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It’s Time for the Pirates To Call up Paul Skenes

Jonathan Dyer-USA TODAY Sports

Pitching for Triple-A Indianapolis on Thursday, Paul Skenes extended his streak of scoreless innings to 12 2/3 to start the season. In his fourth start, Skenes whiffed eight of the 14 batters he faced against the St. Paul Saints, Minnesota’s Triple-A affiliate.

Skenes is the best pitching prospect according to our prospect rankings, so I doubt I have to use too much of this space to convince you that Skenes is an impressive talent. Across nine professional starts since being the first pick in the 2023 draft, he has struck out an eye-popping 37 batters in 19 1/3 innings, just under half of all batters he’s faced. In addition to those strikeouts, he’s allowed just four walks – this is not a case of a flamethrower with only a casual acquaintance with the strike zone – and has yet to allow a professional homer. He ranked only fifth among pitching prospects in the ZiPS Top 100, which may not sound quite as electrifying, but given that ZiPS is designed to be suspicious of players with almost no professional experience, it was high praise to consider him that highly after he’d recorded only 6 2/3 innings as a professional before 2024.

Skenes throws hard, and entering Thursday’s game, he had the highest average fastball velocity of any Triple-A pitcher.

Triple-A Fastball Velocity Leaders, Entering 4/18
Player Average Fastball (mph)
1 Paul Skenes 100.1
2 Justin Martinez 100.1
3 Michel Otanez 98.4
4 Trevor Megill 98.1
5 Ricky Karcher 97.7
6 McKinley Moore 97.7
7 Jordan Holloway 97.5
8 Adrian Morejon 97.5
9 Orion Kerkering 97.1
10 Edward Cabrera 96.9
11 Daniel Palencia 96.8
12 Tony Santillan 96.8
13 Elvis Alvarado 96.7
14 Steven Cruz 96.6
15 Jeremiah Estrada 96.5
16 Connor Phillips 96.4
17 Manuel Rodríguez 96.4
18 Randy Rodríguez 96.4
19 Yerry Rodríguez 96.3
20 Brett de Geus 96.2

Suffice it to say, Thursday didn’t do anything to change where Skenes lands on this ever-so-slightly dated ranking, as his 41 fastballs against St. Paul averaged 100.5 mph. His slowest fastball traveled at 99.1 mph, enough that it would be the offering of a lifetime for many pitchers. Adding in his most recent start, his contact rate on those fastballs is the third lowest in Triple-A (min. 30 fastballs), behind only Edwin Uceta and Mason Englert.

Velocity, of course, doesn’t mean much if your secondary pitches aren’t good. But Skenes is no slouch here, either.

Triple-A Contact Leaders, Non-Fastballs
Pitcher Whiffs Swings Contact Launch Angle
1 Riley Thompson 18 30 40.0% 23.8
2 Spencer Arrighetti 19 33 42.4% 10.3
3 Paul Skenes 24 44 45.5% -5.7
4 Grant Holmes 20 37 45.9% 9.0
5 Touki Toussaint 17 33 48.5% -5.4
6 Carson Whisenhunt 22 43 48.8% 15.1
7 Brooks Kriske 25 50 50.0% 17.6
8 Keider Montero 22 44 50.0% 14.1
9 Konnor Pilkington 19 38 50.0% 11.4
10 Dom Hamel 19 38 50.0% 11.9
11 Jesus Tinoco 16 32 50.0% 24.6
12 Josh Walker 17 35 51.4% 3.4
13 Nick Nastrini 20 42 52.4% 5.0
14 Walter Pennington 26 55 52.7% 6.4
15 Allan Winans 17 36 52.8% 15.7
16 Mason Englert 23 49 53.1% 10.9
17 Beau Brieske 14 30 53.3% 8.0
18 Dakota Chalmers 14 30 53.3% 15.6
19 Hans Crouse 14 30 53.3% 8.6
20 Ken Giles 14 30 53.3% 23.7

The table above includes his seven whiffs on the 10 secondary pitches he threw Thursday. Clearly, Skenes isn’t a pitcher using velocity to try to make up for lackluster secondary offerings. He knows how to miss bats just as well with chicanery as he does with brute force. He’s so thoroughly dominated hitters that he’s been heavily using just his fastball, changeup, and slider; he’s thrown one curveball in total over his last two starts (against Toledo on April 12), and on Thursday, he threw his “splinker” (splitter-sinker) twice against St. Paul. When Skenes isn’t leaving batters futilely swinging at gaseous oxygen and nitrogen, they’ve generally been hitting those pitches into the ground, not the stands.

Back before the season, ZiPS already saw Skenes as a league-average starter in 2024 despite almost no professional experience. For his four starts in 2024, ZiPS translates those numbers as one homer, three walks, and 20 strikeouts in 12 innings, for an ERA of 2.72. Add in that and the Statcast numbers that stabilize very quickly and Skenes’ ZiPS projections are now aligned with his Steamer ones.

ZiPS Projection – Paul Skenes
Year W L ERA G GS IP H ER HR BB SO ERA+ WAR
2024 5 6 3.94 28 28 130.3 116 57 15 46 138 108 2.3
2025 5 6 3.82 29 29 134.3 117 57 15 43 139 111 2.5
2026 6 5 3.75 30 30 144.0 124 60 15 43 145 113 2.7
2027 6 6 3.72 32 32 147.7 126 61 15 41 145 114 2.8
2028 6 6 3.78 32 32 150.0 129 63 16 40 144 112 2.9
2029 6 6 3.80 33 33 156.3 135 66 17 41 148 111 2.9

In terms of run prevention, Skenes’ projection for the rest of this season is better than the three top members of Pittsburgh’s rotation, Martín Pérez, Mitch Keller, and Jared Jones. And that sunny optimism comes from a mean ol’ projection system, which doesn’t have the ability to get a shiver down its transistors when it sees Skenes exile batters like they’re Bruce Banner walking away to sad piano music.

Now, even without looking at this through the cynical lens of service time shenanigans, you can understand why the Pirates are being conservative with Skenes, though you certainly don’t have to agree with what they’re doing. As noted, Skenes doesn’t have a lot of professional experience and they are trying to keep his workload down. He throws the ball ridiculously hard, and extreme velocity does come with the risk of elbow damage and, therefore, Tommy John surgery. But that risk will be there at whatever level he’s throwing, and the whole purpose of giving a pitcher minor league experience is for him to learn how to get big league hitters out. I’m a believer in the idea that you have to challenge a prospect, and the only players who can challenge Skenes at this point are in the majors.

Besides, the Pirates can still manage Skenes’ workload in the majors. They can continue to give him three-inning appearances and ramp him up gradually with some creativity. Let him start and throw those three-inning specials or tandem starts or just have him pitch three or four innings in relief when the opportunity arises. Even if they’re not confident enough in his durability to start him, Skenes can certainly throw quality bullpen innings and reduce the workload of the rest of the ‘pen. Earl Weaver, my favorite manager ever both for objective and subjective reasons (hey, I’m from Baltimore), was certainly quite happy to break starters in as relievers for a while. Jim Palmer, Doyle Alexander, Scott McGregor, Dennis Martinez, and Mike Flanagan all spent good chunks of time as relievers before Weaver put them into the rotation.

[Note: As my colleague Jay Jaffe just reminded me, Weaver wasn’t manager until ’68, so Palmer was Hank Bauer, not Weaver -DS]

This becomes even more of an imperative when you consider where the Pirates are in the standings. If they were playing like the White Sox, maybe calling up Skenes in a furious attempt to avoid losing 110 games wouldn’t be worth upsetting the apple cart. The Pirates may have cooled down since their torrid start, but at 11-8, they are just a game out of first place in the NL Central. ZiPS currently projects the Pirates to have a 10.3% chance of winning the division and a 23.3% chance of making the postseason. If Skenes throws 100 innings in the majors this year, rather than the 60 that ZiPS currently projects when doing its season simulations, Pittsburgh’s odds to win the division climb to 14.2% and its probability to snag a playoff berth jumps to 28.9%. In a tight NL Central race, with all five teams having a plausible shot at winning the division, every game truly matters.

For years, the Pirates have been sacrificing the present to build for the future, so they shouldn’t sacrifice that future to play for a premature present. That said, because Skenes is clearly ready to face big league hitters, there’s no point in keeping him in the minors. It’s time for the Pirates to promote him and make their future the present.


Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 4/18/24

12:01
Avatar Dan Szymborski: TIMEFORADANCHAT AH CN ADAR OF EMIT

12:01
the person who asks the lunch question: what’s for lunch?

12:01
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Some stir-fried chicken I made on Tuesday.

12:01
v2micca: Braves appear to be testing their depth early.  Are their losses going to be enough to give Philly a reasonable window of opportunity to take the division?

12:01
Avatar Dan Szymborski: I’m writing on this for tomorrow!

12:03
Angels firstbaseman: Nolan schanuel could obviously use some work at AAA but why don’t they call up a gold glove first base man named evan white to replace him?

Read the rest of this entry »


Can the Royals Pull Off an AL Central Upset?

Mitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports

Believe it or not, we’re almost 10% of the way through the 2024 season. While baseball always offers myriad surprises, especially this early, one of the ones that most intrigues me is the success of the Kansas City Royals, who stand at 10-6, just a half-game behind the Cleveland Guardians in the AL Central. Naturally, as the resident spoilsport of the baseball analytics community, my job is to dig into the unexpected and see if it has some meat on its bones. And the Royals winning the division would definitely count as unexpected. Justin Mason was the only member of our staff to pick them to win the Central before the season started, while our playoff odds had KC with about a 1-in-14 chance to stand atop the division; ZiPS was even lower, pegging them at a 5.9% chance of taking the division. Read the rest of this entry »


Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 4/11/24

12:00
Avatar Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:00
Chaz: Are the Royals overwhelming favorites to win it all now or do you still think other teams have a chance?

12:00
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Heh

12:00
the guy who says it’s april: it’s april

12:00
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Yup, I’m behind on my “April” responses since I was doing Career Day last week at at elementary/middle school

12:01
Closer problems: Have to drop one of Fairbanks, Alzolay, and Tanner Scott?  Who is your pick?

Read the rest of this entry »


Terrible MLB Teams Are Pretty Good at Baseball

Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports

How would the Norfolk Tides do if they played in the majors? That might sound like an odd question, but it’s one that I’ve been asked four times in the last week. It even came up on Reddit. What’s driving this curiosity isn’t a sudden surge in rabid Tides fandom, but rather the heavy concentration of offensive talent the Orioles have in Norfolk, which until today, included one of the favorites for AL Rookie of the Year, Jackson Holliday. And since I’m one of a handful people with the exact tools of nerdery to answer this query, I couldn’t let it go unanswered. Read the rest of this entry »


Red Sox Extend Defensive Phenom Ceddanne Rafaela

Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports

A month after signing starting pitcher Brayan Bello to a six-year extension, the Boston Red Sox are at it again, this time extending rookie center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela on an eight-year deal worth $50 million. If Rafaela sticks in the majors long enough this season to earn a year of service time, this extension will prolong his free agent eligibility for two years; either way, he’ll be paid a guaranteed salary through the 2031 season.

How you feel about Rafaela comes down to just what you think about his defense. Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin rated Rafaela as the only prospect on THE BOARD last year with a 70 present value for defense and the only one with a future value of 80. They were hardly alone in their praise for his glove, either, as other outlets such as Baseball Prospectus and MLB Pipeline also gave complimentary reviews to his leathercraft.

While prospect writers have occasionally missed on the eventual defensive performance of prospects – Gregory Polanco comes to mind – Rafaela certainly hasn’t shown anything in his limited time in the majors that refutes these views. Measuring minor league defense, as opposed to viewing it, is fraught with obvious peril, but the defensive estimates that ZiPS uses for minor leaguers also love his glove. ZiPS uses a Total Zone-esque measure from Gameday hit locations, similar to Sean Smith’s methodology from nearly 15 years ago. Yes, we’d prefer to have something like OAA or DRS or even UZR for minor leaguers publicly available, but we don’t, so we have to generally be more conservative about conclusions drawn from the data. But for what it’s worth, these estimates, which I call zDEF, had Rafaela as an elite defensive center fielder in the minors in 2023.

Top CFs by zDEF, 2023
Player Runs
Jorge Barrosa 19.8
Ceddanne Rafaela 10.2
Drew Avans 9.9
Jake Mangum 9.7
Michael Siani 9.5
Jaden Rudd 8.5
Jud Fabian 8.4
Maddux Houghton 8.1
Victor Scott II 8.0
Pete Crow-Armstrong 7.9

Incidentally, zDEF had Rafaela at +3 as a shortstop total for his minor league career, so if the circumstances warranted it, it wouldn’t necessarily be the craziest thing to see him follow in the footsteps of another former Red Sox prospect, Mookie Betts, and move back to shortstop at some point, though that certainly is not why Boston signed Rafaela long term.

Let’s run the eight-year ZiPS for Rafaela.

ZiPS Projection – Ceddanne Rafaela
Year BA OBP SLG AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB OPS+ DR WAR
2024 .258 .299 .424 517 78 134 28 9 13 77 24 134 20 101 8 2.2
2025 .254 .296 .413 520 74 132 26 6 15 63 25 133 18 97 8 2.2
2026 .258 .300 .423 527 77 136 27 6 16 65 26 128 18 101 8 2.4
2027 .258 .304 .424 528 79 136 27 5 17 67 28 124 17 102 8 2.5
2028 .258 .306 .425 527 80 136 27 5 17 67 30 120 16 103 8 2.6
2029 .258 .307 .423 523 80 135 27 4 17 66 31 117 14 102 7 2.5
2030 .256 .306 .416 515 78 132 26 4 16 64 31 114 13 100 7 2.3
2031 .256 .306 .418 500 75 128 25 4 16 62 30 112 12 101 7 2.3

All told, ZiPS would happily offer him an eight-year, $67 million — $17 million more than what the Red Sox gave him.

One thing to take into consideration: So long as Rafaela’s glove is excellent, he doesn’t need to take a big offensive step forward to be worth his contract. ZiPS has Rafaela hitting for a skosh more power, enough to get his OPS+ and wRC+ into the 100 range during his peak years, but not sufficient to make him a superstar. As a result, his projections keep him in the solidly above-average territory – he’ll likely have an All-Star appearance or two during an up year – but comfortably below star status. These offensive numbers make him slightly better offensively than the inevitable comp given for him, Jackie Bradley Jr., who put up a 93 OPS+ over parts of eight seasons in Boston and was a few runs better defensively than Rafaela’s projections. Suffice it to say, if ZiPS’s natural conservatism with minor league defensive numbers ends up lowballing Rafaela, he’d be a steal at this price and put up WAR numbers in the range of Kevin Kiermaier’s best years.

As an offensive player, Rafaela remains a work in progress. In nine games this season entering Tuesday, he’s hitting .233/.286/.400 with two triples and an 85 wRC+. He’s actually gotten better at making contact, going from a 69% contact rate at Triple-A last year to 73% in the majors so far. Admittedly, this improvement has come in a small sample — he’s made just 124 big league plate appearances combined between his 2023 late-season debut (72.1% contact in 89 PA) and this year (76.3% in his 35 PA) — but it is still encouraging.

That said, he remains far too aggressive at the plate, especially when you consider his specific profile as a hitter. Unlike his teammate Rafael Devers, who also swings at a pretty high rate of pitches out of the zone, Rafaela doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard; Devers has power to spare, so even though he doesn’t make as much hard contact on pitches out of the zone — his average exit velocity drops to 85.5 mph, down from 94.9 mph on in-zone pitches — he can still do damage. Rafaela doesn’t have that luxury. Instead, he is a speedster (ranking 28th in sprint speed this season among 202 qualified players) who plays his home games at Fenway Park, one of baseball’s best parks for batting average. He should be incentivized to have a more contact-oriented game than most other batters. His contact skills appear to be improving, but he won’t get the most out of his game if he keeps chasing pitches that’s he unlikely to hit.

The Betts trade and the departure of Xander Bogaerts are still, rightfully, pain points for Boston fans. But since then, the Red Sox seem to be making a better effort to retain the players they develop, first with the Devers extension in January 2023 and now with Bello and Rafaela. Ultimately, winning is the only thing that will make things better in Boston. Keeping Rafaela in town should be an important step toward that.


What’s Sweeter Than Having One Ace? Having Two.

Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

Last Friday, my colleague Michael Baumann (the one who doesn’t throw 97 mph) mused that the Orioles’ having an ace was a pretty sweet thing. I can’t help but concur with that thesis, considering I’ve long been saying that one of Baltimore’s missing ingredients was an inarguable no. 1 starter. Nor can I quibble with anything related to Corbin Burnes; I picked him to win the AL Cy Young, after all, and his debut with the O’s was a masterpiece of cruelty to hitters. But what if they already had an ace? Grayson Rodriguez spent a drizzly Saturday doing his best to show why that may be the case.

One can argue that I chickened out a bit about Grayson Rodriguez a few weeks ago when I did not pick him as one of my pitcher breakout choices. In truth, I kind of felt it was cheating since he’d already flashed some utter dominance late last year when he had a 2.58 ERA and a 2.76 FIP in 76 2/3 second-half innings, similar to the star-making stretch that Tarik Skubal enjoyed. ZiPS didn’t go all-in on Rodriguez in the preseason, mainly because there’s always a great deal of downside risk in a young pitcher (or an old pitcher or a pitcher in his prime or a pitcher in a box or with a fox or in a house or with a mouse).

After a rather middling spring, I was eager to watch Rodriguez in a regular season game this year to see how he continued to progress with the things that stymied him when he was first called up in 2023. The first few months of his rookie season, he had a kitchen sink approach, just throwing out all five of his pitches (fastball, changeup, curveball, slider, and cutter) with the apparent hope of baffling major league hitters with variety. Instead, hitters would wait him out, an effective strategy; he was throwing just over 50% first-pitch strikes at the time of his demotion in late May. The result was too many walks and too many at-bats that ended with a batter waiting for something to crush and then proceeding to do exactly that.

Upon returning to the majors after the All-Star break, Rodriguez’s portfolio had gotten another passthrough at the copy desk. The cutter, against which opposing hitters had slugged nearly .900 through May, was almost entirely edited out, and the focus was on primarily getting the fastball-change combination working before mixing in the curves and sliders. Rodriguez walked as many batters in the second half as he did in the first half despite throwing almost twice the innings. The culprit there was the reversal in his first-strike rate; he went from 54.5% in his first stint to 66.8% after his return. To contextualize the significance of that change, 54.5% would have been the second-worst seasonal number among the 44 ERA title qualifiers in 2023, while 66.8% would have been the sixth-best first-pitch strike percentage.

His first start of 2024 was a lot like his second-half starts last year. Rodriguez got off to 0-1 counts as if it were child’s play (77%) and heavily relied on his fastball and changeup. He enticed Angels hitters to swing at nearly two-thirds of his changeups — and they whiffed against 60% of them. The curveball had the identical contact percentage. The end result? Six innings, one run on four hits, one walk, one home runs, and nine strikeouts, matching his major-league high from a start last April against the Tigers.

The only real blemish to his record came in the fourth inning on Saturday, when he threw a first-pitch slider/cutter to Taylor Ward, who casually clubbed it for a solo home run. Rodriguez’s offering — which the broadcast tracked as a slider and Statcast deemed a cutter — did not have the sharpness of his main three pitches, and the fact that there was some disagreement about what pitch it actually was should tell us something about its ineffectiveness. Whatever you call it — and we won’t be combining the two names here — three of the seven he threw were put into play with exit velocities above 100 mph.

Now, the Angels are no doubt one of the weaker teams in baseball and Rodriguez’s start would have been more impressive against the Dodgers or Astros, but it was a continuation of what he accomplished in the second half last year.

So, what’s next for Rodriguez?

Compared to other low-payroll teams, the Orioles have not done a good job signing their best young players to long-term contracts. In fact, no player in Baltimore has a guaranteed deal beyond this season except for Félix Bautista, who’ll make $1 million in 2025. I’d argue that the two best starting pitchers the O’s have developed in the last 30 years were Mike Mussina and Kevin Gausman. The team low-balled Mussina after he had previously taken a hometown discount and the latter, well, they never really figured out what to do with him. Why not get serious about offering Rodriguez a long-term contract before he gets really expensive?

Let’s go back to the preseason projections. Even with ZiPS not fully on board with Rodriguez’s performance in the second half, the long-term projection and the projection percentiles were still about what you’d expect them to be for a talented young pitcher with massive upside.

ZiPS Projection – Grayson Rodriguez
Year W L ERA G GS IP H ER HR BB SO ERA+ WAR
2024 7 6 4.07 28 28 141.7 126 64 19 44 153 101 2.0
2025 7 6 3.98 28 28 142.3 125 63 18 42 149 103 2.1
2026 7 6 3.99 28 28 146.7 129 65 19 41 150 103 2.2
2027 7 7 4.02 29 29 147.7 129 66 19 41 149 102 2.2
2028 7 7 4.06 29 29 148.7 131 67 19 40 147 101 2.1
2029 7 7 4.15 28 28 145.3 130 67 19 39 140 99 1.9
2030 7 6 4.12 27 27 139.7 125 64 18 38 133 99 1.8
2031 6 6 4.19 26 26 133.3 119 62 17 37 126 98 1.7

ZiPS Percentiles – Grayson Rodriguez
Percentile ERA+ ERA WAR
95% 148 2.76 4.6
90% 134 3.06 3.9
80% 117 3.49 3.1
70% 110 3.74 2.7
60% 105 3.91 2.3
50% 101 4.07 2.0
40% 96 4.25 1.7
30% 91 4.49 1.3
20% 87 4.69 1.0
10% 81 5.03 0.5
5% 78 5.25 0.1

ZiPS suggests an eight-year, $57 million contract to buy out two years of free agency, and I think given the upside, you can certainly go higher than that. Just for fun, I took the ZiPS updated projection (with his first start) and the 70th percentile projection for the 2024 season and re-ran the long-term projection to get a not-too-aggressive estimate of what it could look like.

ZiPS Projection – Grayson Rodriguez (70th Percentile)
Year W L ERA G GS IP H ER HR BB SO ERA+ WAR
2025 10 7 3.40 31 31 169.3 149 64 19 49 175 120 3.6
2026 10 6 3.39 30 30 167.3 146 63 19 46 172 121 3.6
2027 10 6 3.40 29 29 166.7 147 63 20 45 168 120 3.5
2028 9 7 3.49 29 29 162.7 144 63 19 42 160 118 3.4
2029 9 7 3.55 29 29 162.3 146 64 20 42 157 115 3.2
2030 9 6 3.61 28 28 157.0 144 63 20 41 148 113 3.0
2031 8 6 3.66 26 26 147.7 137 60 19 39 137 112 2.8
2032 8 6 3.67 24 24 139.7 130 57 17 38 128 112 2.5

There’s a 30% chance that his projection next year will be as good as this or even better. A 3.6 WAR projection for a pitcher is nothing to scoff at; it would have ranked 11th in the ZiPS projections for pitchers this season.

The new O’s owner, David Rubinstein, has excited a lot of people in Baltimore with how he’s talked about the team. But even better than words would be action, and what better way to show a change from the late-stage Angelos era than to actually ensure that one of the team’s best young talents stays in Charm City past his free agent eligibility? It doesn’t necessarily have to be Grayson Rodriguez, but the team should consider him a serious option for an extension. If he develops like scouts and computers believe, he’ll surely be worth it.


Twins Lose Their ‘Too Electric’ Talent and a Veteran Starter

Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports

The Minnesota Twins had a strong start to the season, taking two of three games against the Kansas City Royals. But the positive results came with the unfortunate revelations that Royce Lewis will miss at least the next month, and likely longer, with a severe right quad strain, and right-hander Anthony DeSclafani will miss the entire season after undergoing flexor tendon surgery.

If you want to know why the Twins finally defused all the jokes last fall by winning their first playoff games in more than two decades, Lewis is one of the best answers. After nearly four years of injuries kept him mostly off the diamond, Lewis finally returned last May, though he landed on the IL twice more in 2023; an oblique strain in early July cost him about month and a half, and a hamstring strain in the middle of September prematurely ended his regular season. Still, he raked whenever he was healthy, slashing .309/.372/.548 with a 151 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR in just 58 games (239 plate appearances). His flow of pure, unadulterated awesomeness continued in the postseason as he hit four homers in six games.

With the preseason hope that Lewis would get 581 plate appearances (per our Depth Charts), that was enough to project the Twins to rank fifth at third base in our positional power rankings. He got through the spring healthy and was in the Opening Day lineup for the first time ever, batting third and playing third. His 2024 debut was his career in microcosm: He blasted a no-doubt dinger in his first plate appearance, lined a single his second time up, and got hurt before he had a chance to bat again; that injury occurred almost immediately, while he was rounding second when the next batter, Carlos Correa, hit a double. Read the rest of this entry »


The Official (And Hopefully Not Too Cringe) 2024 ZiPS Projections

Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports

After all the rumors and money and projections, here we are, back at 0-0, with every team having at least some theoretical level of hope for the coming season. Beginning Thursday, actual games will turn these projections to shreds, but this is the best algorithmic projection I have the ability to make for 2024. Just a note that I have not committed an act of decimal cheating; ZiPS does not know that the Padres and Dodgers are 1-1.

The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, meaning there naturally will be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion (the computational algorithms, that is — no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing chemin de fer like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline PAs/IPs for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically (and proportionally) fills in playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings. The model’s had a lot of updates since the pre-spring projections, so probabilities may have moved slightly more than you might have expected from the changes in wins.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. This is actually much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less mind-blowingly awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our ken, and if anyone figures out how to deflect astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in service of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.7 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. With one major exception, most of ZiPS’ problems now are about accuracy rather than bias. ZiPS’ year-to-year misses for teams are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. Now, correlations with fewer than 20 points aren’t ideal, but the individual franchise with the highest year-to-year r-squared is the Mariners at 0.03, which isn’t terribly meaningful. If you think that certain franchises have a history of predictive over- or underperformance, you thought wrong, and I’d bet it’s the same for the other notable projection systems.

If you want to check out the pre-spring projections, which talk about the biggest things to happen up to that point, here are the links to the AL and NL projections. Since it has been requested, for these official 2024 projections, I’ve also added 80th and 20th percentile win totals to the standings tables.

ZiPS Projected Standings – AL East
Team W L GB Pct Div% WC% Playoff% WS Win% 80th 20th
Baltimore Orioles 91 71 .562 37.2% 34.8% 72.1% 8.8% 99.0 82.2
New York Yankees 87 75 4 .537 24.1% 35.2% 59.3% 5.2% 95.8 78.7
Toronto Blue Jays 87 75 4 .537 22.4% 35.9% 58.3% 5.0% 95.3 78.7
Tampa Bay Rays 83 79 8 .512 11.9% 29.2% 41.1% 2.3% 91.1 74.4
Boston Red Sox 77 85 14 .475 4.4% 17.5% 22.0% 0.7% 85.9 69.2

Since the last set of projections, the movement here can mostly be attributed to starting pitching. Corbin Burnes provides a huge boost to the Orioles, but some of the benefit of his addition is negated because of less optimistic innings totals for the injured John Means and, more significantly, Kyle Bradish. The injury to Yankees ace Gerrit Cole diminishes their outlook a bit, though they still have the American League’s third highest playoff probability. Lucas Giolito wasn’t expected to pitch the Red Sox to the postseason, but his injury makes a Boston playoff berth even less likely.

ZiPS Projected Standings – AL Central
Team W L GB Pct Div% WC% Playoff% WS Win% 80th 20th
Minnesota Twins 86 76 .531 41.8% 15.7% 57.5% 4.5% 94.1 77.0
Cleveland Guardians 85 77 1 .525 38.4% 16.6% 55.1% 3.9% 93.3 76.7
Detroit Tigers 78 84 8 .481 13.2% 11.6% 24.8% 0.8% 85.8 69.3
Kansas City Royals 73 89 13 .451 5.9% 6.5% 12.5% 0.2% 81.4 65.0
Chicago White Sox 63 99 23 .389 0.6% 0.8% 1.5% 0.0% 71.5 54.8

People might still be shocked to see the White Sox with a 1.5% chance of making the postseason, but one of the things I’ve learned after doing this for 20 years is that people – even the most sophisticated ones – tend to underrate how often improbable things happen. Luckily, with so many years in the books, I’ve had the ability to do a lot of calibration! In most simulations, the division features a fairly tight race between the Twins and Guardians for the title and the Tigers finishing third. And because the Central is relatively weak, a Royals playoff appearance would be unlikely but not unreasonably so.

ZiPS Projected Standings – AL West
Team W L GB Pct Div% WC% Playoff% WS Win% 80th 20th
Houston Astros 88 74 .543 37.0% 26.2% 63.2% 6.3% 96.5 79.4
Texas Rangers 86 76 2 .531 28.4% 27.0% 55.5% 4.5% 94.4 77.6
Seattle Mariners 86 76 2 .531 27.4% 27.3% 54.7% 4.3% 94.0 77.6
Los Angeles Angels 77 85 11 .475 6.9% 14.7% 21.6% 0.7% 85.6 68.7
Oakland A’s 63 99 25 .389 0.2% 0.9% 1.1% 0.0% 71.6 54.7

The big change here is a slightly more negative distribution of the innings for Astros pitchers, narrowing their lead over the Rangers and Mariners. I appreciate ZiPS’ bringing the M’s just that much closer to the Seattle Mariners .540 meme. The A’s now project to finish a fraction of a win ahead of the White Sox in the AL basement, which is some kind of victory, I guess.

ZiPS Projected Standings – NL East
Team W L GB Pct Div% WC% Playoff% WS Win% 80th 20th
Atlanta Braves 95 67 .586 62.6% 21.4% 84.0% 15.2% 103.3 86.0
Philadelphia Phillies 85 77 10 .525 17.9% 33.4% 51.2% 3.7% 93.3 76.7
New York Mets 83 79 12 .512 12.9% 28.2% 41.1% 2.3% 91.2 74.0
Miami Marlins 79 83 16 .488 6.3% 20.2% 26.6% 1.0% 87.1 70.4
Washington Nationals 66 96 29 .407 0.3% 2.0% 2.3% 0.0% 74.1 57.4

ZiPS does give the Braves a 1% chance at winning 116 games! Atlanta lost a bit in the probabilities because of some changes in the generalized playing time model that fills in the backups. Even if ZiPS sees the playoffs as a bit less certain for this team than it did six weeks ago, the Braves still have the highest projected win total in the majors. The Marlins took a sizable hit after some negative injury news, a pretty big deal for them since the pitching staff is their source of upside. It sure ain’t the hitting!

ZiPS Projected Standings – NL Central
Team W L GB Pct Div% WC% Playoff% WS Win% 80th 20th
St. Louis Cardinals 83 79 .512 27.8% 16.0% 43.8% 2.6% 90.7 74.4
Chicago Cubs 82 80 1 .506 27.9% 15.6% 43.5% 2.5% 91.0 74.2
Cincinnati Reds 80 82 3 .494 20.8% 14.3% 35.1% 1.6% 89.0 71.6
Milwaukee Brewers 78 84 5 .481 14.7% 12.6% 27.3% 1.0% 86.8 70.0
Pittsburgh Pirates 75 87 8 .463 8.9% 9.0% 17.9% 0.5% 83.7 67.3

ZiPS loves Pete Crow-Armstrong and is suspicious of Cody Bellinger matching his 2023 numbers, but bringing him back was still enough to push the Cubs into a near-statistical tie in what was already projected to be a very close race. The Brewers took a hit with the loss of Burnes, and as a result, they slightly boosted the projections for the other four teams in the division.

ZiPS Projected Standings – NL West
Team W L GB Pct Div% WC% Playoff% WS Win% 80th 20th
Los Angeles Dodgers 93 69 .574 49.3% 29.7% 79.0% 11.9% 101.1 84.2
Arizona Diamondbacks 86 76 7 .531 20.5% 34.9% 55.5% 4.4% 94.4 77.8
San Francisco Giants 85 77 8 .525 17.2% 32.1% 49.4% 3.4% 93.2 76.1
San Diego Padres 83 79 10 .512 12.7% 28.5% 41.2% 2.3% 91.3 74.0
Colorado Rockies 67 95 26 .414 0.2% 1.9% 2.1% 0.0% 74.5 59.0

The NL West contenders fighting with the Dodgers – which means the three other teams that are not the Rockies – all received a boost because, since the pre-spring projections, they each added one of the top starting pitchers available, either in free agency or via trade, this offseason. The Diamondbacks, Giants, and Padres are better after having acquired, respectively, Jordan Montgomery, Blake Snell, and Dylan Cease, but the moves haven’t changed the relative positions of these teams in the projected standings. Even so, these deals — along with San Francisco’s signing of Matt Chapman — have created more scenarios in which the Dodgers can be bested for the divisional title, though they remain the favorites.

One thing you see a lot on social media, especially from sites that repost these projections, is outrage that “the best team will only have X wins.” The Orioles are projected to have the best record in the AL, at 91-71, but that doesn’t mean that ZiPS projects 91 wins to lead the AL. Those 91 wins represent Baltimore’s 50th percentile performance in those million simulations, and it is astronomically unlikely that all 30 teams hit their 50th-percentile projections. On average, you should expect three teams to hit their 90th percentile, six to hit their 80th, nine to hit their 70th, and so on and so forth. But again, it’s rarely going to be that neat. So here’s the percentile matrix for the number of wins it would take to secure each of the six playoff spots.

ZiPS Playoff Matrix
To Win 10th 20th 30th 40th 50th 60th 70th 80th 90th
AL East 89.3 92.0 94.0 95.8 97.4 99.1 100.9 103.0 105.9
AL Central 83.0 86.0 88.1 90.0 91.8 93.6 95.6 97.9 101.1
AL West 86.6 89.4 91.5 93.4 95.1 96.8 98.7 100.9 103.9
To Win 10th 20th 30th 40th 50th 60th 70th 80th 90th
AL Wild Card 1 87.4 89.2 90.6 91.8 93.0 94.2 95.5 97.0 99.2
AL Wild Card 2 84.1 85.8 87.0 88.0 89.0 90.1 91.2 92.5 94.4
AL Wild Card 3 81.6 83.1 84.3 85.3 86.2 87.1 88.2 89.4 91.1
To Win 10th 20th 30th 40th 50th 60th 70th 80th 90th
NL East 88.3 91.4 93.6 95.6 97.5 99.4 101.5 104.2 107.8
NL Central 83.5 86.2 88.1 89.8 91.4 93.0 94.8 96.8 99.6
NL West 88.8 91.7 93.8 95.7 97.5 99.2 101.1 103.3 106.4
To Win 10th 20th 30th 40th 50th 60th 70th 80th 90th
NL Wild Card 1 87.4 89.3 90.6 91.8 93.0 94.2 95.5 97.1 99.2
NL Wild Card 2 84.0 85.7 87.0 88.0 89.0 90.0 91.1 92.4 94.2
NL Wild Card 3 81.5 83.1 84.2 85.2 86.2 87.1 88.1 89.3 91.0

2024 Positional Power Rankings: Bullpen (No. 16-30)

David Kohl-USA TODAY Sports

After wrapping up our position player rankings with the league’s designated hitters, we turn our attention to the pitchers, starting with the bullpens in the bottom half of the reliever rankings.

One of my favorite jokes, which I’ve probably beaten into the ground at this point, is that there are three teams a year whose fans think they have a great bullpen, while those who root for the 27 other clubs are convinced that their team’s bullpen is the worst in baseball history and the primary reason they aren’t going to win the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »