You were supposed to read this yesterday. Yesterday, when the playoffs consisted of just 10 teams and Mookie Betts hadn’t yet registered his first hit in Dodger blue. But as with a great deal else about this season, the 2020 playoffs will be something different than we initially expected. Mere hours before the first pitch of last night’s Yankees-Nationals tilt was scheduled to be thrown, ESPN’s Marly Rivera reported that MLB and the MLBPA had approved a deal to expand the postseason. This new structure will only be in effect for the 2020 season, barring further negotiations between the league and the players. The field will now feature 16 teams; every division winner and runner up will make the playoffs, along with the two teams in each league that have the best records beyond those six. They’ll meet in a three-game Wild Card Series that will be seeded thusly:

Seeds 1-3 will go to the division winners based on record.

Seeds 4-6 will go to the runners-up based on record.

Seeds 7 and 8 will be based on record.

Thus, there is a possibility the third-best division winner actually plays a worse team than the two best division winners.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 23, 2020

All of the games in the Wild Card Series will be played in the home ballpark of the more highly seeded team. In the event of regular season ties, mathematical tiebreakers will be used — MLB isn’t exactly keen to play games deeper into the Fall.

David Appelman and Sean Dolinar have already updated our playoff odds to account for the new format (they are wizards). You can poke around here, but the unsurprising takeaway is this: a lot of teams are a lot more likely to play October baseball than they were when yesterday began. Read the rest of this entry »

7:02	Dan Szymborski: Chats. A time for chats.

7:02	Dan Szymborski: THERE IS AN ACTUAL BASEBALL GAME

7:02	Dan Szymborski: I think. Today’s Thursday, right?

7:03	Dan Szymborski: No, we can’t weird up the Real Chats too much.

Read the rest of this entry »

We made it! It took a four-month journey through a still-raging pandemic and some still-burning baseball economic issues, but Opening Day of the weirdest season we’re likely to see in our lifetimes is here. The 2020 season is not a marathon, but a sprint, so we’re already in the home stretch. We’re not starting at square one, of course; if this were Monopoly, the bank would be out of hotels and everyone playing the game would hate each other, especially that jerk who has Boardwalk and Park Place.

Projecting such a season presents some unique challenges a prognosticator doesn’t normally face. It’s not projecting the individual players’ production that’s the problem so much as all the stuff around it. How many players will miss time due to the league’s COVID-19 protocols? How do we adjust for injuries when teams will play just 37% of the games, but players’ recovery from hamstring and elbow woes won’t be similarly prorated? Will top prospect talent have the same short-term upside when they’re riding the bench or practicing at their team’s alternate site that they would if they were playing actual games in the minors? How will the strange, crowdless games and the stresses of keeping up social distancing guidelines affect play?

No, I’m actually asking! I can make educated guesses that I hope aren’t preposterous, but I don’t actually know the answers to these questions. For someone who models stuff, it’s a maddening situation. But it’s a challenge I can’t avoid given that projecting stuff is, well, a big part of my job! But you’re not here to commiserate with me, humor my self-indulgent wordsmithing, or dig out where I make a reference to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, so let’s go straight to the final projected standings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets were fortunate when it came to Jacob deGrom’s back, but they weren’t so lucky regarding Marcus Stroman’s left calf. The 29-year-old righty will start the season on the Injured List due to what’s been described as “a torn muscle in his left calf” — meaning that he has at least a Grade 1 strain. He won’t require surgery, but manager Luis Rojas described him as “week to week.” In a season that’s just over nine weeks long, that’s not good news.

Per Newsday’s Anthony Rieber, Stroman was hit in the calf by a line drive during an intrasquad game last Friday, though he kept pitching. On Monday, he felt tightness in his calf during a 50-pitch bullpen session. On Tuesday night, he underwent an MRI that revealed the tear.

The loss of Stroman is particularly ominous given the Mets’ reduced depth in the wake of Noah Syndergaard’s Tommy John surgery, a matter I highlighted earlier this week. As I discovered, the 2.1 WAR deGrom is projected to produce this year accounts for 38.2% of his rotation’s WAR, the highest share of any pitcher with any team. What’s more, the 1.0 WAR drop-off from deGrom to the number two starter, Stroman, was the largest in the majors, and where the team’s total of 5.5 WAR ranked ninth among the 30 teams, the 3.4 WAR projected for the starters besides their ace is tied for 14th. Read the rest of this entry »

At last, nearly four months after originally planned, the Opening Day of the 2020 season is upon us. It begins this evening at 7 pm ET in Washington, DC, with an impressive pitching matchup that reprises last year’s World Series opener, albeit with one of the principals having changed teams. At Nationals Park — where, in acknowledgement of his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic that caused the delay, Dr. Anthony Fauci will throw out the ceremonial first pitch — three-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer will take the ball for the defending champion Nationals while Gerrit Cole will inaugurate his record-setting $324 million contract with his first regular season start as a Yankee. The night’s other contest, beginning at 10 pm ET, calls upon one of the sport’s top rivalries, pitting the Dodgers — albeit with Dustin May as a last-minute substitute for Clayton Kershaw, who was placed on the injured list due to back stiffness on Thursday afternoon — against the Giants and Johnny Cueto.

This will be Scherzer’s fifth Opening Day start, and third in a row, all with Washington; a fractured knuckle in his right ring finger forced him to yield to Stephen Strasburg in 2017. Cole has just one previous Opening Day start, in 2017 for the Pirates. Both pitchers lost at least a couple such starts to Justin Verlander, Scherzer’s teammate in Detroit from 2010-14 and Cole’s teammate since late ’17; Scherzer didn’t even get the nod when he was fresh off his 2013 AL Cy Young award. Verlander, who will take the ball in the Astros’ opener against the Mariners on Friday, will move into the active lead in Opening Day starts with his 12th. Kershaw would have taken sole possession of third with nine:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great unknowns in this season of great unknowns is what 2020 means for salaries. Not 2020 salaries, mind you: we’ve already figured that one out, give or take some J.A. Happ corner cases and Jacoby Ellsbury grievances. This offseason, however, is an entirely different ball of yarn. Will teams commit as much money to free agency and arbitration this year as they did last year, knowing all the while that fans in stands might be an iffy proposition in 2021? Heck, even with fans back in 2021, would teams avoid free agency to recoup the losses, real or imagined, that they suffered in 2020?

Today, the first new data point is in: per reporting by Jeff Passan, the Dodgers have signed Mookie Betts to a massive extension, totaling $392 million over 13 years. His 2020 arbitration salary ($27 million, of which he’ll receive a prorated $10 million) is in that mix; the new part of the deal is 12 years and $365 million. Per Ken Rosenthal, the deal will include salary deferrals totaling $115 million. Also per Rosenthal, there’s some financial tomfoolery on the front end; a $65 million signing bonus that confers some tax benefits and a salary structure that pays him only $17.5 million per year in 2021 and 2022, shielding the Betts from any loss due to prorating of salaries over the next two years should something unforeseen happen. Depending on how you feel about the specifics of Mike Trout’s extension and deferred money in general, it’s either the biggest or second-biggest contract in MLB history, and it takes the biggest name out of the upcoming offseason’s free agency market.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that money will flow like wine this offseason. The contract Betts signs doesn’t have all that much bearing on what a mid-tier veteran will get, or whether teams will be more aggressive about non-tendering arb-eligible players to save money. Top tier free agents have hardly been the ones getting pinched in free agency in the past five years.

The biggest point of interest from an economic side, in my opinion, is the length of the deal. Everyone knows that Mookie Betts is wildly valuable. Still, I wondered if he might be forced to accept a short but lucrative contract while teams sorted through the long-term fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Will stadiums fill to quite the same capacity ever again? Likely, but it’s no longer a certainty. Owners off-lay risk onto players wherever possible; short-term deals leave the risk of a fall in baseball revenue squarely on the guy taking the field every day. They also, of course, give the player upside should baseball’s economic fortunes improve, but that’s not at the forefront of anyone’s mind at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

It was in many ways a very normal late-July afternoon: Fan blasting, a 1.5-liter water bottle at my side, idly watching the Yankees from my couch. Gio Urshela hit a weak single into right field, and the crowd, whose noise had been hovering at a comfortable murmur up to that point, cheered. In that moment, if I hadn’t looked at the screen, if I’d just taken in the familiar sonic cues of televised baseball, I could almost have convinced myself that it was a normal baseball game in a normal major league season.

Except the crowd kept cheering. It was just a little unimpressive single, and there were two out. The sound, flat and consistent, stretched far beyond where you would expect a collective breath, that fracturing of excitement that happens when one play has ended and everyone is anticipating the next one. And when it did fade, it didn’t dissolve the way it usually does, back into the thousands of individual conversations, all with their own volumes and paces. It faded back to that comfortable murmur, smooth and fast, like someone pushing down a volume slider. When Urshela was caught in a rundown soon after, there wasn’t the dismayed frenzy of people groaning, yelling “No! No!” in frustrated inevitability, standing up in their seats as though doing so could convince the deviant baserunner of the error of their ways. There was just a rise, and then a fall; gentle and unified, a mechanical sigh. Urshela left, and the inning was over. Cut to commercial. Go get a snack.

But wait, no — the inning wasn’t over, somehow. There were, undeniably, three out, and there was, undeniably, the large form of Aaron Judge standing at the plate. The eyes of Aaron Boone and Joe Girardi, peeking out from over their masks and looking across the diamond, connected. The inning would continue. Vince Velasquez, on the mound, would throw a few more pitches. Why? Because he needed to, maybe. Because he might as well.

And when Judge launched a fastball into the empty seats in right, he rounded the bases tentatively, confused. The ball had left the yard, and the lights were flashing, and the noise had swelled. On the replay, they showed the Statcast data, the exit velocity and the ball’s high arc in the air. All the signs we have come to associate with a home run. But was it? This is baseball we’re watching, right? Read the rest of this entry »