2020 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 eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Batters

One of the things that amazes me about the Rays is how easily they seem to be able to find solidly average talent. Give Tampa’s front office a list of minor league free agents and guarantee that those they talk to will sign with them, and I bet they end up with a bushel of 1.5 WAR players. Heck, send them into a dollar store and they’ll probably find a second baseman who can hit .270/.330/.380 and some off-brand Doritos.

Just one player, Austin Meadows, is projected to be worth at least three wins, so the team’s lineup will tend to max out at “good” rather than competing with the Yankees, A’s, or Twins; they just don’t have enough high-upside talent (right now at least, someone is coming). But it also makes them an incredibly safe lineup, one of the few groups that could survive an obscene number of injuries.

Imagine if Mike Zunino, Ji-Man Choi, Brandon Lowe, Willy Adames, Yandy Díaz, Meadows, Kevin Kiermaier, Hunter Renfroe, and Yoshitomo Tsutsugu all walked off the field in protest, like the Tigers Ty Cobb game a century ago. Even losing nine players, ZiPS only has the Rays losing seven wins and still finishing with 84 wins. And that’s an ungenerous projection as it assumes the Rays would have to make all their replacements from within the system and wouldn’t be allowed to do things like acquire Trey Mancini, or pick up some more waiver-wire outfielders.

Getting back to this timeline, Meadows has the highest projection and the greatest upside as well; he’s a polished hitter who could easily get 100 more plate appearances than the projection if he’s healthy and ought to better his defensive numbers.

ZiPS also has friends in Lowe places, and thinks that the Nate Lowe should largely supplant Ji-Man Choi or José Martínez as a full-timer very quickly. I’m very curious where Hunter Renfroe’s defensive metrics go this year. His UZR and DRS spiked quite suddenly last season, and given the volatility of these numbers, digging deeper into his defensive improvement is on my to-do list. And the projection might even be underselling Renfroe’s defense; Jeff Zimmerman wrote a piece on players playing through injuries rather than going in the injured list and Renfroe had the largest difference between his healthy OPS and OPS while injured. Playing through injuries is one of those things that’s really hard for ZiPS to capture.

Pitchers

The Charlie Morton/Blake Snell/Tyler Glasnow trio is a solid one, and it’s amazing that the team won 96 games with the latter two barely throwing enough innings to qualify for the ERA title combined. The Yankees were the team that received most public coverage of their injuries, but the Rays lost a lot of playing time from some of their best players as well. Some luck with the health here gives the rotation even higher upside than their 2019 performance.

It doesn’t look like the Rays are going to a traditional rotation any time soon, but they almost have the personnel to do so. ZiPS was as a big fan of Brendan McKay‘s 2019 and if Tampa just stuck him in the rotation, the computer thinks he’ll be among the best fourth starters in baseball. Trevor Richards is just fine as a conventional fifth starter and ZiPS is hopeful that Brent Honeywell’s healthy enough to give us some rare right-handed screwballs.

Most contending teams don’t trade their saves leader two months before the season starts, but then, the Rays aren’t most teams, and Emilio Pagán is with the Padres now. ZiPS still has the Yankees bullpen as the better one, but the Rays are incredibly deep and could probably lop off their top projected reliever (Nick Anderson) and still have an elite relief corps.

Prospects

I’m not going to spoil ZiPS’ exact ranking for Wander Franco, which will be revealed in the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects post on Monday, but I guess it’s not much of a surprise to say that Franco ranks very highly, edging out another very highly touted prospect by a single run in career projection. ZiPS thinks Wander would be almost average right now, but it’s not a hypothesis that the Rays are likely to test in April. Let’s just say his mean projection is that of a regular All-Star in his prime, and ZiPS projects quick, aggressive growth.

I already mentioned Brendan McKay above, but ZiPS is bullish on his future as a pitcher. As a hitter? Not so much, and we may be at the point where it just makes sense for McKay to whole-ass one thing. Ronaldo Hernandez isn’t quite as close as McKay or Franco, but ZiPS sees him growing into a yearly two-win catcher. Vidal Brujan gets a long-term projection at a similar level as Hernandez’s. The risk is higher, but ZiPS sees Xavier Edwards in the same group as Brujan and Hernandez as a prospect. There will be a lot of Rays in the ZiPS Top 100.

And there’s the usual fringe prospectage for ZiPS to enjoy. Michael Brosseau has enough skills to at least be a role player in the majors and ZiPS thinks Josh Fleming will be an adequate back-end starter. The system retains its love for Colin Poche and has found a new love in Tyler Zombro’s slider and control.

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. Also, I’ve added Yoshitomo Tsutsugo, who is not yet in our system, into the depth chart, and reshuffled a bit, so the depth charts are not an exact match.

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.