Among the many significant repercussions of yesterday’s agreement between the MLBPA and MLB in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic were alterations to the amateur talent acquisition processes, changes that will have both immediate and long-term effects on all stakeholders (owners, players, people in scouting, agents, college coaches and staff, international trainers, etc.) in that arena. Last night, after the details of the agreement were reported by Jeff Passan of ESPN and Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic, I spoke with several of those stakeholders for their immediate thoughts and reactions.

The splashy news, and the detail of yesterday’s agreement that will impact team personnel and the player population soonest, is the soft rescheduling of the 2020 draft — the specific date will be determined by MLB, but it will occur by “late-July” — and the straight razor shave it was given by the owners and player’s union, cutting the 2020 draft to five rounds with the option to trim the 2021 draft to 20 rounds, down from the usual 40. MLB can choose to add rounds to the draft if they wish, and a few people in scouting told me they thought it was a real possibility that MLB will, though there’s no clear financial incentive for them to do so.

MLB can also delay the start of the 2020-2021 international signing period, which typically begins on July 2, to as late as January 2021, and can also push the following period by six months so that it spans the 2022 calendar.

While these developments raise some obvious other questions (such as if and where 35 rounds worth of players end up playing baseball again), the two most significant conclusions drawn by many of my sources in baseball were that the trimming of the draft is a convenient opportunity for MLB to shed rostered players in advance of minor league contraction, and that the new flexible start date for the IFA period is another precursor to an international draft.

The seemingly imminent affiliate contractions means teams will soon need fewer minor leaguers, and cost-conscious MLB, ever seeking to save money where it can, is taking what industry people consider a shrewd and opportunistic approach to the culling of minor league rosters at a time when there’s a convenient pseudo-reason to do it now that their 2020 revenues have been dashed by a pandemic. Why draft and sign 40 rounds worth of players who may not play this summer because of a global health crisis when many will be released next spring after a significant portion of the minor leagues is contracted? Read the rest of this entry »

A pitcher’s swinging strike rate is one of the better measures of how well they are performing. It correlates well to their overall strikeout rate, and is one of the three gold standards I use (along with other methods) to evaluate a pitcher as a whole, in conjunction with O-Swing% (how often a hitter chases) and Z-Contact% (how little hitters make contact with pitches in the zone).

SwStr% can be used to inspect the effectiveness of either an entire arsenal or an individual pitch, and is a strong indicator of how good a pitcher’s “stuff” is. As such, an increased SwStr% is a desirable outcome for a pitcher. Obviously, some pitching styles don’t lend themselves to missing bats, and instead are good for timing disruption and/or weak contact.

One pitcher who fits the mold of a bat-misser is the young lefty prospect from the Oakland Athletics, Jesus Luzardo.

With a minuscule sample of just six games in 2019, amounting to 12 innings pitched, Luzardo had a strikeout rate of 34% (versus a 6.5% walk rate), and held hitters to a .119 batting average with an 0.67 WHIP while posting a 2.36 FIP (1.50 ERA). Luzardo was pretty good during the American League Wild Card game as well. Back in October against the Tampa Bay Rays, he pitched three innings, allowing one hit and two walks while striking out four. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

On what was supposed to the Opening Day of the Major League Baseball regular season, fields will remain empty across the United States in an effort to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Death totals continued to climb worldwide Wednesday, with CNN reporting over 21,000 global fatalities from the virus as that number passed 1,000 for the first time in the United States. Exact numbers remain elusive as testing continues to expand. Last night, the U.S. Senate approved a $2.2 trillion stimulus package in response to the economic fallout.

The deepest cultural impact of the virus in the baseball world will be felt by players and fans today, when the 2020 season was supposed to have gotten underway. Questions remain on how a potential season could look and few exact answers are available.

ESPN Asked Rob Manfred: When Does He See Baseball Returning?

Rob Manfred, asked on ESPN what he _hopes_ could happen from here: “My optimistic outlook is that at some point in May we’ll be gearing back up. We’ll have to make a determination depending on what the precise date is as to how much of a preparation period we need."

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) March 26, 2020

While no one will guarantee an official end date for the countermeasures to the coronavirus (quite reasonably!), the commissioner took his best shot while talking with ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt late Wednesday night, saying his most “optimistic outlook” was that the sport could be back by May, though a 162-game season is likely out of the question. Manfred stated that “nothing’s off the table” as far as a solution, indicating that he will get to do his favorite thing in the days to come: tinker with the sport in order to determine a solution. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Here is Dan, with #PanicDoritos

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Favorite: Sandlot

12:03

Dan Szymborski: LEast: Field of Dreams. I find it treacly and overwrought.

Read the rest of this entry »

There should be baseball today, only there isn’t. Baseball has given way to more important concerns – health, safety, social distance – but its relative triviality doesn’t mean we aren’t feeling its absence. MLB is endeavoring to fill the gap with a day-long marathon of Opening Days and meaningful games past; Ben Clemens wrote a handy viewing guide for Opening Day At Home, allowing you to choose your own adventure. But it isn’t the same. As I was reflecting on what we lose without live baseball, I wondered if part of what moves us about Opening Day isn’t just the promise of the new and its attendant optimism, but also the memories we spirit in with us. Opening Day’s form and place on the calendar has changed as baseball has changed, but it has been home to some special games, and a good many special days spent with friends and family. Here are a few of the FanGraphs staff’s favorites. – Meg Rowley

March 31, 1998: Philadelphia Phillies at New York Mets
Despite 25 years of living in New York City and 22 as part of a Yankees partial season ticket plan, I can only remember attending a few Opening Days, all of them at Shea Stadium. It’s the first one that stands out. Before I was a baseball writer, or even a moonlighting blogger, I was a graphic designer, most notably at a company called Bill Smith Studio that specialized in textbooks and children’s books. Circa fall 1997, I was just another freelancer passing through, at least until the studio’s top project manager discovered I was a baseball fan. Soon Lillie, a Brooklyn-born Mets die-hard who annually purchased a four-seat partial season ticket plan through her one-woman corporation (she was an independent contractor) began inviting me to the occasional game. Suddenly, I also got placement on the studio’s more favorable projects, and quickly accepted an offer to join the staff.

Rightly, Lillie treated Opening Day as a holiday, and splurged for extra tickets, encouraging her guests to bring a friend or significant other. There may have been eight or 10 of us in tow at Shea Stadium for the 1998 opener, including one of my closest pals. On an unseasonably warm 82 degree afternoon, the Phillies’ Curt Schilling and the Mets’ Bobby Jones traded zeroes, with each team stranding several runners in scoring position. In the fifth, the Mets had first and second and one out, but Desi Relaford hit into a 4-6-5-6 double play in which Bobby Abreu (making his Phillies’ debut) was thrown out between second and third after the force play at second. In both the sixth and eighth innings, Philadelphia’s Rico Brogna made the third out, stranding a runner in scoring position. Schilling held the Mets to two hits and one walk while striking out nine over eight innings, while Jones worked around six baserunners in his six scoreless frames. Chants of “Yankees suck!” and boos for both mayor Rudy Giuliani and ex-Met Gregg Jeffries resonated, as they generally do in Queens. Read the rest of this entry »

No pitcher took it in the JAWS quite as hard as position players Ernie Lombardi and Josh Donaldson did via Baseball-Reference’s latest update to its version of WAR, which I’ve spent the better part of the past two weeks unpacking — at least when I wasn’t stocking my freezer and my pantry while reading the grim COVID-19 news. B-Ref’s latest influx of data resulted in alterations to five different areas of the metric that affected players as far back as 1904 and as recently as last season. Lombardi, a Hall of Fame catcher, lost a whopping 7.3 WAR due to the introduction of detailed play-by-play baserunning and caught stealing data from the 1930s and ’40s, while Donaldson lost 3.8 WAR due to a change in the way Defensive Runs Saved is calculated. By comparison, the largest swing for a pitcher, either positive or negative, was the 2.2 WAR gained by Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson.

B-Ref’s version of WAR is different from that of FanGraphs, particularly when it comes to pitching; it’s based on actual runs allowed, with adjustments for the qualify of the offenses faced and the defenses behind it, where the FanGraphs version is driven by the Fielding Independent Pitching categories as well as infield flies. As bWAR is the currency for JAWS, it’s of particular interest to me, even at a time when the Hall itself is closed due to the pandemic. I’ve grazed by the pitchers in my two recent updates, mentioning a few tidbits here and there while trying to avoid a typical Jaffe-length 3,000 word epic, but in this installment I’ll take a closer look at the those most affected. To review, here are the five areas where B-Ref’s WAR update has incorporated new (or recently unearthed) data, ordered for chronological effect:

• New Retrosheet Game Logs (1904-07)
• Caught Stealing Totals from Game Logs (1926-40)
• Baserunning and Double Plays from play-by-play data (1931-47)
• Defensive Runs Saved changes (2013-19)
• Park factor changes (2018)

So the big thing for history buffs, as the site itself noted last month, is the addition of four years worth of box scores that account for every game of the careers of Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson. The latter’s major league debut, on August 2, 1907, happened to be against Cobb’s Tigers. B-Ref’s play-by-play data doesn’t go back quite so far (the earliest boundary is now 1918, though it’s incomplete), so it’s not apparent via the aforementioned link, but it turns out that the first hit Johnson surrendered was to Cobb, who was batting cleanup that day. It was one of six hits Detroit rapped out in the Big Train’s eight innings. Cobb, just 20 years old but en route to his first of 11 batting titles, came away quite impressed. In the aftermath of the game, he said, “We couldn’t touch him … every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park.” Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last several decades, revenues for Major League Baseball have soared, nearing $11 billion last season. The league’s unprecedented prosperity has turned MLB franchises into cash cows in ways not seen in prior generations. It will likely take some time to gauge the extent of the revenue teams will lose due to COVID-19-related delays, but given that some or perhaps all of the 2020 season will be lost, baseball isn’t likely to be a great moneymaker for owners this year. And while league expansion has been talked about for quite some time, it’s possible the losses suffered this season due might actually be the precipitating factor in MLB moving beyond 30 teams.

For the last few decades, owners haven’t felt compelled to expand because they were making plenty of money without the need for a cash grab. The dirty truth about expansion is that it isn’t about growing the sport. It’s about injecting cash into ownership pockets now, with those same owners willing to share a slice of their pie with a couple more teams in the future. If the owners don’t feel the need for that expansion money, they aren’t going to welcome more teams to take a share of overall MLB revenues. In addition, the threat of relocation from teams looking for new stadium deals serves to slow expansion; MLB likes to have potential expansion cities available to threaten municipalities into providing new ballparks.

Modern expansion isn’t about the talent levels available or growing to meet the needs of an increasing population. If it were, we would have seen expansion at some point in the last decade. The talent pool has gotten incredibly good, with fastball velocities and strikeout levels rising to the point that diluting the talent pool could have a positive impact on the game, resulting in more action and balls in play. And in terms of population, the number of people per team is approaching levels last seen in 1960 when baseball had just 16 teams. The graph below shows the U.S. population and the number of major league teams in five-year intervals, to show how the number of people per team in the U.S. has changed since 1960:

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Opening Day! Or, well, it would have been Opening Day. It was Opening Day? The semantics are still unsettled. In any case, today is a day when I’d normally block off my entire calendar and watch baseball — glorious meaningful baseball — all day long. The global pandemic hasn’t stopped my yearning for that yearly ritual; if anything, the grim reality of our current predicament has made me long for baseball more.

Luckily for me and you, MLB is doing its best to make it feel like baseball is still here. The league has assembled a broad slate of games across several platforms that will let you watch all the baseball you can handle. There are 35 broadcasts in all:

Tomorrow MLB presents #OpeningDayAtHome – a full slate of 30 games nationally available across various platforms, including digital streaming and social media, creating a full-day event on what would have been Opening Day. pic.twitter.com/NGd39zk883

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) March 25, 2020

There are so many games, in fact, that you can choose your own adventure. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can let me choose your adventure. Here are a few slates for various types of fan.

World Series Drama
If you want to watch the highest-stakes games available, you’re in luck. Start your morning off with an appetizer: the 2013 Pirates/Reds Cueto game, which I wrote about here, in Spanish on Twitter. It’ll be early, so brew a coffee, eat some cereal, and listen to awesome announcing and echoing Cueto chants. There are no World Series stakes in this game, but it’s the best of a thin 8:30 ET slate if you want drama.

From there, it’s nothing but the hits. Head to Facebook for Cardinals/Rangers Game 6 (2011 World Series) at 11:00. Knowing what happened doesn’t make it any less ridiculous that the Cardinals were down to their final strike twice — in consecutive innings! — and stormed back to win in 11 innings. The level of play wasn’t pristine — the teams combined for five errors, and that doesn’t count Nelson Cruz’s Family Circus routes in right. But you’re not here for crisp play, you’re here for drama, and this game delivers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about which types of old games they would want to rewatch, Noah Syndergaard’s Tommy John surgery, and how short is too short for a regular season, then answer listener emails about whether the 2020 title will be tainted by a shortened season, whether MLB should skip the regular season and go straight to the playoffs or replace the standard playoff format with an extended tournament or bracket, whether great players should be allowed to pick a team for their farewell season, and whether MLB should try seven-inning games this season, plus a Stat Blast (with a special song) about the worst player to play in both his teens and his 40s and whether young playing time or old playing time is a better predictor of a Hall of Fame induction (and a postscript about Mike Trout’s golfing).

Audio intro: Dan Bern, "Opening Day"
Audio outro: Brittany Howard, "Short and Sweet"

Link to info on Opening Day re-airings
Link to Syndergaard injury post
Link to story on Syndergaard wanting to throw harder
Link to second story on Syndergaard wanting to throw harder
Link to story on Syndergaard’s surgery
Link to Sam on every team making the playoffs
Link to EW episode about every team making the playoffs
Link to Jayson Stark on short-season experiments
Link to article on seven-inning games
Link to Stat Blast covers competition
Link to video of Trout’s drive
Link to video of Trout’s chip shot
Link to 2013 article on Trout’s golfing
Link to 2017 article on Trout’s golfing
Link to article on Trout’s hole-in-one
Link to order The MVP Machine

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