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Shelby Miller Opts Out Of 2020 Season

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Righty Shelby Miller has opted out of the 2020 season, the Brewers announced. He had been working out at the team’s alternative training site.

Miller, once an exciting young MLB hurler, has fallen on hard times on the mound of late. He has thrown only 82 innings in the majors over the past three seasons due to a combination of injuries and ineffectiveness.

The Brewers had inked Miller to a minor-league pact in hopes of unlocking some of his former promise. Now, we’ll have to wait and see whether Miller elects to mount another comeback attempt next spring.

Miller joins a still-growing list of players who have opted out of the campaign.

MLB To Cancel Field Of Dreams Game

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Major League Baseball has decided to cancel the “Field of Dreams Game” it had previously scheduled for August 13. The Cardinals and White Sox were supposed to square off in the famed Iowa cornfield.

The Cardinals are currently waiting to see just how bad an internal COVID-19 outbreak turns out to be. No matter how far it has spread, a significant portion of the team will be sidelined for some time and the organization will be forced to scramble to fill out a club.

While that would seem at first glance to be a rather important factor in the decision, Rosenthal says that wasn’t the driving force. Rather, it’s “a logistical problem,” per the report. It’s not entirely clear why those considerations are only now counseling in favor of cancellation, but it was undoubtedly a tricky undertaking even before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Yankees Place Tommy Kahnle On IL, Recall Jordan Montgomery

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9:20pm: Kahnle will “likely” require Tommy John surgery, Jon Heyman of MLB Network tweets.

5:03pm: The Yankees have announced a pair of roster moves in advance of tonight’s game. Righty Tommy Kahnle was moved to the 10-day injured list with what the team termed a “right ulnar collateral ligament injury.” He’ll be replaced by southpaw Jordan Montgomery.

That’s a worrisome addition to earlier news on Kahnle, who had previously been described as suffering from forearm tightness. The reliever was slated to undergo an MRI and visit team physician Dr. Chris Ahmad.

Soon to turn 31, Kahnle had seemed primed to occupy an important role in the Yanks’ pen in 2020. After a rough 2018 showing, he bounced back last season by throwing 61 1/3 innings of 3.67 ERA ball with 12.9 K/9 and 2.9 BB/9.

Montgomery is moving in precisely the other direction. The 27-year-old has been limited to eight appearances over the past two seasons owing to Tommy John surgery. He’s now hoping to regain the promising trajectory he was on before the elbow woes arose.

Future Salary Obligations Of All 30 Teams

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Recently, we ran through the full slate of future financial commitments teams have made to MLB players. As I explained throughout that series of posts, there are several different ways to look at salaries. Since the purpose of this exercise is to see where teams stand as we enter a period of massive uncertainty in the player market, we utilized actual cash still due beyond the 2020 campaign. That includes signing bonuses, deferred money, and money owed to since-traded players.

Every individual team’s breakout can be found at this link. Little has changed since, with one notable exception: the sizable Mookie Betts deal now resides on the Dodgers’ balance sheet. It’s reflected in the charts below. Now, we can put it all together to see how every team stacks up around the game. There’s over $7B in total future commitments tallied here. We’ll break it out in several ways (all charts in millions of dollars).

This chart shows total future MLB guaranteed contract commitments, in the aggregate.

Future MLB Contracts
2021 $4,146.86
2022 $3,459.90
2023 $3,069.35
2024 $2,730.37
2025 $2,464.12
2026+ $1,378.47
Total $7,134.08

And here we have each team’s total future commitments. These numbers would look different if we applied a discount rate, of course. Some teams with longer-fuse commitments (the Brewers and Dodgers, for example) would come out looking lighter. But there’s no single correct discount rate to apply, particularly in times as uncertain as these. So we’ll stick with a simple tally.

Rank Team Total
1 Angels $651.00
2 Yankees $612.00
3 Dodgers $533.36
4 Nationals $488.68
5 Phillies $488.50
6 Padres $396.00
7 Red Sox $355.85
8 Rockies $337.50
9 White Sox $317.75
10 Brewers $299.30
11 Reds $290.88
12 Astros $254.79
13 Cardinals $230.75
14 Cubs $228.50
15 Braves $204.53
16 Mets $201.00
17 Diamondbacks $166.43
18 Twins $154.02
19 Giants $129.15
20 Blue Jays $122.07
21 Mariners $115.45
22 Orioles $106.00
23 Tigers $102.00
24 Rangers $101.50
25 Rays $101.17
26 Indians $40.65
27 Royals $38.75
28 Athletics $37.00
29 Pirates $15.25
30 Marlins $14.25

The most interesting way to look at the numbers is to examine all the teams’ commitments in the same chart, by year. But that’s also tough to present in a legible manner. You’ll have to click on these to see all the details.

First, the top 15 teams by total commitments (link to expand):

And now the bottom 15 teams (link to expand):

Dodgers To Activate Clayton Kershaw

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The Dodgers will activate star lefty Clayton Kershaw, manager Dave Roberts told reporters including MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick (Twitter link). He’ll make his season debut on Sunday.

Kershaw had been sidelined to this point with back tightness. That’s not necessarily a major concern in and of itself, but the surefire future Hall of Famer has had particular troubles in that area over the years.

Thankfully, it seems this flare-up was a minor one. Kershaw, 32, has rather clearly declined in recent years. He was nevertheless capable of spinning 178 1/3 innings of 3.03 ERA ball in 2019.

