The 2020 season will be unlike any other we’ve seen before. Indeed, there may not even be a season. The COVID-19 pandemic has already altered baseball to an even greater degree than the World Wars did. While finding a way to resume play has become a rare point of common interest for MLB and the MLBPA, a contagious illness that spreads easily and is more dangerous than the seasonal flu presents a whole host of problems that need to be solved before a new Opening Day can be announced. Do you quarantine players? How long do you play without fans? What happens if a player tests positive in mid-August?

But let’s assume for a moment that the IHME model is on target. The model predicts that if we can keep up our current social distancing efforts (and the straggler states join in), the worst effects of the virus will be behind us by early-to-mid June. The return of baseball would be a welcome symbol of normalcy, and a baseball season that starts in July could largely be played without too many compromises other than the number of games. But I think it would be a mistake for baseball to just go back to the regular structure. The game will be returning against the backdrop of an international tragedy. In this dark time, baseball should focus on the enjoyable parts of the sport, even if things get a little…weird. 2021 can return to normal business, but let’s make 2020 fun.

United we stand, divided we Fall…Classic

Divisions have been a part of baseball for a half-century — even longer if you consider leagues to be de facto divisions. They’re a convenient way to group teams engaged in competition for playoff spots and to create additional meaningful races beyond simple seeding. But one of the problems with divisions is they just don’t make all that much sense in a severely shortened season. Whether the season is 80 or 100 or 120 games, it will provide less of an opportunity for teams to prove themselves superior to their division rivals. And the shorter the season, the less likely it is that a team will run away with a one-division league and make things boring. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 4, 2019, Ian Miller made his major league debut. With his Twins down 6-0 with only two innings left to play, he replaced Max Kepler to give Kepler a break in the field. Miller’s spot came up eighth in the batting order; he wasn’t guaranteed his first major league plate appearance, but the odds looked good.

But a funny thing happened on the way to his batting debut. Nelson Cruz led off the top of the eighth with a single. Eddie Rosario followed with a home run. The Red Sox went through two pitchers and frittered away a third of their lead — a 6-2 deficit felt less than insurmountable against a shaky Boston team now deep into its bullpen.

So when Miller’s turn to bat came up, with one out and the bases empty in the top of the ninth, Rocco Baldelli made, by some criteria, the best pinch hitting decision of 2019. Rather than have the left-handed Miller face southpaw Darwinzon Hernandez, he brought in Mitch Garver. In addition to being right-handed, Garver was one of the best hitters in baseball last year, full stop. The decision worked: Garver walked, though it didn’t end up mattering — Brandon Workman eventually induced a double play to escape a bases-loaded jam. Read the rest of this entry »

Al Kaline was not only a great player, he had a reputation of being both humble and personable. Both qualities came to the fore when I interviewed the Detroit Tigers legend several years ago in Lakeland, Florida. Sitting on a stool inside the Tigers’ spring training clubhouse, Kaline not only took the time to answer my questions about his career, he did so graciously. One day after his death at age 85, here is our conversation.

———

David Laurila: What kind of hitter did you consider yourself?

Al Kaline: “I was basically a line drive hitter. I was a put-the-ball-in-play hitter who tried not to strike out. I moved the runners along if the situation called for it. I tried to be patient and get a good pitch — I didn’t want to get myself out by swinging at bad pitches — and I didn’t worry about getting two strikes on me. I felt that I could handle the bat well enough to hit with two strikes.”

Laurila: Not striking out was more important in your era than it is now.

Kaline: “Absolutely. Striking out was something… some of the power hitters were striking out 100 times, but otherwise very few guys were striking out 100 times. It was about putting the ball in play and making the other team make plays. So yeah, we didn’t strike out nearly as much.”

Laurila: Why do you think that was? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller split up to talk to the authors of two new baseball books. First, Sam speaks to Sports Stories newsletter author Eric Nusbaum about Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between. Then (33:18) Ben brings on Wall Street Journal national baseball writer Jared Diamond to discuss Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball’s Home Run Revolution, plus a postscript covering the release of the expanded, paperback edition of The MVP Machine, a Stat Blast addendum about the longest Opening Day starting streaks, and the career of the late, great Hall of Famer and Tigers legend Al Kaline.

Audio intro: Bill Withers, "Lonely Town, Lonely Street"
Audio interstitial: Fountains of Wayne, "Laser Show"
Audio outro: John Prine, "Hello in There"

Link to Stealing Home
Link to Eric’s Sports Stories newsletter
Link to Swing Kings
Link to Jared on machine-made baseballs
Link to Ben Clemens on strikeouts and offense
Link to list of longest Opening Day starting streaks
Link to order The MVP Machine

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For a guy who didn’t play at all in 2019, and was right around replacement level the year before, Evan Gattis has been in the news a fair bit this winter. In fact, as much as any of the Astros’ marquee players, he’s become one of the faces of their illegal sign-stealing efforts and the aftermath, a situation he’s confronted with a candor rare among his former teammates, but typical of his time in the majors. Last week, the 33-year-old slugger confirmed that his playing career is indeed over. In his six-year career, the free-swinging Gattis hit .248/.300/.476 (110 wRC+) with 139 homers and 8.9 WAR, but those numbers barely scratch the surface of what’s been one of the more improbable tours through the professional ranks in recent memory.

Within The Athletic’s landmark November 12 report on the Astros’ sign-stealing efforts was a reference to a September 21, 2017 game in which White Sox reliever Danny Farquhar described hearing a banging sound while on the mound. That trash can-based signal was the cue to alert an Astros hitter if a breaking ball or offspeed pitch was coming. Within hours, Jimmy O’Brien of Jomboy Media posted a detailed breakdown to Twitter and YouTube, showing Farquhar facing off against Gattis, with audible bangs anticipating some of the pitcher’s selections. Upon reaching a 2-2 count, Farquhar summons catcher Kevan Smith; the two changed signs, and Gattis struck out chasing a low changeup.

On YouTube, that clip of Gattis receiving signs and then getting hung out to dry once they were changed — compelling audiovisual evidence to accompany the deep reporting of Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich — has been watched over 4.5 million times. Gattis has struck out four and a half million times on that pitch alone. 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.

MLB Considers Fan-Less Season

According to a report by Ken Rosenthal, the league is considering playing games in empty spring facilities in the event that a return to existing facilities and cities is impossible. The plan is still preliminary, and given the speed with which COVID-related health advisories have been changing, is far from settled, but the bones of the plan would see every team quarantine themselves in Arizona and play at spring training facilities.

There are still myriad details to be settled, as is the case for any effort to bring baseball back in the midst of a national emergency. The resources needed to quarantine 800 or so players, as well as gameday staff and other essential personnel, aren’t trivial when local and state resources are already stretched to their breaking point. The league would need special government dispensation for the gatherings. And players would need to be frequently tested — if any player tested positive for COVID-19, the league would likely shut down immediately to prevent the spread.

Still, from MLB’s perspective, if the alternatives are a pie-in-the-sky plan to play games in empty stadiums or no games at all, it’s clear to see why they prefer this one. It’s entirely possible that this is the only way a major league season can happen at all this year, so contingency planning of this type makes perfect sense. There are still wrinkles to be worked out, but backup plans like this are simply good business practice at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

12:22

Jay Jaffe: Hello folks, and welcome to another more-or-less shelter-in-place-based edition of my weekly chats. I hope you all are managing out there amid this challenging time. I’m doing all right — better some days than others — while New York is in the epicenter of the US outbreak. My family and I are safe and well-stocked in terms of supplies, going outside to a minimum and while complying with social-distancing mandates as we deal with the needs of our daughter and our dog, and we’re now regularly wearing fabric masks when we go out.

12:23

Jay Jaffe: I just filed a piece on the wild career of Evan Gattis, who’s been in the news a lot lately, for better or worse. That should be published sometime during this chat. Edit: It’s here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/evan-gattis-rollercoaster-ride-through-baseball-has-ended/

12:26

Jay Jaffe: I think they’re all fine as far as TV and streaming. The question — beyond the obvious one about whether some variant of the plan that was reported by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal on Friday night (https://theathletic.com/1723090/2020/04/03/rosenthal-mlb-pondering-gam…) is even feasible — is whether they’re fully wired for Statcast, which is moving to a new technology called Hawk-Eye this year. I imagine that if this comes to pass, they will be.

12:28

Jay Jaffe: If there’s a skills competition for hitters, you’d figure there might be a parallel one for pitchers, but airing it all out in such a context poses a much higher injury risk than a home run derby would, so I’d be very skeptical that comes to pass.

Read the rest of this entry »

With no sports on the horizon in the near-term, the NBA is looking for creative ways to keep fans entertained. According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the NBA and ESPN are working to televise a game of HORSE:

Discussions have been ongoing among the NBA, NBPA and ESPN about a competition among several players in isolation — presumably using home gyms — that would include them competing shot for shot in the traditional playground game, sources said.

It’s now been 27 years, but the most famous game of HORSE was a fictional one from a McDonald’s commercial that featured Michael Jordan and Larry Bird:

https://youtu.be/NlVYMPIucUM

Read the rest of this entry »

The only thing we know for sure about the 2020 MLB schedule (brought to you by COVID-19) is that it won’t be 162 games. Whatever truncated mutant of a year baseball ends up with will likely be the shortest on record since at least 1994, when most teams got about 70% of the way through the calendar before the strike happened and canceled the rest. Given the current state of things in the United States — with coronavirus still rampant and several states and cities already issuing stay-at-home orders that will run through most of May — it’s unlikely we’ll get even that much of the season played. But no one knows for sure: MLB, like the rest of us, is at the mercy of a virus and its containment measures. Rumors of a 100-game season chock full of doubleheaders played in empty stadiums and a southern California World Series are nothing more than thin gristle to chew on while we wait for more substantive news.

Without a doubt, there are meetings happening in MLB’s now-virtual offices to try to plan for the future. Aside from Rob Manfred timing these Zoom get-togethers and demanding precious minutes be shaved off them, we can’t know for sure what’s being discussed, but how to cram as much of a baseball season as possible into an ever-shrinking window is likely top of the action list. Every day lost further complicates that endeavor, though, as does the fact that MLB’s normal schedule is already a wobbly Jenga tower of unequal matchups and cross-country travel. Like Tetris, every block has to fit into just the right place, or else it all piles up into disaster. Being an outdoor sport in a Northern Hemisphere continent already imposes hard limitations on how far into the year baseball can extend; losing warm-weather months makes it all the tougher.

But amid the carnage and chaos of how to fit too much baseball into too little time, there’s an opportunity for MLB to do something different, if not revolutionary. The sport has long been locked into the construct that is 162 games; now it’s being forced out of that comfort zone. Let’s use this space, then, to get weird, or maybe even find a better way to be. And how would that be, you may be saying to yourself. I’m glad you asked. Read the rest of this entry »