While the end of the ownership lockout looks increasingly far away after the owners’ latest proposal to the players underwhelmed, at some point, major league baseball will return. And when it does, there’s a lot of unfinished business remaining before actual games can be played; at this point, 56% of the positive projected player WAR in 2022 is still available on the free agent market. One prominent name in that group is outfielder Seiya Suzuki. When teams can talk to and sign free agents again, the four-time Nippon Professional Baseball All-Star is expected to draw heavy interest and provide an exciting alternative to the other top outfielders remaining on the market, such as Michael Conforto and Nick Castellanos.

The Hiroshima Toyo Carp may have struggled to get out of the .500 range in recent years, but Suzuki has provided plenty of highlights and one can easily understand why a player like him would intrigue teams in the other hemisphere. Last season, his 38 home runs lapped the rest of his team (Ryosuke Kikuchi was next with 16 dingers), while his 1.073 OPS bested all of his teammates by more than 200 points; that last number also led NPB by a significant margin. Suzuki will play most of the 2022 season as a 27-year-old. Even if he’s not necessarily a significant improvement on Conforto or Castellanos, Conforto’s 2021 dimmed his profile somewhat and Castellanos is a few years older. Read the rest of this entry »

You didn’t have to be a cynical curmudgeon to know that Saturday’s meeting between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association would not magically produce a deal for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, thus allowing spring training to begin on time. With its “defensive” lockout and subsequent failure to officially offer more than one proposal to the players on core economic issues over the previous 71 days — a counterintuitive definition of “jumpstart,” never before observed in the wild — the league had already made abundantly clear the fantastical nature of any dates attached to pitchers and catchers reporting. By prematurely calling for the entry of a federal mediator into the proceedings after the barest attempt to negotiate, by telling the media that “phones work two ways” when it comes to bargaining, by downplaying the financial benefits of owning a team relative to investing in the stock market, and by mischaracterizing the owners’ latest proposal for the Competitive Balance Tax rates, commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners have made it clear in recent weeks that they aren’t ready to play ball. And so, for the foreseeable future, there will be no major league baseball played.

Manfred has yet to make a formal announcement to that effect because no spring training games have been scrubbed thus far, but via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, that could happen by the end of this week, as the exhibition season is scheduled to begin on February 26. During his press conference last week, Manfred didn’t offer a deadline for an agreement that would keep the March 31 date for Opening Day intact, though he did express a desire for a minimum of four weeks of spring training, suggesting that the league has absorbed at least one lesson from the frenzied and contentious run-up to the 2020 season and the soaring injury rates that followed. Nightengale reported February 28 as the deadline for an agreement that would preserve Opening Day, though with 197 unsigned arbitration-eligible players and nearly 300 free agents (his figures), such a compressed timeframe would create a level of chaos and logistical difficulty that would make Team Entropy cringe.

If you’re expecting this column to both-sides the failure to hash out a new CBA, to assign equal blame to the MLBPA as to the owners, you’ll have to look elsewhere. This is a lockout, not a strike. It is entirely of the owners’ doing — you could say they own it — and entirely unnecessary, because the 2022 season could be played under the terms of the previous CBA until a new one is in place. The two sides would need to agree to restore the old agreement’s Competitive Balance Tax, Joint Drug Agreement, and domestic violence policy — all of which have technically expired as of December 1, 2021 — until such a point, and that may not be trivial, but it would be a rare glimpse of good faith. Based on the minimal concessions the owners have been offering, not to mention the widening gap between revenues and salaries over the past decade, they must like that old CBA pretty well, because they seem reluctant to change things too radically.

Yes, the two sides have agreed that the new CBA will include a draft lottery of some kind as well as a universal designated hitter and the elimination of draft pick compensation, as Manfred announced on Thursday. But the owners have refused to budge from the status quo on the years to free agency and arbitration, as well as revenue sharing, and the two sides remain miles apart on the core economic issues addressed in Saturday’s proposal. The players are not amused. Via The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal:

There are some [players] who would have preferred that the union had not made its last counter offer at all. Some of the same sentiment cropped up Saturday, based on a feeling that MLB is moving too little to consistently warrant counter-offers.

