After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

The Royals have an extremely bifurcated offense, with three players projected to be solidly above league-average in Adalberto Mondesi, Salvador Perez, and Whit Merrifield, and a fairly large gulf before the next tier of KC hitters. If the Royals were really going the full rebuild route, you’d see Perez and Merrifield — entering their age-29 and -30 seasons respectively — on other teams’ lists, but the Royals seem content to go the “sorta” rebuild route.

Given how thin their talent is, it’s hard to see them having much success going this route and as such, Perez and Merrifield are likely to be either in their declines or in other organizations by the time the performance matters. Winning 72 games instead of 64 in 2019 isn’t going to jumpstart anything.

I’m sure there will be some gnashed teeth about O’Hearn’s projection, given that he hit .262/.353/.597 in the majors in 170 plate appearances in 2018. He also had a .713 OPS in 406 PA in the Pacific Coast League, which is abysmal for an offensive prospect.

Pitchers

This group won’t be as bad as some people think in 2019, and it wouldn’t take a lot of breaks for the team to achieve their pointless Quest for 75 Wins, which is a little like bragging to your drinking buddies that you can deadlift 125 pounds. Danny Duffy isn’t a lost cause and Brad Keller was good enough in 2018 that it couldn’t all have been a fluke. ZiPS absolutely loves Richard Lovelady, but the rest of the bullpen is a big digital yawn. The Trevor Oaks projection isn’t exactly impressive, but I can’t remember the last time ZiPS didn’t actually hate a pitcher with as low a strikeout rate as he is projected to have.

Bench and Prospects

Troubling and not seen in full here is that ZiPS simply projects very few of the hitting prospects in the upper levels of the organization as good bets to be relevant by the time the Royals are good again. It’s essentially Adalberto Mondesi and Nicky Lopez. Khalil Lee and Emmanuel Rivera are the only two other offensive prospects on this list for whom ZiPS gives even an over/under of three WAR over their major league careers. Now, it’s not quite as bad as that considering a couple of the names I’m not yet projecting are Seuly Matias and Nick Pratto, but it’s certainly less than ideal for a team that really ought to be 2 1/2 years into a rebuild by now.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

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 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.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers.

Batters

Perhaps the biggest disappointment in last year’s projections (and in 2018, really) was the several steps taken backward by Willie Calhoun. Originally, it was believed he would only be in the minors temporarily to beat up minor league pitchers while some service time shenanigans resolved themselves. Problem was, Calhoun never really earned a callup, struggling to hit Triple-A pitchers and only besting an .800 OPS in a single month of the season, a July that was driven by a .364 batting average. The Rangers brought him up when there was obvious playing time for him, but hitting .222/.269/.333 in 108 plate appearances was hardly a strong push for a full-time job. Even ignoring the cameo role in the majors, Calhoun’s power was mostly gone in the minors, which is not good. To be a decent starting left fielder in the majors, you have to be a batting average/on-base percentage deity or be a legitimate all-world talent on defense. Calhoun is neither. I wouldn’t write him off yet, but I’m very worried.

I’m a little surprised that Texas either couldn’t or wouldn’t close a deal with another team for Shin-Soo Choo, a player whose presence required a losing Rangers team to carry a significant salary after Choo turned in a solid little year and had some trade value. Choo is quickly approaching age 40, and until Nomar Mazara actually turns his impressive raw power into actual counting numbers, Joey Gallo is the only really dependable Rangers hitter. Gallo is what he is, and will likely always have an abysmal batting average. He’s fortunate to not have been born 30 years earlier.

One projection that intrigues me is Christian Lopes’, who was a third-tier prospect for the Blue Jays a very long time ago with a fairly mature approach at the plate coming out of high school. It never really manifested itself in the stats, however, and the knock was that he didn’t have a standout tool otherwise. But he’s made great strides the last couple years and has gotten to the point where he may be a pretty interesting role player, with Texas using him at a lot of positions in the minors.

Pitchers

You can see the skinny rebuild in progress in the Rangers’ rotation. You have a number of OK-ish starters (excluding Yohander Mendez, who ZiPS hates with the fire of a thousand suns), probably none of whom will be part of the next good Rangers team. Drew Smyly, Edinson Volquez, and Shelby Miller are essentially reclamation projects, and at three years and $30 million, Lance Lynn may be the last of the quintet “out” of Texas (Mike Minor is there, too), but if the recovery in his peripherals in 2018 isn’t a fluke, Texas may get a real prospect for him.

