Baseball Learner: Crazy baseball rule change question. ESPN ran an article about the rise of hit batters relative to the past. The next day Curtis Mead broke his wrist on an errant pitch. What if hit batters got two bases? Do you think pitchers would be more careful? How about combining that with 3 ball walks? I think it would juice offense and balls in play by making pitchers have to aim more.
12:04
Dan Szymborski: Seems a little too niche to be worth such a major change?
12:04
Dan Szymborski: And in that, you also greatly incentivize a player to try and get hit very strongly
Justine Willard, Wendell Cruz, Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images
If you’re a baseball fan, the end of July means one thing: Trades. That’s right, we’re less than a week away from this year’s deadline, which is set for Monday at 6 p.m. ET, and there’s plenty of action still to unfold. Even a real snoozer of a deadline tends to have at least a few big deals, and so far, the only real needle mover swap made was the fascinating challenge trade that sent Connelly Early from the Red Sox to the Nationals for Curtis Mead.
While we don’t know precisely what will actually happen, since there are no such things as oracles, we have an idea that something will occur, making the trade deadline the ideal time for wish-casting and imagineering. As I do every year, I whip up some trade scenarios that are plausible and productive. We usually get fun additional trade discussion in the comments, so make sure to check those out and maybe even add your own. I’d also suggest letting me know when I give up too much or too little in a trade. Read the rest of this entry »
They might still play in a minor league ballpark, but things were looking up for the Sacramento-ish Athletics coming into the 2026 season. The franchise hadn’t had a winning record (and typically hasn’t even been close) since 2021, with their last stretch of playoff relevance ending after the COVID-shortened 2020 season. The 2025 A’s only went 76-86, but an offensive core of Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Brent Rooker, Tyler Soderstrom, and Jacob Wilson seemed to give the club a good chance to score runs this year. The A’s entered the season with 21.4% playoff odds, their best in some time.
The team’s most plausible breakout scenario involved leaning on a good offense while cobbling together just enough pitching to keep from being on the short end of a bunch of slugfests. The A’s were even confident enough to be on the other side of a salary dump for once, picking up Jeff McNeil over the winter. Unfortunately, things haven’t gone exactly to plan. The A’s are 43-59 entering play on Friday. The offense has been middling, and though they’ve gotten a few promising pitching performances from J.T. Ginn, Hogan Harris, and Gage Jump, the staff has more holes than a wheel of Emmentaler after a run-in with a shotgun. Read the rest of this entry »
The All-Star break affords a good opportunity to run a full update of the ZiPS projections, since the lack of action allows me, the system’s flesh-and-blood creator, the time to refresh every speck of data that ZiPS uses before new games push over my tower of dominoes.
The ZiPS projected standings are the product of a million seasonal simulations; there’s a lot of PC power and a unfortunate amount of linear algebra involved. In order to get a better estimate of the upside and downside of a team, ZiPS takes the important additional step of simulating the roster itself before it ever considers a single game on the schedule. To illustrate, in most of the million simulations, Yordan Alvarez continues to treat opposing pitchers in a rather rude fashion, and sometimes, he even wins the Triple Crown. But in some simulations, he’s merely OK, while in others, he misses time due to injury. In a small percentage of those runs, the injury proves significant and prematurely ends his season. When a player is injured in a ZiPS simulation, the computer fills in the depth charts based on who is left standing. While this isn’t a perfect approach, the overall effect is to give us a range of expectations for the Astros, allowing us to peek as far as as we can into the future until the future actually arrives. Read the rest of this entry »
JJ Wetherholt is one of the biggest All-Star snubs this year, but he still had a pretty great end to the first half of his rookie season. On Friday, he agreed to an eight-year contract extension that runs until the end of the 2034 season. Wetherholt is hitting .259/.356/.399 for a 114 wRC+ and 3.5 WAR, the last number leading the St. Louis Cardinals and ranking second among all second basemen, in a virtual tie with Brice Turang and trailing only Luis Arraez, whose advantage of two-tenths of a win comes from his time as a DH. The eight-year deal guarantees that Wetherholt will make $112.5 million, with the potential to net an additional $20 million from MVP votes and All-Star appearances. He also receives a $2 million signing bonus this fall, which ensures he’ll get something soon if the upcoming CBA negotiation proves to be an extended one.
We can argue all day whether or not Wetherholt is the most glaring All-Star omission this year, but with eight of the top 10 second basemen by WAR not making the cut, and a whole bunch of other positions to dig through, I’d have to write a very different article to tackle that question. But it’s inarguable that Wetherholt is having a marvelous rookie season, and is one of the favorites to win NL Rookie of the Year honors when it’s over. Read the rest of this entry »
The emergence of Statcast (and similar types of tracking data) over the last decade-plus has revolutionized many parts of baseball analysis. A big category that didn’t really exist prior was the notion of “expected” stats. Up until then, numbers were all tallies of results, and proto-expected metrics, like Bill James’ Component ERA, were derived from the classical array of stats. But tracking data opened up new opportunities in this area, allowing us to more closely look at home runs and strikeouts, and see the underlying processes and skills that made those results. While the past is always the past, expected stats are useful when talking about the future.
As someone who made the odd decision to work with baseball projections for half his life, I have a vested interest in finding the best use of this kind of information when predicting the future. Like the Statcast estimates (preceded with an x, as in xBA, xSLG, etc.), ZiPS has its own version, very creatively using a z instead. zStats do have some correlation with xStats, but not a perfect one, as ZiPS uses things like spray data, sprint speed, and plate discipline metrics in its estimates.
It’s important to remember these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and say, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass and are more stable than the actual stats are for individual players. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. Sometimes that’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than are actual homers allowed. Also, the longer a player “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one. Call this the Rule of Isaac Paredes, in honor of a player who constantly stymies zHR. In some ways, we’re projecting how cruel regression toward the mean will be.
More information on accuracy and construction can be found here.
The emergence of Statcast (and similar types of tracking data) over the last decade-plus has revolutionized many parts of baseball analysis. A big category that didn’t really exist prior was the notion of “expected” stats. Up until then, numbers were all tallies of results, and proto-expected metrics, like Bill James’ Component ERA, were derived from the classical array of stats. But tracking data opened up new opportunities in this area, allowing us to more closely look at home runs and strikeouts, and see the underlying processes and skills that made those results. While the past is always the past, expected stats are useful when talking about the future.
As someone who made the odd decision to work with baseball projections for half his life, I have a vested interest in finding the best use of this kind of information when predicting the future. Like the Statcast estimates (preceded with an x, as in xBA, xSLG, etc.), ZiPS has its own version, very creatively using a z instead. zStats do have some correlation with xStats, but not a perfect one, as ZiPS uses things like spray data, sprint speed, and plate discipline metrics in its estimates.
It’s important to remember these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and say, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass and are more stable than the actual stats are for individual players. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. Sometimes that’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than are actual homers allowed. Also, the longer a hitter “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one. Call this the Rule of Isaac Paredes, in honor of a player who constantly stymies zHR. In some ways, we’re projecting how cruel regression toward the mean will be. Read the rest of this entry »
When fans woke up on the first morning of May, the Cincinnati Reds led the NL Central with a 20-11 record and were coming off their fifth consecutive series win. Since that point, the Reds have been the second-worst team in baseball with a 19-34 record, and those same fans awoke on the first morning of July with Cincinnati in last place by three games. There’s a bit of good news, however, as the team’s ace, Hunter Greene, will finally make his 2026 MLB debut in Saturday’s holiday game against the Baltimore Orioles. The return of Greene couldn’t come sooner, but is it a case of too little, too late for the reeling Reds?
A lot was expected of Greene coming into the 2026 season. The second overall pick in the 2017 draft out of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California, Greene was a long time coming. At that point, he’d already been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, in a story by Lee Jenkins, touting him as “the star baseball needs.” His career came close to being derailed by two missed seasons in 2019 and 2020 due to Tommy John surgery, with an assist from COVID to keep him from a 2020 return. Greene’s stuff remained intact after the involuntary time off, and he finally reached the majors in 2022. The 2024 season was his true coming-out party. He posted a 2.75 ERA and a 3.47 FIP in 150 1/3 innings, good enough to rank 10th in the NL with 3.7 WAR. Greene slashed off a walk per nine in 2025, and likely would have received some Cy Young votes if not for two stints on the injured list with a groin injury.
While last year was marred by injury, it wasn’t an arm ailment, and the Reds hoped to get a full, healthy year out of Greene this time around. They needed it, too. Cincinnati was near the bottom of the league in team wRC+ in both 2024 and 2025, and the team hasn’t had a wRC+ of 100 or better since 2010. With the offense expected to be lousy, the Reds likely had to get a lot from their pitching staff in order to be playoff relevant this year. Naturally, that outcome would probably require their best pitcher. But after a single appearance in the spring, Greene had surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. Now, after spending three months of the season on the shelf, Greene is back. Read the rest of this entry »
With July just days away, we’re entering one of the most exciting stretches of the major league season, with the contours of the playoff race coming into full view, All-Star Week festivities looming, and the trade deadline fast approaching. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exempt us from having to contemplate the drier world of player compensation schema, and for what is unlikely to be the last time as MLB and the MLBPA negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. Last week, MLB released a new proposal that would massively overhaul how major league players are paid. By my count, this is the league’s third proposal this month, following its more detailed outline of a potential salary cap and a separate framework that would make the largest changes to amateur talent acquisition since the draft was first instituted in 1965.
Any discussion of baseball’s finances tends to be emotionally charged among fans, so I will freely note my personal biases as a prelude to analyzing the league’s proposal. When I pay money to attend a baseball game (something I admittedly do less than I used to before I covered the sport professionally), I’m paying that money to watch the players play baseball, more so than to watch an owner own a team. Even cynical ol’ me had a Panini sticker book back in the day. Now, teams certainly bear many of the costs to get those players onto the field, but the largest expense — namely, the massive stadiums they play in — is one largely borne by taxpayers. If MLB has a revenue problem, that strikes me as something ownership ought to address. If Bob Castellini and Bob Nutting are suffering because Steve Cohen and Guggenheim Baseball Management have access to more potential revenue than they do (ignoring that the Mets’ and Dodgers’ owners paid a lot more for their respective teams because of those revenue streams) and someone needs to write Castellini and Nutting a check, I’m not sure why it should be Shohei Ohtani and Francisco Lindor (or at least, their comparable future versions) rather than the other owners.
Dan Szymborski: And awaaaay we go
