Through one start, the 2020 version of Justin Verlander somewhat resembled the Verlander of a year ago. He threw six innings of seven strikeout, one walk, three hits ball, allowing two solo home runs, a stat line not too dissimilar from his Cy Young 2019 season. Sadly, a repeat of that fantastic campaign, even in abbreviated form, looks to be very unlikely as on Sunday, manager Dusty Baker announced Verlander would be shut down from throwing for two weeks with a forearm strain. When the season is only two months long, a two-week shutdown likely means half a season lost, potentially more.

Verlander has been one of the more durable starters in the game. Since the start of the 2017 season, he has averaged 38 starts and 244 innings when including postseason. Last season, it was 258.1 innings and 40 starts, as the Astros made it to the seventh game of the World Series for the second time in three years. That’s a lot of innings for any pitcher to throw, and for the 37-year-old Verlander, it might be catching up to him. This isn’t even the first time Verlander has been shut down this year. Back in March, Jay Jaffe wrote about a lat strain that caused the Astros to press pause on his season:

The results of the MRI showed what general manager James Click called “a mild lat strain”; Click portrayed the news as “on the positive side.” Even so, Verlander has been shut down, with no timetable at the moment, and the fear is that he could be in for a repeat of 2015. Through the first 10 seasons of his major league career, he had never landed on the disabled list, but triceps cramping, followed by a triceps strain as he ramped up his activity level, kept him out of action until June 13 of that year. Reviewing reports of his problems that spring, it appears that the Tigers and the pitcher were slow to take his initial discomfort seriously, and it was subsequently noted that Verlander also suffered a lat strain at some point during rehab, which prolonged his absence. In all, he made just 20 starts totaling 133.1 innings in 2015, the only time in 14 full seasons that he hasn’t gone to the post at least 32 times.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Hours before their season officially begins, the Blue Jays finally have a new home for the 2020 season. Denied permission first by the Canadian government to host their home games at the Rogers Centre, and then by the state of Pennsylvania to station themselves at the Pirates’ PNC Park, they will instead call Sahlen Field, the ballpark of their Triple-A Buffalo Bisons affiliate, their home for the majority of the pandemic-shortened campaign.

This is a less-than-ideal outcome for the Blue Jays, whose players had quite reasonably hoped to have access to a major league park given the larger spaces and better amenities than most minor league parks have; outfielder Randal Grichuk described Buffalo as a “worst-case” scenario. On the other hand, key youngsters such as Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. have played at Sahlen in recent years. Biggio had positive things to say:

Cavan Biggio just said on @FAN590 that the infield in BUF is one of the best minor league fields he's played on and he hopes #jays can turn this into a home field advantage because visiting teams won't be thrilled about going to a minor league park.

— Dan Shulman (@DShulman_ESPN) July 24, 2020

While the Blue Jays were granted a National Interest Exemption to host their Summer Camp at the Rogers Centre, playing their regular season games in Toronto was ruled out when Marco Mendocino, Canada’s Minister of Immigration, announced last Saturday that the Canadian government had “concluded the cross-border travel required for M.L.B. regular-season play would not adequately protect Canadians’ health and safety,” mainly given the inability of players to follow the 14-day post-travel self-quarantining guidelines while keeping to the schedule of games. The Blue Jays’ spring training facility in Dunedin, Florida — the only option “that is 100 percent seamless right now,” according to team president and CEO Mark Shapiro — was ruled out because Florida is now the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with an average exceeding 10,000 new cases per day. Read the rest of this entry »

The universe in 2020, it seems, can’t abide happiness—at least not for the Dodgers. Just one day after the team announced a gigantic extension with Mookie Betts, locking up one of the best players in baseball for the next decade-plus, Los Angeles learned that it will be without Clayton Kershaw for a while. Hours ahead of what would’ve been his ninth career Opening Day start, Kershaw instead hit the Injured List with a back strain suffered while working out on Tuesday; per Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, there’s no timetable for his return.

This kind of malady has been frustratingly common for Kershaw, who’s battled his fair share of back pain over the last few seasons. A herniated disc sidelined him for two months in 2016, and back tightness cost him five weeks in 2017 and a month of action in 2018. The 32-year-old lefty managed to avoid further lumbar issues last season en route to a 3.03 ERA and 3.4 WAR in 178 1/3 innings (though shoulder inflammation resulted in an early-season IL stint). But as anyone with a perpetually sore spine will tell you, those problems are often chronic. As such, it has to be worrying for both Kershaw and the Dodgers that his back is once again the source of his woes, and while this strain could be minor, it also could result in a multi-week absence. 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 »

At last, nearly four months after originally planned, the Opening Day of the 2020 season is upon us. It begins this evening at 7 pm ET in Washington, DC, with an impressive pitching matchup that reprises last year’s World Series opener, albeit with one of the principals having changed teams. At Nationals Park — where, in acknowledgement of his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic that caused the delay, Dr. Anthony Fauci will throw out the ceremonial first pitch — three-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer will take the ball for the defending champion Nationals while Gerrit Cole will inaugurate his record-setting $324 million contract with his first regular season start as a Yankee. The night’s other contest, beginning at 10 pm ET, calls upon one of the sport’s top rivalries, pitting the Dodgers — albeit with Dustin May as a last-minute substitute for Clayton Kershaw, who was placed on the injured list due to back stiffness on Thursday afternoon — against the Giants and Johnny Cueto.

This will be Scherzer’s fifth Opening Day start, and third in a row, all with Washington; a fractured knuckle in his right ring finger forced him to yield to Stephen Strasburg in 2017. Cole has just one previous Opening Day start, in 2017 for the Pirates. Both pitchers lost at least a couple such starts to Justin Verlander, Scherzer’s teammate in Detroit from 2010-14 and Cole’s teammate since late ’17; Scherzer didn’t even get the nod when he was fresh off his 2013 AL Cy Young award. Verlander, who will take the ball in the Astros’ opener against the Mariners on Friday, will move into the active lead in Opening Day starts with his 12th. Kershaw would have taken sole possession of third with nine:

Read the rest of this entry »

According to multiple sources, the Dodgers appear to be on the verge of signing Mookie Betts to a significant contract extension that would keep the star in Los Angeles for at least the next decade. The exact details are still up in the air — Ben Clemens will be back in this space for all that analysis when the deal is closer to final — but it’s going to be a big one:

Including 2020, the new deal is expected to keep Mookie Betts in a Dodger uniform for 13 years at more than $380 million.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 22, 2020

Whatever the exact contours of the final contract, it’s almost certainly going to be the largest commitment of resources in Dodgers history so far — don’t forget, the team had to give up Alex Verdugo, Jeter Downs, and Connor Wong just to get the opportunity to make such a gigantic offer. The Dodgers have always exhibited a bit of conservatism when trading their top prospects and often for good cause; players like Walker Buehler and Corey Seager have turned out to be far more valuable to the team than anyone they would have fetched in a trade. But after a few missed World Series championship opportunities, they proved willing to be more aggressive this winter, giving up guys they really liked in order to get Betts for a single year and first dibs on signing him to a mega-contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and again I’ll conduct an interview that falls through the cracks. For one reason or another, the audio file ends up on the back burner long enough that its timeliness evaporates. Due to my neglect — and often to my consternation — the conversation never sees the light of day.

There are notable exceptions. Jordan Weems will reportedly be on Oakland’s Opening Day roster. In 2017 spring training, I’d talked to the then-24-year-old about his recent conversion from catcher to pitcher. He was in the Red Sox organization at the time, and while it was an interesting story… again, sometimes things fall through the cracks.

Fortunately I kept the audio, because it’s an even better story now. Nine years after Weems was drafted as a catcher out of a Columbus, Georgia high school, and seven months after he signed with the A’s as a minor-league free agent, he’s poised to make his major league debut as a reliever.

Weems was well south of the Mendoza line when his position player days ended midway through the 2016 season. The 2011 third round pick had a .119/.241/.134 line with Double-A Portland, and his OPS over 1,180 professional plate appearances was a paltry .568. He knew that his career was in peril, but at the same time, he wasn’t expecting a move to the mound. Read the rest of this entry »