An exciting pitching matchup on Monday between the defending National League Cy Young winner and the NL Rookie of the Year runner-up turned grim in the third inning when 23-year-old Braves right-hander Mike Soroka suffered what appeared to be a leg injury while coming off the mound on a groundball.

Braves starter Mike Soroka leaves today's game after falling to the ground while attempting to cover 1st base. He was helped off of the field. pic.twitter.com/gJC0Dt3Xcz

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) August 4, 2020

The injury was rather apparent in zoomed-in, slowed-down videos shared on Twitter shortly after — I won’t link them here, you can find them yourself if you really want to — and within hours, the Braves confirmed the worst. Soroka tore his achilles tendon, which will cause him to miss the rest of this season and, depending on his recovery, possibly the beginning of 2021 as well.

Losing Soroka, 23, to a serious injury like this is awful. He was second in NL Rookie of the Year voting a year ago after throwing 174.2 innings and posting a 2.68 ERA, 3.45 FIP, and 4.0 WAR. That ERA was good for fourth among qualified starters, while his FIP was 14th. He didn’t get many strikeouts — he had the 14th-lowest K/9 rate in baseball last year — but instead pitched to contact, and was quite successful at it. He had the sixth-highest groundball rate among qualified starters, and according to Statcast, was in the 84th percentile in barrel rate allowed, the 65th percentile in exit velocity allowed, and the 60th percentile in expected slugging percentage. Underlying data didn’t necessarily believe he was the Cy Young contender his ERA portrayed him as, but he was still rated as a solidly above-average pitcher across the board — no small feat for someone who pitched most of the year at age 21 while attempting to buck some of the game’s most popular pitching trends.

This year, however, there was evidence he might be falling more in line with what modern pitching instructors are preaching. Soroka was a sinker baller last year, throwing the pitch 44.6% of the time, while his four-seam fastball rate was just 18.7%. In a small sample of starts this season, however, those two had converged. According to Statcast, in his first 13.2 innings, Soroka had thrown exactly 59 sinkers and 59 four-seamers. Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to today’s chat. While I wait fo the queue to fill, a bit of housekeeping… Here’s my piece from today on Aaron Judge suddenly pulling the ball again https://blogs.fangraphs.com/aaron-judge-is-pulling-the-ball-again/

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Here’s yesterday’s piece on the opt-outs of Lorenzo Cain, Yoenis Céspedes et al https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/as-the-coronavirus-halts-teams-cain-ce…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Here’s today’s FanGraphs must-read, Jon Tayler’s interview with epidemiologist Zachary Binney https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/epidemiologist-zachary-binney-on-whats…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: And here’s a lovely little tribute to the late Terry Cannon of the Baseball Reliquary and Shrine of the Eternals by John Schulian http://www.thestacksreader.com/terry-cannon-the-great-enthusiast

2:04	Jay Jaffe: Yes, I think so, particularly if the designated hitter is here to stay in the NL (and I think it is) but given his injury history, he’s unlikely to find a guaranteed multiyear deal.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I launched this OOTP fan-sourcing project in March, the prospect of an actual season of baseball felt remote. I didn’t give much thought to how I’d feel virtually managing the Brewers while the real Brewers played, because it simply wasn’t an option. The real Brewers weren’t playing, regardless of what we did, so it hardly seemed to matter.

Why bring this up now? Because having both sets of Brewers play at the same time is making it difficult to keep track of the two. In the real world, Lorenzo Cain opted out of playing this season, leaving the Brewers scrambling for center field depth. They resorted to playing Avisaíl García in center yesterday, but they’ll be searching for answers elsewhere. In the Out Of The Park universe, Cain hurt his wrist throwing the ball — he’ll be out a week or more, leaving the team scrambling for depth in the interim.

In the real world, the rotation has some questions. Josh Lindblom left his first start early with back spasms, Brett Anderson looked shaky in his return from injury, and it feels like more arms will be needed. In OOTP, Lindblom missed the first four months of the season with injury, Anderson perpetually looks shaky in his return from injury, and even after an early trade for Kevin Gausman, more arms are surely needed.

Oh, right. There are some big differences. First, the OOTP Brewers are without the services of franchise cornerstone Christian Yelich for the next month or so after he strained his oblique. The team is running out a platoon of Tyrone Taylor and Matt Joyce in left field to replace as much as possible of Yelich’s production — oof. No team could replace Yelich’s production and not miss a beat, but that feels particularly bad, even if Joyce can still hit righties. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries, trades, and ineffectiveness — it’s time to reconstruct a roster on FanGraphs Live. Read the rest of this entry »

For all of the dysfunction that Major League Baseball has offered thus far in the 2020 season, some players are firing on all cylinders, from first-month flashes in the pan (Donovan Solano is hitting .457/.474/.657, Hanser Alberto .429/.459/.686) to familiar faces. Few of the latter are doing so to a greater degree than Aaron Judge. The Yankees right fielder, who has missed a good chunk of the past two seasons due to injuries — and might have missed half of this one if not for the delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic — has hit an major league-high six home runs, all of them in a streak of five straight games from July 29 through August 2. That streak came to an end on Monday, as he had to “settle” for a 2-for-4 performance in the Yankees’ 6-3 win over the Phillies, their eighth in nine games.

The last two of Judge’s home runs came on Sunday night at Yankee Stadium against the Red Sox and were timely, to say the least. His towering three-run shot to left field off of Matt Hall erased a 2-0 deficit in the second inning, while his two-run homer to left center off Matthew Barnes broke a 7-7 tie with two outs in the eighth inning, providing the margin of victory:

Read the rest of this entry »

With every passing day and new positive COVID-19 test, the 2020 MLB season looks shakier and shakier. Already, the league has seen team-wide outbreaks among the Marlins and the Cardinals, forcing both squads to quarantine for days and creating huge holes in the already compressed schedule. Those absences have had a domino effect on the rest of baseball, resulting in other teams that are otherwise COVID-free being forced to put their seasons on hold or rejigger their schedules on the fly. Running through it all is a seeming reluctance on the part of MLB to shut things down or exercise control even as the problem escalates, as well as reports that players aren’t sticking closely enough to the health and safety protocols governing the sport’s return.

The situations in Miami and St. Louis have wreaked havoc on major league baseball, and it’s an open question as to whether the season can survive another team going down — or, at this point, whether it’s safe to play baseball in the middle of a pandemic. So what could Rob Manfred and the league have done differently, and what can they be doing now to try to solve the problem? On Monday, I reached out to Dr. Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University, to get his thoughts on what’s gone wrong in MLB, and if it’s possible — or even wise — for baseball to continue in 2020.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.

Jon Tayler: So what’s the situation as it currently exists?

Zachary Binney: We’ve seen two massive outbreaks on two different teams, the Marlins and the Cardinals, that are not related. The question that MLB is facing right now is whether this is going to keep happening, or is there something you can do to change it?

I got asked this morning, what would you be advising Rob Manfred right now? My answer is that I’d tell him to take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and ask and answer honestly, are things going to change? Is there something we can do to avoid the Marlins and the Cardinals happening over and over and over again? And I think that really depends on the exact circumstances around these outbreaks. One is a fluke, two is a pattern, right? You can’t just say this is only the Marlins, everybody else is being good. That excuse is out the window.

So how did this outbreak happen? Did it happen from what epidemiologists call a point-source exposure, meaning there was some risky behavior from a large number of players or staff, like they went out to a bar or a nightclub and everybody got exposed there, and then there was spread in the clubhouse? Or was there one case introduced that then spread around the clubhouse? If that’s the case, was that because MLB’s protocols were insufficient, or because they weren’t being followed? Were guys not wearing masks? Were they spending too much time indoors in large groups and not distancing? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Shohei Ohtani’s arm injury and his short- and long-term prospects as a two-way player, Mike Soroka and the ongoing pitcher-injury epidemic, the latest positive tests and player opt outs, Tigers reliever Tyler Alexander’s record-setting nine consecutive strikeouts, Clayton Kershaw’s comeback and other heartening news, MLB’s uptick in TV ratings, the strangeness of the standings, how long the regular season would have to last for MLB to give a green light to the playoffs, and robot umps coming to the KBO Futures League. Then (37:34) they talk to Senior Director of Seattle Mariners Productions Ben Mertens about how the Mariners manage fake crowd noise at T-Mobile Park, balancing boos and cheers, taunting opponents, the level of noise the players prefer, the construction of cardboard cutouts, the ballpark uncanny valley effect, and more.

Audio intro: Budgie, "Forearm Smash"
Audio interstitial: Death Cab for Cutie, "Fake Frowns"
Audio outro: Ernest Tubb, "I’m With a Crowd but So Alone"

Link to Ben on injured pitchers
Link to Tony Wolfe on Alexander
Link to article about TV ratings
Link to article about KBO robot umps
Link to Mariners Seat Fleet
Link to article on MLB’s cheering app

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To the surprise of no one, COVID-19 continues to affect the baseball season. Plans have changed and re-changed as two teams have seen clusters of positive tests. While this news is, as always, subject to change, here’s our most recent update.

The Marlins In Purgatory

As of now, the Marlins are scheduled for a Tuesday game in Baltimore. There is, as yet, no information on which players will be available, but the Marlins are behaving as if they’ll need some new blood: they’ve acquired Justin Shafer, Josh Smith, Mike Morin, and Richard Bleier in the last week, and signed Logan Forsythe. Given that the league’s testing protocol requires two negative tests more than 24 hours apart before a player can return to the field, they may need even more reinforcements on the hitting side as well.

The Marlins players who tested positive for COVID-19 took the bus back to Miami. That group comprises 18 players, which left 12 of the initial 30-man roster in Philadelphia awaiting their next move — minus Isan Díaz, who opted out of the season over the weekend. Those 11, plus the four new pitchers, will join players from the 60-man player pool to form what passes for a major league roster and play against the Orioles.

The long-term effects of the last week’s postponements will be harder to plan. The Marlins have played only three games this year, which leaves them with a lot of ground to make up. They were originally scheduled to play Philadelphia in Miami this week before the Orioles and Yankees played an impromptu series to minimize cancelations. At some point, the team will be more or less back to its initial form, and they’ll have a lot of games to play. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

As the 2020 baseball season seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse this weekend in light of the news of an outbreak on the Cardinals, the comments of commissioner Rob Manfred, and the inactivity of six teams, four players — three of them former All-Stars — opted out of the 2020 season: Brewers center fielder Lorenzo Cain, Mets outfielder Yoenis Céspedes, Marlins second baseman Isan Díaz, and free agent lefty Francisco Liriano. None of them are known to be in high-risk groups themselves, meaning that they’ll forfeit the remainder of their salaries. The departure of Cain is likely the most impactful from a competitive standpoint, and that of Díaz the most understandable given his proximity to the largest outbreak to date. All of those were overshadowed by the drama surrounding Céspedes and the Mets, who together turned the announcement of an opt-out decision into a bizarre spectacle that unfolded over the course of a few hours on Sunday afternoon.

We’ll get to Céspedes, but first is Cain. Although he had played just five games this season, the 34-year-old two-time All-Star was off to a promising start, going 6-for-18 with a double and three walks. A speedy, savvy baserunner, he pulled off an entertaining escape from a rundown against the Cubs on July 25, a clip that made the rounds:

Read the rest of this entry »