The Chicago Cubs added another bat to the lineup on Sunday, acquiring designated hitter José Martínez from the Tampa Bay Rays for two players to be named later.

Chicago, with few spare bats to be had from their increasingly thin upper minors, was one of the many National League teams that rolled into the season without a clear full-time designated hitter option. The team has generally used the position to either rest Willson Contreras without losing his bat or to get Victor Caratini’s lumber in the lineup. Larger active rosters in 2020 have facilitated this, giving the Cubs room to carry Josh Phegley as the “break in case of emergency” catcher; teams are usually quite resistant to having their backup catcher as the designated hitter due to the possibility of injury.

Martínez is a limited player, with his defensive abilities at first base and either corner outfield spot both weak points on his résumé, but it’s unlikely the Cubs use him in a role that involves much use of a glove. Phegley was designated for assignment as the corresponding roster move, another sign Chicago sees Martínez taking over a good chunk of the DH job. He’s had fairly large platoon splits in his short major league career, with a .946 OPS against lefties and a .773 against righties, so he’ll at least grab most, if not all, of the starts against southpaws. Those splits are more even in 2020, but you should take platoon splits over a single month about as seriously as you take Pittsburgh’s 2020 World Series chances (read: not at all). 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

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Somewhat lost in the hubbub of the long-awaited arrival of Opening Day is the coincidence that, if not for the coronavirus pandemic, Thursday would have marked the beginning of the 2020 Hall of Fame Induction Weekend in Cooperstown. On April 30, at a point when the Hall of Fame’s doors had been closed for a month and a half, the institution officially announced that its board of directors had unanimously voted to postpone this year’s festivities, with the honorees instead slated to be recognized next year alongside those from the Class of 2021. The decision came down in spite of the fact that Cooperstown itself had been relatively untouched by the spread of the coronavirus, but in anticipation of a potentially record-setting crowd on hand to witness the inductions of Derek Jeter, Marvin Miller, Ted Simmons, and Larry Walker, the institution took an admirably proactive stance, not wanting 50,000-plus attendees from all around the country (and the world) to pack together and then risk carrying infections back to their communities.

The minimal spread of the coronavirus to Cooperstown and the Mohawk Valley allowed the Hall to reopen four weeks ago, with appropriate safety measures in place, but the loss of the weekend’s festivities hits home for this scribe. Not only would I have been attending my fourth Induction Weekend in a row, celebrating with fellow writers, fans, local Cooperstown residents, and other friends I’ve made through my repeated visits, but I would have been hawking copies of The Cooperstown Casebook on Main Street, meeting and greeting readers, a handful of whom have made an annual ritual of buying another signed copy to give to a friend while arguing good-naturedly about the merits of their favorite candidate. That Simmons and Walker were both profiled at length in the book — as were 2017 honoree Tim Raines, ’18 honoree Alan Trammell, and ’19 honorees Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, and Mariano Rivera — makes this year’s postponement sting just a bit more, because it’s incredibly gratifying to share the joy with fans of the honorees for whom we’ve all gone the extra mile, figuratively and literally. Aw, wait ’til next year! 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 »

While researching his latest article, Ben Lindbergh of Effectively Wild and The Ringer asked me and David Appelman if we had data for the most WAR accrued over any given 60-game stretch for a player since 2002 (Hint: It’s Barry Bonds). One question begets others, like who had the worst WAR over 60-games since 2002 (poor Ryan Doumit). The next thing we knew, we had literally millions rows of data, so we decided to make a leaderboard out of them so you can use the data we found.

Creating a quirky leaderboard for this equally quirky baseball season takes database resources and developer time. Your continued support and Membership allows us to afford those resources and create a leaderboard you won’t find anywhere else. If you haven’t already, please consider becoming a FanGraphs Member or donating to the site, so that we can continue to create awesome tools to answer your (and Ben’s) baseball questions.

The Basics

• We have 60-game rolling stats for batters.
• We have 12-game rolling stats for pitchers. By default we only show 12-game spans that have all been starts.
• The rolling stats are delineated by season, so each span of games occurs within the same season.
• This is an extension of the data engine behind our rolling graphs on the player pages, except pivoted into a leaderboard.
• Unfortunately, the length of the rolling stats are fixed to 60 or 12 games, and can’t be changed to other values.
• Since these are rolling stats, you can have spans that have fewer than 60 or 12 games. This typically happens at the beginning of the season or if a player didn’t play enough games over the course of the entire season.
• We include data from 1974 to 2019.

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Yesterday, a few days after the transaction freeze was lifted, we had our first mid-pandemic trade when the Padres acquired Jorge Mateo from Oakland for a Player to be Named Later. Let’s dig into this deal, which is more important mechanically than it is from a baseball standpoint.

The Padres sending a PTBNL to Oakland circumvents the stated 2020 restriction that only players who are part of the 60-man player pool may be traded. Even if the A’s and Padres already know who the player will be, announcing the deal with a PTBNL distinction enables Oakland to avoid using a player pool spot on the new prospect. It’s an indication that, whoever the player is or will be, they’re not currently in San Diego’s 60-man pool, otherwise they’d just have been announced as the trade piece. Since there will be no minor league season, we won’t have an awkward, Trea Turner or Drew Pomeranz situation where a team is rostering and developing a minor leaguer who they and the industry knows they’ll soon trade. Even if the PTBNL needs to be put on the 60 later this summer in order to complete the transaction, doing it at the last possible moment enables the teams to have that roster spot free for as long as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

With talks taking a contentious turn over the last week, as players asked owners to tell them “when and where” to play and Rob Manfred made public statements backing away from his earlier 100% guarantee of baseball in 2020, this season seemed very much in doubt. According to Jon Heyman, the players and owners have an agreement in principle that will give players pro-rated pay while providing expanded playoffs and a waiver of a potential player grievance for failing to live up to the March 26 agreement. Heyman was also the first to report that Rob Manfred and Tony Clark had an in-person meeting yesterday, as Manfred flew to Arizona in an attempt to restart talks.

As Heyman was reporting the deal, multiple reporters confirmed that MLB had made an offer, but indicated a deal had not yet been made. The MLBPA added this:

Reports of an agreement are false.

— MLBPA Communications (@MLBPA_News) June 17, 2020

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It’s not the year of a round-numbered anniversary, but as it’s a time without major league baseball, it will do. On Sunday at 9 pm ET, ESPN will air its premiere of Long Gone Summer, a 30 for 30 documentary on the 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as they vied to break Roger Maris‘ single-season mark of 61 homers, which had stood since 1961. While subsequent allegations concerning performance-enhancing drugs have dulled the luster of the two sluggers’ astronomical totals — 70 for McGwire, 66 for Sosa — director AJ Schnack is far less interested in singling out the pair for scolding than in reliving the excitement of the race, and the camaraderie of the two rivals, which isn’t to say that the topic of PEDs goes unaddressed.

Indeed, Schnack, an award-winning filmmaker whose previous credits include documentaries about They Might be Giants and Kurt Cobain, has gone against the industry grain at least somewhat in making the movie. As he told Uproxx’s Mike Adams this week:

I grew up outside St. Louis, also went to Mizzou. I was a Cardinal fan. That summer really reconnected me with my childhood experience of enjoying sports and enjoying baseball, driving around with my dad, listening to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon on the radio. And when that summer happened, I’d moved to L.A. I was starting to work in film, and it just reconnected me with all of those feelings and the emotions and the excitement that I felt about baseball. So I felt like, yes, we now know that that summer took place in baseball’s steroid era. But, first, >especially for people younger than us, I want to just say this is what that felt like, to be in the middle of that summer.

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Over the past two months, with no Major League Baseball to watch due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve absorbed myself in the progress and eventual return to play of the Korea Baseball Organization. It’s a league to which I had previously paid little mind beyond the arrival of Hyun-Jin Ryu 류현진, the return of Eric Thames 테임즈, and the departures of several less familiar players, such as knuckleballing lefty Ryan Feierabend 피어밴드, but it’s one to which I suddenly felt more drawn via my connections to FanGraphs alumni Sung Min Kim 김민 and Josh Herzenberg. Both are now living in Busan and working for the Lotte Giants, the former in the R&D department, the latter as the team’s pitching coordinator and quality control coach. Recent discussions with them, with MyKBO proprietor Dan Kurtz, and with KBO alums Josh Lindblom 린드블럼 and Eric Hacker 해커 have taught me a great deal about the league and helped bring me up to speed in offering some analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Building off the recent addition of KBO player pages, we’ve created a leaderboard that compiles player stat lines. The details of our current KBO data offerings can be found in the KBO player page introduction post.

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