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

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

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Milwaukee general manager David Stearns has dedicated the first year-plus of his tenure with the Brewers to a pursuit of affordable pieces that might contribute to the club’s next winning season, while trading away the most valuable pieces of its most recent one. The ZiPS projections here reflect the results of that endeavor. On the one hand, no field player is projected to record more than three wins in 2017. (Jonathan Villar, at 2.8 zWAR, is best acquitted by that measure.) On the other hand, 20 positions players receive a forecast of 1.0 WAR or better.

For context, consider: three of the National League’s playoff clubs from 2016 have been included thus far in this series of ZiPS posts. By comparison, only 16 of the Cubs’ position players receive a projection of one win or better. Only 13 of Washington’s do. And only 10 field players for the San Francisco Giants are expected to cross the one-win threshold, per ZiPS. Milwaukee, in other words, has gathered a large collection of players whose median probable outcome is slightly below average. Given the youth of that group, however, and the vagaries of the world, some of those players will develop into average or better players.

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Home-field advantage isn’t always considered a matter of great importance in baseball. Crowds aren’t as close to the action as they are in basketball. There’s nothing comparable in the sport to something like raucous Cameron Indoor Stadium. There are no 100,000-seat, canyon-like stadiums cascading noise to the playing surface like in college football.

But home-field advantage is a real thing in baseball, and significant, and has remained constant for better than a century.

The road winning percentage of visiting teams was .461 in the 1910s. Road winning percentage stands at .464 to date in the 2010s. Road winning percentage has remained consistent over the decades.

Since the 1970s…

Conventional wisdom has it that home-field advantage is derived from some combination of hostile crowds, fatigue from travel, and the familiarity of the playing surface. And, in a way that’s unique to baseball, teams can tailor their roster to their home park’s dimensions. Having carried on that way for better than a century, the home-field edge seems to be something of a scientific law.

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Per Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame Tracker, Edgar Martinez has received 69% of support from voters who have made their ballots public. This puts him well ahead of last year’s pace, although it’s likely that he’ll fall short of the 75% needed to put him over the top. This is the Seattle legend’s eighth year of eligibility.

While Martinez belongs in Cooperstown, it is understandable that some voters haven’t checked off his name. The 10-man limit is a primary culprit, as the ballot is once again stacked with strong candidates. Also working against him is his time as a designated hitter. Fairly or not, a not-insignificant number of ballot-casters hold that against him with a cudgel.

At least one voter feels Martinez simply wasn’t good enough. With ample room on his ballot, and a claim that DH had nothing to do with it, the scribe opined that he “never thought of him as a dominant, feared hitter in his era.” Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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*Unless current standards are changed.

Making the Hall of Fame as a starting pitcher has never been harder than it is right now. Consider that in the last 25 years, only 11 starting pitchers have been elected to the Hall of Fame by the writers. During that same time period, four relievers have been elected, not including John Smoltz, and the pitcher closest to gaining election at the moment is Trevor Hoffman, also a reliever. We will get into active pitchers who have a shot at the Hall of Fame below, just like we looked at position players, but first let’s look at the nearly impossible standard Hall of Fame voters have created.

Over the last 25 years, back to 1992, here are the 11 starting pitchers who have been enshrined along with their WAR, Hall of Fame Rating, and their ranking among pitchers for said rating. You can read more about HOF Rating here. In essence, however, it represents an attempt to summarize a player’s Hall of Fame credentials by accounting both for peak and career.

Tom Glavine is the “worst” pitcher included here — if that’s an appropriate term to use — and he compiled more than 300 wins. His ERA was a bit lower than his FIP so by Jay Jaffe’s JAWS, which uses bWAR, Glavine ranks 30th among starters. There’s a pretty good argument that, over the last 25 years, a pitcher would have had to produce one of the 30 best careers ever in order to gain induction to the Hall. There are 67 starting pitchers currently in the Hall of Fame. The writers have long had tougher standards, but the next list shows the pitchers who were elected in the 25 years before 1992.

We have some truly great pitchers on this list. Koufax ranks a little lower here than one might place him if composing a more subjective list of greatest pitchers of all time — probably due to the way his career ended. Jim Palmer did sport a lower ERA than FIP, though how much Brooks Robinson had to do with that might be up for debate. Gaylord Perry pitched forever using (ahem) unique methods to keep pitching at a high level.

