Of the 12 teams in the playoffs in 2022, only one was projected by both ZiPS and FanGraphs in the preseason as a sub-.500 team: the Cleveland Guardians. But this lone Cinderella in a sea of mean stepsisters toppled the White Sox handily this year, pulling away from the pack late to finish with an 11-game cushion in the AL Central. As the league’s No. 3 seed by virtue of winning the division, Cleveland now hosts the Tampa Bay Rays in the three-game Wild Card Series.

Broadly speaking, there are broad similarities between the Guardians and the Rays. Both play in smaller markets and, depending on how you look at the issue, have a payroll attitude somewhere on the spectrum from admirably thrifty to Ebenezer Scrooge on tax deadline day. However they got there, these teams embraced modern analytics early on, long before it was de rigeur in baseball, and have seen advantages. The Rays were the league doormat during the early, very non-sabermetric days of the franchise, but after an abrupt change in direction, they have the fourth-most wins in baseball over the last 15 years. The Guardians are not far behind.

Despite both teams regularly making the playoffs, they’ve only met in the postseason once before, in the 2013 AL Wild Card Game. Things didn’t go Cleveland’s way then, as Alex Cobb and Tampa’s bullpen combined for a shutout, causing a quick exit from October. Now Cleveland has a three-game series to get its revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are particularly sharp-eyed, you may have noticed that the ZiPS postseason game-by-game projections are now live.

These projections differ from the in-season projections in a few important ways. Where regular season projections are generally geared more towards a macro view of a team’s fortunes, when we get to the playoffs and have an idea of individual matchups, we can shift to more micro-level projections that reflect the very different ways players are used during the postseason. The ZiPS game matchup tool has a built-in lineup estimator that projects every pitcher’s and batter’s line against every other pitcher and batter, so there is no need to look at a team’s generalized offensive strength. We also use what I call the “full-fat ZiPS” rather than the simpler in-season model; the latter is necessary given the realities of daily updates, but isn’t come October. For some players and teams, this makes a difference. For instance, when all of the Statcast and similar data are baked in, ZiPS likes the Guardians more than it would using the in-season version.

For 2022, I’ve refined my model of bullpen usage, and ZiPS also now does a better job projecting the probability of a close game, which changes the odds of each pitcher being used. Read the rest of this entry »

It would be a scurrilous lie to suggest that adding Nolan Arenado to the St. Louis Cardinals has been anything but a roaring success for the franchise. Arenado’s first season with the Cards may have been a bit down compared to his previous campaigns, but he’s rebounded to have arguably his best season ever in 2022. And with a .292/.358/. 533, 151 wRC+ line good for 7.2 WAR, he’s making a solid case for votes in this year’s National League MVP race, especially with teammate Paul Goldschmidt coming back to the pack thanks to a weak September. The near-certain MVP in the American League, Aaron Judge, will be a free agent this offseason. Could the National League MVP join him? Arenado has an important decision to make.

The Rockies originally signed Arenado to an eight-year, $260 million contract in early 2019. That contract came with an opt-out after the 2021 season, an escape hatch if he wanted to take a crack at free agency. Sadly for Rockies fans, opening that hatch became a possibility almost immediately, with Arenado reportedly becoming unhappy with the path the organization was taking before the first season of the new deal was even complete. Per The Denver Post’s Patrick Saunders:

Although Arenado declined to talk publicly about the details of his deteriorating relationship with Bridich, multiple sources told The Post that Arenado feels like “promises were broken” after he signed an eight-year, $260 million contract last February. At that point, Arenado believed the Rockies were going to make roster moves to further improve a team that made the playoffs in 2017 and 2018.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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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