Once considered the natural successor to Clayton Kershaw as The Man in the Dodgers’ rotation, Walker Buehler’s career hit a rocky stretch in 2022. Coming off arguably his best season in the majors, Buehler was pulled from a June start with elbow pain, starting a journey that ended with a Tommy John surgery, the second of his career, two months later. After some unrelated injury setbacks this spring, Buehler returned to the Dodgers, but as a shadow of his former self. He finished 2024 with a 5.38 ERA and a 5.54 FIP, and might not have even made the postseason roster if not for the fact that most of the organization’s other plausible starters don’t currently have working throwing arms. His no-strikeout, six-run outing against the Padres in Game 3 of the NLDS wasn’t an inspiring sign that he’d turn things around in the playoffs.

And yet, in Game 3 of the NLCS against the Mets at Citi Field, Buehler had opposing batters flailing at his shockingly nasty repertoire in a short but effective four-inning start. He left with a two-run lead, but after the Los Angeles offense kept tacking on and the bullpen threw five scoreless innings, the Dodgers left the ballpark Wednesday night with an 8-0 win and a 2-1 advantage in the best-of-seven series.

One of the problems with Buehler in his return this year was that he was just so darn hittable at times. Before 2022, his four-seamer was the foundation that his out-pitches were built around, but even before his elbow surgery, the effectiveness of the pitch had practically disappeared. From 2021 to 2022, he bled about 200 rpm off his fastball’s average spin rate. Batters apparently took notice, suddenly slugging .618 as his heater lost some of its rise. Buehler returned from surgery, but the four-seamer’s effectiveness did not, and the pitch became a smaller part of his toolset. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now down to our final two teams in the American League, the New York Yankees and Cleveland Guardians, who will hash things out in the best-of-seven ALCS starting Monday in the Bronx. Baseball, like most sports, is at it’s peak for fun when there’s something to prove and a little bit of competitive vengeance worked into the mix.

It’s now been 15 years since the Yankees last won the World Series. Unlike their last long championship drought, during their mediocre 1980s and early ’90s, the Bombers have mostly been good since their 2009 title. They’ve made the postseason 10 times in that span and have played in five Championship Series (though they’ve failed to advance each time). Yes, the franchise that was once accused of destroying baseball because it was winning too many championships now draws scrutiny for lately having won too few. There are a lot of reasons for the organization’s relative lack of success lately, but many fans point to a mysterious blend of Brian Cashman, too much analytics, not enough bunting, and Aaron Boone, who at various points has been accused of being the worst manager to have ever existed. Until the 11th time’s the charm for the Yankees, nobody’s going to fear Mystique and Aura.

If the Yankees face a drought, the Guardians are dealing with one of Joadian proportions. Where the Yankees were emblematic as the big evil franchise, the theme among Cleveland baseball for a long time was ineptitude. When they filmed the movie Major League, there was little controversy as to which franchise would play the doormat protagonists. At least the Cubs were considered losers of the lovable ilk. The last 30 years represent the most successful epoch for Cleveland baseball, but the franchise is still lacking a World Series trophy during that span. The last time Cleveland won it all, in 1948, neither of my parents were even born yet, and I’m a man approaching 50 at a distressingly rapid rate. In three of its last four playoff appearances, Cleveland met its demise courtesy of the Yankees. So, of course, the Guardians’ path to the World Series runs through New York; eliminating the Yankees surely would elicit an extra dose of satisfaction.

But who will come out on top? I usually start with the ZiPS projections, because it would be an awfully strange approach to not use the projection system I have on my PC.

There will no doubt be some shifting as the series progresses, but I don’t think ZiPS would have a change in the basic story: These teams are fairly well-matched. All seven projected games stay within that 55/45 split, so it would be tough to call anyone a significant underdog. ZiPS is going a bit against the grain here; it was one of the outliers in liking the Guardians in the preseason.

So, where are the imbalances in this matchup?

The Yankees have the edge on offense because of their talent at the top of their lineup. Yes, José Ramírez is my pick for the most underrated player of this generation, someone who should be seen as a probable Hall of Famer despite rarely getting anywhere near the commensurate attention nationally. But he’s the Guardians’ only elite offensive talent, and we’re putting him up against Aaron Judge and Juan Soto at their peaks, which is a whole different tier of awesomeness. Looking at the Judge/Soto projections vs. Cleveland’s pitching makes clear just how perilous that portion of the Yankees lineup is going to be for the Guardians.

ZiPS thinks enough of Emmanuel Clase to make Judge mortal and thinks Matthew Boyd is just a good enough starter with a lefty split to stymie Soto a skosh. But you can’t avoid these two, and the Guardians don’t have any comparable sources of terror in their lineup. There’s a part of me that wonders if every team should use a solid reliever as an opener against the Yankees if it has a deep enough bullpen, simply because of the certainty of facing Judge and Soto in the first inning.

The drop-off after Judge and Soto is tremendous, however. Of the remaining seven hitters, ZiPS expects Gleyber Torres to have the highest on-base percentage (.335) and Giancarlo Stanton to be the only one with a slugging percentage above .450 (.462) against Cleveland’s lefty pitchers. Against righties, Jazz Chisholm Jr. has the highest projected OBP (.326) and SLG (.443) in the non-Judge/Soto department.

This gives the Guardians some interesting tactical possibilities using their bullpen. With the Yankees having two players with an unusually large proportion of their offensive firepower, it should be a bit easier for the Guards to sprinkle in lesser relievers based on just where they are in the lineup.

The difference between the rotations aren’t as large as one might think. While ZiPS thinks the Guardians have one of the weaker rotations in the playoffs this year, after Gerrit Cole – the best projected starter on either team – the Yankees aren’t all that frightening either. Carlos Rodón has the next best projection, but the Guardians have had a notable platoon split that favors matchups against lefties this season. Luis Gil is having a great rookie season and ought to appear prominently on most AL Rookie of the Year ballots, but ZiPS still sees him as a guy with an expected ERA someone around four, with Clarke Schmidt faring slightly worse.

Cleveland’s rotation finished 2024 with a 4.40 ERA and a 4.51 FIP, both toward the bottom of baseball. But the rotation isn’t that bad, simply because it has largely eliminated most of the sources of this lousiness. None of Carlos Carrasco, Triston McKenzie, or Logan Allen will face off against the Yankees this upcoming week. When looking at the four starters most likely to get starts for the Guardians, ZiPS sees Gavin Williams as the one with the highest projected ERA (4.17). ZiPS is less enamored with emergency options like Ben Lively and Joey Cantillo, but still has both of them on the sunny side of a 4.50 ERA/FIP. Cleveland’s starters don’t have a lot of pizazz, but like the breadsticks at Olive Garden, they’re serviceable and there’s a lot of them. Because they Guardians have a deep rotation, they don’t need to cobble together bullpen games just to survive, which allows manager Stephen Vogt to comfortably utilize the best projected bullpen in baseball right now in the highest-leverage situations.

For the Dodgers-Padres NLDS preview, I ran a simulation for how the probability changed if both teams had a game in which the starting pitcher got knocked out after two innings and the teams played one 15-inning game. In that one, the Padres gained five percentage points in the projection based on this scenario. The Guardians, meanwhile, gain 10 percentage points if we use the same two hypothetical events, going from slight underdogs at 47% to a mildly comfortable favorite at 57%!

Cleveland’s other advantage is having the better bench. The Guardians have myriad platoon options — David Fry or Jhonkensy Noel against lefties or Will Brennan and Kyle Manzardo against righties — and being able to deploy them for the right matchups is a small but real bit of value. Combine bench and bullpen and ZiPS thinks the Guardians have the edge in one-run games by a 54%-46% margin and a 52%-48% edge in games decided by two runs. Blowouts are most likely to go in the Yankees’ favor, but in those hard-fought close contests, the Yankees are slight underdogs.

The Yankees or Guardians will not face a juggernaut in the World Series if they make it through the ALCS. The Mets have some significant team weaknesses, and injuries have resulted in the Dodgers’ being kept together with a roll of duct tape. Whichever team wins these next (up to) seven games has a good chance of finally ending its title drought.

The postseason is at its most fun when both teams have something to prove. The ZiPS projections may have been bullish on the Cleveland Guardians coming into the season, but the computer was in the minority, with most observers thinking the Minnesota Twins were the clear favorites in the division. The Guardians are no longer the habitual losers they were from the 1960s-80s, but their last World Series championship was still in 1948. For their part, the Detroit Tigers dominated the AL Central 15 years ago, but lost both of their World Series, dropping eight of nine games. And Detroit wasn’t even supposed to be here; the team traded Jack Flaherty at the deadline and if someone had bowled them over with an offer, Tarik Skubal might be wearing a different uniform this month.

Game 4 was do or die for Cleveland, with the Tigers’ plan of “Tarik Skubal and then pitching chaos” winning two of the first three games. With a bullpen whose second-half performance led the American League with a 2.50 ERA and 3.0 WAR (the Tigers weren’t far behind with a 3.00 ERA and 2.8 WAR), the Guardians had high hopes that they’d be able to send the ALDS back to Cleveland for one winner-take-all showdown. And that’s precisely what they did, winning a closely fought game that was one of the most entertaining we’ve seen so far this October.

Cleveland struck first and in old-school fashion, with a single and a stolen base from Steven Kwan, and singles by Kyle Manzardo and Lane Thomas, the latter of which scored Kwan. But Will Brennan’s groundout on a low changeup allowed Detroit starter Reese Olson to escape the first having only surrendered one run. Read the rest of this entry »

The NL West race may have been settled in favor of the Dodgers this year, but everybody goes back to the starting gate in the playoffs. The only difference is the possible extra home game the Dodgers get in each individual series, though home field advantage has been far from a valuable perk for teams except for sales of tickets, hot dogs, and $59 foam fingers. With Los Angeles getting a few extra days to try and heal up a little more, the Padres got here the hard way, having to win the best-of-three Wild Card Series against the Atlanta Braves, a team that still managed to squeeze out 89 wins without Spencer Strider and mostly missing Ronald Acuña Jr.

While some of baseball’s best rivalries are the classic ones that have endured for the last century, such as Yankees-Red Sox and Dodgers-Giants, this one between the Dodgers and Padres is a good example of how new rivalries can pop up and be a lot of fun, too. Despite the fact that the two teams have played in the same division for more than five decades, only in recent years has the so-called I-5 Rivalry really heated up. San Diego has infrequently sustained runs of relevance – this is only the second version of the Friars to string together three winning seasons in a row – leaving Dodgers fans with few nightmares featuring a brown-and-mustard palette. But these Padres have been aggressive, and unlike in the past when short-term bursts of ambition were tempered quickly with brutal fire sales, they’ve consistently tried to make the Dodgers uncomfortable at the top of the NL West. Even as the Padres traded Juan Soto over the winter, they acquired their Wild Card Series Game 1 starter Michael King in that deal and then traded for Dylan Cease, who’ll start Game 1 of the Division Series, just before Opening Day. Yet, ultimate success has proven elusive for San Diego, with two disappointing playoff misses in 2021 and 2023 and still no returns to the World Series since 1998’s debacle.

The Dodgers enter the Division Series with something to prove as well. While they do have a World Series trophy from the COVID-shortened 2020 season, with five 100-win seasons in the last seven normal years, they crave to have more hardware to show for their success. Sure, we’re used to the idea that when you have large playoff formats, winning the World Series takes a lot of luck, but neither fans nor history care much about that. Winning the World Series this year would wipe out most, if not all, of that disappointment; taking care of business in this series would get the Dodgers one step closer to that while also giving them a little revenge against the Padres for knocking them out in the 2022 NLDS, after Los Angeles won a franchise-best 111 games.

So, how do the teams stack up? Let’s start with the ZiPS projections. As I type this, Joe Musgrove has been officially ruled out for the NLDS due to his elbow injury, which has now been confirmed to require Tommy John surgery. That means no Musgrove this postseason – or next season – but for now, we’ll just deal with the impact of the news on this series.

For contrast, here are the projections for if Musgrove had been able to pitch in this five-game set.

Replacing Musgrove with Martín Pérez, likely the next man up, basically flips the win probabilities for Game 4. Where every game previously favored the home team in the projections, now the Dodgers are expected to win on the road against Pérez.

Even though the Dodgers are favored to win with Musgrove out, it would still be wrong to call them overwhelming favorites. This is a close series overall, but also a swingy one, with four of the five games projecting to be at least a 55-45 split, meaning that for the most part, these games aren’t projected to be coin flips despite the tightness of the series as a whole. “Breaking serve” here by winning on the road has quite a lot of value. If the Padres can get to Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Jack Flaherty and win one of the first two games, they would expose one of the Dodgers’ current weaknesses: a thin rotation due to injuries. Walker Buehler had only three quality starts out of his 16 outings since returning from Tommy John surgery in May; his performance was shaky enough that in mid-June the Dodgers optioned him to the minors, where he spent two months trying to get right, before they brought him back up to start on August 20. And despite a superficially appealing ERA, Landon Knack would be about the 12th choice for Los Angeles if everyone were healthy. If the Dodgers are able to get out to a 2-0 lead without any bullpen-exhaustion events, like an 18-inning game, they might be in a position of strength to run a bullpen game and axe one of their uncertain starters from the NLDS rotation.

Where the Dodgers have the advantage is their front-line offensive talent, which gives them what appears to be the superior offense overall, an edge large enough that it isn’t erased if you view players such as Jurickson Profar and Donovan Solano with less skepticism than ZiPS does.

Dylan Cease is a terrific pitcher, but ZiPS thinks the Dodgers’ Big Four of Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, and the good platoon side of Max Muncy has a fighting chance of getting to him. It’s more of an uphill climb against Yamamoto; ZiPS has Luis Arraez as the only San Diego batter projected to have a .300 OBP against Yamamoto, and it gives none of the Padres a .450 SLG projection against him. Now, contrast that with the projections at home against Knack and Buehler.

One of San Diego’s other advantages, at least in the eyes of the computer, is its bullpen. While ZiPS has both teams performing similarly overall, it much prefers the depth of the Padres’ unit. To test their bullpens, in each simulation, ZiPS was instructed to knock out both starters after two innings in one game and have another game last 15 innings; in these scenarios, the odds of the Padres winning the series go from 42% to 47% – nearly a coin flip. In a short series, things like roster construction can make a real difference. Look at the way the Nationals were configured in 2019, with four good starters, two relievers they trusted, and a dumpster fire behind them. That kind of distilled performance meant that even when Washington won 13 fewer regular-season games than Los Angeles that year, ZiPS projected the teams as nearly equal when they met in the 2019 NLDS.

Here’s what I get from these reams of data: The Dodgers should stay the course with what’s worked for them all year, trust their elite hitters, and avoid the temptation to get too cute with their managing tactics, but the Padres ought to be aggressive. If they see an opening to get to Yamamoto or Flaherty, treat that game like it’s Game 7 of the World Series. San Diego can’t afford to save any wacky tricks for later. If the Padres can push the Dodgers back on their heels quickly and early, the latter may run out of time to right themselves.

One thing you’ll hear a lot (in all four series), especially early on, is the claim that the layoff is a big disadvantage for teams. Don’t believe it. If the Padres upset the Dodgers here in the five-game series, it won’t be because Los Angeles was too rested. Instead, it’ll be because the Padres played better.

For eight innings on Thursday night, the New York Mets’ bats barely spoke above a whisper. Unfortunately for the Milwaukee Brewers, the ninth inning was the charm in Game 3, as the Mets loudly ended the Brew Crew’s 2024 season with a 4-2 win, largely thanks to a dramatic opposite-field homer from Pete Alonso.

The climactic action may have involved a trio of round-trippers, but for six innings, we got a classic pitchers’ duel between two starters with very different styles. Starring for the Mets was Jose Quintana, who played the crafty veteran lefty trope to perfection here, throwing leisurely fastballs and sinkers where hitters could neither drive them or ignore them, while mixing in a healthy dose of changeups and curves that threatened the dirt.

ZiPS was a bit worried about how Quintana matched up against the Brewers coming into the game; while he’s maintained enough of a reverse platoon split over a long career to be confident in it, Milwaukee has a lot of right-handed hitters who can make a southpaw’s evening unpleasant in a hurry. But William Contreras and Rhys Hoskins went hitless, and ultimately it was the lefties who provided most of the team’s offense. It certainly wasn’t from lack of trying; Brewers hitters offered at 60% of Quintana’s fastballs, including more than half of the ones thrown out of the zone. What’s more, they connected with every Quintana fastball they swung at, but it only resulted in two hits. Quintana didn’t throw a single fastball for a called strike all evening. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: If the White Sox get to stay together, the M’s certainly do

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Maybe they should bring back the trident logo as primary

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t found that much value on it

Read the rest of this entry »

Which characteristics cause a team to either excel or struggle in the postseason? It’s a long-standing debate, and most baseball fans have a preferred theory. Some think it’s having an ace. Others think good contact hitting, or a team’s momentum, is what pushes a club over the top. Some people — the ones most likely to get annoyed when they read my work — think that clutch performances or having veterans with playoff experience on the roster is what causes a club to shine in October. Sadly, the best answer is rather boring: What makes a team play well in the postseason is simply being the better team overall. In 2022, I examined 63 team characteristics throughout baseball history to see if any of them presaged clubs’ fall fates. Outside of leaning more heavily on home runs to score — top pitchers who struggle in the playoffs are far more likely to be felled by homers than issuing walks or failing to strike hitters out — and a barely significant tendency for younger teams to overperform, there just wasn’t much there, there.

But that’s not to say that playoff baseball is identical to regular season baseball. After all, the former is a sprint while the latter is a marathon, and the challenges in each scenario are different. When I ran the numbers for the aforementioned article, the focus was on how the playoff teams played, rather than who played. I specially used a playoff model that estimated team quality as being different in the regular season due to roster construction considerations. Teams are better able to leverage their front-end talent over a few crucial weeks than a six-month period. The qualities of a team’s fifth starter (not to mention their sixth, seventh and eighth) are less crucial to their success come October, and the key bats in the lineup (if healthy) are almost always going to be playing, thanks to the additional days off that clubs get in the postseason. As the 2019 Washington Nationals demonstrated, you can even paper over half your bullpen being a train wreck. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Chat Time Great Action Copter Passion Justice GO!!!!!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Depends on what you call well!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: But ZiPS does have him up to 2.3 WAR in like 540 PA

12:02

Dan Szymborski: That he *appears* to be at least a mild positive in CF really makes him playable

Read the rest of this entry »

Projecting the future is always difficult and full of inevitable misses, and I’m not just saying this because I have a vested interest in having you think I’m good at my job. We have a vague idea of a player’s broad future, enough so that nobody would trade Jackson Holliday for, say, Patrick Corbin. However, there’s always a great deal of uncertainty in prognosticating, and assuming for the sake of this opening paragraph that multiverse theory is correct, there will be planes of existence in which Corbin wins the NL Comeback Player of the Year award in 2025 when the Dodgers somehow fix his slider after a five-minute conversation. That’s not the way to bet, of course, and it’s likely that struggling rookies, especially ones with immaculate pre-2024 credentials — such as Holliday — will see this season as a bump in the road rather than a nasty car-destroying pothole.

Turns out, this was the season for longshot Rookie of the Year picks, especially in the American League. Of the top 17 AL rookies based on the preseason Rookie of the Year betting odds, only two players, Colton Cowser and Wilyer Abreu, ever had a plausible argument for being in the conversation once games started. Luis Gil and Austin Wells were nowhere to be found. For the table below, I’ve included 15 of the 17 players who were given AL Rookie of the Year awards odds by DraftKings before the season, sorted by their preseason ranking in descending order, along with their actual 2024 stats. I’m citing these rankings to get a general sense of who the favorites were back in March, not because I think they are more or less accurate than any other sportsbook odds.

(I’ve excluded the two other players, outfielder Everson Pereira and pitcher Ricky Tiedemann, because neither of them have reached the big leagues this season.)

Only six of these 17 players played even a half-season’s worth of games in the majors. It’s not just sportsbooks and bettors that got it wrong; by the time voting is official, we will have gone 0-for-25 here at FanGraphs.

I’ve done the same thing for the 19 NL players who were given preseason Rookie of the Year odds, with one table for hitters and another for pitchers. (All of the AL rookies who received preseason odds and actually played in 2024 are position players.) Things went significantly better for senior-circuit rookies.

