Should we worry about the WBC?
Rosters announced for World Baseball Classic
Good Morning,
The World Baseball Classic rosters have been announced. This is the last Friday before pitchers & catchers report to camp. We can enjoy the Super Bowl on Sunday and then let the baseball season begin!
Today, I will dive into the potential injury and performance impact from playing in the World Baseball Classic.
Before we get into that, let’s catch you up on the latest news.
📺 SNY NEGOTIATIONS: Finally, there appears to be some progress between SNY and Keith Hernandez in contract talks, per Mike Puma. He notes there is still work to be done, but the two sides are “not far apart on a new multi-year deal.”
🏈 SUPER BOWL AD: The Mets will run a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl in the New York market. We were treated to a peek of it yesterday, and it is marvelous.
A person briefed on the team’s plans estimated the total value (including production costs) of the ad buys was $1.5 million, per The Athletic.
“I come from brands that had hundreds of millions of dollars of ad budget. In the Mets’ world, no, this is not cheap,” the team’s chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg told The Athletic. “This is a calculated risk, but it’s nowhere near what a national ad would ever come close to costing. And in my mind, from a brand perspective, from my history, this is an incredible value investment. … The additional social, the other content we’ll get, the value outweighs the spend by a long shot.”
🤑 MARKETING: If you think about it, this is a pretty brilliant strategy by the Mets. Baseball publications are scraping for Super-Bowl-related content over the next few days. The ad is already spreading over the internet. There have been several articles written about it. The Mets might have paid a pretty penny to buy the ad slot during the game, but they will receive plenty of free press to add to their impressions (as they are in this newsletter this morning).
📚 LEARN MORE: Why the Mets took out a Super Bowl commercial, by Evan Drellich, The Athletic ($)
🌎 WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC: The Mets will be represented by 10 major leaguers and five prospects at the World Baseball Classic. In addition to the names listed below, prospects Jonathan Araúz (PAN), Dominic Hamel (PR), Humberto Mejia (PAN), Cam Opp (UK) and Claudio Scotti (ITL) will participate.
📌 FRONT OFFICE: Longtime executive Bryn Alderson is leaving the organization and his role as assistant general manager, per Andy Martino. The news of the son of outgoing team president Sandy Alderson leaving the team comes on the heels of the Mets hiring Carlos Beltrán as a special assistant to GM Billy Eppler.
Meanwhile, the search for a new Mets president is ongoing. As Martino notes, the organization is looking for a president “focused on revenue growth.” This is separate from the president of baseball operations.
🍎 DOUBLE-A COACHES: We now know the full coaching staff for Double-A affiliate Binghamton. Reid Brignac continues his progression, jumping from manager of St. Lucie to Double-A. Mariano Duncan will be the team’s bench coach; A.J. Sager, the pitching coach; and Darin Everson the hitting coach.
With the World Baseball Classic around the corner, I thought it was a good time to dig into whether having players participate in the tournament is something the Mets (and their fans) should worry about.
We know Buck Showalter isn’t thrilled about the number of Mets he will lose for a large chunk of spring training. The reasoning is clear: his team has championship aspirations, you don’t want to risk someone getting injured in what is essentially a marketing event.
Should we be worried? That’s the question I want to unpack today.
🌎 HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The World Baseball Classic started in 2006. This year will be the fifth installment of the tournament. It is supposed to take place every four years, but because of the pandemic, we haven’t had one since 2017. Still, we have four tournaments of data to use in this analysis.
Drawing from each tournament’s rosters, I created a mini database of players to evaluate how they performed in the subsequent season. I also pulled from outside analysis to provide a broad perspective on various areas of potential impact.
🤕 INJURY RISK
The biggest concern about participating in the WBC is injury risk. Nobody wants to lose a key player in March, and especially if said player hurts themselves playing for someone else.
Evaluating the impact of the WBC on injuries isn’t as straight forward as you would think. We can look at how many players got hurt during or in the aftermath of the tournament in any given season. What we don’t know is whether those players would have suffered an injury anyway.
For instance, we remember Seth Lugo experiencing soreness in the 2017 WBC that turned into a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in his right elbow. Or that Brandon Nimmo pulling his hamstring. It’s easy to point to those cases as reason why the Mets should just stay home during the spring. But let’s not forget the injuries that happened to players who didn’t participate — like Steven Matz developing elbow soreness that lingered throughout the season.
If a player gets injured during the WBC, everyone will point to that as reason why they shouldn’t have played in the tournament. However, the data doesn’t suggest an extreme link.
The most comprehensive study I could find was conducted by The Ringer on injuries following the 2006, 2009 and 2013 tournaments. The analysis found WBC pitchers lost about four more days to injury during their WBC years than they did during the surrounding seasons; while WBC hitters lost slightly less than one more day to injury during their WBC years.
Compare that to a controlled group of players who didn’t participate in the WBC in those given years, and we find a larger injury gap, particularly for pitchers. In other words, there’s not enough evidence to suggest competing in the World Baseball Classic led to an increased rate of injury.
To put it another way, there are going to be injuries, regardless of whether there is a WBC or not. It just sticks out more when an injury happens to someone who was active in the tournament.
Plus, there are rules to try to limit injuries. Pitchers can only throw 65 pitches during a first-round game, 80 in a quarterfinal and 95 in the championship round. They are essentially ramping up the same way they would under normal spring conditions, albeit in higher stress situations.
💪 PERFORMANCE
What about performance? How do players fare after competing in the World Baseball Classic? Does it jumpstart their bats? Boost their command?
An analysis by Beyond the Box Score (where I used to write) of the three WBCs before 2017 found, “Of the 274 players that saw their WAR fluctuate from the year before the classic to the year of, 160 (58.4 percent) players saw a negative change and lost an average of -0.3 wins.”
Adding on top of that analysis, I pulled data from 2017 and found strikingly similar results with 41 of 72 qualified hitters (56.9%) experiencing a negative change in their WAR relative to the season preceding the classic. For pitchers, half of those (32 of 64) who tossed at least 20 innings in both the prior and current year of the WBC saw a negative change in their WAR.
Of course, looking strictly at the group’s WAR differences is a bit simplistic. There are several factors that contribute to how a player performs in a given season. The group is also a year older.
As you would expect, it depends on the player. In fact, Francisco Lindor had one of his best seasons following the last World Baseball Classic. Only three participants finished with a higher WAR that year, and only two came out of the gates with a hotter bat.
Focusing on key Mets from 2017, along with players who are currently on the team, and we find a mixed bag of results. As we know, both Lugo and Nimmo missed the start of that season with WBC-related injuries. However, they both ended up building on their rookie campaigns to produce more value that year. We talked about Lindor already. If you recall, former Mets shortstop, Jose Reyes, struggled after the 2017 WBC. He would turn it on later in the summer. It was also in the twilight of his career.
Two more names that jump off the list above are Edwin Díaz and Starling Marte. They both had down seasons in 2017. Díaz was only a second-year reliever, starting to figure out who he was. Marte had the worst season of his career, suffering an ankle injury during the Dominican team’s run.
🔻 BOTTOM LINE: Depending on how you sort through the data, you can always find something that you can point to as reason why the WBC is a good or bad thing. But I don’t see anything conclusive to suggest players are at a much higher risk of injury or of performance degradation from participating. It’s a case-by-case situation.
◾️ Yu Darvish and the Padres agreed on a six-year, $108 million extension that will pay him through is Age-42 season.
◾️ In an extension of the PitchCom system, MLB will allow pitchers to wear wristbands in Spring Training that will allow them to call their own pitch instead of receiving a signal from the catcher.
🔗 Inside the Lab: How an empty storefront became a Harlem hot spot for MLB pitchers, by Joon Lee, ESPN: “Adam Ottavino never expected The Lab to turn into this. The New York Mets reliever just wanted a place in the city to throw in the offseason, something that can be hard to find here in the winter months. Heading into the 2018 season, Ottavino -- then with the Colorado Rockies-- converted what used to be a Nine West shoe store underneath an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese on St. Nicholas Ave. in Harlem into an advanced pitching facility, decked out with cameras that measure pitch spin rates and iPads that provide pitchers with instant feedback.”
And we close this one out with a this date in Mets’ history…
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No sweat. As an intern at State Department I asked my boss for comment on my grad school application essay. He said “ it’s great if you want to study in S América”. I had misspelled Columbia U!
I fixed it, got in, passed the Foreign Service exam… and State sent me to Colombia just to be sure I got the spelling down!
Happy weekend!
Three days until we start seeing palm trees on a daily basis. Life is good.