How good was phenom Wander Franco’s rookie season in 2021? So good that it actually compelled the Tampa Bay Rays to spend money. Just before Turkey Day, the team and Franco came to an agreement on a massive deal that could reach 12 years and $223 million.

Shortstop Wander Franco and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a 12-year contract that guarantees him around $185 million, sources tell ESPN. The deal is worth a maximum of $223 million. It is done, pending small details. The 20-year-old is going to be a Ray for a long time.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 23, 2021

Since this is baseball, this isn’t one of those NFL deals in which someone lands a comma-laden top number but, when you read the finer details, it turns out that a huge chunk of that money is a roster bonus due in four years that will never be paid off. Eleven years and $182 million of Franco’s deal is guaranteed, with the bulk of the rest coming from a $25 million club option for 2033 and a little more in incentives that kick in for finishing the top five in the AL MVP voting starting in 2028.

This deal is the new all-time record for a player with less than a full year of service time; the previous no. 1 was Ronald Acuña Jr.‘s extension worth up to $100 million, an agreement that this one essentially laps. Fernando Tatis Jr.’s contract is a larger one at 14 years and $340 million, but he was also a player who had cleared two years of service time when he signed on the dotted line, giving him more financial leverage over the Padres.

Franco finished “only” third in AL Rookie of the Year voting, but this was largely due to the fact that voters give a heavy penalty to a great player with less playing time, something I have direct experience with. The winner, his teammate Randy Arozarena, bested him in WAR, 3.3 to 2.5, but he needed twice as many games to get that far above replacement level. There was little question Franco was ready, as he hit .313/.372/.583 in 40 games for Triple-A Durham. These weren’t flash Albuquerque or Las Vegas numbers either; ZiPS translated that performance as a .281/.328/.473 line, not all that different from the actual .288/.347/.463 line he put up for Tampa Bay.

In case it already wasn’t clear after years of him being the consensus best prospect in baseball, the ZiPS projection for Franco is also that of a young star.

Obviously, the potential exists for him to hit higher numbers in his peak seasons; bottom-line projections are 50th-percentile projections and will naturally be much less volatile than what actually happens. But when I ran the 2022 projections for all the likely subjects, thanks to Acuña’s ACL injury, the only player that ZiPS projects to accumulate more WAR than Franco over the rest of their respective careers is Juan Soto.

The big question out there: is the contract fair to both parties? After all, one can make the argument that Franco may have earned much more by simply playing his way through baseball’s salary process and hitting free agency after the 2027 season.

To that question, I’m in the “yes” camp. The Rays have a great deal of financial leverage with Franco two seasons away from his first arbitration year, assuming that he would achieve Super Two status after the 2023 season at two years, 104 days of service time. But by the same token, I don’t expect the Rays to pay him as if he were a free agent, either. What I personally like to see is a contract that reflects the risks that both parties take in a long-term deal without being grossly weighted in one direction or the other. Call it actuarial fetishism, but a contract like Ozzie Albies‘ seven-year, $35 million contract offends me as an analyst in a way that this deal does not.

I’m not sure why I haven’t built this into the standard ZiPS model (I probably will after this ZiPS season is over), but I constructed a small simulation for how much Franco could make going year-to-year and then signing a mega-deal relative to what he will actually get. In the 50th-percentile projection, with near-minimum salaries in 2022 and ’23, arbitration projections, and free-agent contract projections, ZiPS estimates $297 million over the next 12 years. This is well above the $223 million he can max out at, but that’s not the whole story, either. The upside isn’t tremendously high, with the 90th-percentile projection going up to $360 million. Franco could figure out how to pitch like Jacob deGrom this offseason, and he’ll still get relatively paltry sums of money for the next few years; arbitration awards don’t scale up linearly for superstars. And the downside is significant. His 10th-percentile result ends up with him making less than $20 million over his career, and in 35% of the simulations, he falls short of $182 million. By comparison, at the time of their signings, Acuña falls short of his guaranteed deal only 17% of the time, and Albies does worse only 9% of the time. Another natural comparison is when the Rays signed Evan Longoria a week into his major league career to a contract worth a guaranteed $17.5 million over six years; ZiPS only had him doing worse than that contract in 11% of the simulations.