Because Saturday, when MLB made its first economics proposal of February, was predictably just like everything else that preceded it. MLB made moves it thought the players should consider significant, and the players felt, again, lowballed and frustrated. Some players fear that with their counter-offers they essentially are bidding against themselves. The league says it has the same fear with its own offers to players.

While there’s certainly interplay between the various economic facets under discussion, no single issue illustrates the distance between the two sides, and MLB’s unwillingness to yield, more than the Competitive Balance Tax structure. Over the past decade, the tax threshold has not kept pace with revenue (or, for that matter, inflation), and it has functioned as a soft salary cap that even the wealthiest teams have been willing to approach but very rarely go over; per The Athletic, the Phillies, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Astros all finished with payrolls less than $4 million below the first CBT threshold in 2021. From that roundtable, using figures from Forbes and the Associated Press, here’s The Athletic’s oft-circulated graph showing the separation between the revenue and the lowest threshold:

In Thursday’s press conference, Manfred mischaracterized the owners’ previous proposal as being similar to last year’s structure with regards to the tax. Via ESPN’s Jeff Passan:

Manfred said the league had proposed taxation rates that were “status quo.” This was incorrect. In recent years, the tax rate was 20% for teams over the $210 million threshold, 32% at $230 million and 62.5% at $250 million. MLB’s proposal calls for a 50% rate at a $214 million threshold, 75% at $234 million and 100% at $254 million. Additionally, teams would lose a third-round draft pick at the first threshold, a second-round pick at the second and a first-round pick at the largest.

Admittedly, things get a bit confusing when trying to distinguish between the penalties for moving up a tier ($20 million or $40 million above the first tax threshold) and those for repeated annual violations. Using MLB Trade Rumors, The Athletic and the expired CBA, I’ve attempted to summarize the CBT’s recent history and the basics of the three economic proposals that have been officially exchanged since the beginning of the lockout (two offered by the league, one by the players). First, here’s a look at the thresholds:

As you can see, the first threshold has barely budged in recent years, falling short of even a typical 2% or 3% cost-of-living adjustment, let alone the rate of inflation. As MLB Trade Rumors’ Tim Dierkes explained, “A simple 5% increase per year beginning in 2012 would have put the 2021 base tax threshold around $290MM, yet it sat only at $210MM.”

Note that rather than ordering the official proposals chronologically in the table above, I’ve kept the owners’ two proposals adjacent to illustrate how little they differ. The second one increased the thresholds for each of the last three years of the upcoming CBA by a whole $2 million a year. It took the owners a month to come up with that, though to be fair, they did also do away with teams exceeding the first tier losing a third-round draft pick (worth $3.8 million by Craig Edwards’ 2019 estimates, and probably not much more now).

Here’s what those penalties look like:

While the players’ first post-lockout proposal attempts to make up a bit of the lost ground with a substantial jump in the CBT threshold, it maintains the same tiered and annual penalties that were in the last CBA. Meanwhile, the tiered penalties in the league’s two offers have become more severe even while the thresholds have barely moved. Even with the removal of escalating repeater penalties and the draft pick penalties for teams exceeding the first threshold, the owners’ proposal appears designed to continue the effects of the last CBA, during which the average salary fell by 6.4% relative to 2017, with the brunt borne by baseball’s middle class; via the Associated Press’ Ronald Blum, the median salary dropped 30%, from $1.65 million in 2015 to $1.15 million in ’21.

Regardless of the other bells and whistles in the deal, the players simply don’t believe that the structure of the owners’ proposals will allow them to grow their salaries. As pitcher Alex Wood put it via Twitter on Saturday:

If penalties increase under the CBT/Luxury tax IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE THRESHOLD IS MY GOD. Make the threshold a billion dollars it doesn’t matter. Teams already don’t spend bc they use the current penalties as an excuse not to. Imagine if the penalties got worse. SMH.

— Alex Wood (@Awood45) February 12, 2022

Beyond the tax structure, the two sides are far apart on the minimum salary, which in 2021 stood at $570,500, the lowest of the “big four” North American team sports according to The Score’s Travis Sawchick (the NBA’s $925,258 is the highest, and even the NHL comes in at $750,000), and only about 12% higher than in 2016, with annual growth of less than 2% in each of the past four years. What’s more, none of those other sports rely on that minimum-salary labor more than baseball. Via Sawchik, 63.2% of all players in 2019 had less than three years of service time, meaning that they were generally making some function of the league minimum. Those players accounted for 53.6% of all service time accumulated, but only 9.8% of player pay. Via Ben Clemens, in 2021, players making the minimum accounted for 47% of service time accrued, but only 7.5% of player pay. Via Nightengale, 1,145 of the 1,670 players on rosters last year (68.6%) made less than $1 million — a reminder that calling this a fight between millionaires and billionaires is off base.

The union has proposed increasing the minimum salary to $775,000. After making a preliminary offer of $600,000 during negotiations in mid-December, the league offered straight salaries of $615,000, $650,000 and $700,000 for players with 0-1, 1-2, and 2-3 years of service time in their mid-January proposal. On Saturday, they proposed raising the salary for the third year to $725,000, and offered an alternative as well, a flat minimum of $630,000 in the first year of the deal; that’s 10.4% above the current minimum, a jump that would be the largest since the 2012 CBA increased the minimum from $414,00 to $480,000 (15.9%), but it’s less than $6,400 ahead of what the minimum would be if the last CBA’s 2017 minimum ($535,000) had grown with inflation. Under that structure, teams would be able to give raises for subsequent years, but would also be able to unilaterally renew contracts with smaller or no raises as well, just as they have for ages.

Along with the proposals for the minimum salary come proposals for a pre-arbitration bonus pool, where the gap between the two sides might best be described as a chasm. Via ESPN’s Jesse Rogers:

The league increased its offer from $10 million to $15 million while offering a six-person panel — three from each side — to develop a mutually agreeable WAR statistic to allocate the funds. The top 30 players in WAR and award winners would be eligible for the bonus pool.

The union has asked for a $100 million bonus pool, down from a previous offer of $105 million.

The latter reduction came as part of negotiations since the MLBPA’s first formal post-lockout offer. That the two sides have reduced the gap from $95 to $85 million doesn’t exactly count as progress, though to call back to the aforementioned Clemens analysis of the players’ first proposal, the amount in question is now less than 1% of the league’s annual revenues. The structure of how the money would be divided up isn’t clear, but the league’s figure would mean an average of an additional $500,000 for those top 30 players, while the union’s figure would mean an average of $3.33 million — a substantial difference.

Here it’s worth mentioning that nobody who’s in the business of presenting WAR values, not FanGraphs or Baseball Reference or Baseball Prospectus, is comfortable with the idea of its estimates of performance values being deployed in the direct service of determining player salaries. As our own managing editor Meg Rowley said on a recent Effectively Wild podcast:

“This assumes a precision to WAR that, I think people who think WAR is a really useful framework through which to understand baseball would be very quick to tell you, is not present. So what happens if you are the 31st-most valuable pre-arb player and the difference in value between you and the 30th-most valuable is less than half a win? You’re probably not the same, but you’re within our margin for error on this.”

Other elements of MLB’s proposal that ESPN highlighted pertained to service time manipulation, roster continuity, pre-draft physicals and a restoration of the draft-and-follow system. Via Rogers, “The league increased the incentive for teams to keep their best prospects in the majors, offering them two draft picks within the player’s first three years if he finishes in the top three in Cy Young, Rookie of the Year or MVP voting. Previously, the league had offered one extra draft pick per player within his first three years.”

The example Rogers offered was Kris Bryant; had the Cubs kept him up for all of 2015 instead of farming him out for the first 12 days of the season to [check notes] work on his defense — thus leaving him one day short of collecting a full year of service time — they’d have netted one pick for him winning that year’s Rookie of the Year award, and a second one for his MVP award in 2016.

On the subject of roster continuity, the CBA would limit the total number of times a player could be optioned to the minors in a season to five, which could make a significant difference in the quality of life for pitchers at the bottom of the bullpen food chain, the ones vulnerable to getting sent down if they’ve thrown so many pitches that they won’t be available for a day or two. To cite just a few extreme examples, the past year alone saw the Rays option Louis Head 12 times, with the Dodgers optioning Mitch White 11 times, and likewise for the Yankees with regards to Albert Abreu.

On the subject of pre-draft physicals, in what could be called the Kumar Rocker rule (though, as is often the case for players expected to be drafted highly, the Vanderbilt pitcher did not submit to one), the league has proposed that a player who submits to one and is subsequently drafted will be guaranteed at least 75% of slot value and can’t be failed by the team in a post-draft physical. As for the draft-and-follow, the league has proposed reinstating the ability of team to draft a player who’s not yet ready for professional baseball and then sign him the next year. In this case, the team can draft such a player, send him to junior college for one year, and sign him for as much as $225,000 the next year.

For as helpful as those elements may or may not be, they’re of much smaller scale compared to the CBT, the minimum salary, and the structure of arbitration, regarding which “the league has said it won’t move off the status quo,” according to Rogers.

Even with the lack of progress and the players voicing their frustrations, it’s worth noting that the immediate asymmetry of the situation favors the union. Players don’t get paid for spring training, so they won’t feel the bite of missed games as suddenly as the owners will when their exhibition dates begin to dwindle. The owners obviously have much more ability to absorb the loss of games long-term than the players do, but given the empty ballparks of 2020 and the reduced attendance last year, their resolve may be tested more quickly than that of the union. The players appear galvanized and geared up for a stand via which they can regain some of the ground they’ve lost, and guarantee their rank and file significantly more security, financial and otherwise, than they currently enjoy.

I have a baseball pet peeve. It’s not the ongoing lockout, though that’s annoying. It’s not batters who endlessly step out of the box to adjust the velcro on their batting gloves. It’s not even my team failing to get a run home from third with less than two outs. My pet peeve is when broadcasts come up with team record statistics that are less than useless.

Today, I’m doing my part to fight back. This article isn’t about analyzing which of those stats are real and which aren’t; it isn’t even about analysis at all. It’s just some dumb statistics of my own that I made up to counter that trope that annoys me more than anything else: “When (basically any event in baseball) happens, the team has an incredible record!” I’ll also give you a baseline, so that when you hear one of these cherry-picked statistics in the future, you can put it into context. Let’s start with home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

Kody Clemens’s game is built around pop. Playing almost exclusively with Triple-A Toledo, the 25-year-old second baseman went deep 18 times last year in just 424 plate appearances. He knows what he brings to the table. Asked for a self-scouting report, Clemens began by saying he’s “grown to learn that a good part of my game is power.”

Born to a baseball family — his father is the seven-time Cy Young Award winner who shares his surname — Clemens grew up swinging from the left side. That was a matter of happenstance, not of design.

“It just came out that way,” explained Clemens, who is No. 21 on our Detroit Tigers Top Prospects list. “When I was young, my dad put a little bat in my hand and said, ‘Hey, hit the ball.’ I guess I stood up from the left side of the plate. It felt comfortable, so I kept swinging that way.”

The tutelage that followed was predictably based on the perspective of a pitcher. “The Rocket” primarily taught his three sons — Kacy and Koby have also played professionally — about attack plans and how to approach at bats. Mechanics were never much of a focus. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember that one time Lance McCullers Jr. threw 24 curveballs in a row? It was great, and it’s part of Astros (and Lance McCullers Jr.) lore. You’re supposed to intersperse breaking balls with fastballs, to make each play off of the other. Going against that – throwing the same thing over and over again and daring the other team to hit it – is delightful.

What’s so delightful about it? Throwing the same pitch a ton of times isn’t really it. Would you care if peak Mariano Rivera threw 24 cutters in a row, or Jake McGee threw 24 fastballs in a row? Probably not. Fastballs – and for this article, I’m treating a cutter as a fastball – are the default pitch, and if batters aren’t hitting them, why throw something else?

I’d argue that when you’re feeling it, curves and sliders can behave similarly, at least when it comes to the feasibility of throwing them over and over again. McCullers didn’t bounce 24 curves in a row – he commanded plenty of them in the strike zone. His curve isn’t just hard to hit because batters are looking for a sinker. It’s hard to hit because it moves like a hummingbird hunting nectar. It’s definitely cool seeing all those curveballs in a row, but it’s not as though he was relying on the deception of curveball versus fastball to sneak it past batters. They knew what was coming; they just couldn’t do anything with it.

That’s fine, I guess, if you’re into excellent, borderline-unhittable pitches. For truly impressive streaks of identical pitches, though, I’m partial to changeups. The reason for the pitch is right in the name – it’s a change from what the batter is expecting. In Spanish, it’s even more straightforward: cambio. There’s something magical about seeing a batter gear up for a fastball, only to flail awkwardly at something 10 mph slower.

Do it twice, and you’re using the hitter’s expectations against them in a different way, betting that with the changeup out of the way, they’ll go back and look for a fastball. Do it three times, and I’m not sure what you’re looking for. In unrelated news, let’s talk about César Valdez. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s play a quick game. I’ll list two potential starting rotations, and you tell me which one you’d prefer. First contender:

This would be one of the top few rotations in baseball. Nola might be slightly short of the average “top starter on a playoff team,” but it’s close. Webb turned unhittable last year. You can take your pick between Urías and Eovaldi as your third starter; I’m significantly higher on Urías than our Depth Charts projections. Manaea is wildly overqualified as a fifth starter.

Okay, so the bar is pretty high. What about rotation number two?

Burnes is one of the best five starters in baseball; maybe three teams wouldn’t plug him in atop their rotation, though he has some volume concerns. Snell is a risk as well, but one with a tremendously high ceiling. McCullers and Valdez as your third and fourth starters is an appetizing proposition, and Manoah provides yet more upside. This one projects for less WAR than the first rotation, but in fewer innings; it might tax your bullpen more, but in exchange you’re getting some top-shelf arms. I’d prefer rotation number one, but I think it’s quite close, and I wouldn’t fault you for picking number two.

Is that it? Are we just playing “pick your favorite fantasy team” here at FanGraphs? Don’t rule it out if the lockout keeps going, but no, I picked these groups to illustrate a point. The first group of starters? They were all among the top 15 pitchers in the majors last year at one particular skill: throwing first-pitch strikes. The second group? They finished in the bottom 15. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I’m looking into something that doesn’t require much explaining. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I’m looking into a situation that’s so good for the pitching team that in our minds, we go ahead and write it off. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, though; it can just be hard to see why it’s interesting, which is why I’m writing about it. That’s right: let’s talk about when Jacob deGrom gets ahead in the count.

When the best pitcher in baseball has the advantage on a hitter, that hitter doesn’t do well – a real shocker, that one. With two strikes, deGrom turned batters into sub-pitcher-hitting-level zeroes in 2021:

Those aren’t typos. When deGrom hit two strikes before three balls, he struck out roughly three-quarters of the batters he faced and walked almost none. Survive until 3-2, and you stood a chance – he had a 12% walk rate and a mere 52% strikeout rate after 3-2 counts – but for the most part, facing deGrom with two strikes is a one-way ticket back to the bench. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t tell you with any kind of certainty when the 2022 season will start or how many games will be played. I can’t even definitively say if there will be a season at all. But one thing seems nearly inevitable: When we have baseball, it’s not going to be identical to the product we saw last year. For one, the designated hitter, used for the shortened 2020 season in the National League, appears likely to become a permanent part of both leagues, ending the doctrinal schism between the junior and senior circuits. Another likely difference? The playoff structure.

It’s no secret that the owners are highly interested in expanding the playoffs again. Over at The Athletic, Kaitlyn McGrath, David O’Brien, and Katie Woo teamed up to discuss the various goings-on here. The owners have proposed expanding the playoffs to 14 teams, with only the team with the best record in each league getting a bye and everyone else thrown into a best-of-three Wild Card series. The players, meanwhile, have proposed conceding an expanded playoff structure of 12 teams, with multiple byes for top teams.

From the standpoint of the owners’ interests, the best teams winning often isn’t necessarily the ideal outcome. The World Series championship is basically a MacGuffin. MLB doesn’t need it to actually be important, it just needs the public to believe it is. And since the public appears to believe that the best team will win a short series far more often than it actually does, the more teams you can stuff into a postseason without making it seem like chance (rather than talent) is driving the outcome, the better. Who cares if a 107-win team loses two of three games to an 83-win team? They were probably chokers anyway! Read the rest of this entry »

Fred McGriff will likely be on the ballot when the Today’s Game Committee votes in December, and his candidacy is already creating a bit of a buzz. For good reason. The “Crime Dog” finished his career with 493 long balls — he won a home-run title in both leagues along the way — as well as 1,550 RBIs and three Silver Slugger awards. Moreover, he escaped the steroid era unscathed. Highly respected by his peers and fans alike, McGriff is viewed by many as deserving of a plaque in Cooperstown. That he never garnered more than 39.8% support in BBWAA balloting is seen as an injustice.

Which brings us to a player who received a paltry 3.8% in his lone year on the ballot. Was Carlos Delgado just as good, if not better than McGriff? WAR says he wasn’t — McGriff had 56.9 to Delgado’s 44.1 — but in terms of offensive bona fides, the numbers suggest he was. Here is a snapshot of what they did at the plate:

Delgado: 2,035 games, 2.038 hits, 473 HR, .280/.383/.546, .391 wOBA, 138 OPS+.
McGriff: 2,460 games, 2,490 hits, 493 HR, .284/.377/.509, .383 wOBA, 134 OPS+.

A clear majority of the people who weighed in on my recent “Who Was The Better Hitter?” Twitter poll sided with Delgado. The Puerto Rico-born slugger — himself the winner of three Silver Sluggers — won out by a count of 75% to 25%. Might the results have been different had the poll read “Who Was The Better Player?” That’s an interesting question. Would the voters have prioritized their respective WAR totals or, given that both were first basemen, focused primarily on metrics such as wOBA and wRC+?

Regardless of how Delgado’s overall career compares to McGriff’s, one can make a strong argument that he too should be on the forthcoming Today’s Game ballot. Even if he were to ultimately fall short — a strong likelihood given the candidates expected to be considered — Delgado deserves another look after being a one-and-done on a stacked BBWAA ballot. Admirable for his off-the-field efforts — his résumé includes a non-profit foundation and a Roberto Clemente Award — Delgado was one of the best hitters of his era.

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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS

Slim Sallee went 2 for 5 against Sailor Stroud.

Gabby Street went 2 for 5 against Gus Salve.

Cy Seymour went 2 for 5 against Willie Sudhoff.

Mackey Sasser went 2 for 5 against Bob Scanlan.

Champ Summers went 2 for 5 against Lary Sorensen.

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ESPN’s Top 100 Players of All Time — a ranking compiled by dozens of the Worldwide Leader’s writers and editors — has spurred a lot of debate. That’s understandable, and to a large degree, it was by design. Subjective listings of this ilk typically make for quality water-cooler discourse (an activity currently best-defined as “arguing on Twitter”).

Count me among those who rolled their eyes when perusing the rankings. No disrespect to the people who put it together, but in my humble opinion, some of the placements are borderline absurd. With the caveat that everyone on the list was a great player, egregious examples include Ken Griffey Jr. (No. 13) ranked in front of, among others, Rickey Henderson (No. 23), and Derek Jeter (No.28) ranked in front of Joe Morgan (No. 37).

Griffey Jr. had 77.7 WAR; Henderson had 106.3 WAR.
Jeter had 73.0 WAR; Morgan had 98.8 WAR.

There are numerous other examples of WAR being under-weighed, and narrative — ditto a certain amount of recency bias — being over-weighed. Again, lists of this ilk are subjective. Even so, Henderson was clearly superior to Griffey Jr, and Morgan clearly superior to Jeter. Even if you’re inclined to quibble with WAR, those things seem fairly obvious.

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MLB and the MLBPA are currently at war, the former having implemented a lockout while the two sides negotiate a new CBA. With the scheduled start of spring training fast approaching, and progress seemingly at a standstill, fans are becoming increasingly impatient, if not frustrated and/or angry. With that in mind, I ran the following Twitter poll on Thursday afternoon:

With the caveat that bargaining is a two-way street, which side do you support in the CBA negotiations: MLB players, or MLB owners?

A total of 1,198 people weighed in, and the results spoke volumes. An overwhelming 94.5% voted MLB Players, while only 5.5% sided with MLB owners.

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Craig Albernaz had high praise for Logan Webb when I asked him about the 25-year-old Giants right-hander on Friday’s episode of FanGraphs Audio. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Albernaz is San Francisco’s bullpen coach/catching coach, and Webb is coming off a season where he won 11 of 14 decisions and registered a 3.03 ERA and 2.94 FIP over 148-and-a-third innings.

“Logan Webb is nasty,” Albernaz said on the podcast. “I think that’s it; Webby is just nasty. Just like any young pitcher, there is a maturation process of what they are, what they could be, and what they’re trying to be. He took some great strides last year [with] maturity, really getting confidence, and also taking ownership of his own development and how to attack hitters. Credit to Brian Bannister and our pitching guys, J.P. [Martinez] and [Andrew Bailey], for really pushing Webby all through 2020, and last year, to get him where he needs to be.

