Morning Mound Visit: Arizona Fall League season canceled

On Monday, MLB officially announced that the 2020 Arizona Fall League season would be canceled. This doesn’t come as a surprise seeing as how the entire minor league season was canceled, and there hadn’t been any news regarding the upcoming season which was supposed to begin Thursday.

According to Baseball America, MLB didn’t feel that the AFL venues were safe for the large rosters plus coaches and staff. We saw at the beginning of the major league season how quickly and easily cases can spread through teams. Even if MLB and the AFL wanted to push through the season despite the safety concerns, losing a team in a six-team league is far more disruptive than losing one (or two or three) in a league with 30 teams.

The AFL is expected to resume in 2021 as normal. If it doesn’t, it will be because we have much greater things to worry about.

Jonathan Judge | Baseball Prospectus: One thing the baseball community wanted to keep an eye on this season was what happens to the strike zone when fans are absent from the stadium. Jonathan Judge and the team at Baseball Prospectus investigated how the strike zone has been affected in 2020.

Craig Edwards | FanGraphs: In many ways, the race for NL MVP is far more compelling than any playoff race happening right now. Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, Fernando Tatís Jr., and Manny Machado all have a compelling case.

Alex Coffey | The Athletic $: Joaquin Oliver, a classmate of Jesús Luzardo, was one of 17 people killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018. Change the Ref, a nonprofit started by Joaquin’s father Oliver, is trying to put cutouts of Joaquin in all 30 stadiums and put Joaquin behind home plate for the World Series to raise awareness for gun violence.