Life isn’t fair, as it continually reminds us, but we try to keep sports as far from the harsh light of reality as we can. The New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays certainly don’t start in the same place when creating a roster, but when those players are on the field, everybody has to play by the same rules. Whether you’re facing Gerrit Cole or whatever fifth starter the Baltimore Orioles Mad-Libbed onto the roster, you have to get actual hits, score actual runs, and make actual Statcast-blessed defensive plays.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to keep the schedules teams face fair. Ideally, we’d want every team to face the same strength of schedule. With complete discretion over the design of the season, that’s still a nearly impossible task, without knowing which teams will be the best and worst ones ahead of time. And it becomes definitely impossible with unbalanced division schedules, series played mostly in three or four-game chunks, and a need to avoid having teams travel thousands of miles every day, like some character in the final season of Game of Thrones.

And even if you avoid all these things using some dark magics from the Necronomicon or Carson Cistulli’s personal notes, you’re still bound by the laws of the physical universe. Teams can’t play themselves, so even if every team played every other team the same number of games each season, the Yankees get a bonus by not having to play the Yankees, while Orioles’ hitters never get the opportunity to feast on Orioles pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Baseball Invokes UEC Contract Provisions

Per a report by Ken Rosenthal, Major League Baseball will invoke a force majeure provision in the Uniform Employee Contract signed by all non-player personnel on May 1. The provision allows for the suspension of contracts in extraordinary circumstances. The provision has been available to teams since the declaration of a national state of emergency on March 13, but until now hadn’t been used.

The consequences of this decision aren’t yet known. Teams could do anything from leaving everything exactly as-is to furloughing all of their non-player workers, though healthcare benefits will remain the same. Still, even if teams don’t immediately act, it’s a tough situation for workers, including front office personnel, coaches, and scouts, who must now face the prospect of reduced salary or even unemployment while planning for an uncertain season. (Non-player personnel are not unionized.)

The Braves, Giants, and Phillies have already committed to paying their employees until May 31. Other teams will surely follow suit. But it’s hard to read this move as anything other than a bargaining chip for teams. With the specter of unemployment looming over them, employees might be more amenable to changing the terms of their contracts. The Players’ Association has already reached an agreement with MLB on salary changes in the event of a shortened season, and it appears that non-player employees may soon need to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. 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 — Anthony Kay, Pablo López, and Zac Lowther — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

———

Anthony Kay, Toronto Blue Jays

“I’ve been throwing this changeup ever since I’ve been pitching. I never really had a curveball until I was 16 or 17 years old. Growing up, it was mainly just fastball-changeup because my dad didn’t want me [throwing curveballs]. My older brother played, and he also didn’t have a curveball until he got older.

“I first learned a circle change, and I still pretty much throw it to this day. Of course, there has been a little bit of variation. When I came back from [Tommy John surgery] in 2017 it was pretty inconsistent, and I was trying to find a grip that made it more reliable. I used to be on the seams, like a two-seamer, and now I’m kind of moved over to where it’s almost the same, but just off the seams. I was cutting it a lot, and I think being on the seams was a big reason for that. Now that I’m off them, I feel I get a truer release to it.

“It was mostly an inconsistency issue. There were some days where it would be really good, and there were days where it wouldn’t be good at all; it would cut. So I figured I might as well just mess around with it a little bit and try and get it more consistent. I don’t know that I really understand why [the adjustment makes made it more consistent], but it did. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not privy as to whether the Cincinnati Reds assign a grade to character in their draft reports. I also don’t know how much the San Diego Padres weigh that attribute when pondering possible acquisitions. I do know that Taylor Trammell projects as more than a quality big-league outfielder. He projects as a role model.

Trammell became a Padre last summer. Part of the trade-deadline deal that sent Trevor Bauer to the Queen City, he’d been selected 35th overall by the Reds in the 2016 draft out of Kennesaw, Georgia’s Mount Paran Christian School. Blessed with plus raw tools, Trammell is slotted No. 69 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

A prima donna he’s not. When he reaches the big leagues, Trammell will do so with a genuine appreciation for what life has presented him. Moreover, he doesn’t just embrace the game of baseball. He embraces the people who come to see it played.

“I have thoughts on fans,” Trammell told me in Padres camp last month. “I love them. There are people who come to games and want to heckle, and they have the right to do that. Do I agree with it? No, but if you want to pay money to come yell at us, I mean, do whatever you want. Go to a boxing match. Go to a baseball game. Go to a basketball game. Any game. When there are a whole bunch of fans in the stands, whether they’re rooting for you or not rooting for you, it’s great for baseball. They want to see a game and we’re putting on a show for them.”

