The White Sox sent closer Kendall Graveman to the Astros for catching prospect Korey Lee on Friday afternoon. Graveman, signed by the White Sox to a three-year contract days before the 2021–22 lockout started, put up a 3.30 ERA and a 4.00 FIP in 110 appearances with Chicago. This caps off a busy end-of-week flurry for the Sox: Graveman is now the fifth pitcher they’ve traded in 24 hours, after Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, Lance Lynn, and Joe Kelly.

Graveman’s peripheral numbers have slid this season as his strikeout and walk rates have continued to deteriorate, and the six homers he’s allowed this season almost match the eight he surrendered in 2021 and ’22 combined, but I’m slightly less concerned about this than I would be in many similar situations. For one, his plate discipline-against numbers don’t support his problems in these departments. Batters are making contact against Graveman less often than any time in his career (ignoring his five-appearance debut season), and his first-strike percentage, a useful leading indicator of walk rate, is better than ever.

Some of the changes seem to be from conscious approach decisions. Graveman started throwing his four-seamer a lot more often in 2022 and has continued that this year but is now almost exclusively throwing it center-high. The result has been a lot more loft on these pitches. In fact, basically all of Graveman’s pitches, including his sinker, have been hit about 10 degrees higher than last year. It’s been enough to transform him from a reasonably strong groundballer in recent years to a pitcher allowing more fly balls than average. On the negative side, his slider has lost some bite, with its break closer to league-average than at his peak, leading to a lower whiff rate (35%) than in 2022 (43%) or ’21 (44%). ZiPS sees him with a 3.59 FIP for the rest of 2023 in Houston and a 3.72 mark in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »