The Mythology of Reporting Early

Is it always a good thing to show up early?

What does it mean to report to Spring Training early? Is it a sign of renewed determination? A portent of big production in the coming season? Junior Caminero has reported early to camp, like so many other players do every year, but what — if anything — does that tell us?

Several times during my years working for the Miami Marlins analytics department, I was tasked to find out what Spring Training means. That sounds more philosophical than the work actually was. But annually, I got the same answer: Not a whole lot.

The same was true for the Winter Leagues, in both LIDOM and the Grapefruit or Cactus leagues. We are dealing with not only very small samples of performance, but uniquely biased samples. In LIDOM, we have current MLB All-Stars facing off against competition ranging from 22-year-old Double-A prospects to 42-year-old pros who have been out of the league for 10 years. Moreover, the hitters are not getting the same Advance information typical MLB or even Minor League teams provide (previously called Advance Scouting, modern Advance reports tend to be documents or tools for visualizing pitch shapes and pitcher tendencies, hitter strengths and weaknesses, and so on), and the small number of teams means players are facing off against the same players repeatedly.

Similar problems exist in Spring Training, where the MLB is split in twain, half in Arizona and half scattered across Florida. And since the Florida Spring Training locations are so far apart (ranging from Fort Myers to Jupiter on southern end, and going as far north as Clearwater and Lakeland on the northern end), most Grapefruit schedules are heavily weighted towards the nearest neighbors. With the Marlins, we played the Astros, Nationals, and Mets (our 3 nearest neighbors) so frequently that we were able to recycle enormous amounts of our Advance reports. We started to get familiar with their High-A pitching staff and their backup Triple-A catcher.

So the metrics produced by those games — even the good stuff, like contact rate, velocity, Chase%, and so on — are all pretty compromised. It is not MLB-setting equivalent.

I say all this as preamble. I want it to be clear that I did serious, statistical work in this space, and found very little.

So what does reporting early to camp mean?

Here’s a tragically funny article from last year noting that Javier Baez and members of the Detroit Tigers rotation all reported early to the 2024 Spring Training. It includes this ominous note:

The Tigers have at least six starting pitchers entering spring training: left-hander Tarik Skubal and right-handers Kenta Maeda, Jack Flaherty, Casey Mize, Matt Manning and Reese Olson. If all six remain healthy, all six could end up on the Opening Day roster.

Javier Baez (-0.7 fWAR) had an injury-shortened worse year of his career, and only Tarik Skubal (Cy Young and AL Triple Crown winner) and Jack Flaherty (traded to the Dodgers mid-season) actually remained healthy. The Tigers limped into the playoffs on an opener-heavy “rotation,” bolstered by Skubal’s easy-mode-video-game numbers.

In other words, for the Tigers last year, the range of outcomes from early reports could not have been wider.

Last year, Shohei Ohtani reported to Dodgers camp early and then broke a bunch of records during what may well be the greatest DH season of all time. In 2023, a number of players reported early on account of the World Baseball Classic (most needed to at least check in with their team before heading out to the competition, and all the pitchers needed to get their pre-season build-up started). In 2022, we were coming off the lockout, and only minor leaguers reported early. In 2021, we were still coming off the pandemic, and the motivations for reporting early or late had a lot more factors behind than just simple “want-to.”

Hey. It’s been a weird couple of decades these last few years, hasn’t it?

The motivations for reporting early are varied, but they are more complicated and nuanced than I think we (or even the players) are willing to acknowledge. We often see these players only in the context of their baseball lives, but things in real life are more complicated. I remember watching Joey Wendle after a Spring Training game, playing on one of the backfields with his two young kids. I gave a presentation to a group of minor leaguers once during Spring Training, with an infant baby sleeping on the chest of our High-A second baseman.

In other cases, we had serous talks about “...if this [long-time MLB player’s] dad comes around, we have to make sure security and the player is aware.” And other instances of “[this established MLB player] never reports early because he has 6 kids to take care of.”

Some of the very real reasons a player may choose to report early to camp:

• Money: This differs from team to team, and year to year (depending on the CBA), but typically, when a player is invited to attend Spring Training early, the team is going to pay for meals and housing. That’s a big deal for guys on the fringe, making max $40K a season, pushing grocery carts in the winter.
• Family Situation: This one goes both ways — some players are eager to get the season going because the home life isn’t comfortable (or safe). Others are hanging on to every spare moment with their loved ones before they go into that grueling dark tunnel that is a pro baseball season.
• Team Politics: Guys on the bubble are looking for any edge to prove to the decision-makers that they deserve that slot in Double-A or as the backup catcher or whatever. Some may try to use the early time to lobby the coaching staff for strategic changes or specific Advance tools or baseball tech.
• Health: Some guys — many guys, actually — are reporting early to either get ahead of lingering health issues, or because they are concerned there is a health issue. Throwing programs in the winter tend to be pretty light affairs, but once Spring Training rolls around, pitchers may again put their body to the test. They start throwing max effort pitches in increasing quantity, and if they have any medical concerns (spoken or unspoken), reporting early can help get ahead of those concerns.

Which brings me to the biggest, most meaningful metric of Spring Training: HEALTH.

Last year, the Tigers and the Dodgers had the best two records in Spring Training, and the White Sox led the world in losses. That feels meaningful, but if we expand that study to multiple seasons, we find that overall Spring Training records only have modest correlations with season performance.

What has a strong correlation to season results is the health of a squad departing Spring Training. Last year with the Marlins, we lost Eury Perez, Jesus Luzardo, and Braxton Garrett to Spring Training injuries, while already missing Sandy Alcantara. We knew the playoffs were out of reach from Game No. 1. (Maybe a team with a better offense could weather that storm of injuries, but even our intriguing pitching depth was insufficient to replace that much top-end talent.)

Reporting early is not a good measure of desire to win. I think you will find every clubhouse has a population of +90% players who want to win. They were winners as kids, dominating amateur levels as All-Stars, travel ball superstars, and DSL standouts. They were winners at their previous levels (otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are now). And the desire and financial incentive to win grows exponentially with each level they progress.

If reporting early creates the appearance of “want to,” but also simultaneously creates a problem with a player’s home life, then we can safely assume reporting early had a negative consequence. If a player reports early and goes too hard too fast (I saw multiple guys light up radar guns the first week of Spring Training only to burn out and hit the IL within a month of the season starting), then report early in this instance would represent a lack of strategic thinking.

What I’m saying is there is a lot underlying any one of these logistical decisions, even if the players all say the same platitudes. So I think we should disregard early report information. It is data in search of a meaning.