The future is a very uncertain thing, as demonstrated by the very weak 2021 seasons from Cody Bellinger and Gleyber Torres. Those young stars would probably be better off right now if they had signed $150 million contracts after their rookie campaigns. Since every Mets fan is born with a genetic catalog of tales of sadness and loss, ask someone in Queens their feelings about Gregg Jefferies, who put up an OPS over 1.000 as a 19-year-old for Double-A Tidewater and a .961 OPS in his first cup of coffee before settling into a respectable, but disappointing, 20-WAR career.

No matter what happens with Franco, he’s basically a fifth of the way to becoming a billionaire before the taxman gets involved. The Rays leveraged their position — as you expect people to do in salary negotiations — but not in a grotesque way. If I were an agent and Franco were my client, I’d raise no fuss about him taking this deal. He’s one of baseball’s bright young stars, one MLB would be wise to market around, and now he can afford an entourage worthy of his abilities. Thumbs up all around from me.

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 Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Like most teams that lose 110 games, the 2021 Diamondbacks were lousy. But they’re not completely hopeless. Indeed, when perusing the projections from top to bottom, the overall feeling you get isn’t one of a lineup full of disasters and voids but rather an overpowering rush of underwhelmedness, which I’m not sure is an actual word. There are some 20 organizational players listed here (some are now minor league free agents) with projected WARs between 0.5 and 1.5 wins. These are players who have value and can contribute to a winning team, but who aren’t going to win divisions on their own. Ketel Marte projects to stand clearly above the rest of the lineup in 2022, giving Arizona’s offense the look of a bowl of Lucky Charms that has had all the marshmallows picked out. 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 Chicago White Sox.

Batters

The White Sox offense projects similarly to how it did prior to the 2021 season, which is good news for the team considering how easily they made the playoffs. But that also means the fundamental problems in the offense remain, with an additional issue compared to last year. ZiPS may be underestimating Eloy Jiménez — it’s always hard to evaluate players coming back from injury — but we can’t pretend that there isn’t some risk involved there. The remaining outfield position and DH are thornier concerns, and ZiPS is more pessimistic here than Steamer is. This is not a popular opinion, but if the White Sox plan to use Andrew Vaughn like our depth charts indicate they will, I really hope they just let him crush Triple-A pitching for a few months rather than juggling him with Gavin Sheets and Adam Engel. The basic problem is that though Vaughn was deservedly a terrific prospect, and 2020’s lost season of course did him no favors, he still doesn’t have a professional season in line with what you would expect from a top first base prospect. Read the rest of this entry »

The first ZiPS team projections will hit the site this coming Monday, and as I typically do, I’m going to use this space to talk a little bit about my philosophy behind ZiPS, my goals, and the new things I’ve worked on before they go live.

ZiPS is a computer projection system I initially developed in 2002–04 and which officially went live for the ’04 season. The origin of ZiPS is similar to Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey, coming from discussions I had with Chris Dial, one of my best friends (my first interaction with Chris involved me being called an expletive!) and a fellow stat nerd, in the late 1990s. ZiPS moved quickly from its original inception as a reasonably simple projection system, and now does a lot more and uses a lot more data than I ever envisioned 20 years ago. At its core, however, it’s still doing two primary tasks: estimating what the baseline expectation for a player is at the moment I hit the button, and then estimating where that player may be going using large cohorts of relatively similar players.

ZiPS uses multi-year statistics, with more recent seasons weighted more heavily; in the beginning, all the statistics received the same yearly weighting, but eventually, this became more varied based on additional research. And research is a big part of ZiPS. Every year, I run hundreds of studies on various aspects of the system to determine their predictive value and better calibrate the player baselines. What started with the data available in 2002 has expanded considerably: Basic hit, velocity, and pitch data began playing a larger role starting in ’13, while data derived from StatCast has been included in recent years as I’ve gotten a handle on the predictive value and impact of those numbers on existing models. I believe in cautious, conservative design, so data is only included once I have confidence in improved accuracy; there are always builds of ZiPS that are still a couple of years away. Additional internal ZiPS tools like zBABIP, zHR, zBB, and zSO are used to better establish baseline expectations for players. These stats work similarly to the various flavors of “x” stats, with the z standing for something I’d wager you’ve already figured out. Read the rest of this entry »

A busy early offseason continued apace on Tuesday, with the Blue Jays coming to terms with pitcher José Berríos on a seven-year deal worth up to $131 million, pending the usual physical. The new pact buys out the last year of his arbitration eligibility and includes limited trade protection and an opt-out clause that the former Twins ace can exercise after the 2026 season.

