UTK Special 5/9/2020

Lost Season, Lost Brigade

Lesson for the week? Don’t feed the trolls.

There’s still no baseball, unless you count the Asian versions, which give us a taste even if I don’t find the competition compelling. I can have a good time at a Double-A game, but I’m usually there to either hang out with friends and enjoy the atmosphere, or because there’s a prospect I want to get an early look at. KBO offers neither, unless you squint. It’s not without talent and it’s a quality product, but while I love baseball, I just can’t get into it any more than I would a full season of Texas or Southern League ball.

Then again, we might get none of that this season. Between the plan to drop dozens of minor league teams, the need for minor league teams to play with fans, and the myriad of plans being bandied about inside of baseball that all seem to be focused on using the 40-man roster as the full basis for the team, it doesn’t seem that anyone has a positive plan for the minors.

There’s all sorts of negatives here - more than a few teams will fold or be put on the block from current ownership, which could open up more team controlled affiliates. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though I always prefer local ownership.

The bigger issue is that minor league players could lose a full season of development or at least games. We’ve already seen that in college, where teams played about a dozen games before the lockdown. I’m not convinced that it’s a big negative however. Certainly, there’s costs, but for players at this age, they’ll be a year older, a year stronger (hopefully), and there is some evidence that losing a year of games doesn’t have a negative effect.

This once again goes back to the lab we’ve created of Tommy John survivors. This group, increasingly made up of 16-21 year olds, has lost a year of games over and over, by the thousands. I did some research back in the late-2000s that showed that players in the minor leagues didn’t “lose” a year of development. In essence, they could skip the level they would have been at and tended to show good results. I haven’t re-done that, but I’d love to see someone take a look at it.

I once took that a different direction, thinking we could take a healthy pitcher, shut them down from games for a year and essentially do a Tommy John rehab on them, and see how they came out the other side. I thought I had Doug Melvin convinced of the program, but he never went with it. We’ve seen this in extremis with the likes of Rich Hill, Luke Hagerty, and even Jim Morris, but I’m convinced that with modern techniques, this could be effective.

If so, we’re seeing it writ large this season, across all levels of college and quite possibly the bulk of the minor leagues. If 2020 is really “lost”, we should expect a drop-off from everyone in 2021, right? Does anyone really expect that to happen, or will baseball go back to being baseball, at least from a performance level?

I’m curious what would be the expected dropoff. I’m no Tom Tango or Clay Davenport, but I’m sure we have some smart people reading this. Does a collection of the top 50 hitting prospects in baseball lose 2 percent of OPS? Does a similar collection of pitchers see an increase in batted balls? And how do those work together — if the hitters get worse, the pitchers get better, and vice versa, right?

That is, if there’s a drop-off at all. If Tommy John rehabs don’t lose a year, I don’t think pitchers would as a whole either. If hitters can use available tools to keep their eyes and swings ready, I don’t see a major drop-off either. That’s my opinion and I’m open to changing it based on evidence or even some data that suggests I’m wrong.

That isn’t to say that a missed season isn’t a missed opportunity. For a player like Wander Franco, does he get pushed to the majors, or pushed away to where he can’t play games? If he is on the 40, does he ever see the field or get service time that would force the club to make a decision on him?

Just the unintended consequences worry me and I’d like nothing more than to see baseball back at all levels. I’d love to go to Victory Field*, grab a Sun King beer, and sit a couple seats away from friends. I just don’t think it’s going to happen this year.

(* And if anyone has fifty million bucks or so, there’s no better franchise or time to buy than the Indianapolis Indians. It’s family owned with a public structure, a great facility, and the ability to unlock value like no other baseball club I know. Give me three years and we could flip it for a hundred million.)