Category Archives: ‘Weekly’ Hit Ground Ball

Matt Smith’s Monday morning column, looking back at the previous week in MLB and looking ahead to the ‘early’ games scheduled for the week ahead

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Boos, Cheers and Chocolate Bars

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The first full week of the MLB season is now in the books and it’s starting to feel like we’re getting into the swing of it.

Every team has at least one win, albeit still only one win for the Tampa Bay Rays heading into Sunday’s games, whilst every team has at least one loss, albeit still only one loss in the case of the Boston Red Sox (linked to the Rays’ situation) and the New York Mets.

Among the expected favourites, the LA Dodgers have had the slowest start in losing six of their first eight games, with the Cleveland Indians going 3-5 through their first eight games.

But it is still only eight games.

We have to wait for what seems like an eternity for the baseball season to start again and that means it’s difficult to avoid the temptation to draw conclusions from what we’ve seen. Whether good or bad, it’s going to take a couple of months to really get a feel on how teams and players are shaping up this season.

Boos Turn To Cheers

That’s being rational about it, though. It’s easy for fans to lose perspective in the early days of the season, forgetting that a 162 game regular season brings with it plenty of ups and downs.

Giancarlo Stanton got his first taste of the difference between playing in Miami and playing in New York when he was booed in the Bronx on Tuesday for striking out five times. He gave the perfect response the following day by hitting a home run.

Similarly new Phillies manager Gabe Kapler had a rough first few days on the job with his unconventional bullpen management coming under all sorts of scrutiny. Some fans booed him at their Citizens Bank Park home opener on Thursday, partly in jest (I think), but wins like the one they had on Saturday (20-1 over Miami) will soon change that.

The simple rule is that some fan bases are quicker to boo than others and the best way to respond is to give them something to cheer about.

#BonusBreakfastBaseball

In last week’s column I referenced the 17-inning slog between the Cubs and Marlins and that the push for extra inning rules in the Majors may gain momentum over the next ten years.

What I neglected to mention is that for us across the pond there is a perk attached to these long games, especially those on the west coast.

It was about six o’clock on Tuesday morning when I looked at the scores and saw that the game at Chase Field between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks was still in progress. Two hours later and it was still going on. The game lasted 15 innings and took a total of 5 hours 46 minutes to complete, finally being won by Arizona at around 8.25 BST.

That was good fun for neutrals, great fun for D-Backs and quite significantly less fun for Dodgers fans, particularly any that had started watching from first pitch (2.40 am here) and lived through a second Kenley Jansen blow-up early this season.  Again, ‘it’s early’ …

Facebook Freebie that may feel like a blackout

As for watching baseball, a new venture for MLB began on Wednesday when Facebook provided an exclusive broadcast of the day-game between the Phillies and Mets.

Games have been shown live on various platforms before, yet the difference in this case is the worldwide online exclusive part. MLB.TV simply directed you on to the Facebook page where you had to log in to see the game.

It should be said that the Facebook deal isn’t putting anything behind another paywall and MLB will focus on the fact that it makes another weekly MLB live game free to watch.  The issue of course is that you have to sign up to Facebook to watch it and whilst for many people that will be a non-issue, it was coincidental that the Phillies-Mets game was going on precisely when Facebook announced that the number of people affected by the Cambridge Analytica saga totalled a staggering 83 million.

In the UK, we’ve been used to enjoying MLB.TV since its inception without having to worry about any local blackouts that affect subscribers in North America. The Facebook deal is only for one game per week, so it’s not a significant number of games affected over the season, but it is going to be one day-game per week, which has an increased impact on us due to those being the most convenient games to watch live in the British evening.

MLB.TV subscribers are left in the situation of either having to sign up to Facebook – which for many reasons increasing numbers want to avoid – to watch games that they considered they had paid for or miss out. Again, it’s only one game per week, but the concern would be that it sets a precedent that will gradually see more deals being signed that reduce the live action available on MLB.TV.

Twitter are also streaming one game per week live for free again this year; however these are only available in North America so not something we can use to help promote the game in this country.

The Chocolate bars are on Charlie

It’s been a good week for Charlie Blackmon. He signed a new six-year contract with the Colorado Rockies that guarantees him at least $108m.

It’s an interesting deal as it has to be seen in the context of this past off-season’s Free Agent market, with Blackmon’s original contract set to expire at the end of this season. He has decided to work out the best deal he could get with the Rockies rather than test the market and you have to say that seems a wise decision.

Blackmon has been a relatively late bloomer. Whilst his performances over the past few seasons have been excellent, he turns 32 years old in July and so, based on what we’ve just seen, you could imagine teams being wary about offering a contract for more than three years to him, even though his performances would suggest he deserved a bigger investment.

The Rockies don’t have a great track record when it comes to making big signings, from last year’s Ian Desmond deal (that doesn’t make any more sense one year) to the infamous Mike Hampton disaster of December 2000.

In the case of Blackmon, they have been prepared to push the boat out to tempt him away from free agency due to their close knowledge of the player. Come back in six years’ time to see whether it proved to be a wise decision or not.

The Sunday Smasher

The selection here should probably be Shohei Ohtani’s second MLB start on the mound, given how well his debut went and his headline-grabbing, home run hitting we’ve seen this week.

However, I picked his start last week and, as with that one, he’s going to be facing my Oakland A’s so I’ll leave that one alone in the hope that his performance is less eye-catching today.

Instead, I’m going to pick the Marlins-Phillies game that begins at 18.35 BST and is available to watch or listen to via MLB.TV. They may not be teams that neutrals would immediately pick, but I like to make sure I catch a bit of every team early in the season and the reason to choose this one is that it will be Jake Arrieta’s debut for the Phillies.

It looks a very favourable match-up for Arrieta – other than the fear for Phillies fans that they used up all their hits and runs yesterday – and he could do something special.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: The first Sunday of MLB 2018

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A new MLB season brings with it a plethora of firsts, but there’s none better than the first full Sunday of the regular season.

Every team is playing and all but the ESPN Sunday Night game (Giants – Dodgers tonight) are day-games for us to enjoy at a convenient time in the UK.  The exception to that today is a Pirates-Tigers game being made up from yesterday’s postponement, yet that just means there’s an extra game to enjoy.

Throughout the season I write a regular Sunday morning column about the past week in MLB. I started it off in April 2007 and wouldn’t have imagined back then that I’d still be doing it eleven years later.  I’ve changed the format around a bit over the years, but I’ve always liked the process of corralling my thoughts and picking out the key topics, or just the ones that caught my eye from the games I watched that week.

I’ll be continuing with that approach for the 2018 season, whilst adding in some regular blogs about the Oakland A’s campaign (which, based on last night, could be a long one).

Happ Happy, Jeter not so much

Like many of you, I settled down in front of the TV at 17.40 on Thursday eagerly awaiting the first game of the regular season between the Chicago Cubs and Miami Marlins. The Cubs’ lead-off hitter Ian Happ wasted no time in getting his season underway by launching the first pitch he saw into the stands for a home run.

I don’t know about the ESPN coverage, but the Cubs’ WGN-TV commentator Jim Deshaies called Happ’s shot and it seemed like the only person who didn’t think Happ would be wailing on the first pitch if it was close was the Marlins’ pitcher José Ureña.

Unsurprisingly the cameras immediately picked out new Marlins head honcho Derek Jeter (not AKA Mr Popular) watching from the stands. The good news for Jeter was that there was a decent crowd on hand – in Marlins terms – and they were in good spirits. The bad news was that most of those in attendance were Cubs fans on vacation.

The only positive for Jeter is that the Cubs fans presumably were less bothered about him than the fans of the next visitor to Marlins ballpark will be: the Boston Red Sox.

Extra thoughts on extra innings

Fears of a 0-162 season in Miami were instantly dispelled on Friday when the Marlins won the second game 2-1. The 17 inning marathon lasted 5 hours 18 minutes and after Miami levelled the scores at 1-1 in the bottom of the third inning, there were 13 and a half score-less frames until Miguel Rojas hit a walk-off single.

