10 things we've learned from MLB's shortened season

One thing you can say for sure about the 2020 MLB season is that it is happening. Barring the kind of calamity that seems to wait around every corner this year, we're going to get to the playoffs. There seems to be a sound plan to get through that too. And if MLB can pull that off, we'll have a World Series and a champion.

If we get that far, it will qualify this season as a kind of triumph. We'll be sorting out the context of this campaign for years, but it will exist in the record books. Baseball's uninterrupted stretch of conducting some sort of major league campaign will still stretch back to the 1870s. Stuff has happened and some of it has been pretty good. Some has not.

As the first months of the pandemic dragged on, with the sports world in limbo, the wait for the baseball season was interminable. It often seemed like it wouldn't happen. It often seemed like it shouldn't happen, especially given the ill will generated by the negotiations between the league and the players for the parameters of the season. Then, suddenly, it began and the games piled up and it went by very fast. Just like that, summer is in its waning days and we're less than two weeks from the largest October bracket in history.

The season went by so quickly and has been so infused with omnipresent pandemic anxiety, that it might be easy to overlook just what this season has had to offer. And it has given us plenty, though some of its "gifts" weren't exactly on our holiday wish list. Maybe that should not qualify as a surprise. After all, the 2020 season is truly unlike any that's come before. When that happens, there have to be lessons we can learn, right?

Lesson No. 1: Depth matters, but it isn't everything

When the shortened season began with expanded 28-man rosters and talk about the importance of depth emerged, I wondered if the real key to surviving this season might prove to be getting your best players on the field and keeping them there as much as possible. If you accomplished that, you'd be in the postseason. As ever, the outcomes have proved far less black and white than that.

Certainly, some teams have benefited from leaning on the projected tops of their depth charts. Of the top five offenses by OPS+, three of them rank in the top 10 by plate appearances they've gotten from players projected before the season to be one of their nine best hitters. Those teams are the Mets (first in OPS+, first in PA from top-nine hitters), White Sox (third and seventh) and Dodgers (fifth and fifth).

But the story is complex. The Padres rank second in OPS+, getting some big years from core players but also out-of-nowhere contributions from new stalwarts such as Jake Cronenworth and Trent Grisham. And the Yankees are fourth in OPS+ despite another season of injuries sapping the continuity of their everyday lineup. Then there is the sixth-ranked team in OPS+: That would be the Giants, and only three teams have gotten fewer plate appearances from hitters forecast to be among their top nine position players.

There is a similar dynamic on the pitching side. The Cubs (eighth in ERA+) and Athletics (sixth) are the top two teams in batters faced by pitchers projected to be among their top eight. But the Dodgers lead the majors in ERA+ despite having to shuffle starters all season, and the Indians rank second even though they traded their top projected starter (Mike Clevinger) and have featured an effective bullpen that looks much different from what it figured to be over the winter.

When you combine the two measures -- plate appearances from core players and batters faced by core pitchers -- here are the top five: (1) Cubs, (2) Athletics, (3) Phillies, (4) Angels, (5) Nationals. Two solid playoff teams, one only-in-2020 playoff team and two non-playoff teams.

The list of the bottom five teams by reliance on regulars is perhaps an indictment of both the depth and the lean-on-the-regulars models. Those clubs are: (26) Blue Jays, (27) Marlins, (28) Pirates, (29) Orioles, (30) Mariners.

If anything, that list tells you that perhaps the Cinderella-esque Marlins, Orioles and Mariners have benefited from not leaning on their players with the most solid projections. That list might actually suggest that, if you have a short season that is inherently full of randomness anyway, favoring players with high-variability forecasts over players with more stable, but less promising, outlooks is the way to go.

Lesson No. 2: There are lots of good players in professional baseball

The Marlins' season should have been a wipeout. The low ranking in reliance-on-regulars we just noted wasn't necessarily the result of roster design philosophy but because of Miami's early-season COVID-19 outbreak that put the entire team on the shelf for more than a week. The Marlins' last game before that happened was on July 26 and they didn't resume play until Aug. 4. During the interim, GM Michael Hill and his staff scrambled to fill out Miami's player pool and active roster.

So what happened? The Marlins won their first five games after being shut down. They have remained .500 or better at the end of every day this season except three, and have rallied to get back over break-even each time they've dipped below. With 11 days to go in the season, my latest simulations give the Fish a 78% shot at playing into October.

Certainly, the emergence of an exciting young pitching staff is the key part of the big picture in South Florida. But what about that intermediate stretch, when the Marlins fielded a club comprised of reserves who were backed up by other reserves, many of whom had not even been part of the team during either version of spring training?

There are simply more competent professional baseball players than ever before. Stars are still precious and prospects who might become stars are almost as important. But the class between is larger than ever. If it wasn't, the Marlins should have devolved into a laughingstock, at least for a period of a couple of weeks. That they did not speaks well of the general level of play in professional baseball, circa 2020. (Keeping in mind that level of play is a different thing than style of play.) It also speaks well of the Manager of the Year case for Don Mattingly.

Lesson No. 3: Too many playoff teams is a bad thing

This is not a new lesson, but it's one that has suddenly become a hot topic again. I have stated my case against the over-expansion of playoff teams many times already, and my reasoning is summed up here. That diatribe was in response to the proposal for a 14-team playoff structure, and that's what I'm addressing again here. My assumption is that the 16-team format in place for this season is too laden with self-evident problems to ever be considered a permanent part of baseball. Topping that list is the fact that it makes finishing in first place all but meaningless, but the list is long.

I won't repeat myself entirely, but I just want to double and triple down on a couple of points. This morning, when scanning the overnight headlines, I saw one from the Los Angeles Times: "Angels' path to playoffs grows darker with loss to Diamondbacks."

This isn't a criticism of the headline. It was appropriate, which is the problem. Think about this: With their loss to Arizona on Wednesday, the Angels fell to 20-30 on the season. The math is easy: That's a .400 winning percentage. That is a rate of winning that translates to a 65-97 record over a 162-game season. Yet with less than two weeks to go, the Angels started the day just four games out of a postseason slot. Thus a .400 team had every reason to be thinking about the playoffs even though it had just 11 games remaining.

Now, proponents of an expanded playoff format might see this as a good thing. It's not. (The 2020 season excepted, of course.) This is not exciting. It is not interesting. A "race" of this sort is not going to bring a net-positive number of new fans to the product, because insofar as drama exists in a competition between sub-mediocre teams, it is contrived and without integrity. The alienation of existing fans would outweigh the draw for new fans.

The problem is that the attention shifts away from the top of the standings to the middle, for fans, media and team decision-makers alike. The Dodgers and White Sox have already clinched playoff spots. In a 16-team format, there would be seasons in which a top team mathematically clinches a postseason spot not long after Labor Day. When the bar for entry is too low, the certainty of postseason action for the best teams is too high. The negative consequences of that cannot be overstated. The bar is set not at excellence, but at mediocrity.

Also, stop comparing baseball's postseason to that of other sports. The notion that because you have X percent of teams getting into the playoffs in one sport, then baseball should follow suit is, to put it kindly, a head-scratcher. The dynamics of baseball are different from those of other sports, the most important aspect being that the disparity between teams needs lots and lots of games to be sorted out. Baseball is baseball. Let the other sports do their thing, but it should have nothing to do with how baseball sets up its structures.

Finally, we can all agree that baseball needs to make itself as attractive as possible to future generations. What we can't agree on is how that will happen. Any suggestion that we actually know how future generations, or the current ones still in their youth, will spend their leisure time in the decades to come is, at best, questionable. To say that we will attract them by letting everyone into the postseason seems to me to be insulting to the young fans we're trying to attract.

The bottom line is that baseball should always strive to be the best version of itself. But if it strives to reinvent itself into something else, then it's not baseball anymore. It's something else.

Lesson No. 4: Amazing things are always happening in baseball

The best argument for pushing through with this season is probably in this concept. In the grand scheme, sports are not essential by any metric. And the need to conduct the season was far outweighed by public and personal health considerations. However, because baseball has done a pretty good job of pulling this off without making it seem like the roof was about to cave in at any moment, there has been much enjoyment to be gained from even this bizarre, 60-game campaign. Enjoyment isn't everything, but in a year like this one, it's not nothing, either.

Clayton Kershaw became the Dodgers' career leader in strikeouts and bWAR, cementing his status as one of the best players ever for one of baseball's marquee franchises. Albert Pujols finally reached the magic number of 660, the career home run total of Willie Mays. He moved into third place on the RBI list, surpassed only by Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. Lucas Giolito and Alec Mills have thrown no-hitters. Miguel Cabrera has continued (slowly) his march to 3,000 hits and 500 home runs.

The Braves scored 29 runs in a game, setting an NL record. In doing so, they had three players each drive in five runs or more in the same game. According to Elias, that's just the ninth time that has happened. Also, the 20 combined RBIs for Adam Duvall, Freddie Freeman and Ronald Acuna Jr. tied the MLB mark for a trio of teammates in one game. It also happened on April 30, 1944, when the Giants' Phil Weintrub (11) and Ernie Lombardi (7) were joined by a pair of teammates who each drove in two. More famously, when the Red Sox routed the St. Louis Browns 29-4 on June 8, 1950, Bobby Doerr (8), Walt Dropo (7) and Ted Williams (5) combined to drive in 20 runs.

Fernando Tatis Jr. jumped to the top of the conversation about who the game's best player is and became baseball's breakout star. Unless you think that new star is White Sox rookie Luis Robert. Either way, both the ChiSox and Padres have become must-watch teams that figure to burn brightly on the national stage in the years to come.

This is far from a full accounting of memorable things from this season, and we've got 10 more days and a month of playoffs to go. None of this would have happened had the season been lost. Of course, a full season would have been better, and the short season would not have been essential if it proved to be too dangerous, but what we ended up with reminds us of just how much we get from every single campaign.

Lesson No. 5: The immeasurable value of rabbit holes

As you probably anticipated, we're not talking about literal rabbit holes, but the metaphorical kind that are so common in the digital age, where you set about looking up one thing and then click your way in a direction that you never would have anticipated. Sure, it can be a waste of time, but it can also lead to some fun discoveries. It's the kind of small pleasure you get from a baseball season, each of which is just the newest chapter of the longest sports book ever written.

Every day in a baseball season presents opportunities for these excursions. Here is one rabbit hole very much in that esoteric vein:

A few days ago, Orioles rookie Ryan Mountcastle and White Sox rookie Nick Madrigal were both hitting in the high-.360s, low-.370s range. Neither had even enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, so a few empty games since then have dropped them down to more normal-looking averages. Still, for a flash, the career averages of those two debutants ranked second and third in baseball history, if you set the plate appearance minimum at just 80.

It's a silly thing to do, to look at it that way, but I enjoy doing it because the leaderboard is less strange than you would think, making the weird names on it stand out. The thing is, it's always a current rookie atop it because if you've hit that well, you'll stay in the lineup until you find your eventual level. So even with such a low bar for playing time, and Mountcastle and Madrigal off to such hot starts, Ty Cobb's record .366 career mark still ranked fourth. Still, for a couple of days, Mountcastle and Madrigal stood above Cobb.

But none of them -- Cobb, Mountcastle or Madrigal -- stood above Terry Forster. Forster hit .397 in his career over 86 plate appearances from 1971 to 1986, topping the 80 PA-minimum career batting average leaderboard. While I remember Terry Forster as a player from the last part of his career, this is something I did not know and could not have possibly suspected.

For those not old enough or historically curious enough to recall Forster, he was a premier lefty reliever who saved 127 games over his career and eventually became a one-out lefty in his later days. For a time, his notoriety expanded well beyond a sports context. This happened in 1983, when late-night legend David Letterman called Forster a "fat tub of goo." (Here's the full transcript from Sports Illustrated.)

"[Forster is] the fattest man in all of professional sports. I mean the guy is a balloon. He must weigh 300 pounds. The guys doing the ballgame, Skip Caray and Ernie Johnson, not once do they mention that this guy is enormous. They pretend the guy couldn't be in better shape. He is a L-O-A-D. Not once, when they see this mammoth figure, this silo, get up in the bullpen ... I just want them to say, 'Terry Forster's warming up, he's a left-hander, an ERA of 3.5 ... what a fat tub of goo.' Nobody says a thing. It ruined my weekend."

Forster responded by saying, "My wife says worse things than that." He then made a music video about it (proceed with caution). Finally, he ended up going on Letterman's show and making tacos.

All of this from the best hitter of all time. And without hot starts by pair of 2020 rookies, I would never have followed the rabbit to find this out.

Lesson No. 6: Statcast data is changed

This season, baseball went to a new, optical-based tracking system called Hawk-Eye to gather the fine-grained performance data that has revolutionized the game in recent years. I am far from having any sort of sense of just what effect this has had. In fact, it was only last week that I found the first thing that caused me to raise a brow.

In response to a conversation about whether there have been more egregious errors this season, as the questioner observed anecdotally, I went looking at Statcast to see if there was anything revealing. I didn't find anything that directly addressed the issue. Instead I found this:

Expected batting average,
plays resulting in fielding errors
2016: .226
2017: .221
2018: .219
2019: .223
2020: .254
Source: baseballsavant.mlb.com

What this suggests is that the bar for scoring a play as an error has been lowered by quite a bit. In other words, if a ball with a .223 batting average expectation is misplayed, that's going to stand out as an error, right? But one with .254 is murky. That's a fairly well-struck ball. So what happens to all the balls between .223 and .254; what is going on there? The assumption, before checking, would be that lots of balls falling into that range are now being scored as errors, whereas before they were not.

Scanning a list of individual errors shows a number of balls with expected averages in the high-.300s that have resulted in errors. That seems wrong. If you hit a ball that well, it's probably a hit -- in theory. And, perhaps, because scorekeepers are doing games remotely this season, something is happening where fielders aren't getting the same benefit of the doubt as in years past.

Alas, league error data does not bear that theory out. The overall rate of errors per game (0.56) matches 2013 for the lowest in baseball history, and the overall fielding percentage (.984) is exactly the same as it's been since 2014.

After bouncing this issue around internally at ESPN, and with folks who work more closely with Statcast data than I do, these numbers remain a bit of a mystery. It's certainly possible there is something going on with scorekeepers. However, one telling bit of data beneath of all this, shared by a Statcast guru, might be revealing: The error rate on fly balls is down this season, but on ground balls, it's up significantly.

One possible reason for this is not the scorekeepers or any change in the quality of fielding, but the switchover in tracking equipment. The old system was effective at tracking pitches and balls in the air, but sometimes struggled with picking up certain kinds of grounders. According to my Statcast guru, the data coverage on ground-ball data has improved from something like 89% to 99% with the change of systems.

It's certainly possible that the sort of grounders that were being missed previously account for the strange year-over-year disparity in fielding error results. If so, that's a good thing: It means the new tracking system is providing us with an even richer tapestry of data than the old one, and it will add integrity to the attempts to calibrate effective infield fielding metrics. We'll know more after we've lived with Hawk-Eye for a few seasons. For now, we can only guess that it's seeing more of the game than has ever been seen before.

