A Good Year for Marginal Major Leaguers

Just about the only group of MLB-system players who will benefit from the 2020 season are the marginal major leaguers.  Not just the 4-A players who elected to sign with Asian major league teams in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and will get paid for a full season of play, but also the 4-A types who elected to stay in the U.S. this season.

About 11 players are sitting out the 2020 season and 84 have tested positive for Covid-19 so far, opening up a lot of major league roster time for healthy marginal major leaguers to accumulate some service time toward future pension benefits and also maybe show MLB teams they deserve more time in the Show in 2021.  Other players who got hurt in the abbreviated Spring (Summer) Training won’t get to play at all in 2020, which should give the marginal players who do a leg up in 2021.

In fact, the Opening Day line-up for the San Francisco Giants looked to be almost entirely 4-A players, but that may have more to do with the Gints just not being very good this year.

Also, with teams limited to 60 players per organization and just about every team carrying about 8 to 12 top prospects who aren’t yet major league ready but need to get the reps to develop, the 4-A guys are going to get the call when somebody on the major league roster gets hurt.  The groups that really got killed this season are the AAA and AA players good enough to be roster fillers and Class A players not seen as top prospects.  A few of the AAA roster fillers got jobs this year in Taiwan’s CPBL, but with no baseball in Mexico and only very limited play in the Indy-A’s, these guys are SOL.  I’ll be amazed if any Winter Ball is played anywhere this year, which is how a lot of players make enough money to keep playing the next summer.

A full season of no play is just a killer for any player over the age of 27.  Pitchers can come back from Tommy John surgery, but position players, even major league stars, don’t lose a full season and come back the same.

One thing is for sure — now more than ever getting off to hot start when the opportunity comes is everything.  A marginal player who gets hot for 40 games this season is going to look pretty good when the executives are sitting around this winter charting out their teams’ futures.

We’ve all seen players who look great for 40 games in April and May and then the league catches up with them and proves why they haven’t gotten a major league shot before.  Brian LaHair of the 2012 Cubbies springs to mind.  On May 22nd after 40 games he was batting .313 with a 1.028 OPS.  He finished the season at .259 and .784, because the NL figured out he couldn’t hit lefties.  He had to go play in Japan in 2013 and had exactly the same kind of season once NPB teams had figured out he couldn’t hit their lefties either.  This year the league won’t get the same chance to catch up or figure the hot-streaker out.

Covid-19 Will Finish a Lot of Baseball Careers Too

This is a baseball blog, so I’m going to ignore the 130,000+ Americans to date who’ve died of the disease and talk about the impact of the pandemic on the professional lives of professional baseball players.

MLB teams will not only be playing a highly abbreviated 60 game season (pending a negotiated 64 or 66 game season with expanded play-offs, which the owners very much want), but franchise rosters will apparently be limited to 60 players for 2020.  Major league roster limits will be 30-26 during the shortened season, plus a 3-player “taxi squad” in case someone on the major league roster gets hurt or tests positive.

That means only 30 players on the minor league squad.  That isn’t enough to play more than 3-inning practice games.  I haven’t heard whether the minor league squads will be playing against each other.  However, I don’t see how the minor league guys can be ready step into the majors if they aren’t playing games against each other.

The 60-man franchise limit means a lot of minor leaguers won’t be playing baseball in 2020.  Solid, roster-filler AAA players over age 28 will not be included as teams put together their 60-man, as teams will want more promising younger AA players instead, along with all the organization’s top prospects, to whom teams will want to give playing team even if they are initially in over their heads.

I imagine that every single player Class A+ and below who isn’t seen as a top prospect by his team will not being playing any baseball this summer.

For minor league players over the age of 28, a full year off is going to be nearly impossible to come back from, at least for position players.  A full year off at this age is not good for the batting eye or foot speed.

Players in the lower minors under the age of 25 can possibly come back from a full year off, but it’s going to stunt a lot of careers for players who might have been better than their draft pedigree.  And that’s even to say that MLB plays half-way-full minor league seasons in 2021.

The Owners have been fighting to reduce the size of the minor leagues dramatically, and the Coronavirus may mean significant reduction in leagues and levels when things get back to normal compared to immediately before the pandemic struck.

However, it’s been a good year for players from the Americas in Asia in 2020.  KBO and CPBL teams are well into their seasons, and NPB is now almost 14 games in, which probably means that every foreign player in these leagues has received a paycheck, which is more than a lot of pro ball players in the States can say.

And better foreign players are available to Asian teams because the American options have narrowed considerably.  I don’t think there is any way the Kiwoom Heroes sign Addison Russell for $530,000 for the rest of the season in any kind of normal year.

The CPBL should be able to find better foreign pitchers for their money.  Their bread and butter is the kind of 28+ AAA pitcher who isn’t likely to make any team’s 60-man franchise roster.