It would be hard to characterize this one as a major surprise. The players who went to Minnesota in return for Berríos, Austin Martin and Simeon Woods Richardson, were ranked here as the second- and third-best prospects in Toronto’s system, respectively. To get a richer haul at the deadline, you had to trade literally Max Scherzer and Trea Turner. It’s not the type of move you make if you want the pitcher to walk in 14 months with only a possible draft compensation pick in exchange.

Berríos hasn’t developed into a superstar, but he’s been consistently in that 110–120 ERA+, borderline-ace territory since being promoted to Minnesota for good in early 2017. And he has one thing that many other star pitchers lack: a nearly flawless record of avoiding injury; as a major leaguer, he hasn’t made an appearance on the Injured List or missed a single start due to injury. The most he’s been nicked up was being pulled from a start because of a blister in 2019 and some abdominal tightness this September. It’s not just luck; injury time is a useful predictor of future injury time.

At the time of the trade, Toronto’s rotation ranked 19th in baseball in total WAR, nearly a win behind the Royals at 18. The starting pitching was coming around with the emergence of Alek Manoah in June, but he missed some time with a back contusion stemming from a fall in the dugout, and Nate Pearson’s groin problems were enough to keep him from serving as a reinforcement down the stretch. In a packed wild-card race with the Jays 4 1/2 games back at the trade deadline, Berríos provided an opportunity for a significant upgrade in the rotation, and he was as good as advertised, putting up a 3.58 ERA and a 3.28 FIP over 12 starts and throwing seven consecutive quality starts to finish his 2021 campaign.

Read the rest of this entry »

The National League Rookie of the Year award was announced on Monday evening, with Jonathan India taking the victory with 29 first-place votes. India was Cincinnati’s eighth Rookie of the Year, but the team’s first since Scott Williamson in 1999. That number 29 turned out to be surprisingly important personally as, to my surprise, I was the only one to give Marlins pitcher Trevor Rogers a first-place vote. I expected India to win, but not to take Andrew Baggarly’s spot as the unanimity denier that enraged a fanbase.

Arguing about awards was one of my first baseball-related activities as a teenage stathead in the mid-1990s. Being much younger and slightly more foolish than I am now, it boggled my young mind that someone could think that Mo Vaughn had a better year than Albert Belle, or that Dante Bichette was the second most valuable player in the National League. I mean, someone was wrong on the internet!

Twenty years later, I find myself, through a series of unlikely events, voting on baseball’s year-end awards. In my six years of BBWAA membership, I’ve gotten to vote four times by virtue of being in a local chapter with only about a dozen active members. The years I vote, I usually take most of the entire last weekend of the season to make sure I’ve put my best effort forward at deciphering the season’s results. If someone’s going to ask me to be an expert, I’m going to try to act like one, rather than send off my ballot based on fleeting feelings while sitting in the smallest room of my house.

Any time I vote, I write an article like this, because I believe transparency to be vital; every BBWAA vote, including Hall of Fame votes — the Association proposed this, but the Hall of Fame vetoed it — ought to be open for public scrutiny. I don’t know if I’ve arrived at the “right” answer, if such a thing is possible, but I’ve given the best answer I can that’s consistent with my worldview. That’s my responsibility to the players in question and the fans of those players.

Below, I’ve also thrown in some preliminary ZiPS five-year projections for the players I voted for. Projections were no part of my voting, so consider it a bonus for watching me torture the English language as if it were Cary Elwes on a bathroom floor. Read the rest of this entry »

After a one-year hiatus due to the oddity and non-celebratory feeling of a season truncated by a raging pandemic, we’re bringing back the Elegy series in a streamlined format for a 2021 wrap-up. Think of this as a quick winter preview for each team, discussing the questions that faced each team ahead of the year, how they were answered, and what’s next. Do you like or hate the new format? Let me know in the comments below. We’ve already tackled the AL and NL Central, the NL and the AL West, and the AL East. We wrap up this series for 2021 with the NL East. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And we are LIVE

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Dan Szymborski: Because a taped chat doesn’t work since I won’t have any questions.

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Dan Szymborski: Or I guess we could do the Mr. Show sketch thing where all the questions submitted are for next week’s chat.

