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With the Dodgers reporting for pitchers and catchers on Friday, this week seems like a good time to do run ZiPS projections for all 30 teams. Let’s be clear up front: These are not the final preseason projections – and an ancient curse I saw suggests that if you quote them as such, ghosts will eat your lymphatic system – but they’re the best expression of how ZiPS sees the league right now. After all, several marquee free agents remain unsigned and rosters will surely change between now and the start of the 2024 season.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial, or more competently, beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which were released yesterday, meaning there naturally will be some notable 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 plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. 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. I promise, this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less 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 the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.6 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. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. In other words, none year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

I’m from Baltimore, but I would hope last year’s projection miss would disavow anyone of the notion that I weight these team standings toward my personal preferences. The Orioles – and last year’s Orioles – do a bit better in my methodology than others, I suspect because of the weight I deal with depth. In those seasons in which they lose players, especially offensive ones, the team’s depth keeps the falloff from being too dire. Even in simulation no. 452,331, in which the O’s lose both Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschmann to season-ending injuries before the first game, the team still finished 84-78!

The Yankees have significant downside given how much of their punch is tied up in a handful of players, but the reports of their death are quite premature. Juan Soto will provide a huge offensive boost this year, even if they don’t re-sign him after the season. They also added two other outfielders, Alex Verdugo and Trent Grisham, who are better than everybody they ran out there last year, with the exception of Aaron Judge.

ZiPS likes Toronto’s rotation and expects the return of Kevin Kiermaier to help, but without Matt Chapman, it sees third base as a major downgrade from last year. The Rays almost always get the most out of their depth, but ZiPS isn’t sure how much production they will get from their DH spot or how they will cobble together their rotation without Tyler Glasnow.

The Red Sox aren’t a dreadful team, but they’re merely OK in a division that has four good-to-great teams. That being said, they’re just good enough that they still have slightly better than a one-in-five chance of making the playoffs.

ZiPS projects Cleveland to be relatively even with Minnesota, in large part because it likes the rotation trio of Shane Bieber, Triston McKenzie, and Tanner Bibee more than other projection systems do. ZiPS doesn’t see the Guardians as significantly below average at any position — Andrés Giménez remains a ZiPS favorite — and it thinks their bullpen is underrated. The Twins won the division fairly comfortably last year, but remember, they won only 87 games and just lost the AL Cy Young runner-up, Sonny Gray, in free agency. The Jorge Polanco trade came from a surplus of infield talent, but the additions of Anthony DeSclafani and Justin Topa won’t compensate for Gray’s loss to the rotation. If you like Carlos Santana, the team’s “big” offseason signing, I’d recommend you not look at the projection for him.

The projections still see more upside for Detroit’s pitching than its hitting, though after Spencer Torkelson’s surge last summer, ZiPS does expect him to keep improving in his third big league season. The Tigers are good enough that they can make a serious run at .500, but they’ll need some good fortune to get enough offense.

The Royals get credit for being active in free agency this offseason, signing veteran starting pitchers Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, reliever Will Smith, slugger Hunter Renfroe, and utility man Adam Frazier, among other players. That said, those are the types of moves a team makes when it already has a strong core in place and is ready to contend, and, at least as ZiPS sees it, the Royals aren’t quite there yet. That’s not the worst thing in the world, considering they just signed shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. to the longest, most valuable extension in franchise history.

ZiPS has the White Sox as one of the worst teams in baseball, with little to look forward to outside of Dylan Cease, Luis Robert Jr., and the hope that Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez get back on track. This organization is in a very dangerous position in that, like the Rockies a few years ago, I’m not sure it truly understands where it stands.

ZiPS still sees the Astros as the class of the AL West, thanks to the massive concentration of talent in the heart of their lineup. It wasn’t a busy winter for Houston, but the big addition, Josh Hader, gives a boost to the bullpen. The Astros, though, are not unstoppable. They have a lot of viable arms in the rotation, but the upside isn’t what it was three or four years ago, even if Justin Verlander has another strong season left in his arm.

The Rangers are a well-built team, but a lot of their offensive talent is on the wrong side of 30, and last year was probably the best case scenario for a few of their hitters. Their starting pitching is weaker now than it was at the end of 2023. ZiPS did account for the late-season returns of Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Mahle to reinforce the rotation, but all those games without them count, too, and as of this writing, Texas has not re-signed or replaced Jordan Montgomery.

ZiPS likes a lot of what the Mariners did this offseason. It projects Jorge Polanco as a moderate plus at second base and Luis Urías to be an effective replacement for Eugenio Suárez. Gregory Santos is in the top tier of projected relievers, though his projection will come down just a tad once a fixed error in the ZiPS database propagates to our player pages.

It will be nice for the Angels to get full seasons from Zach Neto and Nolan Schanuel, and the team has spent its offseason quietly beefing up its bullpen. But losing Shohei Ohtani is going to hurt.

I believe I have talked about all the major league teams in the AL West and surely did not forget anyone.

One thing that drive me nuts about the discourse of the ZiPS projections is when someone looks at the top median projection and gets very angry with me that some division can be won with 89 or 90 wins. Since most of the tweets on this subject have an aspect for Mature Audiences Only, I’ve translated an example into something suitable for polite company.

Verily, Szymborski, thou art bereft of wit! How dare thee proclaim that a mere tally of 89 victories shall secure the Astros dominion over the AL Wast! Thy discourse betrays a lamentable ignorance, akin to that of a common dullard. Thy prognostications, I dare say, are as worthless as the dregs of a shire-reeve’s larder after Michaelmas!

Yes, the Astros have the best median projection in the AL West at 89 wins, but that doesn’t mean 89 wins will actually win the AL West. This last chart shows the probabilities that X number of wins will take the division or wild card spot in question. So, 89 wins might win the AL West, but only about 20% of the time. The Orioles project to 90 wins, but in the 36.4% of scenarios in which they won the AL East, they averaged 95.3 wins.

The Kansas City Royals committed to the largest contract in franchise history on Monday, signing shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. to an 11-year extension worth $288.8 million. In addition to the guarantee, which runs through the 2034 season, there’s a three-year club option worth $89 million that would bring the total value of the deal to $377 million if exercised. Witt gets some options of his own, with four opt-out opportunities from 2030 to 2033 (the seventh, eighth, ninth, and 10th seasons of the deal). The 23-year-old Witt had a breakout 2023 season, hitting .276/.319/.495 with 30 homers and 49 stolen bases, good for 5.7 WAR, a mark that ranked third among shortstops behind only Corey Seager and Francisco Lindor.

Suffice it to say, I was floored when news of this deal hit Monday afternoon. Money may not go as far as it used to, but a nearly $300 million commitment is still a pretty large one, with fewer than 20 contracts in league history exceeding $250 million in guaranteed cash. A contract this big would still be a massive story in New York or Los Angeles; in the context of Kansas City baseball, the discovery of extraterrestrial life would probably get booted from the front page in favor of this deal. To say the Royals don’t typically enter into pacts like this would be an epic understatement. We’re talking about a franchise that had never given out even a $100 million contract, with the largest previous deal being Salvador Perez’s 2021 extension that guaranteed him $82 million over four years. Triple the size of Perez’s bag of cash and you still have enough left over to make a stack of hundred dollar bills about 140 feet high.

The Royals picked the right player to play Rich Uncle Pennybags with. Witt is the team’s best young player since Carlos Beltrán about 20 years ago. Back then, the Royals valued him so highly that after agreeing in principle to a three-year, $25 million contract, ownership decided to blow up the deal by trying to pull back a million dollars. A year later, Beltrán was traded in a three-way swap that netted the organization Mark Teahen, Mike Wood, and John Buck, who combined for about seven total WAR as Royals. Two decades later, Beltrán has a good shot at making the Hall of Fame — the biggest obstacle is his involvement in Houston’s trashcananigans — and if he gets a plaque, it may be with NY on the cap, not KC.

Witt isn’t some stathead favorite who snuck in a great season on the back of a spike in walks and crazy one-year defensive numbers (though we’ll get to his defense in a minute) — he was one of the top amateurs in the country, and as a pro prospect, he was one of those rare players who the scouts, the numbers crowd, and the computers all relished. He so electrified the atmosphere in spring training in 2021 that the Royals might have given serious thought to having him basically skip the whole upper minors.

While the Royals were probably right to develop Witt traditionally, assigning him to Double-A in 2021, they cleared the decks to get him a full-time spot in the lineup for 2022. Adalberto Mondesi’s presence resulted in Witt starting off at third base, but Mondesi’s ACL tear opened up the shortstop job, which Witt has mostly held since. A .254/.294/.428 line in his rookie campaign wasn’t phenom material, but as a 22-year-old shortstop, it was still enough to place him around average at the position, with a whole lot of unexplored ceiling remaining. Let’s crank up the time machine and jump back to his long-term ZiPS projections before last season:

Assuming the reduced salary figures for his pre-free agency years, ZiPS would have offered 11 years and $282 million to cover Witt through the 2034 season, though without the opt-out years, which do add significant value for most players. And remember, that projection isn’t what the computer suggests knowing how last season went — this is before 2023.

While this projection did a decent job of pegging Witt’s 2023 offense (with a projected OPS+ of 114 vs. an actual OPS+ of 120 and a wRC+ of 115), the computer didn’t see his defensive improvements coming. Originally, it was up for debate whether Witt’s future in the majors would be at shortstop or third base; the Royals originally starting Mondesi at short over Witt wasn’t necessarily some bit of undue veteran deference. Per Statcast’s RAA, Witt improved by 17 runs at shortstop from 2022 to 2023, ranking as the top defensive shortstop in the American League last season. Even Sports Info Solutions’ Defensive Runs Saved, a relative skeptic on Witt, saw a 12-run improvement.

Defense is notoriously hard to measure, but Witt’s numbers improved both in terms of range and avoiding errors. The latter is a relatively small part of defense, but it’s also one that’s much easier to measure, and Witt netted six runs of his improvement just from avoiding errors, going from six non-throwing errors to only two in 2023 despite 50% more innings. Last August, Jake Mintz went into detail on Witt’s defensive instruction at shortstop:

For a crash course in rewiring his defensive approach, Witt’s personal hitting coach Jeremy Isenhower invited well-known private infield coach Nate Trosky out to his hitting facility in Tomball, Texas, for two days of intensive training with the young shortstop. In the nippy mid-December chill, Trosky, an eccentric, fast talking, sun-hat wearing, country-song singing, infield mental skills expert, ran Witt through nearly six straight hours of instruction.
[…]
A close review of Witt’s 2022 errors confirms this hypothesis. Most of his fielding mistakes appeared to stem from a hesitant first step that led to issues with Witt’s timing and rhythm toward the ball. But if Trosky made things incredibly complicated on purpose, Royals first-year infield coach José Alguacil has taken an opposite yet complementary approach.

Let’s spin up the computer one more time and get Witt’s current projection, through the team option years:

How good is this projection? ZiPS would happily throw another $100 million Witt’s way, meaning the Royals still have a lot of room for this deal to be absolutely fabulous from their point of view. Note that ZiPS isn’t even assuming Witt is a +10 defensive shortstop; 2023 was only enough for it to believe that he’s league average. If I tell ZiPS to assume he’s a -10 shortstop with the glove right now, it still thinks $240 million would be a fair deal. In other words, liking this contract from Kansas City’s perspective does not require you to abandon all skepticism about his defense.

Outside of the bottom line figure, it’s encouraging to see the Royals invest in a young star to this degree. It’s hard to remember now, but at one point, the Royals were one of baseball’s model franchises. Founded with the late Ewing Kauffman as the owner, the Royals managed to pass the .500 mark in just their third year of existence, and following their breakout 1975, they were one of the top teams in baseball for 15 years, a whole generation of baseball:

Kauffman mostly kept Kansas City’s stars together and put the team’s cash back into the roster. From 1985 to 1994, the Royals were only out of the top 10 in payroll once, in 1992, and even led the league in 1990. But Kauffman passed away in 1993 and so did the team’s Golden Era. Outside of the Royals’ brief period of relevance in the mid-2010s, they spent so much time in the basement that someone should have checked them for a Vitamin D deficiency. The team’s success in 2014-2015 energized the locals for the first time in decades, but the organization showed little inclination to actually try and keep those fans, and as the team’s core aged and/or moved on, so did the KC faithful. Paid attendance in the championship 2015 season was over 33,000 per game. The Royals haven’t even done half that since 2019.

Does signing Bobby Witt Jr. bring back the Royals as a dynasty? Of course not — the team has still more holes than Clyde Barrow’s 1934 Ford DeLuxe Fordor. But Witt’s signing is a callback to a happier time, when Royal blue held more than just temporary apparel for superstars. Whether or not the Royals solve their other problems, for the next decade, shortstop probably won’t be one of them.

Last week, I looked at players the projection systems agree on and homes for remaining top free agents using ZiPS. To complete this troika of pieces reviewing some of the ZiPS projections, I’ve asked ZiPS for the players whose medium-term outlook has changed the most from last year’s projections to this year’s. There are a lot of ways to do it, but I went with the simple method of looking at 2024-2027 projections at this time last year and the 2024-2027 projections right now.

Let’s jump right into the projections.

I’m actually a little surprised that someone beat Ronald Acuña Jr. here. I liked Colorado’s pickup of Nolan Jones a lot – and nobody would claim I wear purple-and-black colored glasses – but he turned out even better than I or the projection system expected. Jones was a high-power, high-BABIP talent in the minors, both characteristics that served him well in Coors. Nobody’s confusing him with Kevin Kiermaier, but he turned out to be more competent defensively in the outfield than most expected, a not insignificant thing in a park with a very large outfield. Note that ZiPS doesn’t exclusively use Statcast’s OAA/RAA in its defensive estimations; it uses a mix that is mostly so, but still contains a bit of DRS and a dash of UZR. A .400 BABIP would be difficult to “keep” under any circumstances, so regression is expected, but Jones’ career is still on a lot more solid ground than a year ago.

The reason for the suspicions on Acuña are unsurprising and not a secret: He was recovering from a serious ACL injury and had a fairly run-of-the-mill return in 2022. I don’t necessarily think ZiPS was wrong to make this projection given the risk, though I’ll note that it “hated” him to the tune of having the seventh-best four-year WAR projection for a position player. Well, 2023 happened, and I doubt I have to explain the qualities of that campaign for him. He’s back on the previous track on dueling with Juan Soto and Julio Rodríguez for best X-year projections.

None of the projection systems think Evan Carter will hit for as much average as he did during his first taste of the big leagues, but they all think he’s an above-average starter in the majors right now. There was promise in his profile entering 2023, but a lot more uncertainty because for as young as he was, he was still a relatively low-power prospect with a lot of walk value – not always a huge plus for a prospect becuase of the risk of Jeremy Hermida Syndrome – and hadn’t yet played above High-A ball. The majors turned out not to be so far away.

I said last year at this time that ZiPS needed another year to be sure about Masyn Winn, and that’s precisely what happened. Colt Keith, with a full healthy season after a shoulder injury, put himself into the top tier of prospects and earned an extension from the Tigers before he played a game. Chas McCormick is one of the oldest players on the list, and even if it took a long time until Dusty Baker noticed his improvement, the Astros were aware of it. Patrick Bailey turned out to be a truly dynamite defensive player in the majors.

The Henry Davis bump feels a little odd, but ZiPS was really down on him until his minor league performance in 2023, which featured a spicy 178 wRC+ at Double-A and Triple-A. Jake Burger did enough to upgrade him from a useful role player into a short-term league-average starter. Jordan Lawlar’s very short debut in the majors wasn’t impressive, but a 20-year-old shortstop with a 127 wRC+ in the high minors is someone on the verge of being in phenom territory, especially because he can actually play the position; he’s not a Danny Tartabull slugger shoehorned into a position he can’t play.

Robert Hassell III missed most of the Arizona Fall League in 2022 with a broken hamate bone, and things got even worse when the calendar flipped; he hit .221/.324/.321 across two levels in 2023. Just to contextualize how troubling a line that is, ZiPS gets a translation of .201/.275/.274 for the year. It doesn’t end him as a prospect, but it isn’t encouraging to see such a lack of production from one of the two outfield prospects the Nationals received in the Soto trade. On the bright side for Washington, the other outfielder it picked up for Soto, James Wood, was the No. 2 prospect in all of baseball in our updated 2023 rankings and had a four WAR improvement in this exercise.

This wasn’t a great season for Royals hitting prospects. The trio of MJ Melendez, Nick Pratto, and Vinnie Pasquantino were expected to provide some reinforcements to a punchless outlet, but two of the three (Melendez and Pratto) made this list. Even Pasquantino ranked 56th, but that’s more due to his missing more than three months with a shoulder injury that required season-ending surgery; he’s performed considerably better than the other two in the majors. Melendez now finds himself with a limited path to a long career. His bat regressed massively, a major issue now that the Royals are using him as a DH and in the outfield instead of as a catcher because they didn’t trust his glove behind the plate. He now needs to either convince the Royals he can handle catching (and actually be able to do so) or make a huge step forward with the bat, both easier said than done. Pratto was promoted in late April and had a big May, but he basically stopped hitting after that, eventually getting demoted the minors. He didn’t hit there, either.

ZiPS wasn’t a fan of Aaron Zavala, a second-round pick by the Rangers in 2021, but after this walk-heavy prospect hit the wall in Double-A (.194/.343/.285), it’s even less so. However, I wouldn’t completely write him off yet, because it’s hard for a projection system to deal with his injury setbacks; a spinal tumor and UCL surgery in consecutive years have presented major obstacles for him. He may be too patient as a hitter, but he also has had such little experience as a pro that he could still develop a more aggressive approach at the plate. Plate discipline is a means to an end, not an end to itself; if he doesn’t learn to punish pitchers when he get his pitch, he won’t make it as he moves up the minor league ladder.

Jake Cronenworth is a good bounceback candidate with the bat, but playing him at first always was going to take away a chunk of his value, especially as he turned out to be a rather unimpressive defensive player there. Addison Barger was a ZiPS favorite entering 2023, but an elbow injury cost him two months of the season and possibly contributed to his giant step backwards in the power department.

Brett Baty still has one of the best projections on this list, but a half-year of some really awful play in the majors ought to sap some of the exuberance about his output.

At the back of the list, Carlos Correa may have pleased the Twins in October, but it was one of his worst seasons as a pro. Because of his strong track record, ZiPS expects him to be much better moving forward than he was in 2023, but it can’t completely ignore such a down year. ZiPS also remains high on Anthony Volpe overall, but he didn’t show as much progress with the bat as ZiPS had hoped, and some of that superstar high-end has been whittled down a bit.

Some may believe that ZiPS isn’t as positive about Kyle Bradish’s 2023 as it should be, but he is the biggest positive mover among pitchers, going from a fringe fifth starter (in the opinion of ZiPS) to at least a legitimate number-two guy behind Corbin Burnes (!!!). I talked a bit about Brock Stewart in Projection Fight Club; he’s had a long injury history, but the anemic plate discipline numbers batters managed against him last season made ZiPS a believer, even with a relatively small sample size.

Eury Pérez amply demonstrated he was ready for the majors, and just in time to add some cover to a rotation that will be without Sandy Alcantara for 2024. Gregory Santos quickly figured out the whole command thing to go along with a fastball that can touch the century mark. I like to imagine I was correct about the Zach Eflin breakout, even if I was a few years early, but I don’t expect anyone to give me credit for that. He was fourth in the AL in WAR among pitchers, after all. Health seems to be the biggest boost here, because Eflin has been good for a while; he has now had four consecutive seasons with a FIP below four.

The Phillies no longer have Eflin, but they do have Cristopher Sánchez, who quickly worked his way into the rotation to give them a boost down the stretch. ZiPS thinks he’s for real. Same goes for Tanner Bibee, who showed he could finish off batters quite competently with both his slider and his changeup. Michael King consolidated his 2022 gains, and it’s completely unsurprising the Padres want to look at him as a starter if they can.

Alek Manoah’s 2023 represented such a turn of fate that William Hogarth could have painted it. After finishing third in the 2022 AL Cy Young race, he was demoted from the majors to the lowest level of the minors last June, returned after a month, and then was optioned again during the second week of August, this time to Triple-A, where he never pitched because of various ailments. No matter how much promise he has flashed in the past, ZiPS can’t ignore such a brutal decline. Carlos Rodón and Luis Severino were both injured and ineffective last year, two of the reasons the Yankees missed the playoffs. Noah Syndergaard demonstrated that it’s unlikely he can transition effectively from the power pitcher he once was into a finesse guy, and ZiPS jumped off the Shintaro Fujinami train, though I still have some hope for him as a full-time reliever. Kyle Wright and Brandon Woodruff both had significant injuries.

Note that the Ohtani decline here is as a pitcher only, and as mad as it makes me, it’s fair given he just had his second Tommy John surgery.

All told, the decliners for pitchers are much less interesting than the gainers or the hitter numbers, simply because elbows and shoulders change the expectations for pitchers more quickly. I think next year, I’ll filter out injured pitchers.

Coming up later this week: the first official ZiPS projected standings of 2024!

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The first rule of Projection Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Projection Fight Club. Fortunately, the second rule of Projection Fight Club is that you are allowed to write about Projection Fight Club — otherwise, I might get in hot water with our editors for pitching an article I can’t actually produce.

If you’ve been paying attention to the projections housed here at FanGraphs (this is an odd article to read if you’re haven’t been), you’ve probably seen that our player pages now include ZiPS, Steamer, and THE BAT projections for the 2024 season (ATC projections are also available). You may have compared them a little. Perhaps you’ve even shaken your fist at the heavens for the temerity of allowing these systems to besmirch the good name of your favorite player or team. For me, the most interesting projections are the ones where the various systems disagree the most. After all, we watch heavyweight fights, not heavyweight agreements. Nobody would shell out cash to watch the Universal Amiable Concordance Championship.

Since we now have the different projections available, I thought I’d highlight some of the players who inspire the greatest discord amongst the various systems. I’m not going to guess which system will end up being right — it would be inappropriate for me to write a piece like that with one of the pugilists in the ring — but where possible, I’ll talk a bit about the complications involved with projecting those players, and in the instances where ZiPS stands alone as the biggest outlier, I’ll try to lend some additional insight as to why my system is being so nice or mean. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re all looking for an end to the winter doldrums, but whatever meteorological fortunes Punxsutawney Phil might indicate in a few days, the real start of spring doesn’t come until pitchers and catchers report. The vernal equinox ain’t the boss of me! But before camp opens, some unfinished offseason business remains, with scads of free agents still unsigned. And while many of the biggest names — Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Aaron Nola — have long been off the board, there are still players out there who could have a real effect on their next team’s fate.

Of course, we could just wait and see what happens, but I’m impatient. Since I just finished the ZiPS team-by-team rundowns, let’s use them… for evil. Rather than sit around checking our watches, I asked ZiPS to estimate which team will get the biggest championship boost from each free agent. Now, these suggestions don’t have the force of law or extortion — I’d need to be about 700% smarter and at least 7% more villainous to properly construct a doomsday machine — but let’s just imagine. Just to be clear, these aren’t predictions about what will happen, but rather an indication of which team the projections say has the greatest 2024 incentive to sign each player. And if teams aren’t considering these signings, well, maybe they should? We’ll use our 2024 free agent rankings and forcibly sign some of the players remaining. For each player, I’ll include their percentile projections with their new, possibly unwilling employers. Read the rest of this entry »

The Detroit Tigers locked up one of their top young prospects to a long-term extension over the weekend, signing infielder Colt Keith to a six-year contract worth $28.6 million guaranteed, including a buyout after year six. With three team options totaling an additional $38 million, Keith might not hit free agency until after the 2032 season. Those options can be enriched further, by up to $18 million, depending on Keith’s success at earning MVP votes, Silver Slugger awards, and All-Star appearances. The deal has a maximum value of $82 million over nine years.

One of Detroit’s recent struggles has been its inability to find and develop offensive talent. This wasn’t the case during the team’s run of success in the early 2010s, with future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera as its anchor. But as Cabrera and Victor Martinez aged, and other key contributors, such as Prince Fielder, J.D. Martinez and Austin Jackson, left for other teams, the Tigers’ offensive output dropped to the bottom of the league. Aside from Nick Castellanos, who was traded in 2019, none of the young hitters coming up through the system have panned out.

That said, the Tigers have seen some signs of hope over the last few years. When healthy, Riley Greene has been very good, and while Spencer Torkelson had a rough start to his big league career, he improved significantly in the second half of 2023. Detroit still needs more, though, and that may come in the form of Keith, a fifth-round pick from the COVID-abbreviated 2020 draft. Keith showed promise in 2022, hitting .301/.370/.544 for West Michigan of the High-A Midwest League, but he injured his shoulder badly on a pickoff attempt in June, costing him the rest of the season. He recovered enough to play in the Arizona Fall League, where he hit .344/.463/.541 in 80 plate appearances over 19 games.

Despite the short season, he ranked atop Detroit’s prospect list found in our humble home. Splitting 2023 between Double- and Triple-A, Keith stayed healthy and hit a combined .306/.380/.552 with 27 homers and 38 doubles. ZiPS translates that performance into a .268/.328/.454, 20 homer line, well below the level of phenom, but more than respectable for a second base/third base prospect in his first go at the high minors.

With a contract that can stretch for nine years, let’s crank out the long-term ZiPS projection for Keith.

While those are not star-level projections, they are the ones of a player you’d like to keep around through his prime. There are lots of familiar names among Keith’s ZiPS comps, such as Eric Chavez, Hank Blalock, Jedd Gyorko, Castellanos himself, Rafael Devers, Ryan Zimmerman, Travis Fryman, and Joe Crede. No, none of them were Hall of Famers – though it’s plausible that Devers could hit enough homers to prove the exception – but each were solid big leaguers.

One of the largest remaining questions around Keith is what position he’ll play in the majors. He’s played both second and third base, and appears to be below average at both. The probabilistic coordinate method that ZiPS uses graded Keith at about eight runs below average at second base, per 1300 innings, in 2023 and six runs below average at third. My colleague Eric Longenhagen feels that Keith is more likely to stick at second, rather than third.

During his stay in Toledo, Keith began to see more time at second base rather than his native third. He’s a bad defender at both spots but has a much greater chance at becoming passable (read: hidden) at second, where some of Keith’s issues with throwing are masked.

[…]

Keith has bulked up considerably since signing, and the effects of his increased size are evident on defense. Once a fair bet to stay on the middle infield, he is now fighting just to stay at third. He is stiff and bulky, his actions are well below average, and while he shows you a big arm when he gets to wind up and really let it eat, he struggles to throw from odd platforms. It’s feasible a team could live with him playing third base situationally, but it’s not ideal, and Colt is a 30-grade defender right now.

In a perfect world, Keith would stick at one of the two positions, with Jace Jung manning the other. One of the nice things about a rebuild is that teams get the chance to experiment, and the Tigers take advantage of that with Keith. Playing him in left field would be a great deal less exciting, but not a disastrous outcome, with mean projected OPS+ numbers in the high 110s during his prime. Left field Keith profiles similarly to Lourdes Gurriel Jr., who as one of the best outfielders available in free agency this offseason managed to snag a three-year deal with the Diamondbacks.

There are risks that come with signing a player with so little professional experience, but those are reflected in the price. Yes, $28.6 million is a lot of cash, but not so much in the context of baseball, and the ZiPS projection for Keith suggests a $38 million offer, taking into consideration the reduced salaries of the cost-controlled years. Similar extensions to Jon Singleton and Scott Kingery didn’t work out particularly well for the teams that made them, namely the Astros and Phillies, but those deals weren’t detrimental, either. The upside for Detroit here is considerable.

Are the Tigers playoff contenders in 2024? Probably not. But they’re not so far away that it would be a black swan event if they made some noise in the AL Central race or threatened to grab the last wild card spot. If they succeed, it will likely be in large part due to players like Keith taking a step forward.

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the final team is the Chicago White Sox.

Batters

In a certain way, this team is a bit more depressing than the Oakland Athletics. No, they’re not trying to peace out of Chicago, but I think the A’s front office is probably more realistic about the team’s immediate chances of winning than the Southsiders are. It’s always hard to gauge exactly what a team truly thinks of their outlook, but I get the impression that the White Sox think they will be at least halfway competitive in 2024. Realistically, though, a lot of things would have to go their way, even in a weak division like the AL Central.

The Pale Hose have a one-dude offense in a sport where that isn’t a thing. Luis Robert Jr. is in his prime right now, probably at his peak form. If the White Sox were actually rebuilding, he’s the guy they could trade to start meaningfully restocking the farm system. Instead, he’ll be a key cog in their quest to win 70 games. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the penultimate team is New York Yankees.

Batters

If I’ve learned anything from two decades of projection work (and people getting mad at that projection work), it’s that fans are way too optimistic about teams when everything goes great and way too pessimistic after things have gone awry.
The 2022 Yankees were a good example of this. After a first half in which they went 58-23, good for a .716 winning percentage and a Pythagorean win percentage that nearly matched, ZiPS only projected the team to go 45-36 the rest of the way. “Knave!” they shouted at me on Twitter. “Vagabond! Miscreant!” OK, maybe they didn’t use those words exactly, but there was bewilderment and more than a touch of anger that I would disrespect the Bronx Bombers so. In the end, the Yankees actually were four wins worse than that projection in the second half.

And just like things are never as amazing as they seem when everything goes your way, the reverse is true, with the Yankees again being a good example. They had their worst season since 1992 in 2023, and based on how they’ve been talked about over the last six months or so, you’d think they were a glorified Triple-A team. But the Yankees weren’t that bad — they went 82-80 in a division without a true doormat team to beat up on. That record was all of seven wins below their preseason projection, a miss that barely merits raising an eyebrow, and certainly doesn’t justify floating Brian Cashman out to sea (or bunting more). Read the rest of this entry »