Coincidentally the day before this the Guardian had published an article about a brief period in the 1940s when some football competitions adopted a ‘play to a finish’ rule. “Nothing could be more absurd” was how the Guardian put it in 1946 in response to one game lasting nearly 400 minutes and the rule was shelved soon after.

The decision to introduce an extra-innings rule to Minor League baseball this year, with a runner being placed on second base to start each inning, did not go down well among many in the States, albeit with most seemingly oblivious (or not caring) that variations of the rule have been used in international competitions since 2008 and are already used in other leagues around the world (including the leading European leagues).

Outside of MLB, the only argument against some sort of extra inning rule is one governed by tradition as the impact on small playing staffs and other people that are employees or volunteers at the respective game is considerable. There’s more of an argument that the impact can be managed in MLB; the Cubs’ manager Joe Maddon made the sensible suggestion that teams should be able to call-up an extra reliever the day after, for example.

I don’t have a strong view against playing normal rules until you get a winner in MLB; however, I wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of rule is brought in within the next ten years to bring games to a swifter conclusion. How many people actually sat through every pitch of the additional eight innings that were served up on Friday?  Very, very few is the likely answer.

Home runs and more home runs

MLB always does a good job with their Opening Day video package although this time around pitchers would have been given cause to moan even more than usual. Other than a couple of passing shots of hurlers, the video showed a succession of blasts by the likes of Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Kris Bryant and more.

Coming after all the cricket kerfuffle around ball-tampering, it was almost as if MLB was trolling everyone whilst denying that the baseball has changed at all in recent seasons.

George Springer followed Ian Happ by launching his own lead-off home run on Opening Day, doing so for the second year running.  WGN-TV’s Jim Deshaies didn’t just say Happ would hit the first home run of the season, he also predicted he would hit the last one in the World Series too.  Keep a note of that if we end up with a Cubs-Astros World Series and have both Happ and Springer in with a chance of starting and ending the year on a home run.

Giancarlo Stanton waited for the second pitch he saw as a New York Yankee before depositing the ball over the fence. That was the first of two long-balls on his debut in pinstripes.

You’d expect such damage from Stanton, but not so much from the Chicago White Sox’s Matt Davidson. He immediately made anyone who drafted him in their fantasy team look clever by launching three home runs on Opening Day, with Chicago adding three more bombs to give the Kansas City Royals a pounding in Game One.

Nick Markakis launched a walk-off home run for Atlanta on Opening Day, as did former Orioles teammate Adam Jones.  The latter plundered his round-tripper off new Minnesota Twins reliever Fernando Rodney. Rodney has continued to pick up saves in closer roles in recent years despite the analytics crowd telling you not to go near him with a bargepole.

He does tend to walk a tightrope in his appearance and the Twins got their first “Rodney, you plonker” experience out of the way early.

Pillar pilfers three bases

It’s not all about the longball though and the Blue Jays’ Kevin Pillar showed that brilliantly on Saturday by stealing second, third and home to beat the Yankees.  That should have gone down well with the Blue Jays’ crowd at the MLB Meet Up in Leeds last night.

The next one takes place tonight in London, so get down to Belushis’ in SH1 if you’re in the area.

Sunday Game To Watch

The MLB event in London was originally scheduled to show three games in Yankees vs Jays, Rays vs Red Sox and Astros vs Rangers, but they’ve added in the Angels vs A’s game too due to it being the pitching debut of Shohei Ohtani.

First pitch is scheduled for 21:05 BST. Naturally, this A’s fan hopes it’s a complete disaster for the Japanese newcomer as the A’s look to split the series 2-2.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: The Other Teams

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At this time of the year it’s traditional to publish predictions of how the MLB season is going to pan out.

If you asked most fans which ten teams are going to make the playoffs right now, you’re likely to find a lot of similarities.

In the American League, Houston, Boston, New York and Cleveland all look strong favourites, with the LA Angels the trendy pick for the second Wild Card.

In the National League, LA Dodgers, Chicago and Washington are the probable division winners and you can then take your pick from a group of teams to meet in the Wild Card game.

So, rather than focus on the potential division winners, we’ll look at another team of interest in each division.

AL West

Let’s start in the division of the reigning World Series champions with the team that many are awarding the ‘won the off-season’ prize to.

What exactly should we expect from the LA Angels this year? Any team with Mike Trout in it has a chance and they’ve made some good additions, but have they made a big leap ahead or a more modest improvement?

Part of that will be determined by their headline acquisition, Japanese two-way talent Shohei Ohtani. Every team wanted him and it was a coup for the Angels to win his signature. An adjustment period is to be expected and that leads us to Ohtani’s Spring Training, which politely can be described as disappointing. Despite the ever-present caveat this time of year that ‘it’s only Spring Training’, were he not a highly touted player from Japan it’s possible the Angels would have considered sending him to Triple-A given how he has performed.

That’s not a viable option and so he’s going to need to develop his craft in the Majors. Ordinarily it would be fine for Ohtani to take some lumps here and there as he puts together an encouraging debut season to build on, and in isolation that remains the case. The problem with that for the Angels is the rest of their starting rotation comes with plenty of question marks. If Ohtani isn’t really good, will the additions of Ian Kinsler, Zack Cosart and renewing with Justin Upton alone make them more than a potential second Wild Card?

AL Central

The Minnesota Twins proved last year that you can’t always count a team out based on previous form. Few if any picked the Twins to make the play-offs, yet some good performances and other teams not meeting expectations for various reasons meant that the Twins could look around, see no one else was really making a claim for the second Wild Card and take it for themselves.

They did that with no expectations on their shoulders, other than the expectation from others that at some point someone else would overtake them. Now the expectations have changed. That’s not to say they are favourites, but they’ve got something to live up to.

Although they’ve not exactly become big spenders, you can’t accuse the Twins of standing still and failing to add to their roster.

They started with their bullpen, adding Addison Russell and Fernando Rodney, and then took advantage of the slow-moving free agent market by picking up Logan Morrison for their batting lineup and two good starting pitchers in Jake Odorizzi and Lance Lynn. On the negative side, Ervin Satana will miss at least the first month of the season due to a finger injury and shortstop Jorge Polanco will serve an 80-game drug suspension.

The Twins are no juggernaut, yet they are a good team and it shouldn’t be overlooked that they’ll play 57 games combined against the rebuilding Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals. Few seem to be picking them for a Wild Card, but I wouldn’t be so quick to count them out.

AL East

The 2018 AL East looks set to be a heavyweight fight between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. We’ve been there before a few times.

The other three teams have all taken turns at upsetting the order in recent years. I wouldn’t say any had a great chance at doing that this time around, yet if I had to pick a team that would be worth watching it would be the Toronto Blue Jays.

The Edwin Encarnacion-Jose Bautista Blue Jays have gone, with neither player now with the club and fellow star Josh Donaldson heading for free agency at the end of the 2018 season. Nothing lasts forever. Toronto had a really good team there for a few years but many of the leading players are now either gone, past their best or potentially heading towards an exit.

That makes the Blue Jays’ season all the more intriguing. Are they going to slip back again or do they have one last hurrah in them?

They haven’t made any impressive additions to their roster: tinkering with the bullpen, adding a couple of former Cardinals in Randall Grichuk and Aledmys Garcia, and signing veteran Curtis Granderson. They do still have good players on the roster though and will look even better if Aaron Sanchez’s blister issues can be a thing of the past. If not, June and July could be dominated by rumours of where Donaldson will be traded to.

NL East

Picking ‘another team’ from the NL East is a difficult task. The Washington Nationals were a country mile ahead of the rest of their division last year and that doesn’t look like changing in 2018.  The Miami Marlins finished second last year – yes, that surprised me too when I checked – but we all know what’s happened there over the off-season (fire sale number 4 or 5, it’s hard to keep count).

So, you’ve got the young talent of the Atlanta Braves, the young talent and two good free agent additions in the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Mets.  Let’s go with the latter.

