Tag: MLB, Runs, Bits, & Eras, Page 2

Well, that didn’t take long. After a weekend spent joyfully celebrating the return of baseball, Monday hit with a ton of reality bricks.

The Miami Marlins have reportedly at least 12 players testing positive for Covid-19, plus some coaches. MLB stepped in and postponed the Marlins’ scheduled game in Miami against the Baltimore Orioles. And, since the Marlins’ positive tests occurred in Philadelphia (where they’d been playing the Phillies), MLB also postponed the New York Yankees’ game in Philadelphia.

The next 24-48 hours will give an indication of whether this is a hiccup or a collapsing season. If testing shows the impact has been contained, the Marlins can dip into their pool of 60 available players and resume playing once permitted. That’s why each team has a larger-than-usual 30-man active roster and 30 more available on short notice.

But it’s easy to see the whole house of cards falling down. Postponing more than a couple of games can create scheduling nightmares in a season with few off days already. Much worse, we could see an expanding outbreak that renders teams unable to play or facilities deemed unsafe. And that’s to say nothing of what might happen if someone were to become seriously ill.

This quote in The Athletic today speaks volumes about the situation:

“Major League Baseball needs to be thinking about the Phillies,” Dr. Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Emory University’s Oxford College, said Monday on The Athletic’s Starkville podcast. “They have conducted perhaps an inadvertent experiment, but an experiment nonetheless, on whether the virus can be transferred in a game from one team to their opponent. And we are awaiting the results of that experiment. We’ll see that in Philly, I think, over the next three to five days or so. But I think if you want to be cautious, you should probably be quarantining the Phillies as well for the next five days. And that’s extra rough for them because really, they didn’t do anything wrong. But again, it’s the virus that sets the agenda here, and you have to build your agenda around what it’s doing.”

Any sense that continuing to play cannot be achieved safely could start a ripple effect of players and other personnel opting out, and in a very short time the experiment could be over. How many players scheduled to take the field today might already be having second thoughts? “An inadvertent experiment” can’t be the words players want to read today.

Like many others, I got caught up in enjoying the games again the past few days. I started to believe this might just work, being an outdoor game with lots of space between players and precautions being taken.

If this can’t work in today’s America, though, I can’t imagine how the NFL can pull it off this fall. And colleges? I doubt they ever take the field. Too many people in much too close quarters, way more so than baseball requires.

The NBA’s Orlando bubble experiment gets under way within the week, and though they seem to be taking strong measures to protect the players’ health, that could unravel just as quickly if anything goes wrong.

Maybe sports is a luxury the U.S. just couldn’t manage because of how poorly we’ve handled containing the virus in comparison to the rest of the world. These restarts didn’t take place during a time when the cases were under control, but rather the opposite, during a spike. Maybe things can still work out, but we won’t have to look far for reasons why if they don’t.

What Can Happen in a 60-Game Season?

Because baseball naturally lends itself to an obsession with numbers (and I cannot say for certain whether the game draws me to the stats, or vice versa), even non-fans tend to know the significance of certain milestones like hitting .400 or 60 home runs. As Major League Baseball begins its shortest scheduled season by far this week, announcers and writers have offered a variety of opinions on whether an individual achievement like hitting .400 would “count” in a 60-game season.

I think we can wait to see if anyone gets halfway through this season with a legitimate chance before devoting too much brainpower to that question, but I do think there is a number very much worth thinking about from the outset: 2.7. That’s the multiplier we get from the ratio between a full 162-game schedule and the 60-game Covid-shortened one, so essentially every game “counts” like 2.7 games normally would. Winning 3 in a row is the equivalent of winning 8 in a row in a full season, relatively.

We can use 2.7 to gauge what an outstanding individual performance might look like across 60 games. For instance, 20 home runs would equate to 54 in a full season. In 2019, when players collectively reached record-breaking totals yet again, the highest individual total was 53 by the Mets’ Pete Alonso.

At the 60-game mark last season, the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger had hit 20 and wasn’t close to leading the National League. The Brewers’ Christian Yelich already had 25! That’s a pace for 68 in a full season, but he missed 32 games and fell well short at 44.

So we shouldn’t be the least surprised to see someone get to 25 or even flirt with 30 in this short season, because it’s much less difficult to sustain that level of performance for a shorter time period. Hitting 60 homers in a season remains surprisingly rare and hasn’t been achieved since Barry Bonds hit a record 73 in 2001.

(The 60-homer mark has only been reached eight times in MLB history, in fact. A particularly fun stat is that Sammy Sosa did it three times, more than anyone else, but he failed to lead his league any of those seasons. He finished behind Bonds in 2001 and Mark McGwire in 1998 and 1999. Should they ever re-open bars, you could probably win a good bet with that piece of trivia.)

While individual numbers will certainly catch our attention in this 60-game season, the standings could offer another place worth watching. Will any team win 40 games? Probably so. That’s a 108-win pace, and in the past two seasons three teams have won between 106 to 108 games.

Don’t be stunned if a team wins as many as 45, though. In 2013, the Dodgers put together a 42-8 midseason stretch. The 1984 Tigers opened the season 35-5. We don’t have to look far for examples of what’s possible in a chunk of a season, which is what this really is.

A team could be equally bad, too. The 1988 Orioles started the season with a record 21-game losing streak. At the 60-game mark, they were just 15-45. The worst team in 2019, the Tigers, went 47-114, and in June and July they were a combined 10-40. They started a semi-respectable 22-33 and then went 25-81 the rest of the way, which would be a 14-win pace in a 60-game season.