Rafael Devers was an absolute stud last year. He amassed more than 700 plate appearances, the first full season of his career, and put up career highs in pretty much everything. Each of the three slash stats, ISO, wRC+, WAR, defensive value, baserunning runs — seriously, pretty much everything. But I’m not here to talk about that today; we get it, Rafael Devers is great. Instead, let’s talk about another career high: eight times caught stealing.

That sounds bad, right off the jump. Eight times? The rule of thumb with stolen bases is a 75% success rate; succeed any less often, and you’re costing your team value. Take a look at the caught stealing leaderboard, and you can see that most baserunners implicitly get this tradeoff:

Going 50% on your attempts clearly isn’t that. Take a look at this one, from a May 8 game against the Orioles:

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With so much attention focused upon the Korea Baseball Organization right now, it’s helpful to find points of reference, not only players from major league organizations who have gone over to South Korea to escape the Quad A life of bouncing up and down between the minors and majors but also those who have rejoined MLB. One who has done so while upgrading the quality of his baseball life is Josh Lindblom 린드블럼. A 2008 second-round pick by the Dodgers out of Purdue University, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound righty spent parts of four seasons in the majors (2011-14) with four different teams, albeit with diminishing returns. Twice he was traded for former All-Stars, namely Shane Victorino (in a Dodgers-Phillies deal) and Michael Young (in a Phillies-Rangers swap).

After the 2014 season, Lindblom signed with the KBO’s Lotte Giants, and quickly found a level of success that had eluded him stateside. He went 13-10 with a 3.56 ERA (142 ERA+) and 6.5 WAR in 2015 (advanced stats via Statiz), and while he wasn’t as strong in ’16 (10-13, 5.29 ERA, 99 ERA+, 2.7 WAR), he returned to the States on a minor-league deal with the Pirates. Unfortunately, he scuffled during a brief major league stint, and was released in mid-July. He returned to the Lotte Giants on a midseason deal, and helped the team to its first playoff appearance since 2012 by going 5-3, with a 3.72 ERA (136 ERA+) and 2.3 WAR in 72 innings.

From there, Lindblom landed a one-year, $1.45 million deal with the Doosan Bears and emerged as one of the top pitchers in the entire KBO, going 15-4 with league bests in ERA (2.88), ERA+ (175), and WAR (6.8). After re-signing for $1.77 million for 2019, he followed that up with a similarly outstanding campaign, going 20-3, with a 2.59 ERA (164 ERA+) and 6.9 WAR. The Bears, who finished second in 2018 and lost the Korean Series to the SK Wyverns, won it all in ’19, and Lindblom was voted the league’s MVP; in both years, he won the circuit’s Choi Dong-won Award, as the KBO’s top pitcher. Now 32 years old, he parlayed his success abroad into a three-year, $9.125 million-plus-incentives deal to start for the Brewers — the kind of security he’s never had before. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about an anecdote in David Halberstam’s book The Teammates about prescient Cardinals pitcher Harry Brecheen, the uproar when players were first prevented from leaving their gloves on the field, and the 20th anniversary of Glenallen Hill’s rooftop home run, then revisit Michael Jordan’s motivations for playing baseball and discuss the etymology and application of the term “eyewash” inside and outside of baseball (plus a remembrance of the late Jerry Stiller and a salute to the alternately underrated and overrated Ken Phelps).

Audio intro: Carole King, "Up on the Roof"
Audio outro: The Ramones, "Garden of Serenity"

Link to The Teammates
Link to article about gloves on the field
Link to Pages from Baseball’s Past
Link to video of Hill’s homer
Link to article about Hill’s homer
Link to Verducci on Jordan
Link to R.J. on Jordan
Link to eyewash article
Link to Seinfeld scene
Link to article about Phelps
Link to article about the Phelps All-Stars
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Six months ago, few people likely loved the status quo more than MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and the group of owners who employ him. Having just completed the third year of a five-year Collective Bargaining Agreement with the players, baseball revenues continued to soar, with estimated profits during those years totaling $3.57 billion even before accounting for the $2 billion windfall from the BAMTech sale to Disney. Players saw their share of revenues shrink over those three years due to stagnant payrolls, and hoped for an opportunity to negotiate a better deal after the 2021 season. After years of huge profits under the current CBA, MLB owners are faced with the threat of potential losses, and according to reports from Evan Drellich, Ken Rosenthal, and Joel Sherman, the owners appear set to ask the players to subsidize those losses.

