MLB’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) is set to expire on December 1st. Unfortunately with all of the disagreements over issues including rule changes, profit sharing, and minor league living conditions, it’s possible that we could see a work stoppage similar to the one we saw in 1994.

The MLBPA’s website says the purpose of the CBA “is to set forth their agreement on certain terms and conditions of employment of all Major League Baseball Players for the duration of this Agreement.” This is vital to the league and many other major U.S. sports because it sets fair and ethical rules for players and teams to abide by. However, owners have historically dominated negotiations and kept the lion’s share of profits. In recent years, players have been much more open to speaking out, and there has been significant pushback in the media. If there aren’t substantial changes made by December, it would not be surprising to see another lockout or strike.

If there is no new CBA by December 1st, MLB rules say major league play will stop until it is renewed and there will be no moves allowed by any club. This will play a significant role this offseason regardless of whether the CBA gets renewed or not, as the potential scare of a delayed CBA may force teams to rush moves or wait longer on them. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2018, the Tampa Bay Rays introduced the Opener, a novel concept in which a relief pitcher started a game with the purpose of shutting down an offense in the first few innings. The Opener would then hand the ball to a bulk pitcher, who went three-to-four innings before giving way to the usual bullpen corps.

When the Rays introduced the Opener strategy, many in baseball thought it was blasphemy. Starting pitchers have roles and this is the way the pitcher order has been for generations. How dare the Rays upset the natural order of roles, titles, and statistics?

When analysts looked at the Rays roster, however, they quickly understood what the team was doing. By not recognizing a “pitching rotation,” the Rays were looking a level deeper. They were stacking pitchers on a per-game basis, with the intent to win each game and hence build enough wins to make the playoffs. Once it was understood, the Opener was applauded and eventually copied throughout the league.

Besides being a sly way to neutralize lineups, the Opener represented the “Rays Way” amidst financial necessity. The team could not afford a typical major league rotation of four or five quality starters. Relief pitchers are cheaper and easier to find. They couldn’t find five aces, so they built ace performances using multiple relievers, with the additional bonus of paying them less. If you can’t find a hundred-million-dollar starter, build one. Read the rest of this entry »

Our beloved pastime has a long history of over-the-hill veteran players serving important mentor roles around the game, but the primacy of the Competitive Balance Tax and the perpetual crush of roster spot competition and “efficiency” has rendered these players largely moot. Players like the 40-something version of Jason Giambi, a bench bat for years on the strength of his contributions to his team as a leader beyond just his metric value, have grown frightfully rare. It is sad to see that sort of quasi-player/coach fade to memory.

As I look over the U.S. Olympic Roster, I see an awful lot of well-loved veterans who have lost a step over the years and, with that lost step, any serious hope of a consistent job under the new normal of roster construction. But I am convinced there remains value to the game of baseball to have players like Todd Frazier, Edwin Jackson, Scott Kazmir, and David Robertson around the sport beyond what they contribute to the back of the baseball card. A glance at the current free agent list reveals a small glut of other interesting, memorable players, such as Matt Kemp, Ryan Braun, Matt Wieters, and Neil Walker, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball is awash in advanced statistics that more reliably describe key aspects of players’ offensive and defensive performance. It has been reported that through the use of Statcast, the MLB Advanced Media group can supply teams with 70 fields x 1.5 billion rows of data per season [i]. Yes, billion with a b. This flood of information has supercharged MLB teams’ and the sabermetric community’s development of ever-more useful statistics for describing player performance.

However, this amount of data brings significant challenges. Perhaps chief among them is that while certain individuals may be comfortable with reams of tables and ever-increasing numbers of descriptive statistics, many others prefer or require analyses and visualization tools that convert disparate metrics into informative and readily interpretable graphics.

MLB’s situation has certain similarities to the discipline of safety toxicology, where the use of high-information content assays for characterizing chemicals’ toxicological profiles has exploded [ii]. Drawing conclusions from multiple biomarkers and test systems is challenging, as it requires synthesis of large amounts of dissimilar data sets. One tool that toxicologists have found useful is the Toxicological Prioritization Index, or ToxPi for short [iii]. ToxPi is an analytical software package that was developed to combine multiple sources of evidence by transforming data into integrated, visual profiles. Read the rest of this entry »

The pitching talent in the major leagues has never been as good as it is at this very moment.

Strikeout rates have risen in 13 straight seasons, hitting an all-time high of 23.4% in 2020. When pitch tracking started in 2002, the average fastball velocity was 89 mph. That figure was up to 93.1 mph in 2020. Every other pitch has followed suit, whether it’s the slider (84.1 mph in 2020), change-up (84.5 mph), or curveball (79.2 mph). Despite these massive gains in swing-and-miss stuff, walk rates haven’t gotten worse. The walk rate in 2000 (9.6%), for example, was higher than the walk rate in 2020 (9.2%).

While some of this may be due to a shift in approach from batters, mainly a wider acceptance of strikeouts and a fly-ball heavy mindset, pitchers are undoubtedly better than ever at this current moment. Pitching staffs are loaded with velocity, movement, and specialization that makes hitting harder than it’s ever been. When looking at the landscape of major league pitching, there are so many names and pitches to choose from. But which pitchers and pitches stand out the most? Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t need me to tell you how effective Shane Bieber was in 2020. He led the majors in ERA, FIP, K/9, overall strikeouts, and of course was the unanimous winner of the AL Cy Young Award. The underlying pitch-tracking data all back up the quality of his skillset. He’s very good. So you’re probably wondering how this all jibes with a title suggesting it may be better for hitters to not swing at Bieber’s pitches, right?

I’ll start with this: Bieber’s 34% zone rate ranks 316th out of 323 pitchers who threw a minimum of 20 innings in 2020. That’s dead last among qualified starters. How is this possible? The simple answer is that, once again, he’s very good. The slightly less simple answer is that batters swing at unhittable pitches and don’t swing at hittable pitches. Bieber throws almost twice as many pitches out of the zone as he throws in the zone, so what if hitters just stopped swinging at his offerings? Surely he would just change his approach if a batter didn’t swing at his pitches, right? Read the rest of this entry »

In what feels like interminable scrolling of the internet this offseason waiting for something to finally happen, it occurred to me to ask, does any of this rumor-mongering actually tell us anything? It is certainly strange that we as consumers of baseball, a modified game of tag with hitting and throwing a ball, care so much about the internal machinations of billion-dollar organizations and the personal decision-making calculus of people we will never meet. Regardless of this peculiarity, I myself still spend hours a week wondering if George Springer would be willing to play for a team who doesn’t have a guaranteed home stadium for the foreseeable future and subsequently will be located in a foreign country in Canada.

This interest is what feeds the North American baseball media ecosystem and employs thousands of people, from reporters to web designers, social media managers to news aggregators, and many more. I wouldn’t necessarily argue that this content holds no value if it is biased or inaccurate, because the time we spend consuming this offseason content really just satiates our longing for baseball when we can’t watch our favorite teams live. But the question remains, does this content hold any predictive value, or are we just fooling ourselves?

This article is based on data scraped from MLB Trade Rumors, the leading aggregator of rumors around baseball, on December 9, 2020. I pulled the last 2,000 posts that each team was tagged in and analyzed what information we’re actually getting from reading and discussing the rumors and reports inside the baseball media ecosystem. To begin, we can observe the volume of rumors for teams by seeing how many days one would have to go back to reach a cumulative 2,000 posts. Read the rest of this entry »

As Major League Baseball prepares for 2021, teams are bracing for another season of COVID-19 related financial problems. There will undoubtedly be a smaller-than-usual capacity of fans at ballparks nationwide, and depending on the municipality, there might not be fans at all. Teams are hoping 2021 is not as bad as 2020. According to an analysis by the Tampa Bay Business Journal, the New York Yankees missed over $437 million in expected income. Near the bottom of the list, the Tampa Bay Rays lost only $67 million in expected income.

But the pandemic affected the Rays in additional ways, some of which could impair the ability of the team to stay in Tampa Bay. As the Rays recently appeared in the World Series, it is important to explore how the pandemic could impact the long-term sustainability of baseball in Tampa Bay.

In 2019, the Tampa Bay Rays won 96 games and made the playoffs for the first time in six years. Their series versus the Astros was the Rays’ first postseason under Kevin Cash and their first since Joe Maddon and Andrew Friedman left the organization following the 2014 campaign. After three mediocre seasons, the Rays had increasingly improved under the radar of all but the most dedicated baseball fans. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent post in the Effectively Wild Facebook group sparked my curiosity. A poster named Tim wrote: “Record I’d like to see set that isn’t inconceivable: Player gets 5 HR in a single game.” That record is not inconceivable, because it has been accomplished at least five times in the minor leagues.

In fact, the professional baseball record is eight home runs in a single game, set by catcher Jay Clarke of the Corsicana Oil Cities in a 51-3 win over the Texarkana Casketmakers in a Texas League contest in 1902. The last minor leaguer to hit five homers in a single game was Dick Lane of the Muskegon Clippers in 1948.

But of course the poster was in all likelihood talking about the MLB record of four in a game, which has stood since 1894. But it was a commenter on the post that really piqued my interest. They simply asked: “Would a team really continue pitching to a guy who’s already had 4 HR in a game though?”

It’s a valid question to ask, and it set me down a rabbit hole of seeing just how many players had a plate appearance with four homers already in a game, and how those plate appearances went. Looking back at history isn’t necessarily the best way to predict future behavior, but it is a fun exercise if nothing else, because frankly, before conducting this research I had no idea how many players ever had a crack at a fifth home run. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this, you are surely a baseball fan, and as such, you’re probably aware that Major League Baseball is putting lots of options on the table when it comes to rule changes to shake up the game and make it more interesting. We’ve already seen the intentional walk become automatic and the limiting of mound visits. MLB also reached an agreement with the Atlantic League to experiment with some other ideas, such as robot umpires, a three-batter minimum for pitchers, starting extra innings with runners on base, moving the mound back, and banning the shift. Some of these ended up being adopted in the majors on a temporary basis for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and may end up getting implemented more permanently, depending on how the upcoming CBA negotiations go.

But I have an idea that I think is better than any of these. It’s a small rule change; but it would radically change the game. Too radical even for this change-happy commissioner, I think. And here it is:

On a ball in play, a runner who reaches home can decide to continue on to first base and keep running.

Now, before I explain why I find this rule change so appealing, let me first get the logistics out of the way. How could it be determined if a player has decided to go to first or not? For this part, it would have to operate the same as a batter running to first base. (To be clear, I don’t think it should be a force play at first base, though it would still be fun if it was.) Read the rest of this entry »