Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 3/16/20

Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, welcome to the latest edition of my Monday chat and likely the first under some fairly trying conditions that we’re all facing. It was moments after last week’s chat that my wife howled, “Oh shit!” at an email announcing the sudden closure of my daughter’s school, effective end of day (she’s 3 1/2, in her first year of preschool). At the time, it was one of those “abundance of caution” things but as the week grew progressively — and aggressively — more surreal, it looks like we were merely a few days ahead of the curve.

Jay Jaffe: I spent the remainder of last week getting up to speed on the COVID-19 virus and its intersection with baseball and other sports, as you may have seen, and I took the lead for our first installment of what will be a daily roundup of the latest news on that front, leading with the news of the first professional player to test positive, an unidentified Yankees farmhand. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/covid-19-roundup-the-first-player-has-test…

Jay Jaffe: My wife and I already worked from home so that part isn’t so difficult to adapt to, but having our daughter underfoot is a challenge. We’re trying to get a bit of help, babysitting-wise, but it’s understandable if people want to isolate themselves.

Jay Jaffe: Over the weekend, in addition to stocking up on food and cleaning supplies, I sprung for a lot of LEGO to help keep us entertained. Maybe that will help.

Anyway, I hope you all are managing out there. Now, onto the questions.

SweetSweetCandy: looks like a june start … maybe later. does this help or hurt any team more than most?

Jay Jaffe: That’s a good question. Both schedule-wise and injury recovery-wise, the stoppage will have an impact that differs from team to team. We’ll be looking at the latter issue in some systematic fashion, I think (it’s been discussed internally), and I know that Dan Szymborski is examining it from a ZiPS playoff odds standpoint as well. That might even be up today.

Sad Fan: So is shutdown going to be the precedent from here on out every time there’s a global virus outbreak?  If so, we might as well get used to this happening every other ear or so.  Are they working on an emergency future plan?  Playing in empty stadiums is way better than what is happening now.

Jay Jaffe: Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but I’d imagine that while addressing this crisis, MLB and the union can hammer out some protocols that would apply if there are other stoppages down the road. That’s almost certainly not the top priority at the moment, as the league and the union try to figure out how to keep players and staff at camps safe, local governments coordinate their responses, and our health care system scrambles to increase capacities for testing and care.

Everybody is in uncharted territory here and nobody should be expecting overnight solutions or rigid responses that can’t be adjusted as things change — which they have been by the day if not the hour lately.

joelster63: Knowing that you have no more information on this than the rest of us and that, even more than us fans, your world is flipped upside down…how ya doing?

Jay Jaffe: Thanks. This isn’t easy for anyone, but I’m lucky that I live in close proximity to several grocery stores plus a Target and several drug stores, so getting my hands on some supplies isn’t too tough. Also, I already work from home and am used to that aspect of this situation, and while I have a BBWAA card and enjoy covering games, I also have a lot I can do even without games, an extension of my offseason mode. For one thing, I’m thinking about some kind of Hall of Fame/JAWS articles that I can write; there’s some system stuff I’d like to get to that the ballot season crunch just doesn’t allow time for.

Pete: If the season is cancelled, is there any scenario in which Betts becomes a free without ever putting on a a Dodgers jersey? If so, does the trade get unwound in the interest of fairness?

Jay Jaffe: nobody knows, but I don’t think there’d be any specific remedy that singles out one trade or two teams unless everything else is undone as well, and that seems highly unlikely.  

Also, I think and hope that we’re a long way from a full season being canceled. I think MLB could, if push came to shove, run a 2-month season and an expanded playoff format or something in order to recoup some TV money. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Billy Clint: O/U 100 games played this year?

Jay Jaffe: Via Craig Edwards’ piece today (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-many-games-can-mlb-realistically-play-…) it looks like 100 games would take an early June startup. Right now that seems possible if you consider yesterday’s CDC recommendation for eight weeks of limiting gatherings of 50 or more people. That would run through May 10, leaving time for a 3-week mini-spring training, perhaps longer if MLB decides to make up some games on the back end of the regularly scheduled season.

Still, that’s probably a best-case scenario, so i’d take the under on 100 but I think that’s a good target to aim for.

dave: Jay, what tv shows have/will you be watching? Trying to keep it light at my house, so lots of archer/always sunny/simpsons

Jay Jaffe: We’ve lately been in a rotation that includes Billions, Justified (re-watching, as I never saw S1), Better Call Saul, Derry Girls, You’re the Worst (final season, saved ages ago on the TiVO), Archer (which is a grind right now), the Muppet Show (I have the first 3 seasons on DVD and the kiddo is enjoying them as part of our occasional dinnertime viewing).

