The Baseball Hall of Fame’s Induction Weekend, which was scheduled for July 24-27, did not go off as originally planned due to the coronavirus pandemic, but this past weekend, Cooperstown gained a center fielder nonetheless. With his 2020 season debut, which he made on Friday, Mike Trout has now satisfied Hall of Fame election eligibility rule 3(B), which reads in part, “Player must have played in each of ten (10) Major League championship seasons.” Trout is thus fully qualified to be elected once his career ends and the requisite five-year waiting period has elapsed.

[UPDATE: Multiple commenters below questioned whether a season in which no champion is crowned — such as the strike-shortened 1994 season or, perhaps, this one if the pandemic proves unmanageable — constitutes a “championship season.” Regarding 1994, the presence of Jim Abbott, who pitched in the majors from 1989-96 and ’98-99 — 10 seasons, including ’94 — on the 2005 BBWAA ballot offers a precedent for the strike season counting as a championship season. Hall Vice President of Communications and Education Jon Shestakofsky additionally told FanGraphs, “While things could change given the nature of our present situation, we are currently looking at 2020 as a Major League championship season, as dictated by Major League Baseball.]

For most players, the possibility of election isn’t one that emerges until late in their careers, when major round-numbered milestones are being reached and tributes paid. Trout is not most players, for he has done so much at such a young age — he’ll turn 29 on August 7 — that his election is becoming a foregone conclusion. While his Angels have never won a postseason game (they were swept in the 2014 American League Division Series), and while he’s only led the league in one triple crown stat (RBI in 2014), he’s already made eight All-Star teams, won three MVP awards (not to mention the Rookie of the Year), and hit 286 home runs, including this one on Sunday off Oakland’s Mike Fiers — the first of his career on a 3-0 count:

It's good to see @MikeTrout home runs again. pic.twitter.com/f8ihDkuhZm

— MLB (@MLB) July 26, 2020

Trout scores 136 on the Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor, which is based on common statistical benchmarks and accomplishments for old-school stats that have historically tended to appeal to voters; there 100 is “a likely Hall of Famer and 130 “a virtual cinch.” But it’s not those old-school numbers that have made his actual election inevitable, it’s the newer-school ones, the likes of which weren’t added to the backs of baseball cards until after Moneyball was published. Trout, a career .305/.419/.581 hitter, has never won a batting title, and while he’s finished as high as second among the top 10 in the AL six times, that pales in importance to his dominance in other slash stat categories. He’s topped a .400 on-base percentage six times, missing by a point in another year, and leading the league four times. He’s topped a .600 slugging percentage three times, and never finished below .500 save for his cup-of-coffee 2011 season; he’s led that category three times. He’s led in wRC+ six times, including the last five in a row, all at 170 or above; when he hasn’t led, he’s finished second or third, the slacker. Since he entered the league, only Joey Votto has a higher on-base percentage (.438), but Trout has a 14-point edge in slugging percentage on second-ranked David Ortiz (.567) — and that’s in over 1,800 more plate appearances in a more pitcher-friendly environment. Trout’s 172 wC+ is 21 points higher than the second-ranked Votto.

His greatness isn’t just confined to offense, and we have the good fortune that Trouts career is unfolding at a time when we have the tools to appreciate the wholeness of his game. He not only has 200 career stolen bases, he owns an 84.7% success rate to go with it, the third-highest mark among players with at least 200 attempts. By FanGraphs’ reckoning, his 59.3 baserunning runs is second in the majors since his arrival. His totals of 11.1 UZR and 14 DRS over that span are less remarkable, but obviously both above average, and there’s significant value in his ability to play center field at such a level for so long; his overall defensive value — in this case UZR (including his time in left field) plus positional adjustment — puts him in the 89th percentile among all outfielders since 2011.

Add it all up — including his 452 batting runs, 118 more than the number two player over that span, Votto — and you have a player worth 73.4 WAR from 2011-19. That’s a full 50% more than the second-ranked player, Buster Posey, even though Trout’s 2011 season consisted of just 40 games. He has lapped the field.

Trout’s progress towards Cooperstown is most easily seen via JAWS. Just over two years ago, in late May 2018, when he was two-and-a-half months shy of his 27th birthday and still just in his sixth full season, he reached the JAWS standard for center fielders, the average of each Hall of Fame center fielder’s career WAR and his seven-year peak WAR. He blew past that mark like it was a rest stop on the moon for a guy bound for the outer solar system. He’s now 11.2 points above the standard, and fifth in JAWS among all center fielders:

Via Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, Trout has already outproduced all but six center fielders, and he’s still more than a year away from his 30th birthday. His seven-year peak is surpassed only by Mays and Cobb, that despite the fact that three of his seven best seasons are 140 games or fewer — namely his top-ranked 2012 (139 games thanks to his belated call-up, but 10.5 WAR), third-ranked ’18 (140 games, 10.2 WAR), and seventh-ranked ’19 (134 games, 8.2 WAR). Compare what Trout has done though his age-27 season with the rest of the field:

Within that group are significant disparities in playing time; Ruth was 23 when he began dabbling in the outfield, while Mays missed most of his age-21 and all of his age-22 seasons due to military service during the Korean War, and the majority of the players on the list played 154-game seasons. Prorate everybody to WAR per 650 plate appearances, and Trout quite reasonably trails the ahead-of-his-time Ruth, but he still has the draw on everybody else. This is worth remembering, in part because he’s getting the shaft with regards to the impact of the pandemic-shortened season on his counting stats; the WAR-through-age-28 leader is Cobb (78.4), who’s out of Trout’s reach unless he literally matches the best 60-game stretch of his career, a 10-week jag in 2012 during which he hit .368/.431/.644 (197 wRC+) with 15 homers and 28 steals and was worth 5.6 WAR (fWAR, not bWAR, but the point stands). He’s projected for 3.3 WAR this year, which prorates to 8.9 over a full season. If he matches that projection, he’d inch past Hornsby on the list above.

WAR is just a number, though, in this case a quantitative estimate of Trout’s broad, remarkable collection of skills. Stacast’s numbers, by the way, further underscore those skills and the gifts that make them possible. Trout doesn’t hit the ball as hard as Aaron Judge; last year’s 0.8 mph average exit velocity placed him in the 79th percentile, but thanks to his 99th percentile launch angle, his contact produces maximum damage. He’s been in the 99th percentile in xwOBA annually. Oh, and he’s got 95th percentile sprint speed (just don’t ask about his outfield jumps).

We can look at Trout’s numbers all day, but for as fascinating as they are, they underscore that he’s still somewhere within a peak that nobody else is approaching. It’s a fine time to watch him play, particularly given that it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that we’d get to see him this year. Not only was it quite possible that there would be no baseball in general due to the pandemic, but Trout, whose wife Jessica is due to give birth to the couple’s first child in August, has been understandably vocal in his ambivalence about playing in the midst of all this:

#Angels CF Mike Trout, whose wife is pregnant: "Honestly, I still don't feel that comfortable. It's gonna be tough. I've got to be really cautious these next couple weeks. I don't want to test positive. I don't want to bring it back to my wife. It's a tough situation we're in."

— Mike DiGiovanna (@MikeDiGiovanna) July 3, 2020

Mike Trout’s wife, Jessica, is due with their first child in August.

“We’re risking our families, risking our lives to go out here and play for everyone…I want to play. It’s just a tough situation. I’ve just got to play it by ear."

— Fabian Ardaya (@FabianArdaya) July 3, 2020

pic.twitter.com/NFajfITTpu

— Debbie Trout (@DebbieTrout27) July 5, 2020

It wasn’t until last Wednesday that Trout definitively said, “I’m playing,” while noting how well his teammates had been adhering to the mask and social distancing protocols. He expressed relief over the fact that to that point, the team had experienced no outbreaks, and hopefully, things stay that way. Seeing what happened this weekend, with 12 Marlins players and two coaches testing positive, should drive home the possibility that this could happen to any team. If it were the Angels, it might be enough to send the game’s best player home for the remainder of the year, having decided the risks are too high.

For now, though, Mike Trout is playing baseball, cementing his legacy as a bona fide Hall of Famer, and finding new ways to impress us, like by putting a 3-0 pitch into play for just the seventh time in his career, and collecting his second such hit — his first since 2015 — and his first homer.

Last week, I was invited to participate in an ESPN roundtable pegged to the start of the season, answering questions about breakout players and defensive wizards and teams with the most to prove. One question to which I submitted an answer apparently didn’t get run; it asked, “Which player are you most excited to watch in a short season?” My answer was Trout, the same answer I’d give over a 10-game or 162-game season. He’s the best player on the planet, and it’s bad we’ve being robbed of the better part of what should be one of his prime seasons. Still, we are watching a bona fide Hall of Famer in the making as he lays tracks towards Cooperstown, and it would be foolish not to savor every opportunity we get to see that happen.

Once upon a time, on a Friday in the middle of July, Yoenis Céspedes hits a home run.

***

It’s only been a few days since I’ve once again had the opportunity to spend my days sitting around watching MLB.TV. I’m already sick of the MLB Flashbacks that get shown during commercial breaks. The idea behind them is solid: There are so many feats in major league baseball’s memory bank, so many of the magical sports moments that people cite when they talk about why they love the game. Why not use otherwise unoccupied airtime to remind fans just how great the game can be?

But in my experience, at least, they end up having the opposite effect. Devoid of context, unhinged from past and future, the homers and robberies — and they are almost always homers and robberies — start to blur, then to lose meaning altogether. Like a favorite word repeated too often and too excitedly by a little kid, I start to get tired of hearing the same hype music leading in, the same fever pitch of the broadcast, the same reaction of the crowd. It’s what watching baseball feels like if you don’t like baseball. Swing. Bat hits ball. Ball leaves yard. Cheer! Repeat.

That sense of numbness one gets watching home run after home run, back-to-back, packed into the space of a minute or two — it isn’t what drew me to baseball, what continues to draw me to baseball sometimes in spite of myself. The rhythm is too much like time, or at least too much like the way we so often measure it as working adults. Seconds and minutes and hours clipping forward relentlessly, reminding you that in every idle moment you are wasting your life, wasting moments you could have spent being productive. Your time is limited. There is a distance between you and nothing, and that distance is even now getting shorter. Read the rest of this entry »

The cancellation of the minor-league season has presented teams with a huge challenge. Player development is being compromised, and the deleterious effects extend beyond the grooming itself. Prospects need to be evaluated, as well. With no games being played down on the farm, an integral part of the process has been lost.

As circus ringmasters were known to say, “The show must go on.”

Ben Cherington runs the show in Pittsburgh, and he’s less bearish on the quandary than you might expect. Technology, paired with the player-pool activities taking place at the club’s Double-A facility, is a big reason why.

“I’m not going to say it’s the same as professional games, because it’s not,” the Pirates GM said on Thursday. “But through video and technology, and the need for our pitchers in Altoona to get actual game experience, we do have an opportunity to evaluate pitchers and hitters in a way that’s not too different than a game setting. We have professional pitchers facing professional hitters [and] we can measure that through high speed video, through Rapsodo and TrackMan. We can pretty much measure all of the things we would in a in a normal minor-league game… we just don’t have a box score at the end of the night.”

Matt Blood, Baltimore’s first-year farm director, sounded somewhat less enthusiastic when addressing the subject earlier in the week. Read the rest of this entry »

With the surprise news that the 2020 season will feature expanded playoffs, we’ve been scrambling all afternoon to get our playoff odds updated:

And we did it! Or, at least we think we did it, based on the following reporting earlier in the day, which gave us something of a head start:

Seeds 1-3 will go to the division winners based on record.

Seeds 4-6 will go to the runners-up based on record.

Seeds 7 and 8 will be based on record.

Thus, there is a possibility the third-best division winner actually plays a worse team than the two best division winners.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 23, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

7:02	Dan Szymborski: Chats. A time for chats.

7:02	Dan Szymborski: THERE IS AN ACTUAL BASEBALL GAME

7:02	Dan Szymborski: I think. Today’s Thursday, right?

7:03	Dan Szymborski: No, we can’t weird up the Real Chats too much.

Read the rest of this entry »

We made it! It took a four-month journey through a still-raging pandemic and some still-burning baseball economic issues, but Opening Day of the weirdest season we’re likely to see in our lifetimes is here. The 2020 season is not a marathon, but a sprint, so we’re already in the home stretch. We’re not starting at square one, of course; if this were Monopoly, the bank would be out of hotels and everyone playing the game would hate each other, especially that jerk who has Boardwalk and Park Place.

Projecting such a season presents some unique challenges a prognosticator doesn’t normally face. It’s not projecting the individual players’ production that’s the problem so much as all the stuff around it. How many players will miss time due to the league’s COVID-19 protocols? How do we adjust for injuries when teams will play just 37% of the games, but players’ recovery from hamstring and elbow woes won’t be similarly prorated? Will top prospect talent have the same short-term upside when they’re riding the bench or practicing at their team’s alternate site that they would if they were playing actual games in the minors? How will the strange, crowdless games and the stresses of keeping up social distancing guidelines affect play?

No, I’m actually asking! I can make educated guesses that I hope aren’t preposterous, but I don’t actually know the answers to these questions. For someone who models stuff, it’s a maddening situation. But it’s a challenge I can’t avoid given that projecting stuff is, well, a big part of my job! But you’re not here to commiserate with me, humor my self-indulgent wordsmithing, or dig out where I make a reference to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, so let’s go straight to the final projected standings. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great unknowns in this season of great unknowns is what 2020 means for salaries. Not 2020 salaries, mind you: we’ve already figured that one out, give or take some J.A. Happ corner cases and Jacoby Ellsbury grievances. This offseason, however, is an entirely different ball of yarn. Will teams commit as much money to free agency and arbitration this year as they did last year, knowing all the while that fans in stands might be an iffy proposition in 2021? Heck, even with fans back in 2021, would teams avoid free agency to recoup the losses, real or imagined, that they suffered in 2020?

Today, the first new data point is in: per reporting by Jeff Passan, the Dodgers have signed Mookie Betts to a massive extension, totaling $392 million over 13 years. His 2020 arbitration salary ($27 million, of which he’ll receive a prorated $10 million) is in that mix; the new part of the deal is 12 years and $365 million. Per Ken Rosenthal, the deal will include salary deferrals totaling $115 million. Also per Rosenthal, there’s some financial tomfoolery on the front end; a $65 million signing bonus that confers some tax benefits and a salary structure that pays him only $17.5 million per year in 2021 and 2022, shielding the Betts from any loss due to prorating of salaries over the next two years should something unforeseen happen. Depending on how you feel about the specifics of Mike Trout’s extension and deferred money in general, it’s either the biggest or second-biggest contract in MLB history, and it takes the biggest name out of the upcoming offseason’s free agency market.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that money will flow like wine this offseason. The contract Betts signs doesn’t have all that much bearing on what a mid-tier veteran will get, or whether teams will be more aggressive about non-tendering arb-eligible players to save money. Top tier free agents have hardly been the ones getting pinched in free agency in the past five years.

The biggest point of interest from an economic side, in my opinion, is the length of the deal. Everyone knows that Mookie Betts is wildly valuable. Still, I wondered if he might be forced to accept a short but lucrative contract while teams sorted through the long-term fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Will stadiums fill to quite the same capacity ever again? Likely, but it’s no longer a certainty. Owners off-lay risk onto players wherever possible; short-term deals leave the risk of a fall in baseball revenue squarely on the guy taking the field every day. They also, of course, give the player upside should baseball’s economic fortunes improve, but that’s not at the forefront of anyone’s mind at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week and a half, we’ve published our annual season preview, ranking the league’s players by position based on a blend of our projections (a 50/50 split between ZiPS and Steamer) and our manually maintained playing time estimates courtesy of Jason Martinez of RosterResource fame. The result is a document that rivals In Search of Lost Time for length, though we’ve striven to make it a touch more readable. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the handy navigation widget above to catch up. And remember, if you’re a fan of say, the Dodgers, and don’t want to see any other teams’ rankings but theirs, you can use the “View by Team” feature in any of those pieces, and look at that, all Dodgers. No stinkin’ Astros for you.

Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits, but first, it’s important to remember that this exercise captures a snapshot of how we project teams to perform now. Teams aren’t static, however. Since we’ve published our rankings, for instance, Gavin Lux has been optioned. Colin Poche likely needs Tommy John. Jordan Montgomery didn’t make the Yankees’ Opening Day roster. Hell, Franchy Cordero was traded to the Royals about 12 hours before the right field rankings were set to go live. Guys suffer injuries, lose playing time due to underperformance, and get traded. That’s why we maintain a Team WAR Totals page, which lists projected positional WAR by team and updates regularly throughout the season as we learn more about who is likely to take the field every day and what shape they’ll be in when they do. Now, don’t be alarmed — the WAR numbers you see there may vary slightly from what you see on the positional power rankings, mostly because those figures are aware of the injuries and transactions that have altered our playing time estimates since the power rankings went live. The z-scores I include later uses the WAR from the Team WAR Totals page. It’s a good page. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, Jason Martinez took us through the back-end of the bullpen rankings. Now, we conclude the player rankings (a summary will run tomorrow) the same way most great baseball games do: with elite bullpens.

A substantial caveat for readers: There are some positions for which there is a cleaner, wider gap between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, it’s clear the best center field situation belongs to the Angels because of Mike Trout, and that Cleveland belongs at or near the top of the shortstop hierarchy because of Francisco Lindor. Relief pitching is not one of these positions. Sure, we have the bullpens ranked, and you can see their statistical projections above and below, but notice the margins here, and that they’re even thinner than usual because of a shortened season, and recall how volatile relievers are generally. Winning a single, close, coin-flip game is more significant this year than ever before, which means bullpen performance will simultaneously be as meaningful and as volatile as ever.

I’m interested in the benefits of stocking bullpens with pitchers who have varied release points, as well as mechanical looks and repertoire shapes that are different from one another, so I’ve included rudimentary overlays of some of each team’s reliever release points to hopefully give visual learners a more concrete idea of what I’m talking about, while also highlighting which teams seem to care more about having varied looks than others. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we covered the good and the bad of the league’s rotations. Today, we turn our attention to the relievers.

Between the piggybacking, the Opener, and whatever other new strategies managers decide to test out, the 2020 version of the bullpen likely won’t be quite the same as in years past. But it will probably still feature a lot of good comeback stories, a fair number of injuries (and disappointments), and pitchers you’ve never heard of who can throw the baseball very, very hard. One of the things that makes baseball so interesting is that new talents and triumphs emerge every year, especially in a place as volatile as the bullpen.

You should take that into account, then, when assessing these rankings. Every bullpen can be good; every bullpen can be bad. And the gaps this year are sometimes rather narrow — the Reds (a contending team) and the Orioles (a… not contending team) are projected for basically the same WAR from their relievers. Things widen out at the extremes, with the Rays and Yankees both forecast to be worth about 2.0 WAR, while the Royals are due for just 0.3, but it isn’t hard to imagine some bad injury luck or a hot run shaking things up before the season’s done. Of course, some teams need a lot more things to go right than others, and those teams tend to reside here. If a squad finds itself wistfully hoping for an oft-injured closer to stay healthy, or a rookie’s surprisingly good season to repeat, or for a few too many guys to take a step forward, or pitch like they did when they were young, then it’s probably a bullpen ranked in the bottom half of the league. Unless, somehow, it proves not to be. Read the rest of this entry »