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Tuffy Gosewisch isn’t known for his stick. The 33-year-old catcher had a .522 OPS in parts of four seasons with the Arizona Diamondbacks. But he does provide value behind the dish. His defensive acumen — including his ability to work with pitchers — is a primary reason the Atlanta Braves claimed him off waivers earlier this winter.

He worked diligently to turn himself into a big-league asset. Selected by the Phillies in the 11th round of the 2005 draft out of Arizona State University, Gosewisch made his MLB debut with the D-backs eight years later. He’s now in Atlanta, where he projects to serve as the Braves’ backup backstop behind Tyler Flowers.

Gosewisch discussed various aspects of his position when Arizona visited Boston last August.

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Gosewisch on learning to call games: “The first time I caught was freshman year of high school. I caught off and on throughout my high-school career — I also played third and pitched — and in college I caught exclusively. I was [at ASU] for four years.

“In high school, they would occasionally let me call games — which is rare — but for the most part, our coach called them. In college, I called all of my games in my junior and senior years. My manager, Pat Murphy, trusted that I could handle the responsibility. That gave me a lot of confidence and, learning-wise, it was huge.

“I don’t think enough guys get to call their own games in college. I think it would be beneficial to the player, for sure. It would help him learn the game a lot better. But I know that the coaches’ jobs rely on winning, and they don’t want to take a chance on losing a game because of pitch-calling.

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The Giants aren’t a bad team. They just made the playoffs, and they signed a closer in Mark Melancon who (hopefully) won’t make the citizens of San Francisco tear their hair out. Hunter Pence should be healthy! That makes things fun. Fun baseball is good baseball, and the Giants are locked in to a pretty fun team at this point. Every position is accounted for, for the most part. Only left field offers a little room for finding something to write about pondering, so let’s ponder, shall we?

Currently, it looks like the Giants are going to deploy a platoon of Jarrett Parker and Mac Williamson there. Surprisingly enough, no, Parker and Williamson are not tertiary characters from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but actual baseball players. They’ve both seen some playing time since 2015 in fits and starts as depth players.

The Parker/Williamson combo package could, in theory, be fine. The Giants likely aren’t expecting more than league-average production here, after all, and they don’t necessarily need more than that. Parker also has some serious pop in his bat, and frankly, there’s always room for some highlight-reel bombs.

That’ll do! That kind of power works in San Francisco, and if he can meet his ZiPS WAR projection of 1.4 as the big side of the platoon, maybe they don’t need to go get Saunders after all. Parker is also out of options, and may have a hard time making it through waivers to Triple-A.

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Ten plays. Ten plays can change a player’s career.

We talk all the time about how defensive numbers come in small samples. For an outfielder, the sample of plays that actually separate a good from a bad defender is even smaller.

In most cases, a batted ball to the outfield is either a can of corn or a clear hit. In between, there just aren’t many opportunities. For Rajai Davis as a center fielder, there are 19 plays that could have gone either way over the last two years. He missed 10 of them — which is bad — and then many of us stopped considering him as a center fielder. Ten plays!

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

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

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If you were to travel back to the winter of 2013-14 and inform the earlier version of yourself that, in just three years time, Joe Mauer (532 PA, 0.9 zWAR) would receive the worst projected WAR among all Twins starters, the young iteration of you would slap the older one right in the mouth. After that, he’d have some pretty understandable questions about how your journey to the recent past has been made possible and why you’ve chosen to make it. In that intial moment, however, the absurdity of your comments regarding Joe Mauer would overcome him.

On the one hand, this is a negative development for Minnesota. For the past couple years, they’ve typically run payrolls of about $100 million. Allocating nearly a quarter of that to a single win isn’t helpful.

On the other hand, this represents a very positive development for Minnesota — because Mauer’s projection isn’t that bad. Rather, a number of the other projections are just better. For the past couple years, the Twins have lacked an adequate supply of competent hitters and fielders. Regard: last season, their position players ranked 25th by WAR. The season before that? 27th. What the ZiPS numbers here depict is something much more like an average group — with serviceable depth, too.

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