With 2020’s amateur draft consisting of just five rounds, much of the strategy teams typically use related to shifting bonus pool money around was rendered moot. There were no high schoolers to woo with big bonuses after the 10th round, no saving money on a seventh rounder to sign a better first rounder. This served to decrease the incoming talent pool by quite a bit, with many good players going undrafted or unsigned, but it also makes an immediate analysis of the exercise a little bit easier.

With just 160 picks, we can evaluate a team’s decision to take a lesser player early in the draft in order to use the money saved on picks later and vice versa. With less scouting time and fewer looks, there might have been a bit more variation in terms of the quality of the players taken on draft day. Likewise, determining who might improve and surprise is trickier. As such, we shouldn’t consider this analysis ironclad. However, using Eric Longenhagen’s rankings and the selected players’ actual draft positions, we can compare how well each team did with their picks based on those rankings. To determine the value of each player and each pick, I’ll be using my draft pick valuation research from last year, which examined expected production from every draft slot. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball in Korea and Taiwan is in full swing — my apologies for the pun — and a third major professional league is set to join them on Friday when NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) starts up its delayed 2020 season. The novel coronavirus has shown that it has little care for the vagaries of baseball scheduling, so as with other leagues, NPB will naturally play a shortened slate.

Unlike a certain other league – it would be far too gauche of me to identify it by name – NPB is trying to fit as much baseball into the summer as it can. By virtue of being able to start in June, each team is scheduled to play 125 games, with the main change being the suspension of interleague play. (Normally, each team plays three home games against three teams in the opposite league, and three road games against the remaining cross-league competition.)

So with Japanese baseballing imminent, it’s time to run the ZiPS projections for the league, as I did last month with the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). With a league closer to MLB in quality, slightly better data, and more personal experience working with said data, I’m more confident about ZiPS’ NPB projections than the KBO ones.

Without interleague play, both leagues will have .500 records, helpful for the Central League, which has lost the interleague battle against the Pacific League 14 times in 15 seasons. Ties aren’t something ZiPS normally has to account for, but after doing research on the topic, I’ve found they’re even more random than one-run wins in MLB (as we all would have expected). On to the projections!

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, after rejecting Major League Baseball’s latest offer, the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed to abide by the threat MLB had floated at the beginning of the month and allow the commissioner to set the schedule. In response, MLB sent a letter to the MLBPA indicating it would not set a schedule unless the players agreed not to file a grievance over a shortened season. Before looking at why MLB might be taking this approach, let’s take a look at how we got here. It’s been almost a week since the first day of the amateur draft, when Rob Manfred spoke to Tom Verducci about the start of the season on MLB Network. Early in the interview, Verducci asked about the possibility of imposing a shorter schedule:

Tom Verducci: Obviously, you want an agreement. In the absence of an agreement, according to the March 26 agreement with the players the owners believe that you as commissioner can schedule a season that “uses the best efforts to play as many games as possible”. How close are you to that point, how many games are we talking about.

Rob Manfred: I remain committed to the idea that the best thing for our sport is to reach a negotiated agreement with the MLBPA that plays as many games as possible for our fans. We do have rights under the March 26 agreement and there could become a point in time where we’ll exercise those rights.

Manfred went on to say the two sides were “very, very close” on health and safety protocols. After he also indicated that finishing the season in November was not practical due to a potential second wave of the coronavirus and the difficulty of moving the playoffs around for television partners, Verducci got to the heart of the matter and asked whether there would be baseball this season.

Tom Verducci: Negotiations are complicated. Simple question for you. Can you guarantee we will have major league baseball in 2020?

Rob Manfred: We are going to play baseball in 2020. 100%. If it has to be under the March 26 agreement if we get to that point in the calendar, so be it, but one way or the other we are playing major league baseball.

Two days later, MLB provided the players with its “Final Counterproposal for 72 games,” along with a letter from deputy commissioner Dan Halem to union negotiator Bruce Meyer complaining that players were not entitled to pay to begin with and that MLB could have opted to not have negotiated a deal in March at all. The letter did not mention the owners’ fears of the players suing for full salaries in the event of a partial season, the elimination of the roughly $20 million in minimum postseason bonus pools, the relaxation of debt rules that might otherwise have opened up the CBA completely, or the $400 million in amateur signing bonuses that were deferred or eliminated. The March agreement was not an act of generosity, but rather a pact between two sophisticated parties trying to reach the best deal possible. And as Manfred noted, the March agreement gives the commissioner certain rights, including the right to set the schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

The top of the seventh, and the Cardinals lead the Marlins7-6. Hard-earned, after getting out ahead early, 3-0, before ceding six runs, unable to muster a response; they were saving it all for the top of the sixth, when they got them all back — and another for insurance. Not enough insurance, though, not when you’re still trying to win — still, even though there is nothing tomorrow. Nothing the day after that, and nothing the day after that, either.

They’ve been holding up the signs: SAVE OUR SPORT. OWNER$ WIN, PLAYER$ WIN, FANS LOSE. The Cards send a pinch-hitter to the plate to lead it off: Gerald Young, in his 16th game with the big-league club. He is 29 years old. This will be the final game of his major league career.

***

Gerald Young — born in Honduras, raised in California — was signed by the Mets the same day as Doc Gooden. Gooden was the fifth pick overall in the 1982 draft; Young was drafted in the fifth round. Both were selected out of high school. Unlike Gooden, though, Young never ended up playing a single game for the Mets. His three-year career in their system was distinguished only by its anonymity. After the 1984 season, the Mets sent him and two Players to be Named Later to the Astros in exchange for Ray Knight, who had requested a trade.

In the Astros’ minor-league system, no longer a teenager, Young improved steadily. Every year, he advanced a level. His OPS climbed. He stole 54 bases in Double-A. His work in the outfield began to draw notice, too.

Young began the 1987 season in Tucson with the Triple-A Toros, the youngest player on the team’s roster, “scared and nervous” to make the jump to Triple-A. He quickly became the PCL’s stolen-base leader while hitting better than he ever had before. He thrived under the mentorship of Eric Bullock, then a veteran of the Houston farm, five years his senior. An “ooh-and-aah” player, the Arizona Daily Star called him: a thrill-seeker who loved the tension of the chase more than anything else, a dazzling young man with a bright smile and a twinkle in his eye. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Tuesday, the Major League Baseball Players Association offered a quick response to an owner proposal to resume the 2020 season that was fundamentally no better than MLB’s first offer. The players reduced the number of games they proposed to play from 114 to 89, offered expanded playoffs for the next two seasons, and made concessions on service time for players who opt out of the season. The offer looked like a step toward compromise. On Friday, MLB responded with an offer similar to its previous two offers. In response, the players have opted to stop negotiating against themselves, and have asked Rob Manfred to set the schedule and decide how many games the owners want to have this season.

The new offer was staged differently than owners’ the previous attempt, but the foundation of it presented the same reductions the owners have been attempting to pass on to the players since it became clear the season can’t be played with fans in attendance. MLB proposed a 72-game season with 70% pro-rated pay, amounting to $1.268 billion in game salaries. If the postseason, which was to be expanded, were completed, the players would receive another 10% of their pro-rated pay — around $181 million plus a $50 million bonus pool — essentially maxing out at $1.5 billion. Let’s compare the three offers made by MLB to the likely a 54-game season with full pro-rated pay as stipulated by the March agreement:

Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Moskos was drafted fourth-overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2007. It was a dream come true for the Clemson University product, who went into that June day not knowing what to expect. Some teams viewed him as a starter, others saw him as a reliever, and he hadn’t been at his best in the ACC tournament. The uncertainty led to, in his own words, “a lot of stressful emotions.”

He thought his most-likely destination was Colorado. The Rockies (who ended up taking Casey Weathers) had the eighth pick and were reportedly looking for a close-to-ready college reliever who could conceivably contribute down the stretch. The Pirates more or less came out of the blue. While they’d shown interest, Moskos hadn’t receive a phone call prior to the pick being announced, nor had his advisor/agent.

Moskos isn’t in denial of what Pittsburgh probably had in mind.

“Given the way things played out, I have to assume they didn’t see me as someone would cause a financial concern,” said Moskos. “That’s something that steered their draft around that time: they looked more in the bargain-hunting bin than they did at the highest-profile guys. Whatever fault you want to put to that, they didn’t see me a signability issue.”

Moskos, whom Baseball America had projected to go eighth-overall, inked a $2.475M contract and set forth on a professional career that went anything but smoothly. Hampered by injuries and an inconsistent breaking ball, he ended up playing just one big-league season. In 2011, the southpaw came out of the Pirates bullpen 31 times and logged a 2.96 ERA over 24-and-a-third innings. Then his elbow started barking. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s strange that this year’s draft is already over and that some teams took as few as three players. Now we move into $20,000 undrafted free agent signing mode, a totally unprecedented exercise. In the coming days, I’ll add the drafted players to their new teams’ prospect lists over on The Board; you’ll see them on the 2020 Updated list on the Prospect List tab after I do. The farm system rankings will change as I do that. You can already see the approximate Top 100 landing spot for the 50 FV and above draftees on the MLB Draft tab of The Board.

Odds

Texas Rangers
Texas’ draft will be the talk of the industry today. After taking Justin Foscue in the first round (Fosuce was in the mix throughout the middle of round one) the Rangers went off the board (well, public boards anyway) and picked a bunch of six-figure high school types throughout the rest of the draft.

