It’s small potatoes in the context of what’s going on (or not) in the baseball industry and the rest of the world, but so far as the Hall of Fame goes, the problem in a nutshell is this: Half of the starting pitchers who are in the Hall and were born in the 1950s are named Jack Morris. While there’s no need to relitigate the polarizing battle that forestalled his eventual election — been there, done that — the real issue, to these eyes, is that the gruff ex-Tigers workhorse is the only starter in the Hall born after 1951 and before ’63. When stacked up against other enshrined starters, his credentials are modest at best, and so his presence in the plaque room feels like an indictment of the quality of his peers.

The reality is that Morris won battles of attrition, first against the forces that reshaped the role of the starting pitcher following the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973, and then against the voting bodies that were slow to recognize the strength of those forces. He was a throwback, and in the arguments over his merits he became a symbol for a bygone era. Backed by strong offenses, he piled up innings while having less success preventing runs than his the best of his peers, but more success avoiding injuries or replacement by pinch-hitters and relievers. Plus, he won a few big games in October.

For all of that, I did not have Morris or any specific pitcher in mind when I began exploring ways to modernize JAWS to better account for the changes in starting pitcher workloads that have occurred over the past century and a half. After nearly two decades of using my Hall of Fame fitness metric, I know the contours of the position-by-position rankings reasonably well, and so I had a pretty good idea in advance which ones would be helped by whatever adjustments I settled on — that while knowing that those changes wouldn’t be so radical as to upset the entire system. That said, I suspected that shining a brighter light on some of those players would particularly resonate with fans of a certain age, particularly as I worked my way through history and reached the frame of reference of players I’m old enough to have watched. I don’t cross paths with a lot of fans of Jim McCormick or Wes Ferrell these days, but Luis Tiant is another matter. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2028-29 offseason was downright bananas. In a matter of weeks, the Dodgers shelled out $2.3 billion in guarantees, a spending spree that upended the league. What had been a good class for first basemen turned into a single team cornering the market: Yordan Alvarez, Pete Alonso, and Alec Bohm created a veritable pileup at first in Los Angeles, one that pushed the team’s best holdover player, Michael Lindauer, from first to shortstop. It also pushed Bohm to third, which meant fellow free agent signee Carter Kieboom was getting $75 million to be a backup. The rest of the league was caught flat-footed, playing catch-up or giving up on free agency entirely.

That’s just how things go in Magnus Effect Baseball, an online baseball-industry Out Of The Park league that grew out of 2020’s COVID-19 lockdowns but has turned into a freewheeling, frenetic playground that shows no signs of slowing down. Those mighty Dodgers didn’t break the league; in fact, they’re not even the best team in their division. It’s a wildly competitive league, with even the bad teams trying to trade, sign, and develop their way into contention.

Magnus Effect Baseball started the way most online activities did in early 2020: out of sheer boredom. Smith Brickner, the league’s commissioner, wasn’t the originator. At the time, he was working for the Braves as a minor league video trainee, but his job had been put on hold by COVID. “I had just driven 20-plus hours from the Braves’ spring training complex back to Long Island when my buddy Sam Denomme asked if I had an interest in joining an industry-wide OOTP league run by some guys at Driveline,” Brickner told me. “When it became clear that someone needed to step up and actually run the league, I raised my hand.” Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ve probably heard, Major League Baseball canceled the first two series of the 2022 season yesterday, after a self-imposed deadline to finish negotiations with the Major League Baseball Players Association on a new collective bargaining agreement passed with no deal reached. The two sides didn’t appear to be close to an agreement before negotiations ended; indeed, they remained far apart on several key economic issues.

The gulf between them is significant, but it doesn’t seem unbridgeable. Negotiations in three areas – compensation for young players, the competitive balance tax, and postseason expansion – will be key to reaching an agreement when talks resume. Those are far from the only issues that separate the two sides, of course, but they dwarf the rest; presumably a compromise in those three areas would precipitate a deal. Or at least, that was my assumption when I began to look at the differences. Let’s see just how far apart MLB and the MLBPA actually are. Read the rest of this entry »

Connor Joe has had a turbulent couple of years. In the spring of 2019, he made his big league debut as the Opening Day left fielder for the Giants. Just a week prior, San Francisco had acquired him in a trade with the Reds, who had selected him in the Rule 5 draft just three months before that. His time with the Giants would also prove short-lived: after 11 days and a 1-for-15 start to the season, he was designated for assignment. As a Rule 5 pick, he was returned to his original team, the Dodgers, and spent the rest of the 2019 season in Triple-A, where he posted a 132 wRC+ and a 16.1% walk rate but never got the call to return to the big leagues.

The following year, Joe was expected to compete for a roster spot with the Dodgers, but just as spring training was getting underway, team doctors found a tumor that was later diagnosed as testicular cancer. He underwent chemotherapy treatments and was declared cancer-free later in the summer, but the risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic kept him away from baseball for the whole season. He elected free agency in November 2020 and signed a minor league deal with the Rockies later that month.

The 2021 season finally gave Joe an opportunity to shine at the big league level, but it was not without its ups and downs. He started the season in the minors thanks to his lost 2020 and ended the season on the injured list due to a hamstring injury he suffered in early September. Between those endpoints, he struggled enough to get sent down, got hot enough to become the everyday leadoff hitter, and even celebrated his anniversary of being cancer-free by smashing his first career home run. All told, he had 211 plate appearances with a .285/.379/.469 triple slash, eight homers and a 116 wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past several years, we’ve typically had about 1,500 players on The Board at any given time once all the org lists are done, spread across the tool’s pro, draft, and international sections. Heuristics play an important role in enabling us get a grip on such a large pool of players, especially when we are considering individuals for the first time, or trying to assess disparate players on the same FV scale.

For example, we felt comfortable absolutely stuffing Rockies right-handed pitcher Jordy Vargas near the top of their organizational prospect list in large part because of a key heuristic. I have not seen Vargas in person. He spent all of 2021 in the DSL, and didn’t come stateside for instructional league. Because the Rockies have struggled at the big league level and are therefore unlikely to be motivated to trade prospects, other teams have had little reason to thoroughly scout their DSL club, which makes sourcing detailed scout opinions about a player like Vargas difficult. Sometimes, a scout will come across a player like this at random and provide an in-person opinion that makes up the lion’s share of what we impart to readers, but in Vargas’ case, all we had was pitch data (which was how he got on our radar in the first place) and video we sought out from the 2021 DSL.

It can be challenging to drop Vargas right into the Rockies list for initial consideration, since he and someone like Ryan Vilade are apples-and-oranges in the extreme. It’s much cleaner to step back and compare Vargas, apples-to-apples, with same-aged pitching prospects across the global baseball landscape to get a sense of where he fits among that sub-group, assign him a FV grade in that context, and then move him onto the Rockies list. In Vargas’ case, his skill set is very similar to that of high school pitchers taken in the mid-to-late first round of a given draft (projectable 6-foot-3, gorgeous delivery, already throwing in the mid-90s, an excellent curveball), so we can use our heuristic FV for that type of player (in this case a 45) to get an initial sense of where he should be on the Rockies list even though I haven’t seen him, and then try to polish his grade from there. The foundations of most players’ evaluations on our site are built on heuristics like this and then augmented by other, more granular details. Read the rest of this entry »

In the hours immediately following MLB’s decision to cancel the first two series of the regular season, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley are joined by Ben’s colleagues from The Ringer and The Ringer MLB Show, Michael Baumann and Zach Kram, to recap the negotiations leading up to this week’s MLB-imposed deadlines, lament and lambast the owners’ self-interested stewardship of the sport, explain the queasy sensation of simultaneously rooting for and against baseball being played, and forecast how and when the lockout could end, while touching on a number of other topics including the prospect of MLB players suiting up overseas, Derek Jeter’s resignation as CEO of the Marlins, Tony Clark’s striking beard, and much more.

Audio intro: Murder by Death, “Raw Deal”
Audio outro: Bettye Swann, “(My Heart Is) Closed for the Season”

Link to MLBPA statement
Link to Manfred’s letter
Link to Baumann’s column
Link to Jaffe’s column
Link to Passan on the talks
Link to Rosenthal on the talks
Link to McCullough on the talks
Link to Ghiroli on the talks
Link to Harper’s Instagram post
Link to Rosenthal on Jeter
Link to Sherman on Jeter
Link to Rojas tweet
Link to article about lockout photos
Link to Ringer Baseball podcast feed
Link to Dan Devine on Ja Morant
Link to EW episode on lockout effects
Link to Stripling quote
Link to The Simpsons video clip

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So much for commissioner Rob Manfred’s stated desire to avoid a “disastrous outcome,” and so much for the urgency of the owners’ “defensive” lockout, which was supposed to jumpstart negotiations towards a new collective bargaining agreement — albeit in a most curious manner, with 43 days of radio silence and just one formal proposal to the players over a 71-day span. On Tuesday evening, the commissioner canceled the first two series of the regular season — a total of 91 games, constituting five to seven for each team — after the players union and the owners failed to meet his artificially-imposed deadline for a new CBA in time to preserve the season’s scheduled opening on March 31.

“I had hoped against hope I wouldn’t have to have this press conference where I am going to cancel some regular season games,” said Manfred on Tuesday. Citing the two sides meeting in Jupiter, Florida for nine straight days, he added, “I want to assure our fans that our failure to reach an agreement was not due to a lack of effort by either party.”

If indeed those games are lost, they would be the first regular season games missed due to a work stoppage since the 1994-95 players’ strike, and the first due to a lockout by the owners. When the owners locked the players out of spring training for 32 days in 1990, the resulting settlement included an Opening Day pushed back by a week, a season end date extended by three days, and all but two of the 26 teams playing 162 games. The 91 games would instantly leapfrog the 86 missed at the start of the 1972 season due to a players’ strike. As in that year, Manfred has said that games won’t be made up, even if that means competitors playing uneven numbers of games — a situation that helped to decide the AL East that year, with the Tigers (86-70) finishing half a game ahead of the Red Sox (85-70). Read the rest of this entry »

On the day that commissioner Rob Manfred set as a deadline for the completion of a new collective bargaining agreement that would end the owners’ self-imposed lockout and keep a March 31 Opening Day on schedule, no deal was reached. For the eighth consecutive day of negotiations, representatives for the owners and the players’ union met at Jupiter, Florida’s Roger Dean Stadium, going back and forth so many times over the course of 16 1/2 hours that the calculations of steps traveled strained FanGraphs’ servers, to say nothing of the brains of the handful of reporters staked out outside the gates. Enough progress towards a deal was made before the two sides broke for the night at 2:30 AM ET that Manfred agreed to extend the artificially-imposed deadline to 5 PM ET on Tuesday.

While nothing has been finalized, the reports of where the key components are heading do not paint a particularly pretty picture for the players’ side. After a decade in which they have largely been shut out of massive revenue growth, with new television deals falling into place, they appear to be improving the lot of their rank and file — no small matter in an industry where 47% of all service time went to players making the minimum salary — but while achieving only modest gains in areas where they initially sought more radical change.

Based upon the drips and drabs that have emerged from various reports, the battle to expand the postseason has loomed large, with MLB presenting alternative proposals based on whether it’s 14 teams (their preference) or 12 (the union’s preference).

Sources: Deal not close, but not impossible. CBT thresholds, prearb pool big issues, among others. MLB has proposed two choices:

A: 14-team expanded postseason, minimum of ~$700k, ~40m into prearb pool

B: 12-team expanded postseason, ~$675k minimum, ~$20m into prearb pool

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) March 1, 2022

The 12-team format appears to be the route this deal will take, though according to the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand, the gap between the two formats amounts to only a $15 million difference in what ESPN is offering ($100 million for a 14-team format, $85 million for a 12-team one). Whether the “ghost win” concept — giving the division-winning team that does not receive a first-round bye a one-game-to-none advantage in a best-of-five series — survives is unclear at this writing. Read the rest of this entry »

Every offseason, we work diligently to produce prospect rankings for every team in baseball — when all is said and done, our lists typically incorporate well over 1,000 player write-ups. And based on the engagement with last week’s Top 100 Prospects list and our other Prospects Week content, our readers are as excited about prospects as we are. I’m proud of the work we do here at FanGraphs, but there is one area in which we haven’t done as well as we could, and that’s in helping you properly manage expectations.

We see it in the comments, on Twitter, and in pieces at other publications that reference the work done here. People line up a team’s prospect list and assume that is what the team will look like in two, three, or more years. Look up a system’s top five pitching prospects and that’s what the big league rotation will look like down the road. Three good middle infield prospects? That’s too many! What will the club ever do? We’ve tried our best to communicate the exceptionally real (and yet still underrated) failure rate when it comes to projecting prospects, but it’s become clear that we haven’t done a good enough job. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s difficult to be a major league hitter right now, maybe more than ever. For one, pitchers are filthier than ever, with mere relievers averaging velocities that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Teams have also become crafty with how they configure not only their infields, but also outfields, to great effect: League-wide BABIP on grounders and line drives has declined steadily over the years. It’s no wonder some hitters are left frustrated.

But that doesn’t mean hitters are without options. “They may take away our base hits, but they’ll never take away our plate discipline!” Joey Gallo might cry, if Braveheart is ever remade as an epic battle between a small nation of sluggers and a tyrannical pitcher-state. That really is motivating, though, because if you think about it, a hitter has complete control over when to swing. He may be influenced by the opposing pitcher’s sequencing, deception, and so on, but the decision itself can be traced back to his synapses firing off commands or staying put, all in a matter of milliseconds. Read the rest of this entry »