Springtime in baseball is rife with expectation for pitchers. It’s a new year, and over the offseason, players have been working on their craft, whether that be tweaking their pitches, adjusting their mechanics or getting their minds right. Spring training allows players to practice those changes in a simulated setting, but it’s not until a […]
After MLB’s lukewarm interest in free agency the past few seasons, this winter could bring an even less active marketplace. COVID-19 slashed baseball revenues in 2020, and teams are expected to cut payroll next season, which could hurt the middle class of free agents particularly hard. But even during this recent trend away from high-dollar […]
The Washington Nationals are no strangers to long-shot comeback bids. At multiple junctures in last year’s World Series run, their odds of being eliminated were extremely high — from the 84 percent chance they had to miss the playoffs in late May (after starting the season 19-31), to the 87 percent chance they had to […]
Welcome to the second part of our 2020 baseball season breakdown, based on our MLB prediction model. To help make sense of the contenders and also-rans of this strange season, we plugged the shortened schedule into our forecast model and simulated it 100,000 times, tracking each team’s expected record and its odds of winning the […]
SAN DIEGO — Gerrit Cole was a fan of the New York Yankees as a kid. The Yankees have also long been admirers of Cole, drafting him in the first round in 2008 when Cole was then a high school senior. Cole spurned the Yankees; he opted to attend UCLA instead, and he was selected […]