Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about beverage consumption, foreign baseball leagues’ potential for popularity in the U.S., and the life and death of legendary flamethrower Steve Dalkowski, who passed away this week. Then they talk to Rob Liu of CPBLStats.com (25:48) and Dan Kurtz of MyKBO.net (58:22) about two leagues that have beaten MLB back to action, Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) and South Korea’s Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), touching on how their seasons have started, the best ways for American baseball fans to follow them, the players and teams to know, the aesthetic and stylistic differences between them and MLB, the histories and evolutions of the leagues, their fluctuating home run rates, their foreign-player presences, their embraces of sabermetrics, their engaging ballpark atmospheres, the CPBL’s playoff format, and the KBO’s bat flips.

Audio intro: Alec Benjamin, "Steve"
Audio interstitial 1: Sturgill Simpson, "Fastest Horse in Town"
Audio interstitial 2: James Chen, "Summer in Taiwan"
Audio outro: Nadan, "Play Ball"

Link to Pat Jordan on Dalkowski
Link to John Eisenberg on Dalkowski
Link to Joe Posnanski on Dalkowski
Link to Posnanski on Dalkowski again
Link to Steve Treder on Dalkowski
Link to Dom Amore on Dalkowski
Link to Dalkowski obit
Link to CPBL Stats
Link to info on CPBL home run rates
Link to Chin-hui Tsao’s Wikipedia page
Link to story about Tsao as a prospect
Link to Eleven Sports Taiwan
Link to CPBL streaming guide
Link to Jay Jaffe on the CPBL
Link to Marc Carig on CPBL broadcasts
Link to MyKBO
Link to MyKBO Stats
Link to bat flips feature
Link to Sung Min Kim on KBO ball de-juicing
Link to story about ESPN and KBO
Link to KBO streaming instructions
Link to Jaffe on the KBO
Link to order The MVP Machine

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In Friday afternoon’s FanGraphs Live stream, starting at 2 PM ET, we are bringing you a doubleheader of games featuring surprising early contenders.

In our first game, Wade Miley makes his 2020 debut for the Cincinnati Reds, a team off to a shocking 21-3 start and standing comfortably at the top of the NL Central. As we near the end of April, Jesse Winker leads the National League with a .405 batting average and Trevor Bauer, at 3-0 with a 2.24 ERA, ranks third in the National League with 1.2 WAR. Five Reds currently rank in the top 20 in position player wins: Eugenio Suárez (1st), Joey Votto (4th), Winker (12th), Shogo Akiyama (14th), and Tucker Barnhart (19th). Of the regulars, free agent signing Nick Castellanos has been the only disappointment, hitting .216/.303/.364 in the early going for -0.5 WAR.

That Arizona is tied for second place in the NL West, 3 1/2 games behind the leader, isn’t surprising. What is surprising, however, is that the leader is the Colorado Rockies, not the Los Angeles Dodgers! The Diamondbacks are coming off getting swept by the Atlanta Braves, but get Madison Bumgarner for today’s turn against Miley, likely Cincy’s weakest starting pitcher.

Over in our American League game, we get a prime Dallas Keuchel vs. Shohei Ohtani matchup as the 15-11 White Sox take on the 12-13 Angels. The White Sox have fallen back to second in the division with the Twins winning nine of their last 10 games, but get Luis Robert back in the lineup coming off a strained hamstring. Their Nomar Mazara gamble has paid off in the early going with Mazara standing at a .377/.402/.740 triple-slash with seven homers in 21 games. Gio González has struggled with a 7.23 ERA, but Keuchel has been a prime pickup so far and has yet to allow a home run in 33 1/3 2020 innings.

So join Paul Sporer, Ben Clemens, and Dan Szymborski for some hot virtual baseball action right here, on this very page!

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.

Preliminary results from a recent study of antibody tests among New York City residents revealed that 13.9% of tested people came back positive for COVID-19 antibodies. That’s good news in a couple of ways. It’s another test that suggests that, at least preliminarily, the actual fatality rate may be lower than the observed case fatality rate (CFR). This happened with H1N1 in 2009, which also saw the estimated fatality rate, post-outbreak, come far below the observed CFR.

It also suggests the health care system might be able to continue to treat patients, if not in ideal fashion, at least avoiding the worst of experiences of countries like Italy, though reports of the experiences of front-line health care workers across the US, and particularly in places like New York City, serve as a grim a reminder of why it is so important to stay home.

What it means for the return of activities like organized baseball, however, remains to be seen, as such a return is obviously far more dependent on widely available tests for current infection and a decline in fatalities and hospital resource usage in states like Arizona and Florida.

And please, do not inject yourself with bleach or Lysol, whatever the president says!

