Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the new baseball format embraced by the Savannah Bananas, the experimental rules MLB is imposing at various levels of the minor leagues in 2021, and whether they would want to live in a ballpark (like a man who claims to have lived for three years in Veterans Stadium), then answer listener emails about whether this season’s spring training stats are more or less meaningless than usual, the ideal photo to represent baseball on the sport’s Wikipedia page, the definition of pitchability, whether the public’s perception of player mega-contracts has changed, whether this is the “tanking era” or the “superteam era,” and whether tanking is as bad as it’s cracked up to be, plus a Stat Blast about teams that scored the highest percentage of their total runs in one game.

Audio intro: Louis Prima, "Yes, We Have No Bananas"
Audio outro: Iron Maiden, "The Number of the Beast"

Link to story about the Bananas
Link to video about the Bananas
Link to MiLB rules changes announcement
Link to Jayson Stark on the new rules
Link to story about living in Veterans Stadium
Link to The Secret Apartment
Link to Dan Rosenheck on spring training stats
Link to Dan’s presentation on spring training stats
Link to Heyward photo from Wikipedia
Link to Alex Chamberlain on Hendricks
Link to A-Rod contract facts
Link to Zach Kram on the superteam era
Link to Ben on competitive balance and tanking
Link to Craig Edwards on competitive balance and tanking
Link to Craig on the 2019 competitive balance problem
Link to Stat Blast data

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The Mets acquired Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco for little more than a song this offseason, the team’s new ownership making a splash just two months after officially taking over. A one-year rental of Lindor’s services plus Carrasco was enough to give New York an argument for being the favored squadron in the NL East in a likely battle with Atlanta. But what’s the fun of being a large-market team if you’re not going to act like one? Just like the Dodgers, who quickly moved to ink Mookie Betts for the next dozen years after their blockbuster pickup, the Mets have deep pockets and play in a city with limitless revenue potential. Keeping Lindor, if possible, ought to be the team’s priority. Reggie Jackson didn’t go into the Hall of Fame as an Oriole!

While no concrete terms or even loose parameters have leaked, both Lindor’s camp and the Mets have been interested in talking deal. Waiting around to see what happens is one option, but it’s a good deal more fun to play fantasy billionaire ourselves. I didn’t develop a projection system just to get people mad at me — at least not entirely.

Mega-star contracts are difficult because you don’t have a lot of direct comparables. Fernando Tatis Jr. signed a monster 14-year, $340 million pact with the Padres, but there are reasons he should get more than Lindor: He’s five years younger and coming off an MVP-caliber season. On the flip side, Tatis also had less leverage, with four full seasons until free agency.

The best place to start is the basic projection for Lindor from 2022 on. I’m letting ZiPS decide where the endpoint is, given that we don’t have any specifics to work with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Despite an atypically mediocre performance from their bullpen last year, the Yankees project to have the strongest relief corps in 2021 according to our forecasting systems. However, their chances of fulfilling that expectation have taken a hit with the news that Zack Britton, the team’s top setup man, will undergo arthroscopic surgery to remove a bone chip in his left elbow. The 33-year-old lefty could be out until mid-June or later.

Britton had already been slowed this spring by a bout of COVID-19, which he contracted in January while going to the hospital when his wife was giving birth to the couple’s fourth child. He told reporters that he lost 18 pounds and had been set back in his offseason throwing regimen. After experiencing elbow soreness in the wake of a bullpen session on Sunday, he underwent an MRI on Monday that showed the chip.

The surgery will be performed on March 15 by Dr. Christopher Ahmad, the Yankees’ team physician. As WFAN’s Sweeny Murti pointed out, Dr. Ahmad’s website suggests a timeline of six weeks before a pitcher undergoing such a procedure can be cleared to throw, and that a return to full competition could take 3-4 months:

Britton’s surgery will be performed by Yankees team Dr Chris Ahmad. Here is what his website says about timeline for removing a bone chip. h/t ?@Eric_M888? pic.twitter.com/cCULq0g7Qi

— Sweeny Murti (@SweenyMurti) March 10, 2021

Roughly speaking, three months from now means a mid-June return, and four months a return just after the All-Star break (the All-Star Game is scheduled for July 13 in Atlanta). Even a best-case scenario, involving a minimally invasive operation and a buildup to a reliever’s workload instead of a starter’s, might shave a month off that. In 2019, for example, the Rays’ Blake Snell missed about eight weeks after undergoing surgery to remove loose bodies (bone chips or cartilage fragments). He wasn’t built up to a full workload upon returning to help the Rays secure a Wild Card berth and reach the postseason, totaling just 10.1 innings in six appearances and maxing out at 62 pitches, but he was reasonably effective. Because this is happening out of the gate rather than towards the end of the season, the Yankees and Britton have less incentive to hurry back. Via ESPN’s Marly Rivera, Britton isn’t in a rush, saying, “However long that takes is how long I’m going to be out. I know that I’m going to be back with the team at some point this year and pitch significant innings. So that’s all that matters.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure plenty of us would like to simply forget that 2020 ever happened. In this fictional world where a Men In Black neuralyzer is used to erase the memory of the last 12 months, Ketel Marte would be feeling pretty good about his previous season. 2019 was a big year for Marte. He posted a 150 wRC+ and accumulated 7.0 WAR, both easily career highs, and earned a fourth place finish in the NL MVP voting. With last year wiped clean, he’d be looking forward to building off his breakout in 2021 and establishing himself as a bonafide superstar. Instead, the memory of nearly 200 so-so plate appearances in 2020 comes flooding back and all sorts of questions about his true talent level begin to popup.

When compared to his performance prior to 2019, his 2020 season doesn’t seem all that out of place. His power output dropped back to where it was before his breakout, leading to very similar overall offensive contributions to his early career line.

Which season seems like the outlier when put into this context? Of course, it isn’t so easy as simply throwing out his 2019 and settling on a true offensive talent that falls somewhere around 5% below league average. Most of the projection systems think he’ll fall somewhere in between, with some but not all of his power returning.

Marte’s power surge in 2019 was driven by a significant increase in the number of hard hit balls he put in play in the air. He increased his average launch angle from 5.8 degrees in 2018 to 11.5 degrees in 2019. Along with making more authoritative contact more often, those hard hit balls were pulled more often, too. Every single adjustment he made resulted in greater damage when he put the ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a lot of discussion this week about the pandemic anniversary, as we are now one year removed from when things really hit the fan. Most people in the United States realized that things were really bad, or were about to be, sometime during the second week of March 2020. And as it is for many, my pandemic anniversary is today, March 11, which is also when I was in the Dominican Republic for the last time.

The trip had been planned for a while, and I was scheduled to leave for Santo Domingo on Saturday, March 7 with an overnight stop in Newark. It sounds crazy now, but at no point did I or anyone else with the Astros’ contingent heading to the island think twice about traveling. As I departed for O’Hare International, the CDC reported 437 cases of the virus in the United States. More than a quarter of those were from cruise ships or a long-term care facility in Washington State. New York, which would soon become the epicenter for the virus domestically, reported a grand total of 13 new cases. The only related sports story was a rumor that the NBA was working on a contingency plan for playing without fans if things got bad — if.

And so, partially because of our case rates, and partially because The Guardian’s home base is in the UK (I was, and usually still am, getting my COVID-19 news from them), the pandemic still felt like something happening over there. Things in China were dire, obviously, and COVID-19 was starting to spread like wildfire in Europe, where some countries were just beginning to talk about shut downs. In the United States, though, things felt safer. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners’ starting pitchers can be broken into two different groups. There are the veterans at the top in Marco Gonzales and James Paxton, who between them have spent about 10 seasons in Seattle. They’ve both been successful, and so long as they stay healthy — not a given for Paxton — we know what to expect from them. The other half of the Mariners’ rotation is the young guys: Justus Sheffield, Justin Dunn, Logan Gilbert, and others. Each of them had or has considerable prospect stock, but while they’re expected to be successful at some point in the future, we can’t be sure that success will arrive in 2021.

Holding those two groups together in the middle is left-hander Yusei Kikuchi, fittingly, as he represents something from both. At 29 years old and with nine seasons spent in NPB, he’s already a veteran. But as with the young guys, there is still a lot to learn about how he will fare in the majors, given that his MLB experience amounts to two years. The first was 2019, his rookie season and first time pitching in the U.S., when he posted a 5.46 ERA and 5.71 FIP in 161.2 innings as Seattle finished last in the AL West.

The pandemic-shortened 2020 season, though, suggested there could be a lot more to him. Kikuchi’s ERA stayed above 5.00, but his FIP plummeted to 3.30, and he made significant progress with his strikeout and home run rates. If his surface numbers take the step forward this year that his peripherals did last year, it would be a major boost to the Mariners as they try to crawl toward contention.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 season couldn’t have been much fun for the Nationals or Stephen Strasburg. In the wake of their World Series victory over the Astros, the team sputtered out of the gate, while Strasburg, the MVP of that World Series and a newly-minted $245 million man via his opt-out and re-signing in December 2019, was limited to two starts before undergoing late August surgery to alleviate carpal tunnel neuritis.

On Tuesday, Strasburg took the mound for his first Grapefruit League appearance — against the Astros, coincidentally, albeit a much different team from the one he faced in the World Series, with Jose Altuve, Michael Brantley, Carlos Correa, and Yuli Gurriel the only starters in both games. The 32-year-old righty threw 38 pitches, had good command of a fastball that reportedly sat at 93 mph and ranged from 91 to 93 (he averaged 93.9 mph in 2019, via Statcast), and retired five out of the six batters he faced. He struck out four, including Correa looking at a high fastball to end the first, Kyle Tucker looking at a fastball in the second, and Gurriel check-swinging at a low curveball.

These descriptions come from the Washington Post’s Jesse Dougherty and will have to do, as there was no television or Trackman for the game. The Nationals’ Twitter account did celebrate Strasmas by posting a press box-level video of the four strikeouts:

Time to open up your #Strasmas presents…

? ?????????
? ?????????
? ?????????
? ?????????#SpringTraining // #NATITUDE pic.twitter.com/suA2LhCKSa

— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) March 10, 2021

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we looked at my favorite breakout candidates for the 2021 season. Today, we shift to the players I’m more bearish about, and I’m not talking about pilfering picnic baskets. Whether it’s players who I don’t believe will match their 2020 performance, meet their 2021 projections, or who have some aspect of their game that worries me, each of these eight hitters is one who I would place firmly in the “sell” column. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be awful or bad, but it does mean I don’t think the best is yet to come.

José Abreu, Chicago White Sox

Busts are a relative notion, and a player can make this list and still be a contributor. Abreu was terrific in 2020 and is one of the few players in baseball you could inarguably call a leader, but the fact remains that it was by far his best performance in years. Sure, he pasted the ball to the tune of the 10th-highest average exit velocity in the league, but he destroyed baseballs in 2018 and ’19 as well and was far less valuable in those full seasons. Abreu’s far more likely to be an average player than he is to contend for the MVP again, and when you have a guy whose WAR projection for an entire season comes in under his 60-game WAR from last year’s short season, who you have to admit he has some bust potential. That’s doubly true when he’s in his mid-30s; sluggers aging like Nelson Cruz are the exception, not the rule.

Jackie Bradley Jr., Milwaukee Brewers

The popular conception of JBJ is that he had something of a comeback season in 2020, and that’s true on the surface, as his wRC+ of 120 was 30 points above anything he’s done in recent years. The only problem with that part of the tale is that in this case, his .343 BABIP, 45 points above his career average, was the driver of his flashy line. Remove that and his season looked a lot like 2019, when one of the questions entering the offseason was whether the Red Sox would even tender him a contract for 2020. From the specific hit data, ZiPS thinks that he played like a player with a .306 BABIP rather than one in the .340s. He’s still a solid defensive player, but his speed numbers are starting to slip, which tends to be a leading indicator of defensive decline for an outfielder. The relatively small outfield in Milwaukee isn’t the best park to take advantage of JBJ’s talents; his defensive performance would have been more welcome in places like San Francisco or Kansas City. All that said, I should note that ZiPS disagrees with me on this one.

