Mashup: Will a 2020 draftee play in any of the possible 50 MLB games?

Countdown to the 1st round: Latest mock Draft
Jim Callis and Jonathan Mayo, MLB

11. White Sox

Callis: Garrett Crochet, LHP, Tennessee -- Unless Detmers gets here, the White Sox appear to be choosing between Crochet and California prep catcher Tyler Soderstrom, with UCLA outfielder Garrett Mitchell and Abel also possibilities.

Mayo: Garrett Crochet, LHP, Tennessee -- Talk of the White Sox being in on North Carolina State catcher Patrick Bailey has subsided, as has chatter of high school backstop Tyler Soderstrom.

Unanimous pick from the MLB boys. I’d prefer a catcher, myself.

MLB draft: Going to White Sox ‘would be a great story’ for Mount Carmel shortstop Ed Howard
Daryl Van Schouwen, Chicago Sun-Times

White Sox might be setting sights on catcher or pitcher, though, in first round of draft Wednesday.

The 2020 draft starts with the first round tonight, and Ed Howard of the White Sox’s ACE program will be picked ... perhaps even by the Sox themselves.

White Sox take on ‘20 Draft with new outlook
Scott Merkin, MLB

Zoom staff meetings have lasted up to seven hours per day for the last three weeks, per Shirley. They’ve also employed a video service by the name of Synergy, allowing the White Sox to look at every college game over the last three cycles (2018, ’19, ’20).

Mike Shirley made the rounds of every publication last week, in advance of running his very first draft. Tough draw for him, getting this bastardized version. It will be fascinating to see how many undrafted players — potentially hundreds — sign for $20,000 after the proceedings. Even college seniors can’t much afford to get into pro ball buoyed by just a 20k bonus.

What If Mike Trout Only Played 50 Games Every Year?
Craig Edwards, FanGraphs

We seem to be faced with the prospect of a 50-game season in 2020. Getting 50 games is better than getting no baseball at all, but one of the great joys of the sport is seeing Mike Trout, the game’s best player, play baseball three times that often every year. Since the start of the 2012 season, Mike Trout has played in 1,159 games, an average of 145 games per year. During that time, he’s put up 72.7 WAR, an average of 9.1 WAR per season. On a per-50-game basis, Mike Trout has been worth 3.1 WAR, roughly equivalent to the marks put up by Manny Machado and Brian Anderson in 2019.

FanGraphs was really on top of this “50 games” thing, projecting all sorts of small sample size outcomes. The most extraordinary, as if you need more evidence of Mike Trout’s greatness, is his near All-Stardom every season even if limited to just a third of games.

Peering Back at the 2019 Season Through a 50-Game Window
Jay Jaffe, FanGraphs

As Dan Szymborski illustrated in his latest round of ZiPS projections, a lot of strange stuff can happen in just 50 games, including a 28.1% chance of the Dodgers — projected as the best team in baseball over a full 162 games back in March — missing the playoffs and a 0.6% chance of the Marlins winning the World Series. “At 50 games, the ability to meaningfully differentiate between the great and the good, the mediocre and the bad, starts to fade significantly,” wrote Szymborski. “There’s a one-in-five chance that the winner of the World Series will be a team believed to be .500 or worse.”

This sort of reads like we’re feeding a 2020 regular season of 162 games into a Gentlemen Broncos mutator. If the season gets underway, buckle up — it’s gonna be weird.

The goal of this year's Women in Baseball panel? To not have to have one next year
Janice Scurio, South Side Hit Pen at Sports Illustrated

“Women can have eight out of 10 characteristics on a job application, and look at the job description and say, ‘I’m missing these two things.'” And it’s true. We can self-select ourselves out of things as Preusser brings up, or we carry this impostor syndrome where we feel that we don’t belong. In an industry that is full of, well, men, who may not always value our opinions, that’s valid.

A really cool symposium that included SSS alum Janice on its panel. This is a really terrific read and watch. The punch line to the above application is that a guy will look at the description, have five of 10 qualities, and say “I’m PERFECT for this gig!”

Morning Music
Have we done any Elvis here yet? I don’t think so.

It’s a tribute to Elvis Costello’s utter brilliance is that most critics and aficionados would name 50, or 100, or 150 better E.C. songs than “The Other Side of Summer” — it’s from his lost-soul, vitriolic hairy hippie album, after all. Out of the lost years between Attractions and Impostors, searching for a band and some grounding (just off the top of my head, in this short period between core bands, Elvis did albums with an opera singer, a string quartet, an oldies album, and countless other weirdnesses), Costello put out some pretty incredible music. See if you can catch at least three direct references to pop classics Elvis takes the piss out of in this anti-summer jingle.