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

With thousands of players in major and minor league camps this spring amid what has grown into a pandemic with nearly 170,000 confirmed cases worldwide, it was only a matter of time before professional baseball had its first player test positive for the novel coronavirus. That came to pass this weekend; on Sunday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that a Yankees minor leaguer has done so. The player in question, who did not spend any time this spring at the team’s major league camp a mile away in Tampa, Florida, has not been publicly identified, in accordance with HIPAA Privacy Rules.

Thus far among professional athletes, three NBA players — the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, and the Pistons’ Christian Wood, the last of whom played against Gobert last Saturday and was diagnosed over the weekend — have tested positive. Gobert’s positive test led the NBA to suspend its season and set off a domino effect that led to other leagues and organizations suspending play as well, as governmental authorities moved to limit the size of gatherings well below thresholds that would allow sporting events to take place.

Per The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, the minor leaguer in question was symptom-free as of Thursday, but woke up Friday feeling feverish and fatigued. After tests for influenza and strep throat came back negative, the player in question was quarantined. The team learned that his COVID-19 test was positive late Saturday night. Meanwhile, the minor league camp, which has been used by more than a hundred players on a daily basis this spring, was closed on Friday morning and underwent a “deep cleaning” on Sunday — not its first of the spring, according to general manager Brian Cashman. The major league facility will receive another such cleaning as well. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, welcome to the latest edition of my Monday chat and likely the first under some fairly trying conditions that we’re all facing. It was moments after last week’s chat that my wife howled, “Oh shit!” at an email announcing the sudden closure of my daughter’s school, effective end of day (she’s 3 1/2, in her first year of preschool). At the time, it was one of those “abundance of caution” things but as the week grew progressively — and aggressively — more surreal, it looks like we were merely a few days ahead of the curve.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: I spent the remainder of last week getting up to speed on the COVID-19 virus and its intersection with baseball and other sports, as you may have seen, and I took the lead for our first installment of what will be a daily roundup of the latest news on that front, leading with the news of the first professional player to test positive, an unidentified Yankees farmhand. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/covid-19-roundup-the-first-player-has-test…

12:07

Jay Jaffe: My wife and I already worked from home so that part isn’t so difficult to adapt to, but having our daughter underfoot is a challenge. We’re trying to get a bit of help, babysitting-wise, but it’s understandable if people want to isolate themselves.

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Over the weekend, in addition to stocking up on food and cleaning supplies, I sprung for a lot of LEGO to help keep us entertained. Maybe that will help. Anyway, I hope you all are managing out there. Now, onto the questions.

12:10

Jay Jaffe: That’s a good question. Both schedule-wise and injury recovery-wise, the stoppage will have an impact that differs from team to team. We’ll be looking at the latter issue in some systematic fashion, I think (it’s been discussed internally), and I know that Dan Szymborski is examining it from a ZiPS playoff odds standpoint as well. That might even be up today.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020, we estimate that the Dodgers will pay out $236 million in salary. That’s 10% more than any other team in baseball except the Yankees, and over $40 million more than their closest National League competitor, the Cubs. The Dodgers have been big spenders for some time now, and one of the ways they’ve chosen to use their money is to ensure that every position on their roster is stocked with two capable big league players at the very least, and sometimes more than that. It’s not spoiling our upcoming Positional Power Rankings series to note that Los Angeles falls into the top half of every single position on our depth charts, and in the top five of six. Most of those positions are filled with well-paid veterans. The purpose of this piece is to investigate the one position on their roster that isn’t: catcher.

In fact, not a single likely Dodgers’ starter at catcher will be paid more than $1.1 million in 2020. Last year’s starting duo of Russell Martin ($20 million, $16.4 million of which was paid by the Blue Jays) and Austin Barnes ($575,000 in 2019, and $1.1 million this year) morphed, over the course of the 2019 season, into Will Smith and Friends. Although Martin and Barnes caught more games overall last year (61 and 52, respectively), 38 of Smith’s 45 starts came in the Dodgers’ last 57 games of the season, and he enters 2020 — whenever that begins — as the favorite to start the lion’s share of games this year. At 25, with less than a year’s service time under his belt, he’ll make $555,000 in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

With the announcement last week that MLB would suspend spring training and delay Opening Day by at least two weeks, to say that the season’s future is uncertain would be an understatement. The most optimistic of scenarios — one in which the United States’ response to COVID-19 is suddenly and remarkably better than that of other, similar countries — had major league baseball resuming on April 9. The CDC has now recommended the postponement or cancellation of events with 50 or more people for the next eight weeks, which would prevent even spring training games. Update: MLB has announced further delays with a mid-May start the earliest possible date to begin the season in abiding by CDC guidelines. The two-week delay was merely be the first, with an unknown number of weeks of the season lost. The league’s announcement that spring training facilities would be shuttered, and that many players would be returning home, points to a much longer delay; a second spring training will almost certainly be required to allow players time to ramp back up. Some executives are simply hoping for games at some point in May, per Jon Heyman. We don’t yet know how many games the league will play this season, but we can use potential start dates, with a few October regular season weeks and some summer doubleheaders baked in, and attempt to determine how many games the sport might lose as the country attempts to contain this pandemic.

Shorter regular seasons in baseball have been incredibly rare. While the work stoppages in 1994 and 1995 might be fresh in the minds of some, 23 MLB seasons have been played since then. Ronald Acuña Jr., Cody Bellinger, Rafael Devers, Jack Flaherty, and Juan Soto weren’t even born when the start of the 1995 season was delayed. The graph below shows the total number of MLB games played in every year since 1903, the year of the first World Series:

Read the rest of this entry »

MacKenzie Gore struck me as a straightforward sort when I talked to him in San Diego Padres camp last Sunday. Polite but not loquacious, the 21-year-old southpaw perfunctorily answered each of my inquiries about his repertoire and approach. This is something he’s used to doing. As baseball’s top pitching prospect, Gore gets more than his fair share of media attention.

I didn’t walk into the conversation expecting to glean a boatload of fresh insight. I’m familiar with the scouting reports — all glowing — and as a FanGraphs reader you likely are as well. Even so, an opportunity to hear directly from the horse’s mouth wasn’t something I wanted to pass up.

A look at some numbers before we get to his words. In 20 starts last year between high-A Lake Elsinore (this in the hitter-friendly Cal League) and Double-A Amarillo, Gore logged a 1.69 ERA and won nine of 11 decisions. Moreover — this is the eye-popping part — he had 135 strikeouts, and allowed just 56 hits, in 101 innings.

“I’m a guy who attacks the zone with his fastball,” Gore told me. “I’m going out there looking to throw a lot of innings, so I’m trying to get people out early. I’m trying to throw the least amount of pitches possible.”

Fair enough. But given his explosive fastball and multiple plus secondaries, Gore is clearly blessed with the ability to overmatch. Is he ever on the mound hunting strikeouts? Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Major League Baseball delayed the start of the regular season. The decision, in retrospect, was an easy one: every major sport is now shut down. It’s a public safety concern in addition to a player safety issue, and the combination made it impossible to wait. Opening Day has been postponed by at least two weeks, and May might be a more realistic start date.

In their understandable haste to delay the season, MLB left some loose ends. Today, they’ve started to address those. Yesterday, players were simply waiting at team facilities, unsure of next steps. Some spring training games were played even after the announcement that the season would be delayed indefinitely. Teams had no games, but there was no official announcement of what their players would do.

Today, the league eliminated the confusion. Spring training facilities league-wide will be shuttered by mutual agreement of the commissioner and the player’s union:

https://t.co/VTXLnDTZsH spring training facilities shut, players allowed to return home means it is going to be quite a while until MLB games are played.

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, Major League Baseball caught up to the rest of the world of U.S. sports in its response to the novel coronavirus, conceding that public health is the priority by shutting down its spring training schedules in both Arizona and Florida. The start of the regular season, which was slated to begin on March 26, will be delayed by at least two weeks, and if the responses from local officials are anything to go by — such as Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker banning gatherings of more than 1,000 people until May 1 and urging that those of 250 or more people be postponed — that period could run longer.

It’s the governmental restrictions on large gatherings — first in Seattle an San Francisco, and since put into effect in Illinois, New York, and Ohio — that forced the hands not only of MLB but other leagues and organizations when it came to canceling games. As previously noted (this bears repeating), such social distancing measures have been proven to slow the spread of a virus — to “flatten the curve” in order to avoid overwhelming health care systems and force grim decisions on triage — that has shown a 33% daily rise in the cumulative number of cases, and that may ultimately infect 70 million to 150 million people in the U.S. amid this pandemic.

At this point there are still more questions than answers as to where things go from here for MLB, which like just about everybody else, is working without a roadmap. Per the New York Post’s Joel Sherman, the league passed along the recommendation of health experts that players remain in camps:

1/MLB sent a memo to teams stating that both minor and major league players should not leave their spring locales through Sunday except for extraordinary reasons and with MLB knowledge/permission. MLB told me this was the recommendation of its health experts. That keeping

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

2/players under care of club physicians that know them and away from affected areas was the best short-term course of action. How many players will stay working out at club sites beyond the weekend, especially if they don't truly believe the season will start up again on 4/9?

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

In the absence of real baseball (and with plenty of solitary time on fans’ hands), Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley devote an episode to three new fictional depictions of baseball, speaking to novelist Emily Nemens (9:18), the author of spring training tale The Cactus League, novelist Gish Jen (36:56), the author of dystopian baseball saga The Resisters, and actor Hank Azaria (1:08:59), the star of IFC TV series Brockmire, which is about to return for its futuristic fourth and final season.

Audio intro: Belle and Sebastian, "Storytelling"
Audio interstitial 1: Lone Justice, "Cactus Rose"
Audio interstitial 2: Everclear, "Science Fiction"
Audio interstitial 3: Richard O’Brien, "Science Fiction/Double Feature"
Audio outro: The Brian Jonestown Massacre, "Let’s Pretend That it’s Summer"

Link to order The Cactus League
Link to The Cactus League review
Link to order The Resisters
Link to The Resisters review
Link to stream Brockmire Seasons 1-3
Link to stream the Brockmire Season 4 premiere
Link to Ben on Brockmire
Link to order The MVP Machine

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley react to MLB’s COVID-19-caused cancellation of the remainder of spring training and the postponement of Opening Day and discuss the disquieting week and the ramifications for the culture and the 2020 baseball season.

Audio intro: Dan Bern, "Ballpark"
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, "I Get Along Without You Very Well"

Link to MLB announcement
Link to FDR letter
Link to story on baseball’s previous responses to disease
Link to order The MVP Machine

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS