The universal designated hitter will be a reality in 2020, assuming that the Major League Baseball Players Association agrees to the health and safety protocols connected to the March 26 agreement, which is to say, that it will be part of the revised rules for this weird, short season. But because the league and the union were unable to agree to any of the subsequent proposals that have been batted back and forth in recent weeks, the status of the universal DH for 2021 and beyond — with the expectation that it would slip smoothly into the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement — is not a done deal, after all. Rather, it’s something that will have to be revisited within discussions over rules changes for next year, which typically begin at the November owners’ meetings.

Even so, as it’s the rare point upon which both sides agreed amid the otherwise rancorous negotiations, I think I’m still on solid ground in discussing the longer-term changes that could come with such a move. On Friday, I discussed the apparent end of pitchers’ often-pathetic attempts at hitting, and last month, Craig Edwards took an initial stab at how NL teams might handle their DH slots given their roster construction, with special consideration given to the Mets’ situation. This time around, I’d like to consider which players might stand to benefit in the longer run.

For starters, it’s worth noting that the demise of the DH has been somewhat exaggerated. Several years back, the AL saw a notable decrease in the number of players reaching significant thresholds of plate appearances at the spot, but those totals have largely rebounded:

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Matt Harvey doesn’t figure to pitch in a major league game anytime soon, not only because the 2020 season might not get off the ground but because his stint with the Angels last year was rather disastrous — so much so that he’s currently unsigned. However, there’s baseball going on in South Korea, and last week, a report by SBS (Seoul Broadcasting System) surfaced that he’s received interest from at least one KBO team. The New York Post’s Joel Sherman confirmed that multiple teams have been in touch with Boras Corp (which represents Harvey), and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman added that teams in Japan “are looking” at Harvey as well.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBJuomIAbkm/

The 31-year-old righty has been posting videos of his workouts via Instagram, and last month told the New York Post’s Dan Martin of his job search in general:

“I’m throwing bullpens once or twice a week. I hope I get the opportunity. I feel like I’m in high school again, where I have to showcase myself and start all over. I just want to put myself in position to be ready and if it doesn’t work out, to know I put the effort in to make a comeback.”

…“I’ve grown up and matured on and off the field,” Harvey said. “There are a lot of things I’d do differently, but I don’t like to live with regret.”

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To call Foley’s NY Pub and Restaurant a sports bar would be like summarizing Citizen Kane as a movie about a sled. Sure, the bar at 18 West 33rd Street in Manhattan stood out as a place where one could enjoy a beer while watching whatever games were in season — and on some nights, you might find three sports vying for attention on its numerous screens. But for nearly two decades, Foley’s has served as a pillar of the baseball community, a beacon not only for local denizens but for out-of-towners — players, umpires, scouts, celebrities, and writers. “Foley’s was a baseball writer’s Cheers,” wrote MLB.com’s Alyson Footer via Twitter.

Sadly, the occasion for Footer and hundreds of others to share their thoughts about the venerable watering hole on social media was a somber one. On Friday, owner Shaun Clancy posted a video announcing that the bar, which shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 16, will not reopen. “There’s just no way that I can see that we can do it,” he said in the two-minute video, “and I don’t really know what to say except thank you all… This is the end of the inning but not the end of the game.”

A message from @ShaunFromFoleys. Sad news regarding Foley’s. #WeHadBeer pic.twitter.com/i1uimhZQL2

— Foley's NY (@FoleysNY) May 29, 2020

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Last week, I discussed the significant disadvantage NL teams will have if the universal designated hitter is adopted for this season and NL teams were then forced to compete with AL teams for playoff spots. I did the best I could to estimated which players might be the greatest beneficiaries of playing time and then looked at how their teams might be impacted. One team jumped out in a negative way — the Mets finished dead last, receiving no benefit at all from Dominic Smith’s increased playing time at designated hitter. I did note that putting Yoenis Céspedes at the designated hitter spot would put the Mets in the middle of the pack in the NL, though that’s still hardly what one might consider a good situation. Still, it’s probably worth a deeper look.

Before we start moving playing time around to potentially maximize designated hitter production for the Mets, let’s take a look at the team’s projections. Below is every player projected to take at least 100 plate appearances in the field (over a full season), how those players project in their expected playing time, and their projections based on 600 plate appearances. Note that the fielding column is at their position and a positional adjustment has not been applied; only their time in the field is accounted for:

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Last week, conflicting reports regarding the state of Major League Baseball’s ongoing effort to contract and realign the minor leagues surfaced. While Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper and the Associated Press both reported that MLB is nearing an agreement with Minor League Baseball that would result in the loss of 42 affiliated teams, MiLB countered with a statement disputing the accuracy of the reports. Regardless of exactly where things stand in the negotiations, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic endangering the entirety of the 2020 minor league season, some thinning of the herd appears likely.

