Dan Szymborski: AI is getter better at making fun of me, BTW.
12:02
Guest: Vegas had notably much worse ratings on the Twins than both ZIPS and PECOTA (not to mention the fans). Has anything you’ve seen in the Twins playing what has been pretty good baseball so far justified that much higher projection in your mind?
12:03
Dan Szymborski: Well, Taj Bradley’s been really darn good, I mean sub two FIP
12:04
Dan Szymborski: and Mick Abel has been really solid too (and one of the boom picks)
12:04
Dan Szymborski: I’m not confident at all they’re this good, but I think this was always a team in the .500 vicinity
Coming into the season, the ZiPS projections generally saw the Yankees as having lower divisional odds than standings based on other projection systems and methodologies. One of the biggest reasons for that was, paradoxically, one of the best things a baseball team can possess: Aaron Judge with a signed contract. Since ZiPS attempts to simulate the effects of injuries, including season-ending ones, the Yankees offense took an absolutely brutal hit any time Judge was absent. In the system’s current season simulations, that effect has been mitigated somewhat by the improved projections of one man: first baseman Ben Rice.
Judge’s courtroom is a terrifying dystopia in which defendant pitchers find scant justice and almost sure punishment. And while this judge is typically content to handle executions himself, it’s Rice who has been operating the guillotine the most frequently in 2026. Through the first three weeks of the season, Rice has put up a .362/.500/.745 line, good for a league-leading 241 wRC+, and has already hit the 1-WAR mark.
Naturally, when you have an OPS nearing 1.300, a good number of things have probably gone your way, certainly more than have gone against you. Rice’s batting average, fourth in baseball among qualifiers, is naturally helped quite a lot by a .500 BABIP, which has yet to prove sustainable at the big league level. But what makes Rice’s season so amazing is that even if you take some of the helium out of his seasonal line, it still tells the story of a batter who might be emerging as one of baseball’s elite offensive talents. Read the rest of this entry »
Kyle Manzardo: I have the largest difference between xBA and real BA among qualified batters, is there hope for me or am I broken?
12:03
Dan Szymborski: I think you’ll be fine
12:03
Guest: “more tools than can be found at a Florida spring break kegger” just give Dan the Pulitzer now
12:03
Dan Szymborski: Pulitzer Prize for B- Snark
12:04
Guest: it’s April and it remains to be seen if he’s replacement level, average, or better, but is it too early to say Jordan Walker is meaningfully better than he was 2024-25?
I’m a fan of gallows humor, and I think that fans of the Pirates need to be as well. The Pirates have developed their share of stars over the years, but for fans, there’s always the slight bit of dread that once their young talent starts getting paid commensurate with their production, they’ll be swapping the black-and-gold for Dodger blue or pinstripes. So it’s a good time for Yinzers and the Allegheny-adjacent community, as shortstop Konnor Griffin and the team agreed to a nine-year, $140 million contract that would keep him in town until after the 2034 season.
As contracts go, this is a rather straightforward one. While MVP incentives can bring up the deal by a modest $10 million, to $150 million, that’s just about the only complexity present. There is no deferred money to eat away at the present value of the contract, no option years for the Pirates to lock in at the end, and no opt-out provision that could get Griffin to free agency a year or two early. The deal includes a $12 million signing bonus, which will be doled out over the next three years, certainly helpful to Griffin in that he’ll still get a nice chunk of cash even if the seemingly inevitable lockout drags into the 2027 season.
The Pirates have a real up-and-down history with contracts, so it’s always nice to see them spend on franchise talent rather than spread things around on third-tier free agents. They managed to keep Andrew McCutchen a few years past his free agent eligibility, but for the last 50 years, most of the stars who started out in Pittsburgh became better associated with other teams. Players ranging from Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla to Aramis Ramirez and Gerrit Cole, a group that could include Paul Skenes in a few years. Some of the deals the Pirates did sign haunt the dreams of Gen X and millennial Pirates fans (Pat Meares! Kevin Young! Derek Bell!). The Pirates signed Andy Van Slyke and paid him more than the Giants paid Bonds during the latter’s first years in San Francisco.
Griffin was basically everyone’s top-ranked prospect coming into this season, and it’s not hard to see why. He has more tools than can be found at a Florida spring break kegger, and in his first professional season, he terrorized minor league pitchers to the tune of a .333/.415/.527, 165 wRC+ line across three levels, including a 175 wRC+ in his month at Double-A. That would be a drool-worthy performance if he were a 23-year-old first baseman, but he did all of that as a teenage shortstop. He still doesn’t hit the big two-oh for a couple of weeks. Griffin’s one of the few prospects you can plausibly compare to A-Rod at a similar stage in his career without the listener rolling their eyes and saying, “Who, Aurelio?”
A few weeks ago, I did my annual look at contracts I’d like to will into existence, and ZiPS suggested an eight-year, $142 million contract for Griffin. So getting a ninth year is even better!
ZiPS Projection – Konnor Griffin
Year
BA
OBP
SLG
AB
R
H
2B
3B
HR
RBI
BB
SO
SB
OPS+
WAR
2026
.261
.330
.400
532
93
139
23
3
15
83
35
151
30
102
3.6
2027
.265
.335
.418
558
102
148
25
3
18
90
38
149
32
108
4.3
2028
.264
.336
.420
584
109
154
27
2
20
98
42
148
32
108
4.6
2029
.265
.338
.428
601
114
159
28
2
22
105
45
147
32
111
5.0
2030
.265
.341
.434
599
116
159
28
2
23
107
47
142
30
114
5.3
2031
.265
.343
.436
597
117
158
29
2
23
107
49
138
27
115
5.4
2032
.268
.346
.444
597
118
160
29
2
24
109
49
138
27
118
5.6
2033
.268
.346
.444
597
118
160
29
2
24
110
49
138
26
118
5.6
2034
.270
.349
.446
596
118
161
29
2
24
111
50
139
25
119
5.8
That ninth year is pretty darn valuable, and ZiPS would be quite happy to give Griffin $40 million more in order to secure the 2034 projection. ZiPS, like most projection systems, does not generally have fits of irrational exuberance, for the simple fact that it’s well aware about how risky players are. Griffin is not a 5-WAR player yet, so there is risk involved, but that’s true of all players, whether they’re elite prospects or superstars in the middle of their careers. Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera were obviously far more “proven” when they signed their biggest deals than Griffin is now, but the Angels and Tigers paid handsomely for that so-called proof, and as should be clear now, there was a lot of downside involved there, too.
A $140 million contract isn’t a mega-deal in the typical baseball sense, but for the Pirates, Griffin’s contract represents the biggest financial commitment they’ve ever made to a player. They’re all-in when it comes to the Konnor Griffin business. Both team and player are now spared things like years of speculation about future trades or service-time games should Griffin struggle in April. Remember the time the Pirates offered Gerrit Cole $538,000, and when he turned it down, they apparently wouldn’t budge past $541,000, and threatened to pay him the league minimum if he refused? Cheap-bush league shenanigans are now out of the question with Griffin, and the focus can be on the actual baseball.
Even if Griffin isn’t immediately a megastar, he makes the Pirates meaningfully better, and they know it. He really did look raw at times in the spring, to the level that sending him down was excusable, even understandable, unlike when the Chicago Cubs in 2015 decided they needed precisely 20 days some additional time to figure out if Kris Bryant was a better option at third base than Mike Olt. Griffin did get five games with the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians, and it certainly looked like, in a small sample size, that he wasn’t really anything new against minor league pitching. But that’s not the point. The Pirates are true NL Central or Wild Card contenders, and they are much better off with Griffin as their starting shortstop, even if it takes him some time to adjust to the majors, than a decent role player like Jared Triolo. (Triolo has since been placed on the injured list with a patellar tendon injury in his right knee.)
With the long-bubbling Griffin contract negotiations finally complete, now the Bucs can worry about the rest of the team, and making the Cubs and Brewers feel uncomfortable for the rest of 2026.
It would border on being grotesquely premature to talk in too-concrete terms about a 19-year-old Griffin and the possibility of him one day having a Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown. But at least if such an object should ever come into existence, there’s now a realistic chance that it could have a “P” on the cap. That’s enough to make this a good week for Pirates fans.
Robert Edwards, Rick Scuteri, Thomas Shea-Imagn Images
Until this weekend, baseball’s injured list was noticeably bare to start the 2026 season. Then, beginning with Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk on Friday, the stars went down in rapid succession. The Cubs lost two of their top starting pitchers, Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, in consecutive days. Joining them on the IL are two of the top players in the National League, Mets left fielder Juan Soto and Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts, and one of the best pitchers in the American League, Astros ace Hunter Brown. Each of those three teams has a share of first place at the moment, making these especially high-leverage injuries. Read the rest of this entry »
When looking at most April stats, especially the basic ones, I spend a lot of time issuing disclaimers about small sample sizes. After all, any player can do just about anything in 25 or 50 or 100 plate appearances. I’m pretty confident that Joey Wiemer is not going to end the season as the NL MVP, and that Hunter Barco won’t finish the season with the worst WAR in major league history. But conversely, when we’re talking about standings, even if bad/good starts shouldn’t necessarily overconcern us about a player’s future, when it comes to teams, playoffs are determined by wins, which are cumulative numbers with razor-sharp margins. It’s not the end of the world if Cal Raleigh, because of his slow start, finishes with 38 homers instead of his projected 41 (ZiPS DC), but it may doom the Mariners if they underperform their projections by three wins.
The season is just a week old, but there are already sizable impacts in playoff probabilities around the league. To demonstrate this, I ran ZiPS overnight to get the updated playoff odds, so I could compare them to the preseason projections. Six teams have seen their playoff odds change by at least five percentage points. Here’s the full table, as things stand on Friday morning.
Apparently not wanting to be left out of the flurryofcontractextensionshanded out over the last two weeks, the Seattle Mariners signed a big one of their own, locking up infield prospect Colt Emerson to an eight-year contract that guarantees him $95 million over the next eight years. This includes a $1 million salary for 2026, meaning that the contract goes through the end of the 2033 season, with the Mariners holding a 2034 club option that could staple another $25 million onto the back of the contract. Emerson’s deal also includes a no-trade clause and bonuses for All-Star selections and Silver Slugger and MVP awards, de rigueur in deals such as this.
While Emerson doesn’t have one mind-blowing tool that absolutely obliterates the cognitive pathways of watchers, he’s very accomplished at basically everything he does. He’s not going to regularly blast Stantonian shots, but he’ll hit his fair share of home runs, ZiPS thinks 15-20 a year if he played home games at a neutral site rather than T-Mobile Park. Emerson is willing to draw walks, but he still retains a fundamental aggression at the plate; that’s a good thing, as being too passive is a frequent pitfall for prospects who take a good amount of free passes. There’s no whiff problem hiding in his advanced stats, either. He’s not a burner on the basepaths like Trea Turner or Bobby Witt Jr., but at the same time, he’s not me with a belly full of Cool Ranch Doritos, a 32-ounce deli container of beer, and a hamstring that hasn’t gotten a whole lot of use since the Clinton administration. It doesn’t seem like there are any serious concerns about his sticking at shortstop, and the coordinate-based method that ZiPS uses for minor leaguers sees him as a solid B+ defender at the position. Let’s crank out those projections. Read the rest of this entry »
And just like that, the end of winter has been heralded, not by a groundhog or the vernal equinox, but by 6 1/3 shutout innings by Max Fried last night at Oracle Park. Today is the official Opening Day in MLB, and as such, it’s time for the ZiPS projections to spit out its final preseason projections. Hopefully, its numbers are graceful and kind, just in case it has to eat them in six months. This is the 22nd such exercise I’ve done with the ZiPS projections, and as with the other 21 times, there’s not much to do but sit back and wait for reality to destroy the expectations. Most of you already know the methodology by now, but for those who don’t, I’ll do a quick rundown. The rest of you can skip straight to the reason you’re here: the standings!
The ZiPS projected standings are the results of a million simulations of the 2026 season, using the ZiPS projections and the actual team schedules. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion. These projections do reflect the updated post-spring training projections, which were added to the FanGraphs database on Wednesday afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »
When you run a lot of projections, one thing you have to get used to is being very wrong, very often. The ZiPS projections generally run about 4,000 players every year, meaning you should expect around 800 players to either achieve their 90th-percentile projection or fall short of their 10th-percentile projection. Those hundreds of results will invariably be quite a distance away from the standard midpoint projections that you see.
As is my ritual, it’s time to run my two articles discussing my favorite booms and busts of the upcoming season. After looking at the hitters last week, today we turn our attention to the pitchers. But just to keep the ritual of humiliation fully transparent, we’ll start by looking at the pitchers I selected for last year’s booms and busts.
Thank goodness I was wrong about Jacob deGrom, as he managed to have his first essentially healthy season in forever! I think it’s finally time for me to get off the Brandon Pfaadt train, meaning he’ll probably have his breakout this year. A real mixed bag, but it was overall a less bleak result than I had with the hitters! Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Biggerstaff and Isaiah J. Downing-Imagn Images
When you run a lot of projections, one thing you have to get used to is being very wrong, very often. The ZiPS projections generally run about 4,000 players every year, meaning you should expect around 800 players to either achieve their 90th-percentile projection or fall short of their 10th-percentile projection. Those hundreds of results will invariably be quite a distance away from the standard midpoint projections that you see.
As is my ritual, it’s time to run my two articles discussing my favorite booms and busts of the upcoming season, starting with the hitters today and concluding with the pitchers next week. But just to keep the ritual of humiliation fully transparent, we’ll start by looking at last year’s booms and busts.
Oof, ritual humiliation indeed! The booms did not pan out well in 2025, even if you give me generous credit and mark my picks of Joe Mack and Gage Workman as incomplete. The busts worked out much better — from my point of view, at least — but it’s a lot less fun to be right about the bad stuff. Well, let’s get to 2026, and remember to give your picks in the comments so that you can join me in this exercise! Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: It’s clobberin’ time!
