2020 ZiPS Projections: Atlanta Braves

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves.

Batters

The foundation of Atlanta’s offense consists of Freddie Freeman, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Ozzie Albies. There’s little to worry about with this trio, short of the usual concerns about injuries. Albies and Acuña are still absurdly young, and the question isn’t whether they’ll play worse than in 2019, but just how much they’ll continue to grow. People tend to overrate the growth curves of young phenoms. Just because a guy hits 40 homers at 20 doesn’t mean he’ll 60 at age 27, though I do think Acuña will get his 40/40 year in 2020. While there’s always room for improvement, more typically, players who are great very quickly have limited additional upside. If we examined the greatest hitting phenoms in history — Mike Trout, Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Al Kaline, Mel Ott — we’d find they really didn’t grow as hitters after their early 20s.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Acuña and Albies are the scariest pair of young teammates in baseball and if their skills froze in this exact spot for the next 15 years, they could walk to the Cooperstown podium together somewhere around 2045, which is about as long Braves have them signed, and for almost nothing. That’s a bit of a stretch, but if the MLBPA wants motivation to fix baseball’s contract structure, it’s not the Adam Joneses or Neil Walkers that they should be looking at, but players like Albies, who feel they have to sign away some of the best years of their careers just to have financial certainty.

Losing out on Josh Donaldson is disappointing, but even though everyone seems down on both, I’m with ZiPS in thinking that Austin Riley and Johan Camargo will be fine at third. Not a major plus, but they’ll keep the loss of Donaldson to a couple of wins. It’s the left field situation I find particularly egregious; at least at third, there’s Riley, the team’s best in-majors hitting prospect. It’s not that Nick Markakis is a bad deal financially; he’s a bad deal in terms of plate appearances. In five years with Atlanta, he has essentially one half-season of being a really good player and nine half-seasons of being a well-below-average corner outfielder. Likewise, Adam Duvall hit well in his call-up with Atlanta, but remember, the Braves had him in the minors because nobody was interested in an age-30 corner outfielder coming off a .228/.291/.435 showing in 2017-2018.

And ZiPS believes Dansby Swanson is going to be just a guy, not a star. There’s nothing wrong with an average player who may pop into the bottom of the top 10 at his position in an up year. It’s disappointing that it doesn’t seem he’ll join Acuña and Albies as a foundational player for this generation of Braves, but it’s important to judge a player based on what they actually do rather than what you hoped they’d do. Don’t change Wins Above Replacement to Wins Under Expectations. After all, Atlanta had already gotten enough to win the Shelby Miller trade by about May of 2016.

Pitchers

Projections tend to correlate with each other quite highly, for obvious reasons, but there’s definitely some difference of opinion between ZiPS and Steamer when it comes to Rookie of the Year runner-up Mike Soroka. While ZiPS thinks Soroka will allow more home runs in 2020 (18, in a league projected for slightly less offensive, against 14 in 2019), the system sees his ability to limit the long ball is real. Of pitchers with 200 batted ball events in 2019, Soroka was 15th in the league in lowest launch angle; of the 14 pitchers ahead of him, only Luis Castillo and Adrian Houser had a softer average exit velocity. Allowing just four homers in the first half was a bit fluky, but Soroka survived just fine with a more “normal” 10 homers in the second half (a number that was actually slightly unlucky, according to ZiPS). Soroka is only 22 for most of the 2020 season and remember, he missed a huge chunk of 2018 with shoulder problems, so this was his trial by fire.

Similarly, ZiPS has been a Max Fried fan, and, if he’s healthy, Cole Hamels could be one of the best contracts signed this offseason. ZiPS is less excited about a Mike Foltynewicz bounce back (though still more bullish than Steamer). Don’t forget, his statistical record includes his disastrous final outing in the playoffs, so the computer is already taking it into consideration. Folty’s slider slid properly in the second half and I’m hopeful that this is just a case of the Braves rushing him back from injury early in the season, which is something that’s hard for a projection system to capture.

In our 2019 Positional Power Rankings, Atlanta’s bullpen ranked 18th, one of the worst among the realistic contenders. While Luke Jackson’s issues were drastically overstated — 2020 is way past when we should still be pretending blown saves are predictive beyond performance stats — the bullpen as a unit did not perform particularly well. The team took an aggressive approach to fixing the bullpen down the stretch, and the front five or so relievers going into 2020 aren’t the same guys we saw in those spots entering 2019. In all likelihood, they’ll enter the season towards the back of the top 10 this year.

Prospects

The probability-based measurements I use for defense absolutely love both Cristian Pache and Drew Waters. But short-term, what the team needs right at this moment is a more traditional corner outfielder. Even if Ender Inciarte doesn’t return to his previous levels of excellence, Acuña hasn’t conclusively shown that he can’t start in center field either. Pache and Waters will both be playing for the Triple-A Gwinnett Stripers in 2020 and if one develops quickly with the bat, perhaps they’ll force the issue in Atlanta’s left field. ZiPS sees both as peaking as .750-.780 OPS outfielders with plus defense, but they’re still very young and the error bars on that upside are massive.

While ZiPS doesn’t hate Sean Newcomb, it does think that Bryse Wilson and Kyle Wright are as good or better rotation candidates, and sees Ian Anderson bettering Newcomb a year from now. Of the lesser prospects, ZiPS has latched onto two in particular: Tucker Davidson and Corbin Clouse. Davidson ranked seventh on Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaneil’s Braves list, released today; our friends at RotoGraphs have noticed Davidson as well. His four starts up at Triple-A were quite erratic, but at least he didn’t allow any homers in his 19 innings, which is notable given the baseballs used there in 2019. ZiPS sees Davidson peaking as a two-win pitcher and Clouse, who throws both two- and four-seamers and an above-average slider, keeping his ERA in the 3.50 range for several years.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts 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.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

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 the 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.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.

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