Separately, having finished the final season of Mr. Robot and the latest one of The Expanse, I just cracked open the new season of Altered Carbon, and got about 5 minutes into the new season of Homeland before deciding I needed more comedy.

Jay Jaffe: Also, i have been and will continue to check in on my Apollo-related favorites. I am a NASA space travel buff and have been since seeing The Right Stuff in theaters. I’ll watch just about anything about the Apollo program, and just showed part of Apollo 11 (last year’s great movie) to my daughter, who has read about the moon landing via a great book called Moonshot by a former college classmate, Brian Floca. I watched a lot of such fare during my wife’s pregnancy as sort of a coping mechanism — we know the outcomes of the space missions and they’re usually good ones, and tremendously impressive and uplifting achievements.

Bighen: Obviously a lot bigger things going on but would there be any traction around expanding rosters to 29 or 30 people and then upping the number of double headers played throughout the year? Just spit balling

Jay Jaffe: I do think stuff like that will be under discussion if/when play resumes.

Pat’s Bat: Why doesn’t MLB just skip the All Star game and break to get more games in?

Jay Jaffe: Seems possible but it’s just one of many, many issues the league will have to confront. Remember, there’s $$$ at stake for teams and players (in the form of bonuses) that comes with the All-Star Game, so I don’t think they’re going to axe it immediately.

Nick: If MLB plays a shortened schedule, do they create an entirely new schedule for each team, or just pick up in the middle of the schedule they’ve already drafted for 2020?

Jay Jaffe: I imagine they’ll do the best that they can with the existing schedule rather than drafting an entirely new one, with the caveat that they’ll almost certainly ensure that teams play the same number of games if needed to avoid a 1972 AL East-like situation where a strike wiped out the first two weeks of the season, with no rescheduling at all, and the Tigers (86-70) edged the Red Sox (85-70), who weren’t given the chance to play one more game with a chance to tie.

gaffe: Hi Jay. What do you think this does for injured players. On one hand they get more rest before season start, on the other they have less structured access to rehab programs, or sim games, etc, to gradually work their way back from injury. Is it safe to assume their original timelines for return will also be pushed back a few weeks?

Jay Jaffe: Unknown but in yesterday’s memo to teams, injured players who need treatment from club medical personnel are among those allowed to remain in camps so as to keep their rehabs on track.

Jay Jaffe: I imagine that the extra rest will benefit pitchers more, as their annual workload will be reduced, but that could cause repercussions next year as they ramp up again. I do think there’s a concern about how quickly then can ramp up when the season re-starts; we might see waves of pitchers building up from 60 or 75 pitches in game that count. But that’s just spitballin’

Guest: What do you think the minimum number of games would be before MLB just cancels the season?  An 80 game season doesn’t really seem like enough to balance out all the variance in baseball.

Jay Jaffe: Because such a big chunk of revenue depends upon postseason TV, I’m 199% certain that the league and the union are united in a belief that a short season is better than no season. Yes, it will be less than ideal, but concerns about statistical variance are hardly the biggest sacrifice under the conditions.

Mac: Your first post reads that your wife is 3-1/2 in preschool, and it took me way to long to figure out you meant your daughter

Jay Jaffe: whoops, fixed. SMH.

Derek: Do have any sort of indication about when MLB/MLBPA will decide on how things like service time will be affected by this stoppage?

Jay Jaffe: it’s on the list of things to be addressed. Can’t imagine it’s a topic that will be solved in a day or that anyone knows when it will be settled, but everybody involved does care about it.

mt: Moonshot is a wonderful book. I’ve read it to my kids so many times, I have it memorized.

Jay Jaffe: I bought the 50th anniversary edition last year with the idea that I’d show it to my daughter when she’s a bit older, but she showed enough interest in the basics that it’s in the reading rotation.

I’ve thus far been very successful in passing along my love of the moon to her, such that she says things like, “The moon is my friend!” and tries to spot it when we’re outside. We often see it at a particular spot on our morning route to school.

Carolina: Hi everyone, I am chatting from Italy.
I have the impression that in U. S. the criticity of the situation was not communicated enough.  
In Italy the mitigation plan (closing schools and public events) was not enough to contain the virus so we started isolation and lockdown. 
I am expecting a similar evolution also in the other countries. 
Even playing in empty stadium will be a very high risk activity.  
No business will stay the same in these critical conditions.  
At some point they might restrict travels, so I would suggest you to stay in the city that is home for you.

Jay Jaffe: Thanks for your input, Carolina, and here’s hoping for your safety. I think it’s abundantly clear that on the federal level, the Trump administration bungled the handling of this — both in cutting resources well ahead of time and in focusing on the economic issues at the expense of public health ones. But I do think that local governments have been more successful at communicating the urgency of the situation, and the school/bar/restaurant/sports closures and lockdown protocols enacted within the past week have hopefully been a turning point in helping to flatten the curve.

Jay Jaffe: i know that here in New York, this modeling by data scientist Michael Donnelly got a lot of traction within the local government, and based on the dates he gave, the shutdowns are still in the window that could avert some worst-case scenarios. https://medium.com/@donnellymjd/covid-19-new-york-will-be-the-next-ita…

Andrew: Thinking about Covid-19’s affect on the minor leagues, even if we get going again in late May it’s almost a lost season for many developing players. Does this more harm younger players still developing their tools who are farther away from the majors, or does it more harm older prospects who are a bit on the older side of the competition already and are hoping to move through the system quickly. In other words, who’s more disadvantaged, Ronny Mauricio types or Brett Baty types?

Jay Jaffe: I think that minor leaguers in general are getting the worst of this, as they have no union to protect their already-meager wages and other rights. It will be a lost developmental season for young players, and missed opportunities for the ones who are aging out of prospect-dom. I’d imagine that the latter have more to risk as they age out of employability or willingness to put up with the grind and the uncertainty.

Sock: On the flip side of the previous Mookie question, could he potentially play an abbreviated schedule this year and not accrue enough days on the team to actually be a Dodger for two more years? Obviously would affect many other players too.

Jay Jaffe: I’d have to think that whatever length the season winds up being, it’s likely to be 1.000 years of service time for those on rosters from wire to wire. I’m sure somebody who’s well-versed in contract law and labor law has better insight into the uniform player contract and force majeure, and I imagine we’ll see articles on such topic springing up at some point.

Pat’s Bat: What effect will a shortened season have on incentive clauses in players’ contracts like games played or innings pitched?  Are these things able to be renegotiated?

Jay Jaffe: (shrug). Maybe they prorate the actual innings/plate appearances/game totals to the length of final schedule? That’s my best guess

LoveBravesNotBravesFans: Hello, Jay:  Since there’s no baseball, have you and the team at Fangraphs though about re-directing your energies to analyzing / sharing covid19 data?  Collectively, you are uncannily great at gleaning insights from data and representing it in an accessible way to the data-literate.  I would love to see what your intrepid folks would come up with (rates in US v other countries by state; infection rates vs mortality in us v elsewhere and by state; incorporating hospital beds available; etc).  As a data nerd, I am anxious to know what’s actually happening, but most media outlets don’t really understand how to read this data.  I would love to see a covid WAR-equivalent by geography, for example.  Just a random (albeit morbid, I suspect) thought.

Jay Jaffe: I imagine that the most statistically inclined among us might be able to contribute insights in that area, but I can’t imagine what my own contribution to that end would be (Viral JAWS???).

As somebody who has often said that I’m part of the liberal arts wing of the stathead movement, I’m here to try to interpret other people’s findings, and I’m doing my best to sprinkle a bit of that into what I’ve written recently. But I won’t pretend to know enough about the specific of public health and epidemic progress by presenting anything that would muddy the waters while people who do know their stuff try to cut through the noise to convey accurate information.

Guest: Possible schedule/service time solution: play 82 games, which Craig says could start around July 4 if we extend the season by 2 weeks, and make each day of 2020 service time count double.  Thoughts?

Jay Jaffe: Certainly seems plausible.

Kiermaier’s Piercing Green Eyes: What’s for lunch today?

Jay Jaffe: I’ve got some pastrami, jarlsberg, and country bread on hand, and now seems like a good moment to take a short (10-minute) break to prep a sandwich. Back shortly, and feel free to keep tossing questions into the feed, or check out the livestreams from the past weekend’s SABR Analytics Conference, in which I participated remotely.

Cribbing from today’s roundup:

Speaking of social distancing and Netflix-and-chilling, the SABR Analytics Conference that took place over the weekend was sparsely attended given everything else going on around it, but the organization live-streamed its panels and presentations via YouTube. Friday’s stream is here and Saturday’s is here, with Sunday’s pending at this writing; timestamps in the comments will guide you to the individual events. This scribe took part in an hour-long panel on Saturday morning panel, “The Changing Baseball: What We Know, What We Think We Know, and What It Means” with Baseball Prospectus‘ Rob Arthur, SMT’s Meredith Wills, and moderator Mike Ferrin.

Jay Jaffe: OK, sandwich in hand…

Jay Jaffe: …but no new questions in the queue. Will tackle a couple more of interest before I go.

Snotty Scotty: who throws more innings this year, Garret Richards or Matt Shoemaker

Jay Jaffe: In our Depth Charts, which don’t yet account for the stoppage of play ( I don’t think, at least), we have Richards estimated at 150 innings with San Diego, Shoemaker at 129 with Toronto. Both have had a very hard time staying healthy, with respective totals of 8.2 and 28.2 last year, and 76.1 and 31 in 2018; Richards was 14 months removed from Tommy John surgery when he returned last year, while Shoemaker had a torn ACL. Based on track records and arm vs. other issues, I’ll go with Shoemaker as being the better bet for a higher innings total, but the lesser performance in terms of run prevention.

Guest: Sounds like a good way to spend the rest of your afternoon picking crumbs out of your keyboard.

Jay Jaffe: I’ve been working from home for the better part of the past 18 years and have pretty much figured out the basics of how to eat lunch at a keyboard without a flood of crumbs or other messes.

Hurtado: Seriously. Dan Okerent for the HOF. Who says no?

Jay Jaffe: Okrent, best known for his role in popularizing fantasy baseball, is worthy of some recognition in Cooperstown, but he’s one among many writers— a list that probably starts with a tier that includes John Thorn, Pete Palmer, and Bill James — worthy of such an honor but unlikely to be recognized via the BBWAA’s Spink Award, which has deviated from its ranks only once, to recognize Roger Angell a few years ago.

Slapshot: Since you’re more of the resident beer expert without Eno around on Fangraphs, any new good beer finds you’d like to share?

Jay Jaffe: Let’s pull up Untappd (@jay_jaffe) and see what I’ve logged lately that I enjoyed:

Darks: Lagunitas Willetized Coffee Stout, Catskill Porter, Cooperstown Bench Warmer Porter, Critz Farm Pig City Porter (last three from upstate NY)

IPAs: Pulp Friction Motorworks (Florida), Elysian Contract Haze and Space Dust (Washington — had the latter before but not the former), Singlecut Weird and Gilly (Brooklyn)

Pilsner: Threes Brewing Vainglorious (Brooklyn)

Gina P: Does delay make it more or less likely that rookies will be able to make an impact? Thinking guys like Brendan McKay, AJ Puk, Nate Pearson etc.

Jay Jaffe: Probably more likely given that if they’re on innings caps (as I think they all would be), they’ll be able to cover a larger proportion of the remaining season.

Crystal: Will the delay make it more or less likely that trade chips like Kyle Seager or Lindor get moved?

Jay Jaffe: Perhaps more likely as their respective teams confront the reality of lost revenues and its impact on their organizations. But that’s a wild guess.

Jimmy J: Does this delay help injured speed guys like Byron Buxton move up rankings? How much?

Jay Jaffe: I’d think that any player who might have missed the start of the season due to injuries will benefit, and Buxton, who’s coming off shoulder surgery and was not yet game-ready before the stoppage, would be among them.

BANGING SCHEME: Pitching stats are gonna be wild in a short season. I would take the under at 5 total complete games in the league, and would imagine we’re just going to see huge amounts of opener/bulk-innings usage. Basically everyone will be late-season Milwaukee Brewers, all year.

Jay Jaffe: If the ramp-up time is short, then yes, we could see shorter stints from starters, which might make for an interesting laboratory of experiments with ideas that have been circulating for awhile.

Hurtado: Elysian?  YOURE DRINKG BUDWEISER!!

Jay Jaffe: My brother, who lives in Seattle, bought the Elysians during a family vacation. So many craft breweries are now owned in part or whole by majors that it’s tough to keep track but from among the list I just gave, I also know that Lagunitas sold out to Heineken. It’s a reality of the craft world and also a function of what’s available at a given store, which in our case, on Siesta Key in Florida, was limited. I always prefer something from the craft realm but don’t believe in purity tests.

Jay Jaffe: ok folks, I’m going to call it a day on this chat. Thanks for stopping by and for being patient while I field your questions. I dearly hope you all are managing through this crisis and abiding best practices in terms of staying safe. Be well, and let’s do this again next week.