It’s been a little while since we checked in on the Korean Baseball Organization. During Major League Baseball’s struggle to resume play in 2020 — both with fair compensation for players and proper health and safety precautions taken — entire seasons are well underway overseas, not only in South Korea but also in Japan and Taiwan. The KBO was the second to get started after the CPBL and thanks to an effective government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has had its teams play well over 50 games already, or about three-eights of their regular season. Back when the season was just two weeks old, my colleague Jay Jaffe wrote about a league the NC Dinos were already starting to dominate. Six weeks later, very little has changed.

After storming out of the gates with an 11-1 start, the Dinos have yet to relinquish first place, with the team still yet to hit any kind of a real rough patch. Their .685 winning percentage would set them on pace for about a 111-win season in MLB. Even if you strip away their 11-1 start — a run that even a team like, say, the early-season 2019 Mariners can approximate — their record since is still a sparkling 26-16, which equates to about 100 wins in a typical MLB season.

When the Dinos were covered here in May, they were said to be wearing teams out with power and patience. A few weeks later, the patience has diminished, but the intimidating power remains very much alive. The team leads the KBO in slugging (.487) by a good margin, and has hit the most homers in the league with 79. They’ve dropped to fifth in walks drawn, but their power has been enough to keep them the top-scoring team in the league at 6.52 runs per game.

As Jay mentioned, this kind of success for the Dinos has come as a surprise to KBO fans. They haven’t advanced to the Korean Series since 2016, and last year, they finished fifth with a record of 73-69-2; Dan Szymborski’s projections gave them just an 11.6% chance to win the league this year, forecasting them to finish fourth. They’ve surpassed those expectations, though, by having out-of-nowhere breakouts from a number of now-key players.

The Dinos’ lineup is positively relentless. Eight qualified hitters have a wRC+ of at least 110, and four of those rank in the top 10 hitters in the entire league. Jin-sung Kang 강진성 is the best of the bunch, hitting .365/.403/.623 for a 163 wRC+ that ranks third in the KBO. Hui-dong Kwon 권희동 (.312/.425/.558, 158 wRC+), Sung-bum Na 나성범 (.310/.378/.614, 154 wRC+), and Aaron Altherr 알테어 (.307/.380/.615, 154 wRC+), meanwhile, rank seventh, ninth and 10th in the KBO in wRC+, respectively. Each of these guys contributes to the team’s explosive pop — Na ranks second in the league with 15 homers, and Altherr is tied for third with 14.

That group of hitters is a great example of how the Dinos have blossomed. Of those four hitters, only Na had previously established a believable track record of success in the KBO. He entered the season coming off six consecutive seasons with a wRC+ of at least 120, and at 30 years old, he’s still in the prime of his career. It was always likely he’d mash this season — it was less clear whether he’d have much company. Kang, 26, had been a part-time player before this season, posting a wRC+ of 84 last season and 37 the year before. Kwon, 29, had already played six seasons in the KBO, and was above average at the plate in just two of them. Finally, there was Altherr, who as a foreign-born player had some expectations he would perform well, but was still new to the league.

All of those players have broken out in huge ways for the Dinos, and they aren’t alone. On the pitching side, I wrote about the brilliance of Chang-mo Koo 구창모 in the first month of the season and, well, it’s hard to say he’s gotten worse.

Both Statiz and KBO Fancy Stats give Koo the highest WAR of any player in the league this season, despite being a 23-year-old who first managed a FIP under 5.00 just last year. Alongside him in the rotation is Drew Rucinski 루친스키, another first-year KBO player from the U.S. whose 2.30 ERA ranks third in the league, and Mike Wright 라이트, who has outperformed an underwhelming FIP all season long, clocking in with a 3.63 ERA.

The rotation is brilliant at the top, but somewhat suspect at the bottom. If the Dinos have a weakness, it is that the back of their rotation has yet to really crystallize, with Jae-hak Lee 이재학, Sung-young Choi 최성영 and Young-kyu Kim 김영규 all carrying ERAs over 5.00. The story is similar in the bullpen, where Jong-hyun Won 원종현 (2.92 ERA in 24.2 innings) and Jae-whan Bae 배재환 (3.80 ERA in 23.2 innings) have been anchors, but everyone else has gotten hit very hard. It’s an unbalanced pitching staff, but because the offense is so deep — I haven’t even talked about former MVP catcher Euiji Yang 양의지 or longtime KBO stud Sok Min Park 박석민, both of whom are also in the league’s top 20 in wRC+ — that it just hasn’t mattered.

The Dinos aren’t without competition going forward, but no other team has posed a credible threat to their place at the top thus far. The second-place Heroes are sort of a portrait of dull competency — they rank fourth in scoring, on-base percentage, and slugging, and third in team ERA. Their pitching has been led more by finesse than power, as they rank first in BB/9 and eighth in K/9. The Bears, meanwhile, are more of a lesson in extremes. Their offense leads the KBO in OBP and SLG while running second in scoring, but their pitching staff is responsible for the second-highest ERA in the league. Both have had a few cracks at the Dinos this season, but so far, they’ve gone a combined 5-10. Their head-to-head matchups have only widened the gap between them.

All of this places the Dinos in a very good position to take the regular season, and if you need a reminder, that is a very big deal. The KBO playoff format rewards the regular season champion by giving it a bye directly to the Korean Series, with the next four teams having a progressively longer route to face them. The fourth and fifth seeds face each other in a best-of-five wild card round, the winner of that series faces the third seed in the quarterfinals, and so on.

Unlike the top spot, the remaining seeds ought to be highly contested all season. Part of that is due to the fact that the bottom of the league is so clearly defined — the SK Wyverns have gone through a poor enough stretch to nearly catch the Hanwha Eagles, who devoted a chunk of their season to perhaps the worst three-week run in baseball history. With a fifth of the league roughly 10 games behind everyone else, the clubs in front of them have gotten a boost.

Most of those teams have a significant enough strength that it’s easy to imagine them piecing together a hot streak that defines their season. The Kia Tigers, currently in sixth place in the standings, own the league’s best ERA. The seventh-place KT Wiz have scored the third-most runs per game. The road will be quite crowded for some time. But even with much of the season remaining, it seems clear that one team is in the fast lane.

Do you know who throws the fastest fastball in all of baseball? Almost certainly! Maybe you don’t know it exactly — maybe you’re not sure whether Jordan Hicks counts while he’s recovering from Tommy John surgery, so you give it to Aroldis Chapman. Maybe you differentiate between starters and relievers and want to put Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, and Gerrit Cole in the conversation. For the most part, though, you know these names.

Let’s change it up slightly. Do you know who throws the hardest cutter? Again, there’s a decent chance you know that it’s Emmanuel Clase, though he, too, will miss the 2020 season. The second name on that list, though, is Michael Lorenzen, and even if you didn’t know he threw that particular pitch, you almost certainly knew that he throws hard and is good.

Why am I asking this? Because I’m setting up for a far stupider question: who throws the hardest changeup in baseball? Frustratingly, it’s also Syndergaard (minimum 100 changeups thrown). But he’s out for the season — the fastest active changeup in baseball, then! I can tell you with near-certainty that you didn’t guess it. Maybe you got the second-fastest — Jacob deGrom. Heck, maybe you got number four, Tommy Kahnle. I’m fairly confident, however, that you didn’t get number one: Orioles reliever Miguel Castro.

Now that I’ve told you that factoid, it’s time to anticipate your next question: so what? Why do we care who throws the fastest changeup in baseball? The fastest fastball is visceral; it’s as fast as anyone can make a baseball go, which is pretty clearly awesome. You can watch the fastest fastball and be impressed without caring about context. It’s just fast!

The fastest cutter isn’t quite the same, but a near-100 mph pitch with cut looks like witchcraft. Clase isn’t even that great, and he’s still a joy to watch. The fastest changeup, on the other hand, looks like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about baseball dreams and a holiday weekend in MLB marred by testing delays, canceled practices, concerned players, and other impediments to a safe and smooth season, then pick up where they left off four months ago in their season preview series by previewing the 2020 Tampa Bay Rays (16:05) with The Athletic’s Josh Tolentino and the 2020 Miami Marlins (57:10) with the Miami Herald’s Jordan McPherson.

Audio intro: Warren Zevon, "Disorder in the House"
Audio interstitial 1: Superchunk, "Florida’s on Fire"
Audio interstitial 2: Modest Mouse, "Florida"
Audio outro: Mac DeMarco, "Dreams From Yesterday"

Link to Jay Jaffe’s summary of MLB’s testing mess
Link to story on Chaim Bloom’s cardigan
Link to Yandy Díaz workout
Link to story on Jonathan Erlichman
Link to Josh’s Rays return-to-play guide
Link to Josh on the Rays’ farm system
Link to FanGraphs’ Rays prospect rankings
Link to Jordan on the Marlins’ furloughs
Link to Jordan on the Marlins’ COVID-19 concerns
Link to Jordan on Marlins roster decisions
Link to FanGraphs’ Marlins prospect rankings
Link to Roster Resource Team Info Tracker

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Below is another installment of my series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. If you missed the first piece, you’re going to want to take a peek at its four-paragraph intro for some background, then hop back here once you’ve been briefed.

Updating the East

Because our world is a roil of chaos in which people often drop the ball when the stakes are high, there have been a few roster changes in the Eastern divisions, mostly related to COVID-19’s spread or the reasonable fear of it. My initial thoughts on the AL East are linked above, while the NL East is here.

Atlanta’s positive tests during intake included Freddie Freeman, Touki Toussaint, Pete Kozma, and Will Smith, while Felix Hernandez and Nick Markakis opted out. The combination of Markakis’ opt out and Freeman’s delay (Markakis cited a discussion with Freeman as part of his reason for opting out) makes it much more likely that Yonder Alonso breaks camp with the big league club because he plays first base and hits left-handed, the latter of which the Braves’ major league roster sorely lacks. The Markakis opt out also means one of the dominoes leading to a slightly premature Cristian Pache and/or Drew Waters debut has fallen.

The bullpen is thinner without Touki and Smith but still strong because of all the talented youngsters, while Felix’s opt out makes it more likely that one of young arms, most likely Kyle Wright or Bryse Wilson, ends up in the Opening Day rotation.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s COVID situation is already so dire that it seems likely they’ll qualify for the “extenuating circumstances” clause in Section 6 of Major League Baseball’s 2020 Operations manual:

In the event that a Club experiences a significant number of COVID-19 Related IL placements at the Alternate Training Site at any one time (i.e., three or more players), and the Club chooses to substitute those players from within the Club’s organization, MLB reserves the right to allow that Club to remove those substitute players from the Club Player Pool without requiring a release.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I posted my 10 favorite breakout candidates for our abbreviated 2020 season. Now it’s time for that piece’s inevitably less-optimistic companion, the breakdowns.

As with the breakouts, precisely defining a breakdown in exact statistical terms is difficult and, I feel, counterproductive. Sometimes it’s a guy with a few dangerous leading indicators; other times, it’s a player who has already seemingly fallen off the cliff and it’s whether he can catch the ledge. Occasionally, a player reaches an age when decline is nearly inevitable; time eventually defeats all of its opponents after all.

With all that in mind, here are my “favorite” 10 breakdown selections for 2020’s 60-game sprint.

Justin Verlander, Houston Astros

Don’t get me wrong, I still think Justin Verlander is a terrific pitcher. But he’s at an age when pitchers can decline very quickly and he’s recovering from a significant groin injury. ZiPS is still convinced he’s an easy ace, but those low-percentile projections have gotten a bit scarier. Verlander’s projection for 2020 is quite close to his 2019, but the differences at the bottom are stark; ZiPS projects an 14% chance of Verlander having an ERA+ under 80; when re-projecting 2019 with a 60-game season, that number was only 5%. There’s no methodology change that accounts for these differences. As breakdowns go, this is a mild one, but it’s significant given Houston’s increased reliance on Verlander without Gerrit Cole around. Read the rest of this entry »

2:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to my first chat of … summer camp? Spring training 2.0? The long-delayed preseason? I’m still working on what to call it. What’s in no dispute is that I’d like to start the chat with some entry music from the most badass soundtrack composer of all, Ennio Morricone:

2:06

Jay Jaffe: That’s a good question, and not being a lawyer myself, I don’t have a definitive answer. I do know that the discussion of grievances with  regards to the negotiations concerning the return to play centered around whether MLB was making a good-faith effort to schedule as many games as possible, so I would think that the union would have to prove something similar here, and I bet it would be harder given that they did in fact sign off on the health and safety protocol involving this testing regimen just a couple of weeks ago.

2:08

Jay Jaffe: Eugene Freedman, who often writes about labor relations, including for FanGraphs, would be a better person to ask on that score. (((EugeneFreedman))) @EugeneFreedman @RuthKapelus @NickFrancona @barrysvrluga I haven’t received/read the agreement on health and safety, so I don’t know the answer. Normally, the remedy for a dispute over implementation & interpretation of a negotiated agreement is the parties’ grievance procedure. But, in the case of imminent safety and health 1/ 7 Jul 2020

2:09

Jay Jaffe: I have to admit my eyebrows did some funny things when I saw the report that Cohen is re-entering the fray. I’d assume that he’s the best capitalized of any potential buyer, and no, I don’t think Jeff Wilpon is going to get five years this time around because I don’t think the Wilpons have the kind of leverage that they believed they did a few months ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

In what’s becoming a weird tradition on FanGraphs, I wrote an article about bunting last week. It included the usual disclaimers: these are rules of thumb rather than absolutes, managers should absolutely consider edge cases, and so forth. Disclaimers are for nerds, though, and writing about bunts is a sure way to get a good amount of “Hey you have to consider the specific players doing it, stop using neutral contexts.”

Most of the time, I’d just ignore it. All players aren’t created equal, and yet rules of thumb exist. Surely managers are bright enough to realize that if Mike Trout is up there, maybe you should reconsider your guidebook written for average major leaguers. Today, though, I was looking for a topic. So let’s get Mike Trout up there! Let’s put Jeff Mathis on deck! Let’s create those corner case scenarios that everyone always mentions when writers talk generic rules.

The first scenario is simple: let’s put Mike Trout at the plate in a tie game in the bottom of the 10th. You probably already know the simple math: if instead of Trout a generic batter had the first at-bat of the inning, bunting would be a wise choice. Instead, we’re starting with Trout, followed by an exactly average team behind him. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka got hit upside the head and ultimately concussed by a 112-mph screamer off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton, the third player he faced in the team’s first simulated game of summer camp. By Monday, a good portion of Major League Baseball could identify with the headaches and other scary consequences of being knocked down so soon after restarting amid the coronavirus pandemic. The testing program that represents a foundational piece of the protocol to keep players and essential staff safe broke down, causing teams to delay or cancel workouts and amplifying a crisis of confidence within the sport.

Indeed, if one didn’t already feel a fair bit of ambivalence regarding MLB’s attempt to stage even an abbreviated season amid the pandemic, the dysfunction that’s been on display since late last week has certainly provided cause for concern. While the league reported results of its intake tests that initially appeared promising, the caveat attached — incomplete results from most teams — was enough to raise some eyebrows. Beyond that initial stumble, Monday brought news of at least half a dozen teams whose workouts were delayed or canceled due to holiday-related holdups in receiving test results, a matter that should have been anticipated well in advance. All of this comes while the ranks of players testing positive and those opting out both continue to grow, producing absences that could potentially reshape the season and in some cases have life-altering consequences. And of course, this is all unfolding (unraveling?) against the backdrop of record-setting numbers of new cases in the U.S. with totals topping 50,000 for three consecutive days.

Should MLB attempt to proceed at all? Can it? From here, the likelihood of the league pulling this off seems more remote than ever.

Though it was overshadowed by the rancorous and all-too-public exchanges between the owners and the Players Association, MLB sold the union and the public on the viability of a restart based on its ability to expedite a high volume of tests, primarily via saliva-based tests — faster and less invasive than nasal swabs — that a repurposed anti-doping lab in Salt Lake City could process for a 24- to 48-hour turnaround. Even before that turnaround time could be called into question, MLB made a mess of its intake testing, which began at players’ home stadiums on July 1. Players and essential staff were given temperature checks, saliva or nasal swab diagnostic tests for the coronavirus itself, and antibody tests using blood samples. Only those who tested negative were permitted to enter facilities for the first workouts beginning on Friday. Read the rest of this entry »

Today on FanGraphs Live, let’s grapple with the fact that sometimes Christian Yelich gets hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

While most of the attention yesterday rightly went to the potential deficiencies in MLB’s testing protocol as delays prevented multiple teams from getting ready for the season and left many players unaware of their own test results, the league did release this year’s schedule. The season begins with a doubleheader featuring the Nationals against the Yankees followed by the Dodgers against the Giants on July 23, with a full slate of games the following day. If all goes well, teams will have finished the full 60-game season on September 27.

The Schedule is Going to Look Weird

As the league decided to limit travel this year in the hopes of containing the coronavirus, teams are playing games in their own division as well as the corresponding geographical division in the opposite league, with 40 games played in-division and 20 games against the opposite league; six of those interleague games are against each team’s so-called natural interleague rival. So, this serves as your official reminder that Atlanta actually lines up pretty close to the Indiana-Ohio border going from North to South!

Breaking down every @mlb teams updated 2020 travel schedule… Pretty cool looking at the divisional separation of the schedule this way. pic.twitter.com/ht2Bg3qBnj

— Daren Willman (@darenw) July 6, 2020

The Central is clustered together in the middle and the East is all in the same time zone, while the West has some outliers with the Mariners and the two Texas teams a considerable distance apart and Colorado off on its own. Where the schedule gets even weirder is that teams in the division don’t play an equal number of home and road games against their opponents. Teams will play every team in their own division 10 times, but instead of playing five home games and five road games, the number of home games will range from three to seven. That being said… Read the rest of this entry »