When Harold Baines was elected to the Hall of Fame via the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, the argument that he would have reached 3,000 hits had he not lost substantial parts of the 1981, ’94 and ’95 seasons to player strikes must have weighed heavily on the minds of voters. How else to explain the panel shocking the baseball world by tabbing a steady longtime DH who never led the league in a major offensive category and whose advanced statistics equated his career value to good-not-great players such as Paul O’Neill or Reggie Sanders? That time missed was a major talking point for Tony La Russa, who managed Baines in both Chicago and Oakland and was one of several key figures in the slugger’s career who not-so-coincidentally wound up on the committee. Baines finished 134 hits short of the milestone, while his teams fell 124 games short of playing out full schedules in those seasons (never mind the fact that he missed 59 games due in those three seasons due to injuries and off days). On this particular committee, he received the benefit of the doubt regarding what might have been.

Baines was neither the first player nor the last to gain such an advantage in front of Hall voters. As you might imagine, the topic has been on my mind as we confront this pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and I’m hardly alone. In chats, article comments, and on Twitter, readers have asked for my insights into what the current outage might mean with regards to the Hall hopes for active players. I’ve spent the past four years weeks ruminating on the matter, but for as tempting as it may be to dive headfirst into analyzing the outage’s impact on Zack Greinke, Yadier Molina, Mike Trout et al if the season is 100 games, or 80, or (gulp) zero, the more I think about it, the more I believe that it’s important to provide some historical perspective before going off half-cocked.

According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, at least 69 Hall of Famers — from Civil War veteran Morgan Bulkeley, the first president of the National League, to Ted Williams, who served in both World War II and the Korean War — served in the U.S. Armed Forces during wartime. Fifty-one of those men were elected for their major league playing careers, and six more for their careers in the Negro Leagues, the rest being executives, managers, and umpires. Some players, such as Yogi Berra, Larry Doby, Ralph Kiner, and Red Schoendienst, served before they ever reached the majors, and others, such as Christy Mathewson, did so afterwards, but many gave up prime seasons to wars. Williams missed all of the 1943-45 seasons and was limited to just 43 games in 1952-53. Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize, Pee Wee Reese, Phil Rizzuto, and Warren Spahn all missed the entire 1943-45 span as well, with Greenberg missing most of ’41 and half of ’45, too. Several other players missed one or two years. Read the rest of this entry »

With another week in the books, our digital Brewers aren’t any easier to figure out. In fact, it’s been much the opposite. Today, we’ll take a deep dive into the pitching staff, which has already seen a good deal of turnover 12 games into the season, and see if we can settle on roles for a mixed and largely interchangeable group.

First, there’s the Injured List contingent:

Knebel was the only pitcher to start the season on the shelf, but he’s got company now. Brett Anderson is ready to return, having missed only a single turn in the rotation, but the prognosis on the other two is decidedly worse. Lindblom will be back sometime in July at the earliest. And Claudio won’t be back — his rotator cuff injury is a season ender.

Anderson’s imminent return creates an interesting decision. The starting rotation is full of question marks and maybes. The top two feels relatively set; Brandon Woodruff and Adrian Houser are both staying in the rotation unless they get hurt. After that, we have some decisions to make. Read the rest of this entry »

In the new reality of sheltering in place, most schools are now closed. Parents might be looking for new problems and lessons that are interesting to students; it’s a lot easier to keep your mind on a problem when it’s about something that’s already interesting. Teaching addition is a lot easier when you’re counting balls and strikes, or shots and points, than when you’re counting Greek letters or something equally obscure.

To that end, we’re going to be testing out a new program over the coming weeks: FanGraphs Prep. I’ll lay out the project in this article, but in essence, FanGraphs Prep will use baseball as a teaching tool. What we teach is still up in the air, and you can help us with that part by answering a few questions.

For many of the writers at the site, part of baseball’s enduring appeal is the math underlying the game. It’s not the only reason we like the sport, or even necessarily the main reason, but in almost every case, it hooked us as kids. Batting average, ERA, wins and losses; baseball and numbers are inextricable.

For others, the call of the game has been more literary. Roger Angell, Stephen Jay Gould, Jim Bouton — baseball’s written history is rich and varied. Many of us took a flashlight under the covers to read about baseball at night as kids.

In that spirit, we’d like to share our knowledge, and provide what we hope will be a welcome educational diversion for students and those helping to teach them at home. Our plan is to create writing prompts and sample problems that frame different school subjects in the context of baseball. Want to learn basic math? A box score is a treasure box of numbers. Want to learn algebra, or probability? The sport provides excellent examples of those as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Virtual Opening Day 2.0! April 9 represents what would have been Opening Day after MLB’s initial delay to the start of the season.

By popular vote, today’s game, streamed live at 2 PM ET by Paul Sporer, Ben Clemens, and Dan Szymborski, will feature the Los Angeles Dodgers heading to St. Louis to take on Carlos Martínez and the Cardinals.

The Cardinals (7-5) are hoping to avoid a three-game sweep at the hands of the Dodgers. After today’s game, the Red Birds start a nine-game road trip against the Cubs, Dodgers, and Rockies. In the NL Central’s early going, the Cincinnati Reds (10-1) are at the top of the division thanks to a nine-game winning streak. Carlos Martínez had a rough outing against the Reds in his season debut, but earned a no-decision after a quality start against the Orioles last week. C-Mart has yet to walk a batter this season.

The Dodgers (8-4) stand tied at the top of the NL West with the Colorado Rockies, who have gone on a five-game winning streak since benching Ian Desmond. Reigning National League MVP Cody Bellinger’s cold start continues and after 12 games, his line still stands at a rough .187/.264/.229 with no homers and -0.4 WAR. Corey Seager, on the other hand, is off to the hottest start of his career and currently ranks third in the National League in WAR among position players.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Following South Korea and Testing for COVID-19

South Korea could provide a roadmap for a return to play for major league baseball. According to the AP, the KBO is hoping for an early May restart.

On Wednesday, the country recorded 53 new infections, marking the third consecutive day that has seen new cases around the 50-mark. The downward trend from a Feb. 29 peak of 900 is increasing the chances of the 10-team Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) League not only starting in May but also playing a full 144-game season.

“If the situation continues to improve from here and on, teams will start facing each other in preseason games beginning on April 21, and we should be able to get the regular season started in early May,” KBO secretary general Ryu Dae-hwan said after a meeting with club general managers in Seoul.

While a lot can happen in a month, that’s certainly some promising news on the baseball front as well as for South Korea. One of the key factors for success in South Korea has been testing:

Dr. Angela Caliendo said Tuesday that South Korea’s experience “shows you the importance of testing.”

“I do think the testing they did in South Korea was very important in controlling their outbreak,” said Caliendo, an infectious diseases professor at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School.

With their widespread testing program, South Korean authorities were able to identify infected people, isolate them and trace their contacts with other people, who then also could be tested.

If the United States had adequate testing, “you could consider areas of the country that are at different points of the virus” spread progression, Caliendo said during a call with reporters arranged by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where in the player ranks do MVPs come from? As unpredictable as baseball can be, this particular question has a very simple answer for the most part. If we go back through the years, there aren’t too many award winners whose origins deviate too much from a few common paths. MVPs largely are who we thought they were: established superstars, former top prospects, former first round draft picks. In some cases, all of the above are true.

But the stories of how those MVPs ended up with their particular teams can still be intriguing. Some were drafted by the team with which they won the award, including a few, like Bryce Harper and Joe Mauer, who were drafted first overall. Others were traded away only to find success (and some shiny hardware) on another squad.

Here’s a look back at how the NL MVPs of the 1990s were acquired.

Barry Bonds was just one several college baseball stars being considered for the first overall pick in the 1985 draft. Despite his obvious talent, there were some questions about his makeup — his reputation for being cantankerous didn’t begin when he arrived in the major leagues — which may have contributed to him slipping to the Pirates, who held the sixth pick in the draft. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Dan is too! We can have a club.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Eh, I’m nto sure they’re hte same.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Longoria had more glove

Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, in more normal times, we tested the Yankees to see how injury-resistant the 2020 roster actually was in light of the then-recent news that Luis Severino would miss 2020 with Tommy John surgery. While this year’s Yankees roster wasn’t quite as deep as 2019’s, it took a lot of key injuries to seriously affect the team’s 2020 chances. But even as they remained the favorites to win the East, losing James Paxton until at least May, Aaron Judge‘s broken rib, and Giancarlo Stanton’s sore calf muscle increased the team’s downside risk.

ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported late Monday night that MLB and the MLBPA were discussing the particulars of a plan that would see workouts resume in May with the season beginning soon after. Passan is as dependable as they come, and I have little doubt about the story, but the chances of the season starting that quickly strike me as fairly small. As Ben Clemens wrote for FanGraphs earlier today, the logistical lift involved with such a plan is enormous. From what I’ve heard doing the rounds — and I’ve yet to have a colleague form a drastically different impression — MLB’s more realistic targets involve June workouts and a start sometime in early-to-mid July.

Obviously, teams would rather be playing right now, regardless of their roster’s injury status. Reality is terrible! But with reality’s timeline in mind, instead of injuring all of the Yankees, what if we healed them? It’s not quite as preposterous as it sounds thanks to the delayed start to the season. Severino wouldn’t return no matter how late Opening Day ends up being, so my headline is a bit of a cruel lie. But a midseason start to the 2020 season leaves a very real chance that the Yankees kick things off with Paxton, Judge, and Stanton all on the active roster; Stanton was likely to return in April, but the outlook for Paxton and Judge was a bit foggier. Read the rest of this entry »

As strange as it sounds right now, a day will come when baseball people start thinking about how to win baseball games again. That might not be until spring 2021, if COVID-19 forces Major League Baseball to sit out an entire calendar year. But there is still a chance it happens sometime in the next couple of months, and if that’s the case, teams will be preparing for a season unlike any they’ve played before. In addition to all of the structural changes that might be necessary for games to proceed, the simple fact of the season being considerably shorter than normal could change the way teams approach the games. In light of this, one strategy for teams to consider is a return to the four-man starting rotation.

Four-man rotations — or at least, the concept of throwing your best arms on three or fewer days rest — used to be fairly commonplace in the majors. In a piece by Russell A. Carleton at Baseball Prospectus from 2013, he found that around 40% of starts occurred on what we’d now call “short” rest as recently as the early 1970s. Soon after reaching that recent peak, however, the practice nosedived, with short rest starts happening less than 10% of the time by 1984 and continuing to free-fall until reaching a point of near-extinction over the last two decades.

The point of Carleton’s study was not to find out when the four-man rotation died out, but why it did. To that end, he came up with little statistical reasoning. Pitchers who threw on short rest did not seem to perform any worse than they’d be expected to on full rest, nor did any cumulative effects seem to wear them down faster over the course of a full season. This was true regardless of the time period, too, which means it didn’t seem to have anything to do with whether a pitcher was more or less conditioned for it. The best explanation for why teams broadly and swiftly shifted to a five-man rotation was simply fear of injuring arms, and hoping that more rest might prevent that.

Carleton’s piece didn’t take the extra step of actively calling for the four-man rotation to return, but plenty of others have. Major league teams, however, have been taking steps to limit the responsibilities given to starting pitchers, not expand them. In 2014, David Price led the majors with 248.1 innings pitched, while 34 pitchers reached 200 innings, and 65 reached 180. In 2019, Justin Verlander’s league-leading innings total was just 223, with 15 pitchers reaching 200 innings, and 33 pitchers reaching 180 innings. Over a full season, a four-man rotation could add as many as eight starts to a pitcher’s workload, amounting to 40-50 extra innings of work. It would be rather shocking to see a team take that kind of step over 162 games. Read the rest of this entry »