ZiPS is a believer in Jose Leclerc at the front of the bullpen, and sees the rest of the group as a fairly boring but quite adequate relief corps, which is fine with the Rangers not seriously contending yet.

Bench and Prospects

One of the most interesting Rangers projections is that of Brock Burke, a former Rays third-rounder who the Rays brought around very slowly out of high school. 2018 was the year in which everything clicked, with Burke seeing a 30% bump in his strikeout rate while also being promoted, striking out almost 12 batters a game for Montgomery. ZiPS doesn’t give him a huge ceiling, but is surprisingly confident in Burke being a mid-rotation starter despite only him only having limited playing time in Double-A.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

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 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.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

This is a bit awkward, as the most interesting Blue Jays batters essentially sit in the Bench and Prospects section. Probably the starkest difference between ZiPS and Steamer comes in the form of Lourdes Gurriel, Jr., who has such an unhappy projection from ZiPS that I went back and ran it a second time to make sure I hadn’t goofed anything. From his minor league hit data, ZiPS doesn’t think Gurriel will be able to maintain his minor-league BABIP. And the poor defensive projection isn’t just ZiPS overreacting to Gurriel’s fairly poor BIS and UZR defensive numbers; as rudimentary as even play-by-play minor league defensive measures are, Gurriel’s estimates come in below-average there as well.

The larger problem with the Blue Jay offense is that ZiPS essentially sees little upside remaining among the established players. Tulowitzki and Donaldson were both gone, and while they weren’t stars in 2018 by any stretch of the imagination (and Tulo didn’t even get in a game), they at least represented the possibility of star-level performance going into 2018. Smoak’s 2017 was probably his high-water mark and he’s now a designated hitter on the wrong side of 30, while Devon Travis is another year further away from when he looked like he could be a borderline star. Toronto was 10th in the AL in runs scored in 2018, but outside of the admittedly super-exciting addition of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., I just don’t see much of a hope for this unit doing much more than last year. Read the rest of this entry »

Now with their fourth World Series ring since 2004, we can safely say that any remaining curse on the Boston Red Sox has been exorcised with extreme prejudice. Surprisingly, their 108-win, 2018 season was the first hundred-win season for the franchise since 1946, back when Julio Franco was about 35.

The Setup

This World Series-winning Red Sox team should probably considered part of a new dynasty, rather than as the final installment of the one that won three World Series championships in the 21st century. Obviously, the players are different; 14 years have passed, and even awesome players are subject to the ravages of time. But the front office also has a very different look.

Theo Epstein has now been gone for nearly a decade, but in the years after his departure — and the brief interregnum featuring a dashing escape from Fenway Park dressed in a gorilla suit — the front office had a distinct flavor of the Epsteinian dynasty, with Ben Cherington, Jed Hoyer, and Mike Hazen all having ties to Epstein.

When Dave Dombrowski took over as President of Baseball Operations at the end of 2015, the ultimate responsibility for the day-to-day decision-making shifted for the first time to someone without ties to the 2004 champions. The Epsteinians ended with less bloodshed than a lot of great dynasties; Hazen getting a job in Arizona is hardly comparable to the violent end of Andronikos I Komnenos. (I swear I’ll stop now before the rest of the article is just me comparing Red Sox transactions to Byzantine battles.)

It’s easy to forget in the wake of a trophy in 2013 — flags fly forever, yada yada yada — but that victory was sandwiched between three last-place finishes in the AL East. To find the last time the Red Sox had consecutive losing seasons, you’d have to look back to around the strike.

The 2016 roster looked very different than the 2013 one. Only two starting position players remained from 2013, Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz, and the latter was in his grand farewell procession. The 2013 rotation was gone, except for Clay Buchholz, and of the main bullpenniérs, only Koji Uehara remained.

After adding David Price and Chris Sale in consecutive offseasons, the 2017-2018 winter had its own big highlight: the team’s re-signing of Mitch Moreland. OK, we all know that’s a lie; Boston successfully waited out a winter during which many of the other big market teams did little with their cash, and brought in J.D. Martinez on a six-year, $110 million contract. It was the rare signing of a star free agent on Martinez’s side of the defensive spectrum that ZiPS didn’t immediately start digitally laughing at.

With a young offensive core — 30-year-old J.D. Martinez was the old man of the valuable parts of the lineup — and a hopeful return to health and form from David Price, Boston rightly felt that they didn’t have to add too much else. Unlike some of those other high-revenue teams, Boston was on no quest to get under the luxury tax threshold for 2018, already having reset its penalties in 2017 (the Red Sox payroll resulted in a nearly $12 million luxury tax payment).

The Projection

ZiPS projected Boston to be in a close battle with the Yankees going into the season, with a two-win deficit that could evaporate by simply making a slightly different set of assumptions. The computer projected Boston to have a 78% chance of making the playoffs, far better than any projected runner-up, with the next-best being the St. Louis Cardinals at 53%.

ZiPS did see some weaknesses in the team, viewing the catching situation as a bit of a mess and believing Mitch Moreland and Hanley Ramirez to be rather unambitious choices at first base. ZiPS wasn’t super-confident about the depth at the back of the rotation, either, and was concerned the No. 4 and 5 starter situation could unravel very quickly with a few Nasty Surprises in the health department.

The Results

Well, they won 108 games and the World Series, so you could say that there was definitely some more-than-passable adequacy going on. The weird thing about the Red Sox season is that as 108-win teams go, it really wasn’t all sunshine, lollipops, and Mike Trout Everything.

Unusually, you could see a lot of what-ifs scenarios, none of which were all that crazy, in which Boston could have easily finished with even more wins. The catching Cerberus hit like a three-headed hot dog, Moreland and the released Ramirez were in fact rather mediocre at first (though Moreland, as usual, wore his surprise breakout costume for a couple of months), and the back of the rotation did in fact have a couple of Nasty Surprises. Rafael Devers growing from his rookie season instead of regressing from it could have added a couple more wins as well.

The contours of the Red Sox season weren’t surprising, but the magnitude of the good things were. The Twitter Baseballosphere all joked about a specific article written before the season, in which a Boston-area writer said Mookie Betts was as good as Mike Trout (I was one of the sarcastic quippers, naturally). But Betts actually was as good as Trout in 2018, as weird as that claim appeared at the time.

Betts and Martinez gave the team two MVP candidates and Chris Sale was, as usual, a legitimate Cy Young candidate. One could argue that the Boston Red Sox were a bit like a very sunny version of the Colorado Rockies, a team that also had two MVP candidates and a legitimate Cy Young candidate, but surrounded their core with an Ian Demond-Gerardo Parra Imagination Christmas.

Unlike Colorado, Boston never stopped trying to find opportunities to deal with their team’s limited weak spots. Steve Pearce gave the team a legitimate right-handed role player who could do at first base what Hanley proved too inept to accomplish. Ian Kinsler was brought in to patch the hole at second, even if the move failed to be all that profitable. And Nathan Eovaldi solidified the back of the rotation and finished the season having completely resurrected his career.

Boston’s regular-season pummeling of the league continued, with the team steamrolling over the Yankees, Astros, and Dodgers — the majority of the teams ZiPS that thought were better going into the season — and only dropping three games over the entire postseason.

And while he didn’t have a Cy Young-type season, it was nice to see Price eviscerate that laziest of baseball storylines, that of the postseason choke-artist. After a lousy start against the Yankees in the ALDS, Price only allowed seven runs over his remaining 24.1 innings. And after having to make an appearance in that crazy 18-inning Game 3, Price allowed just one run in seven innings, on one day’s rest filling in for Chris Sale, who was hospitalized with a stomach ailment.

What Comes Next?

Over the next few years, the Red Sox will likely have harder decisions to make than their eternal rivals, the New York Yankees. Chris Sale, Rick Porcello, and Xander Bogaerts are free agents after the 2019 season, and if he plays just as well as he did last season, Martinez may very well join them by using his 2019 or 2020 opt-outs. Mookie Betts hits free agency after the 2020 season as well.

That’s a lot of talent to see leave, and keeping that group together will be expensive; the team has already hinted that it will pose a great challenge to sign all of them. This team blew through the luxury tax threshold and that’s with Sale, Betts, and Bogaerts making under $30 million combined. If Martinez doesn’t opt-out, the Red Sox already have a hair under $110 million baked in the 2020 cake for just six players. If you bring back Sale for $30 million, and Bogaerts for $20 million, even with letting Porcello walk, that’s $159 million with 17 roster spots left to fill.

And those spots won’t be cheap to fill. Using the framework developed by Craig Edwards, and the pre-2018 prospect ranks of Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen, Boston had the second-least value in their farm system, ahead of only the Mariners. While the McDongenhagen analysis for this winter isn’t out yet, I daresay that there weren’t enough victories in the minors (Michael Chavis was suspended, Sam Travis was terrible, and Triston Casas can’t single-handedly turn around the farm system) to drastically change this ranking for the better.

As Boston sees its young core become expensive without easy answers from the farm, the team will have to be creative (or get much more comfortable with the luxury tax) in the coming years to not have a significant down turn in the franchise’s fortunes. Transitioning to the team’s next core without spending $300 million a year may be the biggest challenge for the dynasty of the Dombrowskii.

ZiPS Projection – Mookie Betts

Let’s just bask in the Mookie-y goodness and hail to whatever we find in the sunlight that surrounds him.

I asked ZiPS to give me all Betts’ remaining four-WAR seasons in the projections, and it returned a nice little collection of superstar seasons. All-told, ZIPS sees 52 WAR remaining for Betts, which puts him above 80 WAR, a definite Hall of Fame trajectory. Even if his defense doesn’t age as well as ZIPS thinks it will, knocking off ten runs a year from his defense starting in 2019 would still leave him at nearly 70 wins, and that’s way too harsh and adjustment.

That wraps up the Elegy for ’18 series; next year’s series will commence with the Orioles sometime in late March. Thanks for joining me in my final goodbyes to the 2018 season, even if they went week past when I’d intended!

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Though undoubtedly a successful franchise, World Series victory again eluded the Dodgers in 2018. After finishing as the runner-up, or first loser, depending on how inclined you are to glasses being empty or full, the Dodgers have now gone 30 years without winning the Fall Classic. It’s hard to weep too much at the funeral dirge of a team coming off six consecutive first-place finishes, but it’s been a disappointing run of not being able to close the deal.

The Setup

The Dodgers are an organization that represents, in some ways, the worst fears of the analytical community of 15 years ago. It’s one thing to tell small-market teams to be smarter and not have the Cam Bonifays or Chuck LaMars or Dave Littlefields making decisions. But what would happen when, one day, a very rich team also puts together an extremely progressive, highly competent front office?

That’s not to say the Dodgers were a backwards organization; the team was run by the extremely competent Dan Evans and then by one of Billy Beane’s chief paladins in Paul DePodesta. But what those two did not have was an organizational commitment to put together a bleeding-edge unit with a unified, top-to-bottom purpose like those we see in organizations like today’s Astros or Indians.

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The World Series may have been a battle of big market Goliaths, but one last David held out in the Milwaukee Brewers. Powered by two MVP candidates in the outfield, the remnants of the best logo of the 1980s, and perhaps most strangely, the confusing, awesome powers of Wade Miley, Milwaukee stood strong long past the pumpkinization of other sabermetric-darling Cinderellas. And when they went down, of the seven non-Boston teams to survive the wild card round, the Brew Crew was the only one to take their opponents to an elimination game, making Dylan Thomas proud.

The Setup

Of the franchises that underwent a significant teardown cycle over the last decade, the rebuilding of the Milwaukee Brewers may have been among the most low-key. One reason for this is that while other franchises that had to be dragged into their down cycles kicking and screaming and pretending disaster was not upon them, Milwaukee showed an unusual realpolitik about the state of their franchise. A lot of teams would have taken the wrong lesson from Milwaukee’s 82-80 2014 season, when they surprisingly led the NL Central uninterrupted from the second week of the season until the end of August, and believed they were just a couple mediocre veterans away from the promised land.

The Brewers, on the other hand, saw the opportunity to trade Yovani Gallardo while the getting was good (before a 30% drop in strikeout rate was reflected in his ERA). And when 2015 became a mess, the team wasted little time dithering, jumping straight into a rebuild before the roster was a bleak Kafka-esque wasteland of value while simultaneously transitioning to a new braintrust let by David Stearns, with the handoff from Doug Melvin being one of the smoothest transfers of power in human history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most teams that win the World Series, the 2018 Astros did not complete the two-peat, winning 103 games during the regular season but falling to the Red Sox in five, thus keeping the 2000 Yankees as the most recent team to win more than one World Series in a row. Russia may be the stumbling block for empire-builders, but despite arguably having a better team than in 2017, the Astros’ failed to repeat due to the implacable foe of World Series champions: a ten-team playoff in a sport in which teams are relatively close together in quality.

The Setup

Well, the 2017 Astros won the World Series. Which, if you didn’t already know that for some odd reason, you should probably at least have noticed unless you have a strange habit of not reading the opening paragraph to articles.

In my not-so-humbly-expressed opinion, borne from decades as a baseball fan and a couple more as a curiously paid observer, the greatest danger facing any championship team is inaction. When everything has gone right and a team has won baseball’s top honor, there’s a real tendency for that team to decide that each and every player on that championship roster helped lead the franchise to the fated promised land, like some sort of strange, baseball-specific Calvinism. Teams like the 2002 Angels, the 2005 White Sox, and the 2015 Royals all had disappointing follow-ups to their trophy runs and faded out of contention quickly.

While 2017’s follow-up wasn’t the most action-packed one for the Astros, as the team didn’t have many glaring weaknesses, they did still find it in themselves to pull of one off the offseason’s biggest trades, picking up Gerrit Cole from the Pittsburgh Pirates and making a deep rotation even deeper. The trade was a bit of a dice roll; Cole had never really fulfilled his early promise in Pittsburgh except for one shining season. But Houston thought the short-term upside in Cole was greater than the long-term value in the pitchers they gave up to acquire him, and showed they weren’t afraid to continue to tinker with the rotation, even leaving Collin McHugh in the bullpen.

With a deep rotation made deeper by the addition of Cole, and the quartet of Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, and George Springer all still in their twenties for a few more years, Houston, like the other large-market teams, largely avoided dipping their toes into a weak free agent market.

The Projection

Houston didn’t have as obvious a cakewalk as the Cleveland Indians coming into the 2018 season, but very few saw a lot of real resistance for them in the AL West. Of the 40 FanGraphs writers and contributors who made 2018 staff predictions entering the season, 38 chose the Astros to win the West. In ESPN’s panel, 29-of-29 picked Houston.

And the ZiPS SuperComputer© didn’t beg to differ. While the computer thought the Angels had at least some path to a division title if certain not-too-crazy things went right for them, with a 95-67 projected record for Houston, ZiPS projected the Astros to have the second-easiest divisional crown, with 83.9% odds of winning, just behind the Indians at 84.4%.

The reasons for the optimism were, in foresight and hindsight, quite obvious. The Astros were overflowing with awesome, deep talent and had the resources to trade for in-season help if UCL tears somehow proved to be contagious. The team’s weak spot in 2017, designated hitter, looked to be an improved if not a league-beating spot, with the retirement of Carlos Beltran. And in any case, there wasn’t a lot of help available in free agency at that spot.

The Results

Somewhat boringly, a lot of things went right for the Astros; 103-win teams tend to have more than their fair share of breaks go their way, simply because lucky 100-win teams are more likely than unlucky 106-win ones.

That’s not to say everything fell on the sunny side for Houston. Some wounds were self-inflicted. The team made the controversial decision to acquire then-suspended reliever Roberto Osuna at the end of July, a move that read to many as unforced error, given the nature of Osuna’s suspension and the availability of other relievers on the market.

Others were just the way the game goes. Josh Reddick didn’t repeat the best season of his career and Yuli Gurriel’s power dropped off (not surprising for a 34-year-old). Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve both missed time due to injury, the former more seriously with a larger dropoff in play.

But as in the 143 episodes or so of The Simpsons in which Homer gets fired from the power plant before the first commercial break, things mostly worked out. The offensive losses hurt, but the team’s choices in role players arrested some of the loss, with Max Stassi, Tony Kemp, and Tyler White all making very real contributions to the team’s win total. The offense dropped from first in the AL in runs scored to fifth, but this was mirrored by an improvement from fifth to first in the team’s ERA.

Justin Verlander’s 2018 post-trade mojo continued to prove strong, and Gerrit Cole finally had became as unhittable as furious Pirates fans spent years hoping he’d be, seeing an almost 50% bump in his strikeout rate from 2017 after mostly giving up on his sinker, which batters had slugged nearly .500 against that year.

All told, Houston’s rotation collected 22.5 WAR in 2018, a franchise best. Not even the mid-1980s Astros, with Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott’s changeup and the weird world in which Jim Deshaies was a strikeout machine, were able to match that.

Probably the weirdest 2018 phenomenon for Houston was that despite winning games at an impressive clip, they weren’t truly able to pull away from the rest of the division until the last week or so of the season. Pythagorean Magic may sound like a really bad educational video game someone buys for their kids, but it was enough to keep Seattle in the race, to the extent that the Astros actually lost first place for a few days during a twelve-game winning streak.

And after the Mariners returned to earth or their Soundgarden albums or whatever it is Seattle people do in 2018, the Oakland A’s proved nearly as resilient. Despite finishing with 103 wins and never having a losing month in 2018, Houston never established a division lead greater than six games.

What Comes Next?

The big challenge facing the Astros in the present, and over the next few years, will be in dealing with what is a transitional phase in the team’s rotation, one of the big 2018 strengths. Of the five primary starting pitchers for the Astros in 2018, three are already gone: Dallas Keuchel and Charlie Morton to free agency, and Lance McCullers to Tommy John surgery. Verlander, Cole, and McHugh are all free agents after the 2019 season.

Even with an optimistic return from McCullers, that’s an awful lot of quality pitching turnover in a very short period. The team still has an above-average farm system with legitimate rotation candidates, one of whom, Josh James, looks assured of a 2019 spot. But it’s easy to see why when talking with the Miami Marlins about a possible J.T. Realmuto trade, Houston has reportedly been adamant about not giving up Forrest Whitley.

2019 ZiPS Projection – Alex Bregman

I’m going with Bregman here simply because I received a barrage of requests during his breakout 2018 for a ZiPS look into his future. And since I occasionally like to give the people what they want, let’s crank out some Alex Bregman goodness.

Yup, that’s a bonafide star. Enough of one that if Carlos Correa roars back in 2019, the Astros face some very interesting long-term questions. Imagine a world in 2020 in which the Astros are able to make a long-term deal with Bregman but not Correa. Bregman’s defensive numbers at third were hardly amazing, but he did a decent job filling in at short for Correa in 2018. At what point do you start to talk about a Correa trade, especially for a piece that fills up another hole, say in the rotation? It’s not so far-fetched.

Until three of the team’s four postseason starters got knocked out early by the eventual-champion Red Sox, the 2018 Yankees had a successful season. Giancarlo Stanton’s first season in New York may have been a disappointment relative to his MVP 2017, and the rotation required some midseason triage, but the team managed their first hundred-win season since 2009. And thankfully, they did not lose in the wild card game and thus highlight the weirdness in baseball design of combining wild cards with an unbalanced schedule.

The Setup

The early part of the 2017 offseason was wrapped up in the grand hunt for Giancarlo Stanton, a player far more interesting than nearly every free agent actually available for signing. After a number of false starts and mystery teams and trade clauses not-waived, the Yankees came out on top in the race for not-Michael. And unusually when picking up a superstar, it was actually better than simply signing a comparable player in free agency, with the Yankees able to shed Starlin Castro’s salary and only lose two prospects (only one, Jorge Guzman, was a top 10 prospect for the Marlins according to our very own Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel).

The obsession with the luxury tax ensnared several of the larger-payroll teams over the 2017-2018 winter, and the Yankees were one of the chief actors in this little mini-play. We can argue endlessly about whether the current luxury tax system is well-designed (it isn’t) or whether it serves as a soft salary cap (it does), but it is the system in place and staying under the threshold for a year in order to “reset” the penalty rate provides a tremendous financial motivation to go cheap in the short-term.

The desire to reset the luxury tax penalty heading into an offseason in which Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, and possibly Clayton Kershaw were set to hit free agency was strong, and both of New York’s other significant offseason trades reflected this urge. Chase Headley, a perfectly average third baseman for the Yankees, enough to make him a much better signing than rival Boston’s similar deal with Pablo Sandoval, was sent packing to San Diego in a pure salary dump; the Yankees gave the Padres Bryan Mitchell as compensation for taking Headley’s contract. Any notion that this wasn’t a move designed to trim payroll, that the Padres just really wanted Headley, is undermined by the fact that his new-old team gave him nine starts before sending him to the unemployment line, where Headley spent the rest of 2019.

A three-way trade with the Diamondbacks and Rays netted the Yankees Brandon Drury, who was basically brought in to fill the Headley role of a stopgap until Gleyber Torres or Miguel Andujar; he was made as expendable as a secondary henchman objecting to the antagonist’s devious plot in a James Bond film by the second week of the season.

The Yankees spent all of $14 million on one-year contracts for CC Sabathia and Neil Walker, a far cry from a decade prior, when they guaranteed more than $800 million in contracts after the 2007 and 2008 seasons. Only 2015-2016, when the team’s biggest signing was Chris Denorfia, was quieter.

The Projection

The ZiPS projection system pegged the Yankees as two games better than the Red Sox, with just under a 60% chance of winning the division. ZiPS expected the AL East division title to essentially be yet another Yankees-Red Sox battle, with only a 4% chance of one of The Others of surprising enough to take the division. ZiPS was confident about the Yankees’ offense, seeing most of the unknown as a matter how quickly Andujar and Torres would have full-time jobs and how effectively the Yankees would continue to yank Jacoby Ellsbury’s playing time. The bullpen was projected to be the best bullpen that ZiPS ever projected. The computer’s main worry was the back of the rotation, which the computer did not see as very deep should something happened to one of Sabathia, Sonny Gray, or Jordan Montgomery.

The Results

Oddly enough for a team that won 100 games, it felt like the Yankees had more than their fair share of disappointments. Some of the fears about the rotation came to pass; Gray’s command was a tire fire in the first half and Montgomery’s season — and most, if not all, of 2019 — ended in June with Tommy John surgery. Neither Domingo German or Luis Cessa proved to be ready for a rotation spot on a win-now team, and the surprising Jonathan Loaisiga was yanked from the rotation with shoulder pain, leaving the team with obvious back-rotation holes going into the trade deadline.

Unlike a team like the Giants, who could never have made a significant midseason addition without going over the luxury tax threshold (they only had a $300,000 cushion at one point), the Yankees left themselves some space to make move that would require them taking on salary. It was enough space that the team was able to add Lance Lynn and J.A. Happ for the stretch run, and pick up Zach Britton from the Orioles to make a deep bullpen even deeper. None of these moves ended up changing the team’s postseason fate, as New York fell short in the contest for the division, but they might have if the team had gone deeper into the playoffs than they actually did.

As projected by ZiPS, the team set a new all-time record for team home runs in a season with 267, though to be honest, that result wasn’t particularly surprising. But even the second-ranked scoring offense in the AL has some plans go awry. Gary Sanchez, who had established himself as a star-level catcher in his first 1 1/2 seasons in the majors, lost a hundred points of batting average, finishing at .186/.291/.406 (he was Rob Deer-like in that he still was worth 1.4 WAR in 89 games). Further marring his season was the charge that he lacked hustle, which, combined with a groin injury, led to weeks of conspiracy theory about his health status.

Stanton also has to be considered at least a mild disappointment, dropping to 38 home runs and a 127 wRC+ from 59 and 159 his final year with the Marlins. Now, it would be greedy to focus too much on this dip — complaining about a 4.2 WAR player is a high class problem to have — but the fact remains that the Yankees did not get as much from their newly acquired star as they would have liked to see. Greg Bird managed to stay healthy for the second-half of the year, but also managed to stay around replacement level, resulting in him mostly losing his job to Luke Voit.

Those disappointments, even when combined with the Brett Gardner starting to show his age, turned out not to really matter. Aaron Hicks can rightly be described as a legitimate All-Star, which still seems a little strange to 2016 Dan, but that’s the world we’re in now. Andujar and Torres finished second and third in the Rookie of the Year voting (I would have flipped them given Andujar’s poor defense). Aaron Judge’s regression toward the mean indicated his mean was pretty damn high.

One interesting note is that ZiPS never actually knocked the Yankees down behind the Red Sox in projections. Even with the eight-game cushion at the end of the season, ZiPS still saw the Yankees as a sliver better than the Red Sox, though you wouldn’t have known it from their four-game playoff series.

What Comes Next?

In the early offseason, the Yankees have played the “Golly gee, I don’t know, the root cellar needs a’fixin’ and I’m not sure we have the money for those big city fancies with grandpa’s water on the knee” card publicly when it comes to the cream of this year’s free agent crop. This is hardly unusual this winter; most of the big spending teams, including the Red Sox, Dodgers, and Cubs, have all been mumbling this storyline with only a few variations on the theme. Only the Phillies, with their talk of “stupid money” have really broken ranks.

That’s not to say the team has done nothing, but the moves they’ve made have largely been keeping the band together. Gardner and Sabathia, two primary remaining holdovers from the team’s prior core, will return in 2019 on one-year deals. Happ, who stabilized the back of the rotation in late summer, returns in that role for two more years.

The team also made one of the bigger trades this winter, picking up James Paxton from the rebuilding Seattle Mariners for a package led by Justus Sheffield. With a rotation that now looks like Luis Severino–Masahiro Tanaka-Paxton-Happ-Sabathia in 2019, I think at least when it comes to the pitching, the Yankees will have a quiet rest of their offseason.

