2020 MLB Season: How crazy will stats be this year?

Today, we take a deep-dive look into just how crazy stats could look in an abbreviated 2020 MLB season.

It turns out, there will be a 2020 MLB season after all!

The game we love is coming back, just in a much different form than we are used to as the season is now shortened from 162 games to just 60.

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162 games is obviously a much larger sample size than 60 games, and smaller sample sizes generally mean more variance and outliers. This will certainly apply to player stats in the 2020 MLB season.

Over 162 games each year the best teams and players are shown at the end as they have proven themselves for over 6 months long. The hot and cold streaks that come with the long season are evened out over the long duration, but in 2020 one long hot or cold streak is the majority of a season for a team or player.

The question now is how crazy will the stats for individual players be, and we don’t really know the exact answer to that because we’ve never seen anything like this year before.

One thing I would expect is to still see the league leaders in most stats to be covered mainly by the elite players still. I would also expect to see some of the better players to not be at the top and some lesser-known players to surprise us in the 60 games.

If you just look at last year from July 24th (possible 2020 Opening Day) to the end of the season, the league leaders are exactly like what I previously said.

Looking at wOBA (weigthed on-base average), the top 10 players from July 24th on were Nelson Cruz, Alex Bregman, Ketel Marte, Marcus Semien, Yordan Alvarez, Jorge Soler, JD Martinez, Eugenio Suarez, Nolan Arenado, and Anthony Rendon.

All of these guys are some of the more elite hitters in baseball. They’re not the exact 10 best players in the MLB, but they all are still All-Star level players.

Then right outside of this top 10, is JD Davis of the NY Mets having the 11th best wOBA in this time frame. Other surprising guys include Mark Chana, Ji-Man Choi, Kyle Seager, and Yuli Gurriel who were all top 25 in the MLB in wOBA in this time frame.

All those guys are really good hitters but are definitely not at all who you’d predict to be top 25 in wOBA for the season. Yet this duration is basically what the 2020 season will be so you can expect to see more unfamiliar names at the top of statistical categories this year for sure.

In this stretch of the season, 2019 NL MVP Cody Bellinger ranked 60th with a .359 wOBA, while his .415 wOBA ranked 5th for the entire season.

This example right here shows just how different results in 60 games could be from 162 games. In 162 games Bellinger proved to be worthy of NL MVP, yet in this particular stretch of about 60 games, he was a really good player, just not anywhere close to an MVP level.

On the pitching side of things, take a look at Jack Flaherty in 2019. From July 24th on he had an ERA of 0.92 en route to a historical second half. That is the kind of stretch we could only imagine season from a reliever in a full season.

All-Star Luis Castillo of the Cincinnati Reds had a 5.08 ERA in this timeframe while carding a 2.36 ERA for the rest of the season. These are the types of differences we could see in 2020.

Great pitchers could be historically great or surprisingly disappointing in a much smaller sample size. This season won’t be anything close to normal so we better be prepared to see just about anything.

We could see someone like Jackie Bradley Jr have an amazing 2 months as he did to start the 2016 season with a .331 AVG and 1.010 OPS. We could also see average production from some of the most talented players.

Stats will be very different in 2020 and if there’s one thing to take away here, it’s that fans certainly shouldn’t overreact to players under and overproducing in 2020. Anything way out of the norm is more of a long hot/cold streak until we see longer-term results.