It’s no longer early. Whether or not one considers the preseason prognostications about the Cardinals being contenders entering the 2023 season to be well or ill-conceived, they’re certainly not contenders now. Reassurances that it was still early in the season no longer work with baseball approaching the halfway point and the All-Star break. Wednesday night’s collapse in the eighth inning against the Astros dropped St. Louis to 33–46, giving the team a four-game cushion in the ignominious contest to be the worst in the NL Central. The only silver lining is a sad one: in a sea of humiliations, nobody notices another bucket being bailed into it. The Cardinals’ playoff chances haven’t actually evaporated completely, but they more reflect the bland mediocrity that covers the division rather than any great merit of the team. For the first time in a long while, “what’s next?” may not be simply “second verse, same as the first.”

To describe the Cardinals in recent decades, I’d personally call them the best of baseball’s conservative franchises. One of the shocking things about the team is just how unbelievably stable and consistent it is. I was in middle school the last time St. Louis lost 90 games in a season (1990); only five living people on the planet were around for the last time the team lost 100. Even just looking at starts rather than entire seasons, this is one of the worst-performing Cardinals squads that anyone alive has watched.

The franchise has had worst starts, but most of those were in the days of very much yonder. Outside of a possible handful of 105-year-old St. Louis residents, we really only have two Cardinals teams in recent memory that got off to worse starts.

If you’re looking beyond 2023, the Cardinals are in a bit of a pickle. It’s been a long time since they either tore the roster down to its foundations or went whole hog in offseason investment, and they might find themselves in that awkward zone where they’re neither good enough to win now or later. Ken Rosenthal over at The Athletic wrote about this dangerous trap in which they’ve been ensnared, and it’s one of the reasons I’m writing this piece. To quote Ken: Read the rest of this entry »

The Angels did some bargain shopping over the weekend, adding veteran infielders Eduardo Escobar and Mike Moustakas to the roster from the Mets and Rockies, respectively. Escobar, who has triple-slashed a .254/.305/.432 line this year and was a part-timer in New York after the team turned to rookie Brett Baty as the starter at third base, was acquired for two pitching prospects, Coleman Crow and Landon Marceaux. Moustakas has performed adequately as a role player for the Rockies this year, splitting time between first and third and pinch-hitting, and fetched minor league pitcher Connor Van Scoyoc in return.

Assuming the Angels aren’t simply quickly acquiring third basemen from 2018 as part of some mad scavenger hunt, the urgency here reflects their desperate need for infielders. In most seasons, the preseason plan to have Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and precisely nothing else go wrong with the other 24 players has gang aft a-gley by this point of the season, like most of the best laid plans of mice and men, despite Disney selling the Angels to Arte Moreno 20 years ago. Nobody writes a paean to a team with a .537 winning percentage, but this ordinary level of respectability, if the first half ended today, would represent the franchise’s best first-half winning percentage since the 2015 season. At 42–37, Los Angeheim stands just a game out for the last wild card spot, so now is pretty important.

“Now” is also a bit of a problem when it comes to the roster. While this may be the season the Angels finally write the proof to the hypothesis “.500 Team Plus Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout = Playoffs,” parts of the roster have crumbled in recent weeks. And while the lineup has scored 5.3 runs per game in June, more than 20% of that total came in Saturday night’s 25–1 humiliation of the Rockies; the Angels are at a decidedly meh 4.4 runs per game in recent weeks otherwise. The infield increasingly looks like a rickety structure that could collapse with a firm gust of wind. Jared Walsh, who looked in 2021 as if he could hold down the fort at his peak for three or four years, struggled in 2022 with thoracic outlet syndrome, and his return this year was poor enough that he was sent down to Triple-A Salt Lake. Read the rest of this entry »

As one would expect, records and milestones often reflect the eras in which they’re achieved. Pitching records tend to be set in low-offense eras, while offensive milestones rack up more quickly at times when runs are plentiful. As the game ebbs and flows, certain benchmarks that are achievable in one era become far more difficult, or even impossible, in another. One of these achievements, which has long fascinated fans, is hitting .400. Even as batting average became a less relevant number in the post-Deadball era (and even less so as front offices gravitated toward other metrics 75 years later), baseball observers have still rooted for someone to hit .400. I’m one of them; not everything that’s fun has to be an amazing analytical tool, and vice-versa. Hits are, for lack of a better word, cool, and the ability to rack up value primarily via batting average has become far rarer than it used to be. And if hits are cool, Luis Arraez is in super-rad territory, as the Marlins second baseman is currently sitting at .398 as we approach the season’s halfway mark.