The period from mid-2015 to mid-2016 was a lot of fun for the Mets. They went to a World Series in October 2015 and then saw the Yankees trading away players the following summer.  It looked like the city was the Mets’s.

Well that didn’t last very long, did it? The Yankees, in a way that only the Yankees could, rapidly turned a rebuild into a strong Major League roster and loaded farm system.  The Mets lost the 2016 NL Wild Card game and then fell apart in 2017.

Frustratingly for their fans, they haven’t responded aggressively to this turn of events.  Jay Bruce and Todd Frazier are solid, experienced players, but they’re not going to convince a fan base that a team that lost 92 games last year is going to explode back into life.

As ever with these Mets, it all comes down to the starting rotation. If Syndergaard, deGrom, Harvey and Matz can make 100+ starts, and more starts than not reflecting their talent, then they’ll be a Wild Card threat. Mets fans have seen enough to be excited whilst also not being willing to bet their own money on it happening.

NL Central

Just as the Twins sprang a surprise in the AL Central, the Milwaukee Brewers were more competitive than most predicted in the NL Central last season.

Just as the Twins, the Brewers now have some expectations to live up to and, just as the Twins, they’ve not sat back and let the pack pass them.  However, they haven’t made the depth of signings as others and that may be their undoing, especially with Jimmy Nelson working his way back from shoulder surgery.

Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich are an excellent pair of signings to add to the outfield and the top of their batting order. It’s still not completely clear how the roster will shake out from there, with the original plan for Ryan Braun to play some first base already looking like an experiment too far.

It’s far from the worst problem to have as the outfield recruits offer plenty of reason to be excited for the Brew Crew, yet you get the sense that having started to push chips into the middle of the table, Milwaukee might have been better off – if not quite going all in – at least reaching for another starting pitcher to add to the group.

Within their division, you could argue they haven’t given up much to the St Louis Cardinals as they’ve also added an outfielder from the Marlins (Marcell Ozuna) but little else. Whether that’s going to be enough to beat others to a Wild Card remains to be seen.

NL West

I started planning this column in the middle of the week and had already decided to pick the San Francisco Giants for this spot.

Little did I know that the last few days would add more uncertainty to the Giants’ season.

Looking at 2017 in isolation you could say that everything fell apart for San Francisco and that wouldn’t be far from the truth.  What that disguises somewhat is that things started going awry in the second half of 2016. There was no ‘even year’ World Series that time around, they lost 11 of 13 after the All-Star break, and went 30-42 in total, to go from a 6.5 game lead at the top of the West to finishing four games behind the Dodgers.

Over the current off-season there was a clear decision to give it one last go with the Posey-Bumgarner-Crawford team and so trades were made to bring in experienced campaigners Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen.  Reliever Tony Watson was also signed as a free agent to add a quality lefty to the mix, hopefully behind last year’s big recruit Mark Melcancon if he’s fully recovered from forearm surgery.

But then it was announced that Jeff Samrdzija will miss several weeks with a strained pectoral injury and Madison Bumgarner took a line drive back on his left hand that fractured his little finger and could keep him out for the best part of two months.  Their Opening Day four-man rotation will consist of Johnny Cueto followed by Ty Blach, Chris Stratton and Derek Holland, which is a clear drop-off from what might have been.

The two starters shouldn’t have any lingering issues from their ailments so if the team can hold steady then they could build into the season and make a Wild Card run in the second half.  However, there’s an increased injury risk with a veteran team and their chances will depend on keeping their best players on the field, something that hasn’t started well.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Real-life injuries being a fantasy nightmare

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At this time of year, most baseball fans are thinking about their fantasy team rosters as much as the General Managers of real-life MLB teams are thinking about theirs.

Whether it’s a dynasty competition, you’ve already completed a draft already or have one or more to come, there’s lots to consider and Spring Training has a habit of adding a large dollop of confusion into the mix.

My main fantasy competition, the BGB Fantasy League, has its draft this coming week.  I’ve done some mock drafts in preparation and have a good idea of players that I think offer value – and just as importantly ones who I don’t – yet if there’s one thing that you can never fully be on top of it’s this: injuries.

Injuries are a constant source of concern because nobody can truly tell if somebody is about to be out of action. There may be signs in some cases – a loss of velocity by a pitcher, perhaps – but one throw, one swing, one stride can turn a seemingly perfectly healthy player into a Disabled List statistic.

And Spring Training makes that process even more difficult. Everything is geared towards the regular season, so teams understandably are very cautious about any signs of trouble. A slight hamstring tweak that wouldn’t be acknowledged at all when real games are at stake may become a news item and a precursor for a few days’ rest in spring.  What should we brush aside as inconsequential, or start fretting about as an issue that may linger?

Often, none of us can be completely sure.

Certainty can often be seen as a good thing; however in fantasy baseball terms that depends on your competition and draft date.

Just yesterday a potential injury was confirmed as it was announced that Oakland A’s pitcher Jharel Cotton will undergo Tommy John elbow surgery. In fantasy terms, Cotton wouldn’t have figured too highly on draft lists outside of deeper AL-only leagues and I’m using this example more with my A’s hat on (the fact that I wasn’t sure quite what performance he would bring this season doesn’t alter me being gutted that ‘Squeaky’ faces over a year out).  Even so, fantasy owners know he’s out of the equation and can plan around that.=, provided they haven’t used a draft pick on the player already.

With other players, you’re not quite so sure.

The Arizona Diamondbacks’ Zack Greinke made an early exit from his start on Wednesday due to tightness in his right groin.  A leg injury is much less of a concern for a pitcher than an elbow or shoulder problem, and most things point to this being a minor issue, yet Greinke had expressed self-doubts on how he was feeling prior to that start. Maybe it will prove to be more of a problem than first thought?

The same could be said for the Washington Nationals’ Daniel Murphy. He underwent knee surgery in October and at that point no one really thought much of it. He we are on 18 March and whilst he has been taking batting practice and doing some light fielding work, he still hasn’t played a Spring Training game and doesn’t look likely to anytime soon.

Although the Nationals haven’t completely ruled him out for Opening Day, it now has to be a long shot that he’ll be ready in time.

Context is key here and that’s something that can be easily ignored at fantasy draft time. Washington are looking at October and competing for a World Series and whilst they would like to see Murphy out there on Opening Day, it doesn’t really matter if he’s not. Whether it’s a few days or a few weeks, they have enough options to cover the infield early in the season to allow Murphy to take his time with his recovery. The very last thing the Nationals want to happen is to rush Murphy back and then see him break down again.

Any fantasy baseball player from 2017 will know that a cautious approach by MLB teams is now much more likely given the rule change to reduce the minimum Disabled List period down from 15 to 10. The LA Dodgers were one of the more creative users of this last year (other people may find others words to describe it) to give players – pitchers in particular – a bit of rest here and there over the course of the season. I know some fantasy league ‘commissioners’ have changed their Disabled List settings this year as a result where previously there were small limits on how many players you could DL.

One of the many nuggets you will find in the Ron Shandler 2018 Baseball Forecaster is that 58 per cent of the Top 300 drafted players were either disabled, demoted or designated for assignment at some point in the 2017 season. As Shandler puts it:

“Little did you know last March that nearly six out of every 10 players you drafted would be disabled, demoted or DFA’d by year’s end”.

It’s not a case of if injuries or other issues will hit your roster, either real-life or fantasy, but when.  As we scour the Spring Training news for injury updates we all do so knowing that the best we can do is take the latest information then make our educated guesses as to who we may be able to count on and plan for what we may do if a key player goes down.

The only thing we can do is make sure we’ve got the latest injury info to hand when we’re drafting. Injuries are always bad luck for a fantasy owner except for when you make a draft decision not realising that there was a concern about their fitness.

I’m a casual fantasy baseball player so generally don’t feel in a position to offer too much advice to others, but if there’s one bit I can give you it’s to find your favourite fantasy injury news sections, even just the MLB.com one, and make sure it’s accessible when you’re drafting. I’ve made my share of mistakes in the virtual draft room over the years, but this is one I haven’t made and don’t ever intend to.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: MLB UK plans offer hope

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After the success of MLB Battlegrounds in Hyde Park last year and long-running rumours of MLB games taking place in London, many fans in the UK have been waiting for updates on what MLB UK’s plans are for the next couple of years.

