If you’re not familiar with Don Buford, perhaps the first thing you should know is that he was quietly very good. He averaged 4.5 WAR from 1965-1971, and in the last three of those seasons he logged a .405 OBP for Baltimore Orioles teams that captured American League pennants. A speedy switch-hitter who spent the first half of his career with the Chicago White Sox, Buford had a 117 wRC+ and 200 stolen bases from 1963-1972. He played on three 100-plus-win teams, and four more that won 90-plus. A spark plug throughout his career, he never played for a losing team.

Prior to breaking into pro ball in 1960, Buford excelled on both the diamond and the gridiron at the University of Southern California. USC’s first African-American baseball player, he followed his 10 big-league seasons with four more in Japan. Then came Stateside stints as a coach, manager, and front office executive, as well as time spent running MLB’s Urban Youth Academy in Compton, California.

———

David Laurila: You played both baseball and football at USC. Where did you see your future at that time?

Don Buford: “I was leaning toward baseball, because of my size. I was 5-foot-7, 150 pounds, so I didn’t see much of a future in football. I had an offer from the Pittsburgh Steelers — they were interested in me as a kickoff and punt return guy — but I wasn’t interested. That’s the suicide squad in football.”

Laurila: What do you remember about breaking into professional baseball?

Buford: “Coming out of college, I thought I was well-prepared as far knowledge of the game, because I’d had such an outstanding coach in Rod Dedeaux. He was a legendary college coach. We won the NCAA championship in 1958.

“I had offers from the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the White Sox. The Dodgers and Yankees were offering such a minimum — a $1,000 bonus and a $400 salary — and coming out of college, I said, ‘No way; I could make that teaching school.’ That’s why I selected the White Sox. Hollis Thurston and Doc Bennett were the scouts who had followed me, and they felt I had the ability to make it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the last few months of hectic, sometimes nasty negotiations between the players and the owners to resume the 2020 season, one issue operating in the background was the expiration of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement at the end of next year. For those who watch, cover, and love baseball, losing the 2020 season would be sad, but understandable; there’s a global pandemic. To turn around 18 months later and lose all or part of the 2022 season because the players and owners can’t agree to a new CBA would be considerably less so. Still, while MLB and the MLBPA’s inability to agree to modify their March agreement in such a way as to provide mutual benefit (and more games) is frustrating, no deal today doesn’t mean no deal after 2021.

The recent negotiations offer a preview into the tone, tenor, and general degree of trust (or lack thereof) both parties are likely to bring to the table as they work toward an agreement for 2022, but achieving a different result is possible because 2022 is going to be much different than both 1994 and 2020. There will be a lot of issues to resolve, as Dayn Perry laid out at CBS Sports in May and Andy Martino examined yesterday for SNY, and the process will be contentious. But the owners will also be looking to maximize profits after 2021 rather than minimize losses. And while the negotiations over the last month didn’t result in a new deal, they might actually prove to have been fruitful practice for the next time the two parties come to the table. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in March, my colleague Dan Szymborski wrote a piece about how playoff projections changed based on the length of the season. At the time, all we knew was that the season had been suspended, and that whatever season we eventually got was likely to be shorter than the one we expected at the start of the calendar year. How many games we’d ultimately lose was a mystery — Dan ran projections for 140 games, 110 games and, most pessimistically, 81 games. After observing the results, he reached the reasonable conclusion that the shorter the season is, the more margin there is for worse teams (on paper, at least) to sneak into the playoffs, and for supposedly elite teams to fall short.

Three months later, it turns out even 81 games was too ambitious of a dream. After much back-and-forth with the players, owners have officially decided to enact a season of just 60 games, beginning on July 23 or 24 and concluding in the final week of September, when a typical regular season would have also finished. With that number officially in place, our playoff odds have been updated to reflect the dramatic shortening of the season, and the result is a similarly dramatic re-imagining of teams’ fortunes:

This table is helpful because it includes all of the information that forms the base of what we’re discussing here — the changes in each team’s playoff and title odds with a shortened season — but to be honest, looking at each team individually like this doesn’t really drive home the kind of shift that has occurred. On its own, the Rangers moving from a 1-in-100 chance at the postseason to a 1-in-10 chance or the Yankees falling from a nearly 9-in-10 chance to a 3-in-4 chance is interesting, but doesn’t really fundamentally change our thinking. The Rangers are probably out, and the Yankees are probably in. Instead, let’s group teams together by their playoff odds, and see how that distribution plays out under the two season lengths:

This better conveys the heart of the changes — from both the front and back of the spectrum, teams have been pulled into the middle. In a 162-game season, 20 teams had playoff odds of either above 60% or below 20%. In a 60-game season, just 14 teams have such a distinction, meaning that a plurality of teams now fall somewhere between a 1-in-5 and 3-in-5 shot.