If you’re rolling your eyes with skepticism upon reading that, you shouldn’t be. By all accounts, that’s who Trammell is. Part of a working-class family — his father is a post office employee, his mother once balanced two jobs — he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. The values he grew up with remain the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, FanGraphs’ lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and former FanGraphs prospect writer Kiley McDaniel released their book Future Value: The Battle for Baseball’s Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar.

In this excerpt from the chapter “Everybody Wants a Job in Baseball (But Nobody Wants to Die),” presented with permission from Triumph Books, Eric and Kiley discuss the different paths to working in baseball, and how to become a scout – from the tools and skills you’ll need to the people who can help clear the way.

…

Plotting a Path

Depending on what your career goals and timetable are, and despite the fact that everyone in baseball took a unique path, there are lanes to place yourself in to increase your odds at success.

If your goal is to be a GM (this is the most common dream), then you need to figure out what your separating skill will be (you don’t have one right now) and go down the path to be an expert in that area. Increasingly, being an ace scout isn’t a recipe to run a team, so that’s not the smartest way to position yourself for a move up the ladder to GM. You can come up in scouting departments or player development, but be based in the office so you have a management point of view, are getting face time around those people, and are in those meetings. You may need to be a coach or scout as a first step, but know that your path needs to get you into the office sooner than later.

More commonly, GMs come from people who are office-lifer types, who come up as assistants in baseball operations (general contributors across departments), a step up to coordinator or assistant director (managing schedules and interns or entry-level employees, introduced to decision-making meetings), then becoming director of baseball operations (in charge of budgets, rules, running the office day-to-day, pitching in on hiring and higher-level decisions) then assistant GM, where your specialty (running the office, rules, overseeing a scouting or player dev department) is the flavor that your job takes, along with the thing that can headline your résumé for GM.

A sitting GM once described to us that he and his three AGMs are in charge of servicing the various departments (analytics, big league operations, international scouting, domestic scouting, pro scouting, player development). There’s more departments than the four of them, so they’re playing a zone coverage, constantly going between all the areas, making sure each department has what they need to succeed and, ideally, not needing further direction or correction. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no joy in Mudville or anywhere else in the United States as far as the 2020 baseball season goes, but halfway around the globe, the story is very different. The Chinese Professional Baseball League regular season got underway on April 11 in Taiwan, and the Korea Baseball Organization is poised to resume its exhibition season in South Korea on April 21, also without fans in attendance, with an eye towards beginning its regular season in early May. The twist is that both leagues are playing to empty ballparks due to prohibitions against large gatherings as a means of combating the spread of the novel coronavirus. But where Major League Baseball is staring down the very real possibility that its entire season could be wiped out due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both foreign leagues have been able to reopen thanks to their respective countries’ success in containing the outbreak, even if it’s not quite business as usual. Now, through the magic of streaming video, and possibly television, they’re poised to become the center of the baseball world.

Already, the five-team CPBL has begun streaming games on Twitter (in English, via Eleven Sports) and YouTube. For about $35, one can subscribe to CPBL TV (here’s a step-by-step guide in case you’re intimidated by the language barrier). The 10-team KBO began streaming intrasquad exhibitions on YouTube on March 23 — a Lotte Giants intrasquad game featuring former major leaguers Dan Straily and Adrian Sampson starting for the opposing teams — after its exhibition season was postponed. Naver, one of their internet portals, will stream KBO games domestically but right now no agreement for overseas has been announced, though ESPN has approached the league about airing games in the U.S.

Earlier this week, in an effort to give myself a crash course in the KBO — beyond its epic bat flips, of course — and then share it with our audience, I conducted email interviews with three team employees, two of whom will be familiar to FanGraphs readers. Both Josh Herzenberg and Sung Min Kim wrote for this site as recently as last year and now work for the Lotte Giants. Herzenberg, who spent time in the Dodgers’ amateur scouting and player development departments before contributing to FanGraphs, was hired this past winter to be the team’s pitching coordinator and quality control coach, while Kim, a South Korea native who grew up in the States, graduated from the University of Maryland in 2015, and wrote for River Avenue Blues, VICE Sports, the Washington Post, and FanGraphs before being hired into the Giants’ R&D department last fall; while at FanGraphs, he documented the experiences of foreign-born KBO playersas well as the fan culture, the de-juiced baseball, and more. The third participant was Aaron Tassano, an Arizona-based international scout for the Samsung Lions who lived in South Korea for about eight years and previously worked for the Cubs, Rays, and Astros. All three were generous with their time in answering my questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is a statistics-heavy game, and that’s true even for those who don’t think of themselves as being part of the saber set. Because the game’s rules have had a relatively high degree of consistency across eras, the sport’s career milestones have also enjoyed a certain constancy throughout its history. That doesn’t mean that 600 homers from a player whose prime came in the 1960s are exactly the same as the 600 homers a player in the Wild Card era hit, but when you’re talking 600 homers, you’re always talking about someone who was really, really good at hitting home runs.

