In baseball terms, eight years ago doesn’t seem that long ago. Last season, the American League Cy Young winner was Justin Verlander. In 2012, the AL Cy Young winner was David Price, but it definitely should have been Justin Verlander. A number of the guys who were good eight years ago are still good today, and some of the most modern baseball advancements were already being implemented around the game. Some sentences, though, do a lot of work in telling you just how much time has passed. For example: “Hello, would you like to watch a live major league baseball game?” Remember when people said things like that? Ah, to be young again. Here’s another: Eight years ago, R.A. Dickey was the best player in baseball.

Don’t be alarmed if you don’t recall such a time, as it lasted only a brief while. But it surely did exist, for a month-long stretch that reached its height on June 18, 2012. Dickey was coming off four straight outings of no earned runs allowed in at least 7.1 innings, including two complete games. In his most recent start, he’d allowed just one hit while striking out 12 batters in nine innings against the Rays, giving him the best start of his career.

It took him five days to outdo it.

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“He has been the story in baseball this year,” Keith Hernandez said of Dickey as the Mets’ home broadcast team hyped him up entering his June 18 start against the Orioles. They were hardly alone in their admiration. The day before, a lengthy profile of him authored by Tyler Kepner was published in The New York Times. A couple of days before that, he was covered by Shane Ryan at Grantland, and a couple of days before that, he was officially christened a Cy Young candidate by David Schoenfield at ESPN. A day after his start against the Orioles, Jay Jaffe — then of Sports Illustrated — would join the chorus of writers enthralled by Dickey, as would former FanGraphs editor Dave Cameron on this site. Read the rest of this entry »

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Brandon Mann has had a fascinating career. Drafted out of a Seattle-area high school by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2002, the now-36-year-old southpaw has played for six major league organizations, and he’s had multiple stints in both independent ball and NPB. His big-league experience consists of seven games with the Texas Rangers in 2018. With the Chiba Lotte Marines last year, Mann rejoined the Rangers this past offseason, only to be released on June 1.

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David Laurila: You’ve been in pro ball for nearly two decades, with almost none of that time spent in the majors. Why have you kept at it?

Brandon Mann: “I’ve asked myself that question a lot. Pretty much every year I go into the offseason thinking, ‘Man, this might have been my last one.’ But I’ve always had that desire. I know that I can pitch in the big leagues, so I’ve just never felt ready to walk away. Every time I’ve been released has kind of built up the ‘I’ve got to prove somebody wrong’ mentality that I have.

“Over the years I kept training harder and harder, and as I got older I actually started throwing harder. Meeting Driveline, and a lot of the right people, has been a big part of that. But it’s a great question, because I’ve contemplated it many, many times.”

Laurila: How much money have you made in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

After a week of waffling that would make Belgium jealous, Rob Manfred threw a curveball yesterday:

Manfred statement… pic.twitter.com/Z2NgD95F9T

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 17, 2020

Of course, it couldn’t be that easy, and I don’t just mean avoiding mixed metaphors. The MLBPA agreed that new substantive discussions had occurred, but disagreed that an agreement was in place or that a final deal was imminent. We’ll have to wait for another offer from the players, and likely a final counter from the owners, though the fact that their latest proposal includes full prorated salaries — and please, let’s never use the phrase “full prorated” again, like ever — suggests that the two sides will reach a deal.

Lost in the tick-tock of the negotiation and Manfred’s wild swings towards dealmaking and obstructionism, however, baseball is changing shape. When (and if) the game returns this year, it will look different than it ever has before. I don’t mean the season length, though that will certainly be novel. There are two major changes to the game in the owners’ most recent proposal: a universal DH, which Jay Jaffe will cover in greater detail tomorrow, and an expanded 16-game playoff field in 2020 and 2021.

The length of the season, while not yet final, looks likely to fall between 60 and 70 games. There’s not much difference between those in terms of how “real” the season will feel — it’s going to feel short, and that’s fine. Nothing in 2020 has felt normal so far, and baseball is merely following the trend.

