This spring, one of the stickiest issues in the negotiations between the owners and the MLBPA was that of service time credit, a subject that has long caused labor friction. If the 2020 season occurs, the issue of service time credit will largely take care of itself. But what if there is no 2020 season? The lost salaries are hard enough, but the lost service time would have made those losses even greater. Using ZiPS to consider just 15 prominent free agents-to-be after the 2020 and 2021 seasons, I estimated that those players alone would lose roughly $316 million on their next contracts.

In return for $170 million in guaranteed money — an advance if play happened to recommence this year — and agreeing not to sue for their lost salaries, the players struck a deal. If 2020 is not played, the free agents-to-be in 2021 will still hit the market this winter, as players will be credited for the same amount of service they accrued in 2019.

MLB’s system of arbitration and free agency is based on bright lines; five years and 171 days and you have to go through salary arbitration, while one more day lets you hit free agency. The agreement between players and owners benefits them collectively, but inevitably, some individuals will find themselves on the wrong side of one of those new bright lines. And in this case, a few dozen young players, many of whom are among the brightest young talents in baseball, would still be under an additional year of team control if 2020 is lost. Read the rest of this entry »

Gio González has a very particular set of skills. No, it’s not rescuing his kidnapped daughter — it’s something far more useful for baseball. Or, it was — until 2020. González, and Steven Matz as well, are simply otherworldly when it comes out to striking out opposing pitchers.

That probably seems weird to you, because those guys aren’t exactly prolific strikeout artists. Take a look at the top 10 pitchers in pitcher strikeout rate (since 2015, minimum 100 PA):

That’s eight pitchers with high-octane, face-melting stuff…and González and Matz hanging out in rarefied air. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the reliability of betting on baseball using the Grays Sports Almanac from Back to the Future Part II, then answer listener emails about a baseball broadcaster reality show, awarding bonuses for success in specific batter-pitcher matchups, and whether there’s any way to make pitchers into less terrible hitters, plus Stat Blasts about how a bandbox ballpark with a ton of foul territory would play and the least valuable World Series MVPs.

Audio intro: Ten Years After, "I’d Love to Change the World"
Audio outro: Sharon Van Etten, "Nothing Will Change"

Link to video of ESPN’s Dream Job
Link to Stat Blast song covers thread
Link to Garrett Krohn’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to World Series MVPs data
Link to Sam on Bumgarner
Link to post on pitchers pitching to Bumgarner
Link to article on Bucky Harris and pitcher hitting
Link to Ben on the DH
Link to Russell Carleton on the DH
Link to Glavine on the player PR problem
Link to order The MVP Machine

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How do you think one might counter the general sentiment that baseballers are greedy and make too much? It's annoying to hear my coworkers side with ownership.

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Two weeks have passed since the last round of questions, so I am once again asking you to weigh in on the shape and size of the potential 2020 baseball season. Thanks in advance for your help in providing these responses. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

The Rent-is-Too-Damn-High Team

The Oakland A’s and the county stadium authority are in a dispute over ballpark rent. This isn’t the first time there’s been such a dispute at the stadium sometimes known as the Oakland Coliseum. In 2014, the lease-extension negotiations between the A’s and the county stadium authority broke down over a dispute over withheld payments. The Oakland Raiders also withheld rent payments in 2015, part of an ongoing dispute that ended with the Raiders leaving for Las Vegas thanks to a sweetheart deal in their new city.

What’s new this time, of course, is the effect of pandemic economics. Citing the force majeure clause in the contract between the Athletics and the stadium authority, A’s general counsel D’Lorna Ellis referenced the unavailability of the stadium for play to justify the team deferring payment “until [they] have a better understanding of when the Coliseum will be available for use.”

The Coliseum Authority Executive Director made the issue a bit more confusing with contradictory statements, first saying that “because they haven’t used it, they were not able to generate revenue and they have no ability to pay,” before assuring the San Francisco Chronicle that the A’s never suggested revenue was an issue.

Coliseum Authority board member Ignacio De La Fuente, a former president of Oakland’s City Council, was less conciliatory than Gardner. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first two weeks of the Korea Baseball Organization season, the NC Dinos have dominated the rest of the league, jumping out to an 11-2 start. On Tuesday’s ESPN-televised game, they beat the defending champion Doosan Bears, who have come back to the pack with a record of 8-5, that after handing the Dinos just their second loss of the season on Wednesday. The Dinos’ success thus far is worth a closer look, even from 7,000 miles and a language barrier away.

In Tuesday’s game at the Bears’ Jamsil Stadium in Seoul — the venue they share with the LG Twins, but like all KBO games thus far this year one devoid of fans due to the pandemic — the Dinos pounced on 23-year-old righty Young-ha Lee 이영하, the Bears’ third-best starter last year, for three first-inning runs, sending all nine hitters to the plate (Do KBO fans argue over the definition of “batting around” the way MLB fans do? I’m not here to create an international incident). Second baseman Min-woo Park 박민우 led off with a double and scored two batters later when designated hitter Sung-bum Na 나성범 singled.

The Dinos are underway early at Jamsil!#KBO | #NCDinos pic.twitter.com/iTCYYxkXry

— taewoongi (??) (@taewoongii) May 19, 2020

Na took second on a balk, then scored on a single by catcher Euiji Yang 양의지, who himself came around to score thanks in part to a wild pitch and an infield single off a deflection. The Dinos ran the score to 4-0 in the second as Park drew a walk, took second on a very long single by center fielder Aaron Altherr 알테어 off the base of the outfield wall, advanced to third when Yang was hit by pitch to load the bases, and scored on a sacrifice fly by third baseman Sok Min Park 박석민.

(A note to users: in case you’re wondering how to get your fix of play-by-play action after the fact, MyKBOstats offers English-language box scores. When possible, each box score page also offers links to highlights and the full replay on YouTube, all the more reason to drop by.) Read the rest of this entry »

Ty Buttrey had an up-and-down first full big-league season last year. The downs tended to come in clumps. In a pair of early-September outings, the Los Angeles Angels reliever was charged with seven earned runs in just two-thirds of an inning. Prior to that there was a three-game stretch in late July where he allowed seven earned runs in two-and-a-third innings. Take those stink bombs out of the equation and Buttrey would have finished 2019 with a 2.34 ERA, rather than the rocky-by-comparison 3.98 that went into the annals.

Not that he wants, or deserves, a pity party. Unlike duffers, hurlers don’t get mulligans. Once it becomes an official game, everything you do ends up on the ledger.

I caught up to Buttrey at Fenway Park a handful of weeks after his July speed bump. When I asked him for a synopsis of his season as a whole, he pointed to occasional overuse of a 97 mph heater that, velocity-wise, ranked in the 96th percentile among his big-league brethren.

“Early in the year, I was doing pretty well mixing my pitches,” Buttrey told me. “I was feeling comfortable and having a lot of success. Then I had a couple games about three months in where I start getting really fastball heavy. I was throwing way too many and ended up needing to go back to the drawing board.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is the third in a series of baseball-themed lessons we’re calling FanGraphs Prep. In light of so many parents suddenly having their school-aged kids learning from home, we hope is that these units offer a thoughtfully designed, baseball-themed supplement to the school work your student might already be doing. The first and second units can be found here and here.

Overview: A two-week unit centered around building and testing your own projection system.

From the simplest forecasts to the most complex projection systems, one of the most challenging questions to try to answer with statistics is predicting player performance from one year to the next. We do this by using their past stats to create an estimate for their future performance. Accounting for other factors like age and injury adds complexity, though not necessarily accuracy. In this unit, you’ll create a simple projection system and then test its accuracy.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify and apply a weighted mean.
• Gather and organize data from various sources.
• Construct a weighted projection using historical data.
• Explain why a projection system produces errors.
• Identify and apply Mean Absolute Error.
• Identity and apply Root Mean Square Error.
• Evaluate which projection error to use for a given problem.
• Review a projection system and adjust to fit data.

Target Grade-Level: 9-10

Read the rest of this entry »

Not far from Igerna, California, the home of the once-missing B.R. Logan, is the city of Yreka. Yreka, now the seat of Siskiyou County, is a place that holds onto its history as part of the Wild West — you can take a walking tour of historic buildings through the city, and municipal websites still tell the tale Mark Twain himself wrote about the town’s naming. With a population of 7,765, it’s a quiet place, held by the low noise of the nearby Shasta River.

Back at the turn of the century, though, Yreka was a gold rush boomtown. The city was founded as a mining settlement in 1851, and it didn’t take long for the bustle to begin. Its streets were full of people; there was a steady stream of immigration, with Chinese communities establishing themselves not long after the town was incorporated. The Yreka Flats, as they came to be known, ended up being a prodigious source of gold, sustaining the town for decades after it was first discovered there.

And that’s where our story begins — just a few years after the greatest game of baseball ever played in Southern Oregon. Our hero, as it turns out, was a resident of Ashland, Oregon, the antagonists in that contest; one imagines him reading the Ashland paper, shaking his head at the violence and treachery of that undefeated Grants Pass team. His name was Billy Hulen, and by the time we meet him in 1906, his titles were already plentiful: “The Kid,” Phillie and Senator, the best left-handed shortstop you’d ever seen, survivor of spring-training malaria, Northwestern League champion, member of the Order of Elks and the Knights of Pythia, and — most importantly — one of the most beloved baseball players up and down the Pacific coast.

He was in Yreka that February tending to his gold claim. One day, he headed north to Seattle on some non-specific business. A month later, no one had heard from him. None of his many friends had seen him — not since he had passed through Ashland without even telling his wife he was going to be in town. And so, on March 20, the call was put out for friends of Billy Hulen — in Vancouver and Everett, Ashland and San Francisco, all the way to St. Louis, where he was under contract for the next season — to begin searching for him. Billy Hulen simply had to be found. Read the rest of this entry »