2021 ZiPS Projections: Seattle Mariners

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 Seattle Mariners.

Batters

Let’s go straight to the projection that will likely get the most grumbling: ZiPS does not think that Kyle Lewis is a budding star. It does like him better than Steamer does — it mostly comes down to ZiPS being more willing to believe he’s a .340 BABIP hitter — but not to the level where he projects as a good starter. He had a legitimately excellent rookie season, but it’ll take more than an abridged 2020 to convince ZiPS that the previous translations, generally in the .230/.270/.370 range, no longer have predictive value. That’s not to say Seattle should be actively seeking to replace or upgrade from Lewis. One of the “benefits” of being a rebuilding team is that you can give players chances to improve or show an improvement is for real, after all. But these projections see the 2020 AL Rookie of the Year race a little like 1992, with the runner-up, Luis Robert, playing Kenny Lofton and Lewis as Pat Listach. Bumping a projection up by 70 points of OPS from the results of a 60-game season remains an accomplishment.

Evan White’s projection is considerably worse than Lewis’, but that should be a less unexpected digital smear. ZiPS has had all the nopes for White’s future for some time and has yet to give him a better-than-replacement projection. The fact that he was quite awful in 2020, hitting .172/.252/.346 in 202 plate appearances with 84 strikeouts, obviously wasn’t going to change the computer’s mind. Going long-term, ZiPS never gives White an above-replacement projection or even much in the way of upside, with a 90th-percentile projection consisting of a rather lackluster .219/.286/.432 line. While Lewis earned an extended chance in 2020, the Mariners should have low standards for how good another offensive prospect has to be in order to displace White.

That Ty France has the best projection on the entire team is an inauspicious sign of Seattle’s divisional probabilities for 2021. But France is interesting, a kind of fringe role player prospect who suddenly went ballistic for Triple-A El Paso in 2019. With the required caveat that Pacific Coast League statistics have to be taken with a giant grain of salt, there’s no professional league in existence where a .399/.477/.770 line isn’t a good one. His debut with the Padres was decidedly meh, but he hit .305/.368/.468 in 2020. I’d rather have France at first than White, but it’s more important that the Mariners use 2021 to try to pin down where he can contribute defensively long-term.

Mitch Haniger’s projection is disappointing, but he’s missed a year and a half due to a series of injuries, including something like four surgeries to deal with a sports hernia and the very negative effects of fouling a baseball off your own groin. There’s certainly a chance he crushes this projection, making it look like a mean joke by midseason, but there’s some real uncertainty here.

On a positive note, Kyle Seager was healthy and showed more refined plate discipline in 2020, boosting his line to the best it’s been in years. He looked a lot like the player who was a legitimate star from 2013 to ’17, though his defense isn’t what it once was. With less defensive value and his age being a significant factor working against him, the Seager Renaissance is unlikely to be long or reach lofty heights, but he’s a legitimate contributor again. If the Mariners eat some money for 2021, they could move him a la Robinson Canó.

Don’t be too disappointed by the pedestrian projections for Jarred Kelenic and Julio Rodriguez. Losing 2020 was bad for both players, as Kelenic likely would have had a reasonable chance at starting 2021 in Seattle, and Rodriguez would have gotten a full season above the low minors. Both have outstanding long-term projections, especially Kelenic — there’s still a lot of uncertainty with Rodriguez even if the upside is there — but the future is unlikely to come next year. In terms of rest-of-career projections, Kelenic ranks 10th among centerfielders, between Byron Buxton and Cristian Pache.

Pitchers

ZiPS has long seen Marco Gonzales as a serviceable-though-unsexy mid-rotation starter. He hinted at something more than that in 2020 with his already excellent control reaching god-tier status, dropping his FIP to a career-best 3.32. ZiPS just isn’t convinced the improvements in walk and strikeout rate are for real, at least quite yet. While changes in these stats tend to become “real” fairly quickly, ZiPS also doesn’t see the results as being consistent with Gonzales’ plate discipline numbers: zBB predicted seven more walks than he actually allowed, and zK showed 13 fewer strikeouts; both these discrepancies are among the largest in baseball. As with Lewis, Seattle can simply wait and see what it has.

The rest of the rotation is quite a bit less exciting. If there’s good news, it’s that there are few actually disasters among the pitchers, with most non-Gonzales starters having ERA+ projections in the high-80s and 90s. You could argue the Mariners have as many as 10 starting pitchers in the organization that could hold their own as actual major leaguers in 2021, though not particularly good ones. Giving Chris Flexen another shot in the U.S. after his successful stint with the Doosan Bears of the KBO was a good idea and exactly the kind of thing the M’s should be doing.

The problem is the lack of upside at the major league level. The Mariners have exactly two starting pitchers in Justus Sheffield and Logan Gilbert and two relievers in Andres Muñoz (recovering from Tommy John surgery) and Sam Delaplane with big ZiPS upsides. Hopefully, Seattle will use the offseason to add some more lottery tickets to the 26-man roster, whether it’s imports from overseas, pitchers coming off an injury, or pitchers with more tools than skills.

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.