Batflips and Nerds got the chance to speak to MLB UK Head Charlie Hill and it’s well worth a listen if you haven’t checked it out as yet.

London Games

The news we all are waiting for wasn’t provided, but in some ways that was as positive a message as we could get.

Ever since the current MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement was finalised in December 2016, the years of talk finally seemed to be coming to fruition with London being one of the locations on the international play plan for the five years that the CBA covers.

Until an exact date and team line-up is in place and ready to be announced, there isn’t much more Hill can say.  We all know the CBA has potential games in London marked in for 2019 and 2020 and so long as he’s playing coy and doing nothing to temper our enthusiasm, we can be optimistic about what’s to come and there being an announcement in the not too distant future, even if the immense practicalities still need to be worked through.

Wider work

Hill also acknowledged something that has long been said about potential games on British soil: they’ll be great for existing fans but only have a limited short-term publicity boost without them being part of a much larger plan to increase and foster awareness of MLB in the UK.

Outside of supporting fan events – potentially with ex-player Q&A’s as we’ve seen with NFL UK events – there isn’t a huge amount of detail on what this may entail, but that’s down to Hill being clear on MLB UK taking a considered approach and listening to fans as they develop new ideas.

It was interesting to hear Hill talk of the success of MLB Battlegrounds and that part of this was the involvement of ex-Major Leaguers Carlos Pena, Cliff Floyd and Shawn Green and how they – and possibly others in future – could be advocates for MLB UK among the current and ex-playing community.

It seems to me precisely the right way to go in building things progressively, making every step – the MLB pop-up shop, MLB Battlegrounds etc – a success and a point from which to build on to the next one.

Licencing rights

It was expected that work would be going on to gain as much exposure for potential London games as possible, but Hill’s comments suggest that this is being looked at more broadly in respect of finding ways to increase coverage of the sport.

For existing fans already engaging with MLB on social media and the like, it’s easy to underestimate how important mainstream coverage (TV, radio, newspapers etc) still is to get a sport – or any entertainment for that matter – in front of new people.  That’s especially the case in a country where, in significant terms, there isn’t a culture of the sport being part of people’s consciousness.

Online content certainly can play a part in this and it’s interesting to read the announcement on Friday that Facebook are partnering with MLB to show a free game every week during the regular season, with the four games in April all being day-games and therefore convenient evening viewing for us.  There is a caveat in the announcement that it will be available globally “excluding select international markets”, so fingers crossed that doesn’t affect the UK.

Where we’ve come from

The mention of broadcasting rights made me think of where we are with MLB in the UK today.

When it was reported recently that the Oakland A’s and Seattle Mariners would be playing a series in Japan next year, I remembered the A’s-Red Sox series of 2012. Not only were the games featured on BBC 5 Live Sports Extra, but Simon Brotherton and Josh Chetwynd actually went out to the Tokyo Dome to provide BBC radio commentary.

Six years on and such UK-dedicated coverage has been conspicuous by its absence since that time.  Prior to this we had a couple of years of coverage of the MLB season on Five Live Sports Extra and before that the halcyon days of Baseball on 5 when we had MLB on terrestrial TV.

There were three aspects to that coverage: 1) a way for baseball fans to follow the sport if online or TV packages were out of reach or not available, 2) a way for people to stumble across the sport who otherwise may have never given it a chance, and 3) creating a centre for the MLB fan community in this country.

Lots of additional things came out of that coverage, from large numbers participating in the Fantasy Baseball UK competition (still going today – sign up here) to the type of fan get-togethers that are now being picked up again by the likes of MLB UK Committee and active forums such as the UK MLB Supporters Forum.

Social media and online content can help to fill that gap to an extent nowadays, but then again that does always have the risk of fooling us involved in how widespread that support is.  Was the active UK MLB fan community larger ten years ago today than it is today?  I suspect it was and that’s the impact that losing TV and radio coverage can have, yet that’s not to be despondent about what the future may bring.

What we can build together

The MLB fanbase may not be as big as others in the UK, yet for years there have been fan parties, fanzines, forums, blogs, podcasts that have brought those fans together.

MLB UK isn’t having to start from Day Zero, nor are they having to take a punt on hoping there is a community out there to support and be part of their efforts. There are plenty of people across the country who are passionate about the sport, have some great ideas and plenty of talent to make things come to life. The increasing number of UK Twitter accounts, blogs, podcasts and fan-led events show that there are plenty of people willing to be part of it.

If MLB UK can provide a hub to support ideas and to launch new events and plans to then marshal the UK MLB fan troops around them then together we can all really make a difference in spreading the game throughout the country to those will give it a chance.

Other thoughts

Promoting British baseball clubs

It’s good to hear Hill talking about creating a legacy from MLB games.  I know baseball and softball clubs will be keen to be part of future plans and finding ways in which MLB events can help push interest towards the clubs in the UK.  There isn’t always a direct link between playing and watching a sport, but MLB has the power to grab people’s attention and I’m sure everyone involved in baseball here has had numerous examples of neighbours or work colleagues expressing surprise on finding that there is any baseball in this country.  Getting that message out there among the MLB publicity could be a real positive for British clubs.

MLB UK Twitter

The MLB UK Twitter account has been the subject of some comment, mainly in regard to its relative dormant state for several months.  It seems the initial social media presence was there to help build around MLB Battlegrounds and hopefully it will build up as the MLB UK team increases in size. Hill’s comments about having local offices in key areas around the world that know the local culture plays into this, as simply repackaging US content would seem a waste (for example, is it worth retweeting MLB account tweets when surely most following the MLB UK account would already be following the MLB one anyway?).   The value would come in building something that was distinctively a UK focused account that adds something different and unique to what we can find elsewhere.

An example of this would be from the play-offs last year when the MLB UK account started posting #Represent videos from fans. I thought it was a great idea when I saw it, only to be disappointed to find it was actually American fan videos with a MLB UK logo at the end. On an MLB UK account, I want to hear the passion of a Cubs fan from Cardiff rather than Chicago, who then inspires an Astros fan from Hull rather than Houston to post their video too.  All of that takes work to organise and encourage, which understandably is why that wasn’t the approach last year, but that’s the sort of thing that would help build the community even more.

The big (non-Brexit) European question

Whilst London games were the obvious elephant in the room in the podcast, there is another one that is perhaps a touchy subject for a UK fan to go near. On a few occasions Hill spoke of Europe and then focused in on London, which is great for us but may further irritate some in Europe who already feel hard done by. It wasn’t too long ago – 2010/2011 – that Italian and Netherlands authorities were being encouraged to bid for MLB games. Different people have different versions of that process, there were seemingly no firm guarantees from MLB, but ultimately over 12m Euros were invested in an impressive facility near Hoofdorp only for MLB to look to London instead.

We all know why London is such an attractive proposition for MLB – especially as they are notably lagging behind their fellow major North American sports by building a presence here – yet we can also understand that the Netherlands and Italy have made significant contributions to baseball in Europe.

MLB UK rightly should be focusing its efforts on making potential London games a success and not spreading itself too thin, yet in the longer term it would be good to know how they may support the wider European market.  In particular, I would love to see the MLB European Elite Camp be part of a “festival of baseball”, as Hill put it, perhaps playing an exhibition game or putting on a skills competition (home run derby, throwing accuracy, maybe even a Korean All-Star style bunt competition – although I think that may be going too far for a British audience!).

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Ohtani pitches, Honeywell doesn’t

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The weather gods clearly have been reading this column.

After I rejected the meteorological season’s definition of when winter turns to spring last week, in favour of the baseball season version, it looks like we’re going to get a ‘big freeze’ this coming week with snow storms and temperatures down to -8C.

Sorry about that!

Let’s take a positive from it though; it will make watching and listening to Spring Training games from sunny Arizona and Florida all the more appealing.

