A Quick Attempted Measure of Team Depth, Again

The best thing about having ZiPS on the site is having ZiPS on the site. The second-best thing about having ZiPS on the site is it gives people like me an opportunity to recycle blog posts like this. Already, I repeated a polling project, asking you guys how you feel about the various team projections. Now I’m repeating a post from January, where I examined team depth based just on Steamer projections. Now we’ve got the full blended Steamer and ZiPS projections, and we have the newest depth charts possible, so it only makes sense to do this again. I can’t afford to not do this again.

Do I need to explain to you the importance of depth? Probably not, and probably especially not since I’ve already written this. But, I mean, you have your starters, and then you have your other guys. Ideally, the starters all work out, and nothing goes wrong. Ideally, it’s nothing but eight or nine position players and one five-man rotation, and you sweep your way to the World Series. But the thing that usually happens is misfortune. It happens in different amounts to different organizations, but you can expect every team to need reinforcements. Right now, it might not be clear what will go wrong, but something or some things will go wrong, and the strong teams are prepared for adversity.

In this examination of team depth, we’ve got the same caveats we had the first time, except for the one about how this is based only on Steamer. This isn’t based only on Steamer, but the other stuff applies. There’s no real perfect way to run this analysis, and while you can try to assign a grade based on feel, that gets really subjective and doesn’t make for simple team-to-team comparison. Numbers are used, calculations are made. You’re free to have quibbles, but at least the method’s consistent.

I went with a cutoff point, at 1 WAR. I’ve decided to count up players projected to be worth at least 1 WAR over a full season, where a full season is either 600 plate appearances or 180 innings for a starter. For these purposes, I’m ignoring the bullpens, because relievers are relatively difficult to project and they’re relatively insignificant as compared to other guys. The cutoff is admittedly arbitrary, and I don’t love the rough nature of drawing a line, but I’m okay with it in this instance. What you’ll see below is a pretty simple graph, showing the number of players on each team’s depth chart that meet the minimum.

Because of the cutoff, a 1.1-WAR player is treated differently from a 0.9-WAR player, even though they’re basically the same. That’s one issue here. Another somewhat related issue is that this tallies up depth quantity, and not so much depth quality. 2-WAR players and 1-WAR players look exactly alike. There are many issues with this, as there are many issues with any imperfect analysis, but that which has been captured, is here being embedded. Believe in it or don’t, I don’t care.

Surprise: the Red Sox still look exceptionally strong.

I’ll note I made just a few judgment calls. For example, I decided to pretend like Yu Darvish is known to be missing the whole year. I didn’t make the same assumption with Cliff Lee, because less is known about what he’s facing and he might not actually miss the season. Little things can change the numbers by one or two. The overall shape of the graph should be fine.

And it’s Boston ahead, again. It was Boston ahead by a large margin the first time, and it’s Boston ahead by a large margin the second time. Here, the Red Sox have 25 solid qualifying players, and the next-closest team has 21. The difference of four between first and second is the same as the difference between second and twentieth. All the Red Sox position players qualify. And, actually, all the Red Sox starting pitchers qualify. There are clearly tiers — it’s not like all the Red Sox are of equivalent ability — but there’s no one in there the Red Sox would badly miss, because everyone’s got support. There are potential reinforcements all over the place, which gives Boston a distinct leg up.

If you think about it: we know teams over-perform and under-perform their projections. Happens all the time. By stockpiling so much depth, a team might be able to raise its own floor, even without touching the starters, because it’s that much harder to sink. With good support, you worry less about when the regulars aren’t playing, and you worry less about giving the regulars a day or two off. A team with good depth might not immediately strike you as a better team than a team with less depth, and maybe in the end the team with less depth won’t end up needing much support, but as you look at all the layers, you can see how depth can help lift a team to a division title. This can help explain why we have the Red Sox projected a few games ahead of the Blue Jays, even though the Blue Jays seem pretty impressive.

The Cardinals surprised me with their amount of projected starting-pitching depth. Granted, that also comes with plenty of unknowns, like, say, the health of Jaime Garcia. It didn’t surprise me to see they also have a good amount of projected position-player depth. We already knew the Dodgers were deep. The Indians are a little like the Cardinals, in that they have an unusually high number of decent rotation candidates. Right now, some of that is pending further word on Gavin Floyd’s elbow. The Padres have more decent players than they have room for. There are worse problems.

With the Mets, you see why this is a season with real promise for the first time in some years. There’s less promise with the Twins, but this reflects that they have a different problem — it’s not that the Twins are hurting for depth, but that they’re hurting for impact players at the top of the roster. The Twins are fine on scrubs. They’re still looking for the stars. The hope is that they’ll have a couple of them graduating from the minors within the next one or two years.

Flip things around and, yeah, the Phillies and the Braves both seem to be in bad shape. On the plus side, they probably know that, but then this doesn’t even factor in potential major problems with Cliff Lee and Mike Minor. I don’t think I need to dwell on these teams. The Phillies have a better system than you think. The Braves have stockpiled an awful lot of talent over the offseason. It’s still going to be years.

With the Reds and White Sox, you’ve got cases where the real hope is that depth turns out to be unnecessary. Both teams have good first-line talent, which is conspicuous talent, and it’s that talent that makes them both somewhat realistic wild-card contenders. But there’s so little, in the case that a few things go awry, which they almost always do. Injuries already crippled the Reds once. The one neat thing about not having much depth is that it’s fairly inexpensive to add depth on the fly, but with the White Sox, this is what can happen when you try to go from retooling to contending quickly. The team feels adequate, but incomplete.

The rest, you can eyeball, and think about however much you want. Every team in baseball has some depth. The Blue Jays and Brewers have some depth. They don’t have as much depth as the Red Sox, but maybe they don’t need to. You really can’t ever know how much you need to prepare for, which means a team that does a lot of prep might have it not matter, and a team that does little prep might also have that not matter. There are lots of ways the Blue Jays can finish ahead of the Red Sox. The Sox just have more options, but that doesn’t guarantee they’re all going to be put to much use.

Depth is an important thing, just about always. You can’t predict how important it’s going to be, and it isn’t as important as the starters are. As such, depth isn’t thought of as sexy, at least not in advance, but it’s one of those things you’d rather have and not need. The alternative’s a catastrophe. You probably ought to stock the cupboard.