On top of all those strange new rules, there’s another twist to baseball this March: the return of the World Baseball Classic, the always-entertaining tournament that is essentially baseball’s equivalent of the World Cup. (The rules are similar, too, with a 20-team group stage followed by an eight-team knockout round.) Thanks to the pandemic, it […]
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. Yesterday was supposed to be Opening Day of the 2022 Major League Baseball season, but it was delayed a week (to next Thursday, April 7) by a contentious labor dispute between players and team owners that lasted much of the winter. The MLB lockout left fans feeling frustrated […]
After a long, painful, drawn-out negotiating process that never actually yielded a new agreement between owners and players, it looks like Major League Baseball is going to happen in 2020 regardless. The regular season will be 60 games, starting around July 24 and lasting a little over two months, with a standard October postseason. Needless […]
In the midst of the 1994-95 baseball strike, 38 players received surprising news: They had been granted free agency. They were a new type of free agent — a restricted free agent. Players with at least four years of service time in the major leagues but fewer than six — which is still required to […]
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from previous articles about how our MLB predictions work. With spring upon us once again, it’s time to roll out FiveThirtyEight’s baseball predictions for another season of major league action. We first introduced our MLB team ratings during the 2015 postseason and used them to survey the playoff picture. […]