Author Archive: Dan Szymborski

Baseball fans are often unhappy with projections, and they seem to enjoy sharing that unhappiness with me. That’s hardly surprising, of course — projections have large error bars (which we try to express when discussing them), and on some level, they represent a computer saying mean things about players you might like. You probably aren’t shocked by this, though you might be surprised to learn that the time of year I get the most complaints is during the stretch run rather than the preseason. And while some of the complaints I hear are about projections that missed the mark, the majority are about how little the in-season projections have changed since the start of the year. It can be frustrating when a player who is slugging .500 despite a preseason SLG projection of .350 only has a rest-of-season SLG projection of .400. Clearly, the conventional wisdom says, the projections are too slow to change.

Ben Clemens has written a number of pieces auditing our playoff odds, and while they aren’t as meticulously perfected as a 1996 Lexus, they’re pretty darn good. These calculations rely heavily on our in-season projections, which at their gooey, caramel center are an attempt to combine what we knew about a player or team before the season (in the form of preseason projections) with what we’ve learned since.

The relevant question then becomes how much a few months of performance should change what we thought about a player in March. And as it turns out, it’s less than the folks who find projections frustrating might think. When it comes to ZiPS, the preseason projections, both for teams and individual players, are more predictive of rest-of-season performance than season-to-date numbers. That holds true even very late in the season, when there’s been a lot of cumulative in-season performance to look at. I’ve tested preseason projections versus in-season performance as late as September 10 each year, and the preseason projections never clearly do worse than the in-season stats. Since we’re right at the start of September, I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at how the ZiPS preseason projections stack up against March-through-August performance when it comes to projecting what happens in the final month of the season.

And to be clear, I don’t think this preseason edge is exclusive to ZiPS; I expect that Steamer and PECOTA perform similarly well. It’s just that I have a rather unique level of access to ZiPS. But data is more important than a simple claim, so let’s dig in. Read the rest of this entry »

With Byron Buxton out with a hip impingement and no timetable for his return, the Twins were short one outfielder. Luckily for Minnesota, it just so happens that the team’s best prospect, Walker Jenkins, is a center fielder, and is looking a lot like a hitter who didn’t have much more to learn from facing Triple-A pitchers. The fifth pick in the 2023 draft, Jenkins was hitting .308/.407/.532 for a 142 wRC+ in 69 games for the St. Paul Saints when he got the call on Thursday. He started in center for all three games of the team’s weekend series against the White Sox.

Still just 21, Jenkins might have reached the majors even quicker than he actually did if not for sharing Buxton’s proclivity for landing on the injured list. Hamstring and quad injuries in 2024 held him to 82 games, while an ankle injury cost him two months of the 2025 season. An injured shoulder, earned by a collision with the Summit Beer advertisement on the right-center field wall, put him on the shelf for most of May. Since returning to the Saints in late June, Jenkins has been on a tear, hitting .335/.414/.603, topped off with an August line of .405/.484/.772 with eight of his 12 homers on the year.

While one could argue that the Twins should have called up Jenkins a month earlier — Minnesota right fielders have combined for 0.0 WAR — this is one case where I think the conservatism was warranted. With a long injury history, it made sense for Jenkins to get more time in the high minors, and his readiness only became glaringly obvious in recent weeks. His .252/.332/.394 translation through mid-July (by ZiPS) was certainly good enough to be playable, but his hot run has improved his Triple-A translation to a legitimately exciting .287/.364/.450 line on the season. Just to demonstrate what I mean by exciting, ZiPS was still on the fence with Jenkins when I published this season’s top 100 prospects list back in February; ZiPS ranked him outside the top 100, at 131st overall. But if ZiPS had known his 2026 numbers, it would have shot Jenkins all the way up to fourth on the list. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: The appointed time has arrived.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I imagine he *will* get time in 2027, should he keep hitting early next year

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Oh, they do generally change quite a bit, because no two players are truly the same, and paths vary a lot

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been watching the Mariners the last couple of nights, you might feel like you’re back in the halcyon days of 2025. Seattle took the first two games of its series against one of baseball’s best teams, the Phillies, and Cal Raleigh launched four home runs over two nights, including a three-dinger outburst on Monday. Unfortunately, that feeling has been fleeting in 2026, as the Mariners are comfortably below .500 and have only remained in the divisional and Wild Card races because their competition has been exuberantly mediocre. As for Raleigh, after hitting 60 home runs and just missing out on the American League MVP award to Aaron Judge, he’s suffered through easily the worst season of his professional career. Raleigh’s collapse this year has been historic in its magnitude, yet both he and the M’s could still come out of this playing October baseball.

When you see a season like Raleigh’s 2025, it’s natural to expect some kind of regression toward the mean. Indeed, it’s so expected a phenomenon that a whole panoply of curses have been coined to explain it without having to get all mathy about it. Did you just have a horrible season after a great one? Well, you may have been cursed by the Sports Illustrated cover, the Madden NFL cover, a Wheaties box, a Heisman award, a sophomore slump, or an MLB the Show cover. Or maybe you just drank Jobu’s rum. Whatever you call it, Raleigh’s 2026 is well past regression to the mean and more like regression to the really frigging mean. I swear, that’s a technical term.

So just how bad a season has Raleigh had compared to expectations? You could probably just say “Austin Hedges has a wRC+ more than 20 points higher than Raleigh.” Or maybe graph Raleigh’s year-to-year home run totals, with the chart properly labeled so that people don’t think they’re viewing a win expectancy graph from a game where late-period Craig Kimbrel was the closer. But since we have a projection system handy, we can do better than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom tallied his 2,000th strikeout last week, providing another late-career achievement that might be engraved on a Cooperstown plaque sometime in the 2030s. That deGrom would reach 2,000 strikeouts seemed almost certain back at the end of the 2020 season, when he was 641 away. At that time, he’d struck out at least 200 batters in four of his six non-pandemic seasons. The first of those two other seasons was his 2014 NL Rookie of the Year campaign, when he didn’t debut until May 15, and in 2016, injuries limited him to just 24 starts. But since 2020, deGrom has been an example of Zeno’s paradox, seeming perpetually stuck in medias res. Achilles did eventually catch the tortoise, and deGrom and calculus won the day.

deGrom’s journey to 2,000 is a good reminder of why I like to occasionally harass ZiPS for milestone probabilities rather than simply dividing a player’s remaining distance by his most recent seasonal number and calling it a day. Whether or not there are infinite universes where every possibility happens, in this one, tendons tear and players age. A player can be on pace to finish with 500 home runs for a decade and never come particularly close, while another can sneak in the back door to a milestone that nobody saw coming, as Nick Markakis threatened to do late in his career.

The uncertainty is what makes baseball (and life) interesting. I can tell you that Aaron Judge needs 115 homers to make it to number 500; I have a calculator for that, and even if I didn’t, I was once a third-grader. But the road is hard to map, and the aging curve, performance models, and injury models in ZiPS give us a better idea as to the probability that Judge will hit 500 or 600 in this particular universe. It’s no fun to have such a tool and not deploy it, so it’s a good time to do an update on baseball’s search for pretty, round numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

For the New York Mets, the 2026 season has been an almost unmitigated disaster. Widely expected to compete for the NL East crown, the Mets got off to a brief hot start. And by brief, I mean brief, as the season’s high point was knocking out Paul Skenes in the first inning on Opening Day against the Pirates. From there, the season unraveled like the finances of Mike Campbell from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Gradually and then suddenly.

The Mets ambled around the .500 mark for another week or so, until a 12-game losing streak knocked them firmly into the league basement, where they have mostly stayed. By the time the calendar flipped to August, they had long come to terms with the idea that they would be sellers at the deadline. Recently, though, the Mets have gone on a tear, winning 11 of their 15 games since their deadline fire sale, giving some fans an excuse to dream on a miracle wild card run. That almost recently won’t happen, but their abysmal season doesn’t have to signify the start of a long rebuild. In fact, New York teams with massive payrolls aren’t generally extended much rope, with the hope being that the club will find its way back to contention quickly. Can the Mets do that in 2027? Read the rest of this entry »

11:59

Dan Szymborski: Frivolity may now commence.

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Morandini

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Votto wasn’t born the plate discipline god either

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Jose Bautista too, but it could also be the rushed nature of being rule 5

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I would suspect Sosa too, but we don’t really have out-of-zone data for him

Read the rest of this entry »

Want to build a projection system? There are a lot of things you want to prepare for ahead of time, like fans thinking that you have a secret vendetta against their favorite team. The most practically important thing to know is that you are going to be wrong. Not just occasionally, but all the time. And assuring people afterwards that yes, 10% of players are supposed to fail to even meet their 10th-percentile projection isn’t going to get you off the hook, no matter how technically correct you are. Being wrong, however, is your opportunity to improve your model. Indeed, models learn a lot more from being wrong than being right.

When it comes to projecting the number of wins for a team, it mostly comes down to two big factors: how good the players are and who actually plays. Predicting the future is an incredibly difficult activity, and that is reflected in the variance in the probability “buckets.” ZiPS entered the season highly confident that Paul Skenes was a darn good pitcher, but even with that belief, ZiPS was only 50% sure that his 2026 ERA would fall between 2.37 and 3.20, and only 80% sure that it would land between 1.80 and 3.65. But as hard as it is to project how effective a player will be, that’s still easy compared to predicting who will play. Models can get a general idea of the likelihood of injuries from some specifics, like whether a player has missed a lot of time recently or just had Tommy John surgery. But what they don’t know, and certainly never will, is who will tweak their hamstring next Thursday and be out for the rest of the season, who will suddenly lose their velocity in their Labor Day start and need a UCL repaired, or who will be abducted by giant mutant ants and forced to toil in underground sugar caves.

So, which teams have suffered the most due to injury in 2026? If you ask fans, especially those of underperforming clubs, they’ll tell you that their favorite team has been uniquely put upon by injuries this season. But we’re numbers people here. We can do a bit better than that and see which team’s fans can justify their sad laments about the trials and tribulations of the hometown 26. Read the rest of this entry »

The worst-case scenario for Hunter Greene’s elbow has come to pass. The ace right-hander had Tommy John surgery on Thursday, ending his 2026 season and almost certainly knocking him out for the entire 2027 season, too. This was Greene’s second elbow procedure this season; a previous arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies delayed his seasonal debut until Independence Day. Greene’s 2026 season wraps up with a 6.83 ERA, but a better 3.55 FIP over 27 2/3 innings in five starts. This is a full Tommy John revision — Greene previously had Tommy John surgery in 2019 — and not the internal brace procedure that tends to have a quicker recovery.

Suffice it to say, this is a major blow for both Greene and the Cincinnati Reds. For Greene, it’s the latest (and scariest) injury setback in a professional career that has never seen him throw enough innings to qualify for an ERA title. There comes a point at which one starts to wonder if he has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, the point where teams now can’t realistically tell themselves that they can keep him healthy as a starting pitcher. His fastball-splitter-slider repertoire would almost certainly play nicely in relief, though he’ll be hard-pressed to make the same impact as a closer as he could as a legitimate frontline starter. Read the rest of this entry »

With the trade deadline having come and gone, we’ve officially entered the homestretch of the 2026 season. And while teams surely want to avoid tempting the fury of the fates by assuming they’re postseason-bound, they’d be lying if they said they weren’t thinking about October baseball at least a little bit. And why shouldn’t they? Winning the World Series is the ultimate goal, and many of the league’s playoff-relevant teams made deadline moves for the express purpose of improving their postseason chances.

Before you set out on a vacation, it’s natural, even prudent, to contemplate your trip, though it might mean making plans for a destination you never reach. If you’re heading to the beach, you’re likely going to think about the sun and the sand, even though there’s always a chance the alternator in your 1988 Ford Tempo dies on U.S. Route 50 near Easton, Maryland, forcing you to call your friend Alan on your janky 1990s Motorola “car phone,” only for him to gormlessly drive right past you despite your hazard lights and frantic waving. Baseball has its own broken alternators, injuries and losing streaks that render October plans suddenly irrelevant. Still, teams have good reason to think about what will happen if they get there; after all, it’s important that someone remember to pack sunscreen. And since we’re nerdy baseball fans and have access to a projection system, we might as well look ahead too. So which teams are actually built to be the most dangerous in October, and which ones might be better or worse postseason teams than their regular-season records suggest?

When it comes to projecting October, we have to think about teams somewhat differently than we do during the regular season. Projecting the regular season and a playoff series are two very different tasks. Not because of any playoff-related mythology, or because a team possesses specific characteristics that work better or worse in the postseason, but simply because teams use players very differently in October. It’s not quite as extreme as, say, the difference between how 100m gold medalists and 500m gold medalists are built, but it at least rhymes. In the playoffs, you get to ride your top talent hard since you no longer need to keep them fresh and healthy for a six-month marathon. And because of the postseason’s frequent off days, you also get to have a higher proportion of your innings pitched by the pitchers you actually want in the game. Read the rest of this entry »