As the 2020 baseball season seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse this weekend in light of the news of an outbreak on the Cardinals, the comments of commissioner Rob Manfred, and the inactivity of six teams, four players — three of them former All-Stars — opted out of the 2020 season: Brewers center fielder Lorenzo Cain, Mets outfielder Yoenis Céspedes, Marlins second baseman Isan Díaz, and free agent lefty Francisco Liriano. None of them are known to be in high-risk groups themselves, meaning that they’ll forfeit the remainder of their salaries. The departure of Cain is likely the most impactful from a competitive standpoint, and that of Díaz the most understandable given his proximity to the largest outbreak to date. All of those were overshadowed by the drama surrounding Céspedes and the Mets, who together turned the announcement of an opt-out decision into a bizarre spectacle that unfolded over the course of a few hours on Sunday afternoon.

We’ll get to Céspedes, but first is Cain. Although he had played just five games this season, the 34-year-old two-time All-Star was off to a promising start, going 6-for-18 with a double and three walks. A speedy, savvy baserunner, he pulled off an entertaining escape from a rundown against the Cubs on July 25, a clip that made the rounds:

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Monday night, Michael Wacha made a cathartic first start with the Mets. Over five solid innings, he struck out four while allowing only one run on a Mitch Moreland solo shot. He walked away with the win, his first in more than a year, and gave Mets fans hope that they might cheat the injury gods and assemble an acceptable rotation. But wait! Michael Wacha was last seen being terrible. It’s time to do some digging. The game is afoot!

We start this investigation, like so many others of sudden pitching competence, with the fastball. But alas, there’s nothing to be gleaned from it. Wacha averaged 94.3 mph on the pitch, a hair higher than last year’s season-long average but only a hair higher than last July’s mark. Allowing for the fact that the switch to Hawkeye might come with some calibration errors, we can rule out a newly lively fastball accounting for the fact that the Red Sox looked flummoxed.

Or can we? Why not spiral deeper, hunt further for fastball clues? His spin rate is up by nearly 150 rpm. Mayhap that’s the culprit. Mayhap indeed — but in my opinion, it’s not likely. Spin is one of the things to be most skeptical about in the new system. Perhaps skeptical is the wrong word; maybe we should be skeptical of the old measurements. The Hawkeye system measures spin directly with high-speed cameras, while the old radar-based system imputed spin from other factors. The point is, spin is going to be a tricky thing to tackle for a good while. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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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 Mets were fortunate when it came to Jacob deGrom’s back, but they weren’t so lucky regarding Marcus Stroman’s left calf. The 29-year-old righty will start the season on the Injured List due to what’s been described as “a torn muscle in his left calf” — meaning that he has at least a Grade 1 strain. He won’t require surgery, but manager Luis Rojas described him as “week to week.” In a season that’s just over nine weeks long, that’s not good news.

Per Newsday’s Anthony Rieber, Stroman was hit in the calf by a line drive during an intrasquad game last Friday, though he kept pitching. On Monday, he felt tightness in his calf during a 50-pitch bullpen session. On Tuesday night, he underwent an MRI that revealed the tear.

The loss of Stroman is particularly ominous given the Mets’ reduced depth in the wake of Noah Syndergaard’s Tommy John surgery, a matter I highlighted earlier this week. As I discovered, the 2.1 WAR deGrom is projected to produce this year accounts for 38.2% of his rotation’s WAR, the highest share of any pitcher with any team. What’s more, the 1.0 WAR drop-off from deGrom to the number two starter, Stroman, was the largest in the majors, and where the team’s total of 5.5 WAR ranked ninth among the 30 teams, the 3.4 WAR projected for the starters besides their ace is tied for 14th. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets had quite a scare last week when Jacob deGrom left Tuesday’s intrasquad game after just one inning due to back tightness. Thankfully, an MRI taken on Thursday came back clean, and upon being cleared, the two-time reigning Cy Young winner threw a bullpen session on Friday, followed by a 60-pitch simulated game on Sunday. At this writing, he’s on track to make his Opening Day start against the Braves on July 24 in Queens, albeit with his targeted pitch count reduced from 100 to 85, but this close shave underscores the fact that there may be no ppitcher who’s more crucial to his teams chances for contention this season.

