For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Detroit Tigers.
Batters
This is hardly an impressive set of offensive projections, but given that Detroit ranked 13th in the American League in runs scored in 2023, it would be odd to expect them to be that great at this point in the offseason. And in contrast to a team like the Royals, the Tigers have a lot of interesting players, most with actual upside. ZiPS likes Riley Greene, but that’s nothing new, as he’s long been the system’s favorite Tigers hitter. The computer is a believer in Spencer Torkelson’s second-half power being closer to his actual abilities. Tork was one of the biggest underperformers in the zStats that ZiPS uses as part of establishing a player’s baseline. Now, it’s not exactly projecting him to become Matt Olson or anything, but after 2022 and the early parts of 2023, this constitutes a pretty good comeback. Mark Canha is in his decline phase, but he’ll still at least get on base and is relatively flexible on the diamond, though he’s more of an emergency option at third base and in center field at this point.
Javier Báez is the only really depressing veteran hitter projection here. I can’t shake the feeling that he’s got one last season or so of relevance in there somewhere, but that could just be a relic of my memories from before pitchers figured out how to absolutely shut Báez down. ZiPS isn’t really all that keen on Matt Vierling, and third base might be a useful place for the Tigers to look at upgrading this offseason. A Jeimer Candelario reunion would be fun if he’s into it, though the team may simply utilize Colt Keith and Jace Jung at second and third, depending on how their fielding shakes out. ZiPS is very interested in Justyn-Henry Malloy as a hitter, but it absolutely detests his defense at third.
It makes me sad to say, but even with a very ordinary DH situation, the team picks up one or two wins a year just from not having to play Miguel Cabrera.
Detroit will still likely finish in the bottom half of the league in runs scored, but there are players worth watching here.
Pitchers
Tarik Skubal came back from flexor tendon surgery to be one of the best pitchers in baseball in the second half of the season, and I remain surprised how little he was talked about. He came back throwing harder and with better command than he’d previously had in the majors, making me wonder if they replaced a tendon with an industrial spring. Whatever the cause, ZiPS is into it, though it’s obviously hedging its bets about Skubal’s health. There aren’t any real standouts in the rotation, including recent signee Kenta Maeda, but ZiPS sees the Tigers with a lot of starters just below league average, and the vast majority of them are in their mid-20s or younger, so it’s likely a few of them will break out. The computer is especially interested in Sawyer Gipson-Long and Jackson Jobe.
If our depth charts are right about the pecking order in the bullpen, the Tigers are poised to get the most of their relief corps, and ZiPS especially likes Will Vest and Tyler Holton. The quality of the ‘pen drops off a bit as you get to the back of it, but that’s normal for a team that’s still rebuilding. One or two of the starters who don’t make the rotation might serve to fill that need.
Overall, the Tigers look like a roughly .500 team, but their talent is made up of younger players, so they have a decent win ceiling, though I don’t think there’s much chance they go the route of the 2023 Orioles in 2024. In the AL East, this forecast would mean fighting with the Red Sox, but in the AL Central, the Tigers are actually playoff relevant, though they’re certainly far from the favorite.
Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.
Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2024 due to injury, and players who were released in 2023. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Belgian Death Metal Skiffle Band that only plays songs by Franz Schubert, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.33.
Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Boston Red Sox.
Batters
As last-place teams go, the 2023 Red Sox were a pretty good one. Nobody puts a 78–84 season on their sizzle reel, but they played adequate baseball for most of the season, enough that they hovered two to four games out of a wild card spot for a large chunk of the summer. An 8–19 September suffocated those chances, but Boston still managed to have an 81–81 Pythag record. If the Red Sox played in a Central division, they would have been competitive for even longer. But Boston’s coastline is on the Atlantic Ocean, not a Great Lake, so this is where they compete.
The offense highlights the awkward situation the Sox are in. They may be happy with the value they got for a year of Mookie Betts, but he offers something that the Red Sox don’t have: someone who can go out of their minds for a year and put an 8–9-WAR season on the leaderboard. Rafael Devers is very good, and one of the premier power-hitting third basemen of this generation; ZiPS gives him a final median home run total among his active compatriots at the hot corner (442) that’s behind only Manny Machado. But he’s not a multi-dimensional all-around monster. Nor is Trevor Story going to fill that role, even if he has as juicy a comeback season as ZiPS thinks he will. Triston Casas should be good as well, but the rest of the roster is just “there.” To upgrade on this group, you need to find 3–4-WAR players, and those don’t come cheap. Boston would be better off with a few more sixes and zeroes on the depth chart.
On the plus side, some of the reinforcements may help, with ZiPS finding a lot of interesting possibilities in Boston’s top prospects. Ceddanne Rafaela didn’t hit in his brief debut, but my Total Zone-esque coordinate measurement system had him as the second-best center fielder in the minors, behind only Jorge Barrosa. ZiPS also already has Marcelo Mayer at the two wins-per-600 PA threshold in 2025 and is certainly more into Kyle Teel than Steamer is. But like the main offense, there just isn’t that phenom guy, though Mayer could take a big step up if his shoulder doesn’t give him too much more trouble. This isn’t a great offseason to make big offensive additions via free agency, and given how the Red Sox have been run in recent years, I can’t imagine they’ll go into any rentals.
Pitchers
The story here is similar. The Sox aren’t bad anywhere, but there just isn’t a tremendous amount of upside either. Expecting Chris Sale to channel the old Chris Sale for 160 innings is a big ask, and Brayan Bello looks more like a good number two than an ace for the franchise that had Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez. With Steamer, we have the Red Sox rotation as the middle of the pack, and I don’t think anything ZiPS is saying here will change that. On the good side, there are quite a few above-replacement Plan Bs, Cs, and Ds for the rotation — necessary given the injury history of several of the starters — but nobody with amazingly high potential. And maybe someone like Wikelman Gonzalez will change that, but it’s a little too soon for projections to see that as a median outcome. This is one place I can see the team spending some money this winter.
When Steamer came out, I was a little surprised to see the Red Sox projected as a top-10 bullpen, but ZiPS actually agrees with that. I suspect Garrett Whitlock is likely to stay in the bullpen from here on out — this has not been confirmed as far as I’ve seen one way or the other — and as a full-time reliever, ZiPS sees him with an ERA in the low threes. Chris Martin joined the team in a whisper on a two-year contract last offseason and served as one of the team’s indispensable parachutes, with an ERA just over one. Clocks are a concern given his age, and there’s a clear warning sign in the strikeout rate decline, but he should still put hitters in their place for another season. As veteran relievers go, ZiPS isn’t as confident about Kenley Jansen given his age and some erosion in his peripheral metrics, and I’d like to see the Red Sox slowly transition their closer job to Whitlock if they keep him in relief. The bottom of the ‘pen isn’t exciting, but it’ll get the job done.
The Red Sox look like an 80–86 win team or so. That kind of team can surprise, and with the coins flipping a bit different last year, they could have made a real wild card run. The Orioles, Blue Jays, and Rays are a clear tier above them, though, and when all is said and done by winter’s end, I think the Yankees may be as well. But that last question is a tale for another ZiPS entry.
Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.
Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2024 due to injury, and players who were released in 2023. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Belgian Death Metal Skiffle Band that only plays songs by Franz Schubert, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.33.
Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Kansas City Royals.
Batters
Bobby Witt Jr. is the saving grace of this lineup, the only player on the Royals with a high chance of being elite at whatever it is he does. If the team isn’t preparing a large extension for Witt before he hits arbitration, they’re doing something seriously wrong. Sadly, given that it’s the Royals, there’s a good chance of them doing something seriously wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Baltimore Orioles.
Batters
If you’ve looked at the depth chart or glanced down at the projections — if you haven’t, this is a weird article to be reading — you ought to be impressed with just how much offensive talent the O’s have. Of course, some spots are brighter (catcher, third base) than others (first base), but there’s really no gaping hole anywhere in this lineup. This reflects the success the team has had developing offensive prospects in recent years. While practically none of the players picked up in the 2018 selloff have worked out all that well, the Elias-era front office has a great record with minor league hitters. The O’s had our top prospect in 2022 (Adley Rutschman) and 2023 (Gunnar Henderson, though ZiPS had him second to Corbin Carroll), and Jackson Holliday, currently no. 1 on The Board, looks to be the heavy favorite to be the top prospect in 2024. Heck, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone like Coby Mayo or Samuel Basallo ends up the top prospect in 2025! The O’s eke out a few more wins than the depth chart here simply because of their depth; players like Mayo, Joey Ortiz, Colton Cowser, and Connor Norby all project to be positive contributors without an obvious place to lock up playing time right now. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that I’d rather have a lineup of all the Orioles who don’t make their team’s 25-man roster out of spring training than all the Washington Nationals who do!
The Ryans O’Hearn and Mountcastle project as the weakest part of the lineup, but offense is in short supply in free agency, and I don’t expect Baltimore to make any changes here. It was always extremely unlikely that the Orioles would return to being one of the league’s payroll heavy hitters, but comments from John Angelos suggest that they’re not even going to be a middle class team, with spending more in line with Tampa Bay or Pittsburgh. If the least valuable parts of your offense project for a wRC+ around 110, you have bigger needs elsewhere. Before anyone calls shenanigans on some of the top comps, Mike Scioscia broke into the majors as a really good hitter before his radiation poisoning and Grady Hatton was a really good hitter when he was young, too. But when your top prospect gets two Hall of Famers in his top three comps, plus a third player who ought to be a Hall of Famer, you shouldn’t be too greedy.
This is one of the best offensive teams in baseball. While that’s never a guarantee of success, it’s a great place to start!
Pitchers
While the O’s have developed a lot of hitters, they haven’t had the same luck with pitchers outside of Grayson Rodriguez. Very few of the large stable of no. 4-ish starter prospects they had a few years ago really developed further, with Kyle Bradish and Dean Kremer being the primary success stories. Suspicions surrounding the pitching are what held Baltimore back in the ZiPS projections last year, and while the computer has come around on a number of pitchers, Bradish most notably, it’s still a rotation that’s begging for one high-end starter in free agency. I’d love to see the O’s go after Shōta Imanaga in any case; he’s gotten a lot less press than Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but he should come cheaper and there’s a lot to like about him. Plus, he’s a fly ball lefty whose weakness is being occasionally gopher ball-prone, and Camden Yards these days is very friendly for that type of pitcher.
Some of the Bradish gain is counteracted by ZiPS’ crush on Kremer being a bit more chaste than last year, but the rotation is at least acceptable so long as they don’t have poor luck with injuries. The team had been pretty lucky until late in the season when Félix Bautista went on the IL, where he’ll stay in 2024 thanks to Tommy John surgery. The bullpen ranked second in team WAR in 2023, but nearly 40% of that total was Bautista. If the O’s stand pat on the overall accomplishments of their 2023 ‘pen, they might regret it.
So how do the O’s look right now? You can add up the depth chart numbers (despite my warnings) and get them right around 90, and the current ZiPS sim has them at around 92 wins, the best record in the division. But that number will be revised as the winter progresses, and if teams like the Jays make any big additions and the O’s don’t, this standing could erode somewhat, despite the depth. It’s tempting to consider Baltimore’s 101 win-total in 2023 to be the team’s “starting point,” but that’s a path to disappointment, as a team exceeding its Pythagorean record and playing well in extra-innings/one-run games isn’t very predictive. Nor is it explained by bullpen quality; the r-squared between ‘pen quality, best reliever quality, and best three-reliever quality and Pythag/extra-innings/one-run game record is under 0.05 historically. And even then, the O’s don’t project to have as good a bullpen next go-around, thanks to the loss of Bautista. And no, projection misses aren’t predictive of future projection misses, even for very young or very old teams (since the projection systems already factor in age).
This is a very good team. The question is whether ownership is willing to invest enough for the Orioles to really find their ceiling.
Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.
Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2024 due to injury, and players who were released in 2023. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Belgian Death Metal Skiffle Band that only plays songs by Franz Schubert, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.33.
Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Toronto Blue Jays.
Batters
None of the projections here will blow your socks off, but on the plus side, very few of them will get your socks wet (and then you’re walking around all day with your feet wet and clammy, and every time you step it makes a little squishing sound, and you think there’s a bit of dirt in there and you’d like to take off your shoes, but that’s why you’re not allowed in Kroger anymore, so you can’t). If social media is any indication, Matt Chapman might be underrated at this point. He was terrible in the second half, but I haven’t found that to be very predictive, and overall, he still gave the Blue Jays about four wins that they now have to replace. Right now, third base, along with left field and designated hitter, looks to be an amalgamation of role players, though I don’t expect that situation to persist through Opening Day, if for no other reason than active rosters aren’t large enough for Toronto to start the season with all three of those unwieldy chimeras. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Washington Nationals.
Batters
Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. One isn’t the loneliest number on this depth chart, which features the most ones you’ll see outside of a singles mixer. CJ Abrams is the only player to get a two-win projection, and as for any threes, fours, or even something spicier (read: higher)? Well, they’re not invited to this party. We can also dispense with the other bit of bad news: ZiPS is actually more optimistic about a lot of these players than Steamer is.
I was thinking about just ending this writeup there, but that’s too cruel even for me. The good news is that even though the Nationals are unlikely to be very good in 2024, they’re not really supposed to be, and much of this roster is made up of players either still at the start of their career or who nobody in the organization expects to be playing an important role by the time the team is good again. Lane Thomas was a great story this year, as was Joey Meneses in 2022, but does anyone really expect either to be a big part of Washington’s 2027 World Series championship, should that come to pass? The Nats are using this time wisely, and it’s better to look at interesting minor league veterans than washed-up 35-year-olds for the spots you don’t have better prospects to fill. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Tampa Bay Rays.
Batters
With the sudden collapse of the Cardinals, the Rays are arguably the holders of the crown in the solid-but-not-spectacular department. With one problematic exception, just looking at the depth chart, you see a whole bunch of twos and threes but no obvious MVP candidates, unless Yandy Díaz finds yet another extra gear in him. But there’s also almost nowhere on the diamond where you expect a huge collapse if forced to find an emergency fill-in. Manuel Margot can capably take any outfield job handily, and elsewhere, Curtis Mead, Vidal Bruján, Junior Caminero, and Jonathan Aranda can cover most anything needed outside of catcher. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the first team up is the New York Mets.
Batters
At the very least, there’s a good sense of clarity when looking at the Mets depth chart. Francisco Lindor and Brandon Nimmo are plug-and-play options — just stick them in, and if they’re your biggest problem, you’re doomed anyway. Pete Alonso qualifies as that as well, though the Mets are not long from having to make a decision on whether it’s better to offer him a potentially ludicrous contract extension or find a new polar bear (they’re endangered after all!). Jeff McNeil will likely have a season somewhere in between his 2022 and 2023. Francisco Alvarez has a hold on the starting catching job now that he’s outlasted his predecessor (Tomás Nido) and the guy who really, really liked playing said predecessor (Buck Showalter). It’s also obvious that this is a crucial season for Mark Vientos and Brett Baty; the Mets don’t have infinite patience. There likely need to be better solutions in left field, and it’s time to start thinking about a post-Starling Marte right field.
While people are looking for the Mets to make big, splashy signings, it’s also a team that could use an extra bat or two in reserve. With questions at third and in left and right, it’s really hard from a roster standpoint to keep a platoon DH with no defensive value hanging around unless he absolutely crushes his side of the platoon (and Daniel Vogelbach really doesn’t). Eduardo Escobar was traded for good reasons, but he was handy to have around. The fixes to the offense might be low-key because of the need in the next section of this article. There aren’t any young phenoms really threatening to seize a roster spot from any of the offensive stragglers; the Mets have four offensive prospects in our Top 100 who are about a year away from making a real impact in the majors. The fifth, Ronny Mauricio, certainly has upside at second, but then the question becomes how much value McNeil really has as a corner outfielder.
Pitchers
There’s a lot of work to be done here. Kodai Senga is written in with permanent marker, and while ZiPS is very lukewarm — to be nice — about José Quintana, he’s certainly going to be in the rotation as well. After that, the Mets have a deep stable of just-a-guy types; the rotation is probably the biggest hurdle preventing the team from having a nice little bounce-back season. Not to pick on Mike Vasil, who I think will be a serviceable fourth/fifth starter for a while, but if Mike Vasil is this high in the projections, you’ve got some slots to fill. The Mets may have been relieved of the worry of Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander’s inevitable aging curve cliffs, but even if their time with the team didn’t go exactly to plan, without them, the rotation looks like a smoking crater. The good news is that while the free agent market has a real lack of impact bats, starting pitching is well-stocked, even before you consider the availability of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shōta Imanaga.
A healthy Edwin Díaz is a boon for the bullpen, though he’s not enough to single-armedly make this a plus unit. The relief corps is less of a smoking crater than the rotation, and ZiPS is more or less is cool with the rest of the group in Brooks Raley, Drew Smith, Trevor Gott, and Phil Bickford. ZiPS sees Josh Walker as a pretty decent swingman option, if a very low-ceiling one. Still, there’s room to improve. I don’t think the starters who fail to make the rotation next spring have electric enough stuff to be overly enthused about their bullpen chances, so the Mets will likely need to find an arm or two here. It doesn’t have to be a Díaz-like arm — good luck finding that — but a couple of mid-tier relievers might keep the wheels from coming off this apple cart.
Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2024 due to injury, and players who were released in 2023. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Belgian Death Metal Skiffle Band that only plays songs by Franz Schubert, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.33.
Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.
Once again, it’s time for me to fire up my computer and crank out the yearly team-by-team ZiPS projections. This is where I’d normally do my shtick, but we have a lot to get to, so imagine a quote from a 19th century personality, an allusion to a 13th century battle, and a 1980s pop culture reference, and then cram them all together for your own haute couture Szymborski pablum! We’ve got business to take care of, so no time for shenanigans.
ZiPS is a computer projection system I initially developed in 2002–04. It officially went live for the public in 2005, after it had reached a level of non-craptitude I was content with. The origin of ZiPS is similar to Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey, coming from discussions I had in the late 1990s with Chris Dial, one of my best friends (my first interaction with Chris involved me being called an expletive!) and a fellow stat nerd. ZiPS quickly evolved from its original iteration as a reasonably simple projection system, and now does a lot more and uses a lot more data than I ever envisioned it would 20 years ago. At its core, however, it’s still doing two primary tasks: estimating what the baseline expectation for a player is at the moment I hit the button, and then estimating where that player may be going using large cohorts of relatively similar players.
So why is ZiPS named ZiPS? At the time, Voros McCracken’s theories on the interaction of pitching, defense, and balls in play were fairly new, and since I wanted to integrate some of his findings, I wanted my system to rhyme with DIPS (defense-independent pitching statistics), with his blessing. I didn’t like SIPS, so I went with the next letter in my last name, Z. I originally named my work ZiPs as a nod to CHiPs, one of my favorite shows to watch as a kid. I mis-typed ZiPs as ZiPS when I released the projections publicly, and since my now-colleague Jay Jaffe had already reported on ZiPS for his Futility Infielder blog, I decided to just go with it. I never expected that all of this would be useful to anyone but me; if I had, I would have surely named it in less bizarre fashion.
ZiPS uses multi-year statistics, with more recent seasons weighted more heavily; in the beginning, all the statistics received the same yearly weighting, but eventually, this became more varied based on additional research. And research is a big part of ZiPS. Every year, I run hundreds of studies on various aspects of the system to determine their predictive value and better calibrate the player baselines. What started with the data available in 2002 has expanded considerably. Basic hit, velocity, and pitch data began playing a larger role starting in 2013, while data derived from StatCast has been included in recent years as I’ve gotten a handle on its predictive value and the impact of those numbers on existing models. I believe in cautious, conservative design, so data is only included once I have confidence in improved accuracy; there are always builds of ZiPS that are still a couple of years away. Additional internal ZiPS tools like zBABIP, zHR, zBB, and zSO are used to better establish baseline expectations for players. These stats work similarly to the various flavors of “x” stats, with the z standing for something I’d wager you’ve already guessed.
How does ZiPS project future production? First, using both recent playing data with adjustments for zStats, and other factors such as park, league, and quality of competition, ZiPS establishes a baseline estimate for every player being projected. To get an idea of where the player is going, the system compares that baseline to the baselines of all other players in its database, also calculated from whatever the best data available for the player is in the context of their time. The current ZiPS database consists of about 140,000 baselines for pitchers and about 170,000 for hitters. For hitters, outside of knowing the position played, this is offense only; how good a player is defensively doesn’t yield information on how a player will age at the plate.
Using a whole lot of stats, information on shape, and player characteristics, ZiPS then finds a large cohort that is most similar to the player. I use Mahalanobis distance extensively for this. A CompSci/Math student at Texas A&M did a wonderful job showing how I do this, though the variables used aren’t identical.
As an example, here are the top 50 near-age offensive comps for World Series MVP Corey Seager right now. The total cohort is much larger than this, but 50 ought to be enough to give you an idea:
Ideally, ZiPS would prefer players to be the same age and position, but since we have about 170,000 baselines, not 170 billion, ZiPS frequently has to settle for players nearly the same age and nearly the same position. The exact mix here was determined by extensive testing. The large group of similar players is then used to calculate an ensemble model on the fly for a player’s future career prospects, both good and bad.
One of the tenets of projections that I follow is that no matter what the projection says, that’s what the ZiPS projection is. Even if inserting my opinion would improve a specific projection, I’m philosophically opposed to doing so. ZiPS is most useful when people know that it’s purely data-based, not some unknown mix of data and my opinion. Over the years, I like to think I’ve taken a clever approach to turning more things into data — for example, ZiPS’ use of basic injury information — but some things just aren’t in the model. ZiPS doesn’t know if a pitcher wasn’t allowed to throw his slider coming back from injury, or if a left fielder suffered a family tragedy in July. I consider those sorts of things outside a projection system’s purview, even though they can affect on-field performance.
It’s also important to remember that the bottom-line projection is, in layman’s terms, only a midpoint. You don’t expect every player to hit that midpoint; 10% of players are “supposed” to fail to meet their 10th-percentile projection and 10% of players are supposed to pass their 90th-percentile forecast. This point can create a surprising amount of confusion. ZiPS gave .300 batting average projections to three players in 2021: Luis Arraez, DJ LeMahieu (yikes!), and Juan Soto. But that’s not the same thing as ZiPS thinking there would only be three .300 hitters. On average, ZiPS thought there would be 34 hitters with at least 100 plate appearances to eclipse .300, not three. In the end, there were 25; the league BA environment turned out to be five points lower than ZiPS expected, catching the projection system flat-footed.
Another crucial thing to bear in mind is that the basic ZiPS projections are not playing-time predictors, at least with players without firm possession of a full-time job in the majors. By design, ZiPS has no idea who will actually play in the majors in 2024. ZiPS is essentially projecting equivalent production; a batter with a .240 projection may “actually” have a .260 Triple-A projection or a .290 Double-A projection. But telling me how Julio Rodríguez would hit in a full-time role in the majors in 2022 was a far more interesting use of a projection system than it telling me that he would only play a partial season (in the end, quite obviously, he played a full year). For the depth charts that go live in every article, I use the FanGraphs Depth Charts to determine the playing time for individual players. Since we’re talking about team construction, I can’t leave ZiPS to its own devices for an application like this. It’s the same reason I use modified depth charts for team projections in-season. There’s a probabilistic element in the ZiPS depth charts: sometimes Joe Schmo will play a full season, sometimes he’ll miss playing time and Buck Schmuck has to step in. But the basic concept is very straightforward.
What’s new in 2024? Outside of the typical calibration updates, there’ll be an extra table in this year’s projections. Don’t worry, the 80/20 splits are returning, but I’m adding split projections into the team-by-team rundowns as well. Usually I create these for the benefit of companies using my projections for their baseball games and calculate it sometime in February. But this year, I successfully integrated that model into ZiPS and, after repairing all the things I broke doing so, platoon splits are now being spit out with the usual array of numbers.
Have any questions, suggestions, or concerns about ZiPS? I’ll try to reply to as many as I can reasonably address in the comments below. If the projections have been valuable to you now or in the past, I would also urge you to consider becoming a FanGraphs Member, should you have the ability to do so. It’s with your continued and much appreciated support that I have been able to keep so much of this work available to the public for so many years for free. Improving and maintaining ZiPS is a time-intensive endeavor and reader support has enabled me to have the flexibility to put an obscene number of hours into its development. It’s hard to believe that ZiPS is now 20 years old. Hopefully, the projections and the things we’ve learned about baseball have provided you with a return on your investment, or at least a small measure of entertainment, whether you’re delighted or enraged.
Dan Szymborski: ITS CLOBBERING TIME
