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 Colorado Rockies. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

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

Batters
Colorado batters produced the third-lowest cumulative WAR among their major-league peers last year, falling just short of the 10-win threshold. That’s one relevant point when considering the Rockies’ prospects for 2016. Another? That the club also hasn’t altered the roster in any substantive way this offseason. There are, of course, other means by which a team can improve from one year to the next. The promotion of young players from within the system, for example. Or simply by way of positive regression. But even ZiPS — which, like other projections systems, is largely a regression machine — doesn’t call for much improvement in that way.

Third baseman Nolan Arenado (612 PA, 4.1 zWAR) appears to have developed into a real star, combining a high-contact, high-power offensive profile with above-average defense. Charlie Blackmon (638 PA, 1.8 zWAR) and Carlos Gonzalez (473 PA, 1.8 zWAR) are also roughly average. After that, however, the returns among the starting contingent are decidedly less encouraging. Outfielder Gerardo Parra (584 PA, 1.0 zWAR), whose acquisition rendered Corey Dickerson expendable, is best regarded as a solid bench player, at this point.

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Other clubs: Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, White Sox.

The Indians have an enviable number of likely big league players in their system, though only a handful of them project to be impact talents. The top three in the list have the highest ceilings, I believe, with Bradley Zimmer the pretty undisputed number-one guy. I’m pretty high on Triston McKenzie, and at one point had him in the number two spot over Frazier. Other guys about whom I’m a little more optimistic include Mark Mathias, Erik Gonzalez and Greg Allen.

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I’m not sure if baseball is that much of a copycat league, but even if it is, the Royals make things a little tricky, because they’re the defending champs, but they didn’t exactly have just one identity. Think about the various team strengths. Some people think of the Royals as being the team with the defense that catches everything. Some people think of the Royals as being the team with the bullpen that doesn’t ever budge. And some people think of the Royals as being the team with the lineup that puts everything in play. Really, they’re all true — the Royals have played good defense, and they’ve relieved well, and they’ve kept opposing defenses on their toes. If you’re looking to copy the Royals, you have some decisions to make.

What I want to talk about here is contact, and therefore not striking out. We’ve seen teams load up on relievers, and it’s interesting. We’ve seen some other teams focus on improving the defense, although in fairness that’s been going on for a while. Contact is interesting because strikeouts have been going up, and the game just isn’t rewarding discipline like it used to. Hitters are more incentivized now to be aggressive, and though the Royals didn’t prove that, they’ve helped to drive the point home. I think, more than we’ve seen in a while, teams are searching for contact. They want to counter this undeniable trend.

It’s February now, the month in which spring training begins. Certain free agents remain available, but pretty much all the impact moves have been made. Rosters are nearly complete. Because of that, we can look at the projected strikeout landscape. Some numbers are more difficult to project, because they bounce around. I’m referring to stats like batting average. Strikeouts, though, are a good deal more stable. So which teams, right now, look like they’ll make the most and least contact?

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The Detroit Tigers, though they have yet to win the ultimate prize, have clearly been one of the game’s premier franchises over the past few seasons. Before 2015’s 74-87 disappointment, they had reached the playoffs the previous four seasons, earning one AL pennant and two other ALCS berths over that span. In the five previous seasons, going back to the beginning of the Jim Leyland era, they reached .500 in all but one season. It’s been a while since the Tigers’ immediate future appeared bleak.

Last year had to be quite a shot to the old solar plexus for Tiger fans. A team that had been built for the present, featuring relatively newly acquired mercenaries such as Yoenis Cespedes and David Price, was reduced to trading-deadline seller. They have continued to resist the impulse to rebuild; Mike Ilitch isn’t getting any younger, you know.

Well, in the tightly congested 2016 AL Central, within the just as tightly congested AL, there is reason to be bullish on the Tigers. Yes, it is a stars-and-scrubs type of team, and they do lack impact depth at both the major and minor league levels. There are two veteran players, in particular, who were significantly better than they appeared to be last season, and could be key drivers to a post-hype drive to the front for the club this time around: starting pitcher bounce-back candidates Anibal Sanchez and Justin Verlander.

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For the third consecutive year, Ben and Sam draft the 20 minor league free agents they hope will earn the most major league playing time in 2016.

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We recently went through the 2015 qualifying-offer season, the basic facts of which Five Thirty Eight’s Rob Arthur provided a helpfully summarized back in November. In that piece, Arthur asserts that “Each offer is essentially a bet that the player… will be worth 2 or more WAR in the coming year.” He adds that “the math works out so that teams tender offers to almost every remotely deserving free agent [and] [w]ithout fail, those free agents refuse them.” Arthur was writing before the deadline for players to accept their offers, and for the first time this year, there were players who accepted their qualifying offers (Brett Anderson, Colby Rasmus, Matt Wieters).

While teams may have been very liberal in giving out qualifying offers in the past, now that there is a precedence of players accepting the offers, teams will likely need to be more cautious about giving out offers in the future. This article attempts to build a model that determines at what WAR threshold it makes sense for teams to give out qualifying offers.

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Billy Burns was going to be one of those interesting test cases. His numbers in the minor leagues were strong — he drew walks about 12% of the time, and he infrequently struck out. He could motor, too, adding to his value both at the plate and in the middle of the outfield. Yet he had just two professional homers to his name, over 1,800 opportunities, and we’ve seen these failures before. So the question was, could Burns get pitchers out of the zone often enough to keep his OBP respectable, or would he wilt upon being challenged?

I don’t know what you expected from Burns, but I can tell you something I didn’t expect: here was this passive, speedy minor-league outfielder, and then as a rookie he posted baseball’s fifth-highest swing rate. For the sake of comparison, the name right ahead of him was Pablo Sandoval. And Burns wasn’t just aggressive in general — he wound up with baseball’s second-highest rate of swings at first pitches. Burns cast his history aside and turned himself into a swinger, and that’s not something that happens by accident. And no one, I don’t think, would have a problem with the results.

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You may have noticed Major League Baseball unveiled new spring training jerseys. This is important. Spring training gets going in a few weeks and what would we fans be without new spring training jerseys to wear over our winter parkas while we shovel pile after pile of snow, hoping our hearts don’t give out in the process. But, if we do go down, at least we go down with our teams on our chests. And like your proverbial mother and her proverbial obsession with clean underwear, you wouldn’t want to go down with an outdated spring training jersey on. These are the stakes and they are high.

As such, I have viewed the gallery of new jerseys and I have some thoughts which is why this article is called Some Thoughts on the New Spring Training Jerseys. Because we prioritize truth here. It’s above other things, like lies, and candy corn, which, let’s face it, is just terrible.

First Thought: Diamondbacks, Why?

If your team name is too long for the front of your jersey then there are acceptable solutions. For example, you could write it like a signature, emphasizing certain letters joined by scribbles. For example, you might render my name as follows: “M [scribble] H [scribble] K [scribble] y.” Who says team names need be legible? Or, like the A’s do, you could just go with a single letter. The point is, there are options. But what you can not do is this whole “D-backs” thing, because it’s kind of awful — and, as you can probably tell from the first couple paragraphs of this piece, I am personally acquainted with awful. Going with “Arizona” and turning the “i” into a snake would let us leave the “D-backs” in the cul-de-sac of uniform design where it belongs. Good gosh, do I have to do everything, people?

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On Sunday night, Ken Rosenthal wrote a provocative piece over at FoxSports, based on an experience he had at a PITCH Talks event up in Toronto last week. Given the recent success of the Blue Jays and the impending free agency of both Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, the question of whether or not the organization would re-sign either naturally came up. I’ll let Rosenthal take the story from there. Read the rest of this entry »