12:09

Dan Szymborski: And we are here! There’s no queue, so feel free to ask anything off the top of your head.

12:09

Dan Szymborski: I had some technical difficulties.

12:10

Dan Szymborski: Definitely curious to see Carpenter’s ZiPS this year. His improvement in power this year has been insane, more than can be explained by the big bump in offense in the minors

12:10

Dan Szymborski: He’s in the right organization to continue to get opportunities.

12:11

Dan Szymborski: Would be funny if he turned out to be Spencer Torkelson instead of Spencer Torkelson

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At the trade deadline, the Nationals shipped out their franchise player, Juan Soto, to the Padres in return for an admittedly impressive array of prospects. Losing him, along with first baseman Josh Bell, removed the last two dynamic hitters from one of the worst offenses in baseball this side of the Tigers. Replacing your best offensive player, especially one as talented as Soto, isn’t an easy tax, though it’s one the Nats managed to do last time when the Bryce Harper era smoothly gave way to the Childish Bambino one. And for the very short term, at least, Washington has pulled this trick for a second time.

No, the Nats haven’t found another phenom to succeed Soto, but instead, they went with journeyman minor league outfielder Joey Meneses. He isn’t a prospect of any type, or even a young player; he’s older than not only Soto but also Harper. But what Meneses has done in defying expectations is impressive, with his 158 wRC+ in more than 200 plate appearances actually besting Soto’s pre-trade wRC+ of 152. I’m not going to suggest that Meneses is actually able to replace Soto, but it is extremely cool to see a minor leaguer be able to capitalize on such a rare opportunity.

For the background on Meneses, I urge you to check out the piece written by our friend Ben Lindbergh over at the Ringer earlier this month, for which I supplied a ZiPS minor league translation for Meneses’ 2022 season, which came out as a useful but un-enthralling .260/.303/.430 line and a 110 OPS+. Yet the supposedly imminent Cinderella-esque pumpkinification has yet to happen, and Meneses has continued to hit in September, with a .324/.364/.560 line and six homers. After a couple hundred visits to the plate, it becomes harder to dismiss performances like this, so I thought I’d jump in and take a more detailed look at the future of Meneses. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries are always unwelcome, but the pumpkin spice season is perhaps the most unfortunate time of year to lose a player to one. A surprise malady at this point in the season can shut a player out of some, if not all, of the postseason, and with no ability to make trades and playoff eligibility freezing at the beginning of September, it’s especially challenging to fill holes on the big league roster. This weekend featured some particularly bad injury news for playoff teams, as a number of players who can’t be easily replaced saw their postseason outlook take a turn for the worse.

Let’s take stock of what these injuries might mean come October, beginning with the Tampa Bay Rays, who got the worst bit of news. Shane Baz needs Tommy John surgery, and since we’re so late in the season, 2023 is off the table for his return as well. Until this setback, Baz’s recovery from his most recent elbow problem seemed to be going well, and the team had held out hope that they’d be able to get him up to speed enough to at least pitch in relief. With Baz out, the Rays will have to rely more on Tyler Glasnow, who is expected to be activated on Wednesday in his return from a Tommy John surgery of his own.

The bad news in Tampa didn’t stop with Baz. Brandon Lowe’s back problems have ended his 2022 season early. While (hopefully) not as significant as Baz’s injury, Lowe has struggled with back pain for most of the season and recently had a cortisone injection. As with Baz, the hope had been to get him back on the roster in time for the playoffs. Even with his struggles this year, which were due in large part to the aforementioned injury, ZiPS still thinks Lowe’s bat has the most upside of nearly anyone on the team, and the Rays will take a small but significant hit in the postseason projections in his absence. Without Baz and Lowe, ZiPS thinks of the Rays as a .547 team rather than a .553 one, with their solid depth keeping things from being far worse. The full version of ZiPS projects Lowe’s primary replacement, Jonathan Aranda, at a 105 wRC+ for the rest of the season, a significant bump from his 90 wRC+ projection before the season. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: ITS A CHAT

12:05

Dan Szymborski: We’re not there yet, but I’m only 8 years older than Scott Harris, so I know the day is coming not just when GMs are my age, but GMs could THEORETICALLY BE MY KID

12:06

Dan Szymborski: Really, it all comes down to how the ownership/Harris relationship goes.

12:09

Dan Szymborski: Looking at his ZiPS, I think that ZiPS would think so

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Instead of accepting a long-term extension with the Yankees before the season, Aaron Judge made a gigantic bet on himself. A seven-year, $213.5 million deal that starts at age 31 is no small bid for any player, and it was more than the projections — at least ZiPS — predicted at the time. But Judge clearly felt that his chances of doing significantly better outweighed the risks involved in playing out his final year of team control. Well, short of discovering he can throw 102 mph and pair it with a wicked slider, it’s hard to imagine a better season in terms of increasing the value of his next contract than Judge’s 2022. To my mind, he will almost certainly win the American League MVP — not because what Shohei Ohtani has done isn’t magical, but because the Yankees outfielder has put up one of the rare offensive seasons in MLB history that can match such an extreme level of two-way excellence. So just how high might Judge’s contract realistically go this offseason?

First off, let me stress that some appear to be underrating Judge’s season. In some quarters of the tired AL MVP debates on social media, you’ll see it described as just an ordinarily great offensive season rather than one that belongs in the history books besides those of Barry Bonds. By our reckoning, there have only been 55 position players seasons in history that notched double-digit WAR, and not all of those were driven primarily by hitting, but rather fielding (Cal Ripken Jr.), a healthy dose of transcendent baserunning (Rickey Henderson), or an incredibly weak league (Fred Dunlap). The vast majority of years like this are put up by Hall of Famers, so Judge is in rarefied air. There’s no question that he is having a special season.

The problem is that Judge isn’t likely to be paid directly for his special 2022 season, only the increased expectations resulting from such a high-level performance. Even if the Yankees were inclined to give a franchise player a bonus for an MVP season that was played in their uniform but was cost-controlled, no other team is likely to be as generous in rewarding a performance from which they didn’t benefit. When trying to gauge what Judge is likely to get, a few factors work against him, factors over which he has very little control. The biggest is that, again, the first year of his new contract will fall in his age-31 season, which means that no matter how high you think Judge’s baseline expectation is, he’s going to be expected to decline quite significantly throughout the course of the contract and relatively quickly. It’s not a coincidence that, with the nearly sole exception of Joey Votto, the mega-contracts that work out from the perspective of teams are those that start off at a very young age. Read the rest of this entry »

There are far better ways to evaluate offensive performance than the Triple Crown stats or whether a player leads the league in all three categories or not. But winning a Triple Crown, though not a gold star evaluative measure, is a lot of fun, and following a Triple Crown run is a family-friendly good time. It’s a rare feat to accomplish in baseball history, and while increased competitiveness and larger leagues make pulling it off more difficult, it can be achieved in both high-offense and low-offense seasons. It also puts you in the company of a lot of baseball greats, with every AL/NL Triple Crown winner having a plaque in Cooperstown except for Miguel Cabrera, who will almost certainly have his own five years after he retires.

Both Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt look to be in realistic scenarios to win the Triple Crown. To get the exact projections, let’s look at them individually, starting with Judge, who has the simpler scenario.

(To get the probabilities, ZiPS uses the rest-of-season projections for every player, sims out a million seasons, and sees whose lines result in Triple Crown wins, if any. To get a more accurate gauge of what the probabilities are, ZiPS does not assume that the rest-of-season projection is necessarily the underlying ability of every player. In the case of Judge, for example, ZiPS estimates his underlying ability to hit homers over a three-week period as a distribution rather than a point. The generalized model ZiPS uses effectively replicates the number of streaks and slumps in reality over a short period; there’s a reason we have more consecutive hit streaks, homer streaks, and scoreless inning streaks than one would expect from a simple exercise of binomial hijinks.) Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It’s a-me, Szymio!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Correct.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I think the most Mets thing would have been if an outfielder threw firecrackers at a group of war widows and the GM got busted for going on a DUI bender with a mail truck

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Oh, the things you find when perusing the leaderboards. While collecting data to discuss the decline in Jeremy Peña’s plate discipline, I went down a rabbit hole of player performances since May. As tends to happen, one thing led to another, and I ended up running my Cy Young predictor using only data since the start of May. Near the top of each league were pitchers whose presence surprised me even though I already knew both to be excellent. Each of them is on a borderline contender that is now very likely to make the playoffs, and each survives in the majors by relying on command rather than throwing 100-mph smoke. That’s right, I’m talking about Aaron Nola and Shane Bieber. Let’s examine each, starting with Nola, the top National League pitcher in my Cy Young predictor since May.

The Phillies look nearly certain to play postseason baseball. With a probability that is now over 90% by both FanGraphs’ and ZiPS’ reckoning, the Phils are on target to make the playoffs for the first time since 2011. While there have been runs that teased contention in past years, the Phillies have always seemed to end up floating somewhere around .500. But despite Zack Wheeler and Bryce Harper missing parts of the season, Nick Castellanos disappointing, and a defense that just begs for a Yackety Sax soundtrack, the team stands at 79-61. And while he’s obviously not the only player to have contributed to the club’s record, Nola’s impressive run makes him one of the key figures of the 2022 campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in April, 23 of our writers and contributors made predictions about the 2022 season. When guessing who would be the AL Rookie of the Year, nine different players were named, with Bobby Witt Jr. and Julio Rodríguez leading the pack. Not found among those nine names was the starting shortstop for the Astros, a rookie faced with the difficult task of replacing incumbent Carlos Correa, who had gone to the Twins. Jeremy Peña wasn’t pegged as a ROY frontrunner, but for much of the early season, he looked like a sudden superstar. However, he’s struggled offensively in recent months, raising some questions about whether the real Peña is the player with the .878 OPS through mid-May, the one with a .586 OPS since the All-Star Game, or somewhere in the middle.

Back in May, Witt, the preseason favorite, wasn’t even in the top 15; Rodríguez only put up a .544 OPS over April; and Adley Rutschman was days away from even debuting in the majors. While Peña wasn’t making Astros fans actually forget about Correa, he certainly did his best to alleviate any lingering worries about their former franchise building block heading to the AL Central. But since May 17, he has seen his control over the AL leaderboard disappear:

That’s not to say that Peña hasn’t continued to be a solid overall player, but his largest contributions in recent months have been with leather rather than wood. With his range measured at five runs above average at shortstop by Statcast’s RAA and a total of nine runs over all facets of defense by our estimate, he hasn’t disappointed defensively, which has enabled him to remain a legitimate starter even with his offense dropping to disappointing levels. But he’s a far more exciting player with his spring offense, so what went wrong there? Read the rest of this entry »

There are not many subjects that baseball teams agree on, outside of not paying minor leaguers much money. One thing that 29 teams do share is an enormous amount of regret that they didn’t convince Shohei Ohtani to come join their franchise after the end of the 2017 season. (OK, 28 teams since the Orioles bizarrely refused to make a presentation on philosophical grounds, but I’d wager that the current front office would not have operated the same way!) In any case, major league teams and fans who pay attention regularly covet the biggest stars in NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball), and a small but steady flow of talent comes to the United States and Canada from overseas. So I wanted to take a look at two Japanese players who, while they may not be the next NPB stars to come to MLB due to the vagaries of the posting system, are the most exciting young players in the league right now: Tokyo Yakult Swallows third baseman Munetaka Murakami, and Chiba Lotte Marines righty Roki Sasaki.

It would be difficult to overstate how dominating Murakami has been at age 22, but I’m going to try my best to do so. Called up for a cup of coffee at 18 years old in 2018, he quickly became one of Japan’s best hitters, slugging 36 round-trippers at age 19 and putting up OPS figures of 1.012 and .974 in the two years since. Like MLB, NPB is at a fairly low offensive environment these days, though it’s unlikely the underlying causes are similar. The Central League — pretty much the last bastion if you like seeing pitchers hit — is only scoring 3.64 runs per game, its fewest since 2015. That hasn’t kept Murakami from not just finding another gear in 2022, but enough extra gears that it looks like he emptied out a bicycle shop.

At 52 homers, Murakami is not merely at the top of the standings; he is the standings. Only a single player in Japan, Hotaka Yamakawa, has even half the home run total (38). There are only two players within 300 points of his 1.229 OPS: Yamakawa (.988) and Masataka Yoshida (.952), and that’s while using a fairly generous plate appearance requirement (250 PA). In recent weeks, Murakami also set an NPB record by hitting home runs in five consecutive plate appearances.

This type of home run dominance is rare, and Aaron Judge may be the first hitter in nearly a century to beat the runner-up by as large a margin as Murakami’s current one. OPS dominance to this degree is just as rare, even using the same liberal 250 plate appearance threshold rather than the official 3.1 plate appearances per team game, with only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds matching Murakami’s current edge. Read the rest of this entry »