With Qualifying Offers decisions made, the non-tender deadline at our backs and free agency still just getting started, it’s a good time to check in on every team’s payroll before the offseason reaches full bore. With this year’s 60-game season came a substantial reduction in revenues as well as player pay. How much owners plan to cut team payrolls for next season is uncertain, but substantial reductions are expected. To get a sense of where current major-league payrolls fall, here are our projections from our RosterResource payroll pages:

There are a few things to keep in mind here. First, these figures are salaries for 2021, not the average annual value numbers used for the competitive balance tax payroll, which we’ll get to in a bit. In addition, these figures don’t include buyouts for this past year or next season, which stand at around $40 million total potentially owed as of the end of the season. These numbers do include estimates for arbitration-eligible players, as well as an expected number of minimum-salaried players to make it through a season. They do not include the roughly $2 million per team that will be spent on players on the 40-man roster who aren’t in the majors, or the roughly $15 million per team that will be spent on player benefits. Both of those figures will be included in the competitive balance tax numbers below.

The defending champs top this list by a healthy margin with an expected payroll of roughly $190 million if the season started today; they also seem to be well-equipped for another run next season, as they are about five wins clear of every other team in our Depth Charts. The Dodgers could still conceivably add to their infield, bring Justin Turner back, or add some depth to the rotation or bullpen, but by signing Mookie Betts to a contract extension earlier this year, they ensured the best potential free agent in the game will call Los Angeles home next season. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB’s long-shot attempt to recoup COVID-related losses from its insurance providers, Tomoyuki Sugano getting posted, and why the Phillies’ rebuild has stalled, then (36:45) talk to Sean Gibson, the great-grandson of Hall of Famer and Negro Leagues great Josh Gibson and the executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation, about his campaign to get MLB’s MVP award renamed after Gibson, how he learned about his great-grandfather’s life, why he decided to devote himself to honoring the legacy of his great-grandfather and the Negro Leagues, common misconceptions about Gibson, Gibson’s skill as a catcher, what-ifs about Gibson’s career, efforts to collect Negro Leagues stats, the centennial of the Negro Leagues, the Gibson Foundation’s programs, and more.

Audio intro: The Mountain Goats, "Insurance Fraud #2"
Audio interstitial: Dan Bern, "Josh Gibson"
Audio outro: Neil Young, "Goodbye Dick"

Link to AP story about MLB suing its insurance providers
Link to Rob Mains on the MLB lawsuit
Link to Craig Calcaterra on the MLB lawsuit
Link to story about minor league lawsuit getting dismissed
Link to FanGraphs international prospect rankings
Link to Wheeler trade rumors
Link to Jeff Passan on the Wheeler trade rumors
Link to Sam Miller on the Phillies’ rebuild
Link to Josh Gibson Foundation website
Link to Sean Gibson’s article for The Undefeated
Link to MVP petition
Link to Pittsburgh Magazine article about Gibson
Link to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about Gibson
Link to Ben on MLB reclassifying Negro Leagues stats
Link to Gibson’s Seamheads page
Link to Shakeia Taylor on Dick Allen
Link to Jay Jaffe on Allen

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With no in-person Winter Meetings this year, the FanGraphs crew is getting together on Zoom to see some of our friends across the industry. We’ll enjoy a beverage and discuss a range of baseball-related topics with guests including The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler and Sahadev Sharma, Baseball Prospectus’ Craig Goldstein and Shakeia Taylor, Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman of Céspedes Family BBQ, Dennis Wyrick of Rosenhaus Sports, and Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated.

So grab your crispest business casual and your drink of choice, and join us Tuesday at 4:30 PT/7:30 ET on the FanGraphs homepage or on Twitch.

We hope you can make it!

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For the better part of this decade, we’ve repeatedly published an article you can more or less predict. Nearly every year, a version of the same idea gets published. “You’re never going to believe it,” the article starts, “but fastballs got faster again this year.” There are usually some GIFs, maybe a winking joke about how we write this article every year and it keeps being true, and bam, 1,500 words out the door. Oh yeah! There’s also a kicker: “Fastballs keep getting thrown less frequently, too.”

Normally, I’d be writing that article again this year. There’s just one problem: four-seam fastballs didn’t get faster this year; in fact, they’ve been plateauing for a few years. This year’s four-seamers checked in at an average velocity of 93.9 mph. Adjusting for time of year (I used only data from August onward in each season so that we didn’t have any weather effects unique to 2020), here are the last five years of four-seam velocity:

The 2019 season was the fastest on record, and 2020 fell short of that mark. In fact, the last five years look overall unchanged. Look instead at sinkers, though, and you’ll see some velocity improvement:

Which one should we believe? Four-seamers are more common than sinkers, so the blended average looks like this:

Okay, so fastballs didn’t get any faster this year. Sinkers did, and that’s interesting for sure, but at the highest level, it feels like the inexorable march towards higher velocity might have stalled for the moment.

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. It was initially written for The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books, and subsequently adapted for SI.com and then FanGraphs. 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. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

It happened so quickly. Freshly anointed the game’s top prospect by Baseball America in the spring of 1996, the soon-to-be-19-year-old Andruw Jones was sent to play for the Durham Bulls, the Braves’ Hi-A affiliate. By mid-August, he blazed through the Carolina League, the Double-A Southern League, and the Triple-A International League, and debuted for the defending world champions. By October 20, with just 31 regular season games under his belt, he was a household name, having become the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game — breaking Mickey Mantle’s record — and doing so twice at Yankee Stadium to boot.

Jones was no flash in the pan. The Braves didn’t win the 1996 World Series, and he didn’t win the ’97 NL Rookie of the Year award, but along with Chipper Jones (no relation) and the big three of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, he became a pillar of a franchise that won a remarkable 14 NL East titles from 1991-2005 (all but the 1994 strike season). From 1998-2007, Jones won 10 straight Gold Gloves, more than any center fielder except Willie Mays.

By the end of 2006, Jones had tallied 342 homers and 1,556 hits. He looked bound for a berth in Cooperstown, but after a subpar final season in Atlanta and a departure for Los Angeles in free agency, he fell apart so completely that the Dodgers bought out his contract, a rarity in baseball. He spent the next four years with three different teams before heading to Japan at age 35, and while he hoped for a return to the majors, he couldn’t find a deal to his liking after either the 2014 or ’15 seasons. He retired before his 39th birthday, and thanks to his rapid descent, barely survived his first two years on the Hall of Fame ballot, with shares of 7.3% and 7.5%. Last year, he jumped to 19.4%, offering hope that with seven years of eligibility remaining, he still has time to get to 75%.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Houston Astros.

Batters

If you want a reason why the Houston Astros are still a dangerous team and were just a game away from making the 2020 World Series despite a losing record in the regular season, look no further than the Big Numbers in the lineup. The Astros have a lot in common with their 2019 World Series opponents, the Washington Nationals, in that they’re both teams that have been serious contenders for a numbers of years, have some extremely talented young superstars, and are suffering depth issues due to veteran attrition. Even with the loss (as of now) of Michael Brantley and George Springer, there are still a lot of highlights on the club. And the weak points of the lineup are glaringly obvious.

One of those is left field, which is a good reminder that our Depth Charts today will not be the same as they are three months from now. I would be extremely surprised if Houston started the season with Chas McCormick and/or Ronnie Dawson in left. McCormick projects better than Dawson does, but as long as the team’s still trying to contend in 2021, this is definitely a Too Soon thing. It would be a little odd to give McCormick time playing time so quickly after Kyle Tucker had to fight for years for an extended shot! Nor am I convinced that Myles Straw actually ends up the starter in center next season, though it’s more plausible than the current situation in left. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Magadan nearly won a National League batting title in 1990. A first baseman for the New York Mets at the time, “Mags” finished with a .328 average, seven percentage points behind Willie McGee. A big final game of the season could have pushed him over the top — the math showed as much — although the odds were against him. So too was a cagey southpaw making his 547th, and final, big-league start.

“I think I needed to go 4 for 4,” recalled Magadan, who is now the hitting coach for the Colorado Rockies. Willie McGee had been traded to the American League around the end of August — he went to Oakland — so his batting average was frozen. Because of that, those of us who were chasing him had a number to shoot for.”

Magadan went into the Wednesday afternoon finale hitting .329 — Eddie Murray, then with the Los Angeles Dodgers, was at .328 — and the targeted 4 for 4 would indeed have allowed Magadan to match McGee’s mark… albeit only through rounding. Magadan would have finished at .3348 to McGee’s .3353, leaving the latter with the official title by the narrowest of margins.

No decimal points were needed. Magadan went 0 for 1, and then hit the showers with his lone plate appearance having served as a reminder that you can’t always believe what you’re told told. This is especially true when the words are spoken by the opposing pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley offer an update about Sam Miller’s status on the podcast, banter about the Rangers hiring former pitcher Chris Young as their new GM and play-by-play man Len Kasper’s move from Cubs TV broadcasts to White Sox radio broadcasts, and answer listener emails about how tanking teams could be more entertaining, the plausibility and value of a hitting counterpart to the pitching machine, the viability of baseball as a 24-hour service, and how different baseball would be if the dimensions of the strike zone didn’t vary by batter.

Audio intro: The Hold Steady, "Blackout Sam"
Audio outro: Murry Kellum, "Long Tall Texan"

Link to Sam’s announcement Twitter thread
Link to Sam’s ESPN archive
Link to Rangers press release about Young
Link to Young on pitching up in the zone
Link to Ben on Young in 2015
Link to Ben on moving the mound back
Link to Len Kasper report

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When the 2021 season begins, the Rangers’ starting shortstop will not be Elvis Andrus. He has been Texas’ everyday starter there since his debut in 2009 — a remarkable run of longevity — but earlier this week, Rangers general manager Jon Daniels and manager Chris Woodward announced that Andrus would enter spring training as a utility infielder. Replacing him as the everyday shortstop? A former backup catcher.

Describing Isiah Kiner-Falefa as a backup catcher is a little misleading; after all, he won a Gold Glove for his excellent fielding at third base this year. But he reached the majors as a catcher after spending much of his minor league career as an infielder. That was a sacrifice he was willing to make to reach the highest levels with other, more heralded infield prospects ahead of him in the Rangers’ organization. It’s a credit to his determination and dedication that he outlasted those other prospects to earn this opportunity.

As Andrew Simon of MLB.com pointed out, a player moving from behind the plate to the most difficult infield position is almost unheard of in baseball history: Kiner-Falefa could become the first modern player to play at least 50 games at catcher, shortstop, and third base. He was drafted as a shortstop out of high school and gained plenty of experience on the dirt as a minor leaguer, so this isn’t unfamiliar territory for him. Still, simply due to the way he had to make compromises to work his way up to the majors, he’s in rare company.

Read the rest of this entry »