Lesson No. 7: Tim Anderson can really hit

I love watching Tim Anderson play baseball even though he has the exact kind of offensive approach that used to drive me crazy. (Though, by now, assertive hitters have gained a soft spot in my heart, as take-and-rake thumpers have proliferated to a startling degree.) As of Thursday, Anderson had walked in 5.4% of his plate appearances, a career high. That ranked 57th of 61 qualifying AL batters this season. Yet, one season after winning the AL batting title, Anderson was hitting .373.

For one thing, that sets up a heck of race for the AL batting title. New York's D.J. LeMahieu also was hitting .373 and both hitters should qualify, barring a significant injury. Since Sept. 1, Anderson is hitting .450. The last time a player hit over .370 without winning his league's batting crown was 1936, when Earl Averill (.378) finished behind Luke Appling (.388).

Last season, Anderson walked just 15 times, the fewest for a batting champ during the modern era. He beat the mark of 16, set by Zack Wheat in 1918. While Anderson is walking at a higher rate in 2020, the shortened season means he probably would break his own record if he holds off LeMahieu for the batting title. Anderson had walked just nine times through Wednesday.

All of this begs the question: How does he do it? Everyone reasonably expected a regression from Anderson this season, largely because of his hyper-aggression and because he put up an otherworldly .399 average on balls in play in 2019. Through Wednesday, his 2020 BABIP stood at .435. That's 18 points higher than that of any other qualifying hitter in baseball.

In fact, according to baseball-reference.com, Anderson's BABIP would put him in truly rarefied air:

Highest single-season BABIP, modern era
(at least 150 plate appearances)
1. Ty Cobb (.443, 1911)
2. Tim Anderson (.435, 2020)
3. Shoeless Joe Jackson (.433, 1911)
4. Ty Cobb (.424, 1912)
5. Babe Ruth (.423, 1923)
Source: baseball-reference.com

Lesson No. 8: Don't throw a southpaw on the South Side

Yes, it's another White Sox-related item. If you have not noticed, the 2020 ChiSox destroy left-handed pitching. Through Wednesday, Chicago was hitting .293/.371/.551 against lefties for a .922 OPS. That leaves us with this still-in-progress all-time leaderboard:

Highest single-season team OPS,
vs. left-handed pitching
1. White Sox (.922, 2020)
2. Rangers (.885, 1998)
3. Yankees (.884, 1998)
4. Tigers (.873, 2020)
5. Yankees (.872, 1994)
5. Twins (.872, 2019)
Source: TruMedia

Now, the 2020 Tigers are on the list so we have to again remind you that this is based on a season that is nearly over even though most clubs have fewer than 50 games on their ledger. Still, if you consider the same leaderboard, based on just 50-game starts to a season, the White Sox still rank 10th all-time. They are mashing lefties to a historic degree.

Which leads to the next question: Which possible playoff opponents rely the most on lefty pitching? Ranking probable AL playoff teams in order according to batters faced by lefty pitchers: (1) Rays, (2) Athletics, (3) Yankees, (4) Blue Jays, (5) Twins, (6) Astros, (7) Indians.

Lesson No. 9: Blowouts are more common, but it's not just this season

Yes, we've noticed how many extreme blowouts there seem to have been this season. Colleague Dave Schoenfield noted this a couple of days ago, quoting Elias data that shows the number of routs thus far is historically high for the first 50 games of a season.

Let's look at just games decided by 10 or more runs, making that our definition of a blowout. When the Yankees beat the Blue Jays 13-2 Wednesday, it was the 33rd such game this season. That's a rate of one every 22.27 games. Last season, it happened even more often, if just barely: The rate was one every 22.08 games.

Three of the highest-ever rates of blowout games have occurred since 2017. In 2010, it was one in 28.93; in 2000 it was one in 22.08; in 1990, it was one in 33.41. This is not a linear trend through baseball history and it seems highly correlated with league run-scoring levels.