Everyone gets the blues. Sometimes it’s for obvious, “good” reasons, like a global pandemic upending your life and taking hundreds of thousands of others. Sometimes it’s for complicated reasons, like bad brain chemistry and the reverberating effects of trauma. And sometimes it’s for trivial reasons, barely any reason at all. You lose at a game. You trip on a rock. You make a small, forgivable error at work. A tiny thing, in combination with the many other tiny things that make up life, can cast a pall over the ensuing several hours — even days.

Baseball players, being human people, are also subject to the occasional onset of the blues. The public nature of their jobs, though, can make the stakes of these incidences much higher: A small, forgivable error on the field, timed poorly, is a national disgrace, or a step toward the public, humiliating loss of one’s job. And with higher stakes come more dramatic reactions from the players. Reactions like, say, suddenly disappearing.

***

“Rabbit” Sturgeon — that’s how he was always referred to in a baseball context, never by any real, non-animal name — seems to have been born somewhere in Minnesota. He reported his age on the 1930 U.S. Census as 45, putting his birth date around 1885. There’s nothing much on the public record about his early life, but when William E. Sturgeon was around 20, he got into the two professions that would come to define the rest of his life: the railway and baseball.

Rail in the U.S. was hitting its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, and increased regulation made the historically dangerous jobs involved in railroad operations rather less so. Still, doing such work was hardly easy, and the job of a brakeman was one of the most notoriously difficult. Brakemen were responsible for the application of brakes — a simple-sounding but absolutely vital task, especially when massive freight trains were involved. Brakemen also made sure that the axle bearings of train wheels weren’t overheating, kept an eye out for stowaways, and ensured that cargo and passengers were safe. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s 1 AM on a Saturday night in mid-May, and in his otherwise quiet New York City apartment, Jon Sciambi is getting ready for work. As his neighbors snooze, Sciambi, a veteran TV and radio announcer for ESPN, goes over box scores and lineups in his home broadcast studio ahead of the upcoming LG Twins-Kiwoom Heroes game in the KBO, Korea’s professional baseball league. With MLB – Sciambi’s regular assignment – on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic, his job now is to do play by play for games featuring teams and players that, a few weeks prior, he barely knew (if he knew them at all), doing so from thousands of miles away while stuck at home like so many other Americans. For both him and viewers around the country, the KBO is the only game in town, and one that Sciambi and the rest of his ESPN counterparts are learning more or less on the fly.

“This is our baseball window, is the way I’m looking at it, and we’re trying to sort it out,” Sciambi says. “We’re trying to get as much information as we possibly can and put it out there and get good stories and talk baseball and have some fun, man. Smile and have some fun.”

Ordinarily during this time of year, Sciambi and ESPN would be working their way through the early part of the MLB season, traveling from coast to coast and bringing viewers big games from the biggest teams. But COVID-19 has upended both lives and leagues, leaving sports networks scrambling to fill slots that ordinarily would’ve gone not just to MLB, but also to the other major North American professional leagues, which also find themselves on hiatus. ESPN, which normally airs a handful of MLB games a week and spends countless hours parsing transactions and takes, was no exception, suddenly finding itself without any baseball at all as every league on the planet came to an indefinite halt.

The solution came in the form of the KBO. Thanks to a rigorous program of testing and contact tracing, South Korea was able to contain COVID-19 more quickly and effectively than other countries, allowing its citizenry to resume a semblance of normal life. That included its professional league, which had been forced to stop spring training in mid-March and delay its Opening Day. A month later, though, the KBO announced that it would return at the beginning of May, albeit in stadiums without fans and with social distancing measures, such as no handshakes, high fives, or spitting. Aside from Taiwan’s CPBL, it would be the only professional league in action — and as the highest-caliber baseball available, it became an immediate draw for ESPN. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about MLB’s ongoing labor negotiations, the team-to-team differences in minor-league pay and front-office furloughs, and the perils of believing that baseball is purely for profit, follow up on the previous episode’s discussions of Carney Lansford’s claim to be a descendant of Sir Francis Drake and a forward-thinking 1989 Cy Young voter, and answer listener emails about bringing hockey’s three stars system to baseball and redoing the 2012 AL MVP vote with a 2020 awareness of WAR, plus Stat Blasts about an offensively futile game and the most hitless PA any batter has ever had against a single pitcher (featuring former major leaguer and Cardinals farm director Mike Jorgensen on his historic struggles against Dock Ellis, the first time he saw Albert Pujols, and how he helped avert a disastrous Pujols trade).

Audio intro: Townes Van Zandt, "No Deal"
Audio outro: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Thirty-Nine and Holding"

Link to Forst’s letter to minor leaguers
Link to unemployment info for minor leaguers
Link to latest Passan report on MLB labor issues
Link to info on the three stars in hockey
Link to info on FanGraphs’ stars of the game
Link to Mack Longpré and Sophie Welsman’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to Mack Longpré’s website
Link to 1987 bad sequencing game
Link to Good Night, Giants
Link to batter vs. pitcher hitless streaks data
Link to batter vs. pitcher on-base-less streaks data
Link to article on Bagwell vs. Sullivan
Link to article on facing Jeter
Link to Goold on a possible Pujols trade
Link to order The MVP Machine

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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.

Oakland A’s Make Drastic Cuts to Minor League Compensation

With the odds of any kind of minor league season being played away from team complexes getting increasingly long, the Oakland A’s announced that they are ending the $400 weekly subsidies paid to their minor leaguers effective June 1; all 30 teams had previously agreed to pay such subsidies until the end of May.

“Unfortunately, considering all of the circumstances affecting the organization at this time, we have decided not to continue your $400 weekly stipend beyond May 31,” Athletics General Manager David Forst wrote in an email to the organization’s minor league players. “This was a difficult decision and it’s one that comes at a time when a number of our full-time employees are also finding themselves either furloughed or facing a reduction in salary for the remainder of the season. For all of this, I am sorry.”

Given the minimum salaries in the minors, which range from $290 a week in rookie ball to $502 in Triple-A, the team could have paid all of their minor leaguers the minimum for just over $1 million. (Note that this comes at the same time MLB is trying to effectively memory hole $1 billion in revenues in their public battle with the MLBPA.)

Read the rest of this entry »

On March 26, MLB and the MLBPA reached an agreement with respect to playing the 2020 season. The parties were mostly silent for a few weeks regarding financial matters, with much of the focus on when and how the season might be resumed and played safely with the threat of COVID-19 still looming. But operating in the background were increased concerns over lost revenues in the event of games or an entire season played without fans in attendance.

With those concerns has come some anxiety that a public debate on the fate of millions, even billions, of dollars will be perceived by fans of the sport as unseemly, especially when set against the backdrop of the suffering the pandemic has inflicted on so many. But how have the terms of that debate come to be known? With the MLBPA in the position of reacting to proposals offered by the league, I thought I might examine the how and when of MLB’s public claims. Below, you’ll find excerpts from pieces that ran at a variety of publications showing how MLB has attempted to negotiate or portray its financial situation publicly since reaching the March agreement (links are in the date)

April 15

Manfred said about 40% of operating revenue derives from gate and gate-related areas, such as luxury suite rentals, concessions, parking, signage, and program sales and advertising. Going forward with a plan to play in empty stadiums likely would lead to another negotiation with the union, led by former All-Star first baseman Tony Clark.

April 15

“I talked to Jeff Wilpon today, the owner of the Mets. Go Queens. Go New York,” [New York Governor Andrew] Cuomo said. “I said, ‘Why can’t we talk about a baseball season with nobody in the stands? Why can’t you play the game with the players?’ I think it would be good for the country. I think it would be good for people to have something to watch and do to fight cabin fever. And it’s something I’m going to pursue. Apparently Major League Baseball would have to make a deal with the players, because if you have no one in the stands, then the numbers are going to change, the economics are going to change.”

April 16

A league spokesperson said that “both parties understood that the deal was premised on playing in stadiums with fans and the agreement makes that clear.”

April 16

There are owners who have privately said that without readjustments they would lose so much more money, why even play the games.

April 19

“Our clubs rely heavily on revenue from tickets/concessions, broadcasting/media, licensing and sponsorships to pay salaries,” Manfred wrote in an email Monday, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “In the absence of games, these revenue streams will be lost or substantially reduced, and clubs will not have sufficient funds to meet their financial obligations.”

April 21

Although an agreement between the sides on return to play exists and includes a section on players receiving prorated sums of their salaries, multiple owners have suggested that it could cost them more to play games than it would not to play them and said they believe the agreement between the sides could allow them to pursue pay cuts from players.

April 22

[T]o have games just on TV for the whole season for many, many reasons is not practical. – Randy Levine, team president, New York Yankees

April 27

Some teams contend that they could actually lose money if games are played. Their rationale is that local and national TV money will not cover their operating costs. And if that’s the case, they would like players — who already have agreed to be paid a prorated portion of their salary depending on the number of games — to take an even greater pay cut.

May 7

“If we ended up playing and playing in front of full fans, for 82 games, it makes total sense that we would pay players’ full salaries,” one industry executive said. “If you’re in the more extreme where we have to play empty everywhere, that’s half the revenue that would have come in that’s not coming in anymore. We weren’t equipped or budgeting to pay full salaries for that.”

As things stand, league officials say that on average, for every incremental regular-season game played without fans in 2020, teams would spend more money on player salaries than they would earn in revenue.

May 9

Without the players making such a concession, league officials say they will spend more on player salaries than they would earn in revenue for every incremental regular-season game played without fans.

May 9

MLB has said it will lose more money by keeping the pay prorated without fans and is averse to playing games in that situation.

May 11

Major League Baseball owners, with an abundance of optimism that baseball will be played this year, are scheduled to vote on a plan Monday that will require teams to share at least 48% of their revenue with the Major League Baseball Players Association this season, two people with direct knowledge of the proposal told USA TODAY Sports.

The people, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss details, said the historic revenue-sharing plan is integral to diminish revenue losses with games potentially being played without fans beginning in July. MLB officials say that teams are expected to lose about 40% of their gross revenue from ticket sales, concessions and parking.

May 11

“We lose money on every single game (without fans),” one league official said. “We have to propose that they take something less than they already negotiated.

May 13

“We’re talking about heavy, heavy losses,” one owner told USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because negotiations are private. “There are teams that would lose about $100 million during the regular season if we played with no fans and the players’ salaries stayed the same.”

May 14

MLB owners, saying they could lose as much as $150 million per club during the regular season if players don’t restructure their salaries, agreed Monday to propose a 50-50 revenue sharing plan instead of paying them pro-rated salaries.

May 14

Tom Ricketts told season ticket holders that 70 percent of the Cubs revenue comes from game day operations / ticket sales/ fans in the stands. He went on to say with half the season gone 15 percent of gross revenues would be the take with no fans.

May 14

[P]laying in empty stadiums is not a great feel for us economically, but our owners are committed to doing that because they feel it’s important that the game be back on the field. – Rob Manfred, on CNN

May 15

Angels owner Arte Moreno is particularly insistent the league should not re-start without economic concessions from the players, sources say.

May 16

Major League Baseball told players their prorated salaries would contribute to an average loss of $640,000 for each game over an 82-game season in empty ballparks, according to a presentation from the commissioner’s office to the union that was obtained by The Associated Press.

Teams say the proposed method of salvaging a season delayed by the coronavirus pandemic would still cause a $4 billion loss and would give major league players 89% of revenue.

May 19

A March 26 conversation between MLB and the union in which MLB portrays the union as acknowledging that a new negotiation was needed regarding how players would be paid this season could serve as an email version of a smoking gun.

May 22

The players have already agreed to prorate their salaries, costing them about half of their annual salary, but the owners insist without additional concessions they will lose money playing games without fans.

May 24

The players would make more money for every regular-season game played under the current arrangement and therefore could ask the league for an increase from the proposed 82 games. But the league says unless players take another cut, it will lose money for every additional game.

May 26

Major League Baseball dropped a revenue-sharing plan, and instead introduced a sliding scale of compensation to the Major League Baseball Players Association on Tuesday afternoon, the first time the two sides have formally discussed economic issues in an attempt to open the pandemic-shortened season by the July 4th weekend.

The plan, three people with knowledge of the proposal told USA TODAY Sports, proposes to pay players a prorated percentage of their salaries, with the players who make the most taking the biggest salary cuts. The three people spoke only on the condition of anonymity because negotiations are ongoing.

The timeline above certainly isn’t exhaustive; many of the pieces I’ve linked to also include quotes from agents, players, and union representatives, though mostly in response to the public positions MLB has taken. Some of the information has a name behind it, but much of it doesn’t. MLB has a pretty clear public plan, one that attempts to emphasize owner losses in an abbreviated 2020 season.

Over and over again, we hear owners or the league’s representatives asserting that MLB and its teams will lose more money playing regular season games without fans than they will if those games aren’t played at all. When MLB had the opportunity to present and support such claims, their arguments fell considerably short of being convincing. It’s possible that in private, MLB is putting forth good faith arguments, but their public PR battle against the players suggests otherwise. If a public fight is bad for the sport, why do those with the biggest financial interest in the game and its future keep waging one?

The Brewers just keep winning. The Brewers just keep getting hurt. Something has to give, but on this stream, we’ll do our best to work through the injuries and keep the party going. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest in a series of baseball-themed lessons we’re calling FanGraphs Prep. In light of so many parents suddenly having their school-aged kids learning from home, we hope is that these units offer a thoughtfully designed, baseball-themed supplement to the school work your student might already be doing.

Overview:

A four-day unit that uses strikeouts, walks, and home runs to describe relationships between variables and predictive logic.

Many statistics in baseball are inter-related. We examined the relationship between runs and wins a few weeks ago. Today, we’ll learn about a few more of these relationships and how to think predicatively about them.

Learning Objectives:

• Make a hypothesis about the relationship between two variables
• Create a scatter plot using a dataset containing multiple variables
• Estimate and calculate a trend line
• Evaluate a hypothesis using data
• Describe the relationship between variables

Target Grade Level: 7-9

Daily Activities

Day 1
ERA, or earned run average, measures how many runs a pitcher gives up per nine innings. It’s measured in runs — the only thing this statistic cares about is how many innings a pitcher throws and how many earned runs they surrender. But we can look at other statistics as well: what percentage of opposing batters a pitcher strikes out, what percentage they walk, and what percentage of opposing batters hit home runs.

Come up with a hypothesis about how these three statistics relate to ERA. Do you think that pitchers who strike out more batters allow fewer runs on average, or more? Why? Do the same for each of strikeout rate, walk rate, and home run rate. Read the rest of this entry »

The clock is ticking on Major League Baseball’s return to play, at least under a proposed timeline that would allow for a three-week spring training in June, an Opening Day in early July, and an 82-game schedule that follows the rough outline of the typical baseball calendar, with the bulk (if not the entirety) of the postseason in October. Over the past couple of weeks, the league and the players have attempted to find common ground with respect to both health and safety issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the financial ones, the latter with considerably more acrimony — so much so that the threat of no baseball in 2020 still looms, even after the owners made a formal proposal to the union on Tuesday calling for the game’s highest-paid players to bear a disproportionate burden of the financial hit.

Via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale:

The plan, three people with knowledge of the proposal told USA TODAY Sports, does not include the same 50-50 revenue-sharing split the owners agreed on two weeks ago that was never submitted to the union…

The proposal instead includes a sliding scale of compensation, guaranteeing players a percentage of their salary during different intervals of the season, while also including a larger share of postseason money. The players earning the highest salaries would be taking the biggest cuts, while those earning the least amount of money would receive most of their guaranteed salaries, with the union determining the exact percentage splits.

Via the New York Post’s Joel Sherman:

One person who had been briefed on the proposal said the expectation is that players due to make $1 million or less in 2020 would be made close to whole on a prorated basis for games played. Thus, if someone were making the MLB 2020 minimum of $563,500 and 82 regular season games (almost exactly half a season) were played, they would receive roughly half their pay, about $282,000.

But players at the top of the pay chain such as Gerrit Cole and Mike Trout would get less. If that were in the 50 percent range — as an example — then Cole, who was due $36 million, this year would receive half of about the $18 million he would be due for half a season or roughly $9 million.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is my first mock draft of the year, a mock I’ll link to (along with The Board) at the top of and along with each subsequent iteration, as this one lays a foundation of context that I reserve the right to refer back to.

Teams are largely in the final stages of board building right now. National cross checkers are convening electronically; the last of the staff positional group discussions are wrapping up. How accurate can a mock be at this point? If you’d like to use mock accuracy as a proxy for how things will evolve over the next two weeks, take a look at the first complete round one mock Kiley McDaniel and I did last year and compare it to the one we did the day of the draft. You can see the initial mock has players in the right general range, while the final one is more precise. That’s how readers should think about what they’re about to read.

Of course, things are likely to be harder to predict than usual this year. A monkey wrench the size of the planet itself has been thrown into the cogs of the draft process. The draft’s reduced length, signing bonus limitations on players signed after the five rounds, the bonus deferral guidelines, minor league baseball’s imminent contraction, the asymmetry of prospect-to-prospect playing time this spring, the increased involvement from pro departments and otherwise uninvolved executives who had nothing else to do, the relative ease with which pitchers can upload opinion-changing video during the shutdown compared to hitters, the way teams’ cash flow issues might impact strategy, the way each player’s family’s financial situation may have recently changed and altered their signability, and how a college’s scholarship shortage might make players more or less inclined to return to school or matriculate, not to mention how all of those things (I’m sure I’ve missed some) interact with player, agent, and team incentives, make this year’s draft very unpredictable.

In broad strokes, teams seem more inclined to minimize risk this year. For instance, there are teams that do not have some higher profile high school players on their boards because they didn’t see them this spring. Prospects who were only scoutable for a brief window in March, never began play at all, or were in a crowded region and so were an opportunity-cost casualty, are at risk of not being on a team’s board here and there and sliding. There might be a couple of cases where someone slips past where they’re signable.

In my opinion, this is cowardly. Teams have had plenty of looks at Mick Abel, Ed Howard, Freddy Zamora, Austin Hendrick, and most all of the other names who I’ve heard might slip or become unsignable because of this apprehension. Even Nick Bitsko, who teams have the least history with because of when he reclassified, was widely seen last fall (he was awesome) and by about a third of teams in the bullpen this spring — he clearly belongs near the top of the high school arms in this draft.

I agree that a seven month layoff for high school prospects (that’s how long it’s been for guys who played in Jupiter last October) is not ideal, but neither is a three-month layoff for literally everyone else. Some teams seem more inclined to buy into some of the pop-up college arms who made four good starts in February and March rather than cold weather high schoolers who have a multi-year pedigree of performance. Was anyone really going to learn anything new about Ed Howard’s feel to hit by watching him crush bad Midwest varsity pitching? I don’t think so. On to the mock. Read the rest of this entry »