In previous seasons, I have taken a look at Opening Day payrolls and team win totals in August to see how closely the two figures correlate. Given that the 2020 regular season was just a few weeks old in mid-August, I didn’t write that piece then, and since the season was only 60 games long overall, I wouldn’t have been able to make the same type of comparison as in past seasons. Sixty games means more randomness and not as much of an opportunity for the good and bad teams to create separation between each other. It should come as no surprise, then, that the relationship between payroll and wins was not strong last year. The difference between the Dodgers and the Pirates last year was just 24 wins, but if you pro-rated their win percentages over 162 games, it would be a 65-win gap.

It isn’t really the top and the bottom that bunched teams together, though, relative to each other. Sixteen teams finished with a win total from 26 to 34, an eight-game spread. In a normal year, those winning percentages would be the difference between a 70-win team and a 92-win team. Typically, we can be confident that the 92-win team is significantly better than the 70-win team, since the amount of luck required to close a gap of that size is enormous. In a 60-game season, though, that confidence erodes a bit. For example, the Mets and Cubs finished with the same 31–29 BaseRuns record, but Chicago won the NL Central with a 34–26 mark, while New York missed the playoffs at 26–34. The Diamondbacks and Marlins had the same 24–36 BaseRuns record, but Miami finished two games above .500 and made the playoffs, while Arizona was 10 games below .500 at 25–35.

Comparisons between teams were made even more difficult by the unbalanced schedule. Teams played 40 games in their own division and another 20 games against the same directional division in the opposite league. The wins in the West, Central, and East all even out, but the pre-pandemic average payroll for the 10 West teams was around $157 million, followed by $147 million in the East and $122 million in the Central.

With all of that out of the way, here’s how the wins and payroll numbers shake out for 2020.

When it came to winning baseball games last year, payroll was not a significant factor. It’s worth noting that if we used BaseRuns standings, the correlation coefficient (r) moves up to .3, which is in line with what it was for actual wins and payroll for most of the last decade. Here’s a year-by-year look at wins and payrolls over the years.

On its face, last year’s correlation is the lowest since before baseball’s strike. As with much of 2020, the lack of a full season tends to distort the numbers and our ability to get value from them. Would the Marlins and Astros have maintained their roughly .500 trajectories, or would they have moved more toward their projected status? Looking at BaseRuns shows a significantly higher correlation between expected wins and projected payroll, and it’s likely that a full season would have resulted in a much stronger relationship, but the shortened season limits certainty.

In past years, I’ve discussed the relationship between wins and franchise valuations as well as looking at payroll and wins over multiple seasons. There doesn’t seem to be as much fruitful ground to cover beyond what I’ve previously written given the way the 2020 season turned out, though I will note that going back to 2014 puts the relationship between payroll and wins at .52 with the Forbes valuation and wins over that period at .56. Even with the 60-game season, the overall trend remains the same: Money, in terms of payroll or organizational worth, has a strong relationship with how much a team wins.

While I performed this exercise mostly out of habit, it is good to see the intuition of 2020 randomness supported here. Given a shortened season, we would expect to see a weaker relationship between payroll and wins, and that’s exactly what we got. The more games, the more likely we are to see talent win out, and talent is often acquired in exchange for significant sums of money. There isn’t much reason to think the dynamic that has existed in previous seasons has undergone significant change, and 2020 will simply provide an asterisk-laden blip in history. We will see how 2021 turns out for payroll and wins, but I would expect that most teams will continue to be rewarded for higher payrolls while exceptions like the Rays and A’s succeed despite their competitive disadvantage when it comes to player salaries.

Teams generally pay little heed to the torrent of ZiPS projection posts every winter, rudely making changes to their rosters with no thought to the consequences of making my graphs and tables obsolete! This has been less of a problem than usual as this offseason has been a rather quiet one: 18 of the top 20 free agents on our offseason top 50 are still unsigned with just six weeks to go until the scheduled opening of spring training. The Padres have been the rare exception to this dreadful stasis. Rather than sitting quietly on their hands, hemming and hawing about the state of baseball’s finances, they’ve aggressively sought to make improvements that increase the payroll. In a holiday flurry of moves, they added Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, Ha-seong Kim, and Victor Caratini, setting up what could be the most anticipated divisional race in recent memory. It’s a nice change of pace from teams that have practically issued press releases informing fans of just how much worse the product will be in 2021.

That’s not to say that ZiPS didn’t like the Padres before their latest series of moves. In fact, my labyrinthine tangle of algorithms thought that the boys in brown combined to make up the second-best team in the National League. But there was also a clear space between them and the reigning World Series champs, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now, I’m not so sure.

Let’s start by refreshing the team’s depth chart:

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If the Brewers had their druthers, Orlando Arcia wouldn’t have played much this year. After the 2019 season, they acquired Luis Urías from the Padres with the intention of making him their starting shortstop. Arcia, a former top prospect whose bat had stagnated, would be relegated to a backup and defensive replacement — or at least, that was the plan.

Things don’t always work out so cleanly, and 2020 had a way of ruining everything. Urías contracted COVID-19 in July and didn’t debut until August 10. The third base situation didn’t quite work out; Brock Holt and Eric Sogard struggled, and Jedd Gyorko played mainly first base — the addition of the universal DH meant that their brief Ryan Braun experiment at first never amounted to much.

In the end, Arcia racked up 189 plate appearances, nearly a full-time slate. That doesn’t sound great for Milwaukee — Arcia put up a 54 wRC+ in 2018 and a 61 in 2019, plumbing the depths of offensive futility. Those are bad numbers even for a glove-first shortstop, but hey, with a DH, you can just bat him at the bottom of the lineup and limit the leverage of those plate appearances, right? Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

LaTroy Hawkins was just about as well-traveled as they come. The 6-foot-5, 220-pound righty spent 21 years in the majors, pitching for 11 different teams (not counting a return engagement in Colorado) in 44 different ballparks. Generally a setup man (though he did spend time closing), he never made an All-Star team, but he did pitch in the postseason five times with four different franchises, including a World Series with the Rockies. He stuck around long enough to become the 16th pitcher to appear in 1,000 games, and today ranks 10th all-time:

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the official retirement of Phil Hughes, the joy of anticipating top prospects and watching them debut, the sobering reality of players their age starting to retire, a report that the 2021 season is likely to start on time, and a control group for their minor league free agent draft, then (31:40) talk to former Dodgers general manager Dan Evans about how he hired new Marlins GM Kim Ng when he worked for the White Sox and Dodgers, how she distinguished herself as an intern and gained greater responsibility, how to stand out in an MLB front office, why Ng had to wait so long for a GM job, how teams can diversify front offices and ensure that more minority candidates are promoted into positions of power, how the GM role has changed, and how Ng will run the Marlins.

Audio intro: The Who, "1921"
Audio interstitial: Mates of State, "A Control Group"
Audio outro: Courtney Barnett, "Kim’s Caravan"

Link to Hughes’ retirement announcement
Link to video of Hughes’ 2007 debut
Link to 2007 BP top prospect list
Link to Andy McCullough on Hughes’ second career
Link to study on top-prospect production
Link to Jon Tayler on Strasburg’s debut
Link to The Athletic report on the 2021 season
Link to minor league free agent draft results
Link to EW interview with Jen Wolf
Link to Dan’s Sports Management Worldwide page
Link to Dan on Kim Ng
Link to Lindsey Adler on Kim Ng
Link to Olivia Witherite on Kim Ng
Link to Marc Carig on Kim Ng
Link to Jen Mac Ramos on Kim Ng
Link to Jake Mailhot on Kim Ng
Link to Rachael McDaniel on Kim Ng

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One of the “Best of 2020” articles that ran here at FanGraphs over the holidays featured an under-the-radar right-hander with a unique backstory and a knee-buckling bender. Titled Rangers Prospect Cole Uvila is a Driveline-Developed Spin Monster, the story chronicled, among things, a curveball that had spun upwards of 3,300 RPM in Arizona Fall League action. Honed with the help of technology, the pitch profiled as his ticket to Texas.

He’s no longer throwing it. Instead, Uvila is endeavoring to channel former Cleveland Indians closer Cody Allen.

“In my head, I was going to throw it until my career was over,” Uvila said of his old curveball. “Then the pandemic happened. There was a lot of time to look in the mirror, and you just don’t see big-league relievers throwing 76-mph curveballs. It’s not really a thing.”

Uvila started talking with people in the Rangers organization, as well as to the instructors he’s worked with at Driveline over the years. Their messages were essentially the same: With breaking balls — much like fastballs — velocity is king.

“Driveline R&D has this metric called Stuff Plus, which essentially takes every breaking ball over the last five years and gives it a number,” Uvila told me earlier this week. “It’s kind of like wRC+, where 100 is average. I think the highest one was a dude with the Cubs, named [Dillon] Maples, and his graded out at something like 240. So there’s this range of pitches, and looking at the list, I saw this theme of curveballs at 84-85 [mph]. I said, ‘Man, I need to throw this pitch harder.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the experience of podcasting about baseball in 2020, what purpose they think the Hall of Fame serves, and whether they would consider giving up their Hall of Fame ballots, then ring in the new year by extending an old tradition and conducting the eighth annual Effectively Wild Minor League Free Agent Draft, in which they select 10 minor league free agents each and compete to see whose roster will accumulate the most MLB playing time in 2021.

Audio intro: First Aid Kit, "New Year’s Eve"
Audio outro: Death Cab for Cutie, "The New Year"

Link to Craig Calcaterra on the Hall of Fame
Link to Jeff Passan on Hall of Fame voting
Link to list of minor league free agents
Link to Justin Hollander interview episode
Link to last year’s draft results
Link to this year’s draftees

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Episode 903

On the final 2020 episode of FanGraphs Audio, the crew pays their respects to those we’ve lost before inviting a friend back to the program.

• At the top of the show, Jay Jaffe and Dan Szymborski honor the late Phil Niekro. The knuckleballer’s passing marks the seventh Hall of Famer to pass away in 2020 (Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Whitey Ford, Joe Morgan), a truly unfortunate record. Jay and Dan discuss their memories of Niekro and the knuckleball, as well as the other legends that left us too soon. [1:45]
• Following that, David Laurila is joined by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and The Best Podcast in Baseball) to talk about the Cardinals. David and Derrick discuss Derrick’s Hall of Fame ballot, Scott Rolen’s excellence, Yadier Molina’s legacy, and the current Cardinals’ lineup struggles. They also chat about baseball cards, as Derrick tells the story of ending up on his own card. [29:06]

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In 2020 — this despite limited media access due to the pandemic — I once again had an opportunity to interview numerous people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, or from feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

———

“If you want to be a surgeon, you can’t just go into an operating room and start cutting people up. If you want to be a baseball analyst, you can start analyzing baseball data tonight. There’s a lot of public baseball data, and the sorts of modeling we do… a lot of it is open source and free.” — Sam Mondry-Cohen, Washington Nationals assistant GM, January 2020

“Going forward, I expect that we’ll be making fewer trades. We’re in a different growth pattern now. It’s about letting the young guys play.” — Jerry Dipoto, Seattle Mariners GM, January 2020

“You can’t control where you release the ball. The ball just naturally flies out of your hand. You can adjust where your arm wants to be when the ball flies out, but if the ball wants to fly out of your hand, it’s going to fly out out of your hand.” — Ethan Hankins, Cleveland Indians pitching prospect, January 2020 Read the rest of this entry »