Miggy, Wild Card Races, and the CBA: Notes From The Weekend in Baseball

Nightcrawling

As a night person, I love late-night baseball, and this weekend was ideal for that, with the most compelling series, at least in terms of playoff implications, all on the West Coast. The Giants and Dodgers both took two out of three from the A’s and Mets, respectively, so nothing changed at the top of the NL West standings, but keeping the status quo is at least slightly good news for San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the Padres continued to scuffle, needing a dramatic win on Saturday to avoid getting swept by Philadelphia. Losers of nine out of their last 11, all of the excuses for their poor play have revolved around a pitching staff being held together by glue and string after a crippling series of injuries. The offense deserves an equal brunt of the blame; in those 11 games, they’ve scored a grand total of 37 runs, and three of those contests were at Coors Field. It’s hard to call any series in August pivotal, but for San Diego — now closer to the Rockies than first place in the division and suddenly on the outside looking in for the Wild Card game —this week’s three-game set hosting the Dodgers feels like just that.

As for the overall playoff races, the nails in the coffins of the Cardinals, Mets and Mariners all took a significant smack of the hammer over the weekend, with each losing two of three this weekend, and the Blue Jays are in danger of becoming long shots at best to reach the tournament. It suddenly feels like just six or seven teams are fighting for five spots in each league, but at least we have all sorts of possibilities for some real late-season chaos (or entropy, depending on the lens you use).

The First CBA Talks

This story from Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich over at The Athletic earlier in the week on the latest CBA talks feels like it came and went with little impact, but based on the details that were leaked, that’s understandable, as the owners’ proposal for a salary floor to accompany lower CBT thresholds is a non-starter.

To be fair to their side, which is hard to do at times, this is early in discussions, and they certainly didn’t expect or even anticipate acceptance on the players’ side. What they aimed to do with this offer is communicate that they are willing to do something to address all of the players making less than eight figures, but this is nothing short of salary suppression in terms of overall spending. The owners have a figure in mind of what they want to spend in total on player salaries, and they’re open to giving the union a say in determining it in any number of ways, so long as that sum total never increases in and of itself.

Unfortunately, the players know that they can never truly ascertain if that total spending number is a fair one unless the owners open their books. That’s never going to happen, and the union knows that teams are making more money than ever from line items they can easily hide from a strict profit-and-loss spreadsheet that only includes direct baseball revenue. This is the first paragraph I’ve written in 2021 about the labor situation, and this week’s first in-person discussion between the two sides leaves me with no reason to believe that I won’t be writing many more in the coming months.

Does Even Jed Hoyer Want To Watch The Cubs?

While talking to someone inside the game last week, they asked a question that stuck with me: “Do you think Jed Hoyer is even watching his games?” It’s not a dig at the Cubs’ President of Baseball Operations. Ignoring whether or not Chicago should have done what it did at the deadline, once he and his front office decided to trade away their impending free agents, the moves themselves were executed quite well.

Now the Cubs are in a unique spot. Usually after a salary and roster dump, you get a chance to evaluate prospects at the big league level in preparations for next year. Losing certainly isn’t fun, but at least they give you something to be excited about. Figuring out if 30-year-old Rafael Ortega can fit as a fourth outfielder or if 29-year-olds Patrick Wisdom and Frank Schwindel can temporarily hold down a corner infield spot, though, is far less compelling then seeing if a real prospect can be a central figure in the next good version of your big league squad.

Losers of 12 consecutive home games and 21 of 25 overall, the Cubs are a brutal combination of both awful and exceptionally boring. If I’m Hoyer, I’d see this as a good time to go do some affiliate visits to see some of those recently acquired prospects instead of this mess. I hear Myrtle Beach is just lovely this time of year.

The Dangers Of Draft-Week Analysis

We’ve talked quite a bit on the Chin Music podcast about how prospect rankings maintained by teams often can vary wildly from the public third-party lists. For the most part, this is about asymmetrical information, as teams have access to data and video that is not in the public sphere, but it’s also about how teams evaluate players, often valuing (or de-valuing) certain tools and skillsets. Public lists tend to take a more balanced approach that weigh tools and performance somewhat equally.

The same can be said when it comes to the draft. With the 17th pick in 2020, the Red Sox took Northern California high school infielder Nick Yorke, and the immediate public reaction was excessively negative. It’s not like the public had seen Yorke play; instead, it was based on his placement on public pre-draft lists, none of which had him as anywhere near a first-round talent. But for reasons the team’s front office won’t detail publicly, Boston felt very strongly about Yorke’s hitting ability and that taking him at No. 17 would allow them to give him the bonus that would be required to steer him away from his college commitment and avoid a more complicated later-round over-slot strategy.

So far, it looks like the Red Sox were right. After hitting two home runs on Saturday night and reaching base four times on Sunday, Yorke heads into the final month of his first full season in Low-A with a .323/.413/.502 line as a 19-year-old. His approach is solid, his contract rate is outstanding, and his power is burgeoning. He is yet another piece of evidence on how analyzing a draft immediately after it may be necessary in order to serve the readership, but it can be a bit of a fool’s errand.

Miggy Hits No. 500

What I like the best about Miguel Cabrera’s historic blast on Sunday afternoon is that it was a good reminder of just how good he used to and, an occasion, can still be. Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk called for a changeup on the outer edge, and Steven Matz delivered just that. Cabrera recognized it, extended his arms, and drove it the other way 400 feet to become the first Venezuelan player to reach 500 homers.

Cabrera isn’t having a very good year, which is something we’ve been able to say every year since 2016. Maybe it’s just focusing on the now, and maybe it’s a cultural thing — understandable in these troubled times where we collectively entertain ourselves by poking fun at bad things — but the last five years of his career seem to have attracted a focus on his lack of production and his contract as opposed to the fact that he’s one of the best right-handed hitters of our generation … strike that, in the history of the game. Sunday afternoon was a nice reminder of the latter, and it was good to see, at least for one day, all of the things being said about Cabrera falling on the positive side of the ledger.





Kevin Goldstein is a National Writer at FanGraphs.

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Jack Bandit
2 years ago

I assure you, Myrtle Beach is not lovely this time of year.