And while we would like to think that Hall of Fame voting is based off deep analysis and not round numbers, the fact remains that milestones still play a large part in who ends up in Cooperstown. Whether a player hits 470 homers or 520 homers still means something.

For precisely how much missed time has mattered in Hall of Fame voting, you should read my colleague Jay Jaffe’s three-part series on missed time and the Hall of Fame. In those three parts, Jay tackled how missed years due to wars and strikes were handled , and how today’s hitters and pitchers might be treated in Cooperstown terms. So go read those first. I’ll wait.

[…]
[…]

Meg will probably now inform me that I don’t need to actually insert punctuation that represents foot-tapping, so let’s get to some data! That’s what a projection system is for, after all.

Given the world that we’re in, one of my many research projects this spring has been trying to better gauge how missed seasons ought to be treated. Forecasting those seasons is difficult in the best of times; the missed time is typically due to injury or suspension or war. Now, everyone is hanging out at home trying to not catch the current super-virus or crippling ennui.

And I wasn’t entirely sure whether the long layoff would affect all types of players to the same degree. Re-projecting stars for 1982 and 1995 using ZiPS — I didn’t have ZiPS in 1995 though I assume you’ll excuse me for not having a projection system when I was four — I tried to gauge whether missed time affected players of different qualities in different ways. Together with other data (suspensions, premature retirements, and war), I found that my normal missed time algorithm slightly overrated stars’ “return” projections. Apparently, the elite do have more to lose with lost time.

With those results in mind, and to get an idea of how the projections would change in a missed season, I projected the probabilities of some of the active players with the best chances of hitting major milestones doing so. These projections reflect both the lost season and the slightly decreased projection relative to the rest of baseball upon return. These projections also contain an algorithm that makes it more likely a player nearing a milestone will return for an additional season. Further, I told ZiPS that veterans will finish their contracts:

With a full 2020 season, there was approximately a 57% projected chance that one of these 16 players would finish their careers with at least 700 home runs. A single missed year drops that by more than half, to 26%. A lot of that is Albert Pujols. 44 homers isn’t a lot, but he’s only signed through 2021 and let’s be honest, if he wasn’t a future Hall of Famer with a big contract, he’d have spent his summers playing golf the last three or four years. Losing 2020 washes out most of his probability of hitting 700.

But even for the future immortals with more time remaining, it’s a pretty big deal. To hit 700 homers, a lot has to go right; otherwise, we’d have more than three players in history beyond that threshold. Losing a year is a significant loss, even for a younger player. Lopping 40 homers off the career totals of Cody Bellinger or Ronald Acuña Jr. presents a significant handicap.

For the lighter milestones, it’s less of a kneecapping since you don’t need to be quite as fortunate to hit 500 homers. The exception is Miguel Cabrera. ZiPS was already looking at him askance given that his offensive profile has confusingly become Really Slow Craig Counsell, and sees hitting 500 as being difficult if 2020 is lost. That would have been a surprise a few years ago!

For the 21 hitters listed here, ZiPS projects that, on average, two who would have achieved the 3,000-hit feat will now fail to do so as a result of a lost 2020 season. For players near 2,000 hits like Joey Votto (1,866) and Yadi Molina (1,963), that’s unlikely to matter; Molina might retire in that case, but ZiPS isn’t capable of modeling this decision of his. The larger hits are taken by mid-career players like José Altuve and Manny Machado, players who are in their prime but old enough that the calendar is a concern.

It would be especially bad news for Nick Markakis in his quest to be the worst 3,000-hit player in major league history. Johnny Damon fell short in his quest to sneak up on 3000 hits and no 2020 could dive-bomb Markakis’s quest for the last 600ish hits:

Despite the introduction of the five-man rotation, we’ve been blessed with a surprisingly large number of 300-game winners in our lifetime, most recently the impressive Hall of Fame crew of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Randy Johnson, with Roger Clemens on the outside for non-baseball reasons. We’re now in an era, however, when the careers of our elite pitchers did not brush up against the end of the pre-sabermetric era, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever before.

Right now there are only nine active pitchers with 150 wins and only two, Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke, who have passed 200 wins. Still, ZiPS thought that there was a 79% chance that one of those 11 pitchers would win 300 games, whether because of Verlander or Greinke being durable, Clayton Kershaw getting that last 5% back, Gerrit Cole establishing 2019-2020 as his new baseline, or maybe even Rick Porcello working his way to 300 wins by virtue of eating innings and having amassed 149 wins through age-30 thanks to an early start.

With a lost season, that becomes a coin flip (46%). The two best candidates, Verlander and Greinke, see the calendar flip unfortunately. It could still happen, but a lot more good fortune is needed.

The one thing the modern era is good for is strikeout records, because there are a lot of punch outs. What does a lost year do for those chases?

Nobody has established even a 1% chance of catching Nolan Ryan’s 5714 — and nobody will because of the almost 5,400 innings Ryan needed to reach that mark. The odds of catching the 3,000 and 4,000 strikeout marks, still relatively exclusive thresholds, aren’t as impacted as some of the other milestones.

Starting yesterday, I began a hunt through old World Series games for strange tactical decisions. Things were weird in the early ‘90s — MVP candidates bunting, intentional walks so thick they blocked out the sun, and raft-loads of pitchers overstaying their welcome. How did things go in the next half-decade? Better. But not that much better — the event that inspired this project, Byung-Hyun Kim throwing 61 pitches and then pitching the next day, wasn’t until 2001. We’ve still got plenty of weirdness going on. With 1994 lost to the strike, we’ll jump back in in 1995.

1995

The Braves were back with a retooled roster — Chipper Jones, Fred McGriff, Ryan Klesko, and Javy Lopez headlined the new crop of hitters. Marquis Grissom manned center, put up a .317 OBP, and — you guessed it — led off. Mark Lemke (79 wRC+) batted second, and just… come on, Bobby Cox, stop messing with my mind.

Ryan Klesko hit .310/.396/.608 and batted sixth — sure wouldn’t hate getting him a few more at-bats. Even Charlie O’Brien, Greg Maddux’s personal catcher, was better with the stick this year than Grissom and Lemke — he hit seventh. Cleveland was just as bad — they had Omar Vizquel hit second while Manny Ramirez, in a season where he hit .308/.402/.558, languished in seventh. In fact, Vizquel was the worst regular hitter on the Indians, period.

Game 1 was a buttoned-up affair — there aren’t a lot of tactics to talk about when Greg Maddux throws a complete game in 95 pitches. The only real points of interest were two Cox pinch hitting decisions — he pulled Klesko for journeyman Mike Devereaux, then pulled O’Brien for light-hitting Luis Polonia. Both over-valued platoon edges relative to talent levels. The pinch hitting penalty wasn’t commonly known then, which doesn’t help. Read the rest of this entry »

Zac Lowther was described as having “vexing funk” when he was profiled here in August 2018. That hasn’t changed. The 23-year-old southpaw — now No. 12 on our Orioles Top Prospects list — still disrupts timing with his delivery. Moreover, he continues to flummox hitters. In 148 innings last year at Double-A Bowie, Lowther logged a 2.55 ERA, fanned 154, and allowed just eight gophers.

Prior to last season, Eric Longenhagen described how Lowther “hides his arm behind his body… and has nearly seven feet of down-mound extension.” Last week, the 6-foot-2, 235 pound lefty shared that his recent developmental strides have been more mental than physical in nature.

“A lot of it is working on consistency and how I approach everything,” Lowther told me. “I’m not throwing 96 [mph] — I’m that funky guy who kind of goes against the scouting reports — so I have to place to ball and rely on all three pitches. I need to stay within myself; I need to be in the present, but also know how that pitch takes me to the next pitch.”

Lowther’s repertoire consists of a fastball, a curveball, and a changeup. The first of the three is his best weapon, despite its pedestrian (88-93) velocity. And more than deception is at play. The erstwhile Xavier Musketeer gets good carry, and as Longenhagen pointed out, sometimes sinking and tailing action. Read the rest of this entry »

In the four years since I last attempted to determine major league teams’ local television revenue, much has changed in the Regional Sports Network landscape. Four years ago, FOX was the dominant player, owning a majority of the channels, with NBC and AT&T having their own shares as well. Last year, Sinclair completed the purchase of FOX’s RSNs, bought into the Yankees’ YES Network, and partnered with the Cubs to help create them their own network. That big FOX RSN purchase came at a price half that of the initial estimates; Sinclair also attempted to purchase the AT&T RSNs up for auction before AT&T determined the potential selling price was too low.

In addition to the network ownership changes, seven of the 30 teams’ contracts have been up for renewal, with substantial changes to what we previously knew about the broadcast situations of the Braves, Nationals, and Rockies. As was the case four years ago, these numbers are estimates and do not include money from ownership stakes in networks. For the former, I’ll go into a little more detail where I had to speculate the most. For the latter, I’ll illustrate how an ownership share can be incredibly important. For all long-term deals, I assumed a 4% annual increase across the length of the contract. And while much is uncertain regarding this season and its duration, the estimates here are for a full, standard season (2019), both for ease of comparison and their utility in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »