2016 ZiPS Projections – Texas Rangers

After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Cincinnati / Kansas City / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / Toronto.

Batters
The Texas Rangers outperformed their Base Runs record by seven wins this past season, resembling on the peripheral level more a league-average club than a division-winning one. That’s not to discredit their accomplishment, at all. It does, however, begin to explain how a team that won 88 games and returns literally all its positional starters — how such a team could look so ordinary by way of computer algorithms.

It certainly isn’t an advantage for Texas that they have a considerable portion of their payroll allocated to four merely decent players. Elvis Andrus, Shin-Soo Choo, Prince Fielder, and Josh Hamilton are expected to earn roughly $88 million collectively this year and yet to produce fewer than six wins as a group. That’s approximately $15 million per win — or nearly double the current estimated win valuation of the market.*

None of this, of course, is to impugn Adrian Beltre, who famously once played both Daedalus and Icarus in a community theater production of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

*Note: I’ve neglected to mention here that a portion of Fielder’s and nearly all of Hamilton’s contracts are being subsidized by other clubs. Naturally, that changes the dollars-per-win calculus. What it doesn’t change is the projections themselves.

Pitchers
When the Rangers acquired Cole Hamels at the trade deadline this past year, the prevailing wisdom was that they’d done it with a view towards pairing him with a healthy Yu Darvish for 2016. They were seven games behind Houston at that point with a talented Angels club also in the way. Texas proceeded to win 38 of their last 60 games, though, accidentally winning the division and allowing Hamels to record actual meaningful innings in October.

Unsurprisingly, Darvish and Hamels receive the top-two forecasts among the club’s pitchers entering 2016. Which, a note on Darvish and his forecast. Here’s what ZiPS knows: that he recorded zero starts in 2015. Here’s what it doesn’t know: how come exactly. That said, the math looks right: Darvish is projected for 132 innings, roughly what one might expect from a starter who’s expected to miss a month or more to begin the season.

Bench/Prospects
It probably isn’t a popular position in Texas, or any of the other 49 states, to argue that Hanser Alberto is as good at baseball as Prince Fielder — nor would the 27 wRC+ produced by Alberto during his 100-plate-appearance debut do much to alter one’s opinion on that front. However! Alberto also recorded a league-average line in Triple-A last year as a 22-year-old shortstop. He makes contact, he defends, he’s young… and he’s projected to record the same WAR figure as Fielder in 2016 in 100 fewer plate appearances.

Besides Alberto, some of the club’s more celebrated prospects are also well-acquitted: Lewis Brinson, Joey Gallo, and Nomar Mazara — each of them 22 or younger — all receive a projection of at least one win. Among pitchers, the returns are less encouraging: right-hander Luke Jackson’s forecast both (a) calls for a nearly replacement-level performance and (b) represents the strongest projection among the Rangers’ rookie-eligible pitchers.

Depth Chart
Below is a rough depth chart for the present incarnation of the Rangers, with rounded projected WAR totals for each player. For caveats regarding WAR values see disclaimer at bottom of post. Click to embiggen image.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site and author’s own haphazard reasoning.

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Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2016. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams unless Dan has made a mistake. This is very possible as a lot of minor-league signings are generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS is projecting based on the AL having a 3.93 ERA and the NL having a 3.75 ERA.

Players that are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information and a computer isn’t what should be projecting the injury status of, for example, a pitcher with Tommy John surgery.

Regarding ERA+ vs. ERA- (and FIP+ vs. FIP-) and the differences therein: as Patriot notes here, they are not simply mirror images of each other. Writes Patriot: “ERA+ does not tell you that a pitcher’s ERA was X% less or more than the league’s ERA. It tells you that the league’s ERA was X% less or more than the pitcher’s ERA.”

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, Szymborski will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on depth chart to produce projected team WAR.