I have a confession to make, one that might be uncool in the modern, hyper-optimized world of baseball analysis. I love bunts.

I know, I know. I’ve been spending most of a recent article series on old World Series tactics railing about bad bunts. I’ve read Moneyball; outs are bad and runs are good. That’s all true, but I can’t help it. I love to see a well-executed bunt for a hit. Drag bunts, sneak attacks aimed at shifts — I love them all. So today, I set out to find the best bunter.

A quick refresher of why bunting is bad: it makes outs. If you want some proof of this, look no further than a run expectancy chart from 2019:

If you haven’t read one of these before, no worries. Each number represents how many runs scored, on average, from the relevant combination of baserunners and outs until the end of the inning, across all games in 2019. The bases go down the left side, and the outs go across the top. If you have runners on first and second (120 in the table) with no outs, for example, you should expect to score 1.537 runs in the rest of the inning.

This doesn’t mean you’ll always score that many runs, obviously. But it’s a useful baseline. Unless you have some very weird batters coming up (very good or very bad would both do), you can estimate a player’s contribution to how many runs you’ll score by comparing the base/out state before and after their turn at bat. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve taken a fresh, top-to-bottom pass at my draft rankings, which have changed based on continuous discussion with team sources, review of my own notes and video, and the sourcing of data. The updated list, which includes approximately five rounds of players, can now be found on The Board, which is a benevolent spreadsheet-god that controls my thoughts, feelings, and choices.

The exact date of the draft and the specifics of its format (length, etc.) remain unknown, but team sources anticipate there will be about a month between when those details are announced and Day 1 of the draft, which those sources feel provides them with a reasonable, sufficient window to prepare for the specifics. Especially if that eventual announcement includes an adjustment to the length of the draft, it will likely trigger another update to this list.

At this stage, without games going on, there is no new information about players but there will continue to be information that is new to me, be it what I can get my hands on from a statistical standpoint or from sources I haven’t yet spoken to at length. These evaluations are still subject to change between now and the draft. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss the results of MLB’s investigation into Boston Red Sox sign stealing, touching on Boston’s lighter penalties and seemingly lesser offenses compared to the Astros’, whether Boston’s front office and coaches deserved to be absolved, the moral hazard of the advance scout who doubles as a replay-room operator, and more. Then they answer listener emails about firing managers based on one egregious in-game decision, transporting a modern coach to an earlier era of baseball, and properly appreciating Mike Trout, plus a Stat Blast about how many would-be big leaguers will miss out on making the majors because of a canceled or shortened season, and a postscript on trainers, trampolines, and an advance scout.

Audio intro: The Walkmen, "Lost in Boston"
Audio outro: Earlimart, "First Instant Last Report"

Link to MLB report
Link to Sam on Trout and WAR
Link to Stat Blast song covers thread
Link to Mike Conte’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to trampoline study 1
Link to trampoline study 2
Link to trampoline study 3
Link to Stubbs interview episode
Link to Pages from Baseball’s Past
Link to trainer story 1
Link to trainer story 2
Link to trainer story 3
Link to order The MVP Machine

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If you were hunkered down under a stay-at-home order waiting for Major League Baseball to release its long-awaited report on the Red Sox’s illegal sign-stealing efforts, then we have good news for you: the wait is over. On Wednesday, the league announced the conclusions of its investigation and the punishments handed down by commissioner Rob Manfred. If you were expecting the discipline to be comparable to that received by the Astros in January, you may want to get back to binge-watching Tiger King, because according to the report, there simply isn’t a lot to see here.

In the case of the Astros, when Manfred issued his report on January 13, he found that the team illegally stole signs during the 2017 regular and postseason and into the 2018 regular season. He suspended president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season (both were fired by owner Jim Crane within hours), fined the team $5 million (the maximum allowed under MLB’s constitution), and stripped them of their first- and second-round picks in both this year’s and next year’s amateur drafts. When it came to disciplining the Red Sox, however, Manfred only found evidence that the illegal sign-stealing occurred during the 2018 regular season; suspended only J.T. Watkins, the team’s video replay system operator; stripped away only its second-round pick in this year’s draft; and did not fine the team. As with the Astros, no players were punished.

The baseball world waited 3 1/2 months for this? A previously unknown backroom employee has taken the fall for an entire organization while those above him escaped without punishment — it doesn’t get much more anticlimactic than that, nor does it make a whole lot of sense, given the need for intermediaries between the video room and the dugout. And it certainly isn’t a severe enough punishment to act as a deterrent. There isn’t a team among the 30 who wouldn’t trade a second-round draft pick and a single baseball operations employee for a world championship. Read the rest of this entry »

On a purely objective level, Eric Davis had a solid major league career. He played parts of the 17 seasons in the majors, hit 282 homers, and collected 1,430 hits. Davis received MVP votes, made All-Star appearances, and earned three Gold Glove awards. Of a group of three childhood friends consisting of Davis, Darryl Strawberry, and Chris Brown, he’s the one who came out of baseball seemingly the least affected by personal setbacks and tragedy. Davis is still involved in Major League Baseball and has worked with underprivileged kids, something he knows about having grown up in South Central Los Angeles.

But as accomplished a player as Davis was, he was capable of being more. Like another All-Universe athlete from the 1980s who made the majors, Bo Jackson, baseball wasn’t Davis’s best sport in his youth. At John C. Fremont High School, he was considered a basketball player before a baseball player, but at the time, baseball had the quickest path to playing professionally. While the NBA’s policy disallowing anyone to play in the league within four years of high school was struck down by the US Supreme Court, no high schoolers made the NBA between Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby in 1975 and Shawn Kemp in 1989.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, what kept Davis from approaching a Cooperstown career wasn’t personal or legal troubles or a lack of talent; it was a flurry of injuries. From a knee injury suffered as a rookie while sliding to the torn rotator cuff with the Cardinals, Davis was a veritable encyclopedia of maladies. (For a comprehensive listing of his dings and scrapes – and for a great look back on Davis’ career – be sure to check out Norm King’s SABR Bio of Davis.) Some of them were of the ordinary variety, such as an assortment of leg injuries that cut short almost every one of his age 24-28 peak seasons, a broken collarbone diving in the outfield, and multiple shoulder ailments.

Others were less typical, as when Davis lacerated his kidney and ended up in intensive care and endured a month-long hospital stay. Spinal problems, which ruined his 1994 long before the strike ended the season, initially led Davis to announce his retirement at age 32. Just a year after his extremely successful 1996 comeback with the Cincinnati Reds (.287/.394/.523, 26 homers, 3.4 WAR in 129 games), he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Davis spent the second half of the 1997 season recovering from having a portion of his colon, along with a tumor the size of a baseball, removed but still returned to the Baltimore Orioles and hit .327/.388/.592 in his last real full season in the majors. By this point, he was a part-time right fielder/designated hitter, with his days in center field wisely consigned to the past. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the end of March, we’ve been tracking reader sentiment regarding the potential for an upcoming season. It’s been two weeks since the last round of polling, so here are the questions again; these are the same as our initial set. Hopefully your answers will reveal how sentiment has changed (or not) over time.

Thank you for your time and assistance. We will report back with the results.

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.

MiLB Is Closer to Accepting Contraction in Wake of Pandemic

Small baseball communities around the country were delivered a bit of a gut punch on Tuesday, when Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper reported that Minor League Baseball is nearing an agreement with Major League Baseball that would result in the loss of 40 affiliated teams. The Associated Press put out a similar report Tuesday, while Minor League Baseball itself released the following statement.

Minor League Baseball statement pic.twitter.com/FCi67U9kUw

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) April 21, 2020

The statement seems intended to temper public reaction, though it doesn’t exactly reaffirm MiLB’s commitment to keeping the total number of affiliated teams at 160 (MLB’s proposal would reduce the number to 120). MLB’s proposal was first introduced back in October, with the league claiming it would help teams boost minor leaguers’ pay, as well as improve their quality of life by reducing travel distances and guaranteeing higher-quality facilities. Public reaction to the plan, however, decried it for what it more appeared to be — a money-saving move for the league and the owners. But advancing that goal would result in far fewer players having a place in affiliated professional baseball, not to mention the millions of Americans who would find themselves without reasonable in-person access to the sport itself, as Meg Rowley and Ben Clemens wrote about for this site in November.

But the entire professional baseball landscape looks much different now than it did a few months ago. The impact of the lost revenues of months, and possibly an entire season, of baseball is making itself felt at the major league level. The circumstances are much more dire for minor league teams, which are suddenly under threat of extinction not only from the commissioner’s office but the COVID-19 pandemic as well. As a new Professional Baseball Agreement is negotiated, MiLB could place enough value in insuring the long-term security of existing teams that it is willing to accept contraction for those on the chopping block. Read the rest of this entry »

The question got my attention, no doubt because the man asking it was a friend who had tagged me among some esteemed company when he posted it to Twitter. “You can be transported to any baseball season in history,” wrote Jon Weisman, the longtime proprietor of Dodger Thoughts and the author of two books about the team’s history. “Once transported, you will not know what has happened — you will experience it all unfold in real time. Which season do you pick?”

Elsewhere within his series of tweets, Weisman laid out the dilemma at hand: “whether to relive a season you adored, or newly experience a season you would adore.”

In the midst of making dinner, I resisted the temptation to fire off a knee-jerk response. When hypothetical baseball time travel is involved, it’s important not to go off half-cocked, particularly when you can write about it.

I turned 50 years old in December. My storehouse of baseball memories goes back to 1978, the year I learned to read box scores. While a few years during college are faint — I didn’t see a lick of the 1990 World Series, though I do remember participating in some fantasy team-by-mail contest that year, seven years before joining my first online fantasy league — that’s a storehouse of 42 seasons worth of baseball, some of which I would consider reliving if given the chance, not just because of the World Series winners but the quality of the pennant races, with record-setters and Hall of Famers also figuring into the calculus. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor Larnach projects as an impact bat at the big league level. Ranked second on our Minnesota Twins Top Prospect list, and 55th on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list, the 23-year-old Oregon State University product has, in the words of our own Eric Longenhagen, “titanic raw power… and a refined approach.” Moreover, he makes consistent hard contact. Last season, 51.9% of Larnach’s batted balls were hit 95 mph or higher.

Larnach worked to further fine-tune his left-handed stroke over the offseason, and he continues to do so during the current pandemic-necessitated hiatus. He has a specific objective in mind. Larnach slashed .309/.384/.458 last year between High-A Fort Myers and Double-A Pensacola — heady enough numbers to merit an invitation to big-league camp — but an inefficiency has stuck in his craw. The extent to which he can conquer it remains unknown, but given that he draws much of his inspiration from the preparedness of Navy Seals, there’s a pretty good chance that he will.

———

David Laurila: To start, how are you preparing while the season is on hold?

Trevor Larnach: “I’m hitting every day. I’m working with the hitting guy I’ve been with for quite a few years now, Tyler Graham. He recently went from Oregon State’s baseball staff over to the [Texas] Rangers’ staff, where he’s working with their Triple-A team. We’re basically taking what I learned from spring training into kind of an offseason format. I’m pretty much doing everything I did in the offseason, but incorporating a couple of things into my routine that got exposed in big-league camp.“

Laurila: What got exposed?

Larnach: “In big league spring training you’re facing big leaguers and upper level minor league guys. Of course, early on they’re still trying to work out the kinks — just as the hitters are — but putting that aside, I was experiencing big league level pitching: the stuff, the speed, the consistency. It kind of shapes your frame of mind to where you need to be to put yourself in the best position to succeed.

“A big positive for me was getting to talk to Nelson Cruz, Torii Hunter, Justin Morneau, Josh Donaldson, Marwin Gonzalez, and all these different guys. I was picking different things that each one had to say, and incorporating them into my game. Spring training is a perfect time to test things out. I was putting what I worked on in the offseason to test, while at the same time taking in things I took from those guys.”

Laurila: How does the pitching you were facing tie into that? Read the rest of this entry »

The end of March featured a bit of relatively good news on the baseball front, as MLB and the MLBPA agreed on a deal that appeared to address issues like service time and player compensation during this unusual season, allowing for a smooth path forward once and if it is safe to begin play. (Amateur players, who saw the rounds of the June draft dramatically reduced, got a far less good bargain.) The deal looked to be a good compromise from both sides, seemingly ensuring that labor questions would not get in the way of an abbreviated season. However, recent reports, which keyed off comments from Mets owner Fred Wilpon to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, indicate that the peace is not quite as secure as was once thought.

As initially reported, the deal seemed fairly straightforward. The players would receive a salary advance of $170 million that would not need to be paid back in the event of a cancelled season. In addition, the players were to receive service time consistent with what they had accrued in 2019 if no season was played. The players and owners agreed that player salaries would be pro-rated to the number of games played, with service time calculated in the same fashion. The owners received a guarantee that players would not sue for their 2020 salaries. The owners were also given the ability to defer more than a quarter of a billion dollars of draft and international bonuses to future years while the reduction in rounds would eliminate between $50 million and $100 million from the draft pool entirely. Read the rest of this entry »