2022 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Like most teams that lose 110 games, the 2021 Diamondbacks were lousy. But they’re not completely hopeless. Indeed, when perusing the projections from top to bottom, the overall feeling you get isn’t one of a lineup full of disasters and voids but rather an overpowering rush of underwhelmedness, which I’m not sure is an actual word. There are some 20 organizational players listed here (some are now minor league free agents) with projected WARs between 0.5 and 1.5 wins. These are players who have value and can contribute to a winning team, but who aren’t going to win divisions on their own. Ketel Marte projects to stand clearly above the rest of the lineup in 2022, giving Arizona’s offense the look of a bowl of Lucky Charms that has had all the marshmallows picked out.

It wouldn’t have prevented Arizona being dead-last in the NL West, but the organization suffered from a real lack of imagination in 2021. While things improved later in the season, the team prioritized playing veterans like Asdrúbal Cabrera, Josh Reddick, and Stephen Vogt (among others) for months past the point at which it was obvious that the team wasn’t an actual contender. In most cases, giving time to a mildly interesting 25-year-old is a better idea than trotting out a player a decade older, but the Diamondbacks were too little, too late when it came to looking at players who were excelling in Reno. Take Juniel Querecuto, currently a minor-league free agent, as an example. Neither ZiPS nor I think he’s a starter, let alone a star, but a middle infielder with a .301/.354/.489 line at Triple-A is at least worth getting a look at. Seeing Cooper Hummel, acquired in the Eduardo Escobar trade, in left for two months would have helped the franchise more than seeing if David Peralta could still man the position at 34.

One exception to this cloud of meh is Alek Thomas, who crushed it in the upper minors this year, for a combined line of .313/.394/.559. ZiPS isn’t completely sold quite yet, but the system is convinced he’ll stick in center field, which is a fairly big deal, and his rest-of-career projected WAR now tops the 20-win mark, passing Marte. ZiPS doesn’t have much to say about Corbin Carroll yet, of course.

Pitchers

The story continues here. Just like the offense, there’s one pitcher who’s clearly projected above the others in Zac Gallen, long of the projection system’s faves. Once you get past Gallen, ZiPS sees little separating the team’s second-best pitcher from their 10th-best. That’s not the worst problem in the world, but having baseball’s deepest stable of pitchers 10% worse than league average doesn’t exactly prints money. The computer isn’t holding out much hope for a Madison Bumgarner resurgence, and if he shows some kind of pulse this season, the team may be best served by cutting their losses while the getting is good. ZiPS thinks Luis Frías was somewhat unlucky for Reno, projecting him similarly to how Steamer does, but I don’t expect that he’ll start the season in the rotation.

You won’t get any more excited looking at the bullpen, a unit that put up a 5.08 combined ERA in 2021. Mitchell Stumpo, projected by ZiPS as the team’s best reliever, was a fun story in 2021. A Driveline alumnus, Stumpo was an undrafted reliever with an unimpressive college record for the Guilford Quakers, where he was arguably a better hitter than a pitcher; two years later, he can hit 97 mph. He burst through Arizona’s minor league system in 2021, pitching at four levels before finishing his season at Triple-A Reno. He has a fairly large platoon split, but his story — which Zach Buchanan ran down in full for The Athletic — combined with his projection makes him Arizona’a most interesting reliever.

Overall, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Diamondbacks win 20 more games in 2022 than they did in ’21. But based on the roster they have right now, I think they have a fairly low ceiling and will face a great deal of resistance trying to win more than 70-75 games. I’d rather be in Arizona’s position than Colorado’s, but there’s a lot of work to do here.

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 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.

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 that 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 2022.

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.