Last month, I went over some possible playoff structures in an attempt to design a format that allowed for playoff expansion while still preserving the value of adding a star to the roster. I focused on 14-team structures for a couple of reasons: it was more of a challenge to make a 14-team system that didn’t grossly alter team incentives and I suspected that the players would be willing to accept the larger field if it helped them achieve some of their other negotiation priorities.

Well, we’re a month later, and there’s a little more clarity. While there is still a lot to iron out and little idea as to when the league and the players union might reach a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement, there seems to be some kind of very preliminary sorta-agreement on a 12-team playoff system, though ownership has apparently been very resistant to allowing the more highly-seeded teams any advantage outside of the traditional home field-based ones (meaning no knockout run or “ghost wins”). Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 964

This week on the show, David Laurila welcomes long-time Pittsburgh scribe and former Baseball Prospectus colleague John Perrotto to the program.

Perrotto has been covering baseball long enough to remember the last labor stoppage, and he shares his perspective on the current lockout and how it compares to 1994. After that, we get anecdotes about a number of Pirates legends, including what it was like to get to know Jim Leyland, and that one time Brian Giles took batting practice in his birthday suit. We also hear about Perrotto’s clubhouse relationship with Barry Bonds, how impressive of an interview he could be when he wanted to be, and what it took to earn the slugger’s respect.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 43 minute play time.)

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There’s so much going on in the world that I screwed up the intro twice and even got the episode number wrong. Nonetheless, join me and FanGraphs’ very own Ben Clemens for a discussion about the long and ultimately frustrating week-plus of labor talks, the openly available financial records of the Atlanta Braves, the politicization of Derek Jeter’s surprising announcement, and, just because everyone else seems to be talking about it, Elden Ring.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Warning One: While ostensibly a podcast about baseball, these conversations often veer into other subjects.

Warning Two: There is explicit language.

Run Time: 1:03:35.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com.

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley are joined by Evan Drellich, senior writer for The Athletic, to talk about the benefits and drawbacks of reporting from the scene of the CBA negotiations, the proper composition of photos of executives walking to meetings, not getting hoodwinked by sources, whether there really was optimism about a deal leading up to the MLB-imposed deadline for delaying the start of the season, whether MLB tried to sneak proposals past players overnight, whether the owners are trying to break the union, whether the owners and players are united internally, what still separates the two sides (and how much money it’s worth), Rob Manfred’s job security, the changing tone of national coverage of the labor negotiations, what could end the lockout, the prospect of on-field changes, and more.

Audio intro: Guided By Voices, “Cohesive Scoops”
Audio outro: Atomic Rooster, “People You Can’t Trust”

Link to Evan’s first Manfred video
Link to another Manfred video
Link to well-composed Manfred video
Link to MLB exec video
Link to Twitter pooping exchange
Link to thread on where talks stand
Link to Evan’s latest report
Link to Evan’s weekend column
Link to MLBPA statement
Link to Stripling quote
Link to Martino report
Link to article on Ohtani’s service time
Link to Clemens on the financial gap
Link to Evan on EW in November
Link to Ghiroli on the talks
Link to Rosenthal on the talks
Link to McCullough on the talks
Link to Passan on the talks
Link to Ben on Lords of the Realm

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12:02

Dan Szymborski: <weary>

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Nothing is good at the moment!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: If Gleyber Torres doesn’t make sense, you must acquit!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I guess the ideal possible explanation would be that he had a secret injury which magically healed this offseason

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »