2020 ZiPS Projections: Baltimore Orioles

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 Baltimore Orioles.

Batters

Don’t look away in cringing horror; the pitching projections are worse!

ZiPS actually projects every position to be above replacement level, which is something. If you’re a skeptic, you might just say that’s only because Trey Mancini is projected to get playing time at first and in right field, and while that’s accurate, can’t you just be nice for a few minutes?

You could probably call the Austin Hays‘ forecast a pleasant one, though obviously it’s not quite on the level of his .309/.373/.574 line from his 21-game stint with the parent club. Hays was clearly overmatched in his initial cup of joe in the majors in 2017, but the Orioles also promoted him very aggressively that season and he was never the sort of prospect you’d expect to skip Triple-A without issues. There’s also the possibility that his adequate line is underrating him; injuries create a lot of uncertainty and his 2018 season and much of his 2019 were marred by ankle and thumb injuries.

Yes, José Iglesias is one of the best players on the team. The team’s official position is that he’s keeping the seat warm while they see how Richie Martin develops at Triple-A, but in truth, Iglesias is in Charm City because the O’s don’t really have anything there. Martin’s 25, not 22, and the next O’s starting shortstop to have positive value is either in the much lower levels of the minor leagues or not in the system yet.

I’m increasingly confused as to why Chris Davis is on the team. He has no offensive value, no defensive value, and tried to go after manager Brandon Hyde in the dugout (true to form, Davis didn’t get a hit here either). Even worse, Davis at first leaves Trey Mancini playing the outfield, which he does awkwardly, and blocks the most obvious play to place Ryan Mountcastle. And while I don’t think Mountcastle would actually be good, he’s better than Davis and actually has a future. Orioles, the money is gone; this is just sad.

Pitchers

There were a number of ways I could have gone about talking about the Oriole pitching. I could have left the section blank and hoped that my generous and understanding editor would take it as my normal amusitating schtick and let me slide. Or I could have compared their pitching to some battle or war because I’m a military history buff and nobody else is paying me to write about the Battle of Flodden. Or I could just filibuster the pitching projections, hoping that I could hit my word limit and shift right into the prospects without anybody noticing.

Let’s just pull off the Band-Aid.

The O’s are going to allow a lot of runs this year. They allowed a lot of runs last year, including the most homers allowed in the history of baseball, but there were brief respites of adequacy in the rotation. Dylan Bundy was effective in spurts, Andrew Cashner kept his ERA under four until another team was tricked into believing in him, and John Means did enough to finish second in the Rookie of the Year voting.

Bundy’s gone, Cashner’s gone, and while Means’ outlook is better than Jeff Ballard after the latter’s 18-8, 3.43 ERA season (62 strikeouts in 215.1 innings), some regression toward the mean is inevitable. ZiPS will need to see more 2019s from Means before it believes he’ll keep outperforming his peripherals; he didn’t outperform them in the minors, after all, where a junk-thrower ought to have an easier time doing so.

I wouldn’t be excited by Alex Cobb’s 2020 projection (5.15 ERA, 0.8 FIP), but as with Hays, Cobb has been injured so much that it’s hard to know exactly what the team has in him. I’m still a believer that he has something left and if he does, the O’s may be able to flip him this summer. But even if the O’s get nothing for Cobb, I’d really like to see him get his career back on track to where he was in 2014, when he was one of the best mid-20s pitchers in baseball.

The bullpen is less dire, where five pitchers are projected to have an ERA+ over 100 (average for a reliever is usually around 106-110). ZiPS remains optimistic about Tanner Scott, one of the two most prominent pitchers to have a bimodal projection (all highs and lows, with less in the middle). For those curious, the other is Michael Kopech.

If the pitching stays healthy and everyone matches their depth chart outlook, the O’s would actually see their pitching WAR improve by 0.5 wins compared to 2019!

Prospects

Adley Rutschman! I wouldn’t typically give an official projection for Rutschman given his lack of professional experience and the fact that he’s only played 12 games above short-season A-ball. But he’s already 22, the consensus best hitter in the draft, and it’s likely he’ll advance very quickly through the system if things work out. The error bars for this projection are massive, of course.

Hopefully, the Rutschman projection errors are on the good side because the O’s haven’t received much of that from their upper minors prospects. Mountcastle and Yusniel Díaz haven’t dropped completely out of prospect lists, but ZiPS is down on both. Hitting .312/.344/.527, Mountcastle’s line would have looked terrific in a normal year, especially when it’s in the International League rather than the Pacific Coast League. But the high minors got the juicy ball last year and offense exploded even in the IL, which tends to be the more pitcher-friendly league by a considerable margin.

Mountcastle’s Triple-A line only amounted to a wRC+ of 117, meaning he was essentially an average Triple-A first baseman. Average Triple-A first basemen don’t tend to crush it in the majors. Unless Mountcastle’s bat explodes this year, I’d be inclined to see if he can become halfway adequate at third base. As for Díaz, he needs to stay healthy and continue hitting at Triple-A because, at this point, he’s looking more like a fourth outfielder type long-term, at least from a projection standpoint.

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.