At least for the time being, baseball is on its way back to our eyeballs, if only electronically. The Cubs will be back on July 24 with a series against the Brewers. To recap a few season related details, for those who haven’t been paying attention or for whom time no longer has any meaning, here’s the logistics of the new season as it will ideally play out:
Season rules, etc.
The season will last 60 games, and the Cubs will play 10 games each against the other NL Central teams and 20 games against the AL central, with extra games against their ‘natural’ rival. In our case that is the White Sox, who might be pretty good this year, while the Reds and Cardinals get to beat up on the crappy Tigers and Royals respectively.
Not surprisingly there are a buncha roster rule changes this year.
- The game-day roster size has expanded to 30 players, though that number will drop down as the season goes along. I guess this was intended to expand bullpens as pitchers ramp up.
- Teams have a 60-man ‘bubble’ in training camp, but players still have to be added to the 40-man roster before they can appear in a game. I think most teams have less than 60 on their list because you can’t add a player back to your own bubble if they are taken out.
- Teams can carry 3 extra ‘taxi-squad’ players with the team to ‘hot-swap’ between games, one of which has to be a catcher. This is to avoid extra travel.
- There’s a shorter turnaround time for bringing back pitchers who were optioned to the minors – it’s 10 days now instead of 15.
There are also some rule changes
- The NL will play with a DH this year. And the peasants rejoiced! More on that below.
- They’re doing the stupid runner on second rule in extra innings. And the peasants revolted!
- There won’t be any rainouts – if a game has to be called early it will just be treated as a suspended game and picked up the next time the teams play each other. This should vastly improve scheduling, but will likely only work because there are so few long distance single series games this year.
- There’s also covid-19 testing and surveillance stuff, but I don’t know enough to speak on it other than it got off to a rocky start.
- No high fives, spitting, etc. Who knows how this one will play out.
Cubs specific stuff
Obviously as far as the 2020-specific rule changes go the biggest change for the Cubs is the DH. This spawned a lot of jokes about how the Cubs are one of the NL teams that is well prepared for this because War Bear. But it’s not like he’s Adam Dunn out there. I know this is an axe I grind often, but he’s had the misfortune of having a few screwups in high profile games (2015 playoffs, a few home openers). Numbers-wise he rates out as pretty much average for a LF.
That said if he can be replaced by a better glove out there that would certainly be a net positive, though now that I look at Souza’s numbers he’s not exactly an upgrade out there. His bat is certainly an upgrade over Jon Lester’s though.
The schedule was going to be pretty unbalanced no matter what, and a lot of the attention has gone to the Reds since they get a few bonus games against the Tigers. Even in a 60-game season though, eh, it’s just one extra series. The same goes for the uneven distribution of home games within the division – while each team has an equal number of in-division home games that’s not true per team. If anything this should be an interesting experiment on what aspects of home field advantage matter – is it the fans, or is it the lack of travel? All of the NL central teams have an advantage over the rest of the NL in that they get to play the overall crappy AL central, so it will give a leg up in any WC races.
As far as Covid goes, the Cubs are ahead of other teams in that they haven’t had a positive test yet. It’s going to be a matter of time though. MLB has struggled with testing turnaround times already, and the number of tests needed is likely to be in shorter supply going forward thanks to the curve going up. Even if MLB does everything right the utter failure to control the virus around the country could sink things anyway. EW had a podcast with an epidemiologist a few weeks back and the prognisis of what could go wrong was pretty grim. I would have put the chance that MLB completes the season at 20% then, but given the current case trajectory I’d probably drop it down to 10%. At least the positive rate across MLB has been pretty low to start.
It looks like baseball is pretty much going to be a smoke em while you got em situation this year.
Comments
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SKQuote Reply
this was actually much appreciated. I’m amazed anything is happening and will be shocked if this season starts let alone finishes. I do not understand why Disney World is open nor can I fathom people actually standing in line with their children, yet, there it is on my tv screen. I’m taking the week after next off (thank fuck I still have job I’ve always worked from home for) but we still can’t be sure we’d be doing the right thing going somewhere for a few days (and new cases here have been under 25/day for the last several weeks). So if we do it’ll be somewhere remote, not too far, and last minute.
Back in Feb was the first time in 15 years I did not renew my MLB.TV subscription – I must’ve known it wasn’t going to be a year.