That’s not to say there’s no difference between 60 and 70 games. Each additional game nets players roughly $25 million in extra salary, which explains their steadfast desire for more baseball. Owners may or may not also profit from extra games, but do make the majority of their profit from the playoffs. To them, extra games are simply a lever to pull in negotiations with the players. For our viewing purposes, however, it will feel short and random. Dan Szymborski is sitting in the ZiPS situation room as we speak, projections at the ready, to fire off win total predictions and playoff odds as soon as the exact season structure is announced, but suffice it to say that 60 and 70 game seasons don’t produce significantly different outlooks. Read the rest of this entry »

With 2020’s amateur draft consisting of just five rounds, much of the strategy teams typically use related to shifting bonus pool money around was rendered moot. There were no high schoolers to woo with big bonuses after the 10th round, no saving money on a seventh rounder to sign a better first rounder. This served to decrease the incoming talent pool by quite a bit, with many good players going undrafted or unsigned, but it also makes an immediate analysis of the exercise a little bit easier.

With just 160 picks, we can evaluate a team’s decision to take a lesser player early in the draft in order to use the money saved on picks later and vice versa. With less scouting time and fewer looks, there might have been a bit more variation in terms of the quality of the players taken on draft day. Likewise, determining who might improve and surprise is trickier. As such, we shouldn’t consider this analysis ironclad. However, using Eric Longenhagen’s rankings and the selected players’ actual draft positions, we can compare how well each team did with their picks based on those rankings. To determine the value of each player and each pick, I’ll be using my draft pick valuation research from last year, which examined expected production from every draft slot. Read the rest of this entry »

I was hoping the last round of polling would be our last, but here we are. Thanks again for your time. For consistency’s sake, all questions have remained the same since the end of March. Read the rest of this entry »

After taking the 2020 season to the brink of nonexistence on Monday, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred might actually be less popular than the coronavirus pandemic. Five days after “unequivocally” guaranteeing that there would be a season “one hundred percent,” even one of minimal length imposed under the terms of the owners’ March 26 agreement with the players union, he told ESPN he was “not confident” one would happen unless the players waive the right to file a grievance — contending MLB did not make its “best efforts to play as many games as possible” — that could potentially be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This latest round of inflammatory action follows in the immediate wake of a drastically shortened amateur draft, one that suggests that a proposed contraction of the minor leagues is closer to reality than ever, and all of this comes after a winter dominated by MLB’s investigations into the illegal sign-stealing of the Astros and Red Sox, whose punishments many consider too light — and oh, somewhere in there, Manfred fanned the flames by referring to the World Series trophy as “a piece of metal.”

Manfred’s actions over the past several months may have some pining for the charisma and warmth of Bud Selig — that guy really knew how to call off a season — but it’s important to remember that pleasing all of the people, all of the time isn’t and wasn’t the job of either commissioner, or of their predecessors. Manfred isn’t some mad genius twisting the game to his own nefarious ends, and while he’s supposed to act in the best interests of baseball, the reality is that he works for the owners, who pay his salary and have the power to hire and fire him. When he speaks for the owners, implicit in whatever tack he’s taking is that he’s got the backing of the three-quarters of them (23 out of 30) needed to govern.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Fauci Warns Against October Baseball

While the very existence of a baseball season remains up in the air, Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Los Angeles Times that he would advise against playing baseball in October, salary dispute aside. “If the question is time, I would try to keep it in the core summer months,” he said, before specifically saying October is a riskier time to play.

“The likelihood is that, if you stick to the core summer months, even though there is no guarantee… If you look at the kinds of things that could happen, there’s no guarantee of anything. You would want to do it at a time when there isn’t the overlap between influenza and the possibility of a fall second wave.”

If avoiding October play is the goal, there isn’t much time left. A 50-game season and regular-length playoff schedule would need to start by the middle of July at the very latest, which already looks difficult given the current state of negotiations. It would also require renegotiation of postseason TV contracts, not exactly a quick process in regular times. It’s simply a further obstacle to getting baseball back on the field.

When it does come back, though, Fauci will be there. Of his hometown Nationals allowing fans at games in 2021, he said: “Unless you have a dramatic diminution in cases, I would feel comfortable in spaced seating, where you fill one-half or one-third or whatever it is of the stadium, and everybody is required to wear a mask in the stadium.” Read the rest of this entry »