This is the fifth in a series of baseball-themed lessons we’re calling FanGraphs Prep. In light of so many parents suddenly having their school-aged kids learning from home, we hope is that these units offer a thoughtfully designed, baseball-themed supplement to the school work your student might already be doing. The first, second, third, and fourth units can be found here, here, here, and here.

Overview: A one-week unit centered around the MLB Draft.

The amateur draft is one of the most important events in baseball. Months and years of work go into each team’s preparation for the exercise. In this unit, you’ll squeeze all of that work into a single week as you learn about the decision-making process that goes into making a selection in the draft.

Learning Objectives:

• Gather data from various sources to form an opinion.
• Evaluate a dataset using a set of criteria to identify data points that fit.
• Project potential fits based on needs and trends.
• Adapt and adjust as new data is available.
• Explain the reasoning behind a decision-making process.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s strange that this year’s draft is already over and that some teams took as few as three players. Now we move into $20,000 undrafted free agent signing mode, a totally unprecedented exercise. In the coming days, I’ll add the drafted players to their new teams’ prospect lists over on The Board; you’ll see them on the 2020 Updated list on the Prospect List tab after I do. The farm system rankings will change as I do that. You can already see the approximate Top 100 landing spot for the 50 FV and above draftees on the MLB Draft tab of The Board.

Odds

Texas Rangers
Texas’ draft will be the talk of the industry today. After taking Justin Foscue in the first round (Fosuce was in the mix throughout the middle of round one) the Rangers went off the board (well, public boards anyway) and picked a bunch of six-figure high school types throughout the rest of the draft.

In round two, it was Tennessee prep outfielder Evan Carter, a high school two-way player committed to Duke. What I have on Carter at the moment is that he’s fast, has a big, rectangular frame, and that he has good bat speed but a swing path that may not work. This is next to nothing, and we’ll all learn more about Carter in the coming days. Based on what I know right now, he sounds like a 35+ FV prospect, a $600,000 type of high schooler. I also have a 35+ FV on Tekoah Roby, the club’s third rounder, who was up to 94 last summer, flashed a 55 changeup, and has a medium frame. Fourth rounder Dylan MacLean is an athletic, projectable lefty from Oregon whose stuff has coveted vertical action. His fastball was in the mid-80s last summer, up from the low-80s early the spring prior. It’s likely he’ll throw harder as he matures based on the frame and athleticism, or that we’d know he were throwing harder this spring had he played (and that Texas does, but successfully hid it), but he’s the kind of prospect who ends up in the honorable mention section of a team’s prospect list. Finally, their fifth rounder was Thomas Saggese, a contact-oriented SoCal high school infielder. A handful of teams were on Saggese, also a 35+ FV prospect, who could hit enough to play second base everyday. All of these kids are actual prospects, but unless we learn something new about a couple of them (Did MacLean have a velo spike? Did we whiff on Carter as an industry?), this draft will feel odd, and I wonder if Texas’ new stadium has impacted their financial situation and that that may mean they aren’t spending their whole pool. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the continued standstill over starting the season, MLB’s series of superficially different, substantively identical, and equally unproductive proposals, public perceptions of the owners’ and players’ positions, the difference between a 50-game season and an 80-game season, and how the “negotiations” seem destined to end, plus a Stat Blast about repeatedly drafted players. Then (27:01) they talk to FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen about which teams did and didn’t appear to do well in the 2020 draft, how limiting the draft to five rounds affected team strategy, how the pandemic changed draft prep and draft predictions, the potential of Tigers top pick Spencer Torkelson and other notable names, what will happen to the hundreds of players who didn’t get drafted, and the latest on when and where prospects will play in 2020.

Audio intro: Mates of State, "My Only Offer"
Audio interstitial: I Was a King, "Eric"
Audio outro: Wild Flag, "Short Version"

Link to latest Craig Edwards analysis
Link to Jeff Passan report on most recent MLB offer
Link to Eno on season length
Link to Angus Kellett’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to spreadsheet about most-drafted players
Link to Eric’s 2020 draft primer
Link to Eric’s Day 1 draft recap
Link to Eric’s draft odds and ends
Link to story about amateurs signing with NPB teams

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With most every other professional sport moving forward with a plan to resume play, baseball’s unsettled future sticks out like a sore thumb. Inevitably, battle lines have been drawn; the owners claim poverty and hardship, the players toe their pro-rata line while dangling various season lengths and inducements, and each side claims the other is intransigent and negotiating in bad faith (one side’s argument is much stronger than the other’s as far as that’s concerned).

One of the key arguments the owners have made is that their teams aren’t profit centers. It’s never couched in exactly those words, but that’s the primary gist of the argument. When Tom Ricketts spoke about the Cubs’ finances, he focused on a specific point: that the team isn’t hoarding cash.

“Most baseball owners don’t take money out of their team. They raise all the revenue they can from tickets and media rights, and they take out their expenses, and they give all the money left to their GM to spend,” he said, in regards to earlier comments by Scott Boras. Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt approached it from a different angle in discussing the team’s real estate expansion, saying “we don’t view (Ballpark Village) as a great profit opportunity.”

I find both of these quotes quite interesting, not for what they reveal, but rather for how precisely they are formulated. Ricketts focused on cash — dollars that flow from team coffers to owners’ bank accounts. DeWitt focused on the profitability of real estate ventures, profit being a notoriously nebulous concept.

Before going any further, I’ll note that both Ricketts and DeWitt are within their rights to posture heavily, or even lie in substance, with these statements. How productive that approach is (eh) and how well it sits with us (not very!) are questions worth considering, but they’re allowed. They’re not under oath, and they’re in no way required to open their books. Parties bluff and lie in negotiations all the time, and both of these statements are, at their core, negotiations with the players using the public as intermediary.

But let’s take them at their word. This seems to be the core issue the owners are asserting: they aren’t taking home any money from their teams, even in good times, so they can’t be expected to take a loss when times get tough. No cash when times are good, cash loss when there’s a recession; the math doesn’t add up. In almost every public statement, owners mention this exact sentiment. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

“If you let that mad galoot step into the ball he’ll knock its cover off.”

That’s what Pat Tableau, the old manager, said of him — that’s the legend of Ed Delahanty. Six foot one, 190 pounds, who grew up in a boardinghouse in Cleveland, who had four brothers playing with him in the bigs and was the best of them all. It didn’t matter that he swung at anything, that he couldn’t resist a wild pitch. He reached for everything, his huge frame stretching over the plate, over the other batter’s box, “like a kid trying to pick the ripest cherries at the extreme end of the branch.” He tore off the infielders’ shoes. He broke ankles with line drives, the ball hurtling through the air as if “shot from a cannon.” And if he didn’t like the pitcher, he would complain. If he had a bad day, he would complain. He smoked cigars, and he chewed tobacco, and he drank, and if the circumstances of his team weren’t going his way, he would threaten to quit.

Big Ed couldn’t hold back. That was what made him great; that was what stopped him, he said, from being greater.

***

In his breakout season — 1892, four years after his debut — Delahanty finally earned the title of “a decent utility man.” His first four years in baseball were passable. But he decided he was done with that, with “not doing much brilliant work.” He slugged .495 in 1892, the best mark in the league. He kept climbing. The league’s best slugging percentage in 1893 was his again, but nearly a hundred points higher. He hit 19 dead-ball homers. He had the most total bases. In 1894, he did his slugging percentage one better, adding a .405 average into the mix. He was 25. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Yes

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Oh yeah, chat go start now.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: LIkely the young elite players of today plus a few names that we don’t know yet

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Or, more accurately, we don’t know if they’ll be good or not

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Harvey doesn’t figure to pitch in a major league game anytime soon, not only because the 2020 season might not get off the ground but because his stint with the Angels last year was rather disastrous — so much so that he’s currently unsigned. However, there’s baseball going on in South Korea, and last week, a report by SBS (Seoul Broadcasting System) surfaced that he’s received interest from at least one KBO team. The New York Post’s Joel Sherman confirmed that multiple teams have been in touch with Boras Corp (which represents Harvey), and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman added that teams in Japan “are looking” at Harvey as well.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBJuomIAbkm/

The 31-year-old righty has been posting videos of his workouts via Instagram, and last month told the New York Post’s Dan Martin of his job search in general:

“I’m throwing bullpens once or twice a week. I hope I get the opportunity. I feel like I’m in high school again, where I have to showcase myself and start all over. I just want to put myself in position to be ready and if it doesn’t work out, to know I put the effort in to make a comeback.”

…“I’ve grown up and matured on and off the field,” Harvey said. “There are a lot of things I’d do differently, but I don’t like to live with regret.”

Read the rest of this entry »

If all goes well, this might be the final installment of our crowdsourcing exercise, though if the responses from last week are any indication, we’ve got at least one more round to go. The number of responses was down a bit this week, but we still averaged around 1,000 responses per question. As for whether there will be a season, our readers answered with a resounding maybe:

Over the course of the first five polls, two out of every three responses indicated there would be a major league baseball season. It was basically a 50/50 proposition late last week when this poll ran:

(For reference, here are the results for May 20, May 6, April 22, April 8, and March 24)

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that was fun. Let’s do it again today, please. Wednesday night was full of some big surprises early and a few later on, all of which are covered below. I’ll start moving drafted players onto their new teams over on The Board once I wake up, so make sure to take a peek at the farm system rankings as they currently stand — they’re about to change as the new prospects get moved over. Briefly, before I dive in, here are the states from which the most players were drafted yesterday:

**Editor’s Note: This piece initially incorrectly stated that the Baltimore Orioles had absorbed their four corners area. It has been corrected. FanGraphs regrets the error.**

The lone surprise there is Arizona, notable because a couple of teams (the Yankees) have either “absorbed” their four corners area recently or have considered it, meaning they let go of their area scout there and had other scouts fill in, thinking the area doesn’t have enough talent to justify having that extra scout. Four kids from the area went on Day 1, and with a lot of junior college spillover expected next year (there are lots of southwest JuCos), it seems especially foolish for other teams to really consider such cuts. Plus, there’s so much low-level pro ball here, baseball for which amateur scouts have a great context since the players are about the same age as their usual coverage. That makes turning over rocks on the complex backfields inexpensive since most of the four corners scouts live in Phoenix. Okay, I’m done. On to my team-by-team analysis. Read the rest of this entry »