Juan Soto has tested positive for COVID-19. He will not play in tonight’s season opener.

***

The answers are hard to find amid the frenzy of questions. We learn, gradually, that Soto was tested two days ago; that the results just came in this morning. Well, didn’t he play an exhibition game two days ago? Wasn’t he with the rest of the Nats yesterday, doing batting practice? Have they done contact tracing? Is everyone safe?

Yes, everyone is safe, we are told; “Everyone is good.” Soto was, and remains, asymptomatic. Those “closest to him” were tested earlier today, and will be tested again tomorrow.

Unknowns: how contact tracing has determined that everyone is “good”; how safe the rest of the Nationals players are; how the Yankees, who along with every other team have no obligation to wear masks on the field, will have their safety ensured; when Soto will be back.

Just over four hours before the first pitch, the announcement: The playoffs will include 16 teams this year.

***

In the Dominican Republic, Diamondbacks scout Johan Maya dies of COVID-19. He played in the Astros minor-league system and spent 15 years as a scout for them. He had a family, a wife and children. He was 40 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

Hours before their season officially begins, the Blue Jays finally have a new home for the 2020 season. Denied permission first by the Canadian government to host their home games at the Rogers Centre, and then by the state of Pennsylvania to station themselves at the Pirates’ PNC Park, they will instead call Sahlen Field, the ballpark of their Triple-A Buffalo Bisons affiliate, their home for the majority of the pandemic-shortened campaign.

This is a less-than-ideal outcome for the Blue Jays, whose players had quite reasonably hoped to have access to a major league park given the larger spaces and better amenities than most minor league parks have; outfielder Randal Grichuk described Buffalo as a “worst-case” scenario. On the other hand, key youngsters such as Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. have played at Sahlen in recent years. Biggio had positive things to say:

Cavan Biggio just said on @FAN590 that the infield in BUF is one of the best minor league fields he's played on and he hopes #jays can turn this into a home field advantage because visiting teams won't be thrilled about going to a minor league park.

— Dan Shulman (@DShulman_ESPN) July 24, 2020

While the Blue Jays were granted a National Interest Exemption to host their Summer Camp at the Rogers Centre, playing their regular season games in Toronto was ruled out when Marco Mendocino, Canada’s Minister of Immigration, announced last Saturday that the Canadian government had “concluded the cross-border travel required for M.L.B. regular-season play would not adequately protect Canadians’ health and safety,” mainly given the inability of players to follow the 14-day post-travel self-quarantining guidelines while keeping to the schedule of games. The Blue Jays’ spring training facility in Dunedin, Florida — the only option “that is 100 percent seamless right now,” according to team president and CEO Mark Shapiro — was ruled out because Florida is now the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with an average exceeding 10,000 new cases per day. Read the rest of this entry »

Truthfully, it’s hard to overstate what a mess yesterday’s expanded playoffs announcement was. Changing the rules of engagement for an entire league mere hours before the season starts is as weird as it sounds. Announcements made in haste lead to confusion, which is how the baseball world spent a few hours trying to figure out whether top seeds would draft opponents, how the eight teams would be decided, and what the travel schedule would look like.

Even without the last-second shenanigans, however, it’s safe to say that the expanded playoffs aren’t universally popular. Heck, I wrote an article earlier this year decrying them. Today, I’d like to present a contrary opinion. Expanded playoffs are weird! They feel wrong. A team with a record below .500 is fairly likely to get in this year. But hear me out: I think they might work better this year than you think.

It doesn’t take some great leap of logic to understand why expanded playoffs feel weird. Baseball is a sport with a unique relationship to randomness. Every individual game feels like a coin flip. Jacob deGrom can have an off day, or Jacob Waguespack can look untouchable for seven innings.

At the same time, baseball feels like one of the least random sports. The season stretches across the better half of the year, and by the time 162 games have passed, those one-game coin flips don’t feel so random anymore. Gerrit Cole isn’t Gerrit Cole because on every day he pitches exactly to a 2.50 ERA, or anything like that. He’s Gerrit Cole because over the fullness of the season, on average, he’ll get to that 2.50 ERA, through a string of 0’s and 4’s and 1’s and 5’s. Something in our brain knows that — a game of baseball is wildly random, but a season of it is intensely skill-testing. Read the rest of this entry »

Just ahead of the start of the season, MLB and the MLBPA announced an agreement to add an additional round of playoff games to the postseason, eliminating the Wild Card as we knew it for this season only. While they were reportedly part of several of the proposals to resume play, when the players and owners didn’t revise the March agreement, expanded playoffs fell to the wayside. But the lead-up to the regular season apparently gave the sides more time to work out a deal (any changes to the playoff structure have to be collectively bargaine), so here we are. As detailed last night when we frantically changed our playoff odds page, there will be:

• 16 Playoff Teams
• Division winners will receive the top three seeds in each league
• Second-place division finishers will receive the 4-6 seeds in each league
• The two teams in each league with the best records apart from those six will be the seventh and eighth seeds
• The top four seeds in each league will host every game in a best-of-three Wild Card Series to advance to the division series

In terms of the agreement, players will receive a playoff pool totaling $50 million; competitive balance tax money will not be collected this season, which should save the Yankees $8 million to $10 million. The television rights to seven of the eight first-round series will go to ESPN, with the other series going to TBS. The revised 60-game regular season schedule ended up giving FOX and FS1 the same number of televised games, with TBS missing out on a handful of games and ESPN losing a significant part of their regular season schedule. Providing TBS with an extra game or two and ESPN with somewhere between 14 and 21 playoff games (they were previously paying $27 million for a single Wild Card game) likely allows MLB to recover the bulk, or potentially all, of the lost national television revenue for the 2020 season despite the shortened schedule.

As for the ramifications on the field, the extra round of playoffs blends multiple purposes with respect to the season. A shortened regular season means more variation and makes it more difficult to determine who the best teams are. There’s a much greater chance of an otherwise good team missing out on the playoffs due mostly to dumb luck. Take the Dodgers as an example. In a 162-game season, our playoff odds put their chances of making the playoffs at 97%. When the season is shortened to 60 games, those odds go down to 86%. There’s no change in talent between those two situations, but the shorter season makes it so that talent mixes more with luck, resulting in the Dodgers not making the playoffs as often. Adding an extra round and three more teams per league puts the Dodgers odds of making the playoffs back up to 95%. Good teams missing the playoffs because of a shortened season is something probably best avoided if we want the best possible showcase in October. Read the rest of this entry »

After everything that led to the start of its truncated 60-game season, Major League Baseball tried its hardest to fill Opening Day with all the excitement it could. The defending World Series champion Nationals faced this offseason’s most sought-after free agent pitcher, making his debut for the league’s most storied franchise. After that, the Dodgers took the field, joined for the first time by the newest face of their franchise, to host their longtime rivals. Leading immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci — the face of the United States’ fight against the COVID-19 pandemic that led to the suspension of sports seasons all over the world — threw out the first pitch of the season, a not-so-subtle signal to the American public that things are fine, or fine enough.

But the moment had already been soured. Hours before the first game of their season, Nationals wunderkind Juan Soto was announced to have tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing him to miss the season-opener and enter self-isolation. In addition to being scary news for Soto — who is asymptomatic — it also served as one more reminder of the dangers MLB faces as it attempts to play a season in the middle of a pandemic, and the complicated moral quandaries fans of the sport will struggle with as long as that season goes on.

Wednesday — Works out at Nationals Park

Thursday — Receives positive test result for Tuesday test

That is four full days between giving a saliva sample that tested negative and receiving a positive result.

— Jesse Dougherty (@dougherty_jesse) July 23, 2020

Not that we needed the reminder in the first place. For four months, we’ve been absorbing as much information as possible about the virus, its potentially deadly effects, and its insidious spread through asymptomatic carriers; about the difficult ethical debates it created; about the lost jobs and the likely permanent damage dealt to already vulnerable industries and communities; about the potentially devastating hurdles and pitfalls that lurk within the return plans of various leagues; and, of course, since this is pro sports, about whether all of this might be rendered moot by the greed of ownership. After all of that, there was hope MLB’s return would be the escape we’ve all anxiously waited for. Instead, it has become its own source of anxiety — a profoundly risky gamble with thousands of lives in the balance, in which we root less for teams and players and more for the simple wish that nothing terrible happens. Read the rest of this entry »

The universe in 2020, it seems, can’t abide happiness—at least not for the Dodgers. Just one day after the team announced a gigantic extension with Mookie Betts, locking up one of the best players in baseball for the next decade-plus, Los Angeles learned that it will be without Clayton Kershaw for a while. Hours ahead of what would’ve been his ninth career Opening Day start, Kershaw instead hit the Injured List with a back strain suffered while working out on Tuesday; per Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, there’s no timetable for his return.

This kind of malady has been frustratingly common for Kershaw, who’s battled his fair share of back pain over the last few seasons. A herniated disc sidelined him for two months in 2016, and back tightness cost him five weeks in 2017 and a month of action in 2018. The 32-year-old lefty managed to avoid further lumbar issues last season en route to a 3.03 ERA and 3.4 WAR in 178 1/3 innings (though shoulder inflammation resulted in an early-season IL stint). But as anyone with a perpetually sore spine will tell you, those problems are often chronic. As such, it has to be worrying for both Kershaw and the Dodgers that his back is once again the source of his woes, and while this strain could be minor, it also could result in a multi-week absence. Read the rest of this entry »

You were supposed to read this yesterday. Yesterday, when the playoffs consisted of just 10 teams and Mookie Betts hadn’t yet registered his first hit in Dodger blue. But as with a great deal else about this season, the 2020 playoffs will be something different than we initially expected. Mere hours before the first pitch of last night’s Yankees-Nationals tilt was scheduled to be thrown, ESPN’s Marly Rivera reported that MLB and the MLBPA had approved a deal to expand the postseason. This new structure will only be in effect for the 2020 season, barring further negotiations between the league and the players. The field will now feature 16 teams; every division winner and runner up will make the playoffs, along with the two teams in each league that have the best records beyond those six. They’ll meet in a three-game Wild Card Series that will be seeded thusly:

Seeds 1-3 will go to the division winners based on record.

Seeds 4-6 will go to the runners-up based on record.

Seeds 7 and 8 will be based on record.

Thus, there is a possibility the third-best division winner actually plays a worse team than the two best division winners.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 23, 2020

All of the games in the Wild Card Series will be played in the home ballpark of the more highly seeded team. In the event of regular season ties, mathematical tiebreakers will be used — MLB isn’t exactly keen to play games deeper into the Fall.

David Appelman and Sean Dolinar have already updated our playoff odds to account for the new format (they are wizards). You can poke around here, but the unsurprising takeaway is this: a lot of teams are a lot more likely to play October baseball than they were when yesterday began. Read the rest of this entry »

7:02	Dan Szymborski: Chats. A time for chats.

7:02	Dan Szymborski: THERE IS AN ACTUAL BASEBALL GAME

7:02	Dan Szymborski: I think. Today’s Thursday, right?

7:03	Dan Szymborski: No, we can’t weird up the Real Chats too much.

Read the rest of this entry »