In this week’s MLB The Show 20 stream, featuring Paul Sporer, Ben Clemens, and Dan Szymborski, Casey Mize gets his first major league start against the Arizona Diamondbacks, live from Digital Chase Field.

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Much of the focus regarding baseball’s potential return has centered on whether the players and owners can come to a financial agreement both parties feel works for them. The two groups may negotiate as cohesive units, but they are comprised of distinct individuals and entities that often have diverging interests. The league’s proposal appears to have been an attempt to drive a wedge between the highest earners in the sport and those making closer to MLB’s league minimum. And while Rob Manfred needs to find a solution that players will agree to, before he can even make such an offer, his proposal has to fly with his 30 bosses, the MLB owners. Those owners don’t always have the same goals or ideas about how the business of baseball should be run – the league’s latest proposal reflects those differences, as big-market teams received the biggest benefit.

A few weeks ago, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich reported in The Athletic that baseball’s traditional revenue sharing was at risk in 2020. Local television money is big for teams in this era, and the gap between the top 10 teams in television revenue and the bottom 10 is, on average, $67 million even before accounting for network ownership. Attendance and stadium-related revenue tends to further exacerbate that gap. Revenue sharing, where each team pools together 48% of local revenue and divide it equally, shrinks the gap some, but still provides the big-market, high-revenue teams a significant advantage. With most stadium-related revenue potentially gone, the divide gets a bit skinnier. From the Drellich and Rosenthal piece:

“The discrepancy between the Rays and the Red Sox this year is not that dramatic,” the executive said. “It’s still money. It’s tens of millions of dollars. But it’s not hundreds of millions of dollars. And if you’re going to share that, it’s not going to move the needle enough this year.”

MLB’s presentation to the players regarding team losses had some fairly significant holes, but it did show the traditional big moneymakers like the Yankees and Dodgers suffering the biggest losses. Lost stadium revenue drives some of that, but high payrolls contribute as well. Those high payrolls are normally easily justified by massive revenues, but if team revenues were the same, the higher payroll clubs would be more likely to lose money. MLB’s latest proposal attempted to do those clubs a huge favor.

To provide some sense of the typical payroll gap between teams, the graph below shows only salaries of $1 million or more projected in the original 2020 season:

We see a huge spread between the top and bottom teams, which is fairly typical over the last few years. Here’s what the same graph looks like with pro-rated salaries over an 82-game season:

The second graph is basically the first one divided in half. These aren’t full payrolls because we’d need to add in all the minimum-salaried players, but the differences you see are pretty close to the total numbers. MLB’s latest proposal hits the highest-salaried players the hardest, and the teams that pay the higher-salaried players tend to have the larger payrolls. Here’s what would happen to team payrolls under MLB’s latest offer, including only players originally scheduled to make $1 million or more in a full season. The $200 million for playoffs is included in the figures below:

We see these salaries bundled more in the middle. MLB’s proposal dropped these players’ salaries by 45% compared to a pro-rated 82-game season, but the standard deviation of these salaries dropped by 53%. The graph below shows the changes in each team’s payroll from the March agreement with pro-rated salaries to MLB’s latest proposal:

Those teams on the left have the most to gain under MLB’s latest proposal, while those teams on the far right barely see any change to payroll at all. It’s not hard to identify the types of teams in each group. We have the Yankees, Astros, Dodgers, Phillies Cubs, Angels, and Red Sox leading the way with salary cuts while the Marlins, Pirates, Rays, Royals, and A’s are all near the bottom in terms of change. To illustrate the change a little more, here’s a scatter plot showing the change above with Forbes valuations:

There’s a pretty strong relationship here (the R-squared =.57) and a lot of that is because rich teams spend more. In MLB’s latest proposal, those same rich team receive the biggest benefits. It’s the owners’ of trying to share the lost revenue, except instead of doing it amongst themselves, they are hoping that the players will do it for them. It’s a way that prevents some potentially difficult conversations between Rob Manfred and the owners. If the union response is any indication, the owners are going to need to have some of those difficult conversations in the coming days if they want to have a 2020 baseball season.

May 29 marks the 10-year anniversary of Roy Halladay’s perfect game against the Marlins. It’s a bittersweet occasion, alas, because while it shows the two-time Cy Young winner and future Hall of Famer at the absolute pinnacle of his career, Halladay is not here to celebrate. On November 7, 2017, while flying his Icon A5 light sport airplane, he crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, landing upside down in 4 1/2 feet of water. The autopsy published two months later found that he had morphine, amphetamine, Ambien, and alcohol in his system. More recent revelations that he had been in and out of rehab to treat addictions to opiates and to an anti-anxiety drug called Lorazepam deepen the already stark contrast between a player who publicly was known for his exceptional control, both on and off the field, but who privately was battling depression.

The anniversary and the absence of its central figure provides a time for reflection. What follows here are 10 thoughts on Halladay’s career and life, one for each year since that special night in Miami’s Sun Life Stadium — or, if you prefer, one for each of his perfect innings plus one for the aftermath. You can watch the game in its entirety below:

1. Halladay nearly threw a no-hitter in his second major league start, and did pitch a complete game.

Chosen with the 17th pick of the 1995 amateur draft out of a suburban Denver high school (Arvada West), Halladay made solid progress through the minors and cracked Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects in ’97 (23rd) and ’98 (38th). After a strong showing at Triple-A Syracuse in the latter year, the 21-year-old righty made his major league debut on September 20, 1998, throwing five innings of two-run ball with five strikeouts against the Devil Rays. Seven days later, he no-hit the Tigers for 8.2 innings before being foiled by pinch-hitter Bobby Higginson, who homered and also deprived him of a shutout. Halladay did hang on to collect the first of his 203 regular season wins, and the first of his 67 complete games. Read the rest of this entry »

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In 1936, Alfred Lovell Dean, better known by his nickname Chubby, decided to take his baseball career into his own hands. He was all of 20 years old, a native of Mount Airy, North Carolina, and a valued pitcher on the Duke baseball team — until he quit, that is.

Maybe he left due to the lack of run support offered by his collegiate teammates — a 16-strikeout game in the 1935 season ended in a loss on his record. That same year, “renowned” baseball statistician J. Gaskill McDaniel rated Dean the most valuable player of the Coastal Plains League, which might have increased Dean’s perception that his talents were being wasted where he was. At any rate, in cold early days of the year, Dean packed up his things and headed north to find his fortune. His sights were aimed no lower than the New York Yankees.

But the New York Yankees didn’t see what J. Gaskill McDaniel saw. They saw a 20-year-old with a wild arm and limited hitting ability. These were the Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig, whose every season began with an expectation of a World Series title. So they turned Chubby Dean down. There was no place for him there.

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There was a place for him, though, a little to the southwest. Connie Mack was looking to bolster a last-place Philadelphia Athletics team that had been on a steady decline since their seven-game World Series loss to the Cardinals in 1931. He was willing to take a chance on almost anyone who showed talent. On February 10, Duke baseball coach John W. Coombs confirmed from his hospital bed in Palestine, North Carolina, that his erstwhile pitcher had signed with the A’s. Read the rest of this entry »

In the decade that began shortly after the historic home run chase many believe saved the game of baseball, it’s no surprise that only one National League player with fewer than 30 homers placed in the top three of MVP voting. In 2009, Hanley Ramirez only had 24 home runs but also had a league-leading .342 batting average to go along with 42 doubles and 27 stolen bases, which pushed him into the mix for NL MVP. He finished in second place, although he didn’t receive a single first place vote.

But as much as home runs were a primary driver in measuring the decade’s hitting success, it would understate the talent of the two players who accounted for seven of the MVP awards between 2001-2009 to define them by that one statistic. They were simply two of the greatest all-around hitters to ever play the game. Here’s a look back at how those two, along with the three other NL MVPs of the 2000s, were acquired.

In a span of just over four years, Jeff Kent was traded three times in exchange for an All-Star. In each case, it seems unlikely that the team trading him away believed he would finish his career as a borderline Hall of Famer with 377 career homers, 560 doubles (tied for 30th all-time), and an NL MVP award. Read the rest of this entry »

While Even Year Magic was in full swing from 2012-2014, there were plenty of other great World Series storylines. There was Mathenaging, Yostseason, and even Jon Lester fielding bunts. With such an action-packed set of games, let’s get right to it.

2012

The Tigers brought a mostly-sweet lineup to the table: Austin Jackson was a leadoff beast, Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder provided thump from the three and four slots — and yes, Omar Infante batted second in a season where he had a .283 OBP, but they can’t all be perfect decisions. Anyway, Infante had a career OBP of .308, which is — wait, no, that’s still bad. That one’s on Jim Leyland.

The Giants featured the fifth-best offense in baseball, a lineup with almost no holes all the way down, depending on how you feel about Brandon Crawford and Grégor Blanco. In Game 1, that deep lineup overpowered Justin Verlander. There were no key points in the game, no weird decisions — sometimes your dominant pitcher just gets hit. Heck, Barry Zito even had an RBI single. Can’t win ‘em all. Read the rest of this entry »

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On Tuesday, MLB delivered its first economic proposal concerning player pay to the MLBPA since the two sides reached an agreement in March. There were reports that owners had previously agreed to propose a 50/50 split of revenue for what looks to be an abbreviated season played to empty ballparks, but after that potential offer leaked, it was never formally proposed due to the negative public response from the union. MLB’s actual proposal, which includes a paycut for all players from the prior pro-rated agreement in March, was particularly harsh to those making the most money, as the proposed cuts were on a sliding scale with the highest-paid players taking the deepest reductions. Jay Jaffe laid out yesterday why the proposal wasn’t likely to fly with the players, a sense confirmed by Max Scherzer last night:

After discussing the latest developments with the rest of the players, there’s no reason to engage with MLB in any further compensation reductions. We have previously negotiated a pay cut in the version of pro rated salaries, and there’s no justification to accept a 2nd pay cut based on the current information the union has received. I’m glad to hear other players voicing the same viewpoint and believe MLB’s economic strategy would completely change if all documentation were to become public information.

Jeff Passan and Jesse Rogers first reported the proposed salary breakdowns at ESPN:

The formula the league offered, for example, would take a player scheduled to make the league minimum ($563,500), give him a prorated number based on 82 games ($285,228) and take a 10% cut from that figure, leaving him with a $256,706 salary.

The scale goes down as salaries go up, with every dollar:

• $563,501 to $1 million paid at 72.5%
• $1,000,001 to $5 million paid at 50%
• $5,000,001 to $10 million paid at 40%
• $10,000,001 to $20 million paid at 30%
• $20,000,001 and up paid at 20%

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You have to scroll pretty far down our Texas Rangers Top Prospects list to get to Cole Uvila’s name. Befitting his under-the-radar status, the righty reliever is No. 36 in a system that, according to Eric Longenhagen, has a lot of high variance players. None of them are as unusual as Uvila, who at 26 years of age has yet to pitch above A ball.

Not only does his future looms bright — Longenhagen cited “seemingly imminent big league relevance” — Uvila’s backstory is borderline bizarre. Moreover, he boasts a Driveline-developed curveball that features elite spin. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Uvila is coming off a breakout season with the High-A Down East Wood Ducks. In 64-and-two-thirds innings (including seven with Low-A Hickory), the 1,199th pick in the 2018 draft punched out 95 batters and allowed just 34 hits. That was followed by an eye-opening Arizona Fall League campaign that inspired a head-scratching question: “How on earth did this guy last until the 40th round?”

He hasn’t always been a pitcher. The Port Angeles, Washington native was primarily a shortstop in high school, and that was his initial position at Pierce College. By his own admission, he wasn’t a very good one. That led him to the mound, albeit not in a way you might expect.

“I couldn’t hit — I couldn’t catch up to [junior] college pitching — so I ended up getting a shot as a submariner pitcher,” Uvila explained. “I wasn’t dragging my knuckles, but I was low enough that my chest was completely over the rubber. Sidearm is 90 degrees and I was about 45 degrees from the dirt. Anyway, that got me off the redshirt list and onto the field, which was pretty much all I wanted. I never really imagined playing past junior college.” Read the rest of this entry »