As we head into the final weekend of the abbreviated 2020 season, we still have only limited clarity about what the expanded postseason — which starts on Tuesday, September 29 — will look like. Eleven teams have clinched playoff berths, seven in the AL and four in the NL. Five have clinched home-field advantage for the Wild Card Series, and four have clinched division titles, but that still leaves 10 teams vying for the five remaining spots, with the lower half of the NL pool particularly murky. We won’t get any tiebreaker games, and so it might feel as though Team Entropy is just going through the motions, but as I’ve already noted, there’s still enough chaos involved to cause headaches for anybody trying to figure out the matchups from day to day, and there’s a significant possibility that teams will be playing meaningful games even into Monday (more on which below). In that sense, this silly playoff tournament has already started.

Once more, with feeling, here’s how the system works:

• The division winners be seeded 1-3 within their respective leagues based on their won-loss records, the second place teams 4-6, and then the next two teams with the best records 7-8. For the best-of-three Wild Card Series, they’ll be matched up in the familiar 1-8, 2-7, 3-6 and 4-5 pairings, with the lower seed hosting all three games.
• Within divisions, ties will first be broken on the basis of head-to-head records. Since teams haven’t played outside their divisions except against their interleague geographic counterparts, this is of use only for determining first, second, and third place within the division. If three teams in a division end up tied, combined head-to-head records against the other two teams will be used.
• If head-to-head records are tied or not applicable, the next tiebreaker is intradivision record.
• If teams have the same intradivision records, the next tiebreaker is record in the final 20 division games. If that doesn’t break the tie, then record over the final 21 games is used, and then onto final 22, 23, 24, and so forth until the tie is broken.

If it has any bearing upon seeding in the NL, commissioner Rob Manfred may mandate the Cardinals — who have just 58 games scheduled through Sunday due to all of their COVID-19 outbreak-related postponements — and Tigers may be ordered to play a doubleheader on Monday, September 28 to get to 60 games.

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On Monday night, I was watching the Cardinals battle the Royals when I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. As Adam Wainwright labored in the sixth inning — two runs in and runners on the corners with two outs — the Cardinals announcers mentioned one of Wainwright’s greatest strengths — in their minds, at least. “That’s something that Adam Wainwright is really good at, is not compounding the inning… going back and getting the next guy.” I’ve been a Cardinals fan my whole life — and to that tidbit, I said, “Huh?”

It was, in truth, something I’d never thought about. Are some pitchers better than others at turning off the tap, amping up their performance when they need it and keeping crooked numbers from getting even crooked-er? My saber sense was tingling — something about this didn’t sound quite right. But of course, these spots are exactly where if a pitcher could bear down more than expected, it would make the most difference. I decided I’d try to find out how real this effect was.

Defining what I was looking for turned out to be a difficult. What, exactly, does “not compounding the inning” mean? The announcers seemed to think it meant that Wainwright pitched better after runs were in, or at least pitched the same while most pitchers in baseball got worse. Either way, the general idea was that his ones and twos turned into threes and fours less often than average.

One possible reaction to that might be “So?” His ERA is his ERA, regardless of whether it comes via a three-run spurt and eight zeros over nine innings, or three one-run frames and six zeros. To that I say: reasonable point. There are still reasons to care, though. For one, if a pitcher were actually prone to clustering, they’d tend to underperform their FIP over time. One of the reasons home runs are so bad is because they always result in runs, whereas other hits can be scattered around in otherwise dry innings without damage. A cluster-prone pitcher wouldn’t have that advantage; when you give up baserunners in bunches, a single and a home run become much closer in value.

In the same way, a pitcher who was prone to lots of singleton runs allowed but then mysteriously got better after letting one in would beat his FIP over a long time horizon. Base/out states tend to be more dangerous after a run has scored, naturally enough. Getting better then, or not getting worse while most pitchers do, would be quite the superpower. Read the rest of this entry »

With a 2-9 stretch from September 8-19, the Rockies plummeted below .500 for the season and faded from the playoff picture. Though they’re still technically alive-ish in the race for the NL’s eighth seed, they’ve squandered their 11-3 start, and their Playoff Odds are down to 1.7%; they need to overtake at least four teams in the season’s five remaining days. Their task will be that much harder without Nolan Arenado, who last played on Saturday and who was placed on the Injured List on Monday with what the Rockies described as left AC joint inflammation and a left shoulder bone bruise. His season is over.

Listening to the broadcast of the Rockies-Giants game on Monday night, one of the announcers — I forget which side it was, as I was in the midst of flipping around MLB.TV — noted that Arenado has been so durable that “the last time he was on the Injured List, it wasn’t even called the Injured List” or words to that effect. In 2014, he missed 37 games after fracturing the middle finger of his left hand while sliding head-first into second base. From 2015-19, he averaged 157 games per year from 2015-19, playing more games (787) than all but three players, namely Eric Hosmer (795), Manny Machado (793), and Paul Goldschmidt (791).

Arenado initially injured his shoulder during the season’s fifth game, on July 29, while making the kind of diving stop of a Stephen Piscotty groundball that has typified the seven-time Gold Glove winner’s career:

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With less than a week to go in the regular season, writers will soon vote on end-of-season awards, and the shortened season makes for some very tight races. That’s certainly true for American League MVP. Through play on Sunday, here’s the WAR Leaderboard for American League position players:

That’s a fine list of players, to be sure, but it doesn’t include one of the top players by AL WAR at the moment. Shane Bieber has made 11 starts and pitched 72.1 innings good for a 2.13 FIP, 1.74 FIP, and 2.9 WAR. He’s struck out 41% of batters, given up three runs in three starts, two runs in two starts, one run in one start, and no runs in five starts. He pitched at least six innings in every start but one, when he threw five frames against the Brewers on September 6, striking out 10 against one walk, giving up a single run. Given Bieber’s runs’ allowed, there is no real difference between his FanGraphs’ WAR and his mark at Baseball-Reference. He also leads the league in xwOBA over at Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »

Ask 10 professional hitters what they’re trying to do at the plate, and you might get 10 answers. They might be trying to hit a line drive to center every time, or put the ball in the air, or stay back on offspeed pitches, or take what the pitcher gives them. Ask what they want to do, however, and if they’re honest, they’ll tell you they want to hit a home run.

How could you not want to hit a home run? The feeling of absolutely obliterating the ball must be magical. Want to take your time around the bases? It’s all up to you! Your teammates will all congratulate you. There are no fielders to interfere with it. It’s the perfect combination — the best contact you’ll ever make, and plenty of time to enjoy it.

Of course, most trips to the plate don’t end in a home run. For Rafael Marchan, in fact, none of his trips to the plate in a professional game had ever ended with that feeling of elation before 2020. That didn’t stop him from standing out as a prospect, because he checked a lot of other boxes: he’s a catcher with a plus throwing arm, and he has excellent contact skills. It’s a Wilson Ramos starter kit, essentially, and that was enough to make Marchan the Phillies’ 10th-best prospect heading into 2020.

Marchan didn’t look likely to break his string of homer-less professional plate appearances in 2020. He played in A- and Hi-A ball in 2019 and acquitted himself well enough even without the homers; his .271/.347/.339 batting line for the Lakewood BlueClaws was good enough for an unconventional 105 wRC+. That isn’t the kind of line that clamors for a big league call-up, and with no minor league season, it was shaping up to be a year of sitting quietly on the sidelines, not getting any better at hitting or any closer to the big leagues.

There was one thing working in Marchan’s favor: his age. A 2015 signee, Marchan was eligible for the Rule 5 draft after last season, and he would be again this year. The Phillies probably didn’t want to take the chance that someone would snap him up, and they at least wanted to get a look at him in camp before having to make a decision one way or the other. It was a no-brainer to add him to the 60-man player pool, even if we still thought his ETA was 2022.

While Marchan was in camp, impressing coaches with his defense and continuing to make contact against advanced pitching, the Phillies got funky at the major league level. On the August 31 trade deadline, they added David Phelps while activating Ranger Suárez and Jay Bruce from the Injured List. That meant they needed both 40-man roster space and active roster space, and Deivy Grullón got caught in the crosshairs.

Grullón was on the Phillies roster for Rule 5 considerations himself, but was stuck in between roles; he’d come up as a glove-first backstop, but the glove didn’t hold up at higher levels, and while his bat improved, it wasn’t enough to carry him. He looked like a fringy backup or a solid third catcher, which is exactly how the Phillies were using him, but they needed 40-man spots. They were going to lose him in the offseason, anyway: if they protected Marchan in the Rule 5 draft, that would in all likelihood mean releasing Grullón to make the roster work.

It probably wouldn’t matter much for Marchan, but that made him the third catcher on the Phillies’ depth chart this year. With only a month remaining in the season, he wouldn’t likely be needed in the bigs, and in most years, teams can always find a spare third catcher lying around rather than use a 21-year-old who has never played above A-ball if they need a spot start.

Of course, it’s not most years. When J.T. Realmuto injured his hip on September 12, the team added Marchan to the active roster. It was no big deal, from a 40-man perspective; they were going to add him this offseason anyway, so why not do it now? He’d serve as Andrew Knapp’s backup while Realmuto rested — it might only be a matter of days, but Marchan would probably need to catch at least one game, due to a double-header scheduled for September 14.

He went a solid 1-3 in one game of that double-header, and Realmuto didn’t recover quickly, which meant another start, on September 18 against the Blue Jays. And in that game, Marchan did the unthinkable: he hit his first professional home run. It was no cheapie, either; a 364-foot, 99.6 mph blast to right off of an A.J. Cole cutter.

Home runs don’t impress us as baseball fans the way they used to. They’re everywhere in the major leagues, so commonplace as to be boring. Eric Sogard, who looks like a substitute teacher, has a double-digit home run season. Jorge Polanco cranked out 22 last year. Home runs aren’t special anymore.

But c’mon — this is something else. FanGraphs carries minor league data back to 2006. Here’s a list of the players with the most minor league at-bats in that timeframe without a home run:

This list is a bit misleading. For one thing, two of the top four players had extensive pre-2006 minor league careers. In fact, both Gathright and Hopper hit homers before 2006 (Theriot, Ozuna, and Barrett did too, but they’re below Marchan on the list so we’ll leave them out of it). Gathright hit exactly one home run in his minor league career, and exactly one in his major league career. Close to what we’re looking for! But no cigar.

Hopper displayed a jaw-dropping lack of power; in a whopping 4,761 minor league plate appearances, he managed exactly three home runs. He also hit only a single major league home run, but it too was after he’d already gone yard in the minors.

If we’re looking for someone to top Marchan’s feat, then, Kyle Hudson is our best shot. Hudson, like Hopper, combined minor league longevity with absolutely no thump. He was drafted in 2008, then spent four years in the Orioles’ system before getting a shot in the big leagues in 2011. Like Gathright and Hopper, he was a speedy outfielder with questionable pop; he hit one home run in his last season at the University of Illinois, where he was a two-sport star who totaled 999 receiving yards over three seasons of football.

In his brief shot in the major leagues, however, Hudson didn’t exactly power up. He hit a desultory .143/.143/.143 in 29 September plate appearances, then left the Orioles organization in the offseason. He bounced around through five organizations before hanging up his spikes for good in 2015, with no professional home runs to his name.

So there you have it: as far back as I can scrape data, Rafael Marchan is the champion of hitting his first professional homer after a long, fruitless minor league stint. But that’s unsatisfying, even if he’s leaps and bounds beyond any other active minor leaguer when it comes to homer-less plate appearances. That’s because of a simple fact: having the longest streak of never doing something ends as soon as you do that thing.

Take John Gant. One of my favorite weird baseball statistics was that Gant was, briefly, the major leaguer who had the most plate appearances without reaching base. Then he reached base (on a home run, naturally). Now he doesn’t hold that record anymore. If your record involves never doing something, it’s hard to make it stick. Eventually, you’ll do it.

In that vein, I decided to dig a little deeper and look for players who had little power but not actually no power. Here’s a list of players with no more than three homers at the minor league level since 2006:

This is hardly a list of household names, unless you count Gore and Frazier. Ruíz and Weems both converted to pitching, so bereft of pop were they. The players in front of Machan on this list have combined for 35 major league homers, and Frazier has hit 33 of them. He has the vast majority of the major league plate appearances this group has accrued as well; this skillset simply doesn’t seem to get much of a chance in the majors.

That, of course, is mostly meaningless. Marchan is in the major leagues. He’s Philadelphia’s best catching prospect, and if Realmuto leaves this offseason, he might just be their best catcher, period. He’ll get more chances at the major league level, and the batted ball data, scarce as it is, already looks good.

He has a barrel! His hard-hit rate is 50%. The sample size is “go away, this isn’t a real sample,” but we’re not talking about Billy Hamilton here; Marchan’s maximum exit velocity, in six chances, is 99.6 mph, nearly equal to Hamilton’s maximum in 257 batted balls the past two years.

Rafael Marchan is a historical oddity; a near-powerless minor leaguer who still looks like he has a bright future in the major leagues. He’s also, though, a creation of this strange year. Players like Marchan develop slowly. He’s both a catcher and a switch hitter. If there were a minor league season, he might have shown up and shown the pop he’s now showing, hit a handful of home runs and found his way off of this strange list.

That might still happen. If Realmuto returns, Marchan will be back in the minors next year. He might be back in the minors even if Realmuto leaves; he’s a 21-year-old who has never played above A-ball before this year. He’s only here because of a string of unlikely circumstances. The team could drop him in Double-A and sign a veteran to hold down the position to give Marchan another year of seasoning.

I’m rooting for the exact opposite, though. I want him to stick in the majors and hit well enough that his minor league career becomes absurd. I want him to be Hamilton in the minors — although, not actually Billy Hamilton, because he somehow hit 13 homers in 2,272 plate appearances — and a normal hitter in the majors. Marchan isn’t a footnote of history just yet, but he could be, and that’s one piece of 2020 history I’d be happy to remember.

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West. Below is my assessment of the AL Central, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.

Chicago White Sox

Jonathan Stiever’s promotion was instructive because we got to see his velocity coming off of the forearm soreness that ended his spring. He sat 91-94, which is a little below his peak 2019 breakout when he would touch 6’s and 7’s. His changeup looked good, though, and it was a stabilizing force during a jittery first start. He’ll need to locate his slider more consistently for it to be effective, and the same goes for his heater if it’s going to live around 93. Stiever also incorporated his secondary stuff more often in his second outing — that’s probably the long-term strategy if this is where his fastball velocity is going to live.

You’re probably aware that Garrett Crochet made his major league debut over the weekend, becoming the first 2020 draftee to reach the majors and the first since Mike Leake to skip the minors entirely. He made just one pre-draft start this spring sandwiched between a February injury and March’s shutdown, so he was barely seen by teams this year, if at all, which is why some clubs were hesitant to draft him early in the first round. I’ve updated The Board to include his pitch data now that I have it, but neither his Future Value nor ranking has changed yet (45 FV is a late-inning reliever). He currently has the hardest fastball in baseball, and Crochet joins Zack Burdi and Codi Heuer as White Sox rookie relievers who have among the top 20 fastest heaters in the game. He’s yet another weapon in a bullpen that I consider dangerous enough to carry the Pale Hose deep into October. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, Fernando Tatis Jr. had what looked to be an insurmountable National League WAR-lead. Here’s what our NL position player leaderboard looked like before action got underway on Monday, September 7:

With just three weeks left to go in the regular season, Tatis had a one-win lead. Two weeks later, that lead is gone:

What Freddie Freeman has accomplished in the last two weeks has been incredible:

Freeman’s last two weeks would rank 25th for the entire season. If you are wondering if he’s ever done anything like this before, the answer is yes; he’s done it twice:

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This week’s column leads with three perspectives on minor-league contraction, which is slated to occur once the current CBA expires at the end of this month. At least 40 teams are expected to lose affiliated status when that happens, with entire regions of the country finding themselves devoid of professional baseball. A wide-ranging look at the business side of the proposed contraction was provided here at FanGraphs, courtesy of SABR CEO Scott Bush, earlier in the week.

Today we’ll hear from a pair of broadcasters, each of whom paid his dues down on the farm before reaching the big leagues, and from an MLB general manager.

Joe Block, Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster:

“It’s a two-way street, because I can see where the economics makes sense for Major League Baseball. They’re trying to streamline the minor leagues, and I can see the rationale for that. There maybe are too many teams; there are so many organizational players, as opposed to actual prospects. Realigning some of the leagues makes sense for easier travel. From a business standpoint, those things make a lot of sense to me.

“At the same time, I worked in Billings and in Great Falls. Those were two of the greatest experiences of my life, and not just my baseball life. I was living in Montana during the summers. I know how important [baseball] is to folks that live there. The winters are brutal, so having a ball game to watch, a family event… the team is a fabric of the communities in those particular towns.”

Dave Raymond, Texas Rangers brodcaster

“Contraction will be very tough on young broadcasters. Minor League Baseball is the training ground. [Play-by-play] takes time to figure out, to become comfortable with your voice, how to present the game every night. how you control that action. There are executives at the Major League level who, when I’ve applied for jobs, told me, ‘I’ve got to see at least a minimum of 500 games in the minor leagues before we would really even consider a guy.’ It might be 1,000 games.

“Now we’ll be dealing with a smaller pool of potential broadcasters. The guy who would have had a job for a team that gets contracted might have been the next Vin Scully. If he never gets the opportunity, we’ll never know. Plus, even if it doesn’t materialize in the ultimate — a big-league play-by-play job — for so many people, simply getting to call games is a realization of a dream. It would be disappointing for young guys, and gals, to miss out on that opportunity if there is indeed contraction. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Clint Frazier is no longer the future of the Yankees outfield — or, as it has sometimes seemed over the past few years, of somebody else’s — he’s the present. The 26-year-old righty-swinging redhead, who began the season toiling at the Yankees’ alternate training site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, homered for the second straight night on Wednesday, helping the Yankees overtake the Blue Jays for second place in the AL East. During a season in which Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have played a combined total of 35 games due to injuries, in which age has finally caught up to Brett Gardner, and in which the 2019 magic has worn off of Mike Tauchman, Frazier has shown that both his lightning-quick bat and much-maligned glove are ready for prime time.

On Tuesday and Wednesday night in the Bronx while facing the Blue Jays — who came to town half a game ahead of the Yankees in the AL East standings — the Yankees erupted for 33 runs, winning by lopsided scores of 20-6 and 13-2 while hitting at least six homers in back-to-back games for the first time in franchise history; they added another 10 runs and six homers on Thursday night. While Stanton and Judge went hitless in their respective returns from injuries, and AL wRC+ leader (!) DJ LeMahieu and major-league home run leader (!) Luke Voit produced their share of fireworks on both nights, Frazier was right in the middle of the action, collecting two hits, two walks, and a homer in each game. Using MLB.com’s fantastic new Film Room feature, we can play the hits from those two nights in one clip:

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To paraphrase the late, great Chris Wallace, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another freaking other. After MLB announced its bubble-esque postseason format, Rob Manfred slipped in the claim that expanded playoffs are likely here to stay.

Manfred, as he is wont to do, conflated what the owners — his bosses — desire with what has actually been decided; expanded playoffs would require an agreement between the league and the MLBPA. Even though Manfred’s declaration is merely media signaling, though, it’s worth discussing its potential effect on baseball’s competitive landscape, because it would be absolutely earth-shattering.

While the commissioner didn’t elaborate on what type of expanded playoffs he was talking about, it’s fair to assume that they might take the form of this year’s tournament — eight teams in each league qualify, with best-of-three series at the higher seeds’ home parks to cut the field in half — though they could also feature a 14-team field, a possibility reported by Joel Sherman in February. I’ll assume a 16-team field here, as I think the extra television revenue will prove awfully enticing. From there, there would be the normal five-seven-seven structure we’ve grown accustomed to.

In an abbreviated season, expanded playoffs make some sense. 60 games isn’t enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, so a postseason cutoff was always going to feel arbitrary. Sixteen, eight, 10 — none would feel normal, because this season isn’t normal. Given that, creating more of a tournament atmosphere via short series feels like a fun one-off plan.

If every possible 2020 playoff format is going to feel equally valid, the owners have an obvious reason to expand the postseason: money. Owners take in the vast majority of playoff revenue — players get a share of the gate receipts in the first three (in the case of the Division Series) or four (League Championship and World Series) games of each round, while the owners get the rest of the gate as well the television money, which overshadows revenue from ticket sales. More games means more games to sell to TV networks. Ask a group of businesspeople if they’d like some extra money at almost no cost, and well, they probably won’t say no.

But in a full baseball season, a 16-game playoff does something else entirely. One of the neat features of a 162-game season is that it does an excellent job of determining which teams are best. On a given day, anyone can beat anyone. In the broad sweep of time, however, five percent edges add up. That doesn’t mean the 10 best teams always make the playoffs, but it does mean that you can be fairly certain the top team in each league is better than the sixth-best team. Read the rest of this entry »