So, what’s next for the rookies who are out of the awards picture? To get an idea of the change in their futures, I re-ran their projections for the next five years to compare to what their outlooks were during the preseason, using data as of Tuesday morning. I left out the players who have at least two WAR in 2024, as well as Matsui, who is a reliever and performed right in line with expectations, giving us a group of 21. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a National League Rookie of the Year voter this year, so I will not express any of my personal feelings regarding who should win that award.

In the projections, Evan Carter took the biggest hit. With a rather short, walk-heavy pedigree, ZiPS already saw him as riskier than the other top projected rookies, and then he had a rough early-season performance and a back injury that ruined his 2024. Taking all of this into account, ZiPS drops his 2025 line to .244/.338/.399; with a decent glove, that’s enough to be an average corner outfielder in this offensive environment, but well short of his preseason .259/.358/.412 projection. Carter’s teammate, Wyatt Langford, was a source of much projection disagreement entering the season, with Steamer and ZiPS quite excited, and THE BAT being rather meh about the situation. So far, meh has been closer, though he has hit much better (.258/.326/.424 in 91 games) since returning from an injury in late May.

Jasson Domínguez mainly makes this list for two reasons, more time on the injured list, causing ZiPS to take a foggier view of his health, and the fact that he didn’t have the major breakout yet, which is one of the things that ZiPS was banking on for him. His performance in Triple-A was good, but minor league offense is still crazy; ZiPS has his minor league translation at .263/.320/411, compared to his actual .309/.368/.480 line. That said, Domínguez should be starting every day for the Yankees over Alex Verdugo.

ZiPS is definitely bearish on Nolan Schanuel, and it’s increasingly confident that he won’t develop enough power, or enough secondary skills to compensate for his lack of power, to be a real plus at first base. The projections never bought into Hunter Goodman; he hit even worse than expected this year, and is not particularly young. I’m actually surprised DL Hall didn’t take an even bigger hit; back in a starting role, the walks came back with a vengeance, to the extent that returning to the bullpen for good might be the far better fit for him now.

Jackson Holliday’s numbers didn’t take a big hit for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, despite a really lousy debut in the majors, he played well enough in the minors — plus he’s so young and his résumé is so strong — that his small-sample struggles barely register. By reverse-o-fying Holliday’s major league woes into an untranslated minor league line and including it in his overall Triple-A production, ZiPS estimates that he would’ve had a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A this season, down from his actual mark of 142. A 20-year-old shortstop with a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A would still top everybody’s prospect list.

Several of these players simply didn’t get enough playing time to make a real impression. Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad never really had significant chances to grab starting roles with the Orioles this year, and James Wood and Dylan Crews were both midseason call-ups. Even so, the two Nationals rookies received some of the biggest bumps in their new projections. For Crews, the improvement was massive, largely because ZiPS has very little to go on and didn’t translate his college numbers as positively as Wyatt Langford’s, meaning that with a good first impression, Crews had a lot of room to grow in the eyes of ZiPS. Wood added nearly 200 points of OPS at Triple-A from his previous season — a combined .874 mark between High- and Double-A — at the time of his call-up; it was such a drastic improvement that if I had re-done the ZiPS Top 100 prospect list then, he would have come out on top.

None of these 21 players is in contention for the Rookie of the Year awards that will be announced in a few months. But for most of them, the lack of hardware in 2024 doesn’t represent a setback that changes their future outlooks too much.

Even in an age in which baseball – and most sports to an extent – has become an extremely data-driven enterprise, the stew of conventional wisdom, mythology, and storylines could still feed a pretty large family. That’s not to say that this is a bad thing; even an old, jaded stat nerd like me gets excited to enjoy such a stew from time to time. But at the end of the day, an analyst has to focus on what’s true and what is not, and very few bits of baseball orthodoxy are more persistent than that of the sophomore slump. Coined for underperforming second-year high school or college athletes, the meaning in baseball is roughly parallel it: After a successful rookie season, a player finds it difficult to maintain the performance from their debut and are weighed down by the greatly increased expectations. As an analyst, the inevitable follow-up question is whether the sophomore slump is actually real.

While I entered this article with some rather developed skepticism, there’s no denying that high-performing rookies do occasionally have pretty wretched follow-up campaigns. Every longtime baseball fan can probably rattle off a dozen or so names instantly after reading the title of the article. For me, visions of Joe Charboneau, Pat Listach, Mark Fidrych, Jerome Walton, and Chris Coghlan dance in my head. And the list goes on and on. However, a second-year skid doesn’t mean there’s a special effect that causes it. The fact of the matter is that you should expect a lot of regression toward the mean for any player in baseball who can be optioned freely to the minors. The way baseball’s minor league system works accentuates the selection bias; underperforming rookies are typically demoted while the ones crushing reasonable expectations get to stay.

Looking at the sophomore slumpers, the story is typically more complicated than the cautionary tale. ZiPS has minor league translations going back to 1950 at this point, and while Super Joe (Charboneau) hit very well in the season before his debut (.352/.422/.597 for Double-A Chattanooga), at 24, he wasn’t young for the level, and ZiPS takes enough air out of that line to drop his translated OPS below .800. ZiPS thought he’d be an OK lefty-masher, but not much more than that.

Charboneau had a solid offensive rookie season, winning the AL Rookie of the Year award, but in his case, the fates didn’t really give him a fair opportunity to repeat that season. He injured his back in spring training and played through the injury, as was the style of the time. Across a couple of stints in the majors after his rookie breakout, he combined to bat .210/.247/.362 over 147 at-bats, and he was never healthy or trusted enough to make good. He didn’t hit again in the minors, either, with the only exception a walk-heavy .791 OPS as a 29-year-old in A-Ball (!).

As quick as Charboneau’s fall from grace was, it was far from the biggest rookie WAR drop-off. Using the definition of rookie in our leaderboards, which doesn’t know about roster service time days but is suitable for the approach of identifying rookies rather than specific Rookie of the Year eligibility, here are the biggest sophomore slides by WAR since 1901.

Some of these players recovered to have solid major league careers and some of these slumps resulted from serious injury, such as Kerry Wood’s, but for some of the players, that was the end of the road for them in the big leagues. As for Super Joe, his skid was the 100th worst in history among hitters!

So, how do we extract a sophomore-slump effect from simple sophomore slumps? At this point, I’ve been running projections for two decades, so I have a decent-sized database of projections calculated contemporaneously (as opposed to backfilling before ZiPS existed). I certainly haven’t told ZiPS to give a special penalty to solid rookies having bad follow-up campaigns, so I went back and looked at the projections vs. realities for every hitter with a two-WAR rookie season and every pitcher who eclipsed 1.5 WAR. (Rookie pitchers tend to have more trouble grabbing playing time.) That gave me 166 hitters and 207 pitchers. Let’s start with the hitters.

The 26 players in the top bucket averaged 5.1 WAR in their rookie seasons and 3.7 WAR in their sophomore seasons. That’s a pretty significant drop-off, but they were projected for an even steeper decline. The next group — 44 players who accumulated 3-4 WAR as rookies — underperformed its projection by about two runs per player, while the 96 rookies who finished with 2-3 WAR slightly overperformed their projections, but it was very close. As for the entire sample of 166 hitters, ZiPS projected a decline from an average 3.1 WAR as rookies to 2.3 in their sophomore seasons. Their actual average in their second year was… 2.3 WAR. Let’s look at the pitchers.

This is the same story, with the decline for pitchers being about as predictable as it was for hitters: ZiPS underestimated their second-year WAR by about 0.08 wins on average.

That’s not the end of it, however. I wanted to see if ZiPS has projected a similar decline for players who were coming off their second through fifth seasons, because that would determine whether ZiPS was capturing a sophomore-slump effect or if this was just a more general regression to the mean for players with less major league experience.

In sum, ZiPS didn’t knock more performance off high-performing rookies than it did for sophomores, juniors, seniors, and guys who stayed a fifth year because they had to drop too many 8 a.m. classes that they slept through. That’s because the sophomore-slump effect doesn’t exist.

So yes, projections will likely project fewer WAR next season from this year’s standout rookies, such as Jackson Merrill, Jackson Chourio, and Masyn Winn. But that dip is likely to be the result of the typical regression toward the mean that any high performer with a limited track record is expected to experience.