The delayed start to the 2022 season due to the lockout has had a lot of small consequences for the structure of the season, ranging from expanded rosters to my least favorite thing, the continued use of zombie runners in extra innings. The last (we hope) of these changes is a slight alteration to the playoff schedule, which the league sees as a necessity in order to keep the postseason from straying too far into November. On Monday, MLB announced that the three-game Wild Card Series will be played without any off-days, while an off-day will be trimmed from the Divisional Series (between Games 4 and 5); teams in the ALDS get one additional off-day, without travel, between Games 1 and 2. The Championship Series will lose an off-day between Games 5 and 6). The World Series is business as usual.

While I expected this configuration for the Wild Card round (it was already accounted for in the generalized ZiPS projections for postseason performance), there are some slight tweaks that need to be made to account for the changes to the Division and Championship Series with respect to pitching. When projecting the roster strength of a team for the purposes of postseason probabilities, ZiPS weighs pitchers at the top of the rotation more heavily. That’s because historically they have gotten a larger percentage of starter innings in the playoffs than during the regular season. But losing an extra day of rest could result in teams using the pitchers after their No. 3 starters more heavily, as well as more dilemmas involving bringing back a top starter on three days rest. There are also possible consequences for the bullpens. In other words, teams will need to be slightly deeper than normal this playoff season.

So, how do we account for that? To get a rough estimate — I’m not sure there’s a methodology that will let us do any better than that — of the potential effects of the compressed schedule, I went back into the ZiPS game-by-game postseason simulations and put together a new, quick simulation for starting pitcher usage. I used projections as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »

In a shocking story heading into the weekend, MLB announced that Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. would be suspended for 80 games under the league’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. His positive test was for Clostebol, an anabolic steroid that previously led to the suspensions of Dee Strange-Gordon and Freddy Galvis. The ban ends his 2022 season before it ever officially started, and he will also miss a decent chunk of next year, as well.

To say this is unwelcome news would be an understatement. The Padres are in prime playoff position without having the services of Tatis this year, but this is a giant hit; they’re in this position in spite of his loss. Whether you’re talking about the projections of nerdy computer systems or the expectations of team employees and their fans, the idea that he would be back on the roster for at least most of the stretch run and the playoffs was baked into the assumptions.

While a certain trade with the team in D.C. for a specific outfielder of much acclaim rightfully got the most thundering plaudits after the deadline, the depth move for Brandon Drury in a small trade with the Reds is looking even better. After a string of disappointing seasons following his early success in Arizona, he’s having a career year, hitting .269/.333/.521 for a wRC+ of 130 and playing several positions. Drury is competent at both second base and third base, which amplifies the value of his offensive production, and that flexibility allows the Padres to shuffle players around the diamond as needs, matchups, or injuries demand. He’s even played enough shortstop that he can be at least considered an emergency option, but it’s less needed in San Diego with Ha-Seong Kim and Jake Cronenworth likely ahead of him in the depth chart at the position.

The Padres’ depth mitigates the loss of Tatis, but their young superstar is so good that practically any timeshare of mortals will represent a significant downgrade at the position. Entering 2022, ZiPS ranked him second in baseball in projected WAR, behind only Juan Soto, and only because it projected fewer games played for Tatis because of his injury history. ZiPS was not exactly going out on a limb here; Steamer and THE BAT held him in similar regard, as did, well, every person who was even vaguely familiar with baseball. Even my mom, who has just about zero interest in the sport, knew about the suspension, though admittedly she referred to him as “Taters.”

In any case, let’s run the median projections for the NL West, both without a Tatis suspension and with him returning at the end of this week:

The Dodgers have basically closed the door on the longshot chance that San Diego would catch them in the NL West, but the Padres are among the best situated of the plausible wild card teams. Adding Soto gave them the strongest roster among wild card contenders, a roster as strong as Los Angeles’ until Walker Buehler and Clayton Kershaw return. ZiPS saw San Diego, against league-average competition, as a .582 team with the assumption that Tatis would be back. Now let’s go to the current projection without Tatis, which reduces the roster strength by 26 points of winning percentage, to .556.

The impact on both San Diego’s chances of making the playoffs and winning the World Series is significant. In terms of the postseason, just under a tenth of the time, the Padres playing postseason baseball becomes the Padres playing golf and watching the playoffs on TV. Playoffs being a bit of a crapshoot, the absolute impact is relatively small, but that a sixth of their World Series chances just evaporated has to be a sore spot for a team trying to win right now. Against a .575 team, going from a .582 team to a .556 team reduces the chances of victory by about four to six percentage points every series, depending on length.

Naturally, Tatis’ teammates and organization have expressed their frustration with him publicly; it would be unreasonable for them to feel differently. Nobody can find fault when a player is injured, but when he’s out from actions of his own doing, it feels a bit like a betrayal. If I were suspended from my BBWAA membership for a year for conduct violations, while it would obviously affect my personal career, it would be a real slap in the face of my colleagues at FanGraphs and the many writers who have spread my work around over the years.

Joe Musgrove on Tatis:

“A little bummed, a little pissed,” said Joe Musgrove, the lifelong Padres fan and now a pitcher and a leader on the team. “It’s hard to make a judgement or say anything until I hear from Tati or what those details are. But yeah, not a good day.”
[…]
“You can say he’s a young kid and he’s gonna learn his lessons or whatnot,” Musgrove said. “But ultimately, I think you’ve got to start showing a little bit of that remorse and showing us that you’re committed to it and that you want to be here.”

Mike Clevinger:

“The second time we’ve been disappointed with him,” pitcher Mike Clevinger said last night. “You hope he grows up and learns from this and learns it’s about more than just him.”

President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller:

“It’s very disappointing,” Preller said. “He’s somebody that from the organization’s standpoint we’ve invested time and money into. When he’s on the field, he’s a difference maker. You have to learn from the situations. We were hoping that from the offseason to now that there would be some maturity, and obviously with the news today, it’s more of a pattern and it’s something that we’ve got to dig a bit more into. … I’m sure he’s very disappointed. But at the end of the day, it’s one thing to say it. You’ve got to start showing by your actions.”

The explanation given by Tatis was unconvincing.

The Major League Baseball Players Association issued the following statement on behalf of Fernando Tatis, Jr.: pic.twitter.com/gCNVcs0a5Y

— MLBPA Communications (@MLBPA_News) August 12, 2022

Athletes blaming their positive tests on others is old hat, but the claims of a tainted ringworm treatment, while not impossible, sound like a stretch. Dr. Rany Jazayerli, a name most of you ought to be familiar with, is at that rare intersection of baseball analyst, long-suffering Royals fan, and working dermatologist, and he was highly skeptical about Tatis’ claims. On Twitter, he reiterated that he would not consider prescribing anything with Clostebol — as opposed to the similarly named Clobetasol — to a patient with ringworm.

I only speak from my experience as a US-trained, board-certified dermatologist for 19 years. Maybe Clostebol is used to treat ringworm elsewhere, even though it makes no medical sense.

Or maybe Tatis googled Clostebol and was fed a bunch of results for Clobetasol instead. ????

— Rany Jazayerli (@jazayerli) August 13, 2022

Tatis accepted the suspension without appealing, but that’s hardly a great sacrifice given that drug suspensions in baseball are largely strict liability. Without being able to challenge the proof of the violation itself, he must prove by clear and convincing evidence that he bore no significant fault or negligence for the positive test. That’s a tough burden and mostly serves simply to mitigate the penalty to a minimum of 30 games for a first-time offender while still leaving him ineligible for the playoffs. Luckily for the Padres, the postseason ban only applies to the season during which a suspension commences, not all seasons in which there is a suspension, which leaves Tatis eligible to play in the 2023 postseason along with most of the regular season.

There’s no real silver lining, but if Tatis had been suspended just a few weeks later, there would have been an additional problem for the Padres. Since his suspension runs for fewer than 40 games in 2023, he is allowed to play in all spring training games, not just the intrasquad games for which no tickets are sold. Given that Tatis had already missed most of a season with a fractured wrist, the franchise should be happy to get him into as many actual baseball games as they can before he returns sometime next year. If San Diego plays in the maximum of 22 postseason games, he could be back as soon as mid-April!

From a projection standpoint, little changes about Tatis other than the additional normal hit taken from missing time from a non-injury. ZiPS does not look at drug suspensions differently because, after spending a decade researching this issue from every angle I can think of, knowing whether or not a player has been banned for PED use has had no predictive value in the context of performance from MLB-level players. This is largely why I consider PED use a safety issue — players shouldn’t feel forced to use, whether or not they’re effective — and a public relations one.

That latter arena is where Tatis might take the biggest hit of all. The reputational damage will be immense, no matter the efficacy of his PED use. We’re in uncharted territory here, in which a young, elite player is caught using. While Alex Rodriguez has admitted using, and there’s at least a question about David Ortiz as a young player in 2003, these weren’t known at the time. Tatis could come back, put up a Hall of Fame-type run for a decade and pass every drug test with flying colors, and there will be inevitably some people who still think of him as a cheater. Robinson Canó didn’t have to play baseball for 15 years after a drug suspension, and players like Frankie Montas and Nelson Cruz just aren’t in the same tier as Tatis; fans seem to be far more forgiving of moderate talents than transcendent ones.

There could even be Cooperstown consequences. Only speaking for myself, I consider a drug suspension, even if I don’t believe it significantly changed performance, to be a serious offense. To me, as with corked bats, it’s the attempt to cheat, not the efficacy. I do think there is a gray area, as when Mark McGwire allegedly was using. Some will cite Fay Vincent’s 1991 memo banning steroid use as evidence of a baseball rule, but even Vincent himself didn’t believe his memo applied to players.

“I sent it out because I believed it was important to take the position that steroids were dangerous, as were other illegal drugs,” Vincent said. “As you know, the union would not bargain with us, would not discuss, would not agree to any form of a coherent drug plan. So my memo really applied to all the people who were not players.”

In other words, that memo could ban Jim Fregosi or Terry Collins for steroid use. But the drug testing agreement explicitly made it against the rules with penalties attached, and that wiggle room vanished.

Unlike some writers, I don’t consider a PED suspension an automatic disqualifier, but under the Hall of Fame’s voting guidelines, I consider it a violation of the character clause, which I see in baseball terms, and for a borderline candidate, that could put him out. That said, the Hall of Fame voting pool will change a lot in the 20–25 years before Tatis would come up to the electorate — I don’t vote until after the 2025 season, and by the point I would be voting on Tatis, I’ll be in my mid-to-late 60s — so it’s hard to gauge exactly how writers will feel about drug use with another quarter century of experience.

Regardless of what happens to Tatis personally, this is a hit for baseball. He’s one of the league’s most marketable young talents, and one of the proponents for baseball actually being allowed to be fun, not a Very Serious Affair in which we tut-tut about brutish bat flips and proletariat celebrations as we gently sip our beers (pinky out!) and yearn for the return of Regency Baseball standards. Tatis should be one of the faces of baseball, not one of its disgraces. When we lose a player like that, everybody who loves the game loses.

As anyone who does a lot of work with projections could likely tell you, one of the most annoying things about modeling future performance is that results themselves are a small sample size. Individual seasons, even full ones over 162 games, still feature results that are not very predictive, such as a hitter or a pitcher with a BABIP low or high enough to be practically unsustainable. For example, if Luis Arraez finishes the season hitting .333, we don’t actually know that a median projection of .333 was the correct projection going into the season. There’s no divine baseball exchequer to swoop in and let you know whether he’s “actually” a .333 hitter who did what he was supposed to, a .320 hitter who got lucky, or a .380 hitter who suffered extreme misfortune.

If you flip heads on a coin eight times out of 10 and have no reason to believe you have a special coin-flipping ability, you’ll eventually see the split approach 50/50 given a sufficiently large number of coin flips. Convergence in probability is a fairly large academic area that we thankfully do not need to go into here, but for most things in baseball, you never actually get enough coin flips to see this happen. The boundaries of a season are quite strict.

What does this have to do with projections? This volatile data becomes the source of future predictions, and one of the things done in projections is to find things that are not only as predictive as the ordinary stats but also more predictive based on fewer plate appearances or batters faced. Imagine, for example, if body mass index were a wonderful predictor of isolated power. It would be a highly useful one, as changes to it over the course of a season are bound to be rather small. The underlying reasons for performance tend to be more stable than the results, which is why ERA is more volatile than strikeout rate, and why strikeout rate is more volatile than the plate discipline stats that result in strikeout rate.

MLB’s own method comes with an x before the stat, whereas what ZiPS uses internally has a z. (I’ll let you guess what it stands for!) I’ve written more about this stuff in various other places (like here and here), so let’s get right to the data as we start the final third of the season. We’re also looking at how zStats leaders and trailers fared in the two months since I last posted the numbers. Sure, we’re using a small sample size of players and comparing a small sample size to another small sample size, but curiosity gets precedence over everything! Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox remain serious playoff contenders in 2022, but I doubt many would classify this season as a roaring success. With what appeared in the preseason to be the AL Central’s strongest roster, Chicago has not gone on a leisurely stroll to October. Instead, it’s locked in a brutal three-way clash with Cleveland and Minnesota and currently stands 1.5 games behind both.

The reasons for the team’s struggles are myriad. The entire offense failed to produce, especially early in the season, finishing April with a .212/.264/.348 line and an 8–12 record. When healthy, Yasmani Grandal and Yoán Moncada have not hit at all, leaving two offensive problems in unexpected places. Lance Lynn got a late start to the season and has generally been ineffective. The manager has an odd fetish for getting Leury Garcia into the lineup at every possible juncture. We can play this game all day, but we can now throw a new problem onto the pile in the loss of starting shortstop Tim Anderson to an injured ligament in his left middle finger that requires surgery. Anderson is expected to miss four-to-six weeks of play and make a full recovery, but with only eight weeks left in the regular season, that’s a lot of missed time.

After the trade deadline, I projected the White Sox as having the biggest loss in playoff probability of any team due to transactions made around baseball at the deadline. Whereas they would have been projected with a 59.5% shot at the postseason with the pre-deadline rosters, they came out afterward at 52.2%. Despite not actually losing any ground in the last week to their rivals in the standings, replacing Anderson with a combination of Garcia and Lenyn Sosa sends another chunk of the team’s playoff hopes into eternal oblivion.

For the first time this season, the Sox are projected to have a worse chance at taking the division than both the Twins and Guardians, and roughly a quarter of the scenarios in which they make the playoffs have evaporated. Losing a win is a very big deal for a team in such a tight race, and that gets even a bit worse for Chicago because of the change in MLB’s rules for divisional ties, with tiebreakers being used instead of bonus baseball. Right now, should there be a tiebreaker needed, ZiPS estimates that the Guardians will beat the Sox 74% of the time, and the Twins will come out on top in 69% (not nice!) of tiebreakers. And all that is with projections that assume that Anderson misses an average of five weeks. If he has a setback and can’t get back for the rest of the regular season, it obviously gets worse; in the simulations when he didn’t return (about 10% of sims), Chicago only made the playoffs about three times in ten. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs added a source of potential power Monday afternoon, claiming designated hitter Franmil Reyes off waivers from the Guardians. After hitting a solid .254/.324/.522 for Cleveland in 2021, his second season eclipsing 30 homers, Reyes has had a disaster of a 2022, with an OPS barely above .600, easily his worst professional season.

If you had told me at the start of the season that Cleveland would be in a real fight for the AL Central title, I’d have assumed that Reyes would be one of the reasons. The Guardians would probably feel similarly about him, a fixture in the middle of the lineup since his acquisition from the Padres in that 2019 three-way trade that included Trevor Bauer and Yasiel Puig.

It would be inaccurate to call Reyes a well-rounded player. He’s not fast, doesn’t hit for contact, isn’t particularly selective at the plate, and his defense can best be described as “adventurous.” But what Reyes does very well is weaponizing aggression at the plate into hitting baseballs a very, very long way. Even in an age during which we heavily scrutinize the more scientific aspects of batter versus pitcher confrontations, a big dude crushing pitches a mile is a delicacy that should never completely fall off the menu. Of Cleveland’s 14 homers of at least 450 feet since the start of 2019, Reyes owns five of them.

Reyes’ raw physical tools were why the Padres were so interested in signing him as a 16-year-old for $700,000 in 2012, and while it took four years for him to break out in the minors and turn his physicality into performance, the team didn’t mind being patient. The power eventually came, though without the universal designated hitter in the National League, his weaknesses with the glove diminished his value in San Diego. Read the rest of this entry »

Dinelson Lamet’s time in Milwaukee is over before it ever really began, as the team cut him loose last Wednesday. Between missing time with forearm soreness and two stints in the minors, Lamet was ineffective for the Padres this season, issuing nine walks and 13 runs in just 12 1/3 innings spread over 13 relief appearances. One of four players sent to Milwaukee last week for Josh Hader, he never got into a game with the Brewers before being designated for assignment and subsequently claimed by the Rockies.

Typically, a quiet waiver wire claim of a struggling relief pitcher without a big contract falls, well, under the wire, but Lamet is a pitcher I’ve always been fascinated with. Plus, I like surprises, and there’s a big one here: the Rockies did something I really, really like.

Lamet has long been an interesting pitcher, but he’s had a number of serious setbacks that leave him with his career up in the air barely after his 30th birthday. Already behind the usual development curve as a prospect by virtue of being an amateur signee just before his 22nd birthday who was delayed by two years because of paperwork issues, he’s had less time to hone his craft professionally than most. Tommy John surgery cost him his 2018 season, and much of his 2019, and the always dreaded forearm soreness left him on the injured list for large chunks of ’21 and ’22.

Despite the relative lack of experience and the injuries, Lamet got solid results from 2017 to ’20 with a fastball that poked into the upper-90s and a slider that batters ineffectually whiffed through. In 256 1/3 innings over 47 starts in that span, he struck out just under 12 per nine innings, for an ERA of 3.76, a FIP of 3.72, and a healthy WAR tally of 5.1. Per 180 innings, that amounts to 3.6 WAR, nearly at the level we consider to be All-Star, but 180 innings has been a big “but” for him. Time that he should have been honing a third pitch, he instead spent recovering from his various injuries.

With less time spent in Milwaukee than Mike Piazza was a Marlin — I’m not sure Lamet even got issued a jersey in his two days on the team — it seems clear that an extended look at him was not in the team’s plans. It’s hard to blame the Brewers for that, as they’re thick in battle with the Cardinals for the NL Central crown and with a few other teams for one of the wild card spots. A reclamation projection isn’t an ideal situation for a contending team in August to be in. Where Lamet needed to go was to a team out of the playoff race and thin enough on talent that it could afford to look at a 30-year-old who may not be on the roster for more than two months. Enter the Rockies. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Hello people!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: And maybe some bots.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Or cats or alien lifeforms.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: But probably people.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I mean, O’s won’t have Dodgers money but the should have a nice rest of 2020s!

Read the rest of this entry »

Another trade deadline has come and gone, and I must say, this one was more exciting than I expected. I didn’t see the Yankees, Astros, or Dodgers making huge splashes, given that all three are in a daunting position both for first place in their divisions and a first-round playoff bye. There were also relatively few short-term rental options available; Juan Soto, Frankie Montas, and Luis Castillo, among others, could always be traded, but with none of them free agents after this season, teams could also pull them back if they didn’t like the offers. Meanwhile, players like Willson Contreras, Ian Happ and Carlos Rodón stayed put, also to my surprise. By and large, though, we had a whirlwind of a 48-hour period leading up to the deadline.

So, who won and who lost? That’s a bit of a loaded question, because the definition of winning and losing varies depending on each franchise’s goals. A contending team improving, a rebuilding team getting worse but acquiring a stable of prospects, or an indolent team only re-signing its 37-year-old closer are all things that can be considered a win in one way or the other. But we’re here to do some hardcore ranking, so let’s look only at who improved themselves the most in 2022.

To keep this all science-y rather than a somewhat arbitrary exercise, I first projected the entire league’s rest of season in ZiPS and then repeated the exercise with all trades since July 19 unwound. Since some teams primarily got overall playoff boosts and some teams saw improvement mainly in terms of World Series gains, I took each team’s rank in both categories and then ranked everyone by the harmonic mean of those two ranks. Read the rest of this entry »

As Tuesday’s deadline approached, the Cardinals made one last move to upgrade their rotation, acquiring starting pitcher Jordan Montgomery from the Yankees for outfielder Harrison Bader. In a day with complex trades and financial arrangements, this was a refreshingly direct swap — a simple one-and-one trade to address each team’s short-term weaknesses, with no money or additional prospects changing hands.

The dream for the Cardinals this deadline was to head into the dog days of summer with Juan Soto in the middle of the lineup, but given the packages Washington was seeking for its franchise player, it was too much of an all-in gamble for a team that makes its improvements in careful, measured fashion. The front office had little time to bemoan falling short in the Soto sweepstakes with the deadline approaching and the very real possibility that neither Steven Matz nor Jack Flaherty would return to contribute this season, and though St. Louis closed a deal with the Pirates for José Quintana and his fancy new changeup on Monday, more was needed.

Montgomery suddenly found himself expendable in New York thanks in part to the Frankie Montas trade, and his profile makes him a good fit for the Cardinals. A lefty sinkerballer, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them strongly encourage him to keep the ball on the ground even more; they have had the best defensive left side of the infield in baseball this year, playing to his strength as a pitcher.

While Quintana is a free agent at the end of the season, the Cardinals get to retain Montgomery for the 2023 season as well. And with Wainwright the team’s only other unsigned pitcher — though he hasn’t officially announced his retirement and would probably be welcomed back automatically — St. Louis looks to have flexibility in the rotation, even if it falls a bit short of excitement. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets and Giants made a minor trade on Tuesday as the deadline approached, with first baseman/designated hitter Darin Ruf heading to New York in exchange for third baseman-ish/designated hitter J.D. Davis. Three minor league pitchers — Thomas Szapucki, Nick Zwack, and Carson Seymour — are joining Davis in San Francisco.

After thriving in a platoon role in 2020 and ’21, Ruf has struggled this year, hitting .216/.328/.378, though still with a robust .886 OPS against lefties. Davis has performed similarly, hitting .238/.324/.359, but without the beneficial platoon split. The two hitters involved in this trade are both right-handed DH-types who have broadly similar value on the surface, but there are differences in their two profiles that matter enough for teams on two very different 2022 trajectories to make this trade.

Ruf is the easier player to utilize, thanks to large platoon splits that Davis has not historically possessed. The Giants attempted to expand his role this season, giving him more starts against righties (34) than he had combined in 2020 and ’21 (24), and while his true platoon split is likely smaller than the 316 points of OPS it is this season, he’s definitely a player who needs to be used carefully when not possessing the handedness advantage. The Mets clearly value Ruf’s ability to be a top-notch accomplice to Daniel Vogelbach at DH, given that they’re sending some minor league extras along as sweetener.

Zwack is a 2021 draftee having a good first full season in the minors. A low-90s sinker isn’t going to wow anyone these days, but he’s had enough success in A-ball that he’s worth checking in on to see if he can surpass that Double-A wall that can stymie lower-grade pitching prospects. Szapucki is a better-known name, spending the last two seasons in Triple-A and with two unfortunately unforgettable appearances in the majors so far. I’m not convinced that he won’t have a future as a fifth starter in the majors. One has to remember that, unlike in the majors, minor league offense has exploded rather than evaporated, so Szapucki’s decent performance in the high minors makes him worth a flyer. Seymour doesn’t get a lot of press in the scouting world, and while he’s got solid velocity — certainly better than Zwack or Szapucki — he lacks consistent secondary pitches. His debut has been very good, but I wouldn’t take it too seriously; 23-year-olds ought to be pitching quite well against A-ball hitters. Read the rest of this entry »