Andy McKay oversees one of the best farm systems in the game. Seattle’s Director of Player Development does so with a sports-psychology background — McKay has an MBA in Organizational Behavior Studies — as well as a deep appreciation for data and technology. The former college coach is anything but old school when it comes to developing young talent. Case in point: Mariners prospects have their regularly-revisited player plans put together not by coaches, but by analysts.

In Part One of a wide-ranging interview, McKay addresses several of his philosophies, as well as how the Mariners are approaching development without a minor league season.

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David Laurila: We’re talking on July 26, 2020. What is the state of the Mariners farm system right now?

Andy McKay: “We’re really excited about where we’re at, both in terms of our department — the people we’re employing, and the process we’ve created — and the players we have in our system. Those things are moving along at a really good clip. We’re continuing to move the needle forward, even through COVID-19.”

Laurila: How exactly are you moving forward with no minor league season?

McKay: “We made the decision to turn our taxi squad into a very heavy prospect-based camp. If you look at who is down in Tacoma right now… not to mention we had, I think, four players make their major league debuts yesterday. We’re the youngest team in the big leagues. So we have the 10-week program going on, like all the other clubs, and then we’ve got things going on individually, all over the country with our players. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting the season after a long layoff and an abbreviated training camp was bound to put players in different positions of readiness in the season’s early going. When a season starts in late March or early April, teams enjoy a full spring training but weather can have an effect on hitters. Better weather means better offensive production, so it seemed possible that a late-July start might help hitters skip some of the early-season struggles we typically see; the universal designated hitter also seemed likely to help move things along. So far, it has been a bit of a mixed bag.

Through yesterday’s action, teams are scoring 4.5 runs per game, which is down from last year’s 4.8 full-season mark despite the addition of the designated hitter in the National League. Of course, the first week of the 2019 season saw teams score an average of 4.3 runs per game, so there are more runs than the beginning of last season. Runs alone probably aren’t going to tell us if pitchers have a bigger advantage than they normally do, though, particularly when changes to the ball over the last few seasons have had a pretty dramatic effect on scoring. To get a sense of the last few seasons, here are some end-of-season numbers since 2017 (excluding pitchers hitting), along with the start of this season:

Home runs are certainly down from last season, but compared to the last three seasons, the dip isn’t huge. We have seen an increase in the rate of infield fly balls, walks, and strikeouts. The power numbers are down some, but the big drop from previous seasons’ numbers concerns BABIP. The increase in walks isn’t enough to offset the greater number of strikeouts, the lack of power resulting in weaker contact, and considerably worse overall offensive numbers. Before we compare these numbers to typical early-season numbers, let’s add in some plate discipline stats as well:

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I’m biased, but I think summer in Vancouver can be one of the most beautiful seasons anywhere in the world. The rainforest, having spent the autumn, winter, and spring growing lush under the cover of clouds and rain, shines rich green under the sun, illuminated by the light coming off the ocean. It’s hot, but not overwhelmingly so. On some days, you can look out over the water and see the spout of a humpback whale or the dark, swift-moving fins of a transient orca pod. And at sunset, the bright place where the sky and the ocean meet seem to go on forever.

In the summer of 2017, fires engulfed the Pacific Northwest. There was record heat; record time passed between rainfalls. I spent that summer working in a basement shop, bitter and sad, and when I emerged from the top of the staircase at the end of every day, I would often see a sky choked thick with ash and smoke, the sun swollen and red. Everything that was normally so vibrant was cast over with a dull haze. It was sometimes difficult to breathe. I thought, at the time, that it seemed apocalyptic: the reality of climate change clearly visible above me, around me, hanging in the air itself.

That was the summer Nate Pearson came to town.

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The Vancouver Canadians are the Blue Jays’ short-season affiliate, playing in the Northwest League. Baseball has a long, diverse history in Vancouver, though the city isn’t exactly baseball-crazy. Back when the Canadians were a Triple-A franchise, affiliated most recently with the A’s, there were some pretty lean years in terms of attendance and interest. But a renovation of their ballpark, the 68-year-old Nat Bailey Stadium, and affiliation with the recently-successful Blue Jays has made the franchise one of the healthiest and most well-attended in the minor leagues. The banners around the stadium show some of the Canadians alumni who are currently successful major leaguers — Kevin Pillar, Marcus Stroman, and Noah Syndergaard, to name a few.

They show, too, the legends who visited and played in Vancouver in days long gone: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who came north on barnstorming trips. Though thoroughly renovated for the demands of a 21st-century baseball team, the Nat is deliberate in making you feel its history. A little museum is tucked into the concourse under the grandstand; the tall wooden scoreboard is a replica of the original, salvaged from the remains of Sick’s Stadium in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Cardinals got some bad news. Miles Mikolas, the team’s second-best pitcher and a valuable source of bulk innings, suffered a setback in dealing with the arm injury that had bothered him all year. He’ll need surgery to repair his flexor tendon, which will keep him out for all of 2020.

After a scintillating 2018 (2.83 ERA, 3.28 FIP, and a sixth-place finish in Cy Young voting), Mikolas came back to earth slightly in 2019. Even then, his pinpoint control and ability to coax grounders out of opposing batters gave him an excellent floor. While a 4.16 ERA might not sound impressive, it was better than league average in this homer-crazed era, and 184 innings of average pitching is hugely valuable.

The Cardinals came into this season with a competition for starting spots, but Mikolas wasn’t one of the competitors. He and Jack Flaherty would provide the guaranteed quality atop the rotation, while Adam Wainwright, Dakota Hudson, Carlos Martínez, Daniel Ponce de Leon, and Kwang Hyun Kim battled it out for the remaining three slots.

If there’s good news in Mikolas’s injury, it’s that deep bench of starting options. They’re all worse than Mikolas — all worse by a decent margin — but all five look to be quality major league options, which softens the blow. Ponce de Leon, who will take the hill today, made spot starts in 2018 and 2019 with solid results. We project him to be roughly 0.25 runs of ERA worse than Mikolas, which is hardly an unbridgeable gulf.

The real trouble begins if another Cardinals starter goes down. Kim is still an option, but he currently serves as the team’s closer, which is still a pretty wild sentence to write. The bullpen is already a little short-handed, though that should change as Giovanny Gallegos settles in and Alex Reyes and Génesis Cabrera return to the team. At the moment, however, Kim probably can’t stop closing, which leaves St. Louis in a bind. Read the rest of this entry »

In the wake of an outbreak of the coronavirus that has infected 15 Marlins players and two coaches thus far — including four new positive tests reported on Tuesday morning — Major League Baseball showed signs of grasping the gravity of the crisis by backtracking on its previous plan for the team to resume play on Wednesday in Baltimore. Instead, the team’s next two series have been postponed; they won’t play again until at least Tuesday, August 4. The Phillies, whom they faced this past weekend, will be kept out of action until Saturday, August 1 (initially, the plan was for Friday). The postponements affect the Orioles, Yankees, and Nationals, and MLB is in the process of reconfiguring its schedule to absorb the impact of the weekend’s events.

Said MLB in a statement, “Given the current circumstances, MLB believes that it is most prudent to allow the Marlins time to focus on providing care for their players and planning their baseball operations for a resumption early next week.”

The Marlins were initially scheduled to play the Orioles in Miami on Monday and Tuesday, and then in Baltimore on Wednesday and Thursday. In an interview with MLB Network’s Tom Verducci on Monday — by which point the team had at least 13 known infections among players and staff — commissioner Rob Manfred suggested that the Marlins could resume play on Wednesday and Thursday in Baltimore “if the testing results are acceptable.” Even absent Tuesday’s positives, how a double-digit total of infected personnel could be deemed “acceptable” in this context is unclear, but in any case Manfred and the league have seen the light, so now that two-game series has been postponed, as has the Marlins’ three-game set against the Nationals in Miami from July 31-August 2, after which they have a scheduled off day. Per The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, the “vast majority” of Nationals players voted against going to Miami for the series, and while it wasn’t their call to make, it’s noteworthy that the players publicly offered some pushback regarding the league’s plans.

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Five years ago, gimmick defenses were bush league. I don’t just mean that in the pejorative baseball sense, though of course I mean that too. Rather, I mean that when Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh were running the Sonoma Stompers, they toyed with adding gimmick defenses to their indy ball team, and the team rebelled. The players tolerated it — not without reservation — but the reason the wild defensive alignments merited mention in the book is because they were wild.

That was 2015, however, and sensibilities have changed since then. Strange defensive alignments are hardly unusual now. Joey Votto faced a four-man outfield in 2017, and it’s gotten weirder from there. Joey Gallo faces four-man outfields with some frequency. Five-ish man infields have sometimes been a thing in do-or-die late game situations, but the Dodgers rolled one out against Eric Hosmer in the middle innings last year.

I know what you’re thinking. Ben’s going to talk about the “seven-man outfield” the Royals used against Miguel Cabrera. I’m not exactly sure that’s a novel defensive alignment, though. Backing up when somebody slow is batting isn’t the same as forfeiting a right fielder or inventing a new position. It was funny, no doubt, the ultimate mark of disrespect for someone’s speed, but teams have been doing something similar to Albert Pujols for years.

Even though the shock of novel positioning has mostly worn off, I did do a double take on Monday night. With the Pirates attempting to lock down a 5-1 win against the Brewers (about that…), Justin Smoak came to bat. The Pirates checked their laminated positioning cards, shuffled around, and presto! Four in the outfield:

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Here’s something you hear a lot that also has the benefit of being true: baseball is a sport of haves and have nots. There are super teams scattered around the league, the Dodgers and Yankees and Astros of the world. There are plenty of teams that aren’t trying to compete this year; the Tigers and Royals spring to mind, but it’s not like there aren’t others.

In a technical sense, however, the league achieved a rare degree of parity over the weekend — and as we all know, being technically correct is the best kind of correct. After each team played three games, the entire league stood at either 1-2 or 2-1, with fifteen teams apiece in each camp. In that odd, specific sense, this is one of the best years ever for parity in baseball.

Come again? Per no less an authority than MLB.com, this is the first time in the last 66 years that no team started 3-0 in their first three games. In that contrived sense, then, this is the most parity since 1954. Given that it was far easier to have no team start 3-0 then (there were only 16 teams), you would even be justified in saying that this was the most balanced start of all time.

That sounds, without putting too much thought into it, very impressive. 1954! Man hadn’t landed on the moon. The LOOGY hadn’t been invented, or the personal computer. It was a very different time.

As fun as it would be to leave it at “Wow, that was crazy,” I thought I’d spoil the fun with a little math. First things first — what if we think every team is evenly matched? Let’s leave home field advantage out for now — we’re just approximating anyway, and that makes the math cleaner. The math for a single series is easy; if each game is a coin flip, all we need to do is find the odds of getting either three heads or three tails in a row. Read the rest of this entry »

Corey Kluber’s debut with Texas lasted just one inning. A strikeout, walk, caught stealing, and popup made for a snappy opening frame against Colorado on Sunday, and after 18 pitches, the 34-year-old right-hander’s velocity was right where it has been for years. It seemed like the start of a solid return to the mound for Kluber and an exciting first glimpse for Rangers fans at the team’s biggest offseason addition, but the good vibes faded quickly. Kluber never took the mound for the second inning, with the team quickly citing “tightness in his right shoulder” and saying there would be an update Monday.

The update came, and it wasn’t reassuring — Kluber has a Grade 2 tear of his teres major muscle, an injury that will require him to be shut down for at least four weeks. There is a chance he could miss the entire season, and if he does return at some point, he will need to pitch out of the bullpen, as there won’t be enough time to stretch him back out to handle a starter’s workload.

This is the second consecutive season the two-time Cy Young winner has missed substantial time following several years of him being one of the most durable starters in the game. Kluber threw at least 200 innings every year from 2014-18, racking up the second-highest innings total over that five-year span. That run got busted on a fluke play last spring when Marlins third baseman Brian Anderson hit a line drive that got Kluber in his right arm, causing a non-displaced fracture that ended his season after just seven starts. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big liar, or at least I am thanks to Major League Baseball. Last week, after the longest offseason in modern baseball history, I posted the Final ZiPS 2020 Projected Standings. It turns out, however, that these weren’t quite as final as we hoped. Last Thursday, MLB took the step — unprecedented in major sports, at least in my memory banks — of changing the league’s playoff structure the day the season started. The already-bloated 10-team playoff format became an engorged 16-team one. In are four mediocre teams; out is most of the advantage division winners get for being the best in their divisions.

I’m still hopeful this is solely a 2020 issue; the agreement between MLB and the Players Association was only for this year. Baseball’s regular season is the most important in major team sports, after all. Plus, it’s in the interests of the players to avoid further decoupling championships from team quality, as that would inevitably create a further drag on salaries. Assuming 2021 reverts to normal, it still leaves the question of 2020 projections. After a three-day weekend immured in my Fortress of Statitude, I’ve reconfigured ZiPS for the umpteenth and hopefully last time, and present the final, actually official 2020 projected standings. All the commentary in my original article still stands, but now the numbers are quite different.

Warning: There are lots of charts coming.

Let’s start with new start-of-season projections. For these standings, ZiPS knows nothing about what has happened so far this season, whether it’s wins, losses, player stats, or injuries. Whatever it knew last Wednesday, it still knows.

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The last time I saw Matt Shoemaker was on the grass, grimacing in pain. It was last year in Oakland; Shoemaker ran over to cover first on a groundball, then crumpled to the ground. He had torn his ACL.

As I wrote then, it was a cruel, unfair freak accident for someone who had seen far too many of those in his career. Shoemaker, though, seemed determined to push through. I was rooting for him to return and succeed. On Saturday, finally, he made his first start in over a year — having, again, overcome adversity to come back to the field.

And though he was making his return in front of an empty stadium, in the middle of a global crisis, it was hard not to give in to the creeping feeling of joy, sneaking in from behind the anxiety. It is wonderful to see someone succeed in spite of everything.

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“Overcoming adversity” is about as tired a baseball cliche as there is. Look deep enough into the background of pretty much any player and you’ll find adversity that was overcome — that’s just the nature of life, and especially the nature of pursuing a career as stressful, all-consuming, and specialized as professional baseball. That’s not to say that these stories aren’t worth hearing: It’s important to understand the lifetimes of effort and struggle that go into the games we watch for entertainment. But flattening every story into a pat tale of “overcoming adversity” doesn’t do justice to the gravity of players’ experiences. Read the rest of this entry »