In round two, it was Tennessee prep outfielder Evan Carter, a high school two-way player committed to Duke. What I have on Carter at the moment is that he’s fast, has a big, rectangular frame, and that he has good bat speed but a swing path that may not work. This is next to nothing, and we’ll all learn more about Carter in the coming days. Based on what I know right now, he sounds like a 35+ FV prospect, a $600,000 type of high schooler. I also have a 35+ FV on Tekoah Roby, the club’s third rounder, who was up to 94 last summer, flashed a 55 changeup, and has a medium frame. Fourth rounder Dylan MacLean is an athletic, projectable lefty from Oregon whose stuff has coveted vertical action. His fastball was in the mid-80s last summer, up from the low-80s early the spring prior. It’s likely he’ll throw harder as he matures based on the frame and athleticism, or that we’d know he were throwing harder this spring had he played (and that Texas does, but successfully hid it), but he’s the kind of prospect who ends up in the honorable mention section of a team’s prospect list. Finally, their fifth rounder was Thomas Saggese, a contact-oriented SoCal high school infielder. A handful of teams were on Saggese, also a 35+ FV prospect, who could hit enough to play second base everyday. All of these kids are actual prospects, but unless we learn something new about a couple of them (Did MacLean have a velo spike? Did we whiff on Carter as an industry?), this draft will feel odd, and I wonder if Texas’ new stadium has impacted their financial situation and that that may mean they aren’t spending their whole pool. Read the rest of this entry »

With most every other professional sport moving forward with a plan to resume play, baseball’s unsettled future sticks out like a sore thumb. Inevitably, battle lines have been drawn; the owners claim poverty and hardship, the players toe their pro-rata line while dangling various season lengths and inducements, and each side claims the other is intransigent and negotiating in bad faith (one side’s argument is much stronger than the other’s as far as that’s concerned).

One of the key arguments the owners have made is that their teams aren’t profit centers. It’s never couched in exactly those words, but that’s the primary gist of the argument. When Tom Ricketts spoke about the Cubs’ finances, he focused on a specific point: that the team isn’t hoarding cash.

“Most baseball owners don’t take money out of their team. They raise all the revenue they can from tickets and media rights, and they take out their expenses, and they give all the money left to their GM to spend,” he said, in regards to earlier comments by Scott Boras. Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt approached it from a different angle in discussing the team’s real estate expansion, saying “we don’t view (Ballpark Village) as a great profit opportunity.”

I find both of these quotes quite interesting, not for what they reveal, but rather for how precisely they are formulated. Ricketts focused on cash — dollars that flow from team coffers to owners’ bank accounts. DeWitt focused on the profitability of real estate ventures, profit being a notoriously nebulous concept.

Before going any further, I’ll note that both Ricketts and DeWitt are within their rights to posture heavily, or even lie in substance, with these statements. How productive that approach is (eh) and how well it sits with us (not very!) are questions worth considering, but they’re allowed. They’re not under oath, and they’re in no way required to open their books. Parties bluff and lie in negotiations all the time, and both of these statements are, at their core, negotiations with the players using the public as intermediary.

But let’s take them at their word. This seems to be the core issue the owners are asserting: they aren’t taking home any money from their teams, even in good times, so they can’t be expected to take a loss when times get tough. No cash when times are good, cash loss when there’s a recession; the math doesn’t add up. In almost every public statement, owners mention this exact sentiment. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that was fun. Let’s do it again today, please. Wednesday night was full of some big surprises early and a few later on, all of which are covered below. I’ll start moving drafted players onto their new teams over on The Board once I wake up, so make sure to take a peek at the farm system rankings as they currently stand — they’re about to change as the new prospects get moved over. Briefly, before I dive in, here are the states from which the most players were drafted yesterday:

**Editor’s Note: This piece initially incorrectly stated that the Baltimore Orioles had absorbed their four corners area. It has been corrected. FanGraphs regrets the error.**

The lone surprise there is Arizona, notable because a couple of teams (the Yankees) have either “absorbed” their four corners area recently or have considered it, meaning they let go of their area scout there and had other scouts fill in, thinking the area doesn’t have enough talent to justify having that extra scout. Four kids from the area went on Day 1, and with a lot of junior college spillover expected next year (there are lots of southwest JuCos), it seems especially foolish for other teams to really consider such cuts. Plus, there’s so much low-level pro ball here, baseball for which amateur scouts have a great context since the players are about the same age as their usual coverage. That makes turning over rocks on the complex backfields inexpensive since most of the four corners scouts live in Phoenix. Okay, I’m done. On to my team-by-team analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

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