The summer of 1962 was one of political turmoil. Within the United States, the civil rights movement continued to fight for an end to racial segregation, and outside the United States, the globe-consuming tension of the Cold War continued to intensify. The Vietnam War continued to escalate, with Robert F. Kennedy declaring in February that the United States would not leave Vietnam until Communism was defeated. The Space Race proceeded apace, with both Americans and Russians being launched into orbit. And the brewing conflict between President Kennedy’s administration and the still-new Castro regime in Cuba was reaching a fever pitch. In February, President Kennedy extended the embargo on trade with Cuba to include almost all exports; in March, the participants in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of the previous year were put on trial by the Cuban government, and in May were sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment. Both the United States and the USSR continued to test new kinds of nuclear warheads. The Cuban Missile Crisis loomed on the horizon; by midsummer, it was already clear that the pressure was about ready to boil over.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that this conflict found its way into the relatively uneventful world of American professional baseball, where the most interesting thing going on was the Mets’ 120-loss inaugural season. Baseball in the United States, after all, is embedded in the national mythology, from the legends surrounding the sport’s invention to its status as America’s Pastime. The cultural significance of baseball was not lost to either side of the Cold War Conflict. New York Mirror columnist Dan Parker wrote that he was sure the world would be a better place “[i]f more ambassadors used sports instead of double talk as their medium of expression,” and that he’d “like to see the new envoy to Moscow introduce himself in the Kremlin by fetching Uncle Joe Stalin a resounding whack on the noggin with one of Joe Dimaggio’s castoff bats.”

Soviet paper of record Izvestia, meanwhile, in an attempt to undermine baseball’s status as a pillar of American values, claimed baseball was actually a descendant of the old Russian game lapta. In Cuba, where baseball had been the country’s most popular sport for almost a century, the game had developed yet another ideological purpose as a nationalist symbol, with the excellence of Cuban baseball demonstrating the values and victory of the revolution. 

In August of 1962, the ideological tensions existing in baseball manifested themselves in the form of one unlikely person: a 17-year-old boy in a 16-foot boat.

***

On August 5th, 1962, the Associated Press ran a curious news item. The headline read “Cuban Baseball Player Branded as Traitor,” and opened with this paragraph:

A Cuban baseball player who signed a U.S. major league contract but kept it a secret so he could disqualify his nation’s entry in the Central American Games has been denounced as a traitor, Havana Radio said yesterday.

The story identified the player as one Manuel Enrique Ameroso Hernandez. There was no other information about him, no age or identifying characteristics. All that was known was what he had done, and what he had planned to do: He had signed a contract with a major league team, which made him a professional baseball player, and had intended to identify himself as such and claim political asylum in Jamaica, where the Central American Games were being held. The Cuban team, then, having had a professional play for their team, would be disqualified from the competition.

Given baseball’s cultural importance to Cuba and the revolution, this would have been a stunning act of sabotage if it had been successfully carried out. But Hernandez’s reserved, apathetic demeanor leading up to the competition drew suspicion, and he eventually admitted his plan to his teammates. His actions were condemned in the strongest possible terms. Teammates were quoted as saying that they “would prefer death a thousand times before selling ourselves for the bloody dollars of the Yankee monopolies,” and the team issued a statement condemning “the traitorous and miserable attitude of Ameroso Hernandez for having signed as a professional and keeping this secret for the ruinous and cowardly object [of giving] our enemies the opportunity to disqualify our invincible team.” There was no clarification of what was to happen to Hernandez, nor of which major league team he had signed with in the first place.

In the coming days, as the story spread in the American media, more information came out about Hernandez. There was, first, the fact of his talent: Raul Castro had only recently sung Hernandez’s praises on the national stage as Cuban baseball’s finest player, and assessed his annual value at $60,000. (The highest salary in the major leagues in 1962 was $90,000, earned by both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.) This revelation was followed by one that made the former all the more surprising: Hernandez was only 17 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso, it should first be said, really isn’t a great defender. The Mets were quick to let everyone know this throughout 2018, when they didn’t call him up early in the year, when he won Defensive Player of the Month for the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate in July, and when they didn’t make him a September call-up in a completely lost season for the big league club. Seventeen games into his major league career, however, I can say one thing with certainty: I don’t care that he’s supposedly bad at defense. Alonso’s plate appearances are turning into appointment viewing, because he flat-out crushes the ball. I’m not talking garden-variety “boy, that large man can hit,” either. Alonso might not have the best strike-zone recognition, or the best general plate discipline, but when he makes contact, he’s doing damage like almost no one else in baseball.