According to Rosenthal’s report, MLB wants to introduce revenue sharing for 2020 only:

Because games, at least initially, will be played without fans, the players would be asked to accept a further reduction in pay, most likely by agreeing to a set percentage of revenues for this season only.

The idea behind such a plan, from the league’s perspective, would be to protect the players and owners against the economic uncertainty created by the virus.

The players agreed in March to prorate their salaries in a shortened season. Those salaries cover the regular season only, while postseason shares are based upon gate receipts. If the players agreed to a set percentage of revenue, they also would share any additional national TV money generated during the postseason.

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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.

MLB To Communicate Return Plans Early This Week

Major League Baseball owners and commissioner Rob Manfred will convene over a conference call Monday to approve plans for the league’s return, according to a report by Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic. If approved, a proposal will be passed on to the players’ union on Tuesday.

The details of the proposal, Rosenthal says, are likely to address many of the questions that have been batted around in the public sphere over the last few weeks. Spring training would get rebooted for three weeks in mid-June, setting up a regular season that begins in early July and lasts between 78 and 82 games. Teams would open in their home ball parks where possible, and play regionalized schedules that include only teams in their typical divisions and those in opposite league’s corresponding division (AL East teams would face AL and NL East teams, and so on). Teams whose home cities are not containing the virus at the level the league requires could temporarily locate to their spring training sites. Rosters could be expanded to include 45 to 50 players.

This proposal would also expand the playoffs from five to seven teams in each league. Each No. 1 seed would get a first round bye, while the other two division winners and the top Wild Card team would host the three other Wild Card teams in a best-of-three Wild Card round. Read the rest of this entry »

The frequency of North American baseball players randomly disappearing from their teams reached a peak in the early 20th century. Baseball was a big enough deal that a player going missing was newsworthy, which allowed me to read about their disappearances a century later. At the same time, baseball was not yet a big enough deal that choosing to skip out on your team meant missing a multi-million dollar payday, or the prospect of multi-million dollar legal action brought against you. The phenomenon seemed so common in the early 1900s that the stories of players going missing were often preceded with “another” or followed by “again,” and the tales were plentiful enough to allow for quite a bit of variety in their conclusions.

While the tale of the bridegroom who never came arrived from the late 19th century, the stories that will follow over the next few entries hail from a time when both the American and National Leagues existed alongside a veritable wilderness of competitive minor league teams, constantly moving, changing names, collapsing, scheming, and springing up again. It was the perfect time for baseball players to get lost in intrigue and confusion — and a time in which it was easy for players to be obscured by history. We begin with a story of the latter.

***

This is the very brief tale of Everett L. Sweetser, a 27-year-old semiprofessional baseball player and resident of North Yarmouth, Maine. By all accounts, Sweetser wasn’t a particularly notable player. In fact, I can find no public connection between his name and the word “baseball” until August 6, 1912: the day that his missing notice was published in the Boston Globe.

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So far this season, my OOTP Brewers updates have followed a familiar cadence. Every Monday or Tuesday, I write about some new disaster for the team. Josh Lindblom is out for the year, maybe, or Lorenzo Cain isn’t hitting. Maybe the Mets put up six trillion runs on us, or Luis Urías broke his foot rehabbing his broken hand. You get the idea — these articles has been a struggle to keep a team on the field, serialized.

This week is going to be about whatever the opposite of that is. The Brewers have played six games since my last update. They’ve won all six, taking them to 23-18 on the year. The contributions have come from everywhere — the team allowed only 15 runs in those six games while scoring 32. Josh Hader faced 20 batters and struck out 12. This is the Brewers team the Milwaukee brass hoped for in the offseason; pitching lines that look like this:

Oh yeah — Corey Knebel is back. The above game was his first one back in the majors, but he looked fine during his rehab assignment as well. In the meantime, we’ve added Tony Cingrani on a minor league contract, and after a few tune-up appearances, he’ll be ready to bolster the big league bullpen whenever needed. Mystery man Sam Pierron is still going back and forth with me about money, but between Knebel and Cingrani, the reinforcements have arrived. Read the rest of this entry »