12:01

Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Well, a number of hitters are underperforming! Olson, the injured Acuña, and Riley all had prominent spots in the zstats update I posted yesterday

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Oh geez, I’m not sure

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Mercutio’s kind of Fernando Rodney-y. Constantine’s kind of moody

Read the rest of this entry »

Among the panoply of stats created by Statcast and similar tracking tools in recent years are a whole class of stats sometimes called the “expected stats.” These types of numbers elicit decidedly mixed feelings among fans – especially when they suggest their favorite team’s best player is overachieving – but they serve an important purpose of linking between Statcast data and the events that happen on the field. Events in baseball, whether a single or a homer or strikeout or whatever, happen for reasons, and this type of data allows us to peer a little better into baseball on an elemental level.

While a lucky home run or a seeing-eye single still count on the scoreboard and in the box score, the expected stats assist us in projecting what comes next. Naturally, as the developer of the ZiPS projection tool for the last 20 (!) years, I have a great deal of interest in improving these prognostications. Statcast has its own methodology for estimating expected stats, which you’ll see all over the place with a little x preceding the stats (xBA, xSLG, xwOBA, etc). While these data don’t have the status of magic, they do help us predict the future slightly less inaccurately, even if they weren’t explicitly designed to optimize predictive value. What ZiPS uses is designed to be as predictive as I can make it. I’ve talked a lot about this for both hitters and for pitchers. The expected stats that ZiPS uses are called zStats; I’ll let you guess what the “z” stands for!

It’s important to remember that these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a hitter’s zBABIP from the last year and go, “Hey, sounds good, that’s the projection.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass, and are more stable for individual players than the actual stats. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. And sometimes it’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than actual homers allowed are. Also, the longer a hitter “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one.

A good example of this last point is Isaac Paredes. There was a real disconnect between his expected and actual performances in 2023 and that’s continued into 2024. But despite some really confounding Statcast data, ZiPS now projects Parades to be a considerably more productive hitter moving forward than it did back in March. Expected stats give us additional information; they don’t give us readings from the Oracle at Delphi.

One thing to note is that bat speed is not part of the model. The data availability is just too recent to gauge how including it would improve the predictive value of these numbers. It’s also likely that even without the explicit bat speed data, the model is already indirectly capturing a lot of the information bat speed data provides.

What’s also interesting to me is that zHR is quite surprised by this year’s decline in homers. There have been 2,076 home runs hit in 2024 as I type this, yet before making the league-wide adjustment for environment, zHR thinks there “should have been” 2,375 home runs hit, a difference of 299. That’s a massive divergence; zHR has never been off by more than 150 home runs league-wide across a whole season, and it is aware that these home runs were mostly hit in April/May and the summer has yet to come. That does make me wonder about the sudden drop in offense this year. It’s not a methodology change either, as I re-ran 2023 with the current model (with any training data from 2023 removed) and there were 5,822 zHR last year compared to the actual total of 5,868 homers. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Sale is a serious Cy Young contender. This was once a fairly common combination of words to put together, but after five years of injuries and/or ineffectiveness, it seems like a very weird thing to say today. That’s where we are, though, with Sale striking out 82 batters against 10 walks over his 11 starts and 67 2/3 innings. He leads all NL starters in FIP (2.48), walks per nine innings (1.33), and strikeout-to-walk ratio (8.20); he ranks fourth in strikeouts per nine (10.91), sixth in pitcher WAR (1.9), and 12th in ERA (3.06), though both his excellent FIP and xERA (2.73, third in NL) suggest his actual mark could improve as the season goes on. And for subscribers to the old school, he’s posted an 8-1 record for the Braves, a top contender who lost their ace for the season. Indeed, Atlanta’s offseason gamble to trade for Sale is paying off well so far, and his resurgence have been paramount in preventing the Braves from falling even farther behind the Phillies in the NL East standings.

But what hasn’t been revived yet is any talk about Sale’s chances of making a run at Cooperstown immortality in another decade or so. That’s not surprising, given he lost a good chunk of his mid-career years and stands at only 128 wins and 1,848 1/3 innings — volume that wouldn’t get it done for even the most dominant of starters on a per-inning basis. We’ve long accepted that 300-game winners were going to be increasingly unlikely, but what if 200 becomes the new standard? If Sale truly has reemerged from five years in the injury wasteland, suddenly his Hall of Fame case looks at least plausible.

The 300-win standard never actually was a standard for Hall of Fame voting until relatively recently. Barely a quarter of Hall of Fame pitchers are 300-game winners and a quarter of them (six of 24) exclusively played in the 19th century, when baseball was as much a carnival show as professional sport. From 1917 to 1965, nearly a half-century that included baseball’s peak in the context of American culture, there were never more than three future 300-win pitchers active at any point. In most of those years, baseball had only one or two active pitchers who would eventually hit that threshold, typically a combination of Lefty Grove, Early Wynn, and Warren Spahn. It’s not as if this was an era in baseball history that lacked for Hall of Fame pitchers; slightly more than half of AL/NL Hall of Famers had the majority of their careers within that span of years.

To get a clearer picture, I took all starting pitchers (at least 50% of games as starters) and tracked how many per year got at least 10% support on the BBWAA’s Hall of Fame ballot. It’s not completely an apples-to-apples comparison because the rules have changed at times, but it’s not apples-to-grenades either, as the BBWAA rules have been more stable than the various Veterans Committee schemes.

The stinginess trend toward pitchers is clear. Without a lot of 300-win pitchers to vote on, voters didn’t simply shrug and decide that no pitchers were good enough; they were quite happy to vote for lots of pitchers who failed to get 300 wins, or even 250. From 1936 to 1975, the 10-election rolling average of pitchers with fewer than 200 wins to reach that 10% threshold was 2.5. A pitcher with fewer than 200 wins hasn’t received 10% of the vote since Don Newcombe in 1980. This is despite early voters having the deepest pools of players to vote for; even as Hall of Fame voting started in 1936 and players hung on ballots for 15 years instead of the current 10-year window, voters found room for these pitchers with less impressive win totals.

The 90s cluster of pitching greats are either in the Hall of Fame or off the ballot, so unless voting patterns become more like they were before the 1970s, we may have a real lack of pitchers inducted into the Hall of Fame in the coming years. That process has already started, with only 17 different pitchers ever getting 10% of the vote in 21st-century balloting. There are three active pitchers with 200 wins: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Clayton Kershaw. There’s also Zack Greinke, who at age 40 has probably thrown his last big league inning, even though he has not yet officially retired and remains unsigned. It seems very likely that all four will get into the Hall of Fame. But then what? Pitcher usage has changed considerably since that quartet debuted. Right now, there are only 11 other active pitchers with 100 (!) career wins, and none between 150 and 200.

Aside from the previously mentioned quartet, only Sale and Gerrit Cole have ever really come up in future Hall of Fame conversations, though Yu Darvish has an interesting-but-tricky case if voters give consideration to his seven years pitching in Japan. For the first time in ZiPS history, ZiPS doesn’t project a single pitcher who hasn’t already eclipsed 200 wins to have at least a 50% shot of reaching the milestone. Considering this, Sale has an fascinating path to the Hall of Fame. For the most part, the writers still aren’t voting for pitchers without lofty win totals, but it has become clear that the fixation on pitcher wins has decreased in Cy Young voting. This could provide an interesting preview of where Hall of Fame voting is going to be over the next 5-10 years, because year-end voters don’t have the same 10-year requirement for BBWAA membership that Hall of Fame voting does. As a result, you tend to get a younger demographic participating in year-end awards voting, and at least some of those writers will be gaining their Hall of Fame vote between now and when Sale hits the ballot. Additionally, some of the most veteran writers aren’t as active in the year-end voting, as some of them are in a state of semi or full retirement but have maintained their Hall vote. In a contrast the younger writers, some of these senior BBWAA members will lose their vote over the next 5-10 years. Call it the Baseball Writing Circle of Life.

Considering this, let’s crank up ZiPS (Hey, you had to know I was going to do this at some point!) and look at Sale’s up-to-date projections. As discussed at the top of this post, Sale has been excellent in 2024 and, just as importantly, he’s been healthy.

