To call Foley’s NY Pub and Restaurant a sports bar would be like summarizing Citizen Kane as a movie about a sled. Sure, the bar at 18 West 33rd Street in Manhattan stood out as a place where one could enjoy a beer while watching whatever games were in season — and on some nights, you might find three sports vying for attention on its numerous screens. But for nearly two decades, Foley’s has served as a pillar of the baseball community, a beacon not only for local denizens but for out-of-towners — players, umpires, scouts, celebrities, and writers. “Foley’s was a baseball writer’s Cheers,” wrote MLB.com’s Alyson Footer via Twitter.

Sadly, the occasion for Footer and hundreds of others to share their thoughts about the venerable watering hole on social media was a somber one. On Friday, owner Shaun Clancy posted a video announcing that the bar, which shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 16, will not reopen. “There’s just no way that I can see that we can do it,” he said in the two-minute video, “and I don’t really know what to say except thank you all… This is the end of the inning but not the end of the game.”

A message from @ShaunFromFoleys. Sad news regarding Foley’s. #WeHadBeer pic.twitter.com/i1uimhZQL2

— Foley's NY (@FoleysNY) May 29, 2020

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In theory, the Brewers offense was set up to be a stars-and-scrubs operation heading into the season. It’s not that it was particularly low-octane, or even misbuilt; when you have a player like Christian Yelich, it stands to reason that everyone else is going to look pedestrian in comparison.

Of course, theory doesn’t always survive in the real world. There are myriad examples of a team expecting a star performance from one player and receiving one from another. But for our OOTP Brewers, that has emphatically not happened. The offense is off to an excellent start — fourth in the NL in runs scored, fifth in wOBA, and fourth in batter WAR. It’s happened exactly the way that you’d expect — with a transcendent performance from digital Yelich and an adequate job the rest of the way down. Today, let’s celebrate Yelich’s brilliance.

In 2019, the major league WAR leader on May 31 was Cody Bellinger. You might remember 2019 Bellinger started the season off on a torrid pace. Even after an only excellent (instead of mega-excellent) May, he closed the month hitting .379/.465/.749. He was walking more than he struck out, he played excellent center field defense, and he even chipped in seven stolen bases (though he was caught stealing four times). It was a true all-phases effort, and it was worth a massive 4.2 WAR in 241 plate appearances. That pace would make for an 11.5 WAR season.

With that as calibration for how impressed you should be by numbers through the end of May, let’s turn to Yelich. His batting line looks a lot like Bellinger’s: .354/.444/.694, good for a 194 wRC+. Has he accomplished it with an absolutely outlandish BABIP? Honestly, not really. He’s posted a .381 mark so far, which is obviously a high number, but he’s posted a career BABIP of .358, and projection systems pegged him for something in the .340 range going into this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Ken Griffey Jr. is not a typical candidate for a ZiPS Time Warp. Over his 22 years in the majors, from his time as a rookie phenom in 1989 to his sleepy denouement in his return to Seattle, we accumulated as many memories of Griffey as he did accolades. And unlike Eric Davis and possibly Joe Mauer, the earlier subjects of this series, Griffey’s injury struggles in his 30s did not rob him of a spot in Cooperstown; he was elected easily on his first ballot with 99.3% of the vote.

But we could have gotten even more baseball from Griffey than we did.

In the 80s, when fans talked about “Ken Griffey,” they were still talking about Ken Griffey père, then a veteran outfielder whose career featured stints with the Reds, Yankees, Braves, and Mariners, who was wrapping up his Hall of Very Good career. But by the 90s, it was Junior’s turn. When sportswriters of that decade named batters who could challenge Hank Aaron‘s home run record, Griffey was typically the protagonist, not the eventually successful Barry Bonds. Just as Juan Soto and Ronald Acuña Jr. are phenoms for young baseball fans today, Griffey was the start for younger Gen-Xers like myself and for older millennials. Junior always felt special, a player drafted out of high school with the first pick of the 1987 draft, the son of a famous player, an outfielder blessed with the coincidence of being born in Stan Musial’s hometown, on Musial’s 49th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Farmer came in to pitch last August. The Reds were being mauled by the Chicago Cubs, and the 29-year-old Farmer is Cincinnati’s Mr. Versatility. Along with the cameo mound appearance, he caught and played all four infield positions over the course of the season.

What is surprising is that Farmer had never before pitched professionally. The 2013 draft pick — by the Los Angeles Dodgers out of the University of Georgia — has both the background and the bloodlines of an ideal mop-up artist. His father, Bryan Farmer, was an accomplished pitcher at Ole Miss who advanced as far as Triple-A in the Atlanta Braves system.

The chip off the old block was a two-way player as an Atlanta-area prep, and while his bat and glove ultimately became his calling cards, he was very much at home on the rubber.

“I loved pitching,” Farmer related to me recently. “I had a really good curveball — I could buckle some knees — and I also threw a lot of strikes, which is something my dad stressed the importance of doing. I was a closer my senior year of high school, but it turned out that I was a better shortstop than pitcher. My coach at Georgia wanted me to play shortstop every day, so that’s what I did.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the results of a survey of sports fans about fake crowd noise on telecasts, then discuss a difficult, frustrating week for baseball, touching on ownership overreach and intransigence, widespread releases of minor league players, teams and players that have made more commendable choices, baseball’s lost opportunity to lead, the disaster scenario the sport is facing, and who baseball is for. Then (51:12) they talk to labor lawyer Eugene Freedman about the ongoing negotiations between MLB and the MLBPA, how he expects the talks to play out, why MLB players aren’t engaging with ownership’s financial proposal, the role of Scott Boras, the obstacles in the way of a minor league player union, and more.

Audio intro: The Lone Ghosts, "Bad Week"
Audio interstitial: Willie Nelson, "A Little Unfair"
Audio outro: Hazel English, "Make it Better"

Link to Morning Consult survey
Link to ESPN report about minor league releases
Link to Baseball America report about minor league releases
Link to Eric Nusbaum on the owners’ actions
Link to Craig Edwards on the owners’ economic proposal
Link to report about leaked lawyer email
Link to report about Boras letter
Link to Ohtani’s Instagram account
Link to Foley’s farewell message

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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.

Some Minor Leaguers Have Pay Extended, While Others Still Await Word

With the end of the month rapidly approaching, major league baseball teams are running into a deadline of sorts for whether or not they will continue to pay minor league players in the midst of what is all but certain to be a cancelled MiLB season. One of the first teams to announce their decision on this matter was the Oakland A’s, and as my colleague Dan Szymborski discussed in his Wednesday roundup, the news wasn’t positive — A’s minor leaguers will not receive their $400-per-week stipends after May 31. That set a rather ominous tone, but fortunately, many teams in the past 48 hours have come forward with renewed guarantees to their prospects. Here’s a table of what we know about which teams have promised future stipends to minor leaguers, and for how long.

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In this week’s MLB The Show 20 stream, featuring Paul Sporer, Ben Clemens, and Dan Szymborski, Casey Mize gets his first major league start against the Arizona Diamondbacks, live from Digital Chase Field.

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Much of the focus regarding baseball’s potential return has centered on whether the players and owners can come to a financial agreement both parties feel works for them. The two groups may negotiate as cohesive units, but they are comprised of distinct individuals and entities that often have diverging interests. The league’s proposal appears to have been an attempt to drive a wedge between the highest earners in the sport and those making closer to MLB’s league minimum. And while Rob Manfred needs to find a solution that players will agree to, before he can even make such an offer, his proposal has to fly with his 30 bosses, the MLB owners. Those owners don’t always have the same goals or ideas about how the business of baseball should be run – the league’s latest proposal reflects those differences, as big-market teams received the biggest benefit.

A few weeks ago, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich reported in The Athletic that baseball’s traditional revenue sharing was at risk in 2020. Local television money is big for teams in this era, and the gap between the top 10 teams in television revenue and the bottom 10 is, on average, $67 million even before accounting for network ownership. Attendance and stadium-related revenue tends to further exacerbate that gap. Revenue sharing, where each team pools together 48% of local revenue and divide it equally, shrinks the gap some, but still provides the big-market, high-revenue teams a significant advantage. With most stadium-related revenue potentially gone, the divide gets a bit skinnier. From the Drellich and Rosenthal piece:

“The discrepancy between the Rays and the Red Sox this year is not that dramatic,” the executive said. “It’s still money. It’s tens of millions of dollars. But it’s not hundreds of millions of dollars. And if you’re going to share that, it’s not going to move the needle enough this year.”

