This Monday, against the backdrop of the Mookie Betts trade, MLB dropped a bombshell. As Joel Sherman reported, the league is seriously considering expanding the playoff field starting in 2022. The new proposal, a 14-team field with an extra round and a bye, would radically alter the shape of the playoffs, so let’s walk through it and consider the ramifications.

The format would be significantly more complicated than the current one. The best team in each league would receive a bye, while the other six teams would face off in a best-of-three first round. That doesn’t necessarily sound groundbreaking, but there’s some fancy stuff going on behind the scenes. The division winner with the second-best record would get to pick which of the three worst Wild Card teams they’d like to play. The remaining division winner would pick another of those three, and the best Wild Card team would play the remaining team in the group.

The first round would be three games, all played at one park. From there, it would be business as usual: a five-game divisional round with four teams per league, two seven-game championship series, and the World Series.

The league told Sherman what they’re looking for with this new format. They want to drum up interest in baseball among borderline viewers while selling networks more playoff games. The league also hopes that more teams in the playoffs would drive attendance boosts during the regular season. Sherman discussed playoff expansion as a way to counteract tanking, though it’s unclear whether this was a league talking point. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers and catchers have begun reporting to camps, and all but a small handful of name-brand free agents have found home. From among our Top 50 Free Agents list, one in particular stands out for multiple reasons: Yasiel Puig. The enigmatic 29-year-old right fielder’s current plight and potential matches are worth a closer look.

Signed to a seven-year, $42 million contract after defecting from Cuba in 2012, Puig made an instant impact upon debuting with the Dodgers on June 3, 2013, and was just about the game’s most arresting — and polarizing — presence for his first two seasons in the majors. What’s an article about Puig without some video? Let’s remember some highlights.

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In 2011, Major League and Minor League Baseball agreed to extend their current Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) through the 2020 season. That agreement, which extended a prior agreement that wasn’t set to expire until 2014, maintained the status quo between the majors and the minors that most fans are familiar with today. There would continue to be over 160 affiliated minor league teams, with each team’s major league parent organization providing the players and the minor league clubs providing the facilities, travel, and fans. That agreement also included an increase in the ticket tax minor league teams pay to major league teams based on ticket revenue. That PBA is set to expire at the end of this season, and Major League Baseball wants to make drastic changes to the next agreement, changes that would dramatically reshape the minor leagues as we know them now.

The negotiations, which have thus far been quite ugly, first became public back in October when Baseball America revealed some details of MLB’s proposal (Baseball America, and JJ Cooper in particular, has done a great job covering the dispute); a later New York Times report confirmed the 42 teams set for contraction. Since then, the two sides have traded public missives, accusing each other of engaging in behavior that is not in the best interest of baseball.

Cumulatively, the changes proposed by MLB represent a move to gain power and consolidate control over the minor leagues. The MLB plan would move the amateur draft later in the year and decrease its number of rounds, get rid of short-season baseball, remove one-fifth of the independently owned full-season teams, take control of the Florida State League, and restructure existing leagues and reclassify some teams. The cumulative effect of these changes would be to diminish the power of MiLB relative to MLB and to potentially lower affiliate value for independently owned minor league franchises. With such sweeping and fundamental changes on the table, there’s a lot to sort through. But to get to the core of what’s at stake, it’s helpful to unpack one of the most significant changes under consideration: getting rid of short-season baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics.

Batters

The projected highs for the A’s lineup are very high. Matt Chapman has firmly established himself in the top tier of third baseman, and he’s not even reliant on having a +15 glove to be a star. He’s in his prime now and ZiPS gives him a nice chunk of time — five years — until his projection dips below four wins. Now would be a good time to make Chapman a multi-millionaire several times over and extend him a couple years into free agency, practically guaranteeing he spends his best years in Oakland.

ZiPS is all-in on Marcus Semien, forecasting shockingly little regression from the .285/.369/.522, 33 HR, 7.6 WAR line that earned him the bronze medal in the AL MVP race. There’s some regression, especially in the home runs, but there was no BABIP flukiness helping to fuel his big year; ZiPS actually thought he was mildly unlucky there! Signing Chapman to an extension would ease some of the blow in not signing Semien, who is a year away from free agency; the team has little leverage there. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Sources have indicated to FanGraphs that Fernando Romero has been awarded an additional option year. This post originally stated that Romero was out of options, and has been updated.

The need to define a scope, to create a boundary of coverage, creates a hole in prospect writing. Most public-facing prospect publications, FanGraphs included, analyze and rank players who are still rookie-eligible because, contrary to what you might think after seeing the length of my lists, you just have to stop somewhere, if only for the sake of your own sanity. Because of this, every year there are players who fall through the cracks between the boundaries of prospect coverage and big league analysis. These are often players who came up, played enough to exhaust their rookie eligibility, and then got hurt and had a long-term rehab in the minors. Some are victims of the clogged major league rosters ahead of them; others are weird corner cases like Adalberto Mondesi.

Regardless, prospect writers are arguably in the best position to comment on these players because they fall under the minor league umbrella, but simply adding them to prospect lists would open a can of worms — what do you do with other young big leaguers? So every year, I examine a subset of the players caught in this limbo to give curious readers an update on where once-heralded prospects stand now. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the presumptive second-best team in the AL East sent a key contributor from a recent playoff run to sunny California. In exchange, they received a package including a major league outfielder and a minor league catcher. That’s right — Emilio Pagán is headed to San Diego. As Josh Tolentino first reported, the Rays traded Pagán to the Padres in exchange for Manuel Margot and catching prospect Logan Driscoll.

At first glance, this trade seems pretty straightforward. Pagán was the most valuable pitcher in one of the best bullpens in baseball last year. His fastball/slider combination overwhelmed batters to the tune of a 36% strikeout rate and only a 4.9% walk rate. With Nick Anderson, Diego Castillo, José Alvarado, and a host of others ready to pick up the slack, however, he was surplus, and as noted last week, the Rays lacked a right-handed platoon partner to play center alongside Kevin Kiermaier.

Enter Margot, or exit Margot from San Diego’s perspective. Over three seasons as the team’s regular center fielder, he provided spectacular defense and forgettable offense. Per Statcast’s OAA, he’s been the eighth-best defensive outfielder in baseball since the beginning of 2017. His batting line of .248/.301/.394, on the other hand, works out to an 85 wRC+, a cool 207th among qualifying players. The whole package came out to 4.1 WAR over those years, and while that’s a valuable contribution, it’s a fourth outfielder’s line overall, even with the shiny defense. Read the rest of this entry »

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I firmly believe that every baseball fan over 15 years of age — old enough to remember 2012 with some clarity — has a story about the day they fell in love with Hunter Pence, who signed a major-league deal with the Giants last week. Mine was the day, sometime in the late fall of 2012, that I watched his San Francisco teammates demonstrate, through the very best impressions they could muster, that they loved him too. From that day forward, I was a fan of every bug-eyed, gangly, corkscrewed swing. I watched with delight as Pence helped bring a third title to San Francisco in 2014 (his second), then in dismay as he faded to a 60 wRC+, -0.8 WAR nadir in 2018 that spelled the end of his first Giants run. In reporting on his 2019 deal with the Rangers, I wrote that:

I’m never optimistic about players’ ability to re-tool their games after 35 — this is increasingly a young man’s sport, and there’s precious little margin to get it right — but in Pence’s case I hope I am wrong, and that Pence makes the roster and contributes for Texas this year. Hunter Pence is not like many we’ve seen before in this game, and we need more like him.

I was wrong. Pence rode a revamped swing (discussed here by Devan Fink) to a .297/.358/.552 line across 316 plate appearances for the Rangers in 2019. Pence’s 128 wRC+ was the fourth-highest of his 13-year career and his best since 2013’s 135 mark. Pence’s improvement was driven not by an increase in contact rate (his 70.3% mark was unchanged from 2018) but by a marked elevation of his launch angle (to 10.1 degrees, after sitting at 5.7 last year), which led to a substantial increase in his fly ball rate (35.6%; second-highest in his career, again after 2013) and an even more dramatic increase in his HR/FB rate (to 23.1%, more than triple last year’s mark and by three points the best of his career). Read the rest of this entry »