2021 ZiPS Projections: Arizona Diamondbacks

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

Batters

Intending to compete in 2020, the Diamondbacks spent the first half of the abbreviated season in the hunt for one of the Wild Card spots. Arizona hit their high-water mark the morning of August 19, standing in the thick of the race with a 13-11 record. That’s not to say everything went as planned; the team’s pitching staff had an ERA of 5.17, and the offense ranked in the middle of the pack. But contending is contending, and the projections still looked relatively bullish, with Steamer giving Arizona a 62% chance of making the playoffs and ZiPS a 60% shot. Those prognostications turned out to be very overly-optimistic; the D-backs dropped 11 of their next 12 games, a mortal blow in a season of only 60 games. The result was a club that became an aggressive seller at the deadline. Gone were Archie Bradley, Starling Marte, Robbie Ray, and Andrew Chafin as Arizona signaled a significant rebuild.

The D-backs enters the offseason in a much less commanding position than they did last year. Yes, they have a great deal of payroll flexibility, with an estimated luxury tax number more than $100 million below the penalty threshold. The giant “but” here, however, is that they’re also a team that’s very hard to significantly upgrade, full of middling players but with few stars and few obvious gaping holes. Taking a quick peek at the handy-dandy depth chart graphic, Arizona’s lowest-ranked position is the Carson Kelly/Stephen Vogt combination, projected at 1.2 WAR, mostly due to ZiPS being bearish on the latter player. The Colorado Rockies aren’t likely to actually do much in free agency, but if they did, any free agent they’d sign would likely add more wins to their team than to Arizona’s.

That gives the D-backs two paths to avoiding .500-team purgatory. First, they could spend aggressively and add players who would be real upgrades, like George Springer or Trevor Bauer. In an offseason when the league is likely to be more conservative than usual, this route would be my personal preference, but if they had the willingness to do that, it makes a lot less sense to have traded Marte or Bradley. Lesser signings are unlikely to make a giant dent, with only five position players and five starting pitchers currently projected to upgrade the team’s projection by at least a win over what they already have.

The second option — attempting to assemble an 85-win team and catch lightning in a bottle — is arguably a worse strategy in the West than in any other division in baseball. The Dodgers and Padres will likely enter the season projected as the best and second-best teams in the National League respectively, limiting Arizona’s upside by removing a whole boatload of division-winning scenarios.

For the lineup as a whole, only one player who has a good shot at being a star in 2021, namely Ketel Marte, who was still a key contributor despite the evaporation of his 2020 power. Outside of the remaining Marte, not only is there no one in the lineup who is currently a star, there’s who has a puncher’s chance of at least playing like a star for a year. Looking at the ZiPS percentile projections, Nick Ahmed has a 14% chance at a four-win season, Eduardo Escobar is at 8%, and everyone else is below Escobar’s number. Now, there are players in the lower minors with more upside, but it’s unlikely that 2021 will be their time to shine.

Pitchers

The pitching staff is in a place similar to the lineup. The team’s bright spot is Zac Gallen, who is now nearly undoubtedly the most valuable part of the organization. ZiPS was a giant fan of Gallen coming into 2020, projecting him at 12-7 with a 3.62 ERA, 121 ERA+, and 3.2 WAR in 29 starts. He even got a Greg Maddux top comp, albeit Greg Maddux before he became Greg Maddux. Gallen continued to pitch at that level, finishing just out of the top 10 in the NL in WAR. From a projection standpoint, he is likely to poke in at the back of the top 10 in rest-of-career WAR among pitchers when all the numbers are in. It’s time for the baseball world to stop underrating him.

The rest of the rotation is much less exciting. Luke Weaver is easily the most interesting returning starter. His 2020 was a disaster, but a good chunk of that was due to a .349 BABIP that is unlikely to persist next season, and the rest of his performance record is more encouraging. There were already reasons to be worried about Madison Bumgarner before 2020, making his drop in velocity (a full 3 mph) doubly concerning. Clayton Kershaw has had a similar decline in velocity, but unlike Bumgarner, it hasn’t resulted in a nearly 15% barrel rate from opposing batters. Bumgarner will claw back some value by getting to bat in 2021, which now appears likely, but that’s not going to push Arizona over the top.

Closing out games for Arizona is a relief corps that’s neither impressive at the front nor deep at the back. ZiPS thinks Stefan Crichton and Kevin Ginkel will be above-average but won’t match up against the high-leverage relievers on other contenders. The back of the bullpen looks like it will mainly be made up of whatever remaining rotation castoffs start the season on the roster, mostly with projections right around replacement level. Unlike the lineup and the starting rotation, the team could make significant improvements here in free agency without spending absurd amounts of cash. The problem is that Arizona has a tough playoff road if their only big improvements are bullpen-related.

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 2021 due to injury, and players who were released in 2020. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Finnish industrial death metal fourth-wave ska J-pop 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 assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2021; if it does not, there will be widespread minor adjustments across the board come April.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter or something.