Spring training is here. It’s a new beginning! Every team has optimism for the coming season. (Well, almost every team. Sorry, Marlins fans.) But in this time of beginnings, we also have an ending. Specifically, this will be the last spring training — and the last season — with Chief Wahoo. Beginning in 2019, the Indians will no longer use the symbol on their uniforms.

In one sense, the move has seemed inevitable for a while now. Cleveland has been phasing out Chief Wahoo for years in the face of increasing public pressure from people who believe the logo is racist. I don’t intend to comment on that matter in this piece. You’re all intelligent people and can draw your own conclusions.* Instead, I’m going to focus on whether the Indians legally had to remove Wahoo and what the symbol’s removal means for other teams (like the Braves) who use Native American imagery.

*For what it’s worth, research suggests that mascots and logos such as Chief Wahoo are psychologically harmful to Native American youth.

As an initial matter, the traditional use of Chief Wahoo as a logo is generally fully protected by the First Amendment, even if certain individuals regard it as offensive. The Supreme Court has held in cases like R. A. V. v. St. Paul that it’s illegal to ban speech (which includes symbols) simply because it’s offensive. But the Indians are a business, and that makes things a little more complicated.

To take a look at this, we’re going to have to enter into an area of law known as “intellectual property”: trademarks, trade dress, copyrights, and patents. Each protects different things: trademarks protect trade names and logos; trade dress protects a certain product’s label and appearance; copyrights protect creative works; and patents protect ideas like inventions. (There’s a pretty decent overview of the differences here.) For our purposes, let’s oversimplify things and discuss the trademark that applies to both the team name and Chief Wahoo.

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It’s been an angry sort of offseason, which hasn’t been very enjoyable. I find the most reliable cure when I’m angry at baseball is to watch baseball. Baseball is pretty great. So with spring training upon us, I set out to watch some baseball and get back in the spirit of things. But I couldn’t shake that angry feeling. I found myself somehow watching video of ejections, the moments when our guys are at their angriest.

Including spring training and the postseason, there were 197 ejections in Major League Baseball in 2017. Using the meticulously maintained Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, I watched them all. It’s nice when people embrace the things they like, and I wanted to feel like I was a part of something other than being angry. Others have endeavored to unpack ejection data, but that isn’t our purpose today. I was interested in the aesthetics of ejections, the angry walks and grumpy faces. I sought to construct a taxonomy of baseball ejections. This represents the first batch of categories. Another batch will follow.

I Kept Talking
Home-plate umpire Stu Scheurwater ejects Buck Showalter.
Date: April 30
Ejection No.: 21

Ejections of this variety observe predictable stages of how much talking the player or the manager is actually doing.

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We’ve heard all offseason that baseball teams are getting smarter. One of the strategies employed by those smart teams is to wait players out in free agency to get good deals. Todd Frazier signed for two years and $17 million, Eduardo Nunez received only $8 million in guarantees, Carlos Gomez just signed for $4 million, and Logan Morrison only received $6.5 million. Plenty of quality free agents remain, and the market isn’t looking robust. It certainly seems as though teams are winning and that the strategy of waiting has paid off.

Travis Sawchik found that the free agents who signed contracts during the early part of the current offseason ended up receiving about 5% less overall than their FanGraphs crowdsourced estimates predicted. In light of research by Max Rieper at Royals Review, that boded poorly for players. Rieper, who compared actual contract values to those estimated by FanGraphs crowdsource estimates over several years, found that players who sign early in the offseason typically fare much better (relative to the estimates) than those who sign later.

At first glance, it would appear that several prominent, recent free-agent signings seem to fly in the face of Rieper’s findings, though. As Ben Lindbergh mentioned in his recent post on the players’ share of revenue, Yu Darvish, Eric Hosmer, J.D. Martinez, all signed at or above their crowdsourced estimates. I would add the Brewers signing of Lorenzo Cain to that list, as well.

Is it possible that the waiting game hasn’t actually hurt free agents? Or is there something else going on here? With more data available, it might be time to revisit Rieper’s study with the current offseason included.

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Chris Young is in camp with the San Diego Padres, looking to extend a pitching career that began in 2000 when he was drafted out of Princeton University. It may be a tall task. The 6-foot-10 right-hander turns 39 in May, and he put up a 7.50 ERA last season in 30 ragged innings with the Royals. This could be his last hurrah, a fact he readily acknowledges.

“At some point my career will come to an end, as it does for everybody,” Young told me earlier this week. “I’m realistic about that. Over the offseason I had some of those conversations with people that I respect and admire within the game, but right now my focus is on playing. I feel good physically and the ball is coming out well, so I’m excited to compete for a spot.”

The conversations Young was referring to — with the exception of one coaching opportunity — were all in regard to front office work. Several organizations approached him about the possibility, and while no specific roles were discussed, there will undoubtably be follow-ups in the future. How soon that happens is the question that may be answered by opening day. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Eric Hosmer signed with the Padres…wow, was it only last weekend? Eric Hosmer signed with the Padres last weekend. I wrote up the whole post, and then sat back, eager to look at the comments, given how Hosmer is so famously polarizing. And, yeah, those expected comments rolled in, just as you’d think, but there was also another comment that stuck in my head. Here is most of it:

Maybe it’s kind of obvious, when you think about it, but we probably haven’t given it enough consideration. With all the tools we have, it’s been easy to dream on Hosmer’s power upside. Similarly, it’s been easy to dream on Christian Yelich’s power upside. This is supposed to be the era of data-driven player adjustments, so you can imagine a version of Hosmer and a version of Yelich who are able to generate consistent loft. But this isn’t as easy as it seems. It’s not even necessary, and there’s always the chance a change could backfire. See, the thing about Hosmer and the thing about Yelich is that both of these hitters are already good.

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Major-league batters struck out in 21.7% of their plate appearances last season, an MLB record. That rate broke the previous record set in 2016 (21.1%), which broke the previous top rate of (20.4%) set in 2014 and matched in 2015. Major-league batters struck out last season at a rate five percentage points greater than in 2003. You’re probably well aware of this trend — a trend of more swing and miss, of fewer batted balls in play.

Reversing this trend seems difficult. It would require a change in incentives or, perhaps, the ball’s seam height. Batters would have to trade in power for more contact; pitchers would have to throw fewer breaking balls and with less velocity. The game keeps moving toward more power, more velo, more breaking stuff. It seems, at least to this author, that this strikeout level is pretty sticky and might continue increasing for the foreseeable future.

This phenomenon means a number of things. Most relevant to this post, it means that defenders have fewer opportunities, thousands fewer over the collective course of a season, which erodes the value of defense.

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