After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Most major-league clubs probably feature multiple players whom one could reasonably designate as the Face of the Franchise. Until recently, that was not the case with the Tampa Bay Rays. Basically ever since his debut in 2008, Evan Longoria has been synonymous with the club — due in no small part, one assumes, to the concurrence of his best years with the best years of the team. Traded to the Giants on December 20, he’s expected to produce roughly three wins for San Francisco.

How the club will attempt to replace those wins remains uncertain at the moment. Christian Arroyo (409 PA, 0.6 zWAR), Matt Duffy (444, 1.3), Daniel Robertson (406, 1.0), Ryan Schimpf (459, 0.5), and Joey Wendle (563, 1.0) are all candidates for the second- and third-base nexus in Tampa Bay, each flawed in his way. I’ve included Duffy, Robertson, and Wendle on the depth-chart image below simply because they receive the top projections from Dan Szymborski’s computer.

The author noted elsewhere recently that Byron Buxton recorded the highest WAR (3.5) of any player in 2017 who also produced a below-average batting line. By virtue of his 2015 season, however, Kevin Kiermaier (474, 3.3) has the top mark by that same criteria of any player since 1997. He’s projected to produce a precisely league-average batting line in 2018 while also saving 14 runs in center field.

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Episode 796
Meg Rowley has previously served as a contributor both to Baseball Prospectus and Lookout Landing. More recently, she was named as the new managing editor of The Hardball Times. She’s the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Boston Red Sox. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Perhaps more strongly than any club examined to date in this series, the 2018 iteration of the Boston Red Sox resembles its immediate predecessor. For the most part, that’s to the club’s benefit. Last year’s team was projected to receive three or more wins from five different positions, for a total of roughly 19 WAR. This year’s team is also projected to receive three or more wins from five different positions, for a total of roughly 18 WAR. Considering that an average collection of hitters produces 18 wins total in a given season, one is forced to conclude that Boston’s core is strong.

The addition of third baseman Rafael Devers (611 PA, 2.6 zWAR) is quite helpful in this regard. Third base has represented a bit of a black hole in recent years for Boston. Will Middlebrooks (2013-14), Pablo Sandoval (2015, -17), and Travis Shaw (2016) have been the Opening Day starters at third for the Red Sox over that last five years. None have crossed the two-win threshold during that span.

The roster’s weaknesses, meanwhile, remain at the weaker end of the defensive spectrum. Neither first baseman Mitch Moreland (503, 0.9) nor Hanley Ramirez (524, 1.1) profile as anything much better than a platoon type.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
During each of the last two offseasons, Jeff Sullivan has written a post about baseball’s best outfield. In each case, said outfield has belonged to the Los Angeles Angels — not, that is, because of a particularly notable breadth of talent, but rather due to the presence of Mike Trout (653 PA, 7.9 zWAR) on the roster. The 12-win mark typically represents the threshold those Angel outfields have transcended. The combination of Trout, Kole Calhoun (629, 2.4), and Justin Upton (607, 2.6) is forecast for 12.9 wins.

Trout’s excellence isn’t much of a surprise, of course. Much more mysterious is the near future of Shohei Ohtani (355, 0.9). ZiPS calls for the Japanese wunderkind to record a league-average batting line in his first year stateside. Combined with standard corner-outfield defense (Szymborski projects Ohtani in right field), the result is just less than a win in just more than a half-season’s worth of plate appearances. The strength of Ohtani’s forecast is his .333 BABIP, the highest mark assessed to anyone on the club. The weakness? His 31.0% strikeout rate, itself nearly the highest. Ohtani, meanwhile, is projected for a relatively modest .186 isolated-power figure. Overall, it’s less promising than his pitching forecast.

None of this, of course, addresses offseason acquisition Zack Cozart (467, 2.7) or other offseason acquisition Ian Kinsler (584, 3.0). Nor will it. Address them, that is.

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Episode 795
As he noted on Wednesday in the electronic pages, managing editor Dave Cameron is leaving FanGraphs to join the San Diego Padres. This episode represents his final appearance on the program.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
“Baseball’s biggest disappointment,” is how Jeff Sullivan characterized the 2017 Giants back at the end of September. And not without reason: the club produced the league’s worst record relative to the preseason projections, a development expressed in graphic form just below.

On the one hand, that’s bad for the 2017 Giants. On the other, though, it’s probably good for the 2018 version of the club. The Giants are likely due — due perhaps more than any other team — for positive regression. Even if San Francisco were to field precisely the same roster this next season, that same precise roster would almost certainly outperform its disappointing predecessor.

The ZiPS projections appear to support this hypothesis. Here, for example, are the forecasts for San Francisco’s top-four returning hitters:

The core returning members of the Giants’ offense — Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford, Joe Panik, and Buster Posey — are projected, on average, to produce an additional win each in 2018. That’s in roughly the same number of plate appearances as 2017, as well, meaning that ZiPS is calling for all four simply to play better this season.

This isn’t to say the club’s field-playing cohort is without flaw. No outfielder, for example, is projected even to produce an average season. Nevertheless, a combination of positive regression and Evan Longoria (645 PA, 3.1 zWAR) ought to facilitate easy improvement over last year’s performance.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Seattle Mariners. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
When the Mariners took Kyle Seager (638 PA, 4.4 zWAR) in the third round of the 2009 draft, one could have been excused for assuming that the club had acquired him largely to play the role of Dustin Ackley’s Friend. While both players had served as starters on three consecutive College World Series teams at North Carolina, it was Ackley who was considered the real prospect, going second overall to Seattle in the same draft. Indeed, Seager was ranked by Baseball America just 30th among Mariners prospects during that next offseason — a reflection of industry opinion. Eight-plus years later, however, Ackley has become a journeyman, while Seager has become, if not the face of the franchise, then at least its metronome.

Complementing Seager on the current iteration of the Mariners is Robinson Cano (614, 2.9) and a collection largely of average talent. Indeed, ZiPS calls for five hitters — Nelson Cruz (574, 2.2), Dee Gordon (663, 2.3), Mitch Haniger (517, 2.1), Jean Segura (634, 2.1), and Mike Zunino (474, 2.1) — to produce a WAR figure within a half-win of 2.0 on either side. Recent acquisition and prospective first baseman Ryon Healy (619, -0.1) represents the weak link of the starting lineup according to Dan Szymborski’s computer.

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Episode 794
A cafe in downtown Bath, Maine, that’s typically crowded on Saturday mornings was almost entirely empty this past Saturday. The sub-zero temperatures were to blame, almost certainly. But why did almost no one venture into town, as opposed to just slightly fewer people? Dave Cameron has an answer — and thinks it probably informs how we ought to think about the last year or two of a large free-agent contract.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 39 min play time.)

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
One will notice, upon a cursory examination of the projections below, that five of the Royals’ position players are forecast to produce roughly two or more wins in 2018. A closer inspection of the names attached to those figures, however, reveals that three of them — Lorenzo Cain (579 PA, 3.1 zWAR), Eric Hosmer (654, 1.9), and Mike Moustakas (559, 2.5) — appear here not because they’re currently employed by the Royals, but rather because they were formerly employed by the Royals, have been granted free agency, and simply remain unsigned as of January 8th.

Indeed, of the players currently under contract with the club, only Whit Merrifield (648, 2.5) and Salvador Perez (525, 2.6) are projected to record more than two wins next season. Perhaps more remarkably, ZiPS calls for only a single other hitter, Alex Gordon (498, 1.4), to cross even the one-win threshold. Five of the club’s most likely starting nine, meanwhile, feature WAR projections that round to zero. As presently constructed, this team appears almost to be an experiment designed to test the validity of “replacement level” as a concept.

Of some interest here, in a way that isn’t wholly relevant to the Royals, is ZiPS’ assessment of Eric Hosmer. On Friday, Craig Edwards endeavored to give Scott Boras the benefit of the doubt in the latter’s appraisal of Hosmer’s value. With a number of caveats and conditions, he was nearly able to support Boras’s claims with logic, but even that optimistic calculus was based on the assumption that Hosmer is at least a three-win player right now. Dan Szymborski’s model suggests that isn’t the case.

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