What I Learned From Spring Training

Burn After Reading, an oft-overlooked part of the Coen Brothers oeuvre, is quietly one of their best films and includes some of Brad Pitt and George Clooney’s the finest work ever captured on celluloid. I’m not going to spoil the ending by giving you the film’s last bit dialogue (you really shouldn’t worry about spoilers for a 12-year-old flick), but the final exchange is one I think about a lot, as it applies to numerous aspects of life.

CIA Supervisor: What did we learn, Palmer?
Palmer: I don’t know sir.
CIA Supervisor: I don’t f***ing know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
Palmer: Yes, sir.
CIA Supervisor: I’m f***ed if I know what we did.
Palmer: Yes sir, it’s hard to say.

Spring training is not especially informative. Team records don’t matter. Players’ performances rarely predict what will happen during the regular season, although access to underlying metrics like those provided by Statcast can help a bit in figuring out what’s small sample and what’s a real change in ability. Still, we all watch spring ball and try our best to glean some kind of insight from the six weeks leading up to real baseball. Here’s what I got from it this year.

Injuries will be the defining factor of the 2021 season

It’s already happening. The Blue Jays will likely be without George Springer on Opening Day due to a strained oblique, while their big offseason bullpen fix, Kirby Yates, is out for the year following Tommy John surgery. The Rays will be without first baseman Ji-Man Choi for a month following knee surgery, and already have five relievers on the 60-day IL due to a smorgasbord of elbow issues. The Yankees will begin the year without slugger Luke Voit and two crucially important lefties out of the pen in Zack Britton and Justin Wilson. Eduardo Rodriguez, Boston’s scheduled Opening Day starter, has a dead arm. Baltimore outfielders Anthony Santander and DJ Stewart are dealing with muscle strains. And that’s just the American League East.

We all know what happened in 2020, and none of it was good for players in regards to their health. When the game shut down last March, many players shut down as well and weren’t ready to ramp up when the re-start began. Players are downright beholden to their routines, and nothing was routine about the last 12 months. Pitchers don’t have stamina built up from a full season last year, with one team official telling me that he is “terrified” for this season in terms of managing the workload for his team’s staff. More than anything, the 2021 season is going to be a war of attrition. There is going to be a team that far outplays their projection, with the reason being that they were able to stay healthy. On the flip side, some club will be the official disappointment of 2021, and it’ll likely be because the injury gods cursed them for six months. Teams have been working for a decade-plus on injury prediction models, and as far as I know, all they have really concluded is that players who tend to get hurt also tend to get hurt again, while players who tend to stay healthy tend to continue to do so, and “tend” is doing a lot of work here; sadly, there are always unpleasant surprises. It’s all going to add up to a highly unpredictable season and for all the wrong reasons. Speaking of which…

COVID-19 isn’t going away

There are reasons to be optimistic, and a light at the end of what has been an exceptionally dark and extremely long tunnel is visible. We have effective vaccines, which are starting to become more widely available. All of that is great. Hell, all of that is downright wonderful. But we’re not out of this crisis yet, and that glimmer of light has led to a surge in unsafe behavior and an associated rise in COVID cases. On Tuesday, John Hopkins University reported that cases have spiked 25% over the last two weeks, and Chicago reported a disturbing 60% rise since the start of the month as U.S. government officials warn of a third wave that might actually be here already.

And baseball attempts to proceed with its season, the pandemic is making its continued presence known. Boston’s Matt Barnes tested positive, albeit falsely, or at least as a non-infectious positive. No matter how one defines it, he still missed time, though he was back in camp earlier this week. Astros reliever Pedro Báez will have a delayed start to his season due to a positive case, and the team had a late-camp scare when Myles Straw, Abraham Toro and Garrett Stubbs all had to enter the COVID protocols due to contact tracing. If this had been the regular season, they would have missed three games. It looks like there’s a good chance that these kinds of delays and absences will continue through at least the first half of the season if not longer, and that assumes everyone is smart and gets their shots, which isn’t a given. (MLB and the Players Association are trying to incentivize players and team to get vaccinated with the promise of loosened protocols for clubs that get 85% of their Tier 1 personnel vaccinated.) Beyond the players, Tigers pitching coach Chris Fetter has tested positive; his absence leaves the team without a first-year member of their staff on Opening Day. Despite the league’s safety protocols, teams are still relatively close-quartered, and one positive test could hamstring a team for a week or more, potentially having a considerable impact on the standings. Keeping everyone healthy, both at the ballpark and in teams’ communities, is the most important thing, but the impact on the field is undeniable; we all saw the effect the Marlins’ and Cardinals’ outbreaks had last season.

Nobody seems to have any idea what effect the new baseball will have on the game

There’s a new ball in town. It’s supposedly a tad lighter and less bouncy, and will require greater impact to achieve the same kinds of exit velocities we have seen in the past. That produces a conundrum. The ball is less lively coming off the bat, but because of the weight, it could also carry farther. To a non-physicist (that’s me), it all sounds like a zero sum game, and as the ball only started to enter spring games over the last couple of weeks, there isn’t enough data to draw any conclusions at this time. MLB hasn’t helped matters in terms of their communications with teams about the new white spheres being used. “I’m telling you, none of this has been clear,” one club official told me. “And it doesn’t help that the people at MLB that are conveying the message are probably confused, too.” The jury is still out, but it doesn’t seem like it will be a major force on depressing slugging. One comp has been to the 2017 version of the baseball, which was far from dead. The league is working hard to have stricter standards in terms of the baseball, and that’s a good thing, but for 2021, it’s still a relative unknown. “The ball will be what it will be,” concluded the official. “We’ll learn as we go, as we have every year.”

MLB can try all they want to change it, but the game still resolves around power

Players are bigger and stronger than ever. Nearly every player in a big-league lineup can hit the ball over the fence and very often, that’s what they go to the plate trying to do. Meanwhile, pitchers throw harder than ever and velocities continue to rise, leading to more strikeouts. An inability to control that velocity, along with a need to be careful in the zone against all those mashers, leads to more walks. MLB is concerned about the lack of action in games and is beginning to experiment in the minors with some rules meant to create more, but Three True Outcomes baseball continues to accelerate at the game’s top level.

You can’t fight progress, as much as MLB might try, and we’re a long way from shorter, action-packed games.