Ohtani debut

You don’t get many big events in Spring Training, but the first appearance of Japanese star Shohei Ohtani counted as one on Saturday.

Ohtani was on the same plan as the rest of his Angels starting pitchers: two innings or 30 pitches, whichever came first.  He left after 1.1 innings and 31 pitches, one batter after the Milwaukee Brewers’ Keon Broxton took him deep and on to the grass mound behind the left-field fence.

With so little else going on so early in spring, every little last detail was bound to be obsessed over by beat writers and columnists, all whilst accepting that a first start of 31 pitches doesn’t really tell you very much at all.

Watching the Angels’ FWS coverage via MLB.TV, Ohtani showed off one of his fabled splitters in striking out Minor Leaguer Nate Orf (“orf” being the sound some made as the pitch went by) and a big slow curve for a called strike in another at-bat.  His command of his pitches was a bit shaky at times, but that’s to be expected early in the pre-season.

More insightful than Ohtani’s performance was news from the Angels’ camp reported by Terry Smith and Jose Mota about Ohtani’s transition to being an MLB pitcher and also the adjustments the Angels will be making.  The six-man rotation plan seems to still be in play and, with Ohtani also being an option with the bat, it looks like the Angels’ bench will consist of just a back-up catcher, infielder and outfielder.

At first glance that would seem a short bench, not knowing quite how much Ohtani will be used as a hitter in 2018; however, it’s becoming increasingly common for American League teams to only roster three bench players. That allows most teams (i.e. those that don’t have a pitcher who can also hit like Ohtani promises to do) to have an 8-man bullpen to go alongside the 5-man rotation.

‘Bullpenning’ is en vogue in the play-offs and being used more during the regular season too and is one of the key reasons why the length of games has being going up in recent years (time taken for pitching changes, relievers traditionally being more ‘deliberate’ with their pace of play etc).  Whilst limits on pitching changes have not been introduced for 2018, it was mooted as an option being considered by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred in his quest for increasing the pace of play and will be raised again if the trends of 8-man bullpens and lengthening game times continue.

Roth off to a good start

Although it didn’t get the fanfare of Ohtani’s debut, understandably enough, Great Britain pitcher Michael Roth got his spring off to a good start by pitching two score-less innings for the Chicago Cubs against the Milwaukee Brewers on Friday, giving up only one hit in the process.

Roth’s unlikely to make the Cubs’ Opening Day roster given the pitching depth that Chicago has, but some good performances in spring can only help his stock.

Non-roster invitee

Roth is classed as a non-roster invitee for the Cubs and is one of many NRI players across the 30 MLB clubs this spring.

If you’re new to baseball, a non-roster invitee is essentially as the term suggests: someone who is not on the club’s 40-man roster but gets an invite to come to their Major League Spring Training camp.

In Roth’s case, he’s an example of a player who signs a Minor League contract with a club over the off-season and then gets given an NRI to try to earn a spot on the roster or at least to impress enough to either remain in the organisation as a Minor League player or to be picked up by another team.

The other main type of NRI is a player who is already part of the club’s farm system and gets given the opportunity to spend some of spring with the Major League team before being sent on to Minor League camp.  Whilst some of those players will be in a situation of trying to earn a roster spot, in the main they will be there to give the Major League coaching staff a chance to work with them for a few weeks and also to help fill out the Spring Training line-ups.

As you’ll notice, Major League regulars often only play four innings or so at the start of spring – or may not play at all if it’s a road game – before being replaced by Minor Leaguers.

One quirk of the transaction rules is that Ohtani, as a non-MLB free agent, technically signed a Minor League contract with the Angels so he is as an NRI currently as he hasn’t yet had to be added to the Angels’ 40-man roster.

More Rays woes as Honeywell heads under the knife

It seems to happen every spring that a top pitching prospect on the verge of making their Major League debut has their progress cruelly halted by an elbow injury that requires ‘Tommy John’ surgery (named after the pitcher the experimental surgery was first tried on in 1974).

Last year it was the St Louis Cardinals’ Alex Reyes, this year it is the Tampa Bay Rays’ Brent Honeywell.

The pitcher took a pragmatic view to the situation, as reported on MLB.com: “We sign up to be pitchers. Bad things happen every now and then. There’s a couple of things that you can prevent, but I don’t think this is one of them. It’s either going to go or it’s not, the way I look at it”.

It was yet another blow this off-season for Rays fans, coming in the same week as Steven Sousa being traded away to the Arizona Diamondbacks in a three-team trade that also included the Yankees.

If we go by Baseball-Reference’s flavour of WAR (Wins Above Replacement), the Tampa Bay Rays’ most valuable players from 2017 were:

  1. Kevin Kiermaier – 5.1
  2. Steven Sousa – 4.2
  3. Logan Morrison – 3.6
  4. Evan Longoria – 3.6
  5. Corey Dickerson – 2.7
  6. Alex Cobb – 2.3.

The best you can say is that at least Kiermaier is still on the club, at time of writing at least.

Cobb and Morrison are free agents and clearly not coming back to the Rays, Longoria and Sousa have been traded, whilst Dickerson was recently Designated for Assignment (DFA’d) and picked up by Pittsburgh.

There’s an argument that when you add it all up, the Rays might not lose too much performance when additions are factored in and that they were unlikely to challenge the Red Sox and Yankees in the AL East this season even with those players.

Such logical thinking doesn’t make it less jarring for a fan who hangs on the results of all 162 games in a regular season.  Honeywell was one of the reasons Rays fans could look at the off-season departures and think ‘well at least we can enjoy watching him starting his Big League career’

Sadly that’s now going to be put off until sometime in 2019.

The Grandyman Can – and did

The first home run of Spring Training came courtesy of all-round good guy Curtis Granderson. He got off to the perfect start by taking a 1-1 pitch into right field whilst batting lead-off for Toronto.

Granderson signed a $5m contract with the Blue Jays over the off-season after spending time with the Mets and Dodgers last year.  He’s a fan favourite wherever he goes and has a place in the hearts of British baseball fans due to his Ask Curtis appearances on Baseball on 5 years ago.

 

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Cheerio Winter, Hello Baseball (Prospectus)

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When does winter come to an end and spring begin?

According to the Met Office, in the UK it depends on whether you’re looking at the meteorological or astronomical season.  If the former, the first day of spring this year is 1 March, the latter is 20 March.

What the Met Office don’t take into account in that article is a third season you might be going by.

The baseball season.

This year, spring starts on 23 February.  Whilst a few teams are playing on Wednesday and Thursday, the proper spring leagues (Cactus in Arizona, Grapefruit in Florida) get going with games on Friday.

It’s the same every year: we’re all happy to have MLB baseball back as spring games begin, then go into a bit of a lull as the lazy Spring Training-ness of the games loses some of its appeal, before the regular season starts coming into view and the excitement builds again.

Even if you don’t care for Spring Training games all that much, you can at least enjoy them as the next marker that shows the real action is getting ever closer.

Baseball Prospectus 2018 Annual arrives

The start of Spring Training isn’t the only baseball season marker for me this week.  After Truck Day and MLB.TV Day, the next unofficial Day in my baseball calendar is the day on which there’s a knock on the door and the postie hands over a chunky parcel of joy.

That happened yesterday as my copy of the Baseball Prospectus 2018 annual arrived. I’ve been buying it every year since 2005 and whilst the quality has varied at times – never being worse than ‘good’, but not always hitting the heights hoped for – I can’t imagine being without it.

It’s a book you can dip into all season long, but it particularly comes into its own during Spring Training when there are prospects and fringe players to look up and learn more about.

Those other markets

In this column two weeks ago, my final thought was about the potential impact that a more prosperous baseball landscape outside of North America could have on free agents (at the lower levels, rather than the top stars).

This year’s BP Annual looks beyond North America by adding a couple of chapters about the Korea Baseball League and Nippon Baseball League in Japan.  There’s an opening essay about each league set-up followed by stats and commentary on the main players in each league (the Japan league version also includes stats on lots – all regulars? – of other players too).

