The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2017 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

A savant in the batter’s box, Manny Ramirez could be an idiot just about everywhere else — sometimes amusingly, sometimes much less so. The Dominican-born slugger, who grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan, stands as one of the greatest hitters of all time, a power-hitting righthanded slugger who spent the better part of his 19 seasons (1993–2011) terrorizing pitchers. A 12-time All-Star, Ramirez bashed 555 home runs and helped the Indians and the Red Sox reach two World Series apiece, adding a record 29 postseason homers along the way. He was the World Series MVP for Boston in 2004, when the club won its first championship in 86 years.

For all of his prowess with the bat, Ramirez’s lapses — Manny Being Manny — both on and off the field are legendary. There was the time in 1997 that he “stole” first base, returning to the bag after a successful steal of second because he thought Jim Thome had fouled off a pitch… the time in 2004 that he inexplicably cut off centerfielder Johnny Damon’s relay throw from about 30 feet away, leading to an inside-the-park home run… the time in 2005 when he disappeared mid-inning to relieve himself inside Fenway Park’s Green Monster… the time in 2008 that he high-fived a fan in mid-play between catching a fly ball and doubling a runner off first… and so much more.

Beneath those often comic lapses was an intense work ethic, apparent as far back as his high school days, that allowed Ramirez’s talent to flourish. But there was also a darker side, one that, particularly after he left the Indians, went beyond the litany of late arrivals to spring training, questionable absences due to injury (particularly for the All-Star Game), and near-annual trade requests. Most notably, there was his shoving match with 64-year-old Red Sox traveling secretary Jack McCormick in 2008, which prefigured Ramirez’s trade to the Dodgers that summer, and a charge of misdemeanor domestic violence/battery in 2011 after his wife told an emergency operator that her husband had slapped her face, causing her to hit her head against the headboard of the bed. (That domestic violence charge was later dropped after his wife refused to testify.) Interspersed with those two incidents were a pair of suspensions for performance-enhancing drug use, the second of which ran him out of the majors.

For all of the handwringing about PED-tinged candidates on the Hall of Fame ballot over the past decade, Ramirez is the first star with actual suspensions on his record to gain eligibility since Rafael Palmeiro in 2011. Like Palmeiro, Ramirez has numbers that would otherwise make his enshrinement a lock. In his 2017 ballot debut, he received 23.8% — a higher share than Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa, players who were never suspended — from an electorate that appeared to be in the midst of softening its hardline stance against PED users, but dipped to 22.0% in 2018. He won’t get into Cooperstown anytime soon, but he won’t fall off the ballot anytime soon, either.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Boston Red Sox.

Batters

Obviously, the top of the offense is extremely strong, with reigning MVP Mookie Betts and one of the most dangerous hitters today, J.D. Martinez, who can be forgiven for being relatively one-dimensional when that one dimension involves a 170 wRC+ and an OPS over 1.000. But there were some cracks in the back-end in 2018, with Eduardo Núñez a stretch as a full-time second baseman and Mitch Moreland inevitably cooling off after a hot start to finish with the Usual Mitch Moreland Stats. The team brought in Steve Pearce and Ian Kinsler to dampen these issues. Pearce’s tenure was much more successful, but he also remains a role player heading into his late-30s, albeit a very good one. I remain hopeful about Rafael Devers‘ future given that most players his age are still in the minors, but you can’t just wave away the fact that he regressed significantly both at the plate and in the field in 2018. Boston’s three-headed catcher-beast contributed defensively, and did a better job framing than dirty cops in a Brian De Palma movie, but you’d still like their bats to improve to a more normal version of terrible than we saw last season.

The good news is that when your highs are high and your lows are low, it’s easier to make a significant addition than it is if you have a team that’s fairly average from top to bottom. J.T. Realmuto would be just about the perfect fit for the team if the Marlins were motivated to make a reasonable trade. I suspect the Red Sox will be content with Moreland and Pearce at first as they more pressing needs on the roster. And Pearce probably was the best first baseman available in free agency, unless you’ve received some weird news from the future about how 2019 was the The Summer of Duda.

Pitchers

There’s not a lot to complain about in the rotation, so long as everyone is healthy. All five starters are projected to have ERAs better than league-average, and ZiPS, like Steamer, is cautiously optimistic about Nathan Eovaldi’s future, even though 200 innings shouldn’t be the default expectation for a pitcher with his injury history. Some depth would be nice, but Steven Wright is likely a perfectly capable emergency option and the bullpen, as constituted, is probably a below-average group. Even a diminished Craig Kimbrel is a tough reliever to lose. ZiPS thinks a lot of the no-name relievers can be adequate, especially Colten Brewer, a hard cutter/curve hurler picked up from the Padres a few weeks ago.

Bench and Prospects

The problem with the Red Sox farm system is that while it’s far from empty, trades and successful graduations have depleted the upper minors considerably, to the point that if the team is looking for a mid-season reinforcement, they’re more likely to call up a prospect rather than trade them for a more veteran solution. Sam Travis now has a .713 OPS in nearly a thousand Triple-A plate appearances; ZiPS has almost written him completely off as a prospect at this point. And there are no starting pitching prospects that are all that interesting for 2019. That Rusney Castillo has one of the best projections of the players currently at Triple A at .269/.304/.370 is a pretty good example of just how thin the high minors currently are. The big exception here is Michael Chavis, who ZiPS sees developing into an average third baseman with power upside, though not intriguing enough to be a better option than Devers in 2019, or a good enough hitter in the short-term to make Moreland and Pearce uncomfortable.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about expected activity at the Winter Meetings, the pointlessness of the Winter Meetings, and the Hall of Fame elections of Lee Smith and Harold Baines (yes, that Harold Baines). Then (23:04) they talk to FanGraphs prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen about the baseball and multi-sport future of Heisman Trophy winner and A’s first-round draftee Kyler Murray. Lastly (38:38), they bring on baseball executive and former journalist Octavio Hernández to discuss the killings of Luis Valbuena and Jose Castillo, how Venezuelan Winter League teams arrange travel and security, how major leaguers deal with unrest at home, the state of baseball in Venezuela, the state of life in Venezuela, and why Octavio fled the country.

Audio intro: Yes, "Harold Land"
Audio interstitial 1: Dr. Dog, "Both Sides of the Line"
Audio interstitial 2: Parquet Courts, "Violence"
Audio outro: The Thrills, "Your Love is Like Las Vegas"

Link to right field JAWS leaders
Link to Jay’s pre-election post on Baines
Link to Jay’s post-election post on Baines
Link to Ben’s Hall of Baines
Link to Eric’s post on Murray
Link to Murray’s recreation of the Jackson photo
Link to Kiley’s Murray video
Link to story about Venezuelan MLB players who won’t go home
Link to story about Venezuelan players speaking out
Link to episode on Mexican League sabermetrics

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The Hall of Fame’s Class of 2019 may belong to the specialists. Ahead of a BBWAA election where all-time saves leader Mariano Rivera and legendary designated hitter Edgar Martinez are most likely to gain entry, on Sunday at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, the Today’s Game Era Committee elected reliever Lee Smith and outfielder/DH Harold Baines. More than just rankling purists, it is a result that raises some eyebrows.

Smith and Baines were two of the six players on the 10-candidate ballot, alongside outfielders Albert Belle and Joe Carter, first baseman Will Clark, and starter Orel Hershiser. Managers Davey Johnson, Charlie Manuel, and Lou Piniella, and owner George Steinbrenner rounded out the slate. To these eyes, Smith was the most qualified of the players, not only because he held the all-time saves record from 1993 to 2006, when his total of 478 was surpassed by Trevor Hoffman, but because advanced statistics such as WAR, JAWS, and WPA place him in the middle of what’s now a seven-member group of relievers in the Hall. That he once received over 50% of the vote on the BBWAA ballot, where none of the other candidates ever topped 11.2%, made his election appear all the more likely, particularly in front of a group more predisposed to old-school stats than the writers, who lost sight of Smith when the ballot became more crowded late in his 15-year run.

Baines, who took 59.7% of his career plate appearances as a DH and set records in that capacity that were later surpassed by Martinez and David Ortiz, collected 2,866 hits and 384 homers over the course of his 22-year career. Nonetheless, he was poorly supported by the writers; though he lasted through five election cycles before falling off the ballot, he topped out at just 6.1%. Not only is there no precedent for a candidate with so little BBWAA support gaining election by a small committee in the era of the “Five Percent Rule” (from 1980 onward), but there’s really no precedent for a player from the post-1960 expansion era doing so. Via Baseball-Reference:

Of that group besides Baines, only Doby and Paige even played after World War II. Doby broke the AL’s color line in 1947 and played 13 major league seasons, while Paige arrived in 1948 and pitched in parts of just six seasons (the last of which was a one-game cameo at age 59!) and thus was technically ineligible to be voted upon by the writers, since 10 years is the minimum to appear on a BBWAA ballot. What’s more, the stray vote he received was from 1951, when he was still active and before the five-year waiting period rule had been formalized.

All of which is to underscore the fact that there’s no modern precedent for the election of a candidate such as Baines in that regard. While his election does offer some hope to players bumped off the ballot in their first go-round — such as Bobby Grich, Kenny Lofton, and Ted Simmons, who missed election by the Modern Baseball Era Committee by one vote last year — the custom of withholding first-year votes from all but the most qualified candidates helps to explain those mistakes; with Baines, 94 to 95 percent of voters consistently judged him to be unworthy.

Every bit as unsettling is the fact that Baines accumulated just 38.7 WAR (using the Baseball-Reference version) and 30.1 JAWS. Considered as a right fielder — I consider every DH candidate at the position where he accrued the most value — he ranks just 74th in JAWS, below 24 of the 25 Hall of Famers (19th century outfielder Tommy McCarthy is the exception). From under-supported BBWAA candidate Larry Walker (10th in JAWS among right fielders), to players such as Dwight Evans (15th) and Reggie Smith (16th) who have never sniffed a small committee ballot, that’s a troubling inequity. And everyone and their brother has a pet candidate just among the right fielders for whom a stronger case could be mounted. Tony Oliva, Rusty Staub, Dave Parker? All rank in the 30s in JAWS among right fielders, and appear to have stronger traditional credentials as well.

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Alex Kirilloff grew up hitting baseballs. A lot of baseballs. His father owns an indoor hitting facility, and having been home-schooled for much of his life, the top prospect in the Minnesota Twins system not named Royce Lewis would often accompany dad to work. He didn’t sit around reading comic books while he was there.

“I was blessed to have access to a cage, and I took advantage of that,” Kirilloff told me prior to suiting up for this summer’s Futures Game. “We had these big Iron Mike machines that would hold something like 600 balls in the hopper and I would hit two or three of those a day.”

This past season, he banged out a steady stream of hits against Florida State League and Midwest League pitching. Playing 65 games each in Fort Myers and Cedar Rapids, the left-handed-hitting outfielder stroked 107 singles, 49 doubles, seven triples, and 20 home runs. His slash line was a scary .348/.392/.578.

In terms of hands-on molding, Kirilloff isn’t Frankenstein’s monster. His hitting-instructor father didn’t skimp on pointers, but he also understood that a swing has to come naturally. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 847

Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen makes his triumphant return to FanGraphs Audio to discuss the offseason’s early action, including a bevy of Mariners deals, the Cardinals trade for Paul Goldschmidt, and the signing of Nathan Eovaldi. We then turn our attention to such varied topics as former University of Washington quarterback Jake Locker, the potential banning of the shift, and what we think the rest of the winter might hold.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 1 hr 2 min play time.)

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The Colorado Rockies beat the Chicago Cubs in the Wild Card game and almost toppled the reigning NL champion Dodgers in the West, but fell to the awesome power of Wade Miley and Jhoulys Chacin. Colorado was a solid team in 2018, but remained a bundle of confusing inconsistencies. Unlike many good Rockies teams, they figured out how to field a rotation that was little fazed by Planet Coors, only to have a shallow, unsteady offense prove to be their downfall.

The Setup

Coming off an 87-75 season, the team’s first winning season in seven years and first playoff appearance in eight, and with a few glaring holes, the opportunity existed for the Rockies to make an aggressive push to challenge the NL elites over the 2017-2018 offseason.

Instead, the team spent $106 million on three free agent relievers – Wade Davis, Bryan Shaw, and the returning Jake McGee. The bullpen was actually a strength for the team in 2017, finishing sixth in the majors in WAR among relievers; their 3.94 FIP was quite impressive for a team that played half their games at Coors Field. If you don’t buy into WAR for relievers, that 3.94 FIP was good enough for the team to rank sixth in the majors in FIP- and seventh in ERA-.

Now, it was reasonable to make bullpen additions, especially after 2017 All-Star Greg Holland, who ended up doing a poor job evaluating the market for his services, departed in free agency. It may have been necessary to make an addition even if they had kept Holland, of course, given his 6.38 second-half ERA (I wouldn’t fault the Rockies for Holland’s 2018 in this scenario, Jeff Bridich not being a Time Lord as far as I know).

What was unreasonable was what the Rockies did about the significant holes they had outside of the bullpen.

Namely? Next-to-nothing.

The team’s 90 OPS+ in 2017 was the 10th-worst in modern baseball history among teams that made the playoffs, though it has since been knocked down to 11th by the 2018 Rockies. Their 87-75 record, while a positive given the team’s recent history, felt a bit disappointing considering it took six above-average starters (German Marquel, Kyle Freeland, Tyler Chatwood, Antonio Senzatela, Jon Gray, and Tyler Anderson), a top-tier bullpen, and two legitimate MVP candidates on the offense just to get that point.

There’s a fair argument to be made that OPS+ and similar measures can underrate the Rockies. One longstanding explanation has been the Coors Field hangover theory, which has been demonstrated with mixed results over the last decade, and generally holds that Rockies hitters are hurt somewhat by the difference between Coors Field and the parks closer to sea level. The problem for the Rockies’ offense is that this effect has a limit; there isn’t enough wiggle room to make them anywhere near a 105 OPS+ team or something.

And furthermore, if Rockies hitters face a special disadvantage from playing at Coors that simply makes hitters worse overall in terms of their value, it doesn’t excuse the front office’s role in that underperformance; it means that they have to overengineer things when putting together an offense. It’s an aggravating factor for a crime of apathy, not a mitigating one.

The front office made exactly one move to improve the offense, bringing in Chris Iannetta, who hit .254/.354/.511 for the Diamondbacks in 2017; he’d turn 35 near the start of the 2018 season. And that was it.

Whether due to ignorance or incompetence, the front office ignored the fact that their 1B/LF/RF offensive triad were all at the bottom of the league in 2017. Despite the noise about giving Ryan McMahon and David Dahl real shots in spring training, Ian Desmond and the injured Gerardo Parra were given their jobs back on a silver platter, along with Carlos Gonzalez, who re-signed with the team in the middle of spring training.

The Projection

The ZiPS projections had the Rockies at 82-80 coming into the season, facing significant trouble behind the Dodgers from the Diamondbacks (a good call for 5/6th of the season) and the Giants (oops). ZiPS was very optimistic about the pitching staff, with Jon Gray, German Marquez, Kyle Freeland, Antonio Senzatela, Tyler Anderson, a returning Chad Bettis, and even Jeff Hoffman all projected for an ERA+ of at least 96 for the season. But ZiPS only saw 1.0 combined WAR from the Trio of Sadness at 1B/LF/RF, and another blazing hot 0.7 WAR from Iannetta.

The Results

For a nine-win miss, ZiPS didn’t do too badly with the Rockies, getting the team’s essential contours right but missing on the magnitude of just how good the starting pitchers were. From a projected solid-and-deep mix of no. 2 and 3 starters came two stars in German Marquez and Kyle Freeland, the latter of whom was a legitimate Cy Young ballot contender (depending on your philosophy on FIP vs. ERA and related adjusted measures when it comes to evaluating past contributions).

The Rockies should get a ton of credit for their rotation, piecing together a group that received relatively little trouble from pitching half of their games in Coors Field, a feat that has frequently eluded the team over their existence. They’ve built good bullpens before — the mid 90s Rockies had a terrific group — but starting pitching was always a particular bedevilment.

Surprisingly, the bullpen turned out to be a bit of a disaster over the first half of the season. Davis wasn’t horrific, just mediocre, but Shaw and McGee were nearly unmitigated disasters; the three signed relievers combining to make $31 million in return for 171.1 innings of 5.41 ERA ball, which is…not…good. The second half of the season turned out to be sunnier and the addition of Seung-hwan Oh was one of the better trade pickups in baseball.

The offense was a rerun of the 2017 season. Once again, the team had two MVP candidates (with Charlie Blackmon swapped out for Trevor Story) and little production from the key offensive positions. The aforementioned Trio of Sadness, projected at 1.0 WAR, combined for 1.0 WAR, though with the odd wrinkly that they only got that high because of Carlos Gonzalez’s positive defense by UZR. David Dahl grudgingly got playing time at points when healthy, and Ryan McMahon was mostly relegated to the bench. Raimel Tapia appeared in 25 games but only started two of them, generally being used only as a pinch-hitter or pinch-runner.

Given a chance at a mulligan to address the offensive at the trade deadline, the Rockies made the big addition of…Matt Holliday, who received little interest in the offseason and spent his age-38 season out of professional baseball. Holliday did hit, but gave back almost as much value in defense, finishing at 0.1 WAR in his brief return. It’s notable how easily Holliday was handed playing time compared to the team’s young players, getting 65 plate appearances in his five weeks with little of the resistance McMahon or Tapia faced.

Despite the front office hinderance, the Rockies’ rotation and stars got them to 90 wins, a game shy of toppling the Dodgers in the division, and the playoffs, before an embarrassing NLDS sweep by the Brewers, only scoring two runs in three games.

What Comes Next

What’s frustrating about the Rockies is just how many of the tools they have for a great team, rather than a merely good one that wins 85-90 games for a few years. The player development part of the front office has done a terrific job, with almost the entire rotation coming from within; the lone exception is German Marquez, who was obtained from the Rays in the Corey Dickerson trade. The team’s three MVP-candidate position players the last two years (Blackmon, Arenado, and Story) are also farm system products. In the pen, Scott Oberg was homegrown and while Adam Ottavino wasn’t a Colorado product, the Rockies were the team that turned him into a top reliever after being a mediocre starting pitcher prospect claimed off waivers.

And the team has more talent coming. Brendan Rodgers should seize a job in the infield fairly quickly, and Tapia and McMahon, while not technically qualifying as prospects, really should be given their limited opportunities to shine thus far.

It’s at the major league level, however, the team is just not currently run all that well. But there’s still time; despite the problems, they did make the playoffs in consecutive seasons, and the team still has opportunities to add real difference-makers in offense. Why shouldn’t the Rockies be a player for Bryce Harper? I’d argue there’s no team in baseball that needs him more.

And changing how the team is run wouldn’t require a giant teardown and rebuild. It just requires properly evaluating the team’s offensive weaknesses, realizing that Ian Desmond is a sunk cost who should either be a role player or making the league minimum with another team after his release, and treating the team’s offensive prospects as potential contributors who can add value rather that as inconveniences for mediocre veterans. Keep the team, nix the front office.

ZiPS Projection – Nolan Arenado

One problem on the horizon for Colorado is the impending free agency of Nolan Arenado, the prize of their high-performing prospect pipeline. He’s Troy Tulowitzki without the injuries, a player still on the sunny side of 30 who could very possibly have Hall of Fame career, especially if the BBWAA becomes better at evaluating mid-spectrum players.

ZiPS suggests a five-year, $143 million extension for Arenado if signed today. While he’s likely not the type of player who should be signed to an eight-to-ten-year extension, as he’s not hitting the free agent market at as young an age as Manny Machado or Bryce Harper are, he’s a player the Rockies can’t easily replace, and has deserved his MVP consideration the last two seasons.

We’ve talked a couple of times this year about a potential new revenue stream for Major League Baseball: legalized sports gambling. As a quick refresher, back in May, the United States Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (“PASPA”), the federal law that banned states from permitting sports gambling in the United States (outside of Nevada, which was exempt). Even before PASPA was nullified by the Supreme Court, its imminent demise had been seen coming for a while, and so several states had already passed, or were in the process of passing, laws permitting sports gambling within their borders. Those laws, in many cases, took effect as soon as the Supreme Court ruled that PASPA was unconstitutional. And so it was only a matter of time before we saw the major sports leagues get in on the action themselves.

Enter MGM Resorts International, which took advantage of the opening to strike an exclusive deal with Major League Baseball to become the league’s first official gaming and entertainment partner. What does that mean? Well, I’m glad you asked.

As an official sponsor of MLB, MGM Resorts will domestically promote its brand and gaming options across MLB’s digital and broadcast platforms, including MLB Network, MLB.com, the MLB At Bat app and additional fan engagement offerings to be jointly developed.

MGM Resorts will be identified as an MLB-Authorized Gaming Operator and utilize MLB’s official statistics feed, on a non-exclusive basis, throughout its digital and live domestic sports gaming options. MLB will also make enhanced statistics available to MGM on an exclusive basis. In addition, MGM Resorts and MLB will work together on comprehensive responsible gaming measures and work to protect the integrity of the game both on and off the field.

If that seems a bit opaque to you, you’re not alone. So let’s break this down. This is not, as some have said, an event heralding MLB’s acceptance of players gambling and the rehabilitation of the reputation of Pete Rose. Nothing MLB has done overrides or modifies Rule 21, which prohibits players from betting on games. Nor does it mean illegal sports betting is going the way of the dinosaur; if the news is any indication, that dubious vocation is alive and well.

But it does mean that Major League Baseball is, for the first time, officially sanctioning gambling on games – and perhaps more. For starters, MGM is getting official access to MLB’s stats, but it is not getting exclusive access to most of them. That means MLB can turn around and license most of the same data and intellectual property to other gaming companies as well. And MLB made sure that its other gambling ventures (yes, they do exist!) aren’t impacted.

As to the future, as of today, there are no plans to integrate wagering on baseball into MLB’s digital and mobile platforms, such as the popular “At Bat” for mobile devices. The deal also does not impact MLB’s equity investment in DraftKings for fantasy baseball, although there has been talk that both MLB and the NBA may be looking to divest themselves of their ownership stakes in daily fantasy sports companies.

That opens quite a few doors for MGM, as SB Nation notes.

For starters, one of the most interesting parts of this agreement is that MGM will have access to MLB’s statistical data. Despite the fact that baseball and various gambling venues have had a tenuous relationship over the years (to say the least), this means that MGM will likely use that data to set the betting lines and they’ll be at the forefront in that regard.

That kind of access carries some value, as Forbes relays.

MGM Resorts locations will be see labeling such as “MLB-Authorized Gaming Operator” for digital and live gaming events. As part of the deal, MGM will be granted the use of official league logos and marks. MGM will have a visible presence at the so-called MLB Jewel Events, including the All-Star Game and the World Series.

So what did MGM pay for this unprecedented deal? Actually, that’s not at all clear. MLB didn’t disclose how much MGM paid, but at least one unconfirmed report placed the figure at $80 million. And if that seems light, that’s because (at least in one sense) MGM paid for not all that much, as Christian Pina explains.

In the new industry of mobile apps, this all comes back to the flagship app for MLB, MLB At Bat. No, MLB-At Bat isn’t acting as a DraftKings type of sportsbook for you to place bets, it’s honestly mostly just an open line of communication. Major League Baseball will give MGM and MGM’s mobile applications free-reign over their up to the second stats, next-gen stats (exit velocity, spin rate, etc), and most likely input some live betting expected win %’s pulled from MLB At Bat right into any mobile app parented by MGM.

In short, it really doesn’t mean much for you, the gambler and consumer, which isn’t what you probably wanted to hear.

So in one sense, this is, despite the gaudy headlines, not much more than Major League Baseball garnering a new sponsor in a new area that was previously unavailable; were it, the price MGM paid would likely have been substantially higher. As the official gaming sponsor for Major League Baseball, MGM mostly just bought advertising rights. MLB will have other sponsors and gaming partners, but MGM paid for the use of the word “official” by being first in line.

But in another sense, MGM did score a major coup here. Why? Because MGM is receiving exclusive access to what MLB calls “enhancing” statistics, which MGM Resorts will use for the purpose of setting betting lines. In other words, MGM just purchased the right to set betting lines based on Statcast data, which would, in theory, allow for in-game betting based on those data and metrics. (The specific form that data takes, and which exact Statcast stats and feeds will be available to MGM, is still unclear.) And MGM does have avenues to grow its relationship with the league even further, because its contract is only with MLB and not with any of the thirty individual teams. MGM is currently negotiating with multiple teams in the hopes of signing official sponsorship deals with them as well. And Statcast data will allow for more accurate betting lines and more realistic gaming. How Statcast might be used for betting is an issue that has yet to fully develop – and it’s one we’ll be following closely as this new frontier comes into focus.