PHNX Arizona Diamondbacks Podcast - FanGraphs writer Dan Szymborski talks Marlins shutdown, D-backs, and expanded playoffs

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

FanGraphs Senior Writer Dan Szymborski breaks down the latest news out of Miami, MLB's last-minute playoffs adjustment and the D-backs' slow start. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome back into another special edition of the Rattle Podcast. As always, my name is Jesse Friedman and here in this special edition of the show. We are honored to be joined by a longtime friend of the show. His name is Dan Zimborski. Dan is a senior writer for Fangraphs. He's also a contributor for ESPN. He's the guy who created Zips. He is just kind of an all-around baseball guru, and he is here with us today.

Dan, first of all, I know the world is kind of a crazy, contentious place right now. How are you doing personally? I'm doing pretty well. I mean, baseball is back, which is good because, you know, I'm employed as a baseball writer. And like most people, I like to get paid for doing a job and then being able to pay bills and things. So having baseball back is a big boost of that kind of thing. I mean, you know, you always have a feeling in the back of your head that you're thinking, what if there's no baseball in 2020? What if I'm a baseball writer with and baseball doesn't exist

essentially for 18 months? But it's, I mean, there have been some problems to say the least so far, but we are seeing baseball games. So it, that's a good thing. That is, that is a good thing for sure. Well, Dan, there's been all sorts of news coming out lately about baseball, both good and bad, really just kind of all over the place at this point. Uh, the first. first thing I want to ask you about is baseball's handling of this situation with the Miami Marlins that has come up. The Marlins obviously had a few players test positive, and it turned out it came to a team group chat, whether or not they were going to play their game on Sunday, which they certainly should not have played. It has ultimately led to a bit of an outbreak now with the Marlins,

now having a total of 17 of their 30 players on their active roster testing positive. And now Today we heard that the Philadelphia Phillies have had a coach and a clubhouse attendant test positive, which of course is big news because that's the team the Marlins were playing. And it seems like this is the kind of thing that might have moved from one team to another. What's your confidence level, Dan, just in Major League Baseball and how they've handled this? And do you think this is something that, you know, baseball can overcome and still find a way to finish the 60 game season in the long run? I think baseball itself, Major League Baseball needs to give.

better, make it clearer to teams that it's not just a league problem containing COVID-19. Containing COVID-19 is literally everybody's problem. It's the front office. It's the manager. It's the coaches. It's the players. And I think MLB deserves some negative marks for that. I do think that the Marlins need to take a lot of the blame because it doesn't seem like any of this is sensible. I got Marlins' Twitter. That's actually a thing, believe it or not. Very angry with me because I suggested that I think Don Mattingly should be suspended for the rest of the season. And I still do. I think, you know, having that decision relegating into the players was just completely

irresponsible. But they say, oh, well, Don Mattingly's job is to get ready for the game. It's not his job to not play. They should have to wait for MLB to do that. But MLB is, you know, a central, you know, parent organization, essentially. These are the guys who are on the ground and they have to use common sense and caution. if we want to finish the 2020 season with as few interruptions as possible. It means that everybody's job is containing COVID-19.

I'm a baseball writer slash virus mitigator. Don Mattingly is a baseball manager slash virus mitigator and so on. It's like a little hyphen that's on everybody's job until, you know, this is all under control. And that people aren't taking that route saying it's someone else's problem to contain it. That's kind of why the country is in this problem right now. because, yeah, there's been a lack of guidance a lot of times from government, but it comes down to the people and the people have to take care of it because that's where it's going to be enforced. Arresting people for mask use or lack of mask use isn't going to do anything. It only will work if everybody's on board and baseball is no different.

Now, when we talk about completing the season, I'm still pretty optimistic. I don't think that everybody's going to end up with 60 games and that's kind of, you know, that stinks. But in a year like this, it's the kind of thing that has to be forgiven. If one team wins, plays 55 games and another plays 60, I think that's going to be just in the realm of, okay, too bad. This isn't going to be the fairest season in history. Sure. That's why we have 16 teams in the playoffs, hopefully just for this year. Please, just for this year.