Even with ZiPS projecting Sale to be only healthy-ish rather than to have a late-career renaissance like Verlander, that’s another 50 wins and 10 WAR, and with the rest of 2024 added in, 58 wins and 12 WAR. That would bring his total career projection to 186 wins and 62 WAR. Excluding the quartet of Verlander, Scherzer, Kershaw, and Greinke, that’d place Sale second among active pitchers in both wins and WAR, behind only Cole. As far 200 wins go, ZiPS projects Sale to have a 45% chance to reach that milestone, and if 200 becomes the new 300, then he’s got a 45% shot at making it to Cooperstown. Obviously, it’s not that simple, but Sale might not need to get to 200 wins to get elected. When voters look at Sale’s Hall of Fame case, they’ll consider his utter dominance during his best seasons — an eight-season peak from 2012-19 — and, should his health hold up at least to the level that ZiPS projects, he’ll likely go down as one of the very best pitchers during the two-decade era from 2010-2030. That would probably be enough to get him over the hump even if he falls short of 200. This chart tells the story.

It’s not as if Sale’s career is missing those non-statistical highlights. While his postseason performances have been short of cromulence, he does have a World Series ring, six All-Star selections so far, and is already 27th all-time in Cy Young career shares.

Will Sale actually end up in the Hall of Fame? We’ll have to wait until he finishes writing the last handful of chapters, which is sometimes a difficult task. But I think the final story may be better than many people think.

Baseball is big business and no team is infinitely patient with players who are struggling. While teams won’t generally describe it in such blunt terms, at the beginning of the season, every player has some unknown, invisible amount of leeway when it comes to poor performance. Established role players and fringe starters who just squeezed their way onto the big league roster in March may find themselves in the Pacific Coast or International League come late April or early May as they feel the heat of a poor start. As summer approaches, the names facing demotion become bigger, especially when those players are younger guys who still have minor league options remaining. On Sunday night, two of those bigger names ran out of rope, at least for now: Spencer Torkelson and Edouard Julien are headed to Triple-A to play for smaller crowds in smaller towns.

Before we examine what this pair of demotions means, I thought I’d put some numbers to the broader phenomena. I looked at the preseason ZiPS projections for players optioned during the season over the last 10 years. In nine of the 10 seasons, June was the month in which the players with the most combined projected WAR were sent to the minors. That holds true on a rate basis as well, with 0.75 projected WAR per June demoted player the highest monthly average. Naturally, demoted players tend to be worse performers than those who keep their jobs. To use last year as an example, of the 1,091 demotions, only 19 involved players projected for at least 2 WAR. Just one such player, Brayan Bello, was optioned in April, but starting on May 10 with Jose Miranda, bigger demotions started populating the list, with Miranda, David Villar, Oswald Peraza, Brandon Pfaadt, Alek Manoah, Josh Rojas, and Luis Urías all hitting the minors from mid-May through the end of June. Only four two-win players were demoted in July, with Manoah’s second demotion on August 11 the final one. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I keep a bit of a list of things to bring up when we talk stuff at staff meetings, I could add it

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I’m pretty sure from the raw data we have, we at least have the ability

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I’ve tinkered a little, but nothing substantive

Read the rest of this entry »

It may still feel like the 2024 season just got started, but Major League Baseball passed the one-third mark this past week. This is usually a good time for a full, fresh run of the ZiPS projected standings, and I think it’s especially so now after Ronald Acuña Jr.’s season-ending injury, which will have a serious impact on the NL East race.

The ZiPS projected standings use a different methodology than our Depth Chart standings, beyond only using ZiPS rather than a ZiPS/Steamer mix. 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. I then make my own changes, and the final results are correlated with, but far from identical, to Jason Martinez’s projected PAs and IPs. It varies from player to player, but the biggest systemic difference is that my “average” projected playing time for individual players reflects a larger chance of significant injury. I feel this methodology helps better express a team’s depth, something crucial as the season goes on and IL attendance grows. It has the disadvantage, though, of being quite workload intensive, meaning it’s not something that can just be auto-run every morning.

The one change in methodology from past standings is that the average playing time for the projected players is month-based. For example, ZiPS sees no innings for Jacob deGrom at all in June or July, with most of the innings (I have the average at 15) coming in September. So each time, rather than having one distribution of expected team strength for the season, ZiPS now has six distributions for each team based on the calendar month. While the resulting changes are quite small, the sad truth is that baseball projections are mature enough after a couple decades that all improvements are tiny. It’s not just the low-hanging fruit that’s gone; you now have to climb a rickety ladder held by an inebriated friend to get the ones way up there.

Let’s get into the projections before we reach a Tolkien-movie level of narrator exposition. It should go without saying, because it rarely seems to end up that way, but take this as a reminder that 0.0% is not literally 0.0%, but until mathematical elimination, a number that rounds to 0.0%.

The Phillies have seen their projections sink a bit after losing four of five games to the Rockies and Giants, but the Acuña injury is a disaster for the Braves. ZiPS sees Philadelphia and Atlanta as basically equals now, but with a five-game lead, attrition benefits Philadelphia, not Atlanta. The Mets remain as mediocre as their preseason projections said, but the Acuña injury let them claw back almost a full percentage point of divisional probability over the last week, despite their dreadful recent stretch. The Nats have played much better than their expected doormat status, but they’re not certainly not inside the house yet, and ZiPS sees their relevance on the edge of the wild card race slipping away. The Marlins’ 6-24 start to the season all but officially eliminated them from the divisional race, but after playing roughly .500 ball this month, it’s at least plausible, though incredibly unlikely, that they could make a run for the third wild card spot.

Jackson Chourio has struggled, but Milwaukee has received solid offense contributions from almost every other position. Who had Joey Ortiz likely finishing 2024 with more WAR than Jackson Holliday? I can’t say ZiPS or I did, either. (Well, unless I lie.) ZiPS doesn’t expect Robert Gasser to maintain that microscopic ERA, but it does think he’ll get a pretty good jump from what is now a surprisingly low strikeout rate. Right now, the Brewers are the slight favorite to win the Central, but every team in the division still maintains more than a scrap of a chance. I personally think the Cubs will be the most aggressive at the deadline, but that’s a little out of ZiPS’s wheelhouse.

There were scenarios in which the Dodgers were topped in the NL West, but it doesn’t look like any of them are coming to pass. Outside of Bobby Miller’s shoulder injury, the rotation has held together quite well, and we’re getting closer to Clayton Kershaw’s possible return. The Padres and Giants have seen their divisional odds get longer since March, but their win projections remain about where they were initially expected, and both teams are serious wild card contenders. The 50th-percentile win projection for the last NL wild card berth is 85.4, a number well within the realm of possibility for both teams. So could the Diamondbacks, but their odds of getting there are a little less likely because, as of now, they’re three games behind San Diego and San Francisco. The Rockies are stubbornly hanging onto that last decimal point, though ZiPS think they’re the worst team in the National League.

Contrary to the preseason, the playoff picture in the AL East has cleared up considerably in two months. What was projected to possibly be a race between all five clubs, with even the Red Sox having a decent shot, has largely become a two-team competition between the Orioles and Yankees. ZiPS likes the Yankees slightly better in an “everybody stays healthy” projection, but with the injury risks all built in, ZiPS gives the Orioles the subtle nod due to their superior depth. ZiPS still believes the Blue Jays could contend for a wild card spot, because the offense can’t be this mediocre moving forward, but after struggling for two months, Toronto has basically been lapped by Baltimore and New York. ZiPS remains skeptical that the Red Sox will keep up their current win pace (at least their Pythagorean one), but the system thinks the rotation’s success is legitimate. It’s weird seeing the Rays with the worst bullpen WAR in baseball; I almost typed the Devil Rays when looking at that chart.

ZiPS was the Cleveland believer of the projection systems coming into the season, but not even it could’ve expected the Guardians to win two-thirds of their games. I’m not going get mad at my computer for not realizing that David Fry would play like the second coming of Ted Williams. But if the Guardians are bound for some regression, the AL Central is not exactly full of teams that could overrun them. ZiPS remains extremely skeptical of the Royals, but they’ve banked enough wins that they’re not going to disappear from the race anytime soon. The computer now thinks the AL Central will have 1.2 wild card spots (on average), a big jump from 0.5. After an abomination of a start to the season, the White Sox have played just well enough that they still have a 20% chance of avoiding 100 losses. That’s something, I guess.

The Astros must play under a fortunate star because this has to be their best-case scenario considering their abysmal start to the season. With the Rangers treading water and playing some lousy baseball of late, the Mariners doing the usual Mariners .540 thing, and the Angels looking like a lost cause, nobody ran away with the division while the Astros sputtered. The Logan Roy of the AL West, Houston’s future may have some serious questions, but the team has weathered what was likely its worst stretch of pitcher injuries. The lack of a frontrunner in the West has kept Oakland theoretically in the mix, but the team lacks depth to remain single-digit games back from first place for much longer, and its owner is probably far too apathetic about his club’s short-term fate to make any big additions at the deadline. At least Mason Miller is a lot of fun.

As usual, I’m including the ZiPS playoff matrix, which shows the percentile results for the win total of each playoff spot’s eventual victor. For example, while the Orioles and Yankees are both projected to win 95 games, ZiPS projects that the average eventual result for the team that wins the AL East will be 99.3 wins.

In order to not have to reference the preseason projections, I’m also including a sortable table of how the playoff/divisional/World Series probabilities have changed since the preseason projections.

Before the start of the season, the Atlanta Braves were the consensus pick to win the NL East. While it wasn’t unanimous – try getting a few dozen writers to fully agree on something – 22 of 25 FanGraphs writers predicted the Braves to win the division for the seventh straight season. Sportsbooks offered odds on Atlanta that had an implied probability of 75-80% for winning the division. ZiPS projected the Braves to win the most games in the majors and gave them a 63% chance to take the NL East crown. But as we approach the end of the first third of the season, it’s the Philadelphia Phillies who are on top of the division with the best record in baseball. The team’s six-game lead over Atlanta isn’t an insurmountable barrier, but it’s still a comfortable cushion for this point of the season. So, how concerned should the Braves be? And how long do they have to overcome their rivals and keep their division streak alive?

Frequently, when I discuss surprise first-place teams at this point of the season, I compare the situation to a hypothetical foot race between Usain Bolt and me. It goes without saying that Bolt is a much faster runner than I am, to the degree that he’d probably beat me in a race hopping on one foot. But what if he gave me a head start so I could get a sufficient lead? How far ahead would I have to be to have a chance to hold off the world’s fastest man? Uhhh, 10 steps from the finish line by the time he starts running might get it done. Obviously, this isn’t the perfect analogy, because even if Bolt is the Braves of running, I certainly am not the Phillies. But you get the idea: At some point in the season, a division race becomes a question of time, not talent.

First things first, let’s take a look at the current simulated ZiPS projected standings, through Thursday night’s games.

Well, at least if you go by the ZiPS projections, Atlanta fans aren’t getting the happiest version of this tale. ZiPS still thinks the Braves are the better team, but the margin has narrowed considerably. What was a 10-win gap in March has thinned to just a hair over a three-win separation per 162 games (20 points of winning percentage, to be exact). In fact, the Phillies are now projected to have an almost identical probability of winning the division as the Braves did at the start of the season, despite Atlanta’s aforementioned 10-game edge; as I remind people, the future is almost always far more uncertain than you think.

This is actually an impressively durable change, which further complicates matters for the Braves. Projections for teams don’t usually move quickly because, well, baseball history says they shouldn’t. ZiPS has been doing team projections since 2005. If all you had to go on to project the last two-thirds of a season was a team’s preseason projection in ZiPS and the team’s actual record for the first-third of the season, the best mix based on two decades of projections is about two-thirds ZiPS and one-third actual record.

The offenses tell much of the story, so let’s start with Philadelphia’s offense. Here are the differences between ZiPS preseason WAR and the current projected final WAR. The latter consists of the WAR already on the books and the rest-of-season projections. Remember, this already includes all those grumpy old regressions toward the mean.

That’s eight players projected to finish with at least a half-win more than at the start of the season. Castellanos is the only Phillies player whose projected WAR is now a half-win worse, but the projection systems didn’t expect much from him going into the season anyway. None of the hitters who are smashing the ball right now are expected to turn into midnight pumpkins. Even Bohm, the infielder ZiPS was most suspicious of, is now in the top 10 for most projected WAR added for 2025. And it’s not shocking that Harper, Realmuto, Turner (who is currently on the IL), and Stott are projected to maintain their strong starts.

As for the pitching, we projected the Phillies to have the second-best rotation in baseball, so their awesomeness is hardly surprising. Philadelphia’s stars have more than balanced out some of the outfield question marks and its depth hasn’t truly been tested yet, except for Turner’s injury — and as Jon Becker noted in his morning column on Tuesday, Turner’s replacements in the lineup, Sosa and Kody Clemens, have excelled in his absence.

As for the Braves, their vaunted offense has come out rather impotent. They rank seventh in the NL in runs scored, which isn’t disaster territory, but Ronald Acuña Jr., Matt Olson, and Austin Riley have all been just barely above league-average hitters this year. Sean Murphy has been out with an oblique injury that he suffered on Opening Day, but that’s been less of an impact because Travis d’Arnaud has been solid as the everyday backstop. Things might be a lot worse right now if not for the performances of d’Arnaud and Marcell Ozuna.

Atlanta’s current place in the standings is the fault of its underperforming stars, not its complementary talent. And that’s what makes it tough for the Braves to turn things around with a few trades, as they did in 2021 before surging to win the World Series. It’d be one thing if the problem were someone like Orlando Arcia, because the Braves wouldn’t think twice about benching or trading him to acquire a better shortstop. But when it comes to Acuña, Olson, and Riley, all Atlanta can do is wait for them to catch fire. What adds to this general feeling of helplessness is that the team’s biggest problem on the pitching side is Spencer Strider’s season-ending UCL injury. Even if the Braves were to try and swing a trade, their farm system is one of the weakest in baseball right now and only a few teams are currently out of contention. Major reinforcements aren’t on the way anytime soon.

The good news for Atlanta is that its stars are capable of breaking out of their funks at any moment, but the longer it takes them to turn things around, the more time the Phillies have to pull away. To get an idea of how much time the Braves have left, I took the current projected standings and had ZiPS simulate the rest of the season with both teams posting the same record going forward (for the sake of the example, I’m going with a 94-win pace) to see how quickly the divisional probabilities would change. Without picking up ground but also not losing any, Atlanta would slip to two-to-one divisional underdogs by June 10, and hit the three-to-one spot on the last day of the month. If this continues to the morning of the trade deadline, the Braves would find themselves with only an 18% projected chance to win the NL East, while the Phillies’ divisional odds would climb to 81%. (The Mets would still retain a few tenths of a percentage point.)

Let’s be clear: Despite the relatively gloomy outlook for Atlanta, a six-game deficit heading into Memorial Day Weekend is not insurmountable. In fact, the Phillies have the same divisional odds now as the Braves did two months ago. That said, for the first time since 2011, the NL East is the Philadelphia’s division to lose.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Greetings!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I’m sad to report that the chili I was making last week when we chatted did not turn out well.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I got careless with the salt and the whole thing was way too salty.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: So I had to eat it with VERY improper cheese and sour cream added in to mute the saltiness.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Both are certainly making their cases. Pitching development is weird, so when a guys’ working out a lot of the time it’s just him working out

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my menagerie of cats, a black cat named Cassiopeia, has a mortal enemy. Not the vacuum cleaner or an empty food bowl like my other cats, but a bright red cardinal that has been hanging around my backyard for quite a while. Cassie’s bête noire survives because she’s an indoor cat, but if for some reason Cassie ever gained access to the cardinal, that bird would be toast. The St. Louis Cardinals are in a not-dissimilar position. A stable, secure franchise for two decades, their careful planning and prudent measures have kept them away from the cat. But as things have gone wrong for the Cardinals over the last year, they’ve found themselves on a precarious perch, short of options other than unpleasant ones.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I talk positively about the long-term stability of the Cardinals. Before last year’s dreadful 71-91 campaign, the franchise had not been under .500 since 2007, and to find a season with more losses, you have to go all the way back to 1990, when this grumpy aging Gen X’er was a grumpy 12-year-old. Last year’s 4.54 ERA doesn’t sound particularly unusual for a lousy team, but it was for the Cards. The pitching staff’s 114 ERA- was the worst for the franchise in a full season (1994 was an even worse disaster, but a truncated one) since 1913.

All in all, this is an organization that even in rough years could never be described as a dumpster fire. And then last year happened. If we go through the Cardinals’ history of ZiPS projections, we can see a team that was a titan of above-average competence.

This year, the Cardinals were projected to have a bit of a bounceback from 2023, but 83-79 should have served as a bit of a red flag, as only once had ZiPS projected a Cards team to finish with a worse record. The NL Central is one of the weakest divisions and the Cards are not a team in the middle of a rebuild, but one trying to win now. This was an organization that tried to go back to its usual playbook and retool carefully and conservatively. Sonny Gray was the highlight of the winter, signed to a three-year, $75 million contract, but the other signings were one-year stopgaps, either to patch holes in the rotation with no. 4 starters (Lance Lynn, Kyle Gibson) or fill out the back of the depth chart (Brandon Crawford, Matt Carpenter, Keynan Middleton).

Staying the course may work as a long-term strategy when you’re dependably winning 87-93 games a year and your farm system is steadily reinforcing the parent club’s depth with unheralded prospects that end up being real contributors, like Lars Nootbaar, Tommy Edman, Brendan Donovan, and Harrison Bader, among others. This strategy basically involved pretending 2023 didn’t happen, and it ignored a key aspect that also needed addressing: the team’s offense. While the lineup didn’t collapse as drastically as the pitching staff, the team finished 10th in the National League in runs scored, with three of its key contributors in their 30s (Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, and Willson Contreras). Yet the most significant move the Cardinals made with their position players this offseason was a subtraction, when they traded left fielder Tyler O’Neill to the Red Sox. The Cardinals certainly couldn’t have counted on the oft-injured O’Neill to stay healthy enough to be one of the most productive power hitters in the league, as he is right now with the Red Sox (.255/.366/.540, 11 HR, 146 wRC+, 1.1 WAR in 38 games entering Tuesday), but just to shed $6 million in salary, the trade cost St. Louis depth and upside that it no longer had to spare.

It was certainly within the realm of probability that the pitching triage would be effective and Arenado and Goldschmidt would play more like they had in 2022 than last year, but so far, that hasn’t been the case. And now the Cards face a serious problem: The expectations of their talent are simply a lot lower than they were a year ago, or even two months ago. To try to demonstrate this in a straightforward manner, I started with everyone projected to make one plate appearance or throw one inning in the majors the rest of the season. To me, that’s a realistic definition of the short-term talent a team intends to use. Then, I grouped each of these players by team. From there, using these groupings, I looked at each of the 30 teams’ projected WAR for 2025, as of Tuesday morning, and compared it to the 2025 outlooks from before the 2023 season and before the 2024 season. This list doesn’t make any accounting for free agents; I’m simply trying to get a feel for the trajectory of the talent each team has access to at this moment.

The absolute numbers don’t really matter here, so don’t read too much into them. Few teams, if any, will use the same number of players this season, so these projections are based on a varying amount of players for teams, depending on how each club deploys its roster. What does matter is the change in these numbers.

And, as you can see, the Cardinals have the third-largest dropoff in baseball, from before the 2023 season and before Opening Day this year to now. What’s going on here? The simple answer is that many of the players the Cardinals are relying on the most (Arenado, Goldschmidt, the injured Contreras, Gray, Lynn, and Gibson, among others) are in the decline stage of their careers.

Meanwhile, quick reinforcements from within are unlikely. Of the 11 pitchers who have thrown at least 20 innings at Double-A or Triple-A, only Connor Thomas has a translated ERA in ZiPS under four. Perhaps more concerning, Thomas is the only one of the 11 whose projected 2025 ERA is better now than it was before this season began.

The story is the same for the hitters. Entering Tuesday, 21 players in the high minors have at least 60 plate appearances, and even in that really small sample size, only two of them (José Fermín and Jimmy Crooks) have a translated OPS north of .750. More than half the players (12) have OPS translations below .600.

Two-thirds of the hitters have seen their projections for 2025 get worse. Even more troubling is how few of these projected numbers are actually useful to a major league club. Only two hitters project with a .700 OPS in the majors in 2025, and only then just barely.

Further complicating matters is that the diminished projections haven’t been limited to veterans like Goldschmidt. Rather, they’re also the case for pretty much all of the core hitters on the roster who were expected to be “the next generation” of Cardinals. The departed O’Neill may have resuscitated his career with his 2024 so far, but after two injury-affected seasons, he had dropped in status from a player who was eighth in the NL MVP balloting in 2021 to one the Cardinals were happy to see go to save a little cash. Jordan Walker was demoted to Triple-A Memphis before the end of April, and while he’s hit somewhat better since then, a wRC+ of 111 down there is not impressive for a player whose contributions will almost entirely come on offense. Nolan Gorman’s hits this year have been softer than an erotic thriller edited for network television, resulting in 10 points shaved off his projected 2025 wRC+ (115 to 105). Dylan Carlson bears less responsibility for 2024 given the shoulder injury that cost him a month, but after bursting into the majors with a solid rookie season in 2021, he now looks like a fourth outfielder — if that.

Here’s what makes things even trickier for the Cardinals: Despite their 21-26 record and third-place standing, they’ve won six of their last eight games entering Wednesday — their game Tuesday night against the Orioles was suspended due to rain in the sixth inning with the score tied, 1-1 — and have an 19.1% probability to make the postseason, per our Depth Charts playoff odds. That certainly isn’t a great chance, but considering the lack of options to turn things around in time for short-term future seasons, it might be more appealing for the organization to stay the course with the hope of making an unlikely, but hardly impossible, playoff push than it would be to make a drastic decision now that might be more beneficial in the long run.

It’s worth mentioning that, as of Tuesday morning, ZiPS projected St. Louis to have a 15.3% playoff probability because ZiPS is normally more optimistic about the Cardinals than is Depth Charts. ZiPS generally factors in organizational depth more than DC does, and the Cardinals typically have excellent depth. This year, that is not the case. Additionally, even with the expectation that Goldschmidt and Arenado are likely to better the rest of the way than their early season performance, as well as the assumption that Contreras will come back strong from his brutal arm fracture, ZiPS projects the Cardinals to have the 11th-best offense in the National League for the remainder of the season. And the rotation projects no better, at 12th of the 15 NL teams. Amusingly, the bullpen may be the team’s strongest asset, a reversal of fortune from previous years.

In other words, the Cards could very well win 85 games and sneak into a wild card spot. But that’s the hope of a mediocre team, not a top contender. It’s a risky one, too; the prospect of having some chance of making the playoffs may keep the team willing to tread water, again trying to filibuster the decision of whether to push in all their chips or to fold their hand. If the Cardinals decide to punt, some of their players would still have value to other teams in a trade. Closer Ryan Helsley, lefty setup man JoJo Romero, Nootbaar, and Goldschmidt, assuming he starts to hit again, all could fetch significant prospects for the farm system. The 33-year-old Arenado would also net a nice return so long as the Cardinals would agree to pay a chunk of his remaining salary. (After this season, he’ll make $52 million over the final three years of his contract.) Or, if St. Louis wants to double down and try to win in 2025 without selling before the deadline, there are some enticing players who will be free agents after the season, such as Corbin Burnes, Max Fried, Pete Alonso, and – dare I say – Juan Soto. But the organization’s track record suggests that neither of these approaches is likely; the Cardinals don’t tear everything down, and they don’t play at the top of the free agent market.

As things stand, time is not on the organization’s side. When I project the results for the NL Central in 2025 and 2026, using each team’s in-system talent and therefore not accounting for potential future moves, the Cardinals continue to slide relative to the other teams in the division. In fact, St. Louis is the only one of the five teams that has a worse projection for 2026 projection than it does for 2024. The system-only projection for 2025 pegs the Cardinals to win only 79 games, followed by 77 wins for 2026. In these projections, the young pitching in the high minors would replace the team’s current starters, except for Gray, but Hence is the only one who projects to have a high ceiling. Meanwhile, on offense, ZiPS projects the team to continue to get almost nothing from the farm. That’s a problem for many reasons, but one of the most immediate ones is that Goldschmidt, who turns 37 in September, will be a free agent after the season. Even if he isn’t as bad as he’s looked so far this year, it’s unlikely that he’ll be as good as he once was in the future; recognizing this, it would make sense for the Cardinals to move on from him. Except, because of their uninspiring hitting prospects, the Cardinals don’t have a good option to replace even a diminished version of Goldschmidt. Walker and Gorman are natural third basemen, so one of them could take over for Arenado if the Cardinals trade him, but that would open up a hole somewhere else on their roster that would need to be filled by players who aren’t good enough to replace the lost production.

The Cards have long been one of the most competent organizations in the league. But at the moment, steadiness looks like indecision and conservatism looks meek. My cat Cassie will never get the chance to catch her cardinal, but there’s a very real possibility that the predators in the NL Central have successfully captured theirs.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: There’s a time for every purpose under heaven, even SzymChat

12:03

Dan Szymborski: One thing is I’m not sure taht wRC+ is working correctly on the FG page at the moment

12:04

Dan Szymborski: But it’s still an extremely small sample

12:04

Dan Szymborski: and full fat ZiPS isn’t that much more negative

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