If you want to understand how truly incredible Alonso’s start has been, you need to look past the WAR leaderboards. Heck, you need to look past the wRC+ leaderboards — like I said, his plate discipline is a work in progress. Alonso has a near-200 wRC+ with a 31% strikeout rate — the three players at the top of the wRC+ leaderboard check in at 11.5%, 8.6%, and 15.0%, respectively. No, the magic really starts when Alonso puts the ball in play, and I do mean magic. Take a look at the top 10 players in baseball in terms of barrels (a Statcast designation that basically means a ball that is tremendously likely to be an extra-base hit) per batted ball:

Think of it this way: about a third of the time that Alonso puts the ball in play, he’s hitting an absolute rocket. Just being on this list, let alone at the top of it, tells us something. This isn’t a list of guys who have lucked into some game power. It’s not a list you can get on just by taking some walks, like a wRC+ leaderboard — Alex Bregman might have had a nice 2018 at the plate, but it’s hard to fake hitting the ball this hard and this optimally (Bregman ended 76th in barrels per batted ball last year). This isn’t just home run power, either, though it’s certainly that — Alonso has six homers already, including a 118.3-mph, 454-foot missile off of Jonny Venters that had SunTrust Park looking like a water hazard at the Masters:

Read the rest of this entry »

You may have noticed that a number of baseball players have signed extensions this spring. By my count, since Aaron Hicks re-upped with the Yankees on February 25th, 22 players have signed contracts that guarantee them a combined $1.82 billion in new money, and have collectively given 68 years of free agency to the only teams with which they could negotiate. Here are some numbers:

A few notes on this table: I’m only interested in new money for the purposes of this article, so Trout’s deal is recorded as starting in 2021, leaving his 2019 and 2020 salaries entirely alone; he would have gotten those anyway. I’ve also excluded any team and vesting options in the “New Guarantee” column because, well, they’re not guaranteed (I have included any buyout in the contract value columns, because that money is guaranteed). I’ve also included players’ age and service time at the beginning of the 2019 season, as well as the earnings they had received or were guaranteed prior to signing extensions, because I think all three factors are relevant to understanding why these particular players might have been open to extensions.

The table is sortable, so you can play around with it as you would like, but I’ll admit that I find it difficult to draw any general conclusions by examining each deal in its particulars. It does seem to be true, broadly speaking, that the deals involving several free agent seasons have been signed mostly by established players (Trout, Arenado,  Hicks, Bogaerts, and Goldschmidt) while those deals locking in cost certainty for years already under team control are mostly the province of younger, less-experienced players (Bote, Jiménez, Acuña, Albies, etc.). The young stars who already got paid during the draft, meanwhile (think Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa) are largely absent (Bregman excepted). They, for the most part, don’t need what’s being sold right now.

It is possible to look at each individual extension signed in the past six weeks and find nothing there of great concern — to find, in fact, a number of personal circumstances that militate in favor of one deal or another, from the perspective of a particular player and his idiosyncratic preferences. It is only when the deals are viewed in the collective, when we choose to view owners and players as classes attempting to exercise power upon each other, that the degree to which the modern labor environment has narrowed choices for players becomes visible.

Free agency — the crowning and bitterly contested victory of the first generation of MLBPA members and leaders — is now perceived by many of those who won it as an exercise in humiliation. “Craig Kimbrel is one of the best closers in the history of the game,” one player grumbled to me last week, “and he still doesn’t have a deal [in the middle of April]. It’s ridiculous. Why would I want to put myself and my family through that when the time comes?” Manny Machado and Bryce Harper got paid this offseason, yes, but only after most of the league’s franchises had convincingly demonstrated that they were unwilling to compete for the two men’s services. Players got the message loud and clear.