So I think we'll complete it in some form. I think they'll get to the playoffs. and hopefully when the playoffs come with when you know the teams fewer teams you'll be able to not bubble as much but at least controlled a little better now now baseball doesn't have the bubble that the NBA does but MLB does have the advantage in that this sport baseball is the least contactee of the major sports especially you know compared to basketball and football because basketball yeah you don't have a lot of guys but you also, they're, they're pretty close to each other. There's no social, there's no social distancing on defense, unless you're Russell Westbrook, but we won't go into that. That was mean. And obviously in football, you know, every play in football is kind of a clothed orgy in some sense.

So I think for the actual games, baseball is going to be pretty decent. It's the travel and the getting around the dugout that would be a bigger help. Yeah, well, you mentioned expanded playoffs, Dan, which I know you were very vocal on Twitter, that you know what, this is, we'll let it slide for this year, but I sure hope it doesn't stick around. I want to get your perspective on that because baseball, this was a very, very last minute decision, as we all know. Literally, I think it was less than three hours before first pitch on opening day, baseball and the Players Association, come out with an agreement.

they expanded the postseason from 10 teams to 16 teams. Sounds like it's going to be instead of just the first place team from each division having a guaranteed ticket. Now it's the first two teams. And then they'll also take two additional teams with the best records from each league on top of that. Dan, I mean, this is interesting. It's something that's kind of been tossed around in baseball for a long time.

But it seems like 2020 is just kind of the season where baseball is trying everything. We have the DH, we have the three batter minimum for relief pitchers. We have all sorts of new things coming into play that may or may not stick in the future. And I know I thought it was hilarious when you tweeted that on that day when the news came out, that basically Major League Baseball and the Players Association have agreed to make the regular season meaningless by expanding the playoffs, which I agree with because, I mean, 16 teams, that's more than half of the league. it certainly takes away a lot of the meaning.

And we were talking so much about how much each of these individual games matters here in a 60 game season. And it kind of feels like some of that has been mitigated now. Yeah, it makes playing the season a little less practical. At that point, if you're just going to do 16 teams, you might as well, one of my proposals for a weird season was to do just a 32 team tournament, say best of 15 That way you can keep teams in one place and bubble them

For the final two teams Either you know give last year's World Series Participants a buy or do like an ALNL futures roster Which would kind of be fun As long as you're going to be weird Go all in on weird But the thing about it doing in a normal season is Baseball is not the same

Competitive environment as other sports are the difference between teams and baseball is really, really small. There's a reason we need 162 games. Even 162 games doesn't really determine if a 90-win team is better than an 85-win team. And a short series certainly doesn't. So it's really, really weird to have, like, the Dodgers could, you know, win every game this year. Obviously, that's not going to happen at this point. But they could win the game every year and then lose two or three because any team in baseball can lose two or three to any team.

The Orioles can, I mean, the Red Sox would have made the playoffs last year under the system, I believe. And the Orioles took two or three. So the Red Sox, sorry, your season's over because the Orioles won two instead of one game of three. And people say, oh, well, the NBA does 16 teams, but the NBA can do 16 teams because the seventh and eight seeds and really the low seeds in basketball are essentially dead in the water. It only works in basketball because the seventh and eighth seeded teams don't continually upset things. If baseball could do that, then yeah, it probably would be fine. But it's not the situation in baseball. An eight seed is going to beat the one seed all the time in a short series.

And even NBA doesn't do two or three games. They do, you know, longer series than that. So I just don't think it works in baseball just on a four. fundamental level. People say, well, it keeps more teams interested in the playoffs. But my question is, why are the playoffs interesting if they don't really mean anything at that point? Because people say, oh, you don't want the best team to always win? It's like, yeah, it's hard to determine what the best team is. But one of the kind of the base storylines we tell ourselves is that the winner of the World Series is probably one of the best teams in baseball. There are always some exceptions, but that's

kind of why baseball's postseason is important because we we buy into the fiction that it means something and determining who the best team is. If we kind of get rid of that and we can't suspend disbelief, then who cares about being competitive for a postseason tournament that doesn't really mean anything? If winning the World Series doesn't mean anything, then who cares if your team makes the final playoffs to make the World Series beyond Sible A, there's just some more baseball games. That's fun. I think baseball works best when making the playoffs is achievable but difficult. And under the new system, I mean, we'd have below 500 teams literally every year in the

playoffs. When I simulated the season in Zips in the new format, I think it was like 2.6 teams on average below 500 are expected to make the playoffs, you know, per season. If we played 2020 a million times, which I really don't. hope we don't. Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, I know you, you also tweeted out about how, like, you know, this is a shortened season. This is a weird situation. Heck, we've got runners at second and extra innings. This is just a very weird situation for baseball, so maybe we can let it slide for this year. But you are really pushing that, you know, baseball doesn't continue down this

route in the future. What do you think those conversations are going to be like for baseball? I have to imagine for this season, a big part of expanding playoffs was just trying to add some revenue into the game. Some of that lost revenue, of course, from not having fans in the stands. Maybe they can make up for that by shelling in some extra TV revenue come the postseason. But, I mean, you have to believe, Dan, that may be a temptation for baseball down the line, especially if this COVID situation continues. and they're still not able to fill stadiums completely next season, which I think we totally have to consider as something that could happen.

Do you think that baseball could find themselves in a position next year where this is something they want to do again? It's possible. Obviously, I hope we're not in that position for a number of reasons beyond playoffs. I mean, I would take, if we could eradicate COVID-19 completely from, you know, the world and the penalty was we had to have 16 teams in the playoffs for the rest of my life. Yeah, I would take that trade pretty easily. Yeah, that would be very selfish to not take that trade.

But, I mean, obviously, that's not the situation. I don't, I'm not, I mean, I'm not a, you know, a viral scientist, but I don't think that virus has worked that way where you can make deals, really strange deals with them. I think long term, I hope the players realize it's actually in their long term, interest to not have expanded playoffs because I mean I've sold a lot of data to teams I don't as I never ask what data is going to be done or ask anything that that kind of breaches my role of just hitting a button and sending numbers because then I kind of get a conflict of interest when I'm talking

with people but I I do believe that part of the slowdown in salaries is because playoffs are bigger because the larger the playoffs are and the easier it is for a mediocre team team to win the World Series, the less financial incentive there is to investing in players. If we have 16 teams in the playoffs without a really significant benefit to winning the division, like we've had since the most recent update of playoff format, well, not this one, the one before that added the extra wild cards and the wild card played in game. if you don't have that, then all of a sudden the target win total essentially becomes 85 or so. It doesn't, almost every 85 win team makes the playoffs under this new format.

And there doesn't really, there's not that much of a benefit in a short series to be a 100 win team instead of an 85 win team. The differences are quite small. And if teams don't have an actual incentive to be a 100 win team instead of an 85 win team, then why would you spend $300 million regularly in free agency? You wouldn't. Sure. And I do think that I hope that the union realizes this. I'm pretty sure that leadership does. I'm not really sure that the players completely get this and how free agents or how teams evaluate free agents. I'm in a position to know pretty well because, you know, I do a lot of projecting and people buy projections.

I think that it's just the players have to be very wary of this. Dan, I swear you're the only seen voice out there in the Joe Kelly controversy. Please tell the people what is reasonable when it comes to this guy and what he did on Tuesday night. I do think, I do think MLB kind of muddied the issue when they included the taunting and part of it. It should have just been for the headhunting period. He's a repeat offender.

there's a real argument about whether eight games is proper given that's the percentage of the season, but we also suspend people for games, not percentage of seasons, like Domingo Hermon's assault penalty does not drop in more than half because of the season being shorter. He still has that 80-game penalty. It doesn't say, oh, it's now a 36-game penalty. That doesn't actually happen. And there's a very real dispute. about that, that the whole philosophical basis for the penalty, is it the games, is it the

penalty of the season? But I don't think that baseball benefits to having players, essentially trying to hurt each other. And I know people are aggrieved that the Astros weren't suspended, and it would have been ideal if they had been suspended. But the truth is that the commissioner of baseball only has the ability to punish players for rules that are agreed. read upon with the union. One reason that baseball was very quick to grant immunity to both Astros and Red Sox players is that they probably didn't really actually have any way to discipline them at all. They could have tried to punish them, but it's been pretty well established going back to

the drug trials in the 80s or the drug arbitration hearings that baseball, when they make up their penalties that the MLBPA pretty much always win. I remember like when Denny Nagel was released by the Rockies for the issue with, what was it, a prostitute? I'm trying to remember. Well, they tried to release him based on the character clause. The MLBPA, as usual, you know, appealed to that. And they agreed on the eve of the hearing to the Rockies agreed to give him 95% of his remaining salary. So that pretty much tells you exactly how the owners, when push comes to shove, realize

what they can do about player discipline in that way. So there wasn't really a realistic scenario in which Manfred could have punished the players. If, I know, players are angry now, but if they were angry, the time to take action was when MLB sent the letter to the Red Sox initially in 2017, warning them electronic sign stealing. If this was going to be something that players cared about, then as union members of the MLBPA, it was their job to advocate for the union and the membership based on voting to negotiate with the owners to set forth a system of penalties. That was the response. Now, when they say, oh, he got more, Joe Kelly got more games suspended for throwing at the assures and the asses got it for throwing, for stealing signs. Yeah, because your inaction is why the Aster's could not be penalized.

So it's a little hypocritical that in a complaint that Commissioner didn't suspend the Aster's. I think it's a very odd complaint for a union member to say, we're mad that the Commissioner of Baseball didn't grossly violate our collective bargaining agreement. It's an odd argument to make. And it seems to be one that could come back and haunt them at some point. So now it appears there's been some talk that they do have a framework for future penalties, but you know, you can't grandfather in old penalties. It doesn't work like that.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Dan, I want to transition here to the Arizona Diamondbacks a little bit, talk a little D-backs. This is a Diamondbacks podcast after all, so we're kind of obligated to do that. Even though this is not really a team that many of us want to be talking about right now, It was, to say the least, a rough start for them. In San Diego, they lost three out of four. They had a series split with the Texas Rangers after really having a good shot to sweep the series last night.

Unfortunately, Andrew Chafin blew up and the bullpen was unable to hold things down for them. You look at the N.O. West right now, Dan, and obviously it's still early even in a 60-game season, but the Colorado Rockies are four-in-one. They lead the NOS as we speak right now. Of course, the Dodgers are at 4 and 2. The Padres looks really good in that series against the Diamondbacks. They're at 4 and 2, and the Diamondbacks are in the basement right now at 2 and 4. When you think about the NL. West, Dan, how do you think the Diamondbacks stack up compared to these other teams?

I think the Dodgers are clearly better. I don't think I would get any pushback from anybody listening. Nope. That the Dodgers are clearly the best team in the NL. West if you played a million games. and Zips, and I tend to agree with Zips on this one, things that the Padres have more upside than Arizona did. So pretty much all the simulations had the Padres edging out the Diamondbacks, and then a fairly large gulf between the Diamondbacks and the Rockies and the Giants.

Now that the fact that the Rockies have won four out of five when we record this, it does create a bit of a problem for the Diamondbacks, because that's almost 10% of the season. For the Diamondbacks, 10% of the season is over. This is like the equivalent of, you know, 16 games already. We're halfway, we're more than halfway through April in philosophical terms. Sure. So, so if you ever watch poker on TV, do you ever watch poker on TV?

I do not, Dan, no, but you'll have to tell me about it. Okay, well, anyway, when, when players are all in with their chips, they show their hands. and on the screen there's like a probability of of one player beating the other and then every time another card is is dealt then those probabilities change very rapidly all of a sudden if you have you know three of a kind on the board and the other guy gets his his last harder or spade or whatever those those probabilities go from 22% to 100% instantly and it's like that every every game is crucial to determining who makes the playoffs. Coming into the season,

I don't have an updated Zips for today, but the general fan graphs odds, the Diamondbacks were 47% that was their probability of making the playoffs under the new system. And that's dropped now to, I believe, hold on.

Oh, I hit back on my browser. Confound it. Well, that's dropped to 32%. Essentially, they've lost a sixth of a playoff spot already in six games. Sure. And the Rockies have seen their probability go up by a similar amount because every game is important. And so, I know that's a cliche, but 60 game season, we're essentially starting what would be, you know, the trade deadline in a normal year. This is the stretch run.

So it changes the threshold on how teams should act for the rest of the season. It seems weird to say that the Rockies should now be more aggressive at approaching winning now, rather than winning later, because they run four out of five. But that's the situation they're in now. Now they have a quicker impetus to push for a playoff spot. And teams that get off to slow starts, I mean, we're not. there yet, but I think that the threshold for rebuilding isn't really that high. The tigers are four and two, but say they end up losing four in a row. I think at that point, they're almost a rebuild team. A rebuild in 2020 team there. They're always a rebuilding team. But it'll be interesting

to see how teams react to what's an unusual season, because there's no script for a year like this. There are no minor leagues. There are 60 games. There's a raging pandemic. So from a base ball standpoint, I think that the teams that are creative are going to eke out those extra winners that they need to make the playoffs in these one or two win races. I think a big concern for Diamondbacks fans coming out of these first couple series. We've seen Madison Bumgarner pitch twice now. Yeah, he hasn't looked bad, I wouldn't say. He's certainly limited contact.

He's given up five runs over 11 inning so far. So certainly far from disaster. But a big concern, Dan, I'm not sure if you've heard about this, but Bumgarner has averaged about 88 miles an hour with his fastball so far in those two starts, which, you know, we all knew that was a possibility at some point. He's got almost 2,000 innings on his arm. But last year, he was still up in the 91, 92 range with his fastball. I think a lot of people expected, you know, maybe the velocity will dip a little eventually, but it has been a catastrophic drop off so far to start the season.

And he still looked pretty, pretty effective for the most part. But during the post game press conference yesterday, he, he seemed dumbfounded. He literally told us as the media, he said, your guess is as good as mine. He said everything, you know, seems to be coming out just right. But when he looks up at the board, the number is just different than it's been in the past. How viable do you think Madison Bumgarner is at the top of a rotation if he's only throwing about 88 miles an hour? I think he's still viable.

I think he will have to go, you know, the Zach Granky route and go all in on being a nibblery finesse picture. But, I mean, he wasn't exactly, you know, he's been closer to 80s Frank Tanana than 70s Frank Tanana for really most of his career. And I don't say that to be mean. I love Frank Tanana. It is concerning when you lose three miles per hour. And I wasn't initially concerned until I saw some of the quotes because I did see that the velocity was down. and he hasn't had a great year because not only is his velocity down, but Zips actually estimates that his bat as a picture is actually about 20% of his value

and his predicted value over the course of the contract. So the universal DH suddenly being a thing has already kind of lopped off 20% of his performance, which really stinks. I'm personally in favor of if they don't completely abolish the DH, making it a home team decision across the league. I think it's an interesting decision for teams to make. But that's a whole other podcast that we could spend an hour talking about. But I'd be modely concerned at this point.

If this were a normal season, I'd be way more concerned than I am. Sure. But this has been such an odd offseason. and players aren't able, pictures aren't able to prepare the same way that they normally do. Everything has their schedules, everything has just gone, you know, helter-skelter. So I think that some players are going to be surprised that they're not quite where they need to be. But I think 2021, if we have a normal year, will probably be the bigger test for most players. last question here for you dan uh you mentioned just the nature of expanding the playoffs and how it

kind of decreases the incentive to really push all your chips in i have to believe with with a trade deadline that heck this trade deadline is still is about a month away from right now uh teams are going to go into the trade deadline with a record of you know 15 and 15 or 16 and 14 or something along those lines they're going to have to decide whether they want to make any moves uh to kind to help their push toward the playoffs. And this is a weird situation. There's no minor leagues, as we've talked about. So it's going to be really weird to try to trade for prospects at a time like this.

And like we mentioned already, you know, having 16 teams in the playoffs, there just isn't that big of a difference right now between, you know, being the top team in your division versus, you know, being a couple teams away, but still making the playoffs. Do you think, Dan, that we're going to see any kind of significant trade action? come, you know, a few days before that trade deadline? I suspect that we don't. The virus complicates things considerably. Now, if we got to a scenario where nobody was testing positive and all the measures

were working, I think we would see a little more activity, but I think where it is now, I don't think teams are going to aggressively want to be swapping players around unless they need to. I don't see any big trades for prospects, especially because there's still a possibility that the season just ends because something gets out of control and then you've kind of lost out in the trade.

It would feel really bad. I know no one here probably has any particular sympathy for the Dodgers, but if you're a Dodger fan or a Dodger employee, it would have felt pretty bad if there was no 2020 season and the Red Sox won the Moogie Betts trade. convincingly, that that would have kind of stunk.

And it's a trade that might not have been made if it was known beforehand that there might not be at 2020. So I think that we're not going to see a lot of movement unless the environment changes rapidly towards the optimistic side, which I'm not optimistic about. Sure. Yeah, well, Dan, I think you're absolutely right. You won't find a whole lot of sympathy for the Dodgers around here. I think most of our listeners would have been totally okay not seeing moogie vets in 2020.

But alas, here we are. There's baseball. At the end of the day, it's all good news. Dan, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. We really appreciate it. No problem. You have a good one.