Back in March, my colleague Dan Szymborski wrote a piece about how playoff projections changed based on the length of the season. At the time, all we knew was that the season had been suspended, and that whatever season we eventually got was likely to be shorter than the one we expected at the start of the calendar year. How many games we’d ultimately lose was a mystery — Dan ran projections for 140 games, 110 games and, most pessimistically, 81 games. After observing the results, he reached the reasonable conclusion that the shorter the season is, the more margin there is for worse teams (on paper, at least) to sneak into the playoffs, and for supposedly elite teams to fall short.

Three months later, it turns out even 81 games was too ambitious of a dream. After much back-and-forth with the players, owners have officially decided to enact a season of just 60 games, beginning on July 23 or 24 and concluding in the final week of September, when a typical regular season would have also finished. With that number officially in place, our playoff odds have been updated to reflect the dramatic shortening of the season, and the result is a similarly dramatic re-imagining of teams’ fortunes:

This table is helpful because it includes all of the information that forms the base of what we’re discussing here — the changes in each team’s playoff and title odds with a shortened season — but to be honest, looking at each team individually like this doesn’t really drive home the kind of shift that has occurred. On its own, the Rangers moving from a 1-in-100 chance at the postseason to a 1-in-10 chance or the Yankees falling from a nearly 9-in-10 chance to a 3-in-4 chance is interesting, but doesn’t really fundamentally change our thinking. The Rangers are probably out, and the Yankees are probably in. Instead, let’s group teams together by their playoff odds, and see how that distribution plays out under the two season lengths:

This better conveys the heart of the changes — from both the front and back of the spectrum, teams have been pulled into the middle. In a 162-game season, 20 teams had playoff odds of either above 60% or below 20%. In a 60-game season, just 14 teams have such a distinction, meaning that a plurality of teams now fall somewhere between a 1-in-5 and 3-in-5 shot.

While the Rays and Nationals have been pulled in from the front of the pack, we see many more teams creeping up from what used to be the bottom tier of actual playoff hopefuls. The Angels make a huge jump relative to their peers, moving from 18.3% playoff odds to 27.7%, while the White Sox (28% to 37%), Diamondbacks (17.1% to 23.1%), and Phillies (18.1% to 23.6%) bite similar chunks out of the advantages the teams ahead of them once had.

And if the gap between 20% and 60% playoff odds I mentioned just above still sounds like a big one, it really isn’t in theory. Consider that under our 162-game projections, the Braves were given a 58.2% shot at the playoffs and an expected win total of 86 games. The Angels, meanwhile, had just an 18.3% chance at the playoffs, with an expected win total of 83 games. That’s three measly games separating two teams with a 40% gap in their playoff odds. Now, to be clear, more goes into playoff odds than just win total. The Braves play in a division without a clear-cut favorite, and in a league where just one team was projected to win 90 games, while the Angels’ division does have a clear-cut favorite, and play in a league that includes four teams expected to win 90 games. Context plays a big role here, but the slim difference in their win totals does show you just how little could separate a team with 1-in-5 playoff odds from a team with 3-in-5 odds.

That’s in a 162-game season. Cut that total down to 60, and the projected win distribution invites even more chaos:

Look at that tall bar on the left. That includes the Washington Nationals, who are projected to win their division and finish with the second-best record in the NL, and the San Diego Padres, who have less than a 15% chance to win their division and are projected to have the eighth-best record in the NL. Fewer than two wins, on average, separate them now. That’s how you go from two teams being 26 points apart in playoff odds to them being just 17 points apart.

This extreme parity is most apparent in the NL Central, where the top four teams are virtually indistinguishable from one another:

There was already so little separating the middle three teams, and now the Cubs have nearly been absorbed into that group as well. Whoever wins this division is probably going to be a decent enough club, but they’re also going to inevitably be the beneficiaries of a season determined a lot by luck. And the Central isn’t the only division like that. Let’s check back in with the Nationals, Braves, and the rest of the NL East:

Out of every team in baseball, the Nationals are arguably the most-harmed by the shortening of the season. Their 13.4-point drop in playoff chances is second behind the Yankees for the biggest in the sport, with the Astros and Dodgers close behind, but unlike those other three teams, they aren’t able to escape with a still-comfortable lead over the rest of their division. Their once sizable advantage over Atlanta has essentially evaporated, despite the fact that the Braves’ chances at both the division and the Wild Card took a hit as well.

This is what happens when you try to predict what’s going to happen in a situation where every game will mean more, but their sum total will tell you less. Depending on what kind of fan you are or what team you cheer for, that could either terrify or thrill you. And while this might make you angsty at the idea of an “undeserving” team making the playoffs or even winning the World Series, it’s worth remembering that even full seasons don’t always do a great job of awarding the title to team we think is best. Just for this year, it’s probably for the best if we don’t worry much about who actually makes the playoffs. Let’s just hope we get a postseason at all.

I’m wading into the gaming and streaming space with Yeoman’s Work, a lo-fi, multimedia presentation that follows my pursuit of a championship in the baseball simulator, Diamond Mind Baseball, paired with single-camera footage from my baseball video archives. Below is Episode 3, which features my team’s sputtering bullpen situation, as well as video of prominent recent draftees and their undrafted peers who, by default, are now perched at the top of the 2023 class.

Both DMB’s gameplay and most of my video archive are very quiet, low-sensory experiences without music or crowd noise, and I think this will appeal to those of you who enjoy Baseball Sounds, as they are front and center in the footage. If this tone appeals to you, my “musical influences” in this department (i.e. the non-FanGraphs Twitch streams I watch on my own time) are Kenji Egashira’s and Luis Scott-Vargas’ live Magic: The Gathering content, Kate Stark’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streams, and Kathleen De Vere’s pirate radio show, Brave New Faves. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Clearly, it’s been a long time since any of us cared to discuss major league baseball transactions. The most recent post tagged with the “free agent signing” category on this site was a post by Craig Edwards writing up the Boston Red Sox signing of Colin McHugh all the way back on March 5; a pandemic is mentioned nowhere in the body of the text or in the comments section. It was a simpler time, and a lot has changed since then. The schedule is 102 games shorter now. The games themselves are going to look very different. And there isn’t even a guarantee that a full season will be completed.

It’s difficult to wrap your brain around roster moves under the weight of everything else that’s happening, and fortunately, we haven’t had to. Shortly after it suspended the season, Major League Baseball enacted a transaction freeze, prohibiting teams from trading or signing anyone to their roster. That freeze will be lifted Friday at noon, freeing front offices up to put the finishing touches on their rosters ahead of what’s going to be a very short, strange season. It’s a big step toward normal baseball activities resuming, but it’s also difficult to know how much organizations will actually try to accomplish. Even before the legitimacy of the season itself could be called into question, teams already showed some reticence to maximize their competitiveness and front offices have a lot to figure out about a very unique and potentially dangerous situation and not a lot of time.

Still, there has to be some incentive to win, right? Teams like the Dodgers, Reds, and White Sox have already committed a lot of resources to the 2020 season. Then there are the teams that didn’t expect to be competitive this year but, because of a dramatically shortened season, suddenly see only about five or six games separating them from the playoffs instead of 15-20. The banners teams hang for winning this year will be just as big and colorful as they are for any other season, and for the clubs that have decided to go for it, every little bit is going to help. And though the offseason was very nearly over by the time play was initially suspended, there were still a few players on the market waiting to potentially make a difference for someone. Here’s a refresher on some of the better names available:

Yasiel Puig

Yasiel Puig is the best available free agent left, someone we’ve already covered at length several times here at FanGraphs. There’s no need to go in depth again, but to recap very quickly: Puig is still just 29, and is coming off a year during which he was traded twice in eight months. The 2019 season was his worst in three years from both a WAR and wRC+ perspective, but even then he remained average with his bat. The 1.8 WAR ZiPS projected him for (in the case of a 162-game season) is higher than the total right field projection of 17 teams. Whether it’s a true contender like St. Louis or a rebuilding team that could benefit from some extra jersey sales like Detroit, there are plenty of fits for Puig to play baseball in 2020.

Russell Martin

At 37, Russell Martin doesn’t pose the same threat in the batter’s box he once did, but that isn’t to say he’s done being a valuable player. His glove — boosted by framing metrics that placed him in the 95th percentile of all catchers last year according to Baseball Savant — was still good enough that he was worth 1.2 WAR for the Dodgers despite playing in just 83 games (he did respectably by our metrics as well). His days of 15-20 home run power are over, but he’s walked in at least 12% of his plate appearances every year for four seasons now, a rate that makes him a credible on-base threat regardless of his batting average. Teams carrying active rosters of 30 players to start the year makes it very likely most, if not all, will hold onto three catchers, and Martin would make a lot of sense for a team like the Mets or Cubs that lack a really impressive glove behind the dish.

Aaron Sanchez

A rethinking of Aaron Sanchez’s arsenal to emphasize his hard four-seamer and high-spin curveball did nothing to reverse what is now a three-year tailspin after his breakout in 2016. That season, he held opponents to a 3.00 ERA and 3.55 FIP in 30 games to amass 3.5 WAR, but since then, he’s been hit with a 5.29 ERA and 5.12 FIP in his last 55 games. He’s a former 34th overall pick who has flashed success in the majors and July 1 will be just his 28th birthday, so it seems more likely than not that a team will step forward and try to fix him — a club like the Reds, a team with a new pitching regime, makes sense here. But if a team were going to buy into him as a project, one would think they would have done so before spring training, and before the number of games they had to work with in 2020 (not to mention minor league opportunities) got severely cut down. (Update: I failed to note that Sanchez underwent shoulder surgery in September and was likely to miss most of this season.) There’s a good chance he gets passed over until 2021.

Andrew Cashner

For the first half of 2019, Andrew Cashner was the lone bright spot of a woeful Baltimore Orioles rotation. Then he got traded to Boston, where he was moved to the bullpen and got rocked. During his time with the Orioles, he held a 3.83 ERA and 4.26 FIP by basically doing Andrew Cashner things — he struck out just over six batters per nine innings, but walked fewer than three per nine, and limited homers well by generating lots of groundballs. Cashner has played for six different organizations over the past 10 years now, and he’s rarely been bad. Over the past seven years, he’s failed to throw 150 innings just twice, and owns a 4.08 ERA and 4.24 FIP. He’s 33, but if you’re looking for a durable, inning-eating starter you could plug and play in the back half of nearly any rotation, Cashner is a good bet. Jason Vargas (4.51 ERA, 4.76 FIP, 1.8 WAR in 149.2 innings in 2019) is also available and has similar characteristics, though at 37 he’s considerably riskier.

Scooter Gennett

Also previously covered in depth on this site, Scooter Gennett was dreadful coming off a groin injury in 2019, playing 42 games and finishing with -0.5 WAR a 44 wRC+, a 1.4% walk rate, and a 29.5% strikeout rate, and he lacks the defensive capabilities that can give some other infielders a high floor. Before the groin injury, though, he’d been worth 6.7 WAR over his previous two seasons with a 124 wRC+. Assuming he’s healthy now, he’d make a fine left-handed bench bat for a lot of teams.

The Relievers

Fernando Rodney is 43 now, but his fastball velocity is still in surprisingly decent shape, declining by less than a tick and a half over the last four seasons and clocking in at 94.4 mph on average. His World Series line (2 IP, 2 R, 2 H, 6 BB, 0 K) left something to be desired, but overall, his time in the regular season with the Nationals (33.1 IP, 4.05 ERA, 3.71 FIP) went over pretty well. Baseball’s more fun with Rodney in it, so let’s hope someone takes a flyer.

Sam Tuivailala is a weird story. The good news: Three straight seasons of sub-3.50 ERAs between St. Louis and Seattle, more than 10.5 strikeouts per nine last year, and he’s still just 27 years old. The bad news: Lots of time missed due to injuries, the most concerning of which is an Achilles injury the recovery from which hasn’t been seamless. Usually mid-to-upper-90s with his fastball, he reportedly had yet to throw harder than the upper 80s in camp this spring with the Mariners, who released him a week after the season was postponed. I’d imagine a few teams will be willing to work him out once they get the opportunity.

Arodys Vizcaino sat out nearly all of 2019 with shoulder inflammation, which is certainly concerning. Since 2017, however, he has just a 2.53 ERA in 99.2 innings while striking out nearly 10 batters per nine. He won’t turn 30 until November, so it might not be a bad idea to invest a little cash and a spot on your taxi squad in him.

Danny Salazar last threw meaningful big league innings in 2017, as a once-exciting career has been derailed by shoulder, elbow, and groin injuries. When he finally returned for four innings in 2019, his fastball was nearly 10 mph slower than it was the last time we’d seen him. He’d be a reclamation project for a rebuilding team like Baltimore with innings to give.

Blake Wood hasn’t pitched since being diagnosed with a right elbow impingement in April 2018, but carried favorable peripherals as a workhorse reliever in 2016-17. He’s 34, but there might be something left in the tank.

While this year’s Induction Weekend festivities have been postponed until next summer, on Wednesday the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announced plans to reopen to the public on Friday, June 26, after nearly 3 1/2 months of closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reopening is being done with a comprehensive health and safety plan in place, one that includes mandatory mask wearing, timed entrances to limit capacity and allow for physical distancing, widespread availability of hand sanitizer, increased cleaning and disinfection schedules, and the continued closure of the building’s larger gathering spaces. All of this is being done in accordance with New York State’s regionally-focused phased reopening plan, as the Mohawk Valley (which includes Cooperstown) moves to Phase Four.

While New York has been hit the hardest of any state by the novel coronavirus, with over 390,000 conformed cases and over 30,000 deaths according to data from the Centers for Disease Control, the impact in Otsego County, which has a population of 62,000 with Cooperstown as its county seat, has been comparatively minimal, with just 74 confirmed cases and five deaths as of June 22, including only 12 confirmed cases and one death in the six weeks since I covered the virus’ impact on the region in early May.

Despite the minimal number of cases locally, the cancellation of Induction Weekend — which, with Derek Jeter as the marquee attraction was expected to exceed last year’s estimated 55,000 attendees and perhaps even eclipse the all-time record of 82,000 from 2007, when Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn were honored — has hit the area hard, particularly as it followed the cancellation of the Cooperstown Dreams Park series of youth baseball tournaments, which annually bring over 17,000 youth players (and their families) to the region. As of early May, the estimate for the economic impact on local governments via lost sales taxes on the area’s restaurants, hotels, rental properties, and baseball-oriented shops stood at $50 to $150 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I noticed something strange about Clayton Kershaw: he’d seemingly lost the will or ability to throw strikes in a 3-0 count. I did some middlingly fancy statistics, declared that a result like Kershaw’s was unlikely to happen by chance, and called it a day.

Unfortunately, I’d missed something subtle but important:

The Bonferroni correction is, in essence, a way to adjust confidence intervals to avoid taking too much signal from your data. Imagine, if you will, 10 gamblers each flipping 10 coins. One of them flips nine heads in his sample of 10. Amazing, right? There’s only a 1% chance of that happening!

Well, kind of. There were 10 of those gamblers, after all. The Bonferroni correction asks us to formulate a hypothesis beforehand, like “Gambler Number Nine is unusually likely to flip heads.” If we wanted to hypothesize that each gambler was likely to flip heads, that’s 10 hypotheses right there. Without getting too far into the realm of explaining statistical methods, suffice it to say that the Bonferroni correction requires more extreme values to reject the null hypothesis the more hypotheses you start with. In other words, the more things you observe, the weirder they need to be before they’re notable. Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the bevy of rule changes and health and safety precautions accompanying the return of major league baseball in 2020, there’s one in particular that feels like it comes straight out of Little League: the addition of a runner on second base at the start of extra innings. Initially one of Rob Manfred’s many trial balloons floated with the idea of shortening games, the rule has worked its way slowly up the organized-ball ladder, debuting in the World Baseball Classic in 2017, getting added to the Gulf Coast and Arizona Leagues that summer, and eventually becoming the law of the land throughout all levels of the minors in 2018. Not that it was bound for the bigs any time soon: Back in 2017, Manfred said he “[didn’t] really expect that we’re ever going to apply [the rule] at the major league level.”

Well, times have changed — or more accurately, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shortening of the season have led Manfred and company to bring the rule into play, likely for this year only. And on the surface, that makes sense: With only 60 games on the calendar and a potentially limited window in which to play them, it’s in everyone’s best interests to wrap things up quickly. As with the season on the whole, the less baseball, the better.

But how much less baseball is that rule going to create? We have two years’ worth of data from the minors to work with, and per MiLB, the results are notable. Over the last two seasons, just 43 total games went more than three extra innings, compared to 345 in 2016 and ‘17 combined. And as Baseball America’s JJ Cooper notes, nearly three-quarters of all extra-innings minor league games last year and the year before ended in the 10th, as opposed to just under half in the two seasons prior. And nearly all of them — 93% — finished in the 10th or 11th, representing a 20% increase.

That stands to reason. The rule — which puts a runner on second base to lead off the inning — creates a situation in which runs are the norm. A quick check of run expectancy tables shows that a runner on second with no outs led to an average of 1.1 runs scored and created a 61% chance of at least one run scoring from 2010 through ‘15. Both teams get the runner in their half of the inning, so it’s not an unfair advantage for either side, but it does allow the visiting team a chance to take a quick lead or give the home team an immediate opportunity to walk things off. Minor league fans have also noted how the rule immediately ups the drama of extras while also putting a new focus on fundamentals and putting the ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the long-in-the-making announcement about the MLB season starting, touching on the resolution of the dispute between the league and the union, their deeply conflicted feelings about baseball being played during a pandemic, the strangeness of a 60-game season, how to reframe fandom and reorient rooting interests in a short season, starting extra innings with runners on second, and an especially perplexing Scott Boras analogy. Then (45:20) they bring on epidemiologist, incoming Emory University professor, and sports data analyst Zach Binney to discuss MLB’s health-and-safety protocol, the difficult of preventing transmission in baseball compared to other sports, the recent coronavirus outbreaks in baseball, the ethics and efficacy of COVID-19 testing in sports, whether temperature and symptom screenings work, how long players who test positive might have to sit out, prohibitions on spitting, touching, and equipment sharing, how to protect non-players who work for teams, what it might take for MLB to stop the season, the trajectory of the pandemic in the country at large, and more.

Audio intro: Neil Young, "For the Turnstiles"
Audio interstitial: Richard Thompson, "Keep Your Distance"
Audio outro: Ted Berg, "Small Sample Size Song"

Link to Ben on the MLB season starting
Link to info on new Darvish pitch
Link to Dan’s playoff odds and projected standings
Link to Neil Paine on “paper champions”
Link to Neil on the 60-game season
Link to Neil on observing true talent in various sports
Link to Eno Sarris on short seasons
Link to Russell Carleton on the 60-game season
Link to Boras analogy article
Link to 2020 MLB operations manual
Link to summary of manual
Link to Zach’s website
Link to Zach’s Football Outsiders archive
Link to epidemiologist survey about attending sporting events
Link to SI article about baseball’s non-bubble plan

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Players Agree to Health Protocols, Will Report to Camp by July 1

Major League Baseball and the Players Association reached an agreement Tuesday regarding the health and safety guidelines that will govern the 2020 baseball season amid the coronavirus pandemic, officially clearing the path for a season to begin. Owners acted on Monday to implement a 60-game season at full pro-rated pay for players, after the union rejected a proposal over the weekend that, among other things, would have expanded the playoffs and asked players to waive their right to file a grievance. Players will begin training camp by July 1, and the start of the regular season is expected July 23 or 24.

My colleague Craig Edwards already wrote up the agreement here, so I’ll just briefly note some of the highlights. Games will be held in each team’s home stadiums without fans. Teams will play only against teams inside their division as well as teams in the other league’s corresponding geographic division, in an effort to lessen travel. There will be a designated hitter in both leagues, a new extra innings format in which each team starts the inning with a runner at second base, and 30-man active rosters that gradually shrink as the season progresses. The trade deadline will be August 31, and the deadline for a player to be eligible for the postseason roster is September 15. Pitchers will be allowed to, well, here, you read it.

Proposed MLB rule changes for 2020:

* Implementation of DH in both leagues
* Extra innings start with runner on second base
* No limits on position players pitching
* Pitchers can have wet rag in pocket as substitute for licking fingers
* Three-batter minimum still stands

— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) June 23, 2020

If you’ve been suffering through three months of public finger-pointing over economic distrust, dead-on-arrival proposals, and general dread over what the future of baseball holds, all of this qualifies as good news to some degree. But while it is a positive development that salary disagreements won’t cancel the 2020 season, that’s not what suspended it in the first place — a pandemic did. And that pandemic is still very much a threat. States like Florida and Texas, which host multiple MLB teams and were among the first to loosen stay-at-home restrictions, are still seeing a catastrophic increase in their new daily cases. And as extensive as MLB’s safety protocols are, there is still a troubling amount we don’t know, from how the league will enforce its guidelines to how many positive tests it would take to result in a ballpark or team getting shut down. Read the rest of this entry »

“But I didn’t love baseball. Because baseball would never love me back.”

– Bill White, in Uppity: My Hidden Story of the Games People Play

***

Of all the major sports in North American culture, baseball has to be the one most concerned with love. Fans often talk about why they love the game, to share stories of team loyalties passed down over generations, memories made and cherished. Players talk about why they love the game, too, are asked about it like clockwork every Fathers Day, Mothers Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Opening Day. Players are obligated, even, to love the game to a degree deemed adequate; they must be enthusiastic enough, passionate enough (in a respectful way, of course; to “disrespect the game” is not love, but something else entirely).

Love of the game is invoked every time a team pitches a massive taxpayer contribution to fund a new stadium, or every time some “Save America’s Pastime”-esque legislation is floated before governing bodies. To love the game is the cardinal virtue of cardinal virtues, the greatest of these, encompassing everything good and diminishing anything that may be bad. Because love of the game, of course, is never just love of the game: it is love of a values system, of a country, of a certain team, of a certain aesthetic, a certain style of play, a crystalline idea held in the hands — look how it glitters; look how we treasure it, how, when the light hits it just so, you can think of nothing else other than its beauty. What exactly those values, this country, this team really is — to what end, exactly, that love is directed — well, as long as you have love in your heart, then it doesn’t really matter, does it?

***

I have been thinking about this, the love of baseball, because of the sickly back-and-forth lurching of negotiations between MLB and the MLBPA over the past few months, because of the discussions that lurching has caused, and because I have been reading Bill White’s autobiography. Bill White was a longtime major leaguer, was the voice of the Yankees along with Phil Rizzuto for two decades after that, and was the president of the National League during the early-90s expansion and labor crisis. Bill White had about as diverse and lengthy a career in baseball as one could possibly have. In 1961, his willingness to speak out about the segregation Black players experienced during spring training in St. Petersburg spurred a boycott of Cardinals owners Anheuser-Busch, eventually leading Busch to purchase property on which white and Black players could stay together. He was the first Black play-by-play announcer for a major league team, and the duo of him and Rizzuto as the voices of the Yankees became legendary. And he was the first Black president of the National League.

White, before he became a professional baseball player, was in school to become a doctor. He initially took the contract from the Giants’ Leo Durocher because it would pay his tuition. It was never White’s dream to become a baseball player, or a baseball broadcaster, or the president of a league. His view of these always came from a place of ambivalence — the viewpoint of an outsider, someone who had not bought the myth and would not be sold one. He credits this ambivalence for his willingness to speak bluntly and honestly about the injustices he and his teammates faced as players; to negotiate contracts openly; to publicly name racism within the ranks of MLB’s executive class, despite being painted as “bitter” and “angry”; to tell owners, umpires, and Commissioners alike when he thought they were losing the plot. And when it became clear that the position of Commissioner was to become an arm of the owners’ interests, White simply walked away from baseball. “And I’ve never regretted it,” he writes.

It is rare, in the thousands of pages of baseball auto/biography that I’ve read, to encounter someone inside the game so willing to say that they did not love the game of baseball, that they had “no respect” for the business of it. In newspaper archives, back to the first decade of the 20th century and all the way up to profiles of high school teams in 2017, the narrative of love of the game as virtue, love of the game as essential to baseball’s character, is ubiquitous. To see an overt rebuttal of it is jarring.

For White, though, the idea that all — or even most — players loved the game, that they were living the dream, that they would even play for free — it was “pure nonsense.” White believed that for most players, “love of the game” had nothing to do with it. It was just something they had to say, something they had to try to make themselves believe — to make sure the myth continued to be true. The front office and owners certainly didn’t believe it:

“They would keep you on as long as you were useful, but the minute you weren’t, you’d be gone — and it wouldn’t matter what you had done in the past, or if you had a sick child at home, or if you were broke and had nowhere to go. Baseball was business, and while baseball owners may have loved owning baseball teams, most of them didn’t love baseball players.”

And yet, the myth spun on. When Bud Selig’s 20-year marriage fell apart in 1976, one newspaper report attributed it to “love of baseball.”

***

One might have thought that baseball’s shift toward a more analytically-inclined ethos would have done away with all of this. Sabermetricians seek answers that are founded in fact; they ask questions that challenge slippery narratives. Perhaps that is indeed the case more in communities like these, wherein an analytical mindset is encouraged and celebrated.

But that narrative of love-of-game as virtue still holds a particular power over the public. It is still part of the myth-building of Major League Baseball, of baseball as a North American institution. And it still permeates the discourse surrounding baseball, bending and morphing to fit the shape of whatever the issue of the era is. When people decry the problems they see with the game, whatever problems those might be — wanting a universal DH, or not wanting it; greedy owners, and/or greedy players; being overly regressive, or overly progressive — these problems are often contrasted with the ideal love of the game. The people who are causing problems, it is theorized, do not love the game enough, or not in the way that they should, not the true way. No wonder MLB Network chooses to promote their Griffey doc with this quote:

“I didn’t do it because of the money. I didn’t do it for the fame. I did it because I love baseball.”#Junior on MLB Network starts NOW! pic.twitter.com/5EIMkOAdRX

— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) June 22, 2020

No wonder, because it feels good to love things. People love to love things almost as much as they love to hate things. No wonder, too, because many people do love the game. It is wonderful that people can find so much beauty in baseball, that they can feel so passionate about it. A love of baseball improved my life in bizarre and unpredictable ways. It has done the same for many others with all kinds of different relationships to the sport.

All the worse, then, that the concept of loving the game is used in the way that it so often is: a cudgel wielded by the powerful, to manipulate, exonerate, excuse, evade, hammering narratives into shape. You will accept this, because you love it. If you don’t love it, well, why are you even here?

***

Over the coming month leading up to the planned Re-Opening Day, there will doubtless be many more debates surrounding the state of the game — warranted debates, critical ones. We are entering uncharted territory, attempting to restart the sport in the midst of a pandemic that has killed over a hundred thousand people in this country alone. In the midst of an international reckoning with institutional violence against Black people that the sport has made largely ineffectual gestures toward acknowledging.

There will be — as there has been — an effort to use love of the game to distract, appealing to emotion, the soft glow of happy memory. And, for many people, there will be dissonance. Loving the game, but not loving it. Loving the game, but worrying. Not loving the game — wanting to, not being able to. Never having loved it at all, and being frustrated by the spinning of wheels, so much ado when so many more important things are happening.

I keep thinking about a scene in Bill White’s book. He writes about going to visit an ailing Phil Rizzuto in a nursing home:

Once I came in and found Phil, wearing a nice sweater, sitting by the window, looking outside. It was his favorite spot, a place to catch the morning sun. I sat down in a chair next to him, and Phil tried to turn and say something, but by this time it was hard for him to talk. Instead he held up his hand, and I took it in mine.

For the next forty-five minutes we sat there, holding hands and saying nothing. I wondered if maybe having me next to him reminded him of the broadcast booths in which we had sat together so many times.

Two old men, two baseball players, old friends, holding hands in a sunbeam. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry — but I’m pretty sure Phil would have wanted me to laugh.

Bill White never loved the game, a game that didn’t love him. That didn’t matter, in the end. He could see what was important — illuminated, sharp in a sunbeam.