MLB’s presentation to the players regarding team losses had some fairly significant holes, but it did show the traditional big moneymakers like the Yankees and Dodgers suffering the biggest losses. Lost stadium revenue drives some of that, but high payrolls contribute as well. Those high payrolls are normally easily justified by massive revenues, but if team revenues were the same, the higher payroll clubs would be more likely to lose money. MLB’s latest proposal attempted to do those clubs a huge favor.

To provide some sense of the typical payroll gap between teams, the graph below shows only salaries of $1 million or more projected in the original 2020 season:

We see a huge spread between the top and bottom teams, which is fairly typical over the last few years. Here’s what the same graph looks like with pro-rated salaries over an 82-game season:

The second graph is basically the first one divided in half. These aren’t full payrolls because we’d need to add in all the minimum-salaried players, but the differences you see are pretty close to the total numbers. MLB’s latest proposal hits the highest-salaried players the hardest, and the teams that pay the higher-salaried players tend to have the larger payrolls. Here’s what would happen to team payrolls under MLB’s latest offer, including only players originally scheduled to make $1 million or more in a full season. The $200 million for playoffs is included in the figures below:

We see these salaries bundled more in the middle. MLB’s proposal dropped these players’ salaries by 45% compared to a pro-rated 82-game season, but the standard deviation of these salaries dropped by 53%. The graph below shows the changes in each team’s payroll from the March agreement with pro-rated salaries to MLB’s latest proposal:

Those teams on the left have the most to gain under MLB’s latest proposal, while those teams on the far right barely see any change to payroll at all. It’s not hard to identify the types of teams in each group. We have the Yankees, Astros, Dodgers, Phillies Cubs, Angels, and Red Sox leading the way with salary cuts while the Marlins, Pirates, Rays, Royals, and A’s are all near the bottom in terms of change. To illustrate the change a little more, here’s a scatter plot showing the change above with Forbes valuations:

There’s a pretty strong relationship here (the R-squared =.57) and a lot of that is because rich teams spend more. In MLB’s latest proposal, those same rich team receive the biggest benefits. It’s the owners’ of trying to share the lost revenue, except instead of doing it amongst themselves, they are hoping that the players will do it for them. It’s a way that prevents some potentially difficult conversations between Rob Manfred and the owners. If the union response is any indication, the owners are going to need to have some of those difficult conversations in the coming days if they want to have a 2020 baseball season.

May 29 marks the 10-year anniversary of Roy Halladay’s perfect game against the Marlins. It’s a bittersweet occasion, alas, because while it shows the two-time Cy Young winner and future Hall of Famer at the absolute pinnacle of his career, Halladay is not here to celebrate. On November 7, 2017, while flying his Icon A5 light sport airplane, he crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, landing upside down in 4 1/2 feet of water. The autopsy published two months later found that he had morphine, amphetamine, Ambien, and alcohol in his system. More recent revelations that he had been in and out of rehab to treat addictions to opiates and to an anti-anxiety drug called Lorazepam deepen the already stark contrast between a player who publicly was known for his exceptional control, both on and off the field, but who privately was battling depression.

The anniversary and the absence of its central figure provides a time for reflection. What follows here are 10 thoughts on Halladay’s career and life, one for each year since that special night in Miami’s Sun Life Stadium — or, if you prefer, one for each of his perfect innings plus one for the aftermath. You can watch the game in its entirety below:

1. Halladay nearly threw a no-hitter in his second major league start, and did pitch a complete game.

Chosen with the 17th pick of the 1995 amateur draft out of a suburban Denver high school (Arvada West), Halladay made solid progress through the minors and cracked Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects in ’97 (23rd) and ’98 (38th). After a strong showing at Triple-A Syracuse in the latter year, the 21-year-old righty made his major league debut on September 20, 1998, throwing five innings of two-run ball with five strikeouts against the Devil Rays. Seven days later, he no-hit the Tigers for 8.2 innings before being foiled by pinch-hitter Bobby Higginson, who homered and also deprived him of a shutout. Halladay did hang on to collect the first of his 203 regular season wins, and the first of his 67 complete games. Read the rest of this entry »

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