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

Given the speed with which national guidelines on COVID-19 are changing, you could be forgiven for not keeping up with its implications for baseball. Since last Friday, the CDC has recommended avoiding gatherings of 50 or more people for the next eight weeks and the White House asked the country to avoid groups of 10 or more, keep kids home where possible, and avoid eating and drinking in public for the next 15 days.

Meanwhile, major metropolitan areas are settling in for the long haul. The Bay Area announced a Shelter In Place policy on Monday, and New York closed restaurants, bars, and schools until at least April 20; Washington state has announced similar closures of gathering places, with schools set to remain closed until at least April 24. The state of Ohio did the same on Sunday, and Oregon has already followed suit.

So what’s a roundup of baseball news items against that backdrop? It’s insignificant, really. But here we are, on a baseball website, and COVID-19 continues to affect the game. Here are the baseball-related coronavirus stories from the past day. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday night, the day before MLB shuttered spring training and delayed the start to its season, I was texting with a baseball operations employee in a National League front office. We discussed the likelihood of cancellations, the chaos that would inevitably follow, and the repercussions for players and teams. At one point in the conversation he speculated, “minor leaguers will be absolutely shafted.”

It appears that he was right. With one notable exception, minor leaguers, already unpaid during spring training and the offseason, will not collect paychecks for any games missed due to the spread of COVID-19. So far only one team, the Tampa Bay Rays, has announced plans to pay their minor league players during the delay. While not covering anyone’s salary directly, the club plans to give everyone $800 to help with expenses while they’re unable to play ball. It’s a step in the right direction, even if $800 is considerably less than the monthly salaries these players were set to earn before the disruption.

Still, it’s money that players elsewhere around the league would love to have. Most minor leaguers were just weeks away from solidifying their in-season accommodations, and now find themselves without a place to go or a buck to pay for it once they arrive. The situation has caused affected players considerable distress.

“It sucks,” says one pitcher in a National League farm system who, like other players interviewed for this piece, preferred to remain anonymous. “I’m fortunate enough that I can come home and live with my parents and not pay any rent. But I have a lot of teammates who either have a kid or are married and don’t have the opportunity to go home and have their parents pay for everything.” Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Chavis enjoyed a solid rookie season with the Red Sox in 2019. Primarily playing first and second base, the 24-year-old former first round pick slugged 18 home runs while putting up a .766 OPS and a 96 wRC+ over 382 plate appearances. Power was his calling card. Per Statcast, Chavis’ taters traveled an average of 419 feet, and his longest was jettisoned a prodigious 459 feet.

He rode a bit of rollercoaster on his way to Boston. Drafted 26th overall in 2014 out of Marietta, Georgia’s Sprayberry High School, Chavis scuffled in his initial professional seasons. Struggling to find his swing, he put up high strikeout rates, and tepid offensive numbers, casting doubt on his future. Then he began to find himself. Buoyed by a 2017 reunion with his old hitting coach, Chavis regained his stroke, turned a corner, and within a few years was once again propelling baseballs far distances.

Chavis discussed his power-packed swing — including how it was lost, and then rediscovered — at the tail end of last season.

——

David Laurila: Is hitting simple, or is it complicated?

Michael Chavis: “It depends on the day you’re asking me. When things are going good, it’s as simple as could be — it’s easy — but when things aren’t going well, you start trying to find an answer. You start searching for a difference in your swing. Even though you know you should keep things simple, it’s not like you can be, ‘Oh, I just don’t care; it’ll figure itself out.’ It’s kind of… I guess the weird thing about hitting is you’re constantly making adjustments and changes in order to stay consistent.”

Laurila: You’re changing in order to stay the same…

Chavis: “Yes, which obviously doesn’t make sense. But that’s what it is. One day you can think — this is a random example — ‘swing down,’ because maybe you’ve been getting long and loopy. So you think about swinging down, and your body — just how the body works — is going to make an adjustment. But at some point your body is going to make that adjustment without you being aware of it. All of a sudden, thinking ‘swinging down’ is going to become physically swinging down. Then you have to make an another adjustment.”

