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While we don’t yet know for sure whether there will be a 2020 baseball season, any resumption of baseball will likely involve a year that looks like nothing that has come before. Among the many proposals out there, ranging from the tinkering to the radical, is one to eliminate the traditional AL/NL league structure for this year in the so-called Arizona-Florida plan. Teams would play at their Cactus and Grapefruit League spring training facilities (along with Chase Field, Tropicana Field, and Marlins Park), facing off against the teams in that state. Basing teams in the spring training leagues has the benefit of working with existing team facilities, and, as Ben Clemens wrote for the site earlier today, addresses some of the broadcast and climate difficulties, though of course it is as dependent on the widespread availability of testing as the Arizona plan.

Assuming that we go with the highly unusual Cactus/Grapefruit season, the races will naturally look very different than we’re accustomed to. The spring training league assignments adhere more generally to an east/west alignment than an AL/NL one, so many of the traditional rivalries would take on a very different character in 2020.

With a little bit of work, I was able to realign ZiPS to project the outcome of these new league races. Naturally, there’s a little bit of speculation required to formalize this strange new 2020 MLB. I’ve engaged in such speculation because, well, that’s my job!

For the new 2020, I’m assuming that both leagues use the designated hitter, as Bob reported. While the DH/Pitcher hitting battle still rages among baseball fans, in such an unusual season, when pitchers are already having a very odd training schedule, there’s a lot to recommend a universal DH rule, at least temporarily. Without pre-existing divisions, I’m also going to assume that we’d be seeing division-less leagues in 2020. Also, no interleague play, given that the whole idea of spring training leagues is to avoid lots of travel. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a regular series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Latest Florida-Arizona Plan Revealed

On Friday, Bob Nightengale reported a potential regular season plan that would divide teams not along American and National League lines, but instead by spring training site. Ben Clemens discussed the proposal at FanGraphs:

But short of that, I think it’s far better. The Florida weather is a smaller problem, in my eyes, than the difficulty of playing so many games in the desert heat. Any of several plans could handle the scheduling requirements, and all of those plans would make for better viewing than the Arizona-only plan. Some of the plans would also have their own weirdness; strange double headers or one team constantly resting or unbalanced leagues. But they’d all deliver on the key thing we need: baseball, and live baseball at times when people could watch it. Solve the non-baseball issues, and this Arizona-Florida plan could handle the rest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Richard has been busy preparing for a 2020 season that won’t be starting any time soon. He’s done so without a team — the 36-year-old southpaw remains a free agent — and in a manner to which he’s not accustomed. Fifteen years after being drafted out of the University of Michigan, and with 275 big-league appearances under his belt, Richard is endeavoring to revamp both his arsenal and his delivery. To say that he’s doing so in a meticulous, scientific fashion would be an understatement.

What you’re about to read is the result of multiple exchanges with Richard, as well as abbreviated reports (used here with permission) from his offseason visit to Driveline. We’ll start with Richard giving an overview of what he’s dubbed “Project 2020.”

“Before the baseball world came to a screeching halt, I was frequently asked ‘What are you doing now?’ by friends and family alike,” Richard told me. “Although the question was simple enough, I didn’t feel comfortable delving into exactly what I was doing with my time – mostly due to the fact that I didn’t think the majority of people really care where my spin axis was that week. It’s much easier to say, ‘Just throwing every day and waiting for the right opportunity.’
 
“The reality is that I’ve been up to a lot more than simply throwing a few baseballs. I’ve used the last few months to make significant changes. The effectiveness of my repertoire had changed for the worse over the past two seasons. Based on that, I could choose to continue down the same path — one with an aim to execute pitches at a higher rate but likely be relegated to a left-handed bullpen role — or I could veer headfirst into changing how my pitches profiled to right-handed hitters in an effort to level out the platoon splits for longer outings.

“I debated the choice many times over. My wife likely got sick of my asking her, or talking to myself. Ultimately, I came up with a plan to revamp my arsenal to return in time as a starting pitcher, the role I have worked to become since first pitching in my backyard with my dad squatting behind the plate and my mother standing in the box. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, two competing plans for an alternate-site baseball season were leaked. The first was the so-called Arizona Plan: Send all 30 teams to Arizona, rotate games between the available fields, and play an abbreviated major league season with no in-person audience. That plan has its logistical pitfalls, but one of the few things the plan doesn’t alter is the existing divisional structure of baseball. Aside from a shorter season and its attendant complications, baseball would mostly work the way it always has: the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees would attempt to club each other into submission, the AL Central would be full of rebuilding teams, and so on.

The second plan, the so-called Arizona-Florida plan, would be something else entirely. Instead of recreating the exact structure of the league in one city, this plan would place each team at their spring training facility. Many of the logistical issues from before would still need to be answered. Assuming those can be handled, however, there’s still one major twist: instead of existing divisions, the teams would be grouped by geographic proximity — and, of course, given that the existing setup isn’t 15 AL teams in one location and 15 NL teams in the other, the leagues would be scrambled.

Per Bob Nightengale, the divisions would look like this:

That’s quite the scramble. Dan Szymborski is running the new divisions through ZiPS to get an idea of what it does to teams’ playoff odds, but I thought I’d consider the mechanics of playing with 15-team leagues, as well as highlight some interesting matchups, to give you some sizzle to go with your steak, as it were. Read the rest of this entry »

Who was better, Jim Edmonds or Andruw Jones?

I asked that question in a Twitter poll earlier this week, expecting that it would be a close call. Centerfielders both, they played 17 seasons each and finished with similar WAR totals (Jones 67, Edmonds 64.5). Making the comparison especially intriguing was the fact that one was clearly the better defender, while the other was clearly the better hitter.

Instead of a nail-biter, I got a landslide. A total of 4,017 people voted, and a resounding 71.4% opted for Jones. Edmonds, despite having a huge edge in wRC+, garnered a meager 28.6%.

My eyebrows raised a full inch when I unearthed these statistical comps:

Edmonds had a career 132 wRC+. So did Wade Boggs, George Brett, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, Todd Helton, and Billy Williams (among others).

Jones had a 111 wRC+. So did Russell Branyan, Bernard Gilkey, Geoff Jenkins, Adam Lind, Hal Morris, and Neil Walker (among others). Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about new options for supporting FanGraphs and a potential plan to play the 2020 season with a radically realigned league structure, then talk to FanGraphs writer and ZiPS projection system proprietor Dan Szymborski about how a shortened or canceled season would affect projections for 2021, whether players would exceed or fall short of their projections after a long layoff, how a canceled season could impair player development, how returns from injuries, strength of schedule, and fewer games could help or hurt certain teams in 2020, tactics and roster strategies that could be beneficial in a shortened season, whether Statcast has improved projections, doing away with divisions, the appeal of streaming/esports in the absence of traditional sports, the MLB The Show players tournament, and how projecting baseball is different from projecting pandemics.

Audio intro: The Mountain Goats, "This Year"
Audio outro: The Strokes, "Ode to the Mets"

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Episode 883

Lindsey Adler, Yankees beat writer for The Athletic, joins the program to discuss what life is like on the beat right now, how she’s approaching writing during this delay, the anticipated state of the Yankees roster should baseball return later this summer, and what form she’d like the game to take when it does. Plus, Lindsey shares what it was like on the ground in the final days of Yankees spring training, and offers her advice for those who have taken up baking as a pandemic activity.

To read Lindsey’s piece on how the 1981 Yankees stayed ready through the strike, click here.

To read her piece on how Yankees minor leaguers coped with quarantine, click here.

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This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Good morning, and thank you for visiting FanGraphs! We here at the site hope that you and yours stay safe this weekend. Here’s the latest news on COVID-19 as it relates to the game:

Will Americans Return to Live Sports after COVID-19?

If there’s been any consistent messaging from major sports institutions like MLB over the course of this crisis, it’s the assurance that live sporting events will eventually return. But a new poll from Seton Hall University is raising some questions about the nature of that assumed return — will anyone show up? Per the poll, 72% of respondents wouldn’t attend games before the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, and only 13% would feel as safe attending as they had before the pandemic; 74% believed that live sporting events would remain canceled through the end of 2020.

A study published in the medical journal The Lancet, using modeling based on the outbreak in China, suggested that social distancing measures will need to continue until a vaccine is developed in order to avoid a second wave of cases. An unwillingness to attend sporting events with thousands of other people in the absence of one thus seems entirely reasonable. That doesn’t exactly track with some of MLB’s more ambitious contingency plans for getting the Show back on the road this year, and seems likely to have repercussions well beyond 2020. This pandemic has been a life-altering crisis for so many people; it’s no wonder that it might cause people to re-evaluate their relationship to sports and sporting events. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »