After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
What the depth-chart graphic below doesn’t represent very well, but what is still true of the Oakland A’s, is that they’ll probably be getting value from players who aren’t proper starters. Of particular note in this regard is outfielder Craig Gentry, for whom Oakland traded Michael Choice and a friend to Texas this offseason. Gentry’s defensive figures over the last three season have been, speaking in very technical sabermetric terms, entirely bananas. Accordingly, it’s not so unexpected to see him receive a very optimistic projection here (2.4 zWAR) in just 300 or so plate appearances.

Also of note: John Jaso is projected as a catcher here, but is likely to get a significant numbers of plate appearances — perhaps the bulk of them — at DH. Even a poor defensive catcher still receives a pretty substantial increase in value by way of positional adjustment — relative to a designated hitter, certainly. Expecting him to produce two wins in a DH capacity might be unrealistic. Billy Butler posted a 116 wRC+ last season, for example, while DH-ing almost exclusively and still produced just a 1.4 WAR.

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Lance Berkman announced his retirement last week. While a week may seem like an eternity in the world of baseball blogs (especially during the seemingly endless off-season), a player of Berkman’s stature cannot be allowed to slip quietly into the night. If for no other reason, Berkman would deserve recognition on the basis of not one, but two of the best nicknames (judged on originality and appropriateness to the subject) in contemporary baseball in “Big Puma” and “Fat Elvis.” But he was also, as one would hope FanGraphs readers know, a tremendous player. As we so often do, let’s look back on some of Lance Berkman’s biggest hits from the perspective on their impact on individual games.

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Ben and Sam preview the Astros’ season with Zachary Levine, and Nick talks to Houston Chronicle Astros beat writer Evan Drellich (at 23:12).

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Texas Rangers: Programmer Analyst, Baseball Operations

City / State: Arlington TX

JOB SUMMARY:    Analyzes needs, designs, writes, tests and supports new programs and applications to support Baseball Operations.  Works according to approved requirements and detailed specifications.  Supports and contributes to ongoing analytical research.

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On Saturday, Buster Olney mused on who would hit leadoff for the Red Sox this season. And it’s an interesting question, since the Red Sox had grown accustomed to Jacoby Ellsbury at the top of the batting order. As we’ve discussed a couple of other times this offseason, it’s one of those good problems — Boston has a plethora of talented hitters, so it isn’t like they have to shoehorn a bad hitter into the top spot. But a decision still has to be made, so let’s take a look.
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On yesterday’s podcast, Carson and I had a brief conversation about how different history can look with the benefit of hindsight. Or, maybe more accurately, how different baseball history can occasionally look if you apply our current tools and analysis to players and transactions from before the statistical revolution really became popular. That isn’t to say our current tools are perfect — I’m sure in 15 to 20 years, we’ll look back at our current analysis and see a bunch of problems — but I think it’s pretty clear that both the people running baseball teams and watching baseball games understand the relative value of different players better now than they used to. And there’s perhaps no single transaction that better illustrates the stark changes in player valuation we’ve seen over the last 15 years than the trade that sent Ken Griffey Jr to the Reds after the 1999 season.

Griffey was, at that point, one of the game’s true elite. He’d racked up +20 WAR from ages 27 to 29, and that’s with defensive metrics that thought his defense was just average in center field, a sentiment which opposing managers didn’t agree, given that he won a gold glove in each of those three seasons. If he wasn’t the best player in the game, he wasn’t far off from that mark, and because he decided he didn’t want to play in Seattle anymore, the Mariners had to put him on the trade block.

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Jason Heyward was supposed to be going to court in a few weeks. His agents had filed a salary number for arbitration, and his team was a file-to-trial team — once a player has filed an arbitration number with a file-to-trial team, it’s supposed to mean that they are headed to court to debate their respective cases in front of an arbitrator. We thought about this situation when they filed, and it seemed that were reasons on both sides for the public fight over $300 thousand — the team wanted to discuss more reasonable numbers quicker and needed the threat of trial, while the agents in this case were aggressive and didn’t mind the consequences, apparently.

But today, look in the news, and there’s an announcement — the Braves and Heyward have agreed to a two-year $13.3 million deal. This seems to go against the file-to-trial policy, at first. Until you look around the game and realize that two other file-to-trial teams, the Rays and the Blue Jays, have also made deals like this after filing numbers. Now it looks like there was one last benefit to the file-to-trial policy that we didn’t get to: leverage in negotiations for a multi-year deal.

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Yesterday, news broke that right-handed starting pitcher Jeremy Hellickson had surgery to remove loose bodies from his elbow and will be out until mid-to-late May. The childish part of me wants to make a quip about the loose bodies teaming up with those ever antagonistic free radicals, forcing a counter-insurgency executed with surgical precision. It would seem the childish part of me has succeeded.

The less childish part of me wonders how this setback affects the Tampa Bay Rays in 2014. The short answer is, not much, but there are a number of trickle down effects that are worth exploring.

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