Minor league contraction is imminent, with 40 teams expected to lose their affiliated status once the Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) between Minor League Baseball and Major League Baseball expires at the end of this month. Part of a ‘One Baseball’ concept being formulated by the Commissioner’s office, this dismantling and rearranging of the minor league landscape is controversial. To a certain extent, it’s also not well-understood. That’s particularly true on the business front, where myriad factors are at play for nearly everyone involved.

Scott Bush has a solid understanding of what’s involved. Currently the CEO for the Society for American Baseball Research, Bush formerly served as Assistant General Manager for the St. Paul Saints, as well as a Senior Vice President for Business Development with the Goldklang Group, a sports entertainment consulting and management firm that is intricately involved with Minor League Baseball.

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David Laurila: What are your general impressions of the proposed contraction — good for baseball, or bad for baseball?

Scott Bush: “I think it’s going to be difficult to measure the impact of this for several years. With the focus on geographic proximity and the ability for teams
to have more access to players, there’s going to be the potential for improved player development. There’s also going to be, from a minor league perspective, the potential for improved relations with the parent clubs. And if there is an emphasis on geographic proximity, one could assume more meaningful regional ties between the minor league teams and their parent clubs.

“But there’s certainly going to be, at minimum, a short-term loss in terms of interest in baseball. We’re going to see communities lose access to baseball, and that can’t be a good thing. So the unknown — and one of the things that everyone is waiting for — is: Will there be a meaningful replacement? What does that look like? How long will it last? For me, that becomes the crux of starting to answer whether this will be good or bad for baseball overall.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on the relationship between affiliates and parent clubs? Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and beware the Ides of September. As I wait for the queue to fill up, here’s the first look at MLB’s freshly-announced playoff schedule:

2:01	Jay Jaffe: MLB Communications @MLB_PR The 2020 @MLB Postseason will begin with the AL Wild Card Series on Tuesday, 9/29, while Game One of the 2020 World Series at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas will be played on Tuesday, 10/20. 15 Sep 2020

2:02	Jay Jaffe: This might be too much baseball: Lindsey Adler @lindseyadler No travel = no travel days for the DS and CS. The World Series will end on October 28. at the latest. 15 Sep 2020

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Note that after the so-called Wild Card round, which will be played at the sites of each league’s top four seeds, the rest of the games will be at neutral sites, hence no Dodgers in Dodger Stadium, etc.

2:03

Jay Jaffe: Because ties will be settled in the most exciting way of all — mathematically — this year’s Team Entropy is a bit less chaotic than the past, but I hope still helpful in explaining how this playoff format works. Here’s the NL picture https://blogs.fangraphs.com/team-entropy-2020-more-like-un-tropy-right…

2:04	Jay Jaffe: and the AL: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/team-entropy-2020-the-pecking-order/

Read the rest of this entry »

No-hitters are unlikely feats. Navigating 27 outs against a group of professional hitters without allowing a single hit takes a tremendous amount of skill. Still, the list of pitchers with a no-hitter might appear to be somewhat random, with hurlers like Hisashi Iwakuma, Mike Fiers, and Chris Heston making an appearance. Since that Heston no-hitter in 2015, there have been 14 complete game no-hitters. Of those 14, five have been thrown by Cy Young award winners: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Jake Arrieta (twice). Former ace Cole Hamels has a no-hitter, ace-when-healthy James Paxton has one, and current ace Lucas Giolito just completed another. Recent history suggests about half of the pitcher who throw no-hitters are aces or something close to it, while half were aces for a single day. Alec Mills’ no-no against the Brewers on Sunday falls in the latter category, a journeyman righty who pitched his way to history.

Mills’ story deserves telling, though because he’s been an afterthought for much of his career, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you hadn’t heard it before. He was a walk-on at Tennessee-Martin before developing into their ace. Heading into the 2012 draft, Baseball America noted his good “control of an upper-80s fastball that bumps 90 mph at times” as well as “a slurvy breaking ball and nascent changeup.” He was drafted in a round — the 22nd — MLB would prefer doesn’t exist and sent to a rookie-league likely to be disbanded come 2021. He moved slowly through the minor leagues, needing Tommy John surgery early on, but pitched well all the way up through Triple-A in 2016 and made three appearances for the Royals that season.

As spring training began in 2017, the Royals designated Mills for assignment to make room for Jason Hammel on the 40-man roster. He was traded to the Cubs a day later and then missed most of the season with bone chips in his elbow. Mills was never ranked too highly on prospect lists, and the “pitchability righty” and “back-end starter” designations that appeared on the Cubs’ 2019 prospect list run pretty consistently with reports dating all the way to the draft eight years ago. Mills pitched well in a multi-inning relief role and had two good late-September starts against the division-winning Cardinals last season. If not for Jose Quintana’s injury before the start of the 2020 campaign, Mills wouldn’t have made the rotation, though Paul Sporer did mention that “a pair of breaking balls, including a new slow curve (67.6 mph)… [had] yielded a career-best 13% swinging strike rate” in our pre-season Positional Power Rankings.

Entering Sunday’s game, Mills had played pretty much as advertised. He wasn’t striking out many hitters, but posted a slightly above-average walk rate and solid groundball rate. He used his sinker to get those groundballs, but left the pitch up enough to surrender five of his eight homers on a pitch he throws about a third of the time. Those homers and a lack of strikeouts meant a 5.22 FIP entering Sunday, 14% below league average, though perfectly acceptable for an end-of-the-rotation starter. His 4.74 ERA was better and pretty close to league average, though the difference between his ERA and FIP was likely due in large part to a solid Cubs’ defense that has also helped Yu Darvish, Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks and the rest of the Cubs’ staff to lower figures than their Statcast data expects. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, I delved into what chaos there is to be had when it comes to the 2020 playoff picture in the National League. The answer, alas, is not very much, at least relative to a normal season. Alongside Major League Baseball’s combination of health and safety protocols and the expansion of each league’s playoff field from five teams to eight has come the decision to settle all seeding matters — including, potentially, who grabs a spot and who just misses — via the gripping excitement of mathematics instead of those boring tiebreaker games. MLB’s reasoning is that going the math route will minimize travel and keep the schedule as compact as possible during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and on the one hand I get it, but somewhere a McKinsey consultant must be proud of this bloodless, ultra-efficient solution. It stinks on ice, but like so much else, we’ll do our best at Entropy Central to play the hand that we’ve been dealt while hoping that things return to normalcy in 2021.

To refresh your memory regarding the format that was announced on Opening Day, each league’s playoff slates will include the division winners (who will be seeded 1-3), the second-place teams (seeded 4-6), and then the two other teams in the league with the best records (seeded 7-8, and deemed the Wild Card teams). For the first round, teams will be matched up in the familiar bracket format: 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, and 4-5, with all three games at the higher-seeded team’s ballpark in an effort to provide them with some kind of advantage.

If teams are tied for spots after the schedule has been completed, ties will be broken on the following basis:

• Head-to-head record (if applicable). Since teams haven’t played outside their divisions except against their interleague geographic counterparts, this is of use only for determining placement within the division. Presumably, if three teams were to end up tied, combined head-to-head records against the other two teams would be used, but with a minimum of four games separating any three teams in a division, that possibility appears to be remote.
• If head-to-head records are tied or not applicable, the next tiebreaker is intradivision record.
• If teams have the same intradivision records, the next tiebreaker is record in the final 20 division games. If that doesn’t break the tie, then record over the final 21 games is used, and then onto final 22, 23, 24, and so forth until the tie is broken.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I dug up an old concept: expected home run rate. The idea is deceptively simple: assign some probability of a home run to each ball a batter hits in the air, then add them up. It tells you some obvious things — Fernando Tatis Jr. hits a lot of baseballs very hard — and some less obvious things — before getting injured, Aaron Judge had lost some pop.

One question that many readers raised — reasonably so! — is whether this expected home run rate actually means anything. The list of over-performing hitters was full of sluggers. How good is this statistic if it tells you that good home run hitters are, in fact, not as good as their home runs? Sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me.

In search of truth — and, let’s be honest, article topics — I decided to do a little digging. Specifically, I wanted to test three things. First, how stable is expected home run rate? In other words, if a player has a high expected home run rate in a given sample, should we expect them to keep doing it? If the statistic isn’t stable, what’s the point?

Second, how does it do at predicting future home runs? In other words, does an expected home run rate in, say, July predict what will happen the rest of the year? It’s also useful here to see if expected home run rate (from here on in, I’ll be calling this xHR% for brevity) outperforms actual home run rate as a predictor. If xHR% doesn’t do a better job of explaining future home runs than actual home runs, what use is it? Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Cease has a simple calling card: a four-seam fastball that he throws in the upper 90s. Every prospect evaluation of Cease centered on the heater, a bludgeon he would use, the theory went, to leave hitters with no good choices. He backed it up with a curveball and a developing changeup, but those were the backup dancers; the fastball was the star everyone came to see. There were questions about whether he’d be able to make the whole package work, but if it did, the heater would be the reason why.

Nine starts into his sophomore season, however, things haven’t gone according to plan. Cease’s 15.4% strikeout rate is the fourth-lowest among qualified starters, ahead of only Mike Fiers, Antonio Senzatela, and teammate Dallas Keuchel. The White Sox probably hoped Keuchel would help mentor their pitching staff, but uh… not like this. On the other hand, Cease is running a 3.33 ERA, better than team ace Lucas Giolito. Huh?

In an even stranger development, Cease’s fastball appears to be the culprit behind his poor strikeout rate. Though it hasn’t lost any velocity — his 393 four-seamers this year have averaged 97.4 mph — the pitch simply hasn’t missed any bats. Here are the 12 pitchers with the lowest whiff-per-swing rates on their four-seamers, as well as their average velocity:

That’s not a list of bad pitchers. It is, however, disconcerting to see a fastball-first power pitcher sharing space on a list of contact-heavy fastballs with literally Zack Greinke. Cease has an absolute cannon, but he isn’t missing any bats with it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland A’s are cruising in the standings, but their World Series hopes took a hit over the weekend with the news that their star third baseman, Matt Chapman, would require season-ending hip surgery. After missing games for nearly a week with an initial diagnosis of hip tendinitis, a second opinion led to the decision to shut him down for the rest of 2020 due to a torn labrum.

There’s nothing here that would constitute good news, but the loss of Chapman has a minimal impact on Oakland’s chances of reaching the postseason. The team’s not a mathematical guarantee, but with just 14 games left to play, they’d have to give up seven games in the standings to the Astros and eight to the Mariners. Plus, Oakland has already clinched the tiebreaker over the Astros — they’re 7-3 against Houston and they play no more games — which gives them a tiny bit more breathing room in the event of a historic meltdown.

Chapman’s play in 2020 was distinctly below his MVP-contending 2018 and 2019 standards, but his 1.3 WAR has still been enough juice to lead the team. It’s a testament to his power and defense that a .276 on-base percentage likely would have still resulted in an All-Star appearance, if such a game had been played this year. The year-to-year dropoff in his contact numbers is a bit concerning, but given the state of the 2020 season, I’m far less worried than I would be in a more normal year. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Lum was good enough to have played parts of 15 big-league seasons. That he was rarely a full-time starter comes with a caveat. From 1967-1981, Lum was typically on teams that featured All-Star quality in front of him. An outfielder and later a first baseman, the left-handed hitting Honolulu native counted numerous Hall of Famers, batting champions, and Gold Glove winners among his teammates. Prior to appearing in 41 games with the Chicago Cubs at the close of his career, Lum played exclusively with the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds.

A long-time hitting coach, and most recently a special assistant for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Lum discussed his playing days over the phone last month.

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David Laurila: How would you describe your playing career?

Mike Lum: “I was never a star, but I contributed. I played mostly off the bench, and I thought I did a pretty good job. In my younger days I’d play a lot of defense for Rico Carty, who was the left fielder, and then I started pinch-hitting a lot [Lum had 102 career pinch hits, including 10 home runs]. I prided myself in those roles. Yes, it’s to nice to play every day, but there were guys in front of me who were much better. One thing I learned early on is that it takes 25 guys to win, so I just accepted my role.”

Laurila: Do you ever wonder how differently your career might have played out had you not been on teams with so many All-Star quality outfielders? You could have ended up with a thousand more at-bats.

Lum: “No doubt. And a lot of people don’t realize that when you play off the bench, and don’t get consistent at-bats, hitting can be difficult. And it becomes a mind game after that. If you look at my stats, the one year I had over 500 at-bats, I did really well [a 119 wRC+ and 16 home runs]. In my worst year, I had something like 125 at-bats. It’s difficult. That’s why I think guys who can come off the bench like I did can be very valuable to a team.”

Laurila: You mentioned Rico Carty. Other outfielders you played with in Atlanta included Hank Aaron, Felipe Alou, Dusty Baker, and Ralph Garr. Read the rest of this entry »

Like so much else with the year 2020, those of us who root for end-of-season chaos in the form of tiebreaker games have had our hopes crushed by the coronavirus pandemic, or more specifically, Major League Baseball’s combination of health and safety protocols and the expanded playoff format. Not only does the expansion of each league’s playoff field from five teams to eight take some of the do-or-die pressure off plausible contenders on the margins, but the league has decided that the equivalents of Game 163 — whether of the play-in variety or merely to settle which team wins the division and which is the Wild Card — will not be played so as to minimize travel and keep the schedule as compact as possible.

Instead, all seeding — including, potentially, who grabs a spot and who just misses — will be settled in the most exciting manner of all… mathematically! As MLB’s marketing arm knows, that’s the best way to capture kids’ attention these days.

While we won’t get any bonus regular season baseball out of this situation — the added layer of best-of-threes in the postseason is a horse of a different color — the way things shake out could still produce a fair bit of end-of-season scoreboard watching and nail-biting. Like so much else, we’ll do our best at Entropy Central to play the hand that we’ve been dealt while hoping that things return to normalcy in 2021.

To refresh your memory about the format that was announced on Opening Day, each league’s playoff slates will include the division winners (who will be seeded 1-3), the second-place teams (seeded 4-6), and then the two other teams in the league with the best records (seeded 7-8, and deemed the Wild Card teams). A trial balloon regarding the top teams picking their opponents was floated, and it persisted to the point of confusion before being popped. Instead, for the first round teams will be matched up in the familiar bracket format: 1 seed versus 8 seed, 2-7, 3-6, and 4-5, with all three games at the higher-seeded team’s ballpark in an effort to provide them with some kind of advantage. Here it’s worth noting that after so much talk about the dissipation of home-field advantage through the absence of crowds, home teams thus far have a .544 winning percentage this year, higher than it’s been since 2009 (.549); last year, it was .529. Read the rest of this entry »