Intuitively, that makes sense. The 32-year-old deGrom is coming off of a season during which he led the NL in WAR (7.0) and strikeouts (255), ranked second in both ERA (2.43) and FIP (2.67), and third in innings (204). By the numbers, it may not have been as strong as his 2018 season, in which he led in ERA, FIP, and WAR, but for the second straight year, he ran away with the Cy Young, netting 29 out of 30 first-place votes. He’s projected to provide the Mets 2.1 WAR in this abbreviated season, a total 0.1 ahead of Max Scherzer in three more innings (76 to 73), and one surpassed by only the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole (2.4 in 79 innings). Here it should be noted that our innings projections are subject to manual adjustments based upon injury reports, and the news with regards to deGrom’s back was positive enough that we did not dial his total back.

Both Cole’s Yankees and deGrom’s Mets lost their respective rotation’s second-best pitchers — namely Luis Severino and Noah Syndergaard — to Tommy John surgery this spring, though the Yankees’ rotation still projects as the deeper one, with James Paxton (1.5 projected WAR) ahead of Marcus Stroman (1.1) among the remaining number two starters, and likewise Masahiro Tanaka (1.0) ahead of Rick Porcello or Steven Matz (both 0.7). In fact, the Yankees’ rotation’s 6.7 WAR tops our Depth Charts and thus our Positional Power Rankings, though they’re in a virtual tie with the Nationals and a hair ahead of the Rays (6.6). The Mets (5.5) rank ninth, 0.1 behind the Indians and 0.2 behind the Reds. Read the rest of this entry »

Brent Strom had a better playing career than he likes to give himself credit for. His numbers are admittedly nondescript, but he did toss 501 big-league innings and throw 16 complete games, three of which were shutouts. Pitching for the New York Mets, Cleveland Indians, and San Diego Padres, the now-71-year-old southpaw logged a respectable 3.95 ERA over parts of five seasons.

My invitation to revisit his MLB debut — with the Mets on July 31, 1972 — yielded both entertaining anecdotes and a healthy dose of self-deprecation. Now in his seventh season as the pitching coach for the Houston Astros, Strom is equal parts gruff and engaging as a storyteller.

Against the Montreal Expos on that particular night, Strom was stellar. He allowed just two hits and a pair of runs — only one of them earned —over six-and-two thirds innings. Strom fanned seven, and despite departing with a lead settled for a non-decision.

His high school coach was on hand to see it.

“Bernie Flaherty, who is since deceased, had promised that if I made it to the big leagues he would be there for my first game,” Strom told me. “He flew from San Diego to New York to watch me pitch against the Expos that night, which was pretty cool. At least I didn’t disappoint him that game.”

Another notable from back home was there as well, and unlike Flaherty he wasn’t watching from the stands. He was calling balls and strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is another installment of my series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. If you missed the first piece, you’re going to want to take a peek at its four-paragraph intro for some background, then hop back here once you’ve been briefed. Let’s talk about the National League East.

Atlanta Braves

Prospect List / Depth Chart

The Braves have pooled the most catchers in baseball with seven (eight if you count Peter O’Brien and the faint memory of his knee-savers), several of whom are prospects. I think Travis d’Arnaud’s injury history and the implementation of the universal DH makes it more likely that Alex Jackson opens the season on the active roster. I don’t think this would save Atlanta an option year on Jackson since they optioned him in mid-March, and Atlanta’s bench projects to be very right-handed, so he might be competing with Yonder Alonso for a spot.

We’re probably an Ender Inciarte injury away from seeing Cristian Pache play in the big leagues every day. Aside from him, I doubt we see any of the recently-drafted position players (Drew Waters, Braden Shewmake, Shea Langeliers) playing in the bigs this year, and if William Contreras debuts it’s likely because a couple guys ahead of him have gotten hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

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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