Uncategorized News & Rumors

Several notable players have surpassed the threshold for Super Two status, earning them an extra year of arbitration eligibility.  According to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal (Twitter link), the following players have all gained a fourth arbitration year: Walker Buehler, Clint Frazier, Max Fried, Dominic Smith, Mike Soroka, Juan Soto, Gleyber Torres, Luke Voit, and Brandon Woodruff.  Other players who should qualify include J.D. Davis (as Tim Britton of The Athletic notes via Twitter) and Austin Slater (as per MLB Network’s Jon Heyman).

The official Super Two cutoff point hasn’t yet been established.  The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler reported that Miguel Andujar (who has two years and 117 days of service time) fell five days short of Super Two status, though Jesse Dougherty of the Washington Post reports that the Nationals’ Wander Suero “missed it by just a few days,” and Suero has two years, 123 days of service time.

Of the players mentioned, Frazier has the least amount of service time, with two years and 133 days.  For comparison’s sake, here are the Super Two cutoff points for the last 11 years….

• 2019: 2.115
• 2018: 2.134
• 2017: 2.123
• 2016: 2.131
• 2015: 2.130
• 2014: 2.133
• 2013: 2.122
• 2012: 2.140
• 2011: 2.146
• 2010: 2.122
• 2009: 2.139

As a refresher, all players become eligible for arbitration after they amass three full seasons of Major League service time.  However, of the players who have between two and three seasons of service time, the top 22 percent of that group qualify as Super Twos, and thus they get become arbitration-eligible going into their third season, not after their third season.

Naturally, this means a lot of extra money in these players’ bank accounts, as they’ll get a significant raise on the minimum salary.  For the players who have already posted some big numbers, the ability to not just get an extra arbitration year but to establish a high salary benchmark in that first year provides the opportunity to bank several extra millions of dollars in escalating salaries through their arb years.  For instance, Soto has done nothing but mash at a Cooperstown level since joining the Nationals’ lineup, and is projected to earn between $4.5MM and $8.5MM in his first arb-eligible year.  Assuming Soto keeps producing at anything close to his current rate, he seems like a solid bet to reach $20MM in average annual salary by his fourth year of arbitration eligibility.

This offseason’s arbitration class is unusual, of course, since the shortened season will throw off some of the normal methods for calculating arb salaries.  In his annual arbitration projections for MLBTR, Matt Swartz provided three different methods (and often, three different projected salaries) for each player, depending on how arbiters view 2020 statistics.

It’s time for the MLB Trade Rumors Free Agent Prediction Contest!  Click here to enter your picks for the destinations for our top 50 free agents.  The deadline for entry Friday, November 20th at 11pm central time.  You can edit your picks until then.  Further contest info:

• After the window to make picks has closed, we’ll post a public leaderboard page so you can see who’s winning the contest as players sign with teams.  We’re going to use entrants’ full names on it.  So, if that concerns you, please do not enter the contest.  Entries with inappropriate names will be deleted.
• We are also collecting email addresses, which I will use to notify winners.  I may also send occasional promotional emails for Trade Rumors Front Office.
• If a player signs between now and the close of the contest, that’s a freebie, but you still need to go in and make the correct pick.
• After you submit your picks, you’ll receive an email from Google Forms.  In that email, you’ll see a button that allows you to edit your picks.
• We will announce the winners on MLBTR once all 50 free agents have signed.  We will award $500 to first place, $300 to second place, and $100 to third place.  We will also be giving out ten one-year memberships to Trade Rumors Front Office.  Winners must respond to an email within one week.
• Ties in the correct number of picks will be broken by summing up the rankings of the free agents of the correct picks and taking the lower total.  For example: Tim and Steve each get two picks correct.  Tim gets Trevor Bauer (#1 ranking) and James Paxton (#20 ranking) for a total of 21 points.  Steve gets Ha-Seong Kim (#6) and James McCann (#14) for a total of 20 points.  Steve’s total is lower and he’s ahead of Tim for tiebreaker purposes.

If you have any further questions, ask us in the comment section of this post!  Otherwise, make your picks now!

We’ll be taking reader submissions beginning Monday for our MLB Free Agent Prediction Contest.  Once all the entries are in, we like to put up a leaderboard on the site, which gets updated as players sign with teams.

I’m seeking someone to build a leaderboard from scratch, very similar to this one from last year.  On the backend, I’ll need a place to list the 50 contest free agents, update with the correct teams after each one signs, and import around 7,000 contest entries from Google Forms.  The front end will look and function exactly like this.

If you’re interested in tackling this paid project, please send an email to mlbtrhelp@gmail.com explaining your qualifications.

I’d like to take a brief moment to note that MLB Trade Rumors will no longer be doing posts when players change agencies.  MLBTR readers have consistently ignored those posts, which generally aren’t meaningful for those who don’t work in baseball.  This information is also the source of much drama between agents, in which we have little interest.  We do intend to make an exception and write a post when an agency change is a significant national story, like when Robinson Cano left Scott Boras for Jay-Z.

We’ve had an agency database for many years now, as it’s useful to our writers and a small subset of our readers.  In 2021, I plan to update and maintain this database, make it mobile-friendly, add a change history, and include it as a feature of a Trade Rumors Front Office subscription.

As recently as June, the concept of an expanded Arizona Fall League was under consideration by Major League Baseball. But MLB has now decided to cancel the AFL’s 2020 season, Josh Norris of Baseball America reports.

The AFL is the latest baseball league to fall victim to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has cut this year’s major league season of 162 games to 60 and has canceled the minor league campaign.

Because there’s no minor league ball, teams have placed many of their best young players in their 60-man pool and allowed them to train at their alternate sites. Some of those players will enter their teams’ playoff bubbles or join the fall instructional league. That’s among the reasons there will not be an AFL season this year, per Norris, who adds that MLB had concerns over whether the AFL’s usual sites would have been equipped to handle all of the players, coaches and staff members on each team during a pandemic.

For now, the hope is that the coronavirus will not prevent the 2021 AFL season from occurring. The league’s planning on a normal year then with six teams of 35 players apiece, according to Norris.

Legendary hurler Tom Seaver has passed away, Bill Madden of the New York Daily News reports. He was 75 years of age.

Seaver had recently suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. The Hall of Famer spent time as a broadcaster after wrapping up his playing career and ultimately founded Seaver Family Vineyards.

Over two full decades of excellence at the game’s highest level, Seaver compiled 4,783 innings of 2.86 ERA pitching. He claimed three Cy Young awards and still stands as one of the best pitchers of all time.

Seaver will always be remembered most for his dozen-year run with the Mets, which covered all of his very best seasons. His greatest campaign, perhaps, was a monumental 1971 effort in which he ran up a 1.76 ERA with 9.1 K/9 and 1.9 BB/9 over 286 1/3 frames.

In full, Seaver worked to a 2.57 ERA in over three thousand frames in a Mets uniform. The quality continued over a half-dozen campaigns in Cincinnati. Seaver contributed over a thousand innings of 3.18 ERA ball to the Reds before spending one more season with the Mets and then moving on to the White Sox.

Impressive as he was at his peak, the full measure of Seaver’s excellence is revealed in his ongoing effectiveness even at the tail end of his career. Seaver was one of the twenty or so best pitchers in baseball in his age-40 season with the White Sox, when he worked to a 3.17 ERA in 238 2/3 innings. The legend was dealt to the Red Sox in the middle of the ensuing season, which turned out to be his last.

7:01pm: An agreement has been reached, per Jeff Passan of ESPN. Seven-inning doubleheaders will take effect Aug. 1.

6:12pm: Major League Baseball and the union are moving toward an agreement on 2020 doubleheaders, Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark of The Athletic reports. If the two sides reach a deal, doubleheaders would consist of a pair of seven-inning games, but it would only be for this year, according to Rosenthal and Stark.

The idea behind this would be for teams to preserve their pitchers, per Rosenthal and Stark, and it could give every team a better chance of finishing its 60-game schedule during a pandemic-shortened season.

Teams such as the Marlins, Phillies, Yankees and Blue Jays have already seen their scheduled heavily altered just a week into the season because of coronavirus concerns. Neither Miami nor Philadelphia has played at all this week, and neither will take the field again until Tuesday at the earliest. As a result, they’ll have plenty of ground to make up over the next several weeks. Seven-inning doubleheaders could make it easier for them to catch up.

It seems that Major League Baseball would prefer to avoid a repeat of the Astros’ sign-stealing debacle, a scandal that only worsened when individual players escaped punishment due to a lack of a punitive framework and an exchange of immunity for information.

There’s a new structure for dealing with such matters, should they arise in the future, according to Evan Drellich of The Athletic (subscription link). MLB and the MLB Players Association have agreed to a series of rules that are designed to foreclose the round of controversy we’ve seen recently from the Astros and other teams.

The key here is that the commissioner’s office now has authority to impose suspensions — without pay and service time — against players and personnel. Punishment can be assessed upon a violation of the broad prohibition of utilizing “Electronic Devices or Visual Enhancement Devices during the game to identify, communicate or relay the opposing club’s signs or pitch information.”

There are some added protections for players. They’ll get union representation while the league investigates. Much as in the context of the domestic violence policy, the league will start fresh in terms of precedent for suspension lengths (at least for players). It’ll all be subject to appeal and final determination  by a neutral arbitrator.

The league is also stepping up its monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. The video review rooms will be isolated and communications strictly limited; ultimately, cameras will watch over the proceedings. Trained security professionals from a third-party vendor will watch the door to the doors even to the clubhouse; notably, they’ll be given authority to document and even confront any players or personnel that violate rules such as the ban on in-game cellphone access.

For the time being, players will not be able to watch any kind of live or video feed during a game that features an angle of action that would reveal signs. That will ultimately change, but the league needs time to sort out a system for blotting out signs in the feeds its players will be allowed to access.

It’s all a game of whack-a-mole to some extent, but there’s a key backstop now — a clear threat of suspension — that was lacking previously. The new system is a reflection of the inadequacy of the old one. It would be an improvement if it could ferret out and adequately punish cheaters, but the league hopes for more. If this slate of initiatives really works, the likelihood of being exposed and fear of significant punishment will prevent would-be rule-breakers from even trying.