While I’ve lived in New York City for 25 years and attended hundreds of Yankees games and dozens of Mets games in both recreational and professional capacities, I grew up on minor league baseball, primarily in Salt Lake City, where I lived from 1973-88 (and where my parents still reside), and Walla Walla, Washington, where my paternal grandparents lived and where I visited for several summers in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Thus I’m all too familiar with the pain that comes from a city losing its minor league affiliate — and two of the 42 teams reportedly on the chopping block hit close to home, both my current one and the one of my youth.

When I began attending games circa 1977-78, the Salt Lake Gulls were the Triple-A affiliate of the California Angels, and part of the storied, high-scoring Pacific Coast League. They featured future big leaguers like Willie Aikens, Rance Mulliniks, and Dickie Thon, all of whom Angels general manager Buzzie Bavasi made sure to trade away for aging veterans (not without some success), a pattern that continued through the remainder of the two teams’ relationship. While I had no affinity for the big club, I enjoyed following the careers of the aforementioned players and their successors, like Tom Brunansky and Brian Harper, as they fanned out across the majors.

My father would take my brother and me to a few Gulls games each year — often against the Albuquerque Dukes, the Dodgers’ Triple-A team and therefore of considerable interest in our household — and highlights from those games still stick out, particularly from 1979, the year they won the PCL championship. In one game we attended, Ike Hampton, a catcher-turned-designated hitter who clubbed 30 home runs for the Gulls that year, bookended a 17-inning epic with a pair of homers, though I was safely tucked in bed by the time the latter landed. In another game, Floyd Rayford, a third baseman whom Earl Weaver later used as a backup catcher, mashed a dramatic eighth-inning three-run homer that turned a 4-2 deficit into a 5-4 lead, creating pandemonium; we could have turned cartwheels all the way home. Once my fascination with baseball statistics had begun, I’d pore over the Gulls’ daily box scores and update a hand-kept stat sheet, annexing my mother’s pocket calculator to figure out batting averages and ERAs. A few years later, I’d even apply rudimentary Bill James formulas to calculate runs created, though this involved some guesstimation when it came to counting walks via a standard four-numbered box score (AB R H BI). Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of last year, it looked like the Wilpon family might sell the New York Mets to Steven Cohen for around $2.5 billion. The proposed sale was an unusual one. It did not include SNY, the Mets’ regional sports network, which is owned by the Wilpons; the Wilpons were also set to maintain some degree of control of the team for years after the sale. In what didn’t come as much of a surprise given the deal’s unusual nature, things fell apart and the Mets are once again looking for new owners. Enter Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez.

As reported by Scott Soshnick in Variety, Rodriguez and Lopez have sought help from JPMorgan Chase to raise funds to purchase the team. The piece notes that A-Rod and J-Lo have a combined net worth of around $700 million, which is obviously well short of what is needed to meet a potential purchase price over $2 billion. While that gap might appear insurmountable, an A-Rod/J-Lo owned Mets team isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. First, consider that any purchase of this type is going to be financed with a considerable amount of debt. As Tom Ley wrote in his analysis of the Cubs’ previous sale — in the Ricketts’ initial plans to purchase the Cubs, there was talk of financing as much as $750 million of a potential $1.15 billion deal, though in the end, they paid $845 million and financed $450 million — teams are bought with significant amounts of financing:

Ted Lerner purchased the Nationals for $450 million in 2006, and the “Debt Primer Presentation” GSP sent to the Ricketts includes the details of that sale as a case study for how a highly leveraged purchase can work. Lerner took on the maximum amount of debt—$360 million—in order to purchase the team. Jim Crane bought the Houston Astros for $615 million in 2011, reportedly by taking on $300 million in debt; the Dodgers ownership group assumed $412 million in debt when they purchased the team in 2012.

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Baseball, like the world around it, has been flooded with bad news for the last couple of weeks. Normally, losing one of the game’s most exciting 20-something pitchers to Tommy John would create a splash on the level of Dan-doing-a-cannonball-into-a-kiddie-pool. But in these times, the ripples created by the news of Noah Syndergaard’s surgery (along with Chris Sale’s) were relatively minor. What are UCLs compared to the concerns of COVID-19?

But it is bad news. Bad for the Mets and bad for Syndergaard himself. How bad? For a change of pace, let’s start off with the long-term projection rather than finish with it. The projection is notable in this case as there’s a key difference in the model. With no actual game-related news to distract me, I’ve been able to complete work on one of my ongoing data projects: better long-term playing time projections for players with injuries, especially serious ones that cause entire seasons to be missed.

While ZiPS has had a generalized model for injuries — both specific and, well, general — for some time, the focus was mainly on projecting how well the player would play upon returning and the long-term qualitative impact on their play. So long-term, pitchers with bum shoulders would fare worse than those taking a trip to Dr. Andrews’ Magic Elbow Factory, and speedy infielders with leg problems would see their aging curves accelerate. Less of the focus had been the long-term effect on playing time itself, something I’ve been able to work on a lot recently. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball news is coming in drips and drabs these days, which makes sense — we’ve all got bigger things to deal with at the moment than contract extensions and teams with unsettled rotations. Unfortunately, that means that when there is baseball news, it’s likely to be bad, and yesterday was no exception: per Jeff Passan, Noah Syndergaard has been diagnosed with a torn UCL and will undergo Tommy John surgery tomorrow.

Regardless of when or if the season starts, this is obviously terrible news for the Mets. The NL East is nasty and brutish, and the 2020 season, should it happen, will be short. Every win is — well, baseball is never a matter of life and death, and that’s never been more clear than in recent weeks. But every win is monumentally important. Over a full season, replacing Syndergaard’s 4.6 WAR projection with Michael Wacha’s 0.6 WAR projection would be a tough blow, and that’s before considering which minor leaguer will be picking up Wacha’s innings.

Those four wins hurt; over the full year, they drop the Mets from roughly even with Atlanta and Washington to roughly even with the Phillies, turning the division into a two-tiered race. In fact, now that the Mets are without Thor’s services, they’d prefer a shorter season, because they’re decidedly underdogs at this point. As Dan Szymborski recently illustrated, a half-season gives underdogs a fighting chance.

Whatever your feelings towards the Mets, this is a disastrous stroke of bad luck. The team is built to win in 2020; Marcus Stroman will hit free agency after this year, Syndergaard will follow him the year after, and many of the team’s veterans are most useful in 2020. Robinson Canó isn’t getting any younger, Rick Porcello and Wacha are only in the fold this season, and Jacob deGrom is only invulnerable to decline until he isn’t. Without a stacked farm system, this might be the team’s best chance for another World Series berth in the near future. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at any Mets prospect list from 2017 and Amed Rosario was the headliner. He was all fast-twitch muscles and gorgeous defense. His frame was the type that looks perfectly suited for shortstop: tall and rangy, but not so lanky that he couldn’t one day hit for power. We saw him as a 65 FV prospect, the third-best in all of baseball.

After 2017 and 2018, that assessment looked sorely misguided. Over 762 plate appearances across those two seasons, he put up every scary number imaginable. He walked only 4.2% of the time while striking out 22% of the time, both worse than he’d performed in any full minor league season. Pitchers knocked the bat out of his hands; he hit for a .129 ISO despite 12 triples. The speed that made those triples possible didn’t translate into extra value; his BABIP was only .318, which is good but not great, and he was caught stealing a brutal 14 times.

Those are just offensive outputs, but the offensive and defensive approach were perhaps even scarier. He swung at 42% of pitches outside of the zone, the sixth-highest chase rate in the bigs. Every hitter who chased more often than him, however, channeled their aggression better; he somehow swung at a below-average percent of pitches over the heart of the strike zone in 2018 despite all the chasing. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s only March 2, but between Yoenis Céspedes‘ media blackout, J.D. Davis‘ shoulder scare, and Brandon Nimmo’s irregular heartbeat, the Mets’ outfield has already enlivened the spring with a fair bit of drama and a few eye-catching headlines. Thankfully none those events has turned into a worst-case scenario, and as Opening Day approaches, the unit looks to be a potential source of strength on a contending team — though as ever, it could be a challenge to fit all of the parts together.

Indeed, assembling the pieces into a coherent whole has been a perennial shortcoming for the Mets, even before Brodie Van Wagenen took the reins as general manager; this team hasn’t had a true two-way center fielder — as opposed to a misplaced corner who could outhit his mistakes in the middle pasture — since the heyday of Ángel Pagán, if not Carlos Beltrán. Last year’s roster, the first one assembled by Van Wagenen, had such a surplus of infielders that its six most common outfield configurations (from among 27 different permutations in all) involved at least one infielder who had little major league experience as a flychaser:

Coming into 2019, McNeil had never played the outfield in the majors and had just eight games of minor league experience there, while Davis’ outfield resumé amounted to five major league games plus 31 in the minors, with Smith notching 13 in the majors and 26 in the minors. One had to scroll down to the team’s seventh most commonly-used configuration to find a trio of seasoned outfielders playing in the same unit. The mismatches contributed to ongoing defensive woes, as the team ranked 13th in the NL in defensive efficiency (.677), 14th in UZR (-12.8), and last in DRS (-86). Read the rest of this entry »