| 12:01 |
 Dan Szymborski: Welcome to a no doubt very upbeat chat!
|
| 12:01 |
: If MLB made an offer consisting of:
|
| 12:01 |
: Then:
|
| 12:02 |
Dan Szymborski: lol
|
| 12:02 |
: Dan please, I am starving. A ZiPS top 100 Jays teaser, I need it.
|
| 12:02 |
Dan Szymborski: Hey, we gotta keep you guys coming back for SOMETHING. It’s just next week!
|
While the end of the ownership lockout looks increasingly far away after the owners’ latest proposal to the players underwhelmed, at some point, major league baseball will return. And when it does, there’s a lot of unfinished business remaining before actual games can be played; at this point, 56% of the positive projected player WAR in 2022 is still available on the free agent market. One prominent name in that group is outfielder Seiya Suzuki. When teams can talk to and sign free agents again, the four-time Nippon Professional Baseball All-Star is expected to draw heavy interest and provide an exciting alternative to the other top outfielders remaining on the market, such as Michael Conforto and Nick Castellanos.
The Hiroshima Toyo Carp may have struggled to get out of the .500 range in recent years, but Suzuki has provided plenty of highlights and one can easily understand why a player like him would intrigue teams in the other hemisphere. Last season, his 38 home runs lapped the rest of his team (Ryosuke Kikuchi was next with 16 dingers), while his 1.073 OPS bested all of his teammates by more than 200 points; that last number also led NPB by a significant margin. Suzuki will play most of the 2022 season as a 27-year-old. Even if he’s not necessarily a significant improvement on Conforto or Castellanos, Conforto’s 2021 dimmed his profile somewhat and Castellanos is a few years older. Read the rest of this entry »
I can’t tell you with any kind of certainty when the 2022 season will start or how many games will be played. I can’t even definitively say if there will be a season at all. But one thing seems nearly inevitable: When we have baseball, it’s not going to be identical to the product we saw last year. For one, the designated hitter, used for the shortened 2020 season in the National League, appears likely to become a permanent part of both leagues, ending the doctrinal schism between the junior and senior circuits. Another likely difference? The playoff structure.
It’s no secret that the owners are highly interested in expanding the playoffs again. Over at The Athletic, Kaitlyn McGrath, David O’Brien, and Katie Woo teamed up to discuss the various goings-on here. The owners have proposed expanding the playoffs to 14 teams, with only the team with the best record in each league getting a bye and everyone else thrown into a best-of-three Wild Card series. The players, meanwhile, have proposed conceding an expanded playoff structure of 12 teams, with multiple byes for top teams.
From the standpoint of the owners’ interests, the best teams winning often isn’t necessarily the ideal outcome. The World Series championship is basically a MacGuffin. MLB doesn’t need it to actually be important, it just needs the public to believe it is. And since the public appears to believe that the best team will win a short series far more often than it actually does, the more teams you can stuff into a postseason without making it seem like chance (rather than talent) is driving the outcome, the better. Who cares if a 107-win team loses two of three games to an 83-win team? They were probably chokers anyway! Read the rest of this entry »
As you might have noticed if you were surfing FanGraphs while relaxing over the weekend — or recovering from shoveling snow in the Northeast — the ZiPS projections have now been populated in the projections section of the site.
There will be multiple updates to those projections this spring because, well, a whole bunch of the offseason remains, far more than is typical when ZiPS makes its appearance in the database. While I’m more cautiously optimistic than most of my colleagues are about the future of the 2022 season, in the present, baseball’s landscape is less about fans huddled around an abstract hot stove and more about the heat death of the universe. With no MLBPA members being signed, traded, or even acknowledged on official MLB channels, baseball has nearly entered a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
While this is bad for the game and anyone who likes it, it at least makes depth charts less volatile and provides a good opportunity to run some mid-lockout standings. These are quite obviously nowhere near the final preseason projections, but they’re a snapshot of where baseball stands right now. Which teams are in good shape, and which ones still have work to do? Let’s forget about the eternal void that beckons and get to some projections! Read the rest of this entry »
As you might have noticed if you were surfing FanGraphs while relaxing over the weekend — or recovering from shoveling snow in the Northeast — the ZiPS projections have now been populated in the projections section of the site.