Whether you think the most recent .400 hitter was Ted Williams, who put up a .406 average in 1941, or Josh Gibson, who put up an impressive .466 for the Homestead Grays in 69 games a couple of years later, there are very few baseball fans remaining who have a living memory of a .400 hitter. After the Splendid Splinter hit .388 in 1957, it was another 20 years until anyone came that close (Rod Carew in 1977). There were always scattered attempts, such as George Brett‘s effort to sneak up to .400 when he hit a stunning .421 in the second half of the 1980 season (he ran out of calendar, finishing at .390). The offensive outburst of the 1990s wasn’t just in home runs, but in batting average as well, and there was another mini-run of .400 attempts. From 1993 through 2000, there were a surprising number of first-half hitters above .380: Tony Gwynn (twice), Larry Walker, Nomar Garciaparra, John Olerud, Darin Erstad, Todd Helton, Frank Thomas, and Paul O’Neill. Nobody’s been at .380 in the first half more recently, and since 2010, only Justin Turner’s gone into the All-Star break with a batting average north of .370. Read the rest of this entry »

The Guardians made a catching change heading into the weekend, designating veteran Mike Zunino for assignment and calling up prospect Bo Naylor from Triple-A Columbus to take his place. Zunino, signed this past offseason, hit .177/.271/.306 in 42 games in Cleveland, “good” enough for a 63 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR. Naylor, in his second go of Triple-A, is having a season similar to last one, hitting .254/.393/.498 with 13 homers in 60 games, giving him a wRC+ of 122.

Signed to a one-year, $6 million contract this past offseason, Zunino was never intended to be a long-term option for the Guardians. He’s always been a maddingly inconsistent hitter from year to year, oscillating between .850-OPS and .550-OPS seasons, and he missed nearly half of 2022 due to thoracic outlet syndrome. But the hope was that he’d be good enough to hold down the fort long enough for Naylor to get more time behind the plate in the minors.

Zunino’s offense didn’t initially seem all that crucial to his continued employment. Over the last decade, Cleveland has been more than happy to employ catchers who struggle with the bat, so long as said catcher was at least more than competent defensively. The last time Cleveland’s backstops combined for a wRC+ of even 90 was 2014, during the early stages of the Yan Gomes residency. This was a noted shift from the previous decade, when the organization took the opposite approach, with defensively challenged catchers like Victor Martinez and Carlos Santana making their money with their bats. Despite the absymal offense, if Zunino’s defense this season had been at the levels of his time with the Mariners, Naylor would still be hanging out in the state capital. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dan
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12:02

Dan Szymborski: GafternooN!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Carson Roccaforte is one of the top of my head

12:06

Dan Szymborski: Cam Fisher has really fun power

12:06

Dan Szymborski: but these are probably Eric questions

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I’m not an amateur draft guru

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When making any prediction for a young player, dealing with minor league data in an absolute necessity. This still remains a relatively new thing in baseball’s history, with little attention given to minor league stats until Bill James introduced his method of Major League Equivalency in the 1985 Baseball Abstract. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote one of the first things of mine to ever hit the broader internet, a quick primer on how to calculate James’ MLEs. Working with the data was immensely difficult at the time, and even worse when James was developing MLEs. There was no central repository of minor league stats, and just getting the current year was highly difficult; on the young internet of the time, you basically had to copy and paste from Baseball America’s basic data. For past years, there was just about nothing outside of what you could get from STATS. As a youngster, I pretty much spidered the data off of STATS on AOL, which surprisingly had the most data available publicly at the time.

Sabermetrics was a more difficult task back then. Even when Baseball-Reference initially became the first actually usable website, powered by the Lahman database, for the first few years, stats were updated after the season. There was no minor league data there, or anywhere, really. That improved in subsequent seasons, and with more data than James had to work with, people such as Clay Davenport, Voros McCracken, and myself were able to put together our own systems. ZiPS never becomes a thing without minor league data to work on to make the inputs properly. Since James is the one that broke ground, I still call the ZiPS translations zMLEs. These days, I have minor league translations going all the way back to the 1950s.

As we approach midseason, many of the current minor league translations in the upper minors have become highly interesting the farther we get from Small Sample Shenanigans. I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of the numbers with relevance to the rest of the major league season. Remember: minor league translations are not actual predictions but should be treated like any other line of play, with the same possible pitfalls, the same need for context, and the same opportunity to be misleading in certain ways, such as freak BABIP totals (though ZiPS tries to adjust for the last one). All these lines are adjusted to the context of the parent club’s home park and 2023’s level of offense in the majors. All translations are through Monday’s games. Read the rest of this entry »

As a measure to improve baseball for the average fan — or even the decidedly non-average fans who frequent our pages — I think the pitch clock has been a resounding success. Trimming almost half an hour from the length of games hasn’t diminished baseball itself, with the cutting room floor mainly littered with the things that take place in between the action. Now, you can argue that we’ve also eliminated some of the dramatic tension from crucial situations in important games. But for every high-stakes matchup between two great players in a big moment, there were a multitude of unimportant ones stretched out endlessly by a parade of uniform readjustments and crotch reconfigurations. I enjoy having a leisurely Campari and soda with a friend while waiting for dinner, but I certainly don’t want to do that for every meal, and if I could chop down cocktail hour to get my food more quickly, I’d happily find other moments for social bonding.

Of course, game length isn’t the only consideration when assessing the pitch clock. I’m frequently asked in my chats if I think a given pitcher’s underperformance relative to expectation can be attributed to the clock. It can’t feel great to do a job for a number of years and suddenly experience such a monumental change in how you go about executing it. Steve Trachsel ain’t punching no time clock!

Another big question is whether the pitch clock, which can result in mechanical changes, could have an effect on injuries, a subject Will Sammon, Brittany Ghiroli and Eno Sarris explored for The Athletic after a high injury rate in April. While we obviously don’t have enough data to reach a verdict on the long-term effects of the clock (and things like Tommy John surgery count are still going to involve relatively small samples), as we near the halfway point of the season, we do have enough information to look at how the data are shaking out and arrive at some kind of preliminary conclusion about what’s going on. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small sample sizes. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to 2019, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, while toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: It is time. A time. For chats.

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Or at least once!

12:00

Dan Szymborski: I got a DM from someone really annoyed I referred to him as Ellraiser

12:01

Dan Szymborski: It was always iffy if this was the year he was going to contribute, he has huge upside, but the short-term was very uncertian

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The prospect ranks are as high as an elephant’s eye at Castellini Farms. The Reds may have entered this rebuilding cycle with all the grace of an angry cat trying to get a cereal box off its head (as opposed to the awkward toe-dipping of the last go-around), but through trades and their own scouting, they’ve accumulated an impressive amount of talent in the minors. By our in-progress farm system rankings, only the Baltimore Orioles place higher for the 2023 season. Mean ol’ Grandpa ZiPS agrees; the Reds had seven prospects on the preseason ZiPS Top 100, a total that trailed only the Guardians and the O’s. Baltimore and Cincinnati combined seem to have about 80% of the shortstop prospects in baseball.

Whether you go by human or machine, no Red ranked more highly this winter than Elly De La Cruz, who was no. 6 (60 FV) on the prospect team’s Top 100 and no. 15 on the ZiPS list. After an impressive 2021 full-season debut, De La Cruz cranked things up a notch in 2022, hitting 28 homers and slugging .586 combined across High- and Double-A despite only being 20 years old. Questions still remain about his long-term defensive position, but his bat has proved to be even more potent for Triple-A Louisville, as he hit 12 home runs in a mere 38 games and is already two-thirds of the way to last year’s walk total. He’s responsible for the International League’s ERA going up by nearly half a run a game from 2022! OK, I made that last bit up, but you had to actually think about it for a full second before you smelled burning khaki. Read the rest of this entry »