One interpretation of this set of facts might be to suggest that our present position — in which powers collectively won are only being effectively exercised by highly specific tranches of the player population — is the consequence of the market “sorting itself out,” literally assigning to different groups of players different prerogatives and different rewards that result from one choice or another. But baseball is not a free market. Baseball is a group of 30 owners in constant, though only occasionally explicit, contention with the union labor that is its raison d’etre. That means that insights from economics, with its neat lines of preference and consequence, can tell us only so much about the state of the game today. We must turn as well to political science, which is the study of power and how it’s used.

A labor environment that is the product of power relations between two parties naturally in contest with one another does not have a state of equilibrium from which we have somehow fallen and to which we can soon return with one technical adjustment or another. It only has two camps competing with one another over a given pool of resources, and being more or less effective in their exercise of power over the other in order to enable that competition. That makes it a normative, and not exclusively a positive (read: objective) exercise.

Baseball’s owners have of late been remarkably effective in their exercise of power over the players with whom they are in contest, to the point that it is possible to point to a hundred individual deals made in those years and find few wanting in isolation and yet a union full of players who are convinced, and not without reason, that they are in the process of being hosed. Individual choices made among an array of options limited by an exercise of power against those individuals as a group are not particularly meaningful choices at all. The last year has brought with it an awakening of player consciousness to the narrowing of choices they face, a realization that something must be done, and an increasing willingness to do it. The question, of course, is what.

Here, I think, there is room for optimism. There is no particular reason that players and owners should have to tear each other down in public quite so often as they have, even as they will always remain inevitably in conflict. There are ways that the two camps can collaborate to grow the game such that it generates more money for everyone, as we saw clearly after the agreement reached after 1994 strike set the table for an unprecedented period of revenue growth for baseball. Ads like “Let The Kids Play” are important because they build power for players and the league alike, and grow reserves of good will that can later be turned into money, which can thereafter be used to expand the circle of players receiving the lion’s share of dividends from the game’s windfalls, to players in their first six years of big-league time, perhaps, or even to those in the minor leagues. Whether or not the players are actually being hung out to dry right now, many of them think they are, and that perception may well lead to a period of labor unrest that shrinks the scope of the game’s cultural meaning in a way that we haven’t seen since ’94.

I hope that doesn’t happen. And in the meantime, I hope that fans will continue to grow in their understanding that deals which look good, or at least reasonable, in isolation can begin to smell poorly in combination, and that just because a given deal is understandable does not make it justifiable, or something we should necessarily be happy about. In other, simpler, words: Can does not necessarily mean should. Thinking about the recent deals as a result of a competition of power, rather than the inevitable result of some market-clearing activity, opens the door to expressions of opinion on the balance of the power that results.

We as fans of the game have the means, through our voices and our wallets, to express our opinions on the balance of power in major league baseball, and I can think of no particular reason we should want to shore up the position of owners as a class having considered that balance. Major league baseball — as opposed to baseball as an amateur game we play only for ourselves, or our friends — exists because of the cultural meaning we fans assign to it, and the money and attention we pay to effectuate that meaning. That makes us shared stakeholders in its future, perhaps not as entitled to a voice in its direction as the players who play it and the league that facilitates it, but entitled enough to an opinion nonetheless. What we say matters, and how we choose to react to the choices teams have made this offseason can and should affect the way the game moves forward.

Early season performances are always tough to get a handle on, but on a team level, the 16-game mark is worthy of some note. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2012 book Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers (a book to which I contributed), Derek Carty — a name that should be familiar around here — found that at the 16-game mark, a team’s year-to-date record became as predictive as simply assuming they’ll finish at .500, as the largest possible sample of teams inevitably does. Through Monday, 19 teams have played at least 16 games, and 11 have played at least 17, which makes this a good time to take a closer look.

In his study, Carty examined non-strike seasons from 1962 through 2011, calculating the correlation between a team’s record after n games and its final record. After one game, for example, the correlation with teams’ final mark was just .12, while at the five-game mark it was .28, and at the 10-game mark, .42. The correlation reached .5 at the 16-game mark, rose to .52 at the 17-game mark, and so on. Carty made no mention of the likelihood of teams making the playoffs, though with changing postseason formats — including the introduction of a second Wild Card in each league starting in 2012, just when the book hit the streets — such information would be of limited utility.

To my knowledge, Carty hasn’t updated the study since publishing that, so we don’t know for sure that the 2012-18 period hasn’t altered his conclusion slightly. Since we’re not doing brain surgery here — just getting a preliminary read on where this season is heading for teams — it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I didn’t set out to re-create Carty’s study, but I did examine what 16-game performances from the two Wild Card era can tell us. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

There are varying tactics when it comes to approaches at the plate. Getting ahead and waiting for the right pitch is one. Swinging at the first good pitch you see because you might not get another is a second. Protecting the plate when behind in the count comes up often. Hitters use some or all of that when they step up to bat, but Yoan Moncada’s patience last season ended up hurting what could have been a much better season. A more aggressive approach thus far has shown much better results this year as Moncada attempts to take the next step in his development.

Last season, Moncada has a walk rate of 10.3%, which is good, and a strikeout rate of 33.4%, which is bad. The only players at 23 years of age or younger to put up double-digit walk rates and a strikeout rate above 30% (which is going to limit how far back we go given the massive rise in strikeouts) are Kris Bryant (2015) and Joey Gallo (2017). Gallo hit 41 homers to make himself an offensively valuable player. Bryant was constantly making great contact when he did put the ball in play on his way to a Rookie of the Year campaign. Moncada hit the ball hard when he made contact, but not at the same level as Bryant, and ended with a 97 wRC+ on the year. Changes are necessary to improve on that mark, and it looks like Moncada may indeed be making them.

Last week at MLB.com, Mike Petriello also wrote about Moncada, noting just how terrible he was on two-strike pitches, notably pitches on the edge, which caused an absurdly high number of called third strikes.

That made the problem easy to diagnose, if not easy to solve. Don’t get to two strikes. But also, don’t get to two strikes being so desperate that you start expanding your zone and flailing at bad pitches.

We know this, because Moncada and the Sox spent a lot of time talking about it.

“As long as he maintains an aggressive approach within the strike zone, which he has been increasing,” Chicago manager Rick Renteria said to MLB.com in July, “he has a chance of having really good success obviously.”

“We made a plan,” Moncada said to MLB.com in December, referring to extensive offseason work with White Sox coaches. “Right now, I am in a better position to succeed and to be a better player next season. It was a very good experience, overall.”

“We ended up attacking the topic of his strike-zone approach,” Renteria said. “He has great ability to take pitches. That’s something that’s innate in him.”

Petriello noted that Moncada was being a bit more aggressive, particularly with the zone, and he was hitting the ball harder and striking out less, all good outcomes. Moncada has lowered his strikeout rate to 24% on the season, and while that might not necessarily represent a new skill level, even after 66 plate appearances it is enough to change our expectations considering last year’s 33% mark. Moncada’s walks have gone down to about 6%, but he is tearing the cover off the ball with a .242 ISO and a .395 BABIP, which has helped lead to a 152 wRC+. The decrease in walks isn’t great for Moncada, but the lowered strikeouts more than make up for that. Consider that when Moncada put the ball in play last season, he put up a 175 wRC+, one of the top 30 marks in the game. This year, he’s putting up a 227 wRC+ when he puts the ball in play, but he doesn’t need that to keep up to make a different to his overall line as we know that BABIP is going to come down some even if we reasonably expect him to post a high value. Read the rest of this entry »

T.S. Eliot once mused that April is the cruelest month, but for me, it’s the most curmudgeonly one. While baseball returning is always a good thing, a good portion of my April job is to (partially) crush the hopes and dreams of fans excited about hot starts from their favorite players. While stats don’t literally lie, April numbers, thanks to our old friend and scapegoat small sample size, only tell a little bit of the story of 2019. But as cautious as I try to be about jumping to conclusions in baseball’s first month, at least some of those torrid beginnings will contain more than the customary grain of truth. So let’s go out on that proverbial limb and try to guess which scorching Aprils represent something real.

Yoan Moncada

I’ve been burned before touching this hot stove, but there’s something so compelling about Moncada’s early-season performances as to once again disarm the skeptic in me. In 2018’s version of this piece, Moncada’s high exit velocity and his .267/.353/.524 April line had me believing that he had finally turned the corner, the one long-expected from a young, talented player with impressive physical tools.

As the narrator meme goes, he had not turned that corner. Moncada spent the next two months with an OPS that didn’t touch .600, and his final 2018 line represented no real improvement over his 2017.

Moncada is hitting the ball just as hard as he did last year, with his average exit velocity ranking sixth in baseball. But this time around, his performance is also coming with some significant progress in his contact statistics. Moncada’s profile has always been a bit weird in that he doesn’t seem to have a serious problem chasing bad pitches, certainly not as you would expect from a player who just led the league in strikeouts with the fourth-highest total in baseball history. But Moncada was in the top 20 in not swinging at pitches outside the zone.

In 2019, he’s been more aggressive, swinging at more bad and good pitches, but there hasn’t been a corresponding contact tradeoff, and he’s in fact making more contact overall, especially against good pitches. Given that one of the purposes of plate discipline is for hitters to actually hit the good pitch they eke out of the dude on the mound, I once again return to the ranks of the believers. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Boyd has been around for a bit. He was drafted by the Blue Jays in the sixth round of the 2013 Draft out of Oregon State University. He made the majors with the team but was traded to the Tigers at the 2015 trade deadline along with Daniel Norris and Jairo Labourt in exchange for David Price. As a prospect, he wasn’t too highly regarded. While he was a regular on Carson Cistulli’s Fringe Five column, he wasn’t highly ranked. Baseball America, for instance, included him in their organizational rankings only once (he was the 29th prospect in the Jays system after the 2014 season); he received sporadic mention at Baseball Prospectus.

After splitting time between the majors and Triple-A in 2016 and 2017, 2018 showed some promise for Boyd. His strikeout rate went up and his walk rate went down. His home run rate also went up and while overall he took a step forward as a decent rotation guy for the Tigers, there was room to improve. As my friend Brandon Day over at Bless You Boys noted, Boyd showed an extreme home/road split, which is one pitfall of being a flyball pitcher whose tendencies can be masked by playing in the pitcher-friendly Comerica Park. Boyd himself wasn’t satisfied either. He spent his offseason basically finding every way he could to improve himself. He lost 15 pounds, maintained his muscle mass, and even did DNA-based testing to find out what works and doesn’t work for his body.

And so far in 2019, Boyd has been a strikeout machine. In three starts, Boyd has racked up 40.3% strikeout rate, the second highest rate the majors behind Blake Snell. Yes, there’s the obligatory small sample size warning here. Boyd will likely not keep that rate up for the rest of the season. But looking at the changes he’s made and how the hitters have responded to them, there are reasons to believe that he could be taking the next step as a pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

The best rivalry in baseball right now might not be the Yankees versus the Red Sox, or the Dodgers against the Giants. Instead, it might be the one between the Orioles and the Nationals, a feud that has landed in multiple courtrooms and has been literally litigated almost non-stop for over seven years.

The dispute arises from the teams’ joint ownership of the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), though it also seems to have been fueled by what appears to be genuine antipathy from Orioles’ owner Peter Angelos for his team’s southern rival. Back in 2004, when the Montreal Expos were about to move to the District of Columbia, Angelos “went on Baltimore radio station WBAL-AM and pronounced that ‘there are no real baseball fans in D.C.'” Angelos was later the sole dissenting vote against the Nationals’ move, and given territorial rights disputes, having the Orioles on board became a matter of some necessity. So the two teams “worked out a deal whereby the Orioles would hold a majority partnership profit interest in MASN and get to telecast Nationals games at a substantial discount from 2005 to 2011. After that, MASN would be obligated to pay the Nationals ‘fair market value.'”

How Orioles-friendly was that deal?

When MASN was created to broadcast Orioles and Nationals games in the regional territory that once solely belonged to the Orioles, the Orioles owned 90 percent of the network and the Nationals’ stake would increase by 1 percent each year until 2032, when it reached 33 percent.

Despite the deal, which the Sports Business Daily called “one of the most lopsided deals in sports TV history,” Angelos still voted against the Expos’ move to Washington, D.C. And since that deal was struck, the Orioles have resisted MASN’s obligation to pay the Nationals anything close to “fair market value” as required by the contract for Washington’s broadcast rights. Remember, the Orioles still own better than 70% of the network, so they control how much the network pays. Read the rest of this entry »