SKQuote Reply
Now I know who to blame for covid-19.
berseliusQuote Reply
Speaking of mlb.tv, I was SHOCKED to get an email from them saying that they are pro-rating the price for this season. You can either get a refund for the overage or have the extra applied to a mlb.tv sub next year.
berseliusQuote Reply
SK,
I’m glad I have a job where I can WFH, but feel like I’m staring into the void as to what things will look like in 2-3 years. I was going to buy a house this year, now that’s been pushed to the back burner (dying laughing).
berseliusQuote Reply
Maybe.
Smokestack LightningQuote Reply
I don’t blame you for hedging on that. Things happening today are going to have reverberations this time next year and beyond, I assume.
SKQuote Reply
Washington football ——-> Changing its name.
Some pretty hilarious ordering of stakeholders in their public statement about this:
berseliusQuote Reply
SK,
It’s funny, I’ve seen a few dozen articles about every area of life moving forward with a headline like “What we can expect from ______________.”
The answer is nothing. We can expect nothing from anything or anyone anywhere at any point in the foreseeable future. I’m ok with that, so it cracks me up that people still have faith in the tradition of knowing what’s coming.
andcountingQuote Reply
Baseball is likely way safer than basketball given the physical distance of the players and the fact it’s outside in the humidity and sunshine. I have been waiting for a massive spike in deaths from these sunbelt states that just hasn’t come making me think there is something to this “higher amounts of vitamin D modulating cytokine release” thing. (The “cytokine storm” of an over-zealous immune response is implicated in most of the bad outcomes.) I don’t think a small set of fans in open air stands would contribute much to the disease spread.
But of course, this shitshow “presidency” with predictable response has made that moot — we’re all fucked. There is some evidence that people are contracting it more than once, which means herd immunity might not be a thing we can count on. If true, our chances to tamp down the spread are pretty much over. Odds are outbreaks are with us for years to come. And so I have trouble giving two shits about sports — terrible government has crowded out all interest.
(Hey republicans. You’re expansion of big G into the attention economy that brought us the likes of Trump has pummeled all but the most entrenched companies in the private sector. Way to prove yourselves right, assholes.)
ceruleanQuote Reply
why so low? in all seriousness, could things really get much worse than they are now? from my perspective, things are pretty much as bad as they can get. so if mlb is planning on starting the season despite a billion different signs that the country is falling apart at the seams, i guess i don’t really know what could happen that would be so terrible that it would make mlb (or governors, mayors, etc) say “oh shit, maybe we shouldn’t be playing baseball.”
EnricoPallazzoQuote Reply
EnricoPallazzo,
I think it’s going to come down more to whether a mini outbreak happens with some team, or testing related things leads to the players getting too uncomfortable to play. We’ve already seen cases where players are holding out of activities when there’s a hiccup in testing – what happens if some gear is thrown into the works halfway through the season and a team doesn’t get its test results? Or when say a dozen players test positive for some reason, say from travel, or their hotel, or half a hundred other things that they can’t completely control for. Or a bunch of family members get sick (IIRC they’re not tested as often). MLB has a plan in place for dealing with individual positive tests but I’m worried that there’s going to a point where they might have to postpone games, and things might start falling apart after that.
berseliusQuote Reply
berselius,
So it seems like it basically comes down to: are the precautions teams are taking to limit spread going to be effective or just theater? If they’re effective, there shouldn’t really be teamwide outbreaks. If they’re not, the season has very little chance of getting completed. And if the outbreaks in the general population rage out of control? I don’t know. I think 20% sounds right, (dying laughing).
andcountingQuote Reply
andcounting,
I think that even an effective strategy isn’t going to work 100% of the time. All it will take is a couple of false negatives for stuff to get bad, though I don’t know what that rate is looking like these days.
berseliusQuote Reply
andcounting,
A lot of this stuff is theater but maybe theater helps too. I’m obviously not an epidemiologist or psychologist but there’s lots of implicit stuff they have to consider in health advice. For example we should probably all be wearing gloves in addition to masks, but people wearing gloves tend to be less careful with what they touch since they think they’re protected. I think that was part of the reason why the CDC slow pedaled masks early on – they knew masks had some utility (and probably even more so than they originally thought) but could maximize effectiveness if there wasn’t a giant run on the finite supply at the time, which took them away from e.g. health care workers.
berseliusQuote Reply
Nice one, past me. Really raising the bar around here.
ceruleanQuote Reply
and it was already pretty high
EnricoPallazzoQuote Reply
I mean, things can absolutely get worse than they appear right now, and I believe that they will. My take on the lowered death rate is that two things are happening: first, we’re getting better at treating the disease, and second, treatment is far more effective when our medical system is not overwhelmed. During the first wave in the northeast, it got bad enough where the level of treatment suffered, or folks just weren’t getting treated at all. We slowed things down and that issue went away, which helped reduce the number of deaths.
Now that we’re seeing the system get overwhelmed again, I’m assuming the death rates will start to creep back up. It might not be as bad as it was, but it’s going to get worse. (There’s also the issue of whether or not we’re getting a full accounting of outcomes here — Florida already got caught cooking the books, and in the hottest parts of California a broad swath of the most affected populations are afraid to engage with the medical and public health systems due to financial pressure and immigration status.)
I’m not optimistic. I think that we can get the disease back down to a very manageable point if we simply wear masks and wash our hands, but apparently that’s too much to ask. I live in a fairly affluent part of the Bay Area, where we’ve handled this relatively well. Folks generally respect the indoor mask rules for businesses, but it’s about 50/50 in other situations as to whether or not they will (properly) wear them. And these are folks who know better. We have this completely different issue with tens of thousands of homeless folks that’s going to be an impediment to recovery, but if the people with resources don’t do what they need to do we’re fucked. As in, my wife is working on getting a Taiwanese passport because we’d rather risk getting overrun by the People’s Army than dealing with this fucked.
To this point:
You’re absolutely right — I don’t anticipate that the government will shut down the sports leagues, though they will possibly keep fans from attending. I think that it will grind to a halt once a couple of guys get legit infections that permanently damage their capacity to play baseball. These guys are probably better suited to deal with the virus than nearly anyone else, but eventually someone will get hit with a significant, life-altering pulmonary issue. I think that the players are focused on earning their salary in the short window they have to do so, but for the most part they’ve not fully considered the risks involved with even a non-lethal case.
I can’t really get into this, either. I watched like one game of TBT and couldn’t escape the feeling that these guys were putting out a massive risk for the chance at attracting a pro deal somewhere. Like, you can’t play basketball without good lungs. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
uncle daveQuote Reply
Well. We can watch the Cubs play on tv tonight, provided you’ve got access to such content. Their opponents will be the Cubs as per usual.
andcountingQuote Reply
andcounting,
Prediction: Cubs lose.
berseliusQuote Reply
uncle dave,
I should be clear — things are getting much worse and deaths are increasing, but my thinking is that the spread is 99.9% indoors. The anti-lockdown and anti-cop protests have not proven to be a significant vector of disease, and the lack of deaths in the numbers show that. Likewise, the spike I assumed we would see in the likes of Florida and Texas and SoCal in May and early June didn’t really happen. Now they are in prime summer, and everyone is hunkering down in the recycled air of the A/C, and what do you know, spikes are happening.
Even assuming some of these states are intentionally cooking the books on infections and cause of death, it’s impossible to hide deaths in the number necessary to impact to total number of deaths during these time periods compared to prior years. And if they were cooking the books on infections, you would expect to see a percentage of positive tests and a higher case fatality rate than we are seeing, indicating these areas are having fewer awful outcomes (which is then immediately undermined by people becoming more brazen in flouting the guidelines, but that’s another story).
What I am saying is that outside in the dog days of summer, the risk of transmission is really low, and something as simple as more access to sunshine may explain the differences we are setting in CFR. (Though not the higher CFRs among minorities — that’s straight up lack of wealth and opportunity justified by centuries of racism and bootstrapism.) Given all that, baseball is arguably the safest sport to play right now and basketball is the most dangerous in terms of covid risk.
If we had good leadership, we would see closing of bars and restaurants and more outdoor events in the heat of the day with few traceable active cases in the community. Baseball with a socially-distanced audience would have fit right in. Alas.
But hey, “There’s always next year.”
ceruleanQuote Reply
I wonder if this is true. I am more cautious with gloves on and instinctively don’t touch my face which is the opposite of how I feel without them. It should be noted that I am constantly aware of my own mortality though. I suspect that other people are more cautious around those in protective gear as well.
One of the arguments against seatbelts was that people would drive more aggressively if they felt safer — I believe that was true, but it was still a huge win for passengers and drivers everywhere. We have to take into account the magnitude, not just the binary direction.
Regardless, we still don’t have enough PPE to supply hospitals and schools, let alone everyone ( -_-)
ceruleanQuote Reply
Wilson!!!
Jesus Christ, Darvish.
andcountingQuote Reply
cerulean,
TBH, I would not be surprised once/if there’s ever enough data to show it that a nontrivial chunk of the difference between US and Europe’s numbers is the relative lack of AC across the pond.
berseliusQuote Reply
Rizzo —–> rib inflammation? He’s day to day, as are we all.
berseliusQuote Reply
cerulean,
I generally agree with what you’ve laid out here, though I do have some reservations about re-opening ballparks. There are aspects of going to games that have ‘indoor’ qualities to them — even when I go to an A’s game with like 10,000 people in the stands there’s somehow always a line at the men’s room, for instance. It might just be my own paranoia, but I’m just not into the idea of participating in a large gathering yet.
But beyond the obvious malfeasance we’re seeing all over the place right now, I don’t think we’re prepared for how much of an obstacle things like poverty and a lack of health infrastructure, public or otherwise, are going to pose for our recovery. Folks talk about the higher rate of death and infection among the Latino community in the Central Valley as an issue, but you rarely hear mention of housing overcrowding due to poverty and California’s general unwillingness to build housing of any sort. Or folks talk about bad outcomes among African Americans in the black belt, but don’t mention that half of the counties in places like Georgia or Mississippi have no health care facility at all.
How do you track the virus in a location that has no health infrastructure, private or public? How do we test at volume when there’s a small handful of private companies that are currently overwhelmed doing most of the testing? Where do you even start with administering a vaccine when it costs people money and half of this country has none?
I have no idea how we’re going to pull this off, and I see no meaningful relief from the federal government regardless of what happens in November (which is still like, what, four months away?). I guess I’m not adding much to the conversation other than concern at this point, but I don’t see a path to normal, to be honest with you.
uncle daveQuote Reply
Agreed — I don’t give a fuck what anyone says, we should definitely get rid of the DH.
uncle daveQuote Reply
andcounting,
Works on contingency?
No, money down!
uncle daveQuote Reply
Well, as I said already, we’re all fucked…
But in an alternate universe, we could have have had some proper baseball with an audience, even if only at a tenth of capacity. (In that universe, I believe Elizabeth Warren ran for the presidency in 2016 with the encouragement of Bernie Sanders. It was a different world.)
ceruleanQuote Reply
berselius,
We might be able to estimate the amount of time people spend indoors in public and semi-public places. Air conditioning is like fly paper for human beings, so where it exists I expect a tangible difference in the time spent indoors when temperatures are above 80°F.
ceruleanQuote Reply
cerulean,
I’m past the point of hoping for nice things, I guess (dying laughing).
The real question that’s on my mind: are we going to get honkbal this year?
uncle daveQuote Reply
Cyle, Bob Minocqua —————> opening day staters
berseliusQuote Reply
Deleted
PerkinsQuote Reply
PerkinsQuote Reply
Weird, the image posting thing didn’t work. I managed to match the Wood game in a Darvish start in MLB20, which I take as a sign he will absolutely do the same thing this year (dying laughing).
PerkinsQuote Reply
Perkins,
We now know who to blame if Darvish fails to strike out 20 in a game this year.
berseliusQuote Reply
Uh oh. Marquee has an ESPN-style virtual strike zone box. Ugh.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
Maybe someday they’ll invent a way to toggle that, like closed captioning.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
Hey guys! I’ve been gone since February. What did I miss?
Wenningtons Gorilla CockQuote Reply
Wenningtons Gorilla Cock,
Nothing, really. Cubs have won about as many as we thought they would by the end of July.
andcountingQuote Reply
well, it turns out that there’s some kind of virus going around. could be serious?
otherwise nothing notable. wnba season starts on saturday but no other news really. oh…I saw something on tv about some protests a few weeks ago but not sure what that was all about.
