2019 ZiPS Projections – Tampa Bay Rays

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Batters

The Rays are similar to the St. Louis Cardinals in that they’re almost always one of the highest-floor teams in baseball. Since the team’s breakout season in 2008, which saw them reach the World Series, they’ve only really had one season that you could reasonably call lousy, the 68-94 campaign in 2016. Otherwise, Tampa’s been middling at worst, with a stretch of high-70s/low-80s wins that in large part reflects some draft struggles.

Since 2009, the Rays have only really hit on two players in the draft: Kevin Kiermaier and Blake Snell. Now, the jury is still out on some of these drafts, especially the more recent ones, but it’s hard for a team with Tampa Bay’s revenue model — and given some of the surrounding issues, they’re one of the few teams that really does seem to struggle financially — to compete consistently without drafts paying off.

What the team has learned to do out of necessity is develop a keen eye for finding bargains. The Rays’ ability to accumulate a ton of interesting players without obvious “plug-and-play” uses, see how the roster sorts out, and then wring as much value from it as they can, has paid off immensely. They almost always have players like Joey Wendle or Brad Miller or Daniel Robertson hanging around. Tampa simply can’t afford the luxury of fitting their players into the standard baseball tropes.

2019’s roster is no different. Daniel Robertson and Yandy Diaz most notably project as roughly league-average players as full-timers, though the team lacks an obvious, set lineup spot to throw them into for 140 games a year. ZiPS doesn’t think that Ji-Man Choi is anywhere near the .863 OPS player he was in limited time in 2018, but the Rays will give him every opportunity to prove the projections wrong. Even if it’s done for thrift more so than for ethical reasons (and even if that thrift carries its own tricky ethical questions), I’ve always admired teams that give players opportunities, whether in Double-A, Triple-A or the majors, to prove that they can contribute.

Pitchers

ZiPS is all-in on Blake Snell. There’s nothing that screams fluke about his success; even if he outperformed his FIP by a run, something which is unsustainable, that FIP was still below three. His velocity was up, his walks were down, and his curve could embarrass batters even before he became a legit Cy Young winner (see his debut strikeout of Brian McCann).

As with their hitters, the Rays do amazing bargain shopping here as well. While one of the theories out there is that the Rays adopted the opener strategy just to save money, that’s more a happy secondary result for them. The Rays simply didn’t have five guys they could stick in the rotation for 150 innings and hope for the best, especially after the injuries to Jose De Leon and Brent Honeywell. The team accumulates good, unknown relievers by the bucket-full, so it’s in the team’s interest to leverage those arms as much as possible.

ZiPS projects half a dozen pitchers who likely won’t make the roster on Opening Day as being legitimate bullpen pieces, most notably Colin Poche, one of the players-to-be-named later in the Steven Souza trade, who my colleague Jeff Sullivan wrote about in length last June. ZiPS is also a fan of Ian Gibaut, a hard thrower who can change speeds, and, as usual, it is a believer in Oliver Drake. Cole Sulser and Curtis Taylor round out ZiPS’s list of 100 ERA+ projections who won’t crack the team’s April roster.

Bench and Prospects

Something I find interesting about the projections that isn’t immediately obvious in the posted stats is that when it comes to the Rays’ prospects, even the guys with projections around replacement have a surprisingly impressive list of top comps. For example, while ZiPS doesn’t think Jesus Sanchez would play like a major leaguer right now, the top 10 of his comps list is packed full of players who had real careers in the bigs, like Shawn Green, Garret Anderson, Paul O’Neill, Derrick May, Melky Cabrera, and James Loney, and the list goes on.

Tristan Gray is similar — a .216/.265/.357, -0.3 WAR projection won’t excite anyone, but after Donnie Murphy (who still managed nearly 1000 major league plate appearances), most of the top players on his comps list had careers in the big leagues, including Jose Vidro, Scott Cooper, Tim Teufel, and Greg Gagne, to name a few.

This pattern repeats for a lot of Rays prospects, and while I don’t know how meaningful it is, whether it’s a coincidence or if ZiPS is seeing something in these players that the Rays also see, it’s unusual enough to make me curious.

Also of note, ZiPS already sees Nathaniel Lowe as the team’s best first base option, with a 106 projected OPS+ compared to 101 for Avisail Garcia and 102 for Ji-Man Choi. And as with Yandy and Robertson, ZiPS adds Brandon Lowe to the list of league-average Rays without an obvious place in the lineup.

He’s not really a prospect, but Thomas “Not the Pitcher” Milone is fascinating simply because of his defense. The scouting reports for him typically rave about his play in the field, and the Total Zone-esque approach that ZiPS takes with minor league data agrees whole-heartedly, pegging him as the second-best defensive centerfielder in the minors over the last three years, behind only Blake Drake. Milone’s not much of a hitter, which is why this fabulous defense doesn’t get him on prospect lists very often, but a non-prospect who does something incredibly well is someone I always keep an eye on.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

 

 

 

 

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 2019. 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 I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

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

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