Otherwise, I’m not so sure that the impression the team has given of only dipping their toes into free agency is just posturing. Ten years ago, I’d have cried total bull, but with even large-market teams seeming generally less interested in splashing cash than they have been at any point I can remember as a baseball fan (I’m 40), I’m not really sure right now. Bryce Harper or Manny Machado ought to be a fit, as would someone like Brian Dozier to fill-in at second with Torres presumably at short while Didi Gregorius recovers from surgery, but I just don’t know if the team’s hinted lack of interest is genuine or not.

There’s a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma going on with the Red Sox and Yankees, both teams that ought to be in the top three in MLB in 2019, in that both of them spending $200 million might not advantage either over a scenario in which both spend very little. What actually happens is one of the most interesting questions remaining this winter. The Yankees will be a very good team in 2019, but I’m quite unsure how much they’ll open up their ceiling this offseason.

ZiPS Projection – Giancarlo Stanton

How much will Stanton bounce-back from a weak-ish 2019? How beneficial would it be for him to opt out after 2020? How high can he get in the all-time home run rankings? These are questions, naturally, for the ZiPS-o-matic 5000.

No, I’m not actually calling it that.

ZiPS is more negative on Stanton than I had expected. It isn’t thrilled by his step backwards in plate discipline from 2017, now seeing Stanton with a higher chance at going down that “old player skills” career path than establishing a high-enough level for a more graceful decline phase. A lot of players who didn’t age particularly well have crept up in his similarity group, with names like Rudy York, Jack Clark, Jay Buhner, Richie Sexson, and Boog Powell all in the top ten. That gets Stanton up to 637 home runs, but like Pujols, has him petering out before he seriously gets into the Ruth/Aaron/Bonds battle.

No doubt partially out of a sense of jealousy at watching other teams make trades Friday without making one of his own, Jerry Dipoto and the Seattle Mariners added a veteran, picking up outfielder Domingo Santana from the Milwaukee Brewers for outfielder Ben Gamel and pitcher Noah Zavolas.

After acquiring Christian Yelich and signing Lorenzo Cain last offseason, the Brewers faced a bit of a roster crunch when it came to the outfield. On pure merit, it made the most sense for Ryan Braun to see his role shrink coming into the season, but seriously reducing their longtime franchise player’s playing time was something I don’t believe the front office was ever seriously considering. Braun would get some at-bats at first to spell Eric Thames, and between that and various days off and possible injury stints for the quartet, Santana would get playing time and everybody would be happy. And if that didn’t work out, Santana was coming off a .278/.371/.505 age-24 season that could help snag the Brewers a starting pitcher.

Everything worked out quite well for the Brewers, but not so much for Santana. The team was able to juggle the five players in question quite well in the early going, enough to get Santana 24 starts in April, though that was aided by Yelich’s sore oblique that sent him to the ten-day DL. It would be hard to claim that Santana did much with his April playing time, only hitting .237/.321/.269 with no homers. Thames’s thumb injury required the Brewers to have a full-timer at first, and with Jesus Aguilar made the absolute most of the opportunity and the outfield healthy, Santana’s playing time dropped quickly. The return of Thames created another roster crunch and Santana, with an option year available, spent July and August starting for Colorado Springs. He was called up in September, but purely as a reserve and only got a single start for the month.

The Brewers would have had a lot more difficulty trading Santana for a pitcher at this point, so rather than pay him to be a role player, they sent him over to the Mariners for a less expensive role player who can cover center field. Santana’s still relatively young and with three years to go until free agency, he’s more interesting than a pillow contract for a one-year reclamation projection. Even hanging onto Mitch Haniger, Santana likely starts in a corner for Seattle as there’s simply far more promise in his future than that of Jay Bruce.

As Eric Longenhagen noted to me, Zavolas is a former college starter with a low-90s fastball who changes speed well but is missing a solid breaking pitch. Harvard alumni will likely appreciate Zavolas for having thrown a no-hitter against Yale back in April, but he smells a lot like an organizational player to me. He got good results in his debut in the minors, but a 22-year-old ought to be crushing the Northwest League.

From a pure “this is what they project” standpoint, Santana and Gamel come out fairly evenly. I still believe that Santana has some upside remaining, but it will have to involve some kind of improvement in his plate discipline. Santana swung at more bad pitches in 2018 than in 2017, and what’s especially troubling is that unlike some bad-ball swingers, he’s actually quite poor at making contact with the out-of-zone pitches, 14 percentage points worse than the league average in 2018. It feels like there’s a really good player hidden away somewhere in Santana should he adopt a better approach at the plate, but finding that can’t be assured and none of his three previous organizations were able to make him into a better hitter.