EnricoPallazzoQuote Reply
I think it was over ballparks putting a uniform ban on bringing bologna sandwiches into the stands.
berseliusQuote Reply
I don’t know if this is a likely lineup on a consistent basis, but…
Bryant
Rizzo
Báez
Schwarber
Contreras
Heyward
Bote
Kipnis
Happ
…I don’t hate it.
andcountingQuote Reply
Bryant is a late scratch (back stiffness).
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
Uh oh, Descalso left the box with an awkward landing on his ankle. Could be Rossy’s favorite player depending on if its twisted.
BVSQuote Reply
andcounting,
Don’t like Baez batting 3rd. Too many Ks. I’d swap with Contreras.
BVSQuote Reply
Wow. 8th inning tonight. Like the show. Underwood’s House of Ks.
BVSQuote Reply
Damn that’s a lot of money. There goes any other NL team chance of winning for the next 10 or so years.
WaLiQuote Reply
WaLi,
Apparently >120M deferred. Not sure for how long. Maybe he wanted to break both Trout and Bobby Bo records.
I think that takes Betts to his age 40 year. Signing any athlete to age 40 when they are under age 37 seems dumb to me particularly now that I’ve lived past 40.
BVSQuote Reply
Regarding covid discussion above. Apparently my adopted state of SC has gone all in on “do what you want.”
Our apparent saving grace is less population density. Also our testing rates are ok, even if the positive rates are not. But not sure what good they do when results take 5 days to return. Even hospitals in affluent areas are now quite full.
I guess if I disappear you can send dmick or SK out on a search party for me, they’ve got my email/twitter.
Fwiw, Clemson just announced no in person classes until at least Sept 21. Semester starts virtual. No announcement about what really matters…football. As far as I know, ACC still planning on full schedule, unlike BigX and Pac12. Many smaller schools around here have cut some sports forever, like Furman baseball+, etc.
BVSQuote Reply
The Blue Jays are still homeless. They’re supposed to host a game in 6 days. It’s . . . amazing.
andcountingQuote Reply
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
Giancarlo Stanton is strong.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
Losing teams will now make the MLB playoffs.
I hope this is only a one time thing.
BVSQuote Reply
BVS,
I don’t.
I’m happy for the chance to experiment with something new in the postseason.
As far as a losing team making it to the postseason after just 60 games, it makes total sense. The Nationals were 27-33 after 60 last season, and that’s after going 8-2 in games 51 through 60. Obviously this season is batshit, but I don’t think 60 games tells us enough about who the best teams are.
I also like the effect this structure could have on competitive balance in a normal season. In the previous model, with just five teams from each league making it (two of whom risk exiting after one game), there’s a much higher threshold for how good a team has to be to justify fielding a competitive roster past the month of June. But if the majority of teams were to be guaranteed at least two postseason games and a legit possibility of a serious postseason run (and all the revenue that comes with it)? Multiple-season dives for draft position would be a lot less common.
You may not like the idea of crappy teams in the postseason, but I like it better than seeing so many intentionally atrocious teams all over the league.
andcountingQuote Reply
andcounting,
Yeah, we’ve had this discussion before and we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m OK with this for 2020. Bit I’ve seen enough of the NHL and NBA to know that this just makes the first part of the post season boring and I don’t think a . 500 or a losing team should ever be in the playoffs.
I’m ok considering other post season tweaks. How about adding 2 more WC teams and then having WC 1 vs WC 2 and Div3 vs WC 4 in the first round with a 3 game series all at Div 3 and WC1, then winners play Div1 and Div2. You go from 33% of the teams to 40%. Your best WC team which sometimes is better than Div3 gets to host a series and just a game. You probably won’t get a loser team (unless the Mets are in…they are always losers).
Or, better yet, expand to 40 teams and have 8 5-team divisions. Then have a 16 team playoff. New teams can go to Charlotte, Montrael, Portland, NYC, Nashville or Memphis, San Antonio, Vegas, Salt Lake, San Jose, and Vancouver.
Speaking of the Mets, I’m all for ARod buying them so he won’t be broadcasting anymore.
BVSQuote Reply
Descalso ————> 45 day DL
He’s going to be paid either way, but here’s hoping we don’t see him in a cubs uniform again.
berseliusQuote Reply
http://www.obstructedview.net/series-preview-milwaukee-brewers-0-0-at-chicago-cubs/
berseliusQuote Reply