milwaukee. This past November, the Brewers brought Cruz on board to work alongside hitting coach Andy Haines.
In the 27th installment of our “Talks Hitting” series, Cruz addresses his philosophies, as well as Bonds and some of the players he’s worked with in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee.
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David Laurila: Has hitting changed much since your playing days?
Jacob Cruz: “Hitting has really changed. When I started coaching [in 2011], a lot of the terminology was different. It was Dusty Baker talking about ‘step on ice,’ ‘squish the bug,’ and ‘make sure you hit your back with the bat on your followthrough.’ That’s not the terminology that’s being used today, and a lot of it has to do with the tech side of it. We’ve grown. We now know how to measure things, whereas before hitting was more of a guess.
“The players have changed as well. They don’t expect you to give your opinion; they want facts. It’s now ‘Show me the data on why I need to make this change.’ As a coach, that means making sure you’re an expert on every facet of hitting, which includes the technology and the analytics. Everything you can possibly be asked, you want to be able answer. There is a lot of information out there, from the K-Vest to Ground Force data to the bat sensors. All of those are pieces of the puzzle.”
Last week, MLB proposed that major league players take a $1 billion pay cut beyond the pro-rated salaries they’d already agreed to under their March deal. Last Tuesday’s proposal was not met positively by most players, and they had pretty good reasons to be upset. Now the MLBPA has responded to MLB’s proposal, with Jeff Passan first reporting the details followed quickly by Evan Drellich and Jared Diamond. The focus of the union’s response centers around more games, which would take regular season play into October, but it also includes potential salaries deferrals and expanded playoffs for this season and next.
On it’s face, this proposal might not look much of a step forward to getting baseball back in 2020. After all, the MLB proposal asked for a billion dollars in cuts to player pay; adding 32 games to the schedule and increasing player pay by nearly 40% means an extra billion dollars for the players. A source told Jon Heyman the deal was a “non-starter” for owners. But while the deal might not be looked upon favorably by ownership, there are several aspects of it that invite negotiation.
At least publicly, there seems to be a fundamental disagreement between the players and owners regarding whether regular season games make money for baseball’s owners without the presence of fans. In MLB’s presentation to players from last month, their claims of a $640,000 loss per game missed huge chunks of revenue that need to be included to arrive at a more realistic revenue figure. When I ran the calculations based on MLB’s own numbers, I found that MLB generally would make, after accounting for pro-rated salaries, about $170,000 per game. Those numbers actually edge slightly higher the more games are played due to MLB’s inclusion of some fixed costs, like buyouts. Even by these conservative numbers, which come directly from MLB and leave out considerable baseball-related revenue as well as marketing opportunities (or losses), that means that in 32 more games, owners make another $974 million while paying the players another $840 million or so, netting MLB another $134 million overall. While MLB’s public posture is that regular season games cost money, former MLBPA lawyer Gene Orza theorized in an Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal piece that Rob Manfred and the owners want more games just like the players do, but it is a better negotiating tactic to have the players ask for those games. So while more games might be something that the players have a strong desire for in order to make more money, it appears to be mutually beneficial, though certainly some teams will end up better off than others. Read the rest of this entry »
Usually, these results would have been posted last week, but the holiday combined with having some other business to attend to meant a delay until today. The polls closed early last week, before the most recent news cycle of proposals began. We again received more than 1,000 responses, similar to the first four rounds. In the fourth round of voting, the results showed more optimism that some sort of baseball season would be played than in any of the three prior rounds of polling. The results weren’t quite as rosy this time, but two-thirds of the responses believed there would be a 2020 season.
Here’s how the results have tracked since late March:
We saw a couple wild swings the last few rounds, and it will be interesting to see what the next round brings, but this week has settled in between.
In terms of the number of games, here’s how the responses looked the first four rounds:
And this round:
We see 76-100 maintaining the top spot, falling a bit as zero picks up some votes. The big change came in the outlier groups: those thinking there will be more than 100 games are basically non-existent, while the 51-75 group has picked up a bunch of votes.
As for when the season will start, this will be the last poll with May as an option, though it’s not as if it was a popular choice:
These results are basically in line with the last poll, with July or Never leading the way, though certainly some of the July responses might move to August before switching to Never.
As the league’s public plans have shifted from spring training facilities to home ballparks for game sites, the crowd has shifted its answers in response:
A month ago, 60%-65% of responses thought spring training sites would host regular season games. Two weeks ago, those responses dropped around 10 percentage points and they dropped again this round, with the majority believing no regular season games would take place at spring training sites.
As for games without fans, the results mostly line up with the number of regular season games, though there’s a small percentage of the 76-100 votes above that do shift downward, meaning a small percentage of respondents do expect some games with fans this season:
As for when the season will end…
Late November was about 10 percentage points higher in the last round of voting and it appears those lost votes split between No Season and early November. It appears MLB’s stated preference of a relatively normal postseason schedule if not format has caused some answers to move a little earlier in the year.
As for that format, we’ve seen a massive shift, as the clear majority of fans believe there will be expanded playoffs this season:
Expanded playoffs has nearly doubled in terms of responses since just a couple weeks ago.
Later this week, we’ll take another crack at polling our readers. Given the spate of news across the last week, it will be interesting to see how the mood has shifted.
To call Foley’s NY Pub and Restaurant a sports bar would be like summarizing Citizen Kane as a movie about a sled. Sure, the bar at 18 West 33rd Street in Manhattan stood out as a place where one could enjoy a beer while watching whatever games were in season — and on some nights, you might find three sports vying for attention on its numerous screens. But for nearly two decades, Foley’s has served as a pillar of the baseball community, a beacon not only for local denizens but for out-of-towners — players, umpires, scouts, celebrities, and writers. “Foley’s was a baseball writer’s Cheers,” wrote MLB.com’s Alyson Footer via Twitter.
Sadly, the occasion for Footer and hundreds of others to share their thoughts about the venerable watering hole on social media was a somber one. On Friday, owner Shaun Clancy posted a video announcing that the bar, which shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 16, will not reopen. “There’s just no way that I can see that we can do it,” he said in the two-minute video, “and I don’t really know what to say except thank you all… This is the end of the inning but not the end of the game.”
In theory, the Brewers offense was set up to be a stars-and-scrubs operation heading into the season. It’s not that it was particularly low-octane, or even misbuilt; when you have a player like Christian Yelich, it stands to reason that everyone else is going to look pedestrian in comparison.
Of course, theory doesn’t always survive in the real world. There are myriad examples of a team expecting a star performance from one player and receiving one from another. But for our OOTP Brewers, that has emphatically not happened. The offense is off to an excellent start — fourth in the NL in runs scored, fifth in wOBA, and fourth in batter WAR. It’s happened exactly the way that you’d expect — with a transcendent performance from digital Yelich and an adequate job the rest of the way down. Today, let’s celebrate Yelich’s brilliance.
In 2019, the major league WAR leader on May 31 was Cody Bellinger. You might remember 2019 Bellinger started the season off on a torrid pace. Even after an only excellent (instead of mega-excellent) May, he closed the month hitting .379/.465/.749. He was walking more than he struck out, he played excellent center field defense, and he even chipped in seven stolen bases (though he was caught stealing four times). It was a true all-phases effort, and it was worth a massive 4.2 WAR in 241 plate appearances. That pace would make for an 11.5 WAR season.
With that as calibration for how impressed you should be by numbers through the end of May, let’s turn to Yelich. His batting line looks a lot like Bellinger’s: .354/.444/.694, good for a 194 wRC+. Has he accomplished it with an absolutely outlandish BABIP? Honestly, not really. He’s posted a .381 mark so far, which is obviously a high number, but he’s posted a career BABIP of .358, and projection systems pegged him for something in the .340 range going into this year. Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Griffey Jr. is not a typical candidate for a ZiPS Time Warp. Over his 22 years in the majors, from his time as a rookie phenom in 1989 to his sleepy denouement in his return to Seattle, we accumulated as many memories of Griffey as he did accolades. And unlike Eric Davis and possibly Joe Mauer, the earliersubjects of this series, Griffey’s injury struggles in his 30s did not rob him of a spot in Cooperstown; he was elected easily on his first ballot with 99.3% of the vote.
But we could have gotten even more baseball from Griffey than we did.
In the 80s, when fans talked about “Ken Griffey,” they were still talking about Ken Griffey père, then a veteran outfielder whose career featured stints with the Reds, Yankees, Braves, and Mariners, who was wrapping up his Hall of Very Good career. But by the 90s, it was Junior’s turn. When sportswriters of that decade named batters who could challenge Hank Aaron‘s home run record, Griffey was typically the protagonist, not the eventually successful Barry Bonds. Just as Juan Soto and Ronald Acuña Jr. are phenoms for young baseball fans today, Griffey was the start for younger Gen-Xers like myself and for older millennials. Junior always felt special, a player drafted out of high school with the first pick of the 1987 draft, the son of a famous player, an outfielder blessed with the coincidence of being born in Stan Musial’s hometown, on Musial’s 49th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »
Kyle Farmer came in to pitch last August. The Reds were being mauled by the Chicago Cubs, and the 29-year-old Farmer is Cincinnati’s Mr. Versatility. Along with the cameo mound appearance, he caught and played all four infield positions over the course of the season.
What is surprising is that Farmer had never before pitched professionally. The 2013 draft pick — by the Los Angeles Dodgers out of the University of Georgia — has both the background and the bloodlines of an ideal mop-up artist. His father, Bryan Farmer, was an accomplished pitcher at Ole Miss who advanced as far as Triple-A in the Atlanta Braves system.
The chip off the old block was a two-way player as an Atlanta-area prep, and while his bat and glove ultimately became his calling cards, he was very much at home on the rubber.
“I loved pitching,” Farmer related to me recently. “I had a really good curveball — I could buckle some knees — and I also threw a lot of strikes, which is something my dad stressed the importance of doing. I was a closer my senior year of high school, but it turned out that I was a better shortstop than pitcher. My coach at Georgia wanted me to play shortstop every day, so that’s what I did.” Read the rest of this entry »