Justin Upton, Los Angeles Angels

Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Bundy had his best statistical season in 2020. Pitching for the Los Angeles Angels after four-plus years with the Orioles, the 28-year-old right-hander posted career-bests in ERA (3.29), FIP (2.95), and K/9 (9.87). Small sample that it was — 11 starts in a pandemic-shortened campaign — the results represented a breath of fresh air. Bundy had become somewhat stagnant in Baltimore, putting up pedestrian numbers for a club that was going nowhere in terms of short-term contention. Change proved to be a panacea.

Bundy’s secondary pitches, paired with improved command, went a long way toward his success. The fourth-overall pick in the 2011 draft no longer has a plus fastball, but buoyed by a better understanding of his craft, he no longer needs one. With his third decade on planet Earth looming in the not-too-distant future — and his early-career injuries long in the rearview — Bundy has made the full transformation from thrower to pitcher.

———

David Laurila: How would you describe your career so far?

Dylan Bundy: “It’s flown by, that’s for sure. You learn a lot when you first break into the league — 2016 is when I stayed here — and that’s [continued] up to now. The game doesn’t change, but with hitters’ swing paths, the analytics, the shifting… there are ways that the game does change, slowly over time. I think that would be the biggest thing I’d take away from when I first started, to now.”

Laurila: Have you changed?

Bundy: “Overall, I guess… numbers-wise, I have changed. Obviously, everybody knows about the velocity. It’s come down, so now I’m learning how to pitch more. Ever since 2016-2017, I’ve been learning how to throw more off-speed stuff, and finally it clicked. You know, these hitters can time up a 110 mph fastball if you throw it down the middle three times in a row. Eventually, they’re going to catch up to it.

“I’ve really learned that you’ve got to throw pitches for a purpose. That’s whether it’s off the plate, in, off-speed stuff earlier in the count, heaters later in the count, or whatever it may be on that specific day. But it’s definitely been a long journey, learning this stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »

This season, for the first time since the Toronto Blue Jays played their inaugural games in 1977, there will not be a dedicated radio broadcast of their games. Instead of a radio team broadcasting the game, the audio from television broadcasts will be simulcast to radio listeners. Rogers, the Canadian telecom giant that owns both the Blue Jays and the networks they are broadcast on, has made assurances that this is merely a safety measure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is unclear what the plans are for the future of the Blue Jays on the radio. Longtime broadcaster Mike Wilner was laid off this winter, and there has been no replacement announced; even apart from the loss of a Jays radio broadcast, the AM sports radio landscape in Canada has taken significant blows recently, with Bell Media, another telecom giant, unceremoniously taking a number of local stations off the air last month. Should this season prove to Rogers that having a dedicated radio broadcast is an expense not worth carrying into the future, Blue Jays baseball on the radio could prove to be another one of the casualties of the pandemic.

It’s been almost a century since the first major league baseball game was broadcast over the radio: an early-August game between the Pirates and the Phillies in 1921. Despite resistance from both traditional print media and team ownership, the popularity of such broadcasts took off, sparking a conflict that would fundamentally change the revenue structure of major league baseball. In his book Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio, James R. Walker writes about the forces that changed the attitudes of baseball higher-ups towards the broadcasting of baseball on the radio. Declining attendance was at first, and stubbornly, blamed on radio broadcasting, leading team ownership to call for bans on such broadcasts. But with the growing influence and financial power of advertising in broadcasting and the realization that radio was a boon to developing geographically-displaced fandom (especially in the western United States, where many people lived far from a major-league team), fewer and fewer teams held out against the practice.

There was, at the same time, a fundamental shift in what the purpose of such broadcasts was. As Walker writes, the World Series, from 1921 until 1933, was broadcast on the radio — not because it was lucrative to do so, but as a service to the country’s interested public. In 1934, though, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis sold the rights to the World Series broadcast to the Ford Motor Company. Within a few years, a federal judge would hand down a decision naming baseball broadcasts on the radio as the property of the teams involved, and New York, the last holdout of broadcast bans, embraced this new revenue stream. Read the rest of this entry »