With less than a week to go until the trade deadline, things have been relatively quiet on the transaction front, possibly due to the uncertainty surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s availability. But now that an Ohtani trade is off the table, I think we can expect things to really start moving in the next day or so. That makes this the perfect time for one of my favorite/most dreaded pieces of the year, in which I kick things off with some trade imagineering that hopefully doesn’t result in too many people being mad at me. Not all of these deals would necessarily be accepted if they were offered as-is — teams value players differently, after all — nor am I reporting on actual trades that are in the works. But I tried to make sure that each of these deals was plausible and actually met the needs of the teams in question. Let’s get to it!

The Philadelphia Phillies acquire 1B Paul Goldschmidt from the St. Louis Cardinals for OF Johan Rojas, SS Hao-Yu Lee, and OF Carlos De La Cruz

Right now, the Phillies are hoping to get Rhys Hoskins, who is a free agent at the end of the season, back for a playoff run. But rather than pin their postseason dreams on a guy coming off a significant injury, why not simply get a plug-and-play first baseman who is signed through 2024? If Hoskins turns out to be healthy for the playoffs, the Phillies will have an extra pinch-hitter ready for situational duty. But if they trade for Goldschmidt, it would solidify first base while also allowing them to put Bryce Harper back at DH most games. That would leave Kyle Schwarber and the heavily slumping Nick Castellanos to fight for playing time once Cristian Pache returns from his elbow injury (assuming he picks up where he left off). The Phillies are ninth in the NL in runs scored and with a fairly set lineup, there just aren’t a lot of places to add significant run production. Goldschmidt is about as good as you can do at the deadline this year. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Sorry I was slightly late, was finishing up my yearly trade dictator piece.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I suspect we always were headed towards a less than smooth CBA after this one expires, but way too soon to tell if it results in missed games.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: On a fundamental level, the things that players are really unhappy about really haven’t changed all that much.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Luxury tax threshold still grow slower than inflation and slower than MLB’s revenue growth.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves made two minor moves on Monday to fill out their bullpen headcount, acquiring right-handed reliever Pierce Johnson from the Rockies and lefty reliever Taylor Hearn from the Rangers. Heading to Colorado are righty relief pitcher Victor Vodnik, our no. 13 Braves prospect a few months ago, and minor league starter Tanner Gordon. The return for Hearn is unknown as of press time, but it’s unlikely the Rangers will be getting a prospect of much significance.

The Rockies have traded RHP Pierce Johnson to the Braves for a pair of minor leaguers, per source.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) July 24, 2023

If these turn out to be the biggest trades made over the last week of July, it would be a mighty disappointing deadline, but the Braves get what they wanted here. Their bullpen hasn’t exactly struggled this season — it’s second in FIP, WAR, and ERA — but adding a bit of depth while they still can has a lot of appeal to it. Through graduations and trades in recent years, the top of their farm system is kind of shallow at the moment, so internal reinforcements would be a bit trickier. Not helping matters is that they currently have five relievers on injured lists, four of them on the 60-day IL, and basically have no additional relievers on the 40-man roster left to call up in a pinch without shoving a starting pitcher in there.

Johnson is probably the safer bet of the two pickups, and I don’t necessarily mean to damn him with faint praise considering the season he’s had so far. Even in a Coors Field environment, an ERA of six is not what you like to see, and even the FIP in the mid-fours hardly screams “pitcher you’re going to use in high-leverage situations.” Johnson took over the closer role when Daniel Bard had to step away from baseball temporarily earlier this season. He only blew a couple of saves before losing the gig last month, but his walk rate this season — never his strength — led to a lot of adventures like you’d see from Fernando Rodney in a down year. Johnson’s saving grace, and almost certainly the reason the Braves valued him, is that he misses bats and throws hard; if carefully managed, he can be an asset to the ‘pen. Read the rest of this entry »

The full midseason run of the ZiPS projections have been completed, and while the standings updates are always a lot of fun, they tend to move in a similar direction to our FanGraphs standings, so they’re usually not the most shocking. What I find the most interesting are the player projections — not even the numbers for the rest of the season (the in-season model is simpler, but improvements in the full model are naturally going to be incremental), but the ones that look toward 2024 and beyond.

After looking at the hitter gainers and decliners and then the pitcher gainers, we’re wrapping this up with the list of the pitchers with the largest declines in projected 2024 WAR since my original projections to dig a little into what changed for each player. Sometimes it’s performance, sometimes it’s health, sometimes it’s a change in position. Let’s jump straight into the names, since I assume everyone reading this knows that ZiPS isn’t a cheeseburger or a hoodie.

One note: For this list, I looked only at the pitchers who have played in the majors whose sole decline isn’t because of injuries; otherwise, the list would simply be “dudes having Tommy John surgery” and fringe Double-A prospects who hit the wall suddenly. I doubt you need any help from a projection system to know why Carlos Rodón’s projection is worse now. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e86a78a7-713d-4d6b-8a93-4fad86923866

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Martinez is back to pretty much where his projection was – ZiPS was already aggressive with him

12:03

Dan Szymborski: His projection really fell off in the earl going, but he’s been much better last couple months

12:06

Dan Szymborski: Outside of the big names, it gets unimpressive quickly!

Read the rest of this entry »

The full midseason run of the ZiPS projections have been completed, and while the standings updates are always a lot of fun, they tend to move in a similar direction to our FanGraphs standings, so they’re usually not the most shocking. What I find the most interesting are the player projections — not even the numbers for the rest of the season (the in-season model is simpler, but improvements in the full model are naturally going to be incremental), but the ones that look toward 2024 and beyond.

After looking at the hitter gainers and decliners, today, we’re onto the pitchers with the largest increases in projected 2024 WAR since my original projections to dig a little into what changed for each player. Sometimes it’s performance, sometimes it’s health, sometimes it’s a change in position. Let’s jump straight into the names, since I assume everyone reading this knows that ZiPS isn’t a cheeseburger or a hoodie. Read the rest of this entry »

The full midseason run of the ZiPS projections have been completed, and while the standings updates are always a lot of fun, they tend to move in a similar direction to our FanGraphs standings, so they’re usually not the most shocking. What I find the most interesting are the player projections — not even the numbers for the rest of the season (the in-season model is simpler, but improvements in the full model are naturally going to be incremental), but the ones that look toward 2024 and beyond.

On Tuesday, I took a look at the hitters with the biggest increases in projected 2024 WAR, so naturally, today, we’re focusing on the hitters with the largest decreases since my original projections and dig a little into what changed for each player. Sometimes it’s performance, sometimes it’s health, sometimes it’s a change in position. Let’s jump straight into the names, since I assume everyone reading this knows that ZiPS isn’t a cheeseburger or a hoodie. I’ve also started with the players who were actually projected to be better than replacement level in 2024 at the start of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

The full midseason run of the ZiPS projections have been completed, and while the standings updates are always a lot of fun, they tend to move in a similar direction to our FanGraphs standings, so they’re usually not the most shocking. What I find the most interesting are the player projections, and not even the numbers for the rest of the season — the in-season model is simpler, but improvements in the full model are naturally going to be incremental — but the ones that look toward 2024 and beyond.

For today, we’ll start with the hitters with the largest increases in projected 2024 WAR since my original projections and dig a little into what changed for each player. Sometimes it’s performance, sometimes it’s health, sometimes it’s a change in position. Let’s jump straight into the names, since I assume everyone reading this knows that ZiPS isn’t a cheeseburger or a hoodie. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now three months past the last ZiPS projected standings, which ran before the season, and as one should expect, reality has caused a whole lot of changes to the prognostications. Most of the times when I run ZiPS standings, I use data from the in-season player projection model, which is simpler based on the fact that a full batch run of the 3,500 or so players projected, even if I split it up among my two most powerful computers, would take a total of about 30 hours to finish. But I always do the whole shebang in the middle of every month, and baseball’s pause for All-Star Week provides me an opportunity to run projected standings with the best possible model I can come up with, and not have it be a couple days out of date.

So that’s what we’re going to do. With one exception, the methodology remains identical to the one described in the final preseason projections.

I’ve spent the last week working on and testing an addition to the ZiPS standings model to factor in the problem that preseason projections have with temporality. Basically, you can project teams based on who they have in the organization at the time of the projection, but you can’t easily do it for players not in the organization who will eventually be. If I knew at the start of 2022 that the Padres would have Juan Soto for most of the summer, it would have had an effect on the preseason projections! Like any model that people continually work on, ZiPS doesn’t have substantial bias in almost all categories: there’s no systematic tendency to overrate or underrate any specific type of team (bias in exercises like this is easier to iron out than inaccuracy). But there’s an exception: ZiPS in the preseason slightly underrates teams that will eventually add value to the major league roster in the form of trade and overrates those do the opposite.

This is something I’ve long wanted to try to deal with in as effective a way as I could. So what I’ve done is gone back and re-projected every team at June 15, July 1, and July 15 since I started ZiPS, then, with the data of players each team added at the major league level, used the playoff projections at that date, the team’s payroll (it does have a factor), the weakness of the team’s worst positions, the time since last playoff appearance, and the team’s farm system ranking (where possible) to make a probabilistic model of increases and decreases in roster strength due to the trade deadline. Overfitting is a concern, so I’ve cross-validated to do my best to ensure that isn’t an issue, and while it’s less than a half-win in final accuracy, any shaving off of error is a helpful thing. So these standings represent some increased chances that teams like the Orioles and Rangers have a slightly stronger roster than what is currently available from August 1 on, and that teams like the A’s and Tigers have weaker ones. The changes in projections are small because this is a noisy, inaccurate thing, but I’ll be tracking in future years both standings with and without this model to see how they fare. Read the rest of this entry »

The Angels started off Independence Day by announcing that Mike Trout had suffered a broken hamate bone in his left wrist and will miss at least the next four-to-eight weeks. That cuts short what had been his healthiest season since 2016; Trout had played in 81 of the team’s 87 games, and the costovertebral dysfunction in his back — something that’s going to remain a long-term issue — didn’t prevent him from playing center field daily. That wasn’t the only firework for the Angels, either; later that day, Anthony Rendon fouled a pitch off his lower leg, a painful enough blow that he needed help standing up and getting off the field. And if that weren’t enough for the fans in Orange County, Shohei Ohtani was pulled from his start with a then-undisclosed injury and walked off the field accompanied by a trainer — true horror movie material. His issue, at least, did not turn out to be serious, but it wasn’t the most festive holiday. Dropping the second of three games against the Padres, right after Juan Soto served a small but spicy helping of trash talk, removed any silver lining.

Angels announce that Mike Trout is going on the IL with a left hamate fracture.

That’s a massive blow for the Angels, who are already dealing with many injuries.

Jo Adell has been called up.

— Sam Blum (@SamBlum3) July 4, 2023

Rendon’s X-rays of his shin came back negative, so for now, his injury is being diagnosed as a shin contusion. It’s still possible he ends up on the Injured List, but it appears that he’s avoided a significant injury. Thankfully for the Angels, they have better depth at third base than just a few months ago after the low-key acquisitions of Eduardo Escobar and Mike Moustakas in recent weeks. Neither are likely to replace the production the Angels are hoping to see from Rendon, but the position will likely not be a disaster in his absence.

Ohtani’s injury is connected to a blister, believed to be the result of the treatment for a cracked fingernail that pushed his start back by a day. Blisters have been tied to pitchers missing significant amounts of playing time; Josh Beckett is a primary example. But if this is just due to Ohtani’s acrylic nail deteriorating over the course of the game, it doesn’t seem like anything concerning. He did, however, indicate that he won’t pitch in the All-Star Game, which stinks for viewers but is pretty small potatoes in the big picture. In any case, we basically already got the big All-Star-esque moment earlier this year, when Ohtani faced off against Trout with the WBC on the line. And even if Ohtani ends up missing a start with the Angels, there’s no problem with him continuing to hit.

But if injuries to Rendon and Ohtani aren’t big deals, the one to Trout most certainly is. The three-time MVP broke the hamate bone in his wrist while swinging at a Nick Martinez pitch in the eighth inning on Monday. While far from a career-affecting injury, it’s one that will keep him out of the lineup for one to two months. The Angels are heavily reliant on the production they get from their two megastars, so losing one of them for somewhere between a third and two-thirds of the remaining season is a particularly unwelcome sight. The team is right around .500 and just four games behind the Yankees for the last wild card spot, so we’re talking about a group with legitimate October aspirations. But the Angels aren’t alone; the Blue Jays, Mariners, Red Sox, and Guardians are all within two games of them in the standings, meaning every win has a lot of playoff leverage. Read the rest of this entry »