While the Rays and Nationals have been pulled in from the front of the pack, we see many more teams creeping up from what used to be the bottom tier of actual playoff hopefuls. The Angels make a huge jump relative to their peers, moving from 18.3% playoff odds to 27.7%, while the White Sox (28% to 37%), Diamondbacks (17.1% to 23.1%), and Phillies (18.1% to 23.6%) bite similar chunks out of the advantages the teams ahead of them once had.

And if the gap between 20% and 60% playoff odds I mentioned just above still sounds like a big one, it really isn’t in theory. Consider that under our 162-game projections, the Braves were given a 58.2% shot at the playoffs and an expected win total of 86 games. The Angels, meanwhile, had just an 18.3% chance at the playoffs, with an expected win total of 83 games. That’s three measly games separating two teams with a 40% gap in their playoff odds. Now, to be clear, more goes into playoff odds than just win total. The Braves play in a division without a clear-cut favorite, and in a league where just one team was projected to win 90 games, while the Angels’ division does have a clear-cut favorite, and play in a league that includes four teams expected to win 90 games. Context plays a big role here, but the slim difference in their win totals does show you just how little could separate a team with 1-in-5 playoff odds from a team with 3-in-5 odds.

That’s in a 162-game season. Cut that total down to 60, and the projected win distribution invites even more chaos:

Look at that tall bar on the left. That includes the Washington Nationals, who are projected to win their division and finish with the second-best record in the NL, and the San Diego Padres, who have less than a 15% chance to win their division and are projected to have the eighth-best record in the NL. Fewer than two wins, on average, separate them now. That’s how you go from two teams being 26 points apart in playoff odds to them being just 17 points apart.

This extreme parity is most apparent in the NL Central, where the top four teams are virtually indistinguishable from one another:

There was already so little separating the middle three teams, and now the Cubs have nearly been absorbed into that group as well. Whoever wins this division is probably going to be a decent enough club, but they’re also going to inevitably be the beneficiaries of a season determined a lot by luck. And the Central isn’t the only division like that. Let’s check back in with the Nationals, Braves, and the rest of the NL East:

Out of every team in baseball, the Nationals are arguably the most-harmed by the shortening of the season. Their 13.4-point drop in playoff chances is second behind the Yankees for the biggest in the sport, with the Astros and Dodgers close behind, but unlike those other three teams, they aren’t able to escape with a still-comfortable lead over the rest of their division. Their once sizable advantage over Atlanta has essentially evaporated, despite the fact that the Braves’ chances at both the division and the Wild Card took a hit as well.

This is what happens when you try to predict what’s going to happen in a situation where every game will mean more, but their sum total will tell you less. Depending on what kind of fan you are or what team you cheer for, that could either terrify or thrill you. And while this might make you angsty at the idea of an “undeserving” team making the playoffs or even winning the World Series, it’s worth remembering that even full seasons don’t always do a great job of awarding the title to team we think is best. Just for this year, it’s probably for the best if we don’t worry much about who actually makes the playoffs. Let’s just hope we get a postseason at all.

I’m wading into the gaming and streaming space with Yeoman’s Work, a lo-fi, multimedia presentation that follows my pursuit of a championship in the baseball simulator, Diamond Mind Baseball, paired with single-camera footage from my baseball video archives. Below is Episode 3, which features my team’s sputtering bullpen situation, as well as video of prominent recent draftees and their undrafted peers who, by default, are now perched at the top of the 2023 class.

Both DMB’s gameplay and most of my video archive are very quiet, low-sensory experiences without music or crowd noise, and I think this will appeal to those of you who enjoy Baseball Sounds, as they are front and center in the footage. If this tone appeals to you, my “musical influences” in this department (i.e. the non-FanGraphs Twitch streams I watch on my own time) are Kenji Egashira’s and Luis Scott-Vargas’ live Magic: The Gathering content, Kate Stark’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streams, and Kathleen De Vere’s pirate radio show, Brave New Faves. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Clearly, it’s been a long time since any of us cared to discuss major league baseball transactions. The most recent post tagged with the “free agent signing” category on this site was a post by Craig Edwards writing up the Boston Red Sox signing of Colin McHugh all the way back on March 5; a pandemic is mentioned nowhere in the body of the text or in the comments section. It was a simpler time, and a lot has changed since then. The schedule is 102 games shorter now. The games themselves are going to look very different. And there isn’t even a guarantee that a full season will be completed.

It’s difficult to wrap your brain around roster moves under the weight of everything else that’s happening, and fortunately, we haven’t had to. Shortly after it suspended the season, Major League Baseball enacted a transaction freeze, prohibiting teams from trading or signing anyone to their roster. That freeze will be lifted Friday at noon, freeing front offices up to put the finishing touches on their rosters ahead of what’s going to be a very short, strange season. It’s a big step toward normal baseball activities resuming, but it’s also difficult to know how much organizations will actually try to accomplish. Even before the legitimacy of the season itself could be called into question, teams already showed some reticence to maximize their competitiveness and front offices have a lot to figure out about a very unique and potentially dangerous situation and not a lot of time.

Still, there has to be some incentive to win, right? Teams like the Dodgers, Reds, and White Sox have already committed a lot of resources to the 2020 season. Then there are the teams that didn’t expect to be competitive this year but, because of a dramatically shortened season, suddenly see only about five or six games separating them from the playoffs instead of 15-20. The banners teams hang for winning this year will be just as big and colorful as they are for any other season, and for the clubs that have decided to go for it, every little bit is going to help. And though the offseason was very nearly over by the time play was initially suspended, there were still a few players on the market waiting to potentially make a difference for someone. Here’s a refresher on some of the better names available:

Yasiel Puig

Yasiel Puig is the best available free agent left, someone we’ve already covered at length several times here at FanGraphs. There’s no need to go in depth again, but to recap very quickly: Puig is still just 29, and is coming off a year during which he was traded twice in eight months. The 2019 season was his worst in three years from both a WAR and wRC+ perspective, but even then he remained average with his bat. The 1.8 WAR ZiPS projected him for (in the case of a 162-game season) is higher than the total right field projection of 17 teams. Whether it’s a true contender like St. Louis or a rebuilding team that could benefit from some extra jersey sales like Detroit, there are plenty of fits for Puig to play baseball in 2020.

Russell Martin

At 37, Russell Martin doesn’t pose the same threat in the batter’s box he once did, but that isn’t to say he’s done being a valuable player. His glove — boosted by framing metrics that placed him in the 95th percentile of all catchers last year according to Baseball Savant — was still good enough that he was worth 1.2 WAR for the Dodgers despite playing in just 83 games (he did respectably by our metrics as well). His days of 15-20 home run power are over, but he’s walked in at least 12% of his plate appearances every year for four seasons now, a rate that makes him a credible on-base threat regardless of his batting average. Teams carrying active rosters of 30 players to start the year makes it very likely most, if not all, will hold onto three catchers, and Martin would make a lot of sense for a team like the Mets or Cubs that lack a really impressive glove behind the dish.

Aaron Sanchez

A rethinking of Aaron Sanchez’s arsenal to emphasize his hard four-seamer and high-spin curveball did nothing to reverse what is now a three-year tailspin after his breakout in 2016. That season, he held opponents to a 3.00 ERA and 3.55 FIP in 30 games to amass 3.5 WAR, but since then, he’s been hit with a 5.29 ERA and 5.12 FIP in his last 55 games. He’s a former 34th overall pick who has flashed success in the majors and July 1 will be just his 28th birthday, so it seems more likely than not that a team will step forward and try to fix him — a club like the Reds, a team with a new pitching regime, makes sense here. But if a team were going to buy into him as a project, one would think they would have done so before spring training, and before the number of games they had to work with in 2020 (not to mention minor league opportunities) got severely cut down. (Update: I failed to note that Sanchez underwent shoulder surgery in September and was likely to miss most of this season.) There’s a good chance he gets passed over until 2021.

Andrew Cashner

For the first half of 2019, Andrew Cashner was the lone bright spot of a woeful Baltimore Orioles rotation. Then he got traded to Boston, where he was moved to the bullpen and got rocked. During his time with the Orioles, he held a 3.83 ERA and 4.26 FIP by basically doing Andrew Cashner things — he struck out just over six batters per nine innings, but walked fewer than three per nine, and limited homers well by generating lots of groundballs. Cashner has played for six different organizations over the past 10 years now, and he’s rarely been bad. Over the past seven years, he’s failed to throw 150 innings just twice, and owns a 4.08 ERA and 4.24 FIP. He’s 33, but if you’re looking for a durable, inning-eating starter you could plug and play in the back half of nearly any rotation, Cashner is a good bet. Jason Vargas (4.51 ERA, 4.76 FIP, 1.8 WAR in 149.2 innings in 2019) is also available and has similar characteristics, though at 37 he’s considerably riskier.

Scooter Gennett

Also previously covered in depth on this site, Scooter Gennett was dreadful coming off a groin injury in 2019, playing 42 games and finishing with -0.5 WAR a 44 wRC+, a 1.4% walk rate, and a 29.5% strikeout rate, and he lacks the defensive capabilities that can give some other infielders a high floor. Before the groin injury, though, he’d been worth 6.7 WAR over his previous two seasons with a 124 wRC+. Assuming he’s healthy now, he’d make a fine left-handed bench bat for a lot of teams.

The Relievers

Fernando Rodney is 43 now, but his fastball velocity is still in surprisingly decent shape, declining by less than a tick and a half over the last four seasons and clocking in at 94.4 mph on average. His World Series line (2 IP, 2 R, 2 H, 6 BB, 0 K) left something to be desired, but overall, his time in the regular season with the Nationals (33.1 IP, 4.05 ERA, 3.71 FIP) went over pretty well. Baseball’s more fun with Rodney in it, so let’s hope someone takes a flyer.

Sam Tuivailala is a weird story. The good news: Three straight seasons of sub-3.50 ERAs between St. Louis and Seattle, more than 10.5 strikeouts per nine last year, and he’s still just 27 years old. The bad news: Lots of time missed due to injuries, the most concerning of which is an Achilles injury the recovery from which hasn’t been seamless. Usually mid-to-upper-90s with his fastball, he reportedly had yet to throw harder than the upper 80s in camp this spring with the Mariners, who released him a week after the season was postponed. I’d imagine a few teams will be willing to work him out once they get the opportunity.

Arodys Vizcaino sat out nearly all of 2019 with shoulder inflammation, which is certainly concerning. Since 2017, however, he has just a 2.53 ERA in 99.2 innings while striking out nearly 10 batters per nine. He won’t turn 30 until November, so it might not be a bad idea to invest a little cash and a spot on your taxi squad in him.

Danny Salazar last threw meaningful big league innings in 2017, as a once-exciting career has been derailed by shoulder, elbow, and groin injuries. When he finally returned for four innings in 2019, his fastball was nearly 10 mph slower than it was the last time we’d seen him. He’d be a reclamation project for a rebuilding team like Baltimore with innings to give.

Blake Wood hasn’t pitched since being diagnosed with a right elbow impingement in April 2018, but carried favorable peripherals as a workhorse reliever in 2016-17. He’s 34, but there might be something left in the tank.

While this year’s Induction Weekend festivities have been postponed until next summer, on Wednesday the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announced plans to reopen to the public on Friday, June 26, after nearly 3 1/2 months of closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reopening is being done with a comprehensive health and safety plan in place, one that includes mandatory mask wearing, timed entrances to limit capacity and allow for physical distancing, widespread availability of hand sanitizer, increased cleaning and disinfection schedules, and the continued closure of the building’s larger gathering spaces. All of this is being done in accordance with New York State’s regionally-focused phased reopening plan, as the Mohawk Valley (which includes Cooperstown) moves to Phase Four.

While New York has been hit the hardest of any state by the novel coronavirus, with over 390,000 conformed cases and over 30,000 deaths according to data from the Centers for Disease Control, the impact in Otsego County, which has a population of 62,000 with Cooperstown as its county seat, has been comparatively minimal, with just 74 confirmed cases and five deaths as of June 22, including only 12 confirmed cases and one death in the six weeks since I covered the virus’ impact on the region in early May.

Despite the minimal number of cases locally, the cancellation of Induction Weekend — which, with Derek Jeter as the marquee attraction was expected to exceed last year’s estimated 55,000 attendees and perhaps even eclipse the all-time record of 82,000 from 2007, when Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn were honored — has hit the area hard, particularly as it followed the cancellation of the Cooperstown Dreams Park series of youth baseball tournaments, which annually bring over 17,000 youth players (and their families) to the region. As of early May, the estimate for the economic impact on local governments via lost sales taxes on the area’s restaurants, hotels, rental properties, and baseball-oriented shops stood at $50 to $150 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I noticed something strange about Clayton Kershaw: he’d seemingly lost the will or ability to throw strikes in a 3-0 count. I did some middlingly fancy statistics, declared that a result like Kershaw’s was unlikely to happen by chance, and called it a day.

Unfortunately, I’d missed something subtle but important:

The Bonferroni correction is, in essence, a way to adjust confidence intervals to avoid taking too much signal from your data. Imagine, if you will, 10 gamblers each flipping 10 coins. One of them flips nine heads in his sample of 10. Amazing, right? There’s only a 1% chance of that happening!

Well, kind of. There were 10 of those gamblers, after all. The Bonferroni correction asks us to formulate a hypothesis beforehand, like “Gambler Number Nine is unusually likely to flip heads.” If we wanted to hypothesize that each gambler was likely to flip heads, that’s 10 hypotheses right there. Without getting too far into the realm of explaining statistical methods, suffice it to say that the Bonferroni correction requires more extreme values to reject the null hypothesis the more hypotheses you start with. In other words, the more things you observe, the weirder they need to be before they’re notable. Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the bevy of rule changes and health and safety precautions accompanying the return of major league baseball in 2020, there’s one in particular that feels like it comes straight out of Little League: the addition of a runner on second base at the start of extra innings. Initially one of Rob Manfred’s many trial balloons floated with the idea of shortening games, the rule has worked its way slowly up the organized-ball ladder, debuting in the World Baseball Classic in 2017, getting added to the Gulf Coast and Arizona Leagues that summer, and eventually becoming the law of the land throughout all levels of the minors in 2018. Not that it was bound for the bigs any time soon: Back in 2017, Manfred said he “[didn’t] really expect that we’re ever going to apply [the rule] at the major league level.”

Well, times have changed — or more accurately, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shortening of the season have led Manfred and company to bring the rule into play, likely for this year only. And on the surface, that makes sense: With only 60 games on the calendar and a potentially limited window in which to play them, it’s in everyone’s best interests to wrap things up quickly. As with the season on the whole, the less baseball, the better.

But how much less baseball is that rule going to create? We have two years’ worth of data from the minors to work with, and per MiLB, the results are notable. Over the last two seasons, just 43 total games went more than three extra innings, compared to 345 in 2016 and ‘17 combined. And as Baseball America’s JJ Cooper notes, nearly three-quarters of all extra-innings minor league games last year and the year before ended in the 10th, as opposed to just under half in the two seasons prior. And nearly all of them — 93% — finished in the 10th or 11th, representing a 20% increase.

That stands to reason. The rule — which puts a runner on second base to lead off the inning — creates a situation in which runs are the norm. A quick check of run expectancy tables shows that a runner on second with no outs led to an average of 1.1 runs scored and created a 61% chance of at least one run scoring from 2010 through ‘15. Both teams get the runner in their half of the inning, so it’s not an unfair advantage for either side, but it does allow the visiting team a chance to take a quick lead or give the home team an immediate opportunity to walk things off. Minor league fans have also noted how the rule immediately ups the drama of extras while also putting a new focus on fundamentals and putting the ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the long-in-the-making announcement about the MLB season starting, touching on the resolution of the dispute between the league and the union, their deeply conflicted feelings about baseball being played during a pandemic, the strangeness of a 60-game season, how to reframe fandom and reorient rooting interests in a short season, starting extra innings with runners on second, and an especially perplexing Scott Boras analogy. Then (45:20) they bring on epidemiologist, incoming Emory University professor, and sports data analyst Zach Binney to discuss MLB’s health-and-safety protocol, the difficult of preventing transmission in baseball compared to other sports, the recent coronavirus outbreaks in baseball, the ethics and efficacy of COVID-19 testing in sports, whether temperature and symptom screenings work, how long players who test positive might have to sit out, prohibitions on spitting, touching, and equipment sharing, how to protect non-players who work for teams, what it might take for MLB to stop the season, the trajectory of the pandemic in the country at large, and more.

Audio intro: Neil Young, "For the Turnstiles"
Audio interstitial: Richard Thompson, "Keep Your Distance"
Audio outro: Ted Berg, "Small Sample Size Song"

Link to Ben on the MLB season starting
Link to info on new Darvish pitch
Link to Dan’s playoff odds and projected standings
Link to Neil Paine on “paper champions”
Link to Neil on the 60-game season
Link to Neil on observing true talent in various sports
Link to Eno Sarris on short seasons
Link to Russell Carleton on the 60-game season
Link to Boras analogy article
Link to 2020 MLB operations manual
Link to summary of manual
Link to Zach’s website
Link to Zach’s Football Outsiders archive
Link to epidemiologist survey about attending sporting events
Link to SI article about baseball’s non-bubble plan

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