They make for an interesting and welcome addition to the book, adding something a bit different that you might not think to go and look at on the internet otherwise.

The first name included in the Korean Baseball League list is Roger Bernadina, better-known for his time with the Washington Nationals in MLB or – for British fans – being the star man for the Netherlands in the 2007 European Championships final against Great Britain.

Another name that caught my eye was that of Michael Choice.  I wrote last week about some of the A’s prospects that had got away. Choice was drafted in the first round by the A’s in 2010 and rose to being the team’s top prospect, making the Majors in September 2013 before being traded to the Texas Rangers a few months later.

Things never quite panned out for Choice in the Majors and after bouncing around the Minors for a few years he decided to take up the offer of joining the Nexon Heroes in the KBO League last July.  The commentary on him in BP18 notes that he hit three home runs in his final game of the 2017 season and agreed a $600k deal to stay with the team for 2018.

New for 2018

Much of the rest of the formula stays the same, although there’s a new addition to the pitcher profiles in the form of three new ‘Top-Line Pitching’ metrics. These are designed to give an insight not strictly on performance but the type of pitcher they are, “how a pitcher gets to their results” is how they describe it.

The metrics look at Power, Stamina and Command and give a score for each based on a 0-100 scale.  First impressions are that they do offer something different and could be a useful ‘quick glance’ profile of a pitcher, although it would have been nice if they had spent a bit more time putting them into context in the Statistical Introduction by going through some examples of different types of pitchers.

The other addition is the presence of some specially designed Topps category leader cards that decorate the end of a team’s section if they have any leaders on their team from 2017.  Fourteen teams draw a blank and some aren’t your obvious leaders.  Baltimore’s sole leader card is of Caleb Joseph for his league-leading 2.9 Blocking Runs mark, which is nice for him and his family.

Don’t save the best ’till last, put it first

If this off-season’s player free agent market seems strange, that’s nothing compared to Jayson Stark becoming a free agent at the end of April last year in the latest round of cost-cutting by ESPN.  Picking a favourite baseball writer is like picking a favourite band, you love the ones you love for different reasons and choosing between them is impossible, but Stark is one of the first names that would come into my head.

Stark provides the traditional guest foreword to this year’s BP annual and it’s a typically thoughtful and entertaining read.

And the great thing is, that’s not where Stark’s baseball writing in 2018 comes to an end.

The Athletic keeps on growing

Ken Rosenthal broke the news this week that Stark has been signed up to join The Athletic’s expanded MLB team from 1st April.

The Athletic is a fairly new venture with a simple mandate: providing quality sports writing at a price.  In some respects this runs counter to prevalent trends, with media companies moving towards video and audio and the long-held expectation of many that online content will be available for free.

The fact that it runs counter to these trends is the whole point. The belief is there’s a sizeable audience that still values writing and are prepared to pay a reasonable cost for it. I count myself among that number, signed up in early January and I’ve been impressed so far.

It seems like every week or so another baseball writer confirms they are joining the website’s staff.  Whilst the quality of the articles published is generally high and provides good variety, you can tell it’s still in a formative period somewhat and building up to cover the entire circuit (20 of the 30 MLB teams have dedicated writers, alongside the national writers such as Rosenthal, Stark, Peter Gammons and Jim Bowden).  I probably feel that a little more than most subscribers as I don’t follow any of the other North American sports so I don’t get the benefit of all of the other content they are putting out.

Still, the national MLB writing is already strong (and will be even better with Stark on board), the Oakland A’s are covered well by new beat writer Julian McWilliams and Melissa Lockard and I’m enjoying dipping into the local coverage of other teams to pick up the early news from Spring Training camps.  I definitely recommend taking a look.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Prospect Lists

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After Truck Day and MLB.TV Day, this coming week brings us the next important off-season landmark when pitchers and catchers officially report to the 30 MLB Spring Training camps.

Or potentially report to the Players Association camp for un-signed free agents.

Despite the news yesterday of Yu Darvish reportedly agreeing a six-year deal with the Chicago Cubs, the Hot Stove continues to be lukewarm with Todd Frazier being the only ther notable name to come off the market this week, leaving plenty of players without a team Spring Training camp to go to as yet.

While the experienced Major Leaguers are struggling to get the attention of teams, talented young players are always in demand.

Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs published their top 100 prospect lists (101 in BP’s case) this past week, joining the previously-released lists by Baseball America, ESPN’s Keith Law and MLB.com Pipeline.

Prospects are prospects

Some people absolutely obsess over prospects, taking ranking lists and expert comments about their favourites (usually from their chosen team’s farm system) far too seriously for their own good.

The attraction with thinking about prospects is the wonder of what they might become. There is always hope with a prospect, unlike a player that is struggling to lay off a big league breaking ball or a pitcher heading to the bullpen because their third-best pitch hasn’t turned out to be quite of the quality to allow them to be an effective Major League starter.

Essentially what you’re buying into with a prospect is that they haven’t yet proved they can’t be a quality player in the Big Leagues.  Some are able to make the step up, but many more never quite live up to the hype others build up around them.

Appel says farewell

Take the case of Mark Appel, who has just announced he’s taking an indefinite period of leave from baseball.

When he was drafted number one overall out of college by the Houston Astros in 2013 the consensus wasn’t just that he would become a Big Leaguer but that he would get there quickly. However, for various reasons it just never worked out for him.

In this case it didn’t hurt the Astros much and happily Appel seems quite content with his decision, to the point where it looks more likely than not he will move on completely from the game.

He’ll have to accept being labelled a ‘baseball bust’ if he does become only the third ever player to be picked number one and not to make the Majors, but he’s a 26-year-old with a degree from Stanford University and a $6.35m draft bonus so he’s achieved an awful lot to help him plot a new course in life and good luck to him.

Why does [insert prospect writer name] hate my team …

When FanGraphs’ Top 100 was published I jumped onto the Oakland A’s UK Twitter feed to highlight that their list was clearly the most well-informed:

Obviously that was tongue in check, but it’s pretty funny witnessing the huge personal offence some fans feel when a prospect list dares to not be quite so positive about their team as they are.

What makes this all the more curious is that just because a player may be your team’s prospect today, that doesn’t mean he will still be tomorrow.  You don’t last long as an Oakland A’s fan without learning not to get too attached to any player and that doesn’t just apply to those on the Major League roster.

Addison Russell was the recent big hope for A’s fans before he was traded to the Chicago Cubs in the deal for Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel in July 2014.  The blow was softened slightly at the time by the fact that the club was being bold and going ‘all in’ to win a World Series, but the gamble didn’t pay off and only felt worse when Russell was celebrating in the Fall Classic with the Cubs two years later.

Prior to that, notable ‘what ifs’ included Andre Ethier who caught my eye when reviewing the 2005 Minor League season only to then be traded to the Dodgers that December for the combustible Milton Bradley, and the memorable case of Grant Desme. He had an excellent 2009 season, capped off by winning MVP honours at the Arizona Fall League, to get me all excited about seeing him in an A’s uniform before he gave up baseball a couple of months later to become a Catholic priest.

If it can happen, it will happen to the A’s.

Trading prospects

The other thing with fans is that they can often change their views on a prospect very quickly when it comes to a potential trade.  Outstanding or intriguing prospects can turn into average or long-shots when a deal is completed and they are no longer part of their farm system.

Drawing on the A’s again, that came up at last year’s trade deadline when rumours were rife of Sonny Gray being traded to the Yankees. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the A’s prospects let alone anyone else’s, but I knew better than to rely on the thoughts of Yankee fans as I was glued to ESPN’s coverage via BT Sport.

https://twitter.com/keithlaw/status/892100584781819906

And Keith did, taking a measured but optimistic view on all three players the A’s got in return.

Jorge Mateo and Dustin Fowler both appeared on some of the Top 100 lists and James Kaprielian received some honourable mentions as he works his way back from Tommy John elbow surgery.  I’m interested to see what their futures may hold, Fowler may well make the Opening Day roster if he’s fully recovered from a knee injury suffered in his Major League debut for the Yankees last year, but I know not to get too excited.

I’ll enjoy watching them in an A’s uniform if and when they do.

Exciting debuts

That doesn’t mean I’m a killjoy about prospects, mind you.  Every baseball fan enjoys seeing a young star blazing a trail as they begin their Major League career, regardless of which team they are on.

The 2010 season sticks in the memory as being a particularly good vintage for prospect debuts.  Jason Heyward grabbed the headlines on Opening Day at Turner Field when he launched a home run in his first Major League at-bat for the Atlanta Braves.

And then we had the Stephen Strasburg show.  I can’t remember a more hotly-anticipated debut, nor one that subsequently lived up to expectations, quite like Strasburg’s first start in June 2010 against Pittsburgh.  It was absolutely mesmerising watching him mow down hitter after hitter, striking out 14 batters in total whilst consistently shooting out fastballs at 98-99 MPH.

You didn’t have to be a Nationals fan to be captivated by it, nor to be absolutely gutted when just a couple of months later he went down with a serious elbow injury that kept him off the mound for just over a year.

On a similar theme, it was almost a year ago to the day that news broke of the St Louis Cardinals’ exciting pitching prospect Alex Reyes requiring elbow surgery that would put him out of action for at least a year.  His recovery is going well and he’s averaging around the 17th-18th mark on most prospect lists right now, with Baseball Prospectus being the most optimistic by still ranking him 8th (he was number 1 on their 2017 list).

He’s currently on schedule to return sometime in May and all true baseball fans will be hoping that he can put the injury behind him and live up to his potential.

The Shohei Show

Which brings us to another pitcher, Shohei Ohtani.  One of the main questions those publishing prospect lists this year answer right from the start is whether they are including him as a prospect, bearing in mind he has played professionally in Japan.

Baseball Prospectus and ESPN (Keith Law) have not considered him for their rankings, whilst Baseball America (#2), FanGraphs and MLB Pipeline (both #1) have and not surprisingly he is right near, or at, the top.

There will be a huge amount of coverage of Ohtani’s Spring Training as he prepares for his first season in MLB.  The Angels start their regular season with a four-game series in Oakland, so I may well get to see him pitching his debut against my club. However, the Angels will want to keep a cap on his innings this year so they could decide to skip their star pitcher from being the Opening Day starter and push him back to their fifth game to tie in with their home opener against Cleveland.

Whenever Ohtani’s debut happens it will be a big event and something every baseball fan will be keeping an eye on.

Back to the lists

As someone who doesn’t invest a lot of my ‘baseball time’ in prospects, I suspect I value the work of prospect experts all the more.

Despite what some fans will claim, they put huge amounts of research into constructing the lists and do so fully in the knowledge that they’re ultimately projecting the development and future work of human beings, introducing lots of variables that could knock them off their current course (for good or bad).

Even if you find the Major League marathon can be a challenge to keep up with at times, it’s well worth checking out the lists and following the progress of your team’s prospects and the key names around the Minor Leagues.

Baseball America (can see the list for free, commentary requires a subscription)

Baseball Prospectus (can see the list for free, commentary available in the BP 2018 Annual)

FanGraphs (list and commentary available for free)

Keith Law at ESPN (list and commentary requires an ESPN Insider subscription)

MLB Pipeline (list and commentary available for free).

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Free Agency Fall-Out

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The story of the week has been that, once again, there hasn’t been much in the way of stories to tell.

However, that’s created a story in itself.

Or something like that.

Player and agent angst growing

The slow-moving MLB free agent market has prompted much comment over the past two months and it’s only escalated as each week has gone by with many free agents still not finding a contract to their liking.

The teams will say that they are making offers and it’s not their fault if the players are holding out and waiting for something better.  In other words, the reason free agents are still out there is because players are deciding not to sign contracts on offer.

There’s a certain amount of validity to that position. One of the rumours this week has been that first baseman Eric Hosmer is seeking a deal of eight years or more.  As a relatively young free agent (he turned 28 in October) coming off the best season of his career to date, you can understand him setting his sights high.  However, you can equally understand why teams are reluctant to make such a lengthy commitment in any player, especially one whose performance levels have been inconsistent year-to-year.

MLB Trade Rumors predicted that Hosmer would sign a 6-year, $132m contract in their Top 50 Free Agent round-up back in early November.  There have been rumours of seven-year offers from the San Diego Padres ($140m) and Kansas City Royals ($147m) that subsequently have been denied in terms of the values being thrown about, but there has clearly been interest from several teams and negotiations of lengthy and lucrative deals.

Who is right or wrong in this case is in the eye of the beholder and both sides have strong vested interests in painting the other as the blocker in coming to a deal.

One agent, Brodie Van Wagenen, decided to go on the attack on Friday:

“There is a rising tide among players for radical change. A fight is brewing. And it may begin with one, maybe two, and perhaps 1,200 willing to follow. A boycott of Spring Training may be a starting point, if behavior doesn’t change”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that an agent demanding teams spend more money on his – and other agencies’ – clients is not exactly a shock; however what can’t be denied is that MLB teams do have plenty of money as they like to tell us this is so.

There’s a sense that MLB wants to have its cake and eat it by on the one hand trumpeting their record revenues ($10bn+ in 2017) and revelling in the high prices the clubs sell for (the basket-case that is the Miami Marlins selling for $1.2bn, for example), but then in the next breath pleading poverty and that teams are losing money.

Something doesn’t seem to add up there, although it may be accurate.  The Premier League is a prime example of how normal rules don’t tend to apply to sports teams as the teams enjoy huge revenues and yet consistently lose money.  The reason usually is because of an unsustainable wages-to-revenue ratio so in the case of football some would say the balance is too far the other way, with too much of the money going into the pockets of players and agents.

The difference, of course, is that Premier League teams have to spend money whatever their ambitions are as not doing so and missing out on Champions League money, or getting relegated altogether, has significant consequences.

The heart of the matter in MLB is that teams not only face no penalties for not spending money, but in fact often are incentivised to ‘tank’.

Another view

That leads onto comments made by the A’s Brandon Moss in an interview on Wednesday.

Whilst acknowledging the issues, Moss put forward the persuasive argument that the situation players find themselves in this winter is in part their own fault as all of the aspects that affect the free agency market are collectively bargained for.

The Players Association (union) has faced some criticism for the Collective Bargaining Agreement reached in the 2016/17 off-season, but the leadership of a union is ultimately beholden to its members.  Moss’s thoughtful comments (and it’s well worth watching the full video linked to above) suggest something I’ve thought for a while: that when push comes to shove most players are happy with their lot and it’s only when things really stir up that they’re prepared to do anything about it.

That’s their choice, but you do get the sense that more players are now starting to ask questions and that the next round of Collective Bargaining talks (the current one will run out aft the 2021 season) will be much more fraught than we’ve seen for many years.

Just a thought …

Thinking about the Premier League example a bit more, the other major factor affecting the market in football is that the top English league is competing against other leagues to sign the best players.  Wages keep increasing because footballers can ply their trade in many countries, whether traditional major leagues in Europe or heading off to places like China.

The overriding issue with the players’ position in MLB seems to be that players often have a very short-term view and in particular to benefit current established Major League players. Moss made that very point, noting his career may not have long to run and his concern is for future players.  We’ve seen in previous CBA negotiations how Major Leaguers have been happy to trade away rights for amateur players (courtesy of significant restrictions on U.S. amateur draft bonuses and international draft pool funds) to win other rights for themselves.

Whenever something comes along to promote baseball more widely (World Baseball Classic, playing series in other countries) there’s always a fair amount of resistance (not from all players, it should be said).

This is very much playing the long game, but if there were more leagues to go and play in then that would only benefit the players.  Of course, the best players will always want to be in MLB and will get paid to do so, but it could create a better market for back-of-rotation starters and ‘average’ position players who would have alternative offers they could pursue.

We’ve seen some players taking that route already, often with the aim of rebuilding their value and then coming back to MLB.  Eric Thames is the classic recent example as he played in Korea for three years before signing a 3-year, $16m contract with Milwaukee over the last off-season.

This off-season, whilst Shohei Ohtani understandably gained all of the attention in joining MLB from Japan, Miles Mikolas has also made the same move.  Mikolas made 37 pitching appearances combined for the Padres and Rangers between 2012 and 2014 before trying his luck in Japan by signing for the Yomiuri Giants.  After three seasons in the Nippon Professional Baseball League, back in December Mikolas signed a two-year, $15.5m deal with the St Louis Cardinals.

So, some opportunities are out there already, but MLB players might want to look to the future when it comes to anything they could do to help promote the game outside of the States.  Putting all of your hopes into 30 MLB owners who basically having a monopoly on the market is far from ideal.

Especially, whether in collusion or not, those owners decide they don’t want to pay you what you think you’re worth.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Brewers, Hoffman and more

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January is almost over and whilst wishing away months isn’t the best approach to life, it’s understandable with the first of the year.

It normally throws up bad weather and travel problems as well as keeping you in the gloom of days beginning with going to work in the dark and then coming home in the dark too.

But most of all it doesn’t offer much baseball, other than some glimmers of light from places like Australia.

Once we cross over into February we’ll be in the month that MLB.TV prices are announced, teams start reporting back to their Spring Training camps and this year even will be the first month when teams start playing their Grapefruit/Cactus League schedules.

So long January, there’s baseball to be getting on with.

Milwaukee making moves

If you had the Milwaukee Brewers down as the team to get the Hot Stove bubbling again you were looking pretty smart on Thursday.

The Brewers not only revamped their outfield by signing Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain, they made the NL Central and Wild Card race a considerably more exciting prospect.

Milwaukee surprisingly spent 60 days at the top of the NL Central last season before the Cubs predictably nudged past at the end of July.  Their second-placed finish ahead of the St Louis Cardinals paled against the similarly surprising Minnesota Twins winning an AL Wild Card at first glance, yet the Brewers finished a win ahead of the Twins (86 to 85) and fell victim to a higher level of competition for the second NL Wild Card than was needed in the AL last year.

The lengthy loss of starting pitcher Jimmy Nelson to a shoulder injury put a dampener on the end of the Brewers’ 2017 and initially affected their hopes for 2018, but the team haven’t let that hold them back.

It’s always great to see a smaller market team such as the Brewers coming out of a building phase with some quality young players and then having a go for it. The excitement of their 2008 season when they traded for CC Sabathia mid-season and just fell short in the NLDS to eventual World Series champs the Philadelphia Phillies is still fresh in the memory – so much so that it was a bit of a shock to find it was a full ten years ago when looking up the details.

They pulled off another big trade in December 2010 when they acquired Zack Greinke from the Royals and then made it to the NLCS in 2011, losing 4-2 to the Cardinals.  Lorenzo Cain was one of the players the Brewers traded away in that deal, which makes his return as a free agent all the more special. Milwaukee didn’t do badly out of that trade by any stretch of the imagination, yet their fans still would have watched Cain – as well as Alcides Escobar – win a World Series with the Royals and think of what might have been.

The same may happen with Lewis Brinson, the talented young outfielder who highlighted the package they sent to the Miami Marlins for Yelich.  However, largely gone are the days when you could swing a lopsided trade for a quality Major Leaguer like Yelich.  If you want to get someone good, you have to give up a good package to do it.

The Brewers judge that they have a shot at the NL Wild Card over the next few years and are doing exactly the right thing by making a group of deals – another one or two may well be forthcoming giving their outfield logjam – rather than just making one addition and stopping there.  There’s no guarantee it will work, but it’s increasingly feeling like some Front Offices are using the lack of any guarantees – and therefore the potential for fingers to be pointed in their direction at a trade or free agent signing going wrong – as a reason to merely tinker around the edges.

You can’t get relegated in MLB so the worst that can happen is things don’t pan out, you trade some players a couple of years down the line and build again.  I love what the Brewers are doing and will continue to hold that view regardless of whether it works out for them over the next few seasons.

Hall of Fame results

Although Trevor Hoffman ended his MLB career with a two-year stop in Milwaukee, everything thinks of him as a San Diego Padre.  Few in North America would link him to Great Britain either, but we had a personal reason to cheer his election to America’s National Baseball Hall of Fame this week alongside Chipper Jones, Jim Thome and Vladimir Guerrero.

Hoffman was part of the 2016 Great Britain World Baseball Classic coaching staff and you won’t find anyone involved in the national programme saying anything other than great things about his contributions.

I started watching baseball in 1998, so I have a strong connection to the excellent Padres team of that year – Tony Gwynn, Greg Vaughn, Ken Caminiti, Kevin Brown, Andy Ashby etc – that was so ruthlessly swept aside in the World Series by a New York Yankees team that ranks as one of the greatest of all time.

Hoffman only pitched in one game during the Fall Classic, taking the loss in Game Three, and that gets to the heart of the hardcore stattos being unimpressed by his election to Cooperstown. Hoffman was a closer who racked up huge numbers of saves, a role and a statistic that many analysts put little store in nowadays when evaluating performance.

I understand the argument, yet it doesn’t take into account the important point that the Hall of Fame is not simply determined by who were statistically the greatest players, otherwise there would be no point in deciding election by a vote.  It is there to recognise historic and memorable contributions to the game.  During the era in which he played, I always saw Hoffman and Mariano Rivera – who few would argue against being a first-ballot election next year – as consistently being the two leading lights in their role as closer.

To say saves didn’t matter, and that Hoffman being the first ever player to reach 500 then 600 count for nothing, has an analytical validity but doesn’t reflect how the vast majority of baseball fans enjoyed his career at the time.  It’s a personal choice for someone to disregard that, yet it’s also a personal choice to decide to take that into account.

Hoffman always stood out to me in part because any appearance or reference to him always led to Baseball on 5 presenter Jonny Gould mentioning that the pitcher’s mother was British. We don’t have all that many links to Major Leaguers, so that always made him a player to watch out for even if he wasn’t on your own team.

Now we can say we have a direct GB link to Cooperstown. I wonder if there will be a Union Flag or two at the ceremony this summer?

The Gouldfish Hall of Fame show?

Given the ever-present Chipper Jones figure that Braves-fan Gould ensured was always on the Baseball on 5 desk, the Hall of Fame announcement sparked the first time this year, and far from the last, that I thought of their MLB coverage with a smile.

Maybe Josh Chetwynd and Dave Lengel can convince their old pal to do a special one-off podcast for the Cooperstown weekend?!

GB pitcher signs with the Cubs

Further on the Great Britain theme, Michael Roth – member of the Great Britain 2012 and 2016 World Baseball Classic teams and the 2014 European Championships – has signed a Minor League deal with the Chicago Cubs.

The former College World Series hero for South Carolina has never quite kept hold of a Major League job in short Big League spells with the Angels and Rangers.  He pitched in Triple-A last year for the Sacramento River Cats (Giants) and Durham Bulls (Rays) and likely will be stationed at that level with the Iowa Cubs this season.

Roth qualifies for the GB squad by virtue of his mother being British. His GB stats can be found in the Project Cobb archive.

Hardball Times Annual -free to download

I had been searching for news on the 2018 Hardball Times Annual for a while, not finding either the new edition available anywhere on the usual book websites or anything on Fangraphs/Hardball Times to say the annual has ceased to be.

It turns out that the Annual is still alive and well but is now being released digitally.  And for completely free!

I’ve reviewed the 2010 and 2011 editions in the past – I think I stopped reviewing them just because they are always great so wasn’t much more to say – and a quick check of my baseball book shelves shows that I’ve been buying it consistently since 2006.  You really can’t beat it for a strong collection of baseball writing, from reviewing the previous season to research articles, history and – new for this year – a baseball fiction section.

Honestly, I always prefer a physical book but if this is the best way to keep the annual going then that’s fine with me. It’s well worth downloading and diving into during February.