Manfred Warned Clark Of Possible Season Shutdown

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4:29pm: Teams have been issued a memo with new regulations, Scott Miller of Bleacher Report reports (Twitter links), including the requirement of a compliance officer who will monitor on and off-field personnel decisions.

The league investigated the Marlins situation, Miller adds. It determined that the club was “very lapse” in avoiding settings with a greater risk of transmission.

MLB also announced its most recent testing results. Twenty players and nine staff members have tested positive in the past week. Twenty-one of those positive results came from one organization, which is obviously by this point known to be the Marlins.

4:05pm: It sounds as if there’s serious contemplation of a potential end to the just-launched 2020 MLB campaign. Per Jeff Passan of ESPN.com, commissioner Rob Manfred informed MLBPA chief Tony Clark that the league could halt the campaign if problematic recent developments aren’t turned around.

While this could and may yet become a contentious matter, it doesn’t sound as if the message was intended as a threat. Passan labels it, instead, as a “reality check” for the sport. Both owners and players would obviously suffer financially if the season is punted.

The concerns are by now well-known. More than half of the Marlins’ active roster has come down with COVID-19 and the team isn’t playing presently. The Phillies are also on ice since they recently played the Miami org. And now two members of the Cardinals have tested positive.

It sounds as if the commissioner’s office could contemplate a cancellation or pause as soon as Monday. The hope is that the Marlins-related outbreak will be contained and that the Cards won’t have further positive tests. The worst-case scenario would be for members of still other organizations to come down with infections.

It seems there’s also a broader concern with the way players are behaving on and off the field — with some government officials evidently conveying issues to the league. Rule-breaking behavior captured on cameras doesn’t make for a good look, though in many cases it’s not especially risky for transmission. But it sounds as if league officials have identified high-risk actions occurring elsewhere in the ballpark and away from the field of play.

There’s ample blame to go around for this situation. Player responsibility is an easy target, and may well be at play in some cases, but there’s far more to it than that. Travel poses obvious transmission opportunities, even for those that strictly adhere to protocols. And the Marlins-Phillies fiasco — in which informally ascertained player sentiment was inexplicably allowed to drive decisionmaking — shows that there have been leadership and planning failures from the highest levels of the league on down.

Of course, the largest factor in the difficulty of pulling off a season isn’t really in the control of Manfred, Clark, or any of those they’re paid to lead. With tens of thousands of Americans testing positive every day, and many more surely coming down with uncounted infections, it’s awfully difficult to keep the virus from infiltrating traveling baseball teams and/or the many people involved in staging games.

Kohl Stewart Opts Out Of 2020 Season

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Orioles hurler Kohl Stewart has opted out of the 2020 season, the team announced. He will receive his salary and service time because he was in a heightened risk category.

As Stewart discussed in a statement, he has type 1 diabetes. He says he’s at least pausing his participation. O’s manager Brandon Hyde made clear that the team supports his decision.

This was surely a tough call for the 25-year-old. While he was once a #4 overall draft pick, Stewart washed out with the Twins and entered the season hoping for a fresh start after the O’s signed him to a minor-league deal over the offseason. He started the season on the active roster but had not yet appeared in game action.

Stewart has been added to MLBTR’s list of players that have opted out of the 2020 season.

MLB, Union Agree To Rules Changes

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JULY 31: The 7-inning doubleheader rule is now official. There’s no word yet on the proposed roster extension.

JULY 29, 2:04pm: These measures are union requests that the league is presently considering, per Joel Sherman of the New York Post (via Twitter).

1:45pm: It appears that the recent run of COVID-19 infections within the Marlins organization has prompted further contemplation of rules changes. The MLB Players’ Association has reached out to its members to gauge their sentiment regarding a few potential tweaks, per Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic (Twitter links).

Most notably, it appears the union has discussed with the league the possibility of keeping the 30-man active roster in effect all season long. The plan had been for it to ramp down to 26 players over the course of the campaign. But there’s now consideration of maintaining maximum flexibility for the entirety of the season.

The idea here, presumably, would be to make it easier for teams to manage workloads and deal with any coronavirus-related matters that arise. With more players to work with, for example, it’s easier to be proactive with isolating anyone who may have experienced possible transmission.

The other potential modification relates to doubleheaders. It’s possible the league could utilize a pair of seven-inning games or a regular nine-inning contest followed by a shorter, seven-inning affair. That would make it easier to squeeze in twin bills, as may well be needed to accommodate the scheduling modifications that have already proven necessary.

In both cases, the matters appear only to be under consideration at this time. Ghiroli cautions that “no firm decisions” have been reached just yet.

Rangers Select Greg Bird, Jimmy Herget; Designate Ariel Jurado

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The Rangers announced they’ve selected the contracts of first baseman Greg Bird and righty Jimmy Herget. To create 40-man space, the team designated righty Ariel Jurado for assignment.

Bird, 27, turned in an impressive showing upon his call-up in 2015 but has fallen flat since. He dealt with numerous injuries and couldn’t replicate his early success with the Yankees. The Texas org picked him up on a minors deal over the offseason.

As for Herget, who’s closing in on his 27th birthday, this’ll be his second look. He threw 6 1/3 innings last year with the Reds, failing to record a strikeout. In 58 1/3 Triple-A frames last year, he worked to a 2.91 ERA with 10.4 K/9 against 5.5 BB/9.

Jurado, 24, was dropped after getting quite a few looks over the past two seasons. He carries a 5.85 ERA in his 177 career innings at the game’s highest level. He hadn’t yet appeared in 2020.

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