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.

1. José Ramírez, Cleveland Guardians, -15.8%

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.

2. Rafael Devers, Boston Red Sox, -11.8%

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.

He’s been more than that this year, particularly of late. There are a lot of players responsible for Atlanta’s current 14-game win streak, and Swanson’s been a key piece of that puzzle, hitting .379/.455/.586 line with 1.1 WAR. But even when you back up and look at the entire season, it’s not the returning Acuña Jr. leading the team in WAR, nor Albies, the big acquisition Matt Olson, Austin Riley, or one of the pitchers; it’s Swanson. Read the rest of this entry »

Two major bits of unpleasant injury-related news hit the headlines on Tuesday afternoon. First, the Blue Jays announced that Hyun Jin Ryu, a key cog in the rotation, would undergo elbow surgery that would result in him missing the rest of the entire 2022 season. Over in the NL West, a scheduled CT scan revealed that Fernando Tatis Jr. had not seen enough healing in his wrist to allow him to start swinging a bat. Both of these injuries are of the type that could impact the divisional races.

For both Ryu and the Jays, his sore elbow is a major hit. Jay Jaffe has already touched on the impact to Toronto’s rotation from the loss of Ryu. In his case, there were clear signs of something being not quite right leading up to his initial trip to the shelf. Per Jay:

This is already Ryu’s second trip to the injured list this season. After lasting just 7.1 innings over his first two starts and allowing a total of 11 runs, he landed on the IL on April 17 with what was described as forearm inflammation. Upon returning to the Blue Jays on May 14, he fared somewhat better, yielding just six runs (five earned) in 19.2 innings over four starts, but his average four-seam fastball velocity decreased by about one mile per hour from outing to outing, from a high of 90.3 mph on May 14 to a low of 87.6 on June 1 — a troubling trend.

Back then, the timetable was reported to be at least multiple weeks. Full Tommy John surgery would obviously end Ryu’s 2022 campaign, but we’re far enough into the season that even repair of a partially torn UCL wouldn’t allow him to return in the fall. If he should require the full surgery, his 2023 season would definitely be in peril, with only a late-season return being feasible. He’s a free agent after the 2023 season, too, so there’s a very real possibility that he’s played his last game in a Jays uniform.

I wouldn’t characterize it as good news, but Ryu’s previous Tommy John surgery was a long time ago, undergone in 2004 when he was still in high school, meaning he got most of a professional career out of his first surgery before a possible revision procedure. Unfortunately, in one study, less than half of pitchers needing a second procedure returned to pitch at least 10 games. Read the rest of this entry »

Faced with a middling rotation on a middling roster, the Angels took a risk this winter when they made Noah Syndergaard their big free-agent pitcher signing over any of the marquee names available. Syndergaard was once one of those dazzling names, but injuries haven taken away three of his most recent seasons (most of 2017, all of 2020, and all but two innings in 2021) and, eventually, the final gear of a fastball and sinker that both tangled with triple digits on the radar gun. It’s difficult for a one-year deal to end too badly, but at $21 million for 2022, the Angels clearly thought of this as more than a pillow contract or a lottery ticket. So has it worked? Sort of.

To get one thing out of the way: Syndergaard is not the pitcher he once was. As Jay Jaffe wrote earlier this month, he’s lost about four miles per hour on his fastball, forcing him to reconfigure his pitch mix. He’s not exactly Jered Weaver or Zack Greinke, let alone Frank Schwindel throwing 35-mph rainbows to the Yankees, but throwing 93 or 94 mph is quite different than throwing 99 or 100. That said, he’s still gotten decent results, at least in bottom-line numbers, and his ERA stands at 3.69, with his FIP barely behind at 3.81. His strikeout rate has plummeted to just 15.4%, or 5.83 K/9, numbers that barely match up to his 26.4% and 9.74 through 2019. But the lack of strikeouts is partially mitigated by the fact that his control remains excellent, and he’s still effective at preventing hitters from making good contact.

Pitchers have been successful with meager strikeout rates, even in today’s game. However, it leaves little margin for error, and when pitchers like Kirk Rueter or Chien-Ming Wang finally hit a bump, they didn’t just get a flat; the wheels fell completely off. Even with more reason to hope for his health than before the season and after some perfectly respectable performances, ZiPS is actually less confident about Syndergaard’s future than before:

While we can be a little more confident now about playing time, we should also be less bullish about the chances of Syndergaard recapturing his pre-injury form. Even with more innings now projected than at the start of 2022, ZiPS has knocked his rest-of-career mean projection from 19.1 WAR to 13.7. Every game of a decidedly mortal Syndergaard takes us a little farther from the thunder god. Read the rest of this entry »

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 .350, we don’t actually know that a median projection of .350 was the correct projection going into the season. There’s no divine baseball exchequer to swoop in and let you know if he was “actually” a .350 hitter who did what he was supposed to, a .320 hitter who got lucky, or a .380 hitter who suffered 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 was 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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 .350, we don’t actually know that a median projection of .350 was, in fact, the correct projection going into the season. There’s no divine baseball exchecquer to swoop in and let you know if he was “actually” a .350 hitter who did what he was supposed to, a .320 hitter who got lucky, or even a .380 hitter who suffered misfortune. If you flip heads on a coin eight times out of ten 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 was a wonderful predictor of isolated power. It would be a highly useful one, as changes to that over the course of a season are bound to be rather small. 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 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 places such as here and here, so let’s get right to the data for the first two months of the MLB season. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays started a short road trip off in style on Monday night with an 8–0 shellacking of the Royals. It was a feel-good kind of an evening — at least if you’re not a resident of Kansas City — in that the Jays got homers from two young players falling short of lofty expectations (Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette) and that a recently struggling bullpen (4.70 FIP, -0.5 WAR over the last 30 days) one-hit the Royals over four innings in closing out the rout. It was one of the 10 games in which the Jays play teams at the bottom of the American League before heading to New York to square off against the first-place Yankees.

One of the questions I was asked on one of my radio hits yesterday, this one with Blake Murphy of Sportsnet 590 in Toronto, was if the next two weeks were especially important for the Jays, coming against the weakest teams and with a seven-game divisional deficit. I believed it was, but it did make me curious just how important it was. And since I can’t run a ZiPS projection in my own head but need a computer, here we are! Just how important are the next two weeks for Toronto?

It would be hard to characterize the Blue Jays as a struggling team. While they were hovering just above the .500 mark in mid-May, they’ve been on a bit of a tear lately, winning 14 of 19 games. A 32–22 record stands at a 96-win pace, comfortably above the 88-win median that ZiPS projected for each of the top four AL East teams back in April. The problem is that the Yankees have been even better at 39–15, or a 117-win pace.

Still, Toronto’s record is impressive, and even more so when you consider how tough a schedule it’s had. The team’s average opponent this year has had a .544 winning percentage, which translates into an 88–74 record. In other words, a typical game for the Jays has seen them face off against a team projected by ZiPS to be as strong as the average non-Orioles AL East team. From a projection standpoint, ZiPS believes that they have had the toughest schedule in baseball so far.

A seven-game deficit is a significant one. Even if you thought the Jays were as solid as the Yankees at the start of the season, winning one more game over 162 games is an easier task than winning eight more over 108. Even if New York plays just .500 ball the rest of the season, Toronto has to maintain its pace (62–46, .574) in order to finish with a one-game lead (avoiding a tiebreaker now that MLB has killed off game 163).

Opening up ZiPS, I ran some experiments on the team’s fate over the next two weeks. Let’s start with the current projections. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like almost yesterday when, amidst the lockout’s flurry of recriminations and constantly shifting arbitrary deadlines, we weren’t quite sure if there was even going to be a 2022 season at all. But Opening Day arrived after a short delay, and now we’re just about a third of the way through the season. The trade deadline is just two months out and as we saw last year, the elimination of the August waiver-trade period served to increase the stakes. While we don’t know the exact contours of what the pennant races will look like or which destinations make the most sense for potential trade candidates, the basic outlines of the season have been drawn. Short of some major surprises, we can start speculating about a few of the more interesting players likely to be available.

Juan Soto, Washington Nationals

The official position of the Washington Nationals is that they aren’t trading Juan Soto, no way, no how. I’m not sure I actually believe them. Soto will be a free agent after the 2024 season and has already turned down a 13-year, $350 million extension offer from the team. Plus, the longer they hang onto him, the less mega of a mega-package they’re likely to net in return for their superstar. It’s tempting to compare Soto’s situation with Bryce Harper’s, but as he approached free agency, the Nationals were fielding a team they had reason to think was competitive. This year’s squad is looking up at the Reds, and the farm system doesn’t have anywhere near the talent needed to quickly salvage the situation. The possibility of a sale and Soto’s age complicate the calculus – if Washington was able to convince him to stick around, he’s young enough that he’s likely to still be very good the next time they are. Soto isn’t posting his normal numbers, but ZiPS sees little reason to worry; it thinks that Soto’s hit data should have resulted in a BABIP closer to .320 and a slugging percentage well in excess of .500, similar to his xBA and xSLG. It would stink for Nationals fans, and putting together a deal worthy of netting Soto is its own challenge, but a trade could be a possibility come August. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Welcome to the start of the Dan Szymborski Birthday season.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I’d personally avoid unless the next option is really poor – Coors is still Coors.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Possible, but I’m still optimistic on some of those guys turning it around

12:06

Dan Szymborski: What’s kinda awkward is that Profar and Hosmer have been steadily fading but the guys struggling aren’t really bouncing back

Read the rest of this entry »

As you may recall, just as the season was getting underway, Aaron Judge, who is set to become a free agent after the 2022 season, rejected a contract extension proffered by the Yankees; the deal would have been worth $230.5 million over eight years (seven years at $30.5 million per year, plus $17 million for this year), keeping Judge in pinstripes for most of the rest of his career. Instead, Judge decided to play out his final season under team control and then hit the free agent market with as much leverage as he is ever likely to have. Judge gambled on himself, and while two-thirds of the season remains, the early returns are pointing in his direction.

In a year that has seen offense largely disappear — just as a number of power hitters have seen their performance evaporate — Judge has bucked the trend. After his home run in Sunday’s loss to the Rays, he’s already up to 18 on the season, nearly half of his total (39) from his impressive 2021 campaign. That number even outstrips the pace of his 2017 season, during which he hit 52 round-trippers in an offensive environment far more conducive to crushing pitchers’ dreams. Judge might not have the big contract he’s looking for yet, but he’s done about as much to improve his standing as anyone could in two months.

Judge’s season line stands at a spicy .303/.371/.657, numbers that would count as superlative even in Coors Field during the era’s highest-offense seasons. In 1968: The Next Generation, that’s enough for a 192 wRC+ and 2.8 WAR; spicy may actually undersell just how dangerous he’s been. Read the rest of this entry »