Laurila: Basically, one of your mental cues needs to be adjusted. Read the rest of this entry »

Will there be a 2020 baseball season? How many games will teams play? What will that mean for the 2020 baseball season? Normally, these would be extremely upsetting questions to contemplate; in the world in which we’re currently living, they’re somewhere around the 75,000th most important quandaries facing us. But as someone qualified to serve as a baseball writer rather than an epidemiologist, they’re also the kinds of questions I can actually seek to answer, and the differences between how baseball will eventually look versus what we’re used to are bigger than you might think. Assuming we have a season, that is; if no games are played, the projections will be 100% accurate.

So how much do the playoff races change in a shorter season? To answer this, I spent the weekend reconfiguring ZiPS so that it wouldn’t assume a 162-game season — an eventuality I had hoped not to have to deal with unless or until there was a strike — allowing me to run playoff probabilities for seasons of any length. Let’s start with the baseline projections, how ZiPS saw the races before the world turned upside down:

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Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about life during self-isolation and delayed media consumption and explore some of the long-considered and ultimately rejected article ideas in Sam’s tickler file, including Ken Griffey Jr.’s rap career, an undiscovered baseball star in Yosemite, an advance-scouting conspiracy theory, an unorthodox solution to extra-inning games, and a complaint about baseball inspired by Shel Silverstein (plus a brief baseball coronavirus update and the recommended baseball distraction of the day, about the new Statcast system and Hawk-Eye).

Audio intro: John Lennon, "Isolation"
Audio interstitial: Kid Sensation (Feat. Ken Griffey Jr.), "The Way I Swing"
Audio outro: Built to Spill, "The Wait"

Link to Timóteo video 1
Link to Timóteo video 2
Link to Timóteo video 3
Link to Statcast presentation video
Link to Statcast presentation summary
Link to Statcast presentation notes
Link to article about new Statcast physics
Link to order The MVP Machine

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How do you describe a batter’s plate discipline? I sometimes struggle with it. I might describe their walk rate and strikeout rate, maybe add in something about how often they swing. I’m never sure how much to weight walk rate and how much to care about strikeouts. How does someone with a 25% strikeout rate and 10% walk rate compare to someone with a 20% strikeout rate and a 7% walk rate?

What about Anthony Rizzo? He gets on base without swinging the bat fairly often, but it doesn’t show up in his walk rate, only in bags of ice and bruises. Getting hit by a pitch is marginally more valuable than a walk if you listen to our linear weights (because walks happen more often when there are bases open, while HBP tend to be random), but it doesn’t show up in the “plate discipline” numbers we’re used to looking at.

I’ve danced around this concept a few times here at FanGraphs. When I wrote about Joey Gallo’s new approach, I touched on how his strikeout and walk rates related to how good he needed to be on contact to succeed. When I wrote about Luis Arraez’s unique talents, I framed his walks and strikeouts in terms of what it meant for the rest of his contact. Behind the scenes, I’ve been using a standardized version of this calculation for quite a while. Today, with no baseball coming to save us, it’s time to explain my method.
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This is the first installment of what we plan to make a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

With thousands of players in major and minor league camps this spring amid what has grown into a pandemic with nearly 170,000 confirmed cases worldwide, it was only a matter of time before professional baseball had its first player test positive for the novel coronavirus. That came to pass this weekend; on Sunday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that a Yankees minor leaguer has done so. The player in question, who did not spend any time this spring at the team’s major league camp a mile away in Tampa, Florida, has not been publicly identified, in accordance with HIPAA Privacy Rules.

Thus far among professional athletes, three NBA players — the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, and the Pistons’ Christian Wood, the last of whom played against Gobert last Saturday and was diagnosed over the weekend — have tested positive. Gobert’s positive test led the NBA to suspend its season and set off a domino effect that led to other leagues and organizations suspending play as well, as governmental authorities moved to limit the size of gatherings well below thresholds that would allow sporting events to take place.

Per The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, the minor leaguer in question was symptom-free as of Thursday, but woke up Friday feeling feverish and fatigued. After tests for influenza and strep throat came back negative, the player in question was quarantined. The team learned that his COVID-19 test was positive late Saturday night. Meanwhile, the minor league camp, which has been used by more than a hundred players on a daily basis this spring, was closed on Friday morning and underwent a “deep cleaning” on Sunday — not its first of the spring, according to general manager Brian Cashman. The major league facility will receive another such cleaning as well. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

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.

12:06

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…

12:07

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.

12:08

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.

12:10

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.

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