Five years ago, gimmick defenses were bush league. I don’t just mean that in the pejorative baseball sense, though of course I mean that too. Rather, I mean that when Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh were running the Sonoma Stompers, they toyed with adding gimmick defenses to their indy ball team, and the team rebelled. The players tolerated it — not without reservation — but the reason the wild defensive alignments merited mention in the book is because they were wild.

That was 2015, however, and sensibilities have changed since then. Strange defensive alignments are hardly unusual now. Joey Votto faced a four-man outfield in 2017, and it’s gotten weirder from there. Joey Gallo faces four-man outfields with some frequency. Five-ish man infields have sometimes been a thing in do-or-die late game situations, but the Dodgers rolled one out against Eric Hosmer in the middle innings last year.

I know what you’re thinking. Ben’s going to talk about the “seven-man outfield” the Royals used against Miguel Cabrera. I’m not exactly sure that’s a novel defensive alignment, though. Backing up when somebody slow is batting isn’t the same as forfeiting a right fielder or inventing a new position. It was funny, no doubt, the ultimate mark of disrespect for someone’s speed, but teams have been doing something similar to Albert Pujols for years.

Even though the shock of novel positioning has mostly worn off, I did do a double take on Monday night. With the Pirates attempting to lock down a 5-1 win against the Brewers (about that…), Justin Smoak came to bat. The Pirates checked their laminated positioning cards, shuffled around, and presto! Four in the outfield:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something you hear a lot that also has the benefit of being true: baseball is a sport of haves and have nots. There are super teams scattered around the league, the Dodgers and Yankees and Astros of the world. There are plenty of teams that aren’t trying to compete this year; the Tigers and Royals spring to mind, but it’s not like there aren’t others.

In a technical sense, however, the league achieved a rare degree of parity over the weekend — and as we all know, being technically correct is the best kind of correct. After each team played three games, the entire league stood at either 1-2 or 2-1, with fifteen teams apiece in each camp. In that odd, specific sense, this is one of the best years ever for parity in baseball.

Come again? Per no less an authority than MLB.com, this is the first time in the last 66 years that no team started 3-0 in their first three games. In that contrived sense, then, this is the most parity since 1954. Given that it was far easier to have no team start 3-0 then (there were only 16 teams), you would even be justified in saying that this was the most balanced start of all time.

That sounds, without putting too much thought into it, very impressive. 1954! Man hadn’t landed on the moon. The LOOGY hadn’t been invented, or the personal computer. It was a very different time.

As fun as it would be to leave it at “Wow, that was crazy,” I thought I’d spoil the fun with a little math. First things first — what if we think every team is evenly matched? Let’s leave home field advantage out for now — we’re just approximating anyway, and that makes the math cleaner. The math for a single series is easy; if each game is a coin flip, all we need to do is find the odds of getting either three heads or three tails in a row. Read the rest of this entry »

Corey Kluber’s debut with Texas lasted just one inning. A strikeout, walk, caught stealing, and popup made for a snappy opening frame against Colorado on Sunday, and after 18 pitches, the 34-year-old right-hander’s velocity was right where it has been for years. It seemed like the start of a solid return to the mound for Kluber and an exciting first glimpse for Rangers fans at the team’s biggest offseason addition, but the good vibes faded quickly. Kluber never took the mound for the second inning, with the team quickly citing “tightness in his right shoulder” and saying there would be an update Monday.

The update came, and it wasn’t reassuring — Kluber has a Grade 2 tear of his teres major muscle, an injury that will require him to be shut down for at least four weeks. There is a chance he could miss the entire season, and if he does return at some point, he will need to pitch out of the bullpen, as there won’t be enough time to stretch him back out to handle a starter’s workload.

This is the second consecutive season the two-time Cy Young winner has missed substantial time following several years of him being one of the most durable starters in the game. Kluber threw at least 200 innings every year from 2014-18, racking up the second-highest innings total over that five-year span. That run got busted on a fluke play last spring when Marlins third baseman Brian Anderson hit a line drive that got Kluber in his right arm, causing a non-displaced fracture that ended his season after just seven starts. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big liar, or at least I am thanks to Major League Baseball. Last week, after the longest offseason in modern baseball history, I posted the Final ZiPS 2020 Projected Standings. It turns out, however, that these weren’t quite as final as we hoped. Last Thursday, MLB took the step — unprecedented in major sports, at least in my memory banks — of changing the league’s playoff structure the day the season started. The already-bloated 10-team playoff format became an engorged 16-team one. In are four mediocre teams; out is most of the advantage division winners get for being the best in their divisions.

I’m still hopeful this is solely a 2020 issue; the agreement between MLB and the Players Association was only for this year. Baseball’s regular season is the most important in major team sports, after all. Plus, it’s in the interests of the players to avoid further decoupling championships from team quality, as that would inevitably create a further drag on salaries. Assuming 2021 reverts to normal, it still leaves the question of 2020 projections. After a three-day weekend immured in my Fortress of Statitude, I’ve reconfigured ZiPS for the umpteenth and hopefully last time, and present the final, actually official 2020 projected standings. All the commentary in my original article still stands, but now the numbers are quite different.

Warning: There are lots of charts coming.

Let’s start with new start-of-season projections. For these standings, ZiPS knows nothing about what has happened so far this season, whether it’s wins, losses, player stats, or injuries. Whatever it knew last Wednesday, it still knows.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I saw Matt Shoemaker was on the grass, grimacing in pain. It was last year in Oakland; Shoemaker ran over to cover first on a groundball, then crumpled to the ground. He had torn his ACL.

As I wrote then, it was a cruel, unfair freak accident for someone who had seen far too many of those in his career. Shoemaker, though, seemed determined to push through. I was rooting for him to return and succeed. On Saturday, finally, he made his first start in over a year — having, again, overcome adversity to come back to the field.

And though he was making his return in front of an empty stadium, in the middle of a global crisis, it was hard not to give in to the creeping feeling of joy, sneaking in from behind the anxiety. It is wonderful to see someone succeed in spite of everything.

***

“Overcoming adversity” is about as tired a baseball cliche as there is. Look deep enough into the background of pretty much any player and you’ll find adversity that was overcome — that’s just the nature of life, and especially the nature of pursuing a career as stressful, all-consuming, and specialized as professional baseball. That’s not to say that these stories aren’t worth hearing: It’s important to understand the lifetimes of effort and struggle that go into the games we watch for entertainment. But flattening every story into a pat tale of “overcoming adversity” doesn’t do justice to the gravity of players’ experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Less than a week into the 2020 regular season, Major League Baseball has a full-blown crisis on its hands, as the Miami Marlins are in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak that threatens their ability to field a competitive team and calls into question the league’s entire return-to-play effort. On Sunday, the Marlins played the Phillies without three of their regulars or their scheduled starting pitcher, all of whom had tested positive for the coronavirus. On Monday morning, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that eight more players and two coaches had tested positive as well, and on Tuesday The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported four additional players testing positive, bringing the total number of cases over the last five days to 17. Monday and Tuesday’s games involving both the Marlins (who were to play their home opener against the Orioles) and Phillies (who were to host the Yankees) have been postponed, and more may follow.

Needless to say, this is not good.

Even before the Marlins’ outbreak came to light, MLB was unable to make it to the first official pitch of the regular season without a star player testing positive and being scratched from the Opening Day lineup amid questions about testing turnaround time and the protocol for handling exposed players. About five hours before the Yankees’ Aaron Hicks stepped in against Max Scherzer at Nationals Park last Thursday, Washington left fielder Juan Soto was pulled from the lineup due to a lab-confirmed positive test off a saliva sample taken on Sunday — four days earlier — igniting fears that other Nationals had been exposed in the time since he had provided the sample on Tuesday. That Soto had tested negative on three subsequent instant-result tests (both saliva and nasal) further muddied the waters.

The Nationals did not quarantine any additional players after contact tracing Soto’s infection, having determined that “no players or staff were deemed to have met the CDC definition of close contact” — staying within six feet for at least 15 minutes — with Soto. Thankfully, the 20-year-old slugger is reportedly asymptomatic and has received the first of two lab-confirmed negative tests necessary for his return; he will also have to go 72 hours without exhibiting symptoms. The rest of the Nationals reportedly tested negative as of Saturday, and at this writing, the team has reported no further infections.

As for the Marlins, though they hail from a state that has become the epicenter of the pandemic, the team had not experienced a disproportionate number of positive tests between the start of their summer camp and the approach of Opening Day, with only outfielders Lewis Brinson and Matt Joyce landing on the injured list due to undisclosed reasons as of July 16. On Friday, however, just before the their first game against the Phillies in Philadelphia, the Marlins placed catcher Jorge Alfaro on the injured list for undisclosed reasons. Then, about an hour before Sunday’s game, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that scheduled starting pitcher José Ureña had been scratched due to a positive test. The game proceeded nonetheless, and Heyman soon followed up with a report that first baseman/designated hitter Garrett Cooper and right fielder Harold Ramirez — both of whom had started the team’s first two games — had tested positive as well, as had Alfaro. Read the rest of this entry »

The first few days of baseball have brought us our first taste of this year’s new extra innings rules. Sure, the rules were around in the minor leagues before now. Sure, teams theoretically care about their prospects winning. But for the most part, this is new — high stakes games with untested rules to try out. There have now been five extra inning games. Let’s walk through the decisions in each of them to see whether teams are playing the odds or acting rashly.

Angels at A’s

The game between the Angels and A’s was the first extra innings contest of the year. In the top of the 10th, the Angels played it by the book. With first-ever ghost runner Shohei Ohtani on second, Jared Walsh swung away. Whoops:

What can we say tactically, other than that you shouldn’t do that as a runner? Not much. Matt Olson made an excellent read, Matt Chapman made an excellent scoop, and it’s probably a bad break for the Angels that their first automatic runner was the player who had the most on his plate in summer camp, between rehabbing from Tommy John and the usual rigors of two-way work. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss several takeaways from the first weekend of the MLB regular season, starting with the COVID-19 outbreak among the Miami Marlins, the apparent inadequacy of MLB’s health and safety protocols, and the season’s tenuous state, before segueing into game action including sac bunts, pitcher usage, parity, the pace of games, masks, the ways they’re watching, and much more.

Audio intro: Eric Matthews, "Start of the Meltdown"
Audio outro: Fleetwood Mac, "Keep on Going"

Link to Rosenthal and Stark on the Marlins
Link to Joel Sherman on the Marlins
Link to Mike Petriello on bunting in extra innings
Link to Ben Clemens on bunting in extra innings
Link to You Must Remember This episode
Link to Alibi Ike trailer
Link to Alibi Ike short story
Link to BP on Bard and Choi
Link to Shakeia Taylor on MLB’s tepid embrace of BLM

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Once Major League Baseball made the necessary decision to dramatically shorten its 2020 season amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the chances that there would be a few more statistical oddities than usual significantly increased. The potential exists for the numbers themselves to be goofy, like a player hitting .400, but the players who top leaderboards this season might also surprise. For a 60-game stretch in 2018, the batting title belonged to Scooter Gennett; for another, the home run leader was Matt Carpenter. And with this morning’s disturbing news of an outbreak in the Marlins’ clubhouse, this season could wind up being even shorter than we believed just a few days ago, cut off at a point so early that its statistics would be rendered utterly meaningless. But even if we don’t end up 60 games worth of baseball, one data point will likely hold up to historical scrutiny: Giancarlo Stanton had the hardest hit ball of 2020.

483 feet! 121 mph! @Giancarlo818 with a ?. pic.twitter.com/REfWTeejGV

— MLB (@MLB) July 26, 2020

You don’t need to know any of the numbers to appreciate that home run. It’s a cool home run. It has all the aesthetics of a good Stanton dinger — a mistake pitch up in the zone, a direct, powerful swing from a truly massive human being, and then that same human being slowly strutting up the first base line while he watches an obviously crushed ball land in a place most guys can’t reach in batting practice. It’s hard to improve upon that experience, but the numbers actually do add something here. The distance of the homer was 483 feet, and the exit velocity was 121.3 mph. In 2019, just seven home runs surpassed that distance, and no batted balls of any kind matched that exit velocity. If I had to guess, none will in 2020, either.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Ivey fashioned a 1.46 ERA over 46 Double-A innings last year, and in the words of our own Eric Longenhagen, he features “a gorgeous, old-school, 12-to-6 yakker that freezes hitters.” A third-round pick in 2017 out of Grayson County College, Ivey is No. 14 on our Houston Astros Top Prospects list.

Ivey is also somewhat unique. Along with having transferred from a D-1 power to a JUCO — this despite holding his own as a freshman — the Dallas-area native has a delivery that the Baseball America Prospect Handbook described as “something out of the 1940s.”

The 24-year-old right-hander, who as noted in a recent Sunday Notes column has recovered from COVID-19, talked about his “yakker,” his path to pro ball, and his “violent head whack” over the telephone earlier this month.

———

David Laurila: You transferred from Texas Tech to Grayson for your sophomore season, reportedly to become draft-eligible a year early. You were subsequently selected by the Astros in the third round. Did things pretty much go as planned?

Tyler Ivey: “First, going to junior college was different, but it was a very good different. I was excited to go there because of the coach at Grayson, Dusty Hart. I’d known him a little in the past, and a lot of buddies had played for him. I’d heard nothing but amazing things about him and Grayson.

“Obviously it’s a different environment there. You go from living in a three-story condo/house to a pretty crammed-up dorm where you’re sharing a bathroom with four other guys. But that’s something you fall in love with over time. Grayson was a really good place to do your own thing and just be yourself. They have a minor-league sort of mentality where you need to put the work in and then just go out and perform. That really allowed me to grow within myself and create my own routine. It ended up working out as well as I possibly could have hoped.”

Laurila: Living in a crammed-up dorm sounds like perfect preparation for life in the minors. Read the rest of this entry »