“His fastball — how it moves, how it plays in the zone — is elite. His breaking ball, his sweeper, is nasty, and it comes out of the same tunnel. His changeup is filthy, just his sell on it. The horizontal movement… it’s everything you want. He checks a lot of boxes. But what really made the strides last year, in my opinion, was his relentless attack of the strike zone. That’s a message [for] all of our pitchers. We want them to attack the strike zone. But Webby was just relentless on throwing all of his weapons in the strike zone, making hitters make decisions on pitches… He really stepped up for us down the stretch.”

Friday’s conversation with Albernaz also addressed Bannister, Buster Posey, Farhan Zaidi, organizational approaches, and more. The episode also includes Eric Longenhagen and Ben Clemens catching up on a variety of topics, including pitchers who throw both four-seamers and sinkers. The pod is well worth a listen.

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A quiz:

Which player holds the record for most extra-base hits in a single season?

The answer can be found below.

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NEWS NOTES

Jeff Francis has been elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. A Vancouver native who pitched in the big leagues from 2004-2015, Francis spent the bulk of his career with the Colorado Rockies, who drafted him ninth overall in 2002 out of the University of British Columbia.

Triple-A schedules have been expanded to 150 games — up from 144 — beginning with the 2022 season. Minor-league teams last played as many as 150 games in 1964.

The Milwaukee Brewers announced that Josh Maurer will be joining their radio broadcast team and will be calling approximately 60 games. The voice of the Triple-A Pawtucket/Worcester Red Sox since 2014, Maurer will join Gary Cohen, Dave Flemming, Will Flemming, Andy Freed, Glenn Geffner, Aaron Goldsmith, Dave Jageler, Jeff Levering, Mike Monaco, and Don Orsillo as former PawSox broadcasters now in MLB booths. Additionally, Dan Hoard is now the radio voice of the Super Bowl-bound Cincinnati Bengals.

David Green, an outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants from 1981-1987 died earlier this week at age 61. Originally signed by the Brewers, the Managua native was sent to St. Louis in December 1980 as part of a seven-player deal that included Rollie Fingers, Sixto Lezcano, and Ted Simmons. Green is one of 15 Nicaraguan-born players in MLB history.

MLB has promoted five umpires to full-time status: Ryan Addition, Sean Barber, John Libka, Ben May, and Roberto Ortiz. The five — all of whom have worked 300 or more MLB games as call-ups — are replacing Fieldin Culbreth, Kerwin Danley, Gerry Davis, Brian Gorman, and Joe West, who have retired. Ortiz will be MLB’s first full-time Puerto Rican-born umpire.

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The answer to the quiz is Babe Ruth, who had 119 extra-base hits in 1921. The Sultan of Swat produced 44 doubles, 16 triples, and 59 home runs that year.

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Adrián González announced his retirement yesterday, officially closing out an MLB career that spanned the 2004-2018 seasons. A five-time All-Star first baseman, González logged a 133 wRC+ over a 10-year prime that saw him play for the San Diego Padres, Boston Red Sox, and Los Angeles Dodgers. His Red Sox tenure was in some ways confounding. González was targeted for criticism by certain members of the Boston media, this despite his slashing .321/.382/.513 with 42 home runs in his two years with the club. The subject of a May 2011 FanGraphs Q&A — González was an outstanding hitter.

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Could Jack Harshman have become the first true, two-way player in the modern era? Looking at both his big-league numbers and his minor-league career, one can’t help but wonder.

Harshman played for five MLB teams from 1952-1960, and during that time he made 217 pitching appearances, 155 of them starts, posting a 69-65 record and a 3.50 ERA. A southpaw, Harshman was at his best in 1956 when he went 15-11 with a 132 ERA+ for the Chicago White Sox. That same year, he hit six of his 21 big-league home runs.

Harshman didn’t go up to the plate looking to hit singles, nor did he often look to move runners over with a well-placed bunt. He had just 18 sacrifices over his eight seasons, and 27.6% of his 76 career hits left the yard. Suffice to say, Hartman took healthy hacks.

His minor-league numbers were, in modern vernacular, sick. Harshman toed the rubber down on the farm, but he was primarily a slugging first baseman. In 1949, Harshman homered 40 times with the American Association’s Minneapolis Millers, and two years later he bashed 47 more with the Southern Association’s Nashville Volunteers. Enamored with his arm, the New York Giants converted him to a pitcher in 1952.

Harshman’s 1953 season, which he spent with the Volunteers, was his last in the minors. It was also his most eye-opening in terms of both-sides-of-the-ball production. On the mound, Harshman went 23-7 with a 3.27 ERA over 259 innings. At the plate, he slashed .315/.446/.631 with 12 home runs in 184 plate appearances.

Could Harshman have succeeded as both a pitcher and a position player in the big leagues? Possibly not, but he might have deserved an opportunity to try.

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Dave Foutz was a two-way player for the St. Louis Browns and the Brooklyn Grooms from 1884-1896. Nicknamed “Scissors,” the Carroll County, Maryland native played 596 games at first base, 320 in the outfield, and made 251 pitching appearances. As a hitter, Foutz finished his career with a 101 wRC+. As a pitcher, he augmented a 124 ERA+ with a 147-66 won-loss record. Moreover, Foutz’s .690 winning percentage is tied with Whitey Ford for third-highest in MLB history among pitchers with at least 100 wins. Only Al Spalding (.795% from 1871-1877) and Spud Chandler (.717% from 1937-1947) were credited with wins at a higher rate.

Speaking of Spud, the erstwhile New York Yankees hurler had a truly remarkable career. It was relatively brief — nine full seasons, plus five games split between 1944-1945 during WWII — but what he did during that time stands out like a sore thumb. Along with his W-L record (yes, the recipe requires a large grain of salt) Chandler logged a 132 ERA+, won an MVP award, and was on six World Series-winning teams. In 1943, the right-hander from Commerce, Georgia allowed one earned run while tossing a pair of complete-game victories in the Fall Classic.

Even more remarkable is that Chandler didn’t make his MLB debut until he was four months short of his 30th birthday. He threw his final pitch at age 40 in the 1947 World Series. The last batter he faced was Jackie Robinson.

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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE

Jim Trdinich is stepping down from his position as director of baseball communications for the Pittsburgh Pirates and will become the team’s first-ever historian. Jason Mackey has the story at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Baltimore Orioles outfielder Cedric Mullins had his breakout season while battling Crohn’s disease. Steve Melewski has the story at MASN Sports.

At The Athletic (subscription required), Dan Hayes and Michael Russo teamed up to tell us about Justin Morneau’s hockey Field Of Dreams.

Writing for Bally Sports, Gordon Edes expressed how helping minor leaguers is still a major problem in baseball.

Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper wrote about how NFL and NBA salaries have outstripped MLB salaries in recent years.

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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS

In 1987, Barry Bonds had 611 plate appearances and walked 54 times. In 2004, Bonds had 617 plate appearances and walked 232 times.

Sandy Koufax had 11 shutouts in 1963. He fanned 306 batters that year.
John Tudor had 10 shutouts in 1985. He fanned 169 batters that year.

Ted Williams hit five home runs in games that ended 1-0. That’s a record.

Steve Gerkin went 0-12 with a 3.62 ERA for the Philadelphia A’s in 1945. It was the right-hander’s only big-league season.

John Coleman went 12-48 with a 4.87 ERA for the Philadelphia Quakers in 1883. The National League club finished the season 46 games in arrears of the Boston Beaneaters, with a record of 18-81-1.

Randy Hundley caught 160 games for the Chicago Cubs in 1968. He started 156 of those games.

The Detroit Tigers signed Hall of Fame catcher Ivan Rodriguez to a free agent contract on today’s date in 2004.

Players born on today’s date include Don Fisher, whose two big-league appearances came with the New York Giants in 1945. Fisher’s first outing was a five-inning relief effort in which he allowed four runs. His second was a 13-inning complete game shutout.

Babe Ruth (714) has the most home runs among players born on today’s date. Ruth also has the most stolen bases (123) and pitcher wins (94) among players born on today’s date.

Also born on today’s date was Bill Koski, whose career comprised 13 games and 27 innings for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1951. The right-hander’s first professional experience came a year earlier when he toed the rubber for the Mayfield Clothiers in the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League, a Class D circuit that was commonly referred to as the Kitty League.