Athlon Sports Preseason Sports Magazine's provide in-depth analysis of the upcoming seasons and events. Each preview includes great feature stories, team previews, depth charts, predictions, schedules and more.
Let’s set the pandemic aside for a moment and celebrate what we still have. Baseball hasn’t gone away; in fact, it’s being played at a very high level, with all-time greats plying their trade and the analytics revolution allowing us to enjoy the game with a deeper intensity and understanding than ever before. Two of those all-time greats feature heavily in this year’s magazine. The Dodgers’ acquisition of Mookie Betts was the final piece of a championship puzzle, but it was more than that — L.A.’s successful pursuit of Betts was a seismic event that will impact the game for years to come. We dig deeper into that fascinating chapter in recent history in Matt Trueblood’s feature story “The Trade That Changed Everything.” Then there’s Mike Trout. Like Ted Williams…
FEBRUARY Feb. 10: The Red Sox trade Mookie Betts to the Dodgers, marking the fifth time an MVP winner has been traded since Aug. 2017. JULY July 23: The 2020 season begins, snapping a stretch of 266 days without regular-season or postseason games since the 2019 World Series ended — the longest such stretch in MLB history. July 23: New Yankee and former Astro Gerrit Cole faces off against the Nationals’ Max Scherzer on Opening Day, after the two started against each other in Game 1 of the 2019 World Series. It’s just the second time that two starters who faced off in a game of the prior World Series have met on Opening Day. July 24: The Blue Jays start an infield — Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Vladimir Guerrero…
A TEAM • Started players who were all sons of major leaguers in the first four spots in the lineup in a game (Blue Jays, July 24). • Started players born in Cuba in the first four spots in the lineup in a game (White Sox, Aug. 1). • Played a doubleheader in which both games were scheduled for fewer than nine innings in the modern era (Aug. 2, Reds/Tigers). • Had four pitchers register a 10-strikeout game in the team’s first seven games of a season in the modern era (Indians). • Used nine different starting pitchers in the first nine games of a season in the modern era (Marlins). • Hit back-to-back home runs to lead off a game twice off the same pitcher in the same season…
1. THE IMPACT OF THE VIRUS It’s an outcome no one could have ever conceived: an officially sanctioned regular season with a combined paid attendance of zero. That was life in 2020 for Major League Baseball, which whittled its season to 60 games because of the coronavirus and barred all ticket sales until the NLCS and World Series in Texas. Alas, with the pandemic still raging at press time, 2021 presents more of the great unknown — but the games in Texas, at least, showed that limited, socially distanced attendance was feasible. The possibility of fans, then, is the overwhelming factor that most consumes us for this season. How will varying state regulations impact attendance — and, subsequently, team revenues? Will health or financial concerns keep fans from the ballpark…
The COVID-19 pandemic shortened and distorted the 2020 MLB season, so drawing any overpowering, sweeping conclusions from it is a fool’s errand. On the other hand, as we head into the 14th season of the pitch-tracking era and the sixth year of the league’s increasingly ubiquitous Statcast system, smaller and smaller sample sizes are able to tell us more and more. Further, many of the trends we saw develop in 2020 reflected or extended ones we’d seen over the previous handful of seasons. The biggest theme of MLB, at this moment, is the extraordinary pace of change, and last year only magnified and accelerated that. In numerous ways, as the 2021 season dawns, pitching is an ultramodern art form built on the foundations of a recognizable but distinctly different one,…
Just as technology informed an evolution in pitching strategy and evaluation, it’s facilitated a crucial expansion of our understanding and appreciation for the other half of the battery. Catchers’ ability to win strikes and influence umpires by presenting pitches well on the edges of the strike zone has been quantified for over a decade and has become the top statistic teams and serious analysts use to evaluate defense behind home plate. Elite framers can create 20 runs of value in a season. There’s always been much more to being a catcher than meets even the careful eye, though, and that’s as true as ever. Good catchers have to be singularly unselfish. The grueling nature of the position requires sacrificing playing time and health. They must be willing to sacrifice their…
