What this winter’s free agent market ends up looking like — and how lucrative it proves to be for players — is unsurprisingly very much in flux. The 2020 season is still in flux, and how it plays out, or if it ends up being played at all, will have a significant affect on the offseason. If there’s no season, we know that players will still receive service time, making guys like Mookie Betts, James Paxton, and J.T. Realmuto free agents. Players will receive raises in arbitration. For competitive balance tax purposes, no season would mean no tax payments. The Red Sox would still need to stay under the $210 million tax threshold in order to reset their tax amount, though with 2021 being the final season of the current CBA between the players and owners, the ramifications of such a move are very much unknown and could end up being completely nullified by a new deal.

Ifsome version of the season does get played, there might be slightly fewer questions, but the winter will still bring about considerable uncertainty. With that in mind, and the season still a ways off, let’s take a moment to see how team payrolls are shaping up this offseason. For the graph below, I looked at competitive balance tax payrolls, which take the average annual value of contracts and include around $15 million in benefits, with a few million for 40-man players not on the active roster, as well as expected minimum salaries players. I estimated arbitration-eligible players by giving them a 50% raise over 2020 figures and for the most part, I declined club options. The only options shown as exercised below are for Adam Eaton, Starling Marte, Anthony Rizzo, and Kolten Wong. All others are presumed declined. All figures are from our RosterResource Payroll pages. If rosters remain the same with a season played in 2020, this is what we might see as payroll heading into free agency.

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Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Effectively Wild community’s least-disliked MLB teams and two unjust Cy Young/MVP snubs, then discuss what Michael Jordan’s brief baseball career taught us about Jordan and about baseball.

Audio intro: Willie Nelson, "Why Do I Have to Choose"
Audio outro: Emmylou Harris, "Jordan"

Link to EW MLB Survivor game recap
Link to EW MLB Survivor game data
Link to Ben on peak Pedro
Link to Jordan oral history
Link to episode about Jordan oral history
Link to Steve Wulf on Jordan and baseball
Link to Neil Paine on Jordan’s career
Link to list of significant minor league seasons
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Hu? The name took me back, and even more than a decade later, accounted for a substantial percentage of what I knew about Taiwanese players in the professional ranks. Circa 2008, Chin-Lung Hu was considered a Top 100 prospect by both Baseball America (no. 55) and Baseball Prospectus (no. 32), and the third-best prospect on the Dodgers behind Clayton Kershaw, who panned out, and Andy LaRoche, who did not. I’d written about him a couple of times for the Baseball Prospectus annuals, noting that his acrobatic fielding conjured up comparisons to Omar Vizquel and forecast for future Gold Gloves as well as the bat speed to hit .300 at the major league level. A dozen years later, here he was, halfway around the globe and fresh off a milestone and a bit of history: his 1,000th hit in the Taiwan-based Chinese Professional Baseball League — due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the only professional baseball league currently playing its regular season, albeit to empty ballparks — and with the fewest games played (704) to reach that mark to boot.

Alas, I had actually missed the momentous knock, but caught up with it on Twitter a short while after via the Eleven Sports Taiwan account, which was streaming an English-language broadcast of Saturday’s game between the Rakuten Monkeys and the Fubon Guardians (Hu’s team). The Guardians had been on the short end of a 12-2 rout in the eighth inning when Hu, who had gone 0-for-4 in pursuit of hit number 1,000, singled just to the right of second base, plating a run.

NO.1000 HIT for #HuChinLung #???
He is a former @MLB @Dodgers player #Hu become the fastest to reach this goal in #CPBL history @fubonguardians pic.twitter.com/OEQczSBv31

— DAZN Taiwan (@DAZNTaiwan) April 18, 2020

An inning and maybe 45 minutes later — shortly after 9:30 AM in Brooklyn, where I had my 3 1/2-year-old daughter in my lap as we peered at a foreign but recognizable version of the national pastime — the announcers were still talking about Hu’s hit, because he was up again in what was now a 12-5 game. With men on first and second and two outs, he grounded into a potential game-ending double play, but the second baseman’s throw had pulled the shortstop well off the bag, and Hu beat the throw to first. The Guardians’ manager actually challenged the call via instant replay but was denied. The inning continued, and the game eventually ended 12-9, still a win for the undefeated (4-0) Monkeys.

My appetite had been whetted, to say the least. Read the rest of this entry »

Life isn’t fair, as it continually reminds us, but we try to keep sports as far from the harsh light of reality as we can. The New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays certainly don’t start in the same place when creating a roster, but when those players are on the field, everybody has to play by the same rules. Whether you’re facing Gerrit Cole or whatever fifth starter the Baltimore Orioles Mad-Libbed onto the roster, you have to get actual hits, score actual runs, and make actual Statcast-blessed defensive plays.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to keep the schedules teams face fair. Ideally, we’d want every team to face the same strength of schedule. With complete discretion over the design of the season, that’s still a nearly impossible task, without knowing which teams will be the best and worst ones ahead of time. And it becomes definitely impossible with unbalanced division schedules, series played mostly in three or four-game chunks, and a need to avoid having teams travel thousands of miles every day, like some character in the final season of Game of Thrones.

And even if you avoid all these things using some dark magics from the Necronomicon or Carson Cistulli’s personal notes, you’re still bound by the laws of the physical universe. Teams can’t play themselves, so even if every team played every other team the same number of games each season, the Yankees get a bonus by not having to play the Yankees, while Orioles’ hitters never get the opportunity to feast on Orioles pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Baseball Invokes UEC Contract Provisions

Per a report by Ken Rosenthal, Major League Baseball will invoke a force majeure provision in the Uniform Employee Contract signed by all non-player personnel on May 1. The provision allows for the suspension of contracts in extraordinary circumstances. The provision has been available to teams since the declaration of a national state of emergency on March 13, but until now hadn’t been used.

The consequences of this decision aren’t yet known. Teams could do anything from leaving everything exactly as-is to furloughing all of their non-player workers, though healthcare benefits will remain the same. Still, even if teams don’t immediately act, it’s a tough situation for workers, including front office personnel, coaches, and scouts, who must now face the prospect of reduced salary or even unemployment while planning for an uncertain season. (Non-player personnel are not unionized.)

The Braves, Giants, and Phillies have already committed to paying their employees until May 31. Other teams will surely follow suit. But it’s hard to read this move as anything other than a bargaining chip for teams. With the specter of unemployment looming over them, employees might be more amenable to changing the terms of their contracts. The Players’ Association has already reached an agreement with MLB on salary changes in the event of a shortened season, and it appears that non-player employees may soon need to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Anthony Kay, Pablo López, and Zac Lowther — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

———

Anthony Kay, Toronto Blue Jays

“I’ve been throwing this changeup ever since I’ve been pitching. I never really had a curveball until I was 16 or 17 years old. Growing up, it was mainly just fastball-changeup because my dad didn’t want me [throwing curveballs]. My older brother played, and he also didn’t have a curveball until he got older.

“I first learned a circle change, and I still pretty much throw it to this day. Of course, there has been a little bit of variation. When I came back from [Tommy John surgery] in 2017 it was pretty inconsistent, and I was trying to find a grip that made it more reliable. I used to be on the seams, like a two-seamer, and now I’m kind of moved over to where it’s almost the same, but just off the seams. I was cutting it a lot, and I think being on the seams was a big reason for that. Now that I’m off them, I feel I get a truer release to it.

“It was mostly an inconsistency issue. There were some days where it would be really good, and there were days where it wouldn’t be good at all; it would cut. So I figured I might as well just mess around with it a little bit and try and get it more consistent. I don’t know that I really understand why [the adjustment makes made it more consistent], but it did. Read the rest of this entry »

“That’s why I haven’t said anything. I haven’t talked to anybody. I just kind of let it go. Hopefully one day it just kind of got forgotten, and five years down the road (people said), ‘Where’s that Buehrle guy? Is he still around?'”

– Mark Buehrle on his retirement, 2017

It’s the final Sunday of the season, and the Toronto Blue Jays are playing meaningful baseball. That battle, at least, is already won. They clinched the division a few days ago, a postseason berth just before that — an August and September that, homer by homer, hammered two decades of futility into the dirt. With a win today and a loss from the Kansas City Royals, they could guarantee home-field advantage through a hypothetical ALCS. That is not why this game is important. The camera keeps panning to a nervous group of people, sitting in the stands under shadow, waiting out the top of the first, as the Blue Jays go silent — waiting for Mark Buehrle, who steps onto the Tropicana Field mound to face the Rays for the second time in three days. They can count out the numbers they are hoping for on their hands. Six outs. Six outs to get to 600, to 200 innings — to 3000 innings, spread with shocking consistency over 15 consecutive seasons. 

John Gibbons was questioned about this decision, of course. That the Jays are in the postseason at all seems a tenuous enough position to maintain. He knows, and everyone knows, that they should reach for every advantage they can get. And yet everyone knows, at the same time, that there can be multiple important things happening on a baseball field — that personal milestones, arbitrary as they are, are meaningful; that what is meaningful to one player can be almost as meaningful to the entire team. Six outs.

***

Read the rest of this entry »

With MLB in limbo, Ben Lindbergh investigates virtual baseball, talking to the designers of three new baseball video games—Ramone Russell of Sony San Diego, makers of MLB The Show 20, Markus Heinsohn of Out of the Park Developments, makers of Out of the Park Baseball 21 (37:56), and Scott Drader of Metalhead Software, makers of Super Mega Baseball 3 (1:21:50)—about the histories of their respective franchises, how their games differ stylistically, their different development plans, balancing realism and fun, how their games are helping fans and players cope with the absence of actual baseball, and much more (plus postscripts on Baseball Mogul 2020 and minor leaguers’ likenesses in MLB The Show).

Audio intro: The Alan Parsons Project, "Games People Play"
Audio interstitial 1: Jim Noir, "Do You Like Games"
Audio interstitial 2: Shout Out Louds, "Play the Game"
Audio outro: Drive-By Truckers, "Play it All Night Long"

Link to Episode 427 with Owen Good
Link to MLB The Show 20 trailer
Link to MLB The Show 20 website
Link to MLB The Show Players League
Link to MLB Network on Twitch
Link to FanGraphs on Twitch
Link to Ben on the ball in MLB The Show
Link to Mets broadcasters calling MLB The Show
Link to Ben on esports
Link to Out of the Park Baseball 21 trailer
Link to OOTP 21 website
Link to B-Ref’s OOTP 21 season sim
Link to MLB Dream Bracket
Link to Super Mega Baseball 3 trailer
Link to Super Mega Baseball 3 website
Link to Baseball Mogul 2020 website
Link to story about minor leaguers in MLB The Show
Link to Advocates for Minor Leaguers
Link to More Than Baseball
Link to order The MVP Machine

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I’m not privy as to whether the Cincinnati Reds assign a grade to character in their draft reports. I also don’t know how much the San Diego Padres weigh that attribute when pondering possible acquisitions. I do know that Taylor Trammell projects as more than a quality big-league outfielder. He projects as a role model.

Trammell became a Padre last summer. Part of the trade-deadline deal that sent Trevor Bauer to the Queen City, he’d been selected 35th overall by the Reds in the 2016 draft out of Kennesaw, Georgia’s Mount Paran Christian School. Blessed with plus raw tools, Trammell is slotted No. 69 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

A prima donna he’s not. When he reaches the big leagues, Trammell will do so with a genuine appreciation for what life has presented him. Moreover, he doesn’t just embrace the game of baseball. He embraces the people who come to see it played.

“I have thoughts on fans,” Trammell told me in Padres camp last month. “I love them. There are people who come to games and want to heckle, and they have the right to do that. Do I agree with it? No, but if you want to pay money to come yell at us, I mean, do whatever you want. Go to a boxing match. Go to a baseball game. Go to a basketball game. Any game. When there are a whole bunch of fans in the stands, whether they’re rooting for you or not rooting for you, it’s great for baseball. They want to see a game and we’re putting on a show for them.”

If you’re rolling your eyes with skepticism upon reading that, you shouldn’t be. By all accounts, that’s who Trammell is. Part of a working-class family — his father is a post office employee, his mother once balanced two jobs — he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. The values he grew up with remain the same. Read the rest of this entry »