Just ahead of the start of the season, MLB and the MLBPA announced an agreement to add an additional round of playoff games to the postseason, eliminating the Wild Card as we knew it for this season only. While they were reportedly part of several of the proposals to resume play, when the players and owners didn’t revise the March agreement, expanded playoffs fell to the wayside. But the lead-up to the regular season apparently gave the sides more time to work out a deal (any changes to the playoff structure have to be collectively bargaine), so here we are. As detailed last night when we frantically changed our playoff odds page, there will be:

• 16 Playoff Teams
• Division winners will receive the top three seeds in each league
• Second-place division finishers will receive the 4-6 seeds in each league
• The two teams in each league with the best records apart from those six will be the seventh and eighth seeds
• The top four seeds in each league will host every game in a best-of-three Wild Card Series to advance to the division series

In terms of the agreement, players will receive a playoff pool totaling $50 million; competitive balance tax money will not be collected this season, which should save the Yankees $8 million to $10 million. The television rights to seven of the eight first-round series will go to ESPN, with the other series going to TBS. The revised 60-game regular season schedule ended up giving FOX and FS1 the same number of televised games, with TBS missing out on a handful of games and ESPN losing a significant part of their regular season schedule. Providing TBS with an extra game or two and ESPN with somewhere between 14 and 21 playoff games (they were previously paying $27 million for a single Wild Card game) likely allows MLB to recover the bulk, or potentially all, of the lost national television revenue for the 2020 season despite the shortened schedule.

As for the ramifications on the field, the extra round of playoffs blends multiple purposes with respect to the season. A shortened regular season means more variation and makes it more difficult to determine who the best teams are. There’s a much greater chance of an otherwise good team missing out on the playoffs due mostly to dumb luck. Take the Dodgers as an example. In a 162-game season, our playoff odds put their chances of making the playoffs at 97%. When the season is shortened to 60 games, those odds go down to 86%. There’s no change in talent between those two situations, but the shorter season makes it so that talent mixes more with luck, resulting in the Dodgers not making the playoffs as often. Adding an extra round and three more teams per league puts the Dodgers odds of making the playoffs back up to 95%. Good teams missing the playoffs because of a shortened season is something probably best avoided if we want the best possible showcase in October. Read the rest of this entry »

After everything that led to the start of its truncated 60-game season, Major League Baseball tried its hardest to fill Opening Day with all the excitement it could. The defending World Series champion Nationals faced this offseason’s most sought-after free agent pitcher, making his debut for the league’s most storied franchise. After that, the Dodgers took the field, joined for the first time by the newest face of their franchise, to host their longtime rivals. Leading immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci — the face of the United States’ fight against the COVID-19 pandemic that led to the suspension of sports seasons all over the world — threw out the first pitch of the season, a not-so-subtle signal to the American public that things are fine, or fine enough.

But the moment had already been soured. Hours before the first game of their season, Nationals wunderkind Juan Soto was announced to have tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing him to miss the season-opener and enter self-isolation. In addition to being scary news for Soto — who is asymptomatic — it also served as one more reminder of the dangers MLB faces as it attempts to play a season in the middle of a pandemic, and the complicated moral quandaries fans of the sport will struggle with as long as that season goes on.

Wednesday — Works out at Nationals Park

Thursday — Receives positive test result for Tuesday test

That is four full days between giving a saliva sample that tested negative and receiving a positive result.

— Jesse Dougherty (@dougherty_jesse) July 23, 2020

Not that we needed the reminder in the first place. For four months, we’ve been absorbing as much information as possible about the virus, its potentially deadly effects, and its insidious spread through asymptomatic carriers; about the difficult ethical debates it created; about the lost jobs and the likely permanent damage dealt to already vulnerable industries and communities; about the potentially devastating hurdles and pitfalls that lurk within the return plans of various leagues; and, of course, since this is pro sports, about whether all of this might be rendered moot by the greed of ownership. After all of that, there was hope MLB’s return would be the escape we’ve all anxiously waited for. Instead, it has become its own source of anxiety — a profoundly risky gamble with thousands of lives in the balance, in which we root less for teams and players and more for the simple wish that nothing terrible happens. Read the rest of this entry »

The universe in 2020, it seems, can’t abide happiness—at least not for the Dodgers. Just one day after the team announced a gigantic extension with Mookie Betts, locking up one of the best players in baseball for the next decade-plus, Los Angeles learned that it will be without Clayton Kershaw for a while. Hours ahead of what would’ve been his ninth career Opening Day start, Kershaw instead hit the Injured List with a back strain suffered while working out on Tuesday; per Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, there’s no timetable for his return.

This kind of malady has been frustratingly common for Kershaw, who’s battled his fair share of back pain over the last few seasons. A herniated disc sidelined him for two months in 2016, and back tightness cost him five weeks in 2017 and a month of action in 2018. The 32-year-old lefty managed to avoid further lumbar issues last season en route to a 3.03 ERA and 3.4 WAR in 178 1/3 innings (though shoulder inflammation resulted in an early-season IL stint). But as anyone with a perpetually sore spine will tell you, those problems are often chronic. As such, it has to be worrying for both Kershaw and the Dodgers that his back is once again the source of his woes, and while this strain could be minor, it also could result in a multi-week absence. Read the rest of this entry »

You were supposed to read this yesterday. Yesterday, when the playoffs consisted of just 10 teams and Mookie Betts hadn’t yet registered his first hit in Dodger blue. But as with a great deal else about this season, the 2020 playoffs will be something different than we initially expected. Mere hours before the first pitch of last night’s Yankees-Nationals tilt was scheduled to be thrown, ESPN’s Marly Rivera reported that MLB and the MLBPA had approved a deal to expand the postseason. This new structure will only be in effect for the 2020 season, barring further negotiations between the league and the players. The field will now feature 16 teams; every division winner and runner up will make the playoffs, along with the two teams in each league that have the best records beyond those six. They’ll meet in a three-game Wild Card Series that will be seeded thusly:

Seeds 1-3 will go to the division winners based on record.

Seeds 4-6 will go to the runners-up based on record.

Seeds 7 and 8 will be based on record.

Thus, there is a possibility the third-best division winner actually plays a worse team than the two best division winners.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 23, 2020

All of the games in the Wild Card Series will be played in the home ballpark of the more highly seeded team. In the event of regular season ties, mathematical tiebreakers will be used — MLB isn’t exactly keen to play games deeper into the Fall.

David Appelman and Sean Dolinar have already updated our playoff odds to account for the new format (they are wizards). You can poke around here, but the unsurprising takeaway is this: a lot of teams are a lot more likely to play October baseball than they were when yesterday began. Read the rest of this entry »

7:02	Dan Szymborski: Chats. A time for chats.

7:02	Dan Szymborski: THERE IS AN ACTUAL BASEBALL GAME

7:02	Dan Szymborski: I think. Today’s Thursday, right?

7:03	Dan Szymborski: No, we can’t weird up the Real Chats too much.

Read the rest of this entry »

We made it! It took a four-month journey through a still-raging pandemic and some still-burning baseball economic issues, but Opening Day of the weirdest season we’re likely to see in our lifetimes is here. The 2020 season is not a marathon, but a sprint, so we’re already in the home stretch. We’re not starting at square one, of course; if this were Monopoly, the bank would be out of hotels and everyone playing the game would hate each other, especially that jerk who has Boardwalk and Park Place.

Projecting such a season presents some unique challenges a prognosticator doesn’t normally face. It’s not projecting the individual players’ production that’s the problem so much as all the stuff around it. How many players will miss time due to the league’s COVID-19 protocols? How do we adjust for injuries when teams will play just 37% of the games, but players’ recovery from hamstring and elbow woes won’t be similarly prorated? Will top prospect talent have the same short-term upside when they’re riding the bench or practicing at their team’s alternate site that they would if they were playing actual games in the minors? How will the strange, crowdless games and the stresses of keeping up social distancing guidelines affect play?

No, I’m actually asking! I can make educated guesses that I hope aren’t preposterous, but I don’t actually know the answers to these questions. For someone who models stuff, it’s a maddening situation. But it’s a challenge I can’t avoid given that projecting stuff is, well, a big part of my job! But you’re not here to commiserate with me, humor my self-indulgent wordsmithing, or dig out where I make a reference to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, so let’s go straight to the final projected standings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets were fortunate when it came to Jacob deGrom’s back, but they weren’t so lucky regarding Marcus Stroman’s left calf. The 29-year-old righty will start the season on the Injured List due to what’s been described as “a torn muscle in his left calf” — meaning that he has at least a Grade 1 strain. He won’t require surgery, but manager Luis Rojas described him as “week to week.” In a season that’s just over nine weeks long, that’s not good news.

Per Newsday’s Anthony Rieber, Stroman was hit in the calf by a line drive during an intrasquad game last Friday, though he kept pitching. On Monday, he felt tightness in his calf during a 50-pitch bullpen session. On Tuesday night, he underwent an MRI that revealed the tear.

The loss of Stroman is particularly ominous given the Mets’ reduced depth in the wake of Noah Syndergaard’s Tommy John surgery, a matter I highlighted earlier this week. As I discovered, the 2.1 WAR deGrom is projected to produce this year accounts for 38.2% of his rotation’s WAR, the highest share of any pitcher with any team. What’s more, the 1.0 WAR drop-off from deGrom to the number two starter, Stroman, was the largest in the majors, and where the team’s total of 5.5 WAR ranked ninth among the 30 teams, the 3.4 WAR projected for the starters besides their ace is tied for 14th. Read the rest of this entry »

At last, nearly four months after originally planned, the Opening Day of the 2020 season is upon us. It begins this evening at 7 pm ET in Washington, DC, with an impressive pitching matchup that reprises last year’s World Series opener, albeit with one of the principals having changed teams. At Nationals Park — where, in acknowledgement of his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic that caused the delay, Dr. Anthony Fauci will throw out the ceremonial first pitch — three-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer will take the ball for the defending champion Nationals while Gerrit Cole will inaugurate his record-setting $324 million contract with his first regular season start as a Yankee. The night’s other contest, beginning at 10 pm ET, calls upon one of the sport’s top rivalries, pitting the Dodgers — albeit with Dustin May as a last-minute substitute for Clayton Kershaw, who was placed on the injured list due to back stiffness on Thursday afternoon — against the Giants and Johnny Cueto.

This will be Scherzer’s fifth Opening Day start, and third in a row, all with Washington; a fractured knuckle in his right ring finger forced him to yield to Stephen Strasburg in 2017. Cole has just one previous Opening Day start, in 2017 for the Pirates. Both pitchers lost at least a couple such starts to Justin Verlander, Scherzer’s teammate in Detroit from 2010-14 and Cole’s teammate since late ’17; Scherzer didn’t even get the nod when he was fresh off his 2013 AL Cy Young award. Verlander, who will take the ball in the Astros’ opener against the Mariners on Friday, will move into the active lead in Opening Day starts with his 12th. Kershaw would have taken sole possession of third with nine:

Read the rest of this entry »