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.

Dr. Fauci Skeptical About NFL Season

Earlier this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci recommended that MLB try to avoid playing games in October, and his scheduling suggestions didn’t stop at baseball. Yesterday, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that if the NFL wants to have a 2020 season, they’ll need do so in a heavily quarantined environment, similar to that of the NBA at DisneyWorld.

“Unless players are essentially in a bubble — insulated from the community and they are tested nearly every day — it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall,” Fauci said. “If there is a second wave, which is certainly a possibility and which would be complicated by the predictable flu season, football may not happen this year.”

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Caleb Smith has been a pleasant surprise for the Miami Marlins since being acquired from the New York Yankees prior to the 2018 season. That’s not to say the NL East club didn’t recognize his potential upon making the deal, but at the same time, he wasn’t exactly prominent on prospect lists. A 14th-round pick in 2013 out of Sam Houston State University, Smith was — and still is — a southpaw with underwhelming velocity and solid but nothing-special secondary pitches.

His path from New York to Miami included brief stops in Milwaukee and Chicago. The Brewers took Smith in the December 2016 Rule-5 draft and promptly flipped him to the Cubs. The following spring he was returned to the organization he was no longer all that enamored with playing for. Following a stellar Triple-A season that included a big-league cameo, he was off to his new baseball home.

In two seasons with the Marlins, the 28-year-old hurler has made 44 starts and logged a 4.52 ERA over 230.2 inning. Featuring a high spin rate fastball that gets good arm-side run — a pitch he augments with a slider and a changeup (with a curveball soon to join the mix) — Smith has fanned 10 batters per nine innings since coming to Miami.

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David Laurila: You were drafted in 2013. What did scouts like about you at the time?

Caleb Smith: “They liked how I used my fastball and my changeup. I didn’t really have a breaking pitch — I didn’t have a curveball or a slider — but they liked the life on my fastball. I think that’s it. They didn’t really say anything else to me.”

Laurila: Were you asked to make any specific adjustments upon reaching pro ball?

Smith: “What the Yankees wanted was for me to pitch down in the zone. That was their focus, and it was always a problem for me, because I have a hard time doing that. My ball just naturally stays at the top of the zone. Eventually I got better at it — I was able to work down in the zone a little bit more — but not as effectively as they wanted me to. I knew I could get outs at the top of the zone, but they just weren’t into that at the time.”

Laurila: What hinders your ability to work down in the zone? Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, Rob Manfred and Tony Clark met in Arizona. On Wednesday, MLB made an offer to the MLBPA that would give players pro-rated salaries for 60 games and a $25 million postseason pool. It also included $33 million in salary relief from the $170 million in advances players received, and a universal designated hitter. In exchange, the owners would get expanded playoffs for the next two years, and the players would agree to waive any grievance the MLBPA might otherwise have brought against MLB for failing to make its best effort to schedule as many games as possible, as is required by the March agreement. The players have countered that proposal; the two sides, it would seem, are very close.

As first reported by Jeff Passan and Jesse Rogers, the player proposal is for 70 games at pro-rated pay, with the same or similar salary advance forgiveness as the owners proposed, $50 million in playoff money, and a 50/50 split of new postseason TV revenues in 2021. The deal would include grievance waivers from both parties over the March 26 agreement, as well as the universal designated hitter.

The major differences the players propose are as follows:

• The regular season would end on September 30 instead of September 27.
• Ten extra regular season games, which would provide players with $252 million in additional pay, and, even using only local revenue, provide around $155 million in revenue to the owners.
• $25 million more in postseason pool money.
• Fifty percent of 2021 expanded playoff money, which could amount to $100 million or more for the players, though it would also mean corresponding increases for owners in 2020 and 2021, given that they stand to receive roughly 75% of those rights.

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In baseball terms, eight years ago doesn’t seem that long ago. Last season, the American League Cy Young winner was Justin Verlander. In 2012, the AL Cy Young winner was David Price, but it definitely should have been Justin Verlander. A number of the guys who were good eight years ago are still good today, and some of the most modern baseball advancements were already being implemented around the game. Some sentences, though, do a lot of work in telling you just how much time has passed. For example: “Hello, would you like to watch a live major league baseball game?” Remember when people said things like that? Ah, to be young again. Here’s another: Eight years ago, R.A. Dickey was the best player in baseball.

Don’t be alarmed if you don’t recall such a time, as it lasted only a brief while. But it surely did exist, for a month-long stretch that reached its height on June 18, 2012. Dickey was coming off four straight outings of no earned runs allowed in at least 7.1 innings, including two complete games. In his most recent start, he’d allowed just one hit while striking out 12 batters in nine innings against the Rays, giving him the best start of his career.

It took him five days to outdo it.

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“He has been the story in baseball this year,” Keith Hernandez said of Dickey as the Mets’ home broadcast team hyped him up entering his June 18 start against the Orioles. They were hardly alone in their admiration. The day before, a lengthy profile of him authored by Tyler Kepner was published in The New York Times. A couple of days before that, he was covered by Shane Ryan at Grantland, and a couple of days before that, he was officially christened a Cy Young candidate by David Schoenfield at ESPN. A day after his start against the Orioles, Jay Jaffe — then of Sports Illustrated — would join the chorus of writers enthralled by Dickey, as would former FanGraphs editor Dave Cameron on this site. Read the rest of this entry »

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Brandon Mann has had a fascinating career. Drafted out of a Seattle-area high school by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2002, the now-36-year-old southpaw has played for six major league organizations, and he’s had multiple stints in both independent ball and NPB. His big-league experience consists of seven games with the Texas Rangers in 2018. With the Chiba Lotte Marines last year, Mann rejoined the Rangers this past offseason, only to be released on June 1.

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David Laurila: You’ve been in pro ball for nearly two decades, with almost none of that time spent in the majors. Why have you kept at it?

Brandon Mann: “I’ve asked myself that question a lot. Pretty much every year I go into the offseason thinking, ‘Man, this might have been my last one.’ But I’ve always had that desire. I know that I can pitch in the big leagues, so I’ve just never felt ready to walk away. Every time I’ve been released has kind of built up the ‘I’ve got to prove somebody wrong’ mentality that I have.

“Over the years I kept training harder and harder, and as I got older I actually started throwing harder. Meeting Driveline, and a lot of the right people, has been a big part of that. But it’s a great question, because I’ve contemplated it many, many times.”

Laurila: How much money have you made in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

After a week of waffling that would make Belgium jealous, Rob Manfred threw a curveball yesterday:

Manfred statement… pic.twitter.com/Z2NgD95F9T

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 17, 2020

Of course, it couldn’t be that easy, and I don’t just mean avoiding mixed metaphors. The MLBPA agreed that new substantive discussions had occurred, but disagreed that an agreement was in place or that a final deal was imminent. We’ll have to wait for another offer from the players, and likely a final counter from the owners, though the fact that their latest proposal includes full prorated salaries — and please, let’s never use the phrase “full prorated” again, like ever — suggests that the two sides will reach a deal.

Lost in the tick-tock of the negotiation and Manfred’s wild swings towards dealmaking and obstructionism, however, baseball is changing shape. When (and if) the game returns this year, it will look different than it ever has before. I don’t mean the season length, though that will certainly be novel. There are two major changes to the game in the owners’ most recent proposal: a universal DH, which Jay Jaffe will cover in greater detail tomorrow, and an expanded 16-game playoff field in 2020 and 2021.

The length of the season, while not yet final, looks likely to fall between 60 and 70 games. There’s not much difference between those in terms of how “real” the season will feel — it’s going to feel short, and that’s fine. Nothing in 2020 has felt normal so far, and baseball is merely following the trend.

That’s not to say there’s no difference between 60 and 70 games. Each additional game nets players roughly $25 million in extra salary, which explains their steadfast desire for more baseball. Owners may or may not also profit from extra games, but do make the majority of their profit from the playoffs. To them, extra games are simply a lever to pull in negotiations with the players. For our viewing purposes, however, it will feel short and random. Dan Szymborski is sitting in the ZiPS situation room as we speak, projections at the ready, to fire off win total predictions and playoff odds as soon as the exact season structure is announced, but suffice it to say that 60 and 70 game seasons don’t produce significantly different outlooks. Read the rest of this entry »

With 2020’s amateur draft consisting of just five rounds, much of the strategy teams typically use related to shifting bonus pool money around was rendered moot. There were no high schoolers to woo with big bonuses after the 10th round, no saving money on a seventh rounder to sign a better first rounder. This served to decrease the incoming talent pool by quite a bit, with many good players going undrafted or unsigned, but it also makes an immediate analysis of the exercise a little bit easier.

With just 160 picks, we can evaluate a team’s decision to take a lesser player early in the draft in order to use the money saved on picks later and vice versa. With less scouting time and fewer looks, there might have been a bit more variation in terms of the quality of the players taken on draft day. Likewise, determining who might improve and surprise is trickier. As such, we shouldn’t consider this analysis ironclad. However, using Eric Longenhagen’s rankings and the selected players’ actual draft positions, we can compare how well each team did with their picks based on those rankings. To determine the value of each player and each pick, I’ll be using my draft pick valuation research from last year, which examined expected production from every draft slot. Read the rest of this entry »