Lost Seasons Mean Lost Milestones

Baseball is a statistics-heavy game, and that’s true even for those who don’t think of themselves as being part of the saber set. Because the game’s rules have had a relatively high degree of consistency across eras, the sport’s career milestones have also enjoyed a certain constancy throughout its history. That doesn’t mean that 600 homers from a player whose prime came in the 1960s are exactly the same as the 600 homers a player in the Wild Card era hit, but when you’re talking 600 homers, you’re always talking about someone who was really, really good at hitting home runs.

And while we would like to think that Hall of Fame voting is based off deep analysis and not round numbers, the fact remains that milestones still play a large part in who ends up in Cooperstown. Whether a player hits 470 homers or 520 homers still means something.

For precisely how much missed time has mattered in Hall of Fame voting, you should read my colleague Jay Jaffe’s three-part series on missed time and the Hall of Fame. In those three parts, Jay tackled how missed years due to wars and strikes were handled , and how today’s hitters and pitchers might be treated in Cooperstown terms. So go read those first. I’ll wait.

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Meg will probably now inform me that I don’t need to actually insert punctuation that represents foot-tapping, so let’s get to some data! That’s what a projection system is for, after all.

Given the world that we’re in, one of my many research projects this spring has been trying to better gauge how missed seasons ought to be treated. Forecasting those seasons is difficult in the best of times; the missed time is typically due to injury or suspension or war. Now, everyone is hanging out at home trying to not catch the current super-virus or crippling ennui.

And I wasn’t entirely sure whether the long layoff would affect all types of players to the same degree. Re-projecting stars for 1982 and 1995 using ZiPS — I didn’t have ZiPS in 1995 though I assume you’ll excuse me for not having a projection system when I was four — I tried to gauge whether missed time affected players of different qualities in different ways. Together with other data (suspensions, premature retirements, and war), I found that my normal missed time algorithm slightly overrated stars’ “return” projections. Apparently, the elite do have more to lose with lost time.

With those results in mind, and to get an idea of how the projections would change in a missed season, I projected the probabilities of some of the active players with the best chances of hitting major milestones doing so. These projections reflect both the lost season and the slightly decreased projection relative to the rest of baseball upon return. These projections also contain an algorithm that makes it more likely a player nearing a milestone will return for an additional season. Further, I told ZiPS that veterans will finish their contracts:

With a full 2020 season, there was approximately a 57% projected chance that one of these 16 players would finish their careers with at least 700 home runs. A single missed year drops that by more than half, to 26%. A lot of that is Albert Pujols. 44 homers isn’t a lot, but he’s only signed through 2021 and let’s be honest, if he wasn’t a future Hall of Famer with a big contract, he’d have spent his summers playing golf the last three or four years. Losing 2020 washes out most of his probability of hitting 700.

But even for the future immortals with more time remaining, it’s a pretty big deal. To hit 700 homers, a lot has to go right; otherwise, we’d have more than three players in history beyond that threshold. Losing a year is a significant loss, even for a younger player. Lopping 40 homers off the career totals of Cody Bellinger or Ronald Acuña Jr. presents a significant handicap.

For the lighter milestones, it’s less of a kneecapping since you don’t need to be quite as fortunate to hit 500 homers. The exception is Miguel Cabrera. ZiPS was already looking at him askance given that his offensive profile has confusingly become Really Slow Craig Counsell, and sees hitting 500 as being difficult if 2020 is lost. That would have been a surprise a few years ago!

For the 21 hitters listed here, ZiPS projects that, on average, two who would have achieved the 3,000-hit feat will now fail to do so as a result of a lost 2020 season. For players near 2,000 hits like Joey Votto (1,866) and Yadi Molina (1,963), that’s unlikely to matter; Molina might retire in that case, but ZiPS isn’t capable of modeling this decision of his. The larger hits are taken by mid-career players like José Altuve and Manny Machado, players who are in their prime but old enough that the calendar is a concern.

It would be especially bad news for Nick Markakis in his quest to be the worst 3,000-hit player in major league history. Johnny Damon fell short in his quest to sneak up on 3000 hits and no 2020 could dive-bomb Markakis’s quest for the last 600ish hits:

Despite the introduction of the five-man rotation, we’ve been blessed with a surprisingly large number of 300-game winners in our lifetime, most recently the impressive Hall of Fame crew of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Randy Johnson, with Roger Clemens on the outside for non-baseball reasons. We’re now in an era, however, when the careers of our elite pitchers did not brush up against the end of the pre-sabermetric era, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever before.

Right now there are only nine active pitchers with 150 wins and only two, Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke, who have passed 200 wins. Still, ZiPS thought that there was a 79% chance that one of those 11 pitchers would win 300 games, whether because of Verlander or Greinke being durable, Clayton Kershaw getting that last 5% back, Gerrit Cole establishing 2019-2020 as his new baseline, or maybe even Rick Porcello working his way to 300 wins by virtue of eating innings and having amassed 149 wins through age-30 thanks to an early start.

With a lost season, that becomes a coin flip (46%). The two best candidates, Verlander and Greinke, see the calendar flip unfortunately. It could still happen, but a lot more good fortune is needed.

The one thing the modern era is good for is strikeout records, because there are a lot of punch outs. What does a lost year do for those chases?

Nobody has established even a 1% chance of catching Nolan Ryan’s 5714 — and nobody will because of the almost 5,400 innings Ryan needed to reach that mark. The odds of catching the 3,000 and 4,000 strikeout marks, still relatively exclusive thresholds, aren’t as impacted as some of the other milestones.