MLB The Show is MLB The Show

Perhaps one of the only businesses thriving right now, at least of those that don’t make toilet paper, is Sony Interactive Entertainment San Diego, the developers of MLB The Show 20 for the PlayStation 4. Without much real baseball, you’ve seen a lot more exposure for the game than I can ever remember. We now have major league players streaming games against each other live, with ESPN and other networks set to broadcast select games from the MLB The Show Players League. The first broadcast was last night, with the next one coming Sunday night.

Korean Baseball Organization, ESPN at an Impasse

One of the bits of news that excited me last week was the prospect of seeing more KBO games broadcast live in the United States. If you haven’t watched one of their broadcasts before, the energy and excitement the crowds bring is quite refreshing, even if you do not speak the language (I don’t). What comes across is a league in which fun appears to be the priority, a sometimes sharp contrast with what is often an over-serious sport here. Theme songs, chants, bat flips — anything goes!

So it was disappointing to hear that there were hiccups in ESPN’s attempts to broadcast KBO games in the United States to help fill the programming void. Unfortunately, the catch appears to be that ESPN wanted the rights to the games for free. KBO baseball is established in South Korea and while a whole new audience is tempting, it’s a business and a league that is far beyond the point of needing to “work for exposure.”

COVID-19 Outbreak in Venezuela

While individual major league players have largely been spared from the effects of COVID-19 (though not always their family members), not everyone in baseball has been so fortunate. In Nueva Esparta, a small state consisting of three islands off the northern coast of Venezuela, there have been 93 reported cases of COVID-19, 83 of which are connected to the Roberto Vahlis academy. This makes up nearly a third of Venezuela’s reported coronavirus cases. The Phillies signed an outfielder, Yhoswar Garcia, out of the academy just last month.

More Teams Extend Benefits

In Wednesday’s COVID-19 roundup from my colleague Tony Wolfe, there was a handy-dandy reference chart of which teams have extended non-player employee salaries and for how long. Since Wednesday, the Texas Rangers have reiterated that there would be no layoffs or furloughs until at least the end of May. The Mets are at least formulating a plan for June and beyond, past their previous May 31 commitment. And the Pirates extending their employment guarantee to May 31 also just missed our publication time.

NHL Moves Closer to Reboot

There’s safety in numbers (well, maybe not), and MLB now has more company when it comes to leagues trying to find creative ways to continue their suspended seasons. The NHL is exploring their own version of baseball’s Arizona/Florida solution. The NHL initially tried exploring a neutral site plan, but found the logistics too difficult to overcome, so the current plan under consideration involves a number of regional “hubs” at which teams would play.

How Taiwan Restarted Baseball

This isn’t really new news in itself, but there was a highly detailed piece describing the steps that Taiwan needed to take in order to make starting the season practical. It’s going to take a lot more to get baseball going than just confining players to hotels. Hygiene will be especially important, and could present a challenge for a sport known for so much spitting and licking of hands.

When you see the “we said, they said” press release exchanges in the media between MLB and the MLBPA concerning salaries in a fanless baseball world, it serves as a reminder that baseball’s biggest fight is actually the one on the horizon. By comparison, that fight might make the COVID-19 policy squabbling look like a nursery school shoving match.

Baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2021 season, and long before the novel coronavirus altered the 2020 baseball landscape, players had real grievances they wished to see resolved in the next labor agreement. After two tepid winters of free agency — it did thaw a bit this last winter — and teams treating luxury tax thresholds as soft salary caps, players have expressed varying degrees of unhappiness with baseball’s current economics. Service time shenanigans like the Cubs swearing that Kris Bryant’s services were needed exactly one the day after a call-up would have otherwise resulted in free agency following the 2021 season are not conducive to good-faith negotiations between equal parties.

The players are no doubt going into these talks with a wish list of things they want. Some they’ll get, others they won’t. But the negotiation on both sides will be hard-fought; dealings between owners and players usually only go smoothly when the subject is taking away money from people with no voice at the table.

If I were the evil dictator of the MLBPA — I made myself the evil dictator of MLB last week when mixing up some new divisions — here are what my priorities would be for the next CBA. (I’ll let someone else answer the question of why I always label myself an evil dictator.) Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s hard for me not to look at my own numbers against them and be pissed,” a retired major league pitcher said. “Everyone involved deserves to be seriously punished because it’s wrong.”

– a retired major league pitcher on the Astros, quoted in ESPN, January 2020

Cheating is serious business. We know this, almost instinctively, from earliest childhood — the righteous anger one feels when you catch someone sneaking a peek at your cards, dropping a rock only after seeing you put down scissors, sticking out a suspiciously well-placed foot preventing your escape in a game of tag. That’s not fair — cheater! You appeal to others around you, trying to get them to see, to mete out justice. Something has been disrupted here; something is wrong that can only be righted with punishment. You entered into a contest with agreed-upon rules, and those rules were broken in favor of cheap victory. It is self-evidently outrageous, self-evidently cruel, and even if justice is not done — even if the false victory is upheld through deception, lack of witnesses, or negligence of investigation — the hurt is indelible. You will never play rock-paper-scissors with that particular kid again. You will tell all your friends, too, not to engage in contests with them. A cheater is a cheater is a cheater.

And yet we know, too, an instinct coming from a similarly primal place, that cheating, when executed for one’s own benefit, and especially when executed without detection, can be valuable, if a little guilt-inducing. When the value of the prize claimed outweighs the guilt, it can even feel better than a straightforward win. After all, the other party, if they were smart enough, would have cheated, too, or at least cheated better than they did; and really, when you think about it, isn’t outsmarting the opposition part of the competition? Haven’t you, in the successful execution of your subterfuge, put in more effort than the loser now sulking about your victory? Isn’t this all just part of the game — a part of the game that you happened to be better at? You are not a cheater, no; that word doesn’t apply to what you’ve done. To call the means of your success cheating would be to demean the skill involved in said success, you think. One might almost consider the loser who is accusing you of cheating to be the real cheater — trying to steal away, through non-competitive, extrajudicial means, the victory you earned through your own ingenuity. Cheating is bad. And you, what you have done, isn’t bad. Read the rest of this entry »

In real life, when a player starts the season poorly, it’s tempting to chalk it up to variance and sample size. Through April 23 of last year, for example, Jackie Bradley Jr. was hitting .134/.203/.164, good for a -7 wRC+. The rest of the way, he hit .239/.335/.461, a 104 wRC+. Nothing was wrong!

That’s the snarky, detached analyst view. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t work that way on the actual team. It’s harder, when you’re living through the oh-fers and demoralizing strikeouts, to determine whether or not to give that player as much playing time over the rest of the year. Of the 10 players with the worst batting lines on that day, eight saw their playing time meaningfully curtailed over the remainder of the season.

And that brings us to our Out Of The Park Brewers. The FanGraphs readership’s intrepid management has led the team to a 13-12 record, which is an okay enough start all told; there have been injury issues across the pitching staff, Luis Urías is still rehabbing from his offseason injury, and there was that absolute pasting at the hands of the Mets.

But there’s one disturbing performance that stands out so far; Lorenzo Cain is hitting .136/.212/.153, good for a Bradley-Jr.-in-bad-times wRC+ of -7. It’s by far the worst line on the team; Orlando Arcia has played poorly enough that he’s lost most of his playing time to Brock Holt, and even he has a 30 wRC+.

What’s a manager to do? It’s not obvious. The team is built for Cain to be an anchor; the corner positions are a grab bag of mix-and-match players. Christian Yelich can man left or right with equal aplomb, and the other outfield slot can be filled by nearly anyone; Avisaíl García, Ryan Braun, Ben Gamel, Holt, or even Eric Sogard. But only Gamel and Yelich can even fake center, and I’m skeptical that either could do it full time. Read the rest of this entry »

Pablo López has a pair of good throwing partners as he waits for baseball to return. The 24-year-old Miami Marlins right-hander has a Colombian catcher in his neighborhood, and a retired Venezuelan physician encamped in his spare bedroom. His relationship with the former is paramount to his future, and with the latter, a portrait of his past.

López is living in Miami, where he returned after spring training was abruptly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. His priorities in camp had been a continuation of his offseason efforts, which came on the heels of a promising, albeit uneven, 2019 campaign. Despite a queasy 5.09 ERA — his FIP was a healthier 4.28 — López is projected to land a spot in the Marlins’ starting rotation.

For now, all he can do is keep his arm fresh with the help of the backstop and doctor.

“I’m going to this warehouse that has a turf area about 150 feet long,” López told me late last week. “They have portable mounds we can use, and I’m there three times a week. Outside of those three days, there’s a green area close to my community and I go out and play catch with my dad.”

Danny López grew up playing baseball in Venezuela. His own father, Pablo’s grandfather, coached him during his teenage years. Medical school then squelched any possibility of pursuing a professional career, but he did continue as an amateur. According to Pablo, his father “played for a company — big companies had their own league — and while I never got to watch him play, I hear that he was pretty good.”

Rather than follow in his father’s footsteps, Pablo went in the opposite direction. Accepted to medical school upon graduating from high school — at age 16, no less — the multi-talented son opted instead to sign with the Seattle Mariners. Five years later, he was traded to Miami. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »