Dan Szymborski: Feel free to flood with questions, no matter how goofy, because this didn’t appear on the site until five minutes ago, so my queue is looking rather ribsy.
12:05
DR: Where is the FG draft week coverage?
12:05
Dan Szymborski: That’s Eric’s department! I’m sure he has stuff planned
12:05
Greg: Is run differential more or less predictive if you remove the most extreme outcomes on either side of the spectrum (i.e. remove 5 biggest wins and losses for a team and then calculate run differential). Thinking about teams like the Pirates who have some sizable losses but very few sizable wins. Are they more like a -125 run diff team or a -85?
12:06
Dan Szymborski: I think generally, considering how many games there are, it wouldn’t really change things much
Bashing the White Sox is commonplace these days, and you can’t say the negativity hasn’t been earned. Widely expected by fans, reporters, pundits, and computer projection systems (as well as their sarcastic creators) to steamroll one of the worst divisions in baseball, the Pale Hose have struggled to consistently stay at .500, let alone stay ahead of the Twins and Guardians. Yet there are still reasons to think that the Sox, if not the team they were believed to be, can still salvage the 2022 season without divine intervention.
They’re Still Relevant in All the Projection Systems
Yes, when you look at the White Sox, you see some major, gaping holes, many of which are problems of the team’s own making, whether because of poor evaluation or inaction. Coming into the season, they were near the bottom of the league in our positional power rankings at second base and right field despite an offseason that saw a plethora of good options at those positions. They also didn’t assemble much in the way of depth in places where they had injured players or underwhelming options. Similar to my approach to mowing my backyard, they did the bare minimum.
But all of this is already baked into the cake, so to speak. The projection systems still assume that Leury García is awful and that Chicago needs another bat; the forecasts for players like Yoán Moncada, Yasmani Grandal, Eloy Jiménez, and Lance Lynn have already taken major hits. As for the team’s lack of depth, the ZiPS projected standings use a methodology that attempts to properly discount teams with underwhelming Plan Bs. Read the rest of this entry »
The Rays’ injury tally continued to climb over the weekend as the team added two key parts of its lineup — shortstop Wander Franco and center fielder Kevin Kiermaier — to the injured list. Not to be outdone by the hitters, pitcher Jeffrey Springs joined them after his first game back from a family emergency. If the season ended today, the Rays would be the American League’s second Wild Card team, but five other clubs, including the blazing hot Orioles, are within five games.
#Rays Franco looks to be headed for hamate surgery, Kiermaier is sidelined again with left hip problems as injuries continue to mount https://t.co/JxJD3gZO9A
Franco’s injury is the most concerning, both in terms of its severity and the resulting loss of production. The team’s franchise player broke his hamate bone on Saturday in the first inning against the Reds while fouling off a 100 mph Hunter Greene fastball. While having a fastball explosive enough to indirectly break bones probably adds to the flame-thrower’s mystique, for Franco, it’s a massive setback, one that comes just a couple of weeks after missing a month with a quad injury. With an expected recovery in the six-to-eight week range, it’s unlikely the Rays will have their shortstop back in the lineup much before September, and any significant setback could end his season.
Year-in and year-out, Tampa prides itself on having one of the deepest rosters in baseball, but replacing Franco is a tall order. Indeed, a few weeks ago, ZiPS actually projected him as the AL player who would be the sixth-hardest to replace due to a theoretical season-ending injury. With a .260/.308/.396 line over 58 games (good for a 104 wRC+), his production has been down compared to his rookie season, but would be considered a massive achievement for any other 21-year-old shortstop. He projected as a five-win player coming into the season, and his play so far hasn’t changed that much; all of our projection systems here anticipated at least a 120 wRC+ the rest of the way, and Franco was underperforming the peripheral estimates of both Statcast’s xStats and ZiPS’ zStats. Read the rest of this entry »
As we reach the mathematical halfway point of the season and approach the trade deadline, this is an opportune moment to run an update of the ZiPS projected standings. The standings are based on projections from the most robust version of ZiPS rather than the simpler one, which is more practical to run daily during the regular season, implementing things like the Statcast-aided zStats and up-to-date minor league translations.
The process that ZiPS uses is the typical one, but I’ll run it down quickly for those who may be new to how these projections work. ZiPS starts with a modified version of our depth chart and applies a generalized probabilistic model of available playing time for the players listed. So instead of a team’s roster strength being a simple sum of everyone’s projected WAR pro-rated to a fixed expected number of plate appearances, we end up with a whole distribution of possible roster strength. As an example: While Jacob deGrom still has a median of 55 innings in the roster sims I run for each team, sometimes he’ll be at 65 or 70 innings, sometimes he’ll be at 30 or 45 innings, and occasionally, it’ll be much worse than that. ZiPS will then “fill in” playing time based on the next players available on the depth chart and their probabilistic measure of availability. Just to stay with the Mets: When the outfield is healthy, the depth chart is mostly Mark Canha, Brandon Nimmo, and Starling Marte. But on the particularly bad rolls, the team’s estimated roster strength will have a lot more Ender Inciarte, Nick Plummer, Mark Vientos, and even players like Daniel Palka and Terrance Gore.
After ZiPS gets a distribution of each team’s roster strength, it “draws” one each year and sims out the rest of the season, team versus team, a million times and sees what happens. Is this a perfect methodology? Absolutely not! But I think we get closer to our goal of trying to evaluate team uncertainty and team depth, something which is harder to do using a less time-consuming scheme.
As we reach the mathematical halfway point of the season and approach the trade deadline, this is an opportune moment to run an update of the ZiPS projected standings. The standings are based on projections from the most robust version of ZiPS rather than the simpler one, which is more practical to run daily during the regular season, implementing things like the Statcast-aided zStats and up-to-date minor league translations.
The process that ZiPS uses is the typical one, but I’ll run it down quickly for those who may be new to how these projections work. ZiPS starts with a modified version of our depth chart and applies a generalized probabilistic model of available playing time for the players listed. So instead of a team’s roster strength being a simple sum of everyone’s projected WAR pro-rated to a fixed expected number of plate appearances, we end up with a whole distribution of possible roster strength. As an example: While Jacob deGrom still has a median of 55 innings in the roster sims I run for each team, sometimes he’ll be at 65 or 70 innings, sometimes he’ll be at 30 or 45 innings, and occasionally, it’ll be much worse than that. ZiPS will then “fill in” playing time based on the next players available on the depth chart and their probabilistic measure of availability. Just to stay with the Mets: When the outfield is healthy, the depth chart is mostly Mark Canha, Brandon Nimmo, and Starling Marte. But on the particularly bad rolls, the team’s estimated roster strength will have a lot more Ender Inciarte, Nick Plummer, Mark Vientos, and even players like Daniel Palka and Terrance Gore.
After ZiPS gets a distribution of each team’s roster strength, it “draws” one each year and sims out the rest of the season, team versus team, a million times and sees what happens. Is this a perfect methodology? Absolutely not! But I think we get closer to our goal of trying to evaluate team uncertainty and team depth, something which is harder to do using a less time-consuming scheme.
On Monday night, the Orioles beat the Mariners, turning an early 7–0 lead into a 9–2 win. In the annals of history, a last-place team beating a fourth-place team in a midseason game won’t exactly be one that old baseball historians recount in future documentaries. But it did cause the O’s to cross a symbolic threshold, guaranteeing that they’d have their first winning calendar month since 2017 (counting a 2–1 March 2019 would be a scurrilous case of loopholery). That’s not exactly cause to break out a Melchizedek of the bubbly stuff, but it’s progress for a team whose rebuilding efforts seemed to be lacking that characteristic.
One thing that bedeviled the Orioles was how little of a boost they received at the start of the rebuilding process. Mike Elias may have been hired after the 2018 season to oversee the reconstruction, but it was the old brain trust who got the ball rolling with major trades, dealing away Manny Machado, Zack Britton, Kevin Gausman, Jonathan Schoop, and Darren O’Day and receiving 15 players in return. Until this season, it looked like the only one that would make any impact on the team’s future would be Dillon Tate, picked up from the Yankees in the Britton trade, who has made his home as a mid-tier reliever. You can make an argument that the best minor leaguer involved in an Orioles trade during the first year of the rebuild was a player who was traded from Charm City, not acquired, when the O’s sent minor league veteran Mike Yastrzemski to the Giants.
The lost 2020 minor league season was problematic for everyone on the planet, but in a pure baseball context, I’ve argued that it was especially so for a Baltimore team flooded with Triple-A tweener pitchers and not enough places to play them. Fast-forward to our second season of relative normalcy, and you start to see a real foundation start to come together. We were generally bullish around here about Baltimore’s farm system coming into the season; my colleagues Eric Longenhagen and Kevin Goldstein rated the team very highly, and ZiPS had the team with the best prospect in baseball both at catcher and on the mound. ZiPS is even more positive about the team’s future now as most of the top prospects have improved their stock, some massively, rather than see it slide. Let’s run down some of the projection changes since the start of the season. Read the rest of this entry »
Who is baseball’s most irreplaceable player in 2022? This doesn’t mean the most valuable player, and in terms of the playoff hunt, the hardest player to replace isn’t necessarily the best one. Some teams are either cruising to the playoffs or effectively eliminated in practice, if not in purely mathematical terms (hello, Tigers and Royals). To answer this question, I ran the updated ZiPS projected standings after Tuesday’s games and then re-ran the entire simulation with the assumption that each relevant player missed the rest of the season due to injury.
For the NL, ZiPS estimates that nine teams remain plausible playoff contenders, which I define as having a 5% chance of making MLB’s new 12-team playoff format. The exceptions are the Diamondbacks, Cubs, Rockies, Pirates, Nationals, and Reds. Seven of the nine remaining teams are above 50%, with only the Phillies (27%) and Marlins (8%) between a coin flip and that arbitrarily chosen 5% threshold. Let’s jump right into the NL’s top 10 list.
Burnes was always going to make this top 10 list, but Brandon Woodruff‘s ankle injury and Freddy Peralta‘s more significant shoulder injury push him into the top slot. The hit may even be more severe than the -11% listed here; ZiPS puts a lot of stock in Aaron Ashby’s presence, but any kind of forearm pain for a pitcher should lead fans to look sadly into the middle distance. Nobody on the Brewers comes even close to Burnes in playoff impact, so a nasty surprise here ought to make them very aggressive about picking up a pitcher. After all, we’re already into the Chi Chi González portion of the depth chart.
Ronald Acuña Jr. has a better projection than Olson, but ZiPS sees Atlanta’s options at first base to be relatively bleak. That was one of the team’s biggest questions back when Freddie Freeman was a free agent, and though Atlanta has patched together DH somewhat, all bets are off with a serious Olson injury. In the event he goes down, I expect it’s more likely that Austin Riley plays first with Phil Gosselin playing third than Adam Duvall or Eddie Rosario getting shifted to first, but since ZiPS isn’t a Gosselin-stanner, it thinks that’s only shuffling a hole around. Read the rest of this entry »
Who is baseball’s most irreplaceable player in 2022? This doesn’t mean the most valuable player, and in terms of the playoff hunt, the hardest player to replace isn’t necessarily the best one. Some teams are either cruising to the playoffs or effectively eliminated in practice, if not in purely mathematical terms (hello, Tigers and Royals). To answer this question, I ran the updated ZiPS projected standings after Tuesday’s games and then re-ran the entire simulation with the assumption that each relevant player missed the rest of the season due to injury.
For the AL, ZiPS estimates that 10 teams remain plausible playoff contenders, which I define as having a 5% chance of making MLB’s new 12-team playoff format. The exceptions are the Tigers, Royals, A’s, and Orioles. After this quartet, there’s a significant jump to the Rangers at 9% and the Angels at 10%. Sorry, there are no Yankees and Astros on this list with their respective big leads in their divisions. Let’s jump right into the AL’s top 10 list.
ZiPS projects the Guardians as only the third-best team in the weak AL Central despite currently being part of a first-place tie, which gives them about a coin flip’s chance to make the expanded playoffs. While both Andrés Giménez and Shane Bieber project to finish the season in All-Star territory at over four WAR, Ramírez remains the player who most drives Cleveland and the only one who could figure in the MVP race. Ernie Clement is the most likely player to step in if Ramírez was lost for the year — he’s already filling in for him — and that’s a massive downgrade for a team that generally needs things to go right in order to make the playoffs.
The fact that Devers ranks so highly should get the Red Sox thinking when the subject of a possible extension for their star third baseman comes up. Boston has surged back into the playoff picture in recent weeks, but its playoff hopes still rest on the edge of a knife, and the in-house replacements for Devers are a weak group. Bobby Dalbec and the returning Christian Arroyo would likely take over at third unless the team decided to move Enrique Hernández to the position. Suffice it to say that Boston’s not giving Devers a lot of time off to play some designated hitter. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a wonderful era of baseball in which to be a fan of shortstops. From Francisco Lindor to Carlos Correa to Corey Seager to Xander Bogaerts, there are so many top-tier players at the position. Contrast that with the 1960s and ’70s, an era from which only one shortstop actually got into the Hall of Fame in Luis Aparicio (Ernie Banks never played another game at short after 1961). A merely “good” shortstop can get overlooked in such an atmosphere.
Dansby Swanson certainly wasn’t overlooked during his days as an amateur. The No. 1 pick in the 2015 draft, he was ranked as the best draft-eligible player that year by a number of highly respected analysts and scouts, including our own Kiley McDaniel. Also lending to the hype was the fact that, just six months after being drafted by Arizona, he was the key player in the notorious trade that sent him, Ender Inciarte, and Aaron Blair to Atlanta in exchange for Shelby Miller.
If scouts were over-exuberant about Swanson’s development, so was ZiPS, which pegged him as the fifth-best prospect in baseball before the 2016 season, behind Seager, Byron Buxton, J.P. Crawford, and Orlando Arcia (oof). But Swanson didn’t develop into the superstar that many predicted. Over his first three seasons, he hit .243/.314/.369 for a 75 wRC+ and 2.2 WAR — hardly the worst player in baseball, but a far cry from the phenoms we’ve been blessed with, such as Fernando Tatis Jr. and Mike Trout. While Swanson hadn’t quite been named a bust, there were certainly whispers of disappointment.
If Swanson’s early career didn’t exactly go gangbusters, he steadily improved with the Braves. He had his first two-WAR season in 2019, earned his first MVP vote in ’20, and recorded his first three-WAR season in ’21. Since the start of 2019, he has ranked 10th among shortstops in WAR, sandwiched between Seager and Javier Báez. But in Atlanta’s pecking order in recent years, it’s (rightfully) been Ronald Acuña Jr., Freddie Freeman, and Ozzie Albies that have drawn the most attention among Braves hitters, with Swanson seemingly relegated to being one of the ohyeahhimtoos in public regard.
Dan Szymborski: Welcome to chat!