There will be multiple updates to those projections this spring because, well, a whole bunch of the offseason remains, far more than is typical when ZiPS makes its appearance in the database. While I’m more cautiously optimistic than most of my colleagues are about the future of the 2022 season, in the present, baseball’s landscape is less about fans huddled around an abstract hot stove and more about the heat death of the universe. With no MLBPA members being signed, traded, or even acknowledged on official MLB channels, baseball has nearly entered a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
While this is bad for the game and anyone who likes it, it at least makes depth charts less volatile and provides a good opportunity to run some mid-lockout standings. These are quite obviously nowhere near the final preseason projections, but they’re a snapshot of where baseball stands right now. Which teams are in good shape, and which ones still have work to do?
Let’s forget about the eternal void that beckons and get to some projections! Read the rest of this entry »
After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Milwaukee Brewers.
I can’t say I’m displeased to see Luis Urías at the top of the batter list — I’ve long been fascinated by him and even featured him on my breakout list last year — but I’d definitely be uneasy about having him as my team’s best player. Urías projects to essentially repeat his 2021 season. Third base (or second) is a better long-term home for him than shortstop, so last year’s Willy Adames acquisition showed the correct instinct on Milwaukee’s part. Read the rest of this entry »
| 12:02 |
Dan Szymborski: The chat is now.
|
| 12:03 |
: ZiPS seems very down on Jo Adell and Brandon Marsh. Is there any hope for them?
|
| 12:04 |
Dan Szymborski: Yes. Adell’s projection has already rebounded from the year before! But he still needs to develop.
|
| 12:05 |
Dan Szymborski: As for Marsh, ZiPS is not yet enthralled by his offense
|
| 12:05 |
: Rangers ZIPS came out today. The rotation is a nothing burger outside of Gray. ZIPS seems to under project innings for Hearn (92), Dunning (109), who are both certain to be in the rotation but has (134) for Folty who isn’t even on the team?
|
| 12:05 |
Dan Szymborski: ZiPS goes from history.
|
After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers.
If you start by looking at the offensive comps in the chart below, you can see how quickly things go downhill in the batters’ projections. You start with two easy Hall of Famers and then about 40 seconds later, you’re reassembling the late-80s Braves. Now, the late-80s Braves eventually became the 90s Braves, something the Rangers are no doubt striving for, but getting from Point A to Point B isn’t a route you can just put into your car’s navigation system.
Signing Corey Seager and Marcus Semien is a great place to begin, though. Seager’s health record hasn’t been perfect, but it hasn’t been Eric Davis-like, either, and he still has a couple of seasons left of his 20s. Semien is a few years older, but after rightfully being a big part of the American League MVP race in two of the last three seasons, he starts off on a pretty high pedestal. Read the rest of this entry »
After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves.
Can the Braves win the World Series again? Yup! But it would be a lot easier to do if they could bring back Freddie Freeman. Sure, finishing his Atlanta career with a World Series trophy is a storybook ending, but that’s for a 39-year-old Freeman, so let’s can the epilogue for now. While it’s still taken as an assumption that he’ll return, the fact is he didn’t sign before the 2021 season, he didn’t sign during the 2021 season, and he didn’t sign before the lockout. Until he actually puts his pen to the dotted line, anything can happen, and until then, first base is the Braves’ biggest weakness.
ZiPS is projecting a solid return for Ronald Acuña Jr., but there’s still some danger in that outfield. It seems nearly certain that Marcell Ozuna will return, but from a baseball standpoint, he didn’t hit at all early last year. Now, imagine a scenario in which Acuña isn’t quite ready, Ozuna is struggling, and the Braves have to field a designated hitter in addition to cobbling together whatever at first. The outfield depth just isn’t that strong, especially with neither Cristian Pache nor Drew Waters having any kind of breakout years in Triple-A. There’s a reason that Alex Anthopoulos had to remake the outfield on the fly last summer, which is something that you ideally don’t have to do again in 2022.
Read the rest of this entry »
After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Miami Marlins.
We’ll get the bad news out of the way first because, well, that’s the order we do these blurbs in. There’s a lot to like about the Miami Marlins, but most of those things are on the pitching side. The offensive holes aren’t so deep as to prevent baseballs or electromagnetic radiation from escaping. But the offense is thoroughly uninspiring wherever you look. The lineup is neither good nor particularly young, and as such, it will likely struggle to push the Marlins to be much better than the National League’s 14th-ranked offense in runs scored, Miami’s 2021 mark. Read the rest of this entry »
