2020 ZiPS Projections: Houston Astros

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 Houston Astros.

Batters

Let’s get the garbage receptacle in the room out of the way: there are no adjustments for sign-stealing related shenanigans baked into ZiPS. The simple truth is that the data to do so doesn’t really exist, and any adjustments made for an unknown effect on unknown players for an unknown amount of time would lack any precision. It’s one of those unknowables floating around in the aether that makes up part of the error bars.

Houston’s front-end offensive talent remains an absolute battering ram. The great players are, well, great, and there are few holes in the lineup, though there will be less offense behind the plate in 2020, and Gurriel’s age means he’s always a cliff-diving risk in any given season.

What’s fascinating about Houston’s offense is that Carlos Correa has, to some extent, been forgotten. After three consecutive years during which he’s missed significant time due to injury, he’s not talked about with the awe he was a few years ago. But let’s not forget that he turned 25 just a few months ago. Even with the missed time, Correa has produced 4.7 wins per 600 plate appearances, so it’s not as if his poor attendance has been matched by disappointing play.

ZiPS remains high on Kyle Tucker, higher than Steamer — the relatively low right field production on the graphic is more Josh Reddick-related. The computer still isn’t quite confident enough to call Michael Brantley a 150-game player, but after two healthy seasons, some of the red flags about his injury record have taken on a more yellowish hue.

And yes, Alex Bregman is amazing. You were expecting something different?

Pitchers

Justin Verlander projects to continue to be Justin Verlander for another season, which is quite important given the loss of Gerrit Cole to the Yankees. Lance McCullers Jr. stepping back into the fray is also a very big deal for the team, as it’s otherwise lacking in rotation depth. I still feel like the Astros could use another mid-rotation starter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a reclamation project made his way to Houston; I’ve had Danny Salazar as an Astro in my headspace since the moment he was cut loose by Cleveland.

ZiPS really, really likes the bullpen, even the back end. I think 7 WAR is a very aggressive projection, even with the various scattered sub-replacement innings most teams get from their bullpen basements. ZiPS never fell out of love with Chris Devenski and even Bryan Abreu’s rather bland projection looks a lot better when you consider I didn’t ask the computer to project him purely as a reliever.

The Astros are really short on lefties, and while I don’t think that’s as dangerous as some people do, it’s nice to have guys for those situations. It’s this lack of southpaw depth that goes a long way to explaining why Blake Taylor and Kent Emanuel have spots on the 40-man roster, with ZiPS preferring the former.

Prospects

Forrest Whitley is a top prospect based on his build, his fastball, and the upside of his breaking pitches. From a projection standpoint, he’s still a work in progress, so I wouldn’t be concerned about the pedestrian numbers below. Whitley just doesn’t have a very long professional track record yet thanks to a drug suspension and some abdominal injuries. The team has been very cautious with him for good reasons; better to wait longer for Whitley than risk lat or oblique soreness causing a dangerous change in his delivery.

Assuming you count Tucker as a major leaguer, there’s not a lot of pizazz in the system after Whitley. ZiPS has Brandon Bielak and Tyler Ivey in the “interesting” category, but neither will make a 2020 impact in the majors unless they have Urquidy-type breakouts. Where ZiPS does have some interest is in Abraham Toro; the systems sees him as good enough offensively to at least be a role player in the majors right now. There’s some disagreement on his defense here; scouts tend not to like his fielding but ZiPS, with zDEF derived from a probabilistic approach to Gameday play-by-play data, does not think he’s a major problem at third. Jack Mayfield has potential in a poor man’s Dan Uggla sort of way, but I suspect his cups of coffee will come in another organization.

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.