Commentary: What Have We Learned in the First Twenty Games?
Photo by Megan Ellis
Hot take: this season has been...weird.
All jokes aside, the 2020 baseball season certainly hasn’t gone down the way anyone expected it to at the beginning of Spring Training this year, and the condensed schedule combined with the constant uncertainty of a pandemic has brought about a lot of Weird Baseball over the first third of the season. Between new extra-inning rules, empty stands, 7-inning doubleheaders, and being constantly at the mercy of test results, it’s certainly been a different sport to follow and watch this year.
However, as I mentioned in a previous article, I think a lot about this season was going to be unclear until we got about a third of the way through it. And now that we are finally at that point, we certainly have learned a lot about baseball in 2020. With that being said, here are some of my biggest takeaways from the first twenty or so games of the regular season:
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Things have become a little more normal…
After quite a rocky start to the year that featured two major COVID-19 outbreaks, multiple postponements, and a lot of uncertainty from fans, players, and executives alike, it seems as though MLB is finally on some (somewhat) solid footing as we officially head into the middle of the season. And after a couple of weeks of real games, it seems as though both teams and fans are starting to settle into the season.
For example, take the Arizona Diamondbacks. After getting off to arguably the worst start of any team in baseball through their first ten games of the season, they have battled back over their last eleven and have gotten themselves into a playoff spot for the first time in this young season. Similarly, teams that got off to an extremely quick start have started to cool down as they regress to the mean. Sticking in the NL West, the Rockies took the league by storm through the first two weeks of the season, at one point sitting on top of the division with an 11-3 record. But since that time, things have started to come off the rails a bit. They have now lost five of their last six games heading into play tonight, giving up a staggering 46 runs during that stretch to the Mariners, Rangers, and aforementioned D-backs.
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Additionally, the games themselves have also felt a little more normal. While I was skeptical about fake crowd noise at first, I do have to admit that it has added a nice touch to the TV broadcasts. Even the crowd-less grandstands have become a little less jarring over time, and they certainly have looked better than the awful fake fans Fox has tried to overlay on them. Plus, teams have found some clever ways to use that space, such as advertising banners, cardboard cutouts, and even some teddy bears for charity. Maybe it’s just because I like having baseball back on the TV every day, but I certainly haven’t minded this weird setup as much as I expected to.
...but some things are still surprising.
Seriously, raise your hand if you had the Marlins or the Orioles contending for the playoffs this year, because if you did I need to tell me what the winning lottery numbers are going to be. This has obviously been a surprising season for multiple reasons, but those two teams have got to be the biggest shocks so far. Miami still holds the top spot in the NL East, largely thanks to a well-timed hot streak after their COVID-19 hiatus ended, and the Orioles have somehow found themselves second in the AL East despite not having their best player.
To be fair, Miami is still quite behind the rest of the league in terms of games played and they are playing with a large group of replacement players, so it’s incredibly hard to tell what their true level of talent is. With the Orioles, however, it’s easy to watch their offense and think that they just might be for real. As a team, they’re slugging .459 through the first third of the season, second in baseball behind only the Yankees. They also rank sixth in wRC+ (113), have the fifth-lowest strikeout rate (20.6%), and are tied for fourth in wOBA (.338). Again, all without their best hitter in the lineup.
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Now, this is not to say that we should make any assumptions that either of these teams will keep this up. As a friend of mine pointed out to me last night, the Marlins and Orioles both had similar stretches last year, but they ended up finishing with records of 57-105 and 54-108 respectively. That being said, it’s much harder to waste a good start in a sixty-game season. Who knows, there still might be room for them to surprise us even more.
The stat chases are most certainly on
Heading into the season, there was a lot of speculation about how the sixty-game season would put a lot of statistical achievements within reach, most notably the mythical .400 batting average. So far, it seems like those achievements are still within the realm of possibility. Among qualified hitters, there are currently three hitters still sitting above the .400 mark: Charlie Blackmon of the Rockies, DJ Lemahieu of the Yankees, and surprise contestant Donovan Solano of the Giants. Now, the odds of any of them maintaining this status over the other two-thirds of the season are still quite slim, but they are not zero -- something that couldn’t be said during a regular season.
However, a more interesting chase may be happening on the mound. As I wrote about earlier last week, we currently have four starting pitchers who are on pace to break Bob Gibson’s single-season ERA record of 1.12 -- a feat that would be staggering even in a sixty game season. And this is not even mentioning some of the other, smaller stat chases going on throughout this season. For example, will we see someone hit 20 home runs (a 60-homer pace)? Will a pitcher record over 100 strikeouts (a 300-K pace)? Perhaps most importantly, will we see a team win 46 games and record the highest single-season win percentage in MLB history? Who knows for sure? All I can say is that these chases are going to make an already-interesting season even more fun to watch.
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Forget .400, These Pitchers are On Pace For an Even Crazier Feat
Our biggest obstacle is human stupidity
The fact that this season is happening at all is a testament to the weeks of negotiations, preparations, and regulations MLB and the Player’s Union have put into place. But in baseball, as in life, the only thing you can’t prepare for is the sheer extent of human stupidity. This season has been in jeopardy from almost the moment it started, as the Marlins had a COVID-19 outbreak on Opening Weekend stemming from multiple players breaking quarantine and going out (allegedly “for a milk”). Shortly after that, the Cardinals had their own preventable outbreak - this time from a casino outing - that postponed all of their games for nearly two whole weeks. And even after players had seen the consequences of selfish behavior, the commissioner warned that the season is in danger, and MLB tightened their pandemic regulations, Mike Clevinger and Zach Plesac have shown us that players are still selfish and/or stupid enough to keep putting the rest of their teammates and the league in danger.
If there is an ultimate lesson to this 2020 season, it is that the only way we can get through it is for everyone to do their part in keeping everyone safe. There’s no doubt that there is a certain level of stir craziness among the players right now -- god knows most of us in this country have felt that way over the past six months. But just like how we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens to do things like wear masks and keep our distance, these players have a responsibility to their team and the game of baseball to do their part in keeping their teammates safe and the season going. If they can’t do that...well, let’s just say that the last twenty games will have ultimately been for nothing.