12:00

Dan Szymborski:

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I can see Reynolds ending up in New York

Read the rest of this entry »

After a one-year hiatus due to the oddity and non-celebratory feeling of a season truncated by a raging pandemic, we’re bringing back the Elegy series in a streamlined format for a 2021 wrap-up. Think of this as a quick winter preview for each team, discussing the questions that faced each team ahead of the year, how they were answered, and what’s next. Do you like or hate the new format? Let me know in the comments below. We’ve already tackled the AL and NL Central, as well as the AL East and the NL West. Today, we’re looking at the AL West.

Houston Astros (95–67)

The Big Question
Could the Astros bounce back from a surprisingly disappointing season and do so while almost playing the heel as fans returned to the park? Despite being awash in offensive talent, this was easier said than done due to the possible lack of pitching depth; any team would have had a difficult time replacing the starters that have left since the team’s 2015 breakout. Even ignoring the smaller losses like Dallas Keuchel or Brad Peacock, making good on the departures of Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton, as well as the de facto one by Justin Verlander, was an extremely tall order. Further complicating efforts was that Forrest Whitley, Houston’s top pitching prospect, required Tommy John surgery in March.

How It Went
As with the Nationals, Dusty Baker continued to be the perfect manager at the right time for the Astros. Sometimes you want a Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, but sometimes it’s 10 degrees outside and you have a burst pipe in your house, and you need a highly-skilled craftsman rather than a transcendent artist. And honestly, Dusty showed a bit of the Florentine in 2021, managing a young pitching rotation of raw talent quite well and adjusting when Lance McCullers Jr. was injured in the playoffs. Coupled with Zack Greinke showing signs of decline and suffering a late-season neck injury, it was a technical challenge for him to balance the roster, and he did pretty well. He didn’t earn his first managerial World Series ring (he has one as a player with the 1982 Dodgers), but I think you can make a case that this season was his finest hour.

The sign-stealing controversy, meanwhile, didn’t magically go away, but it didn’t seem to faze the Astros at all. They played just fine on the road in the regular season and playoffs, showing little sign that the derision of the crowds had any effect. On the contrary, the offense roared back to pre-2020 levels, Jose Altuve demonstrated he was far from done, and Carlos Correa had his healthiest season in a long time. With the lineup rocking the house, the pitching staff just had to avoid being terrible to make the Astros one of the AL West favorites. They did far better than that. One raw arm, Framber Valdez, officially shed the “raw” descriptor by building on 2020’s improvements. Another, Luis Garcia, is one of the favorites to win the AL Rookie of the Year award (he would have been mine). Cristian Javier isn’t polished yet, but he performed well in various roles, and when he could locate his slider, it was scary.

What’s Next?
There’s still a lot of work to do. Correa is much harder to replace in-house than George Springer was. Greinke may be in his decline phase, but he also gave the Astros 171 good innings in 2021, something that is hard to replace. That’s doubly so if it turns out that McCullers’ injury does end up costing him time in 2022. The team does have some payroll room to work with — a little more if Aledmys Díaz or Rafael Montero are non-tendered — and the highly encouraging 2021 cameo from Jeremy Peña after returning from injury helps the shortstop situation. As solid a success as 2021 was in the pitching department, the team would be well-served to aggressively go get more this winter.

Player Projection Spotlight: Kyle Tucker

A ZiPS favorite for a long time — it had him pegged as a league-average outfielder as early as 2018 — Tucker built on his 2020 season, hitting .294/.359/.557 and finishing with just under 5 WAR. His solid plate discipline improved in the best way, as he became even more aggressive at swinging at pitches in the strike zone without suffering contact issues or reduced power. Only two players in the top 10 for zone swing percentage were also better-than-average at avoiding swings at out-of-zone pitches: Tucker and Freddie Freeman. Derek Fisher didn’t become a thing in Houston, but Tucker and Yordan Alvarez are building blocks for this franchise.

Seattle Mariners (90–72)

The Big Question
Did the Mariners have enough pieces they could put together to challenge the top of the division? Seattle’s roster looked a bit like one of those baskets from Chopped: a lot of intrigue, but it wasn’t obvious how the whole thing would work together without ending up as a nice frosty bowl of cod liver ice cream for dessert. The right side of the infield looked particularly problematic, with Evan White and Shed Long Jr. having miserable 2020s, but these were two players who required playing time, not 33-year-old journeymen you could simply replace without risking losing future contributions.

How It Went
It went pretty well, actually. A big assist came from the run differential, but considering this looked like a team that should have been happy to finish with a .500 record, Seattle has to be pleased with the final standings. Not ecstatic, as the M’s were eliminated from the playoff picture after losing two of three to the Angels in the final weekend, but the year ought to be considered a success. But neither White nor Long answered questions about them positively, and 2020 Rookie of the Year Kyle Lewis was done after May due to a knee injury.

Luckily for them, the Mariners received enough pleasant surprises elsewhere to make up for it. Mitch Haniger hit just as well as he did before his long string of injuries, and Chris Flexen’s solid season will likely have even more teams looking to Korea for rotation help.

What’s Next?
The Mariners won 90 games rather than the 76 implied by their run differential, and while mean statheads aren’t taking those off the scoreboard, there’s literally almost no correlation in baseball history for teams outperforming run differential one season and then doing it the following year. The magic didn’t carry over in 2019 or ’10, and it’s unlikely it’ll do so in ’22.

Another troubling thing is that Seattle’s success in 2022 was derived mainly from older players. In addition to the young players mentioned above, Jarred Kelenic struggled in his debut, Taylor Trammell lost his starting job in a month, and Justus Sheffield struggled with injuries and command. Logan Gilbert was solid, but he was an exception. Paradoxically, though, that gives Seattle some additional upside here. Most of those players are young enough to turn things around, so the Mariners could easily draw their flush with some breakouts that help compensate for a more normal Pythagorean record. Helping matters is that it looks like president of baseball ops Jerry Dipoto appears to have the ability to add payroll this winter.

Player Projection Spotlight: Jarred Kelenic

I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t have some worries about Kelenic, but they ought to be milder than his performance in the majors suggests. Where you should really panic are those cases when a player fails to hit in the majors and then goes back and continues to struggle against minor league pitching. That wasn’t the case for him; he hit pretty well for Tacoma, and when you combine his major league line and minor league translation, ZiPS sees his 2021 as a .215/.293/.403 line. That’s not good, mind you, but it’s less of a disaster, and similar to his translation from 2019 of .226/.281/.411.

It’s troubling if Kelenic’s not better at 21 than at 19, but he’s still very young, and the loss of the 2020 season prevented him from going through trials by fire as he moved up the ladder, each rung featuring pitchers more able to adjust to hitters than the one before. I still think Seattle made a mistake not getting him playing time that year.

Oakland Athletics (86–76)

The Big Question
Could the A’s continue to find enough free or cheap talent to remain relevant given the thinning out of their farm system? After ranking in the middle of the pack prospect-wise entering the 2019 season, they steadily dropped in the rankings over the next two seasons. By 2021, they had sunk to 28th, ahead of just the Rockies and Nationals. And that wasn’t solely due to graduations to Oakland’s roster, which were basically just Jesús Luzardo and Sean Murphy. Coming off a year in which there was no minor league season, which made it trickier to string the fishing pole with waiver wire than usual, some good news on this front would be a pretty big deal.

How It Went
The results here were mixed. Luzardo, rather than developing into the ace the team hoped for, struggled with his command far more than in 2020, and by the end of the season, the Lizard King was a Marlin, traded for Starling Marte. But Sean Manaea was healthy and effective, as was James Kaprielian. The cobbling together of the roster mostly worked yet again, from Cole Irvin being picked up very cheaply and being a solid innings-eater to a lineup that hardly disappointed, except for Matt Chapman (at least offensively). Less successful was the bullpen, which combined for just 1.5 WAR, better than only a single Oakland relief corps over the last two decades. As such, the A’s were that rare team that actually saw their use of relievers drop relative to recent seasons while the four-inning and five-inning specials became more common league-wide.

What’s Next?
It’s likely that another round of cost-cutting is about to wallop Oakland. The A’s already let Bob Melvin, manager for the last 11 seasons, go to the Padres without any compensation just months after extending his deal for another year. That saved them $4 million, and unless they change their philosophy, there’s likely to be more soon. Manaea and Chris Bassitt, keys to the rotation this year, are both entering their final year of salary arbitration, and Chapman, Matt Olson, and Frankie Montas are all free agents after 2023. These are a lot of losses to replace simply by being clever with underappreciated Triple-A talent; the Rays do this, but their farm system churning out pitcher after pitcher has been key to them punching above their weight in the AL East.

Without replacing anyone they’re losing this year or have already lost, the A’s already have to make significant cuts to the payroll to get them back down to last year’s payroll. No sense in not playing pauper now, I guess, before they’ve squeezed a fancy new stadium out of the city to replace WhateverIt’sCalledThisYear Coliseum.

Player Projection Spotlight: Matt Chapman

A .210/.314/.403 line is decidedly unimpressive, but the good thing about Chapman is that his glove is so good that to be a drag, his offense has to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. The A’s may have to be satisfied with a rebound that features a low batting average, as his drop-off in play isn’t fueled by a freakishly low BABIP. His contact numbers really have gotten worse, as he’s become far more vulnerable to breaking pitches than he used to be. The dropoff across the board in exit velocity is a concern, but ZiPS still sees Chapman as young enough that this isn’t fatal — yet.

Los Angeles Angels (77–85)

The Big Question
Could the Angels build some semblance of an adequate team around Mike Trout? That’s been the question for the last decade, but one they need to answer affirmatively given how valuable their franchise player has been. That they haven’t done so successfully — they last made the playoffs in 2014 and last had a winning record in ’15 — is an organizational disaster; all they’ve gotten from the peak of the best player they’ve ever had is an ALDS sweep and a parade of bland 75–80 win seasons.

How It Went
Like the reboot of a movie franchise, the old superstar was injured, but a new superstar rose from his ashes in Shohei Ohtani. Now, he’s been a contributor before, but this was the first season we got to see that glittering promise of what happens if a player is a full-time star pitcher and a full-time star hitter simultaneously. Babe Ruth did both, but consecutively rather than at the same time, and Wes Ferrell only received scattered playing time when he wasn’t pitching. And yet the Angels once again generally stunk around their big star.

What’s Next?
The challenge remains the same. Now, the Angels can hope to have both Ohtani and Trout on the roster for the entire 2022 season, but even both of them might not be enough given the roster around them. Adding another six wins to the 2021 squad doesn’t get the Angels to the playoffs, and you can’t expect that kind of magical season to be Ohtani’s baseline, so a few of those wins, at least, are coming back off the tally. Meanwhile, Trout turned 30 in August and is no longer as durable as he once was.

If the Angels — or more accurately, ownership — have any sense, they will be among the most prominent players for free-agent talent this winter. The Albert Pujols contract is no longer available as an excuse, and Justin Upton’s $28 million disappears from the books in another year. After Trout and Anthony Rendon (also someone who is hopefully healthier for 2022), there are no gigantic long-term commitments once Upton is gone, aside from the obvious need to extend Ohtani, unsigned past 2023. Los Angeles has some good secondary talent on the offense, but there are a lot of needs on the pitching side of the equation. Steamer only sees two average starting pitchers and a thin bullpen, and while ZiPS isn’t official yet, it’s not any more optimistic (and arguably is even less so). It’s an exciting challenge for GM Perry Minasian, but only if he’s given free rein by owner Arte Moreno.

Player Projection Spotlight: David Fletcher

Fletcher has never been a star, but he’s a lot of fun as a throwback to an older style of hitter — no power, high contact — that is seen far less often in the modern game. After all, who wants to lose a fantastic term like “punch and judy” to the aether? He remained as good at connecting with the ball as he usually was, but he perhaps took it too a little too far in 2021. In the past, he had been very selective at the plate, but he started swinging at a lot more pitches of all types this year. Unfortunately, the decline in his discriminating taste largely led to worse outcomes when he actually hit the ball. Nobody would confuse Fletcher’s power with Javier Báez’s, but his average exit velocity of 82.3 mph was below that of the average pitcher at the plate (83.2).

In the end, Fletcher lost 44 points of isolated power from 2020 and saw his walk rate cut nearly in half, and that was not compensated with comparable increases in batting average. I’m actually more optimistic than ZiPS is here, as I see his 2021 issues stemming not from a lack of ability but from leveraging that ability in a way that utilizes it to the fullest. You can fix an approach better than you can fix a lack of talent.

Texas Rangers (60–102)

The Big Question
Unfortunately, the biggest question for the Rangers — just how long a full-scale rebuild would have to be — was one that could not possibly have been answered in 2021. Their attempted quick retool to coincide with the opening of the new stadium failed miserably, resulting in the need to start from scratch. And with the cupboard nearly empty of major league talent and a farm system that was still only middle of the pack, Texas’ goal in 2021 was simply to remain moderately interesting for the fans as the front office addressed some serious long-term problems.

How It Went
Texas assembled a reasonably competent bullpen, but one made up of journeymen and veterans rather than the farm paying out dividends. Neither Jordan Lyles nor Mike Foltynewicz showed enough life to fetch a return in a trade this summer, but Texas was able to turn Kyle Gibson into Spencer Howard once the Phillies grew desperate for pitching. Adolis García filled the fun side of the equation by hitting 31 homers and driving in 90 runs, but he’s already older than Joey Gallo, rather one-dimensional, and more likely to fill Renato Núñez’s role with the Orioles a few years ago rather than be someone who is one the roster three or four years from now. Nathaniel Lowe showed life at times, but not so much that he’s obviously the long-term answer at first base. Willie Calhoun still hasn’t shown he can actually hit in the majors, and Nick Solak remained as inconsistent as he was in 2020.

What’s Next?
The biggest concern about the Rangers — and the same one that has hindered Baltimore’s rebuild — is how few answers they got about their young hitting. No position players on the major league roster took the type of step forward to make you say, “OK, now that is a franchise guy.” Outside of Josh Jung, Yohel Pozo, and Justin Foscue, there are scant few hitters in the system I feel better about now than I did in March. That doesn’t mean the rebuild is a failure, but it means that the Rangers still are very, very early in that sorting-out process; little so far has stuck to the wall. At this point, Texas needs to hoard young talent like it was premium toilet paper in March 2020 and hope for the best.

Player Projection Spotlight: Dane Dunning

It wasn’t quite the season for Dunning that Texas hoped for after his triumphant return from Tommy John surgery for the White Sox in 2020. He missed time due to injury, but at least it was an ankle problem this time around rather than a scarier elbow or shoulder issue. ZiPS sees him as a good bit better than his 2021 ERA and doesn’t think that he “earned” his poor .338 BABIP based on his play-by-play data.

The next step is to stay healthy for 150 innings or so, which would be good news for a franchise that has suffered from a woeful lack of it lately. I think the key for Dunning to take the next step is better consistency from his changeup; his sinker is impressive, but it’s more the vertical type rather than one with the notable fade of Morton’s or Blake Treinen’s, and it could be a consistent tool against lefties. Please, no sinker versus two-seamer wars in the comments!

After a one-year hiatus due to the oddity and non-celebratory feeling of a season truncated by a raging pandemic, we’re bringing back the Elegy series in a streamlined format for a 2021 wrap-up. Think of this as a quick winter preview for each team, discussing the questions that faced each team ahead of the year, how they were answered, and what’s next. Do you like or hate the new format? Let me know in the comments below. We’ve already tackled the AL and NL Central, as well as the AL East. Today, we’ll consider the NL West.

San Francisco Giants (107-55)

The Big Question
Could a low-key winter get the Giants on pace with the Dodgers and Padres? 2020 was the fourth consecutive losing season for San Francisco, and the division’s two best teams were extremely active in the offseason. It wasn’t the kind of doom and gloom it appeared to be for the Rockies and Diamondbacks, both of which ZiPS pegged for under 70 wins, but the Giants’ offseason seemed like it was geared more towards enjoyable respectability than elite status. The offense was solid in 2020 as new manager Gabe Kapler showed a real knack for using the expanded rosters to weaponize role-player talent, but it was also the oldest lineup in baseball. I was personally optimistic about the team’s reconstructed rotation, but there were a lot of moving parts to get the offense and pitching both clicking.

How It Went
Suffice it to say, it went really well, with the Giants outperforming ZiPS by more wins than any other team in the history of the projections. Outperforming projections by more than 30 wins is a rare feat, and the Giants did in the most difficult way, like climbing Mt. Everest in a pair of gym shorts and a tank top. Generally speaking, the teams that crush expectations have a lot of high-variance players, often extremely young talent with upside but an uncertain short-term outlook or guys with an injury history. But this wasn’t the case with the Giants; a bunch of 30-to-35-year-old veterans are the easiest type of player to project. Of the 20 teams that outperformed their ZiPS by the most wins (going back to 2005), the Giants were the only team that ZiPS had with tighter projection bands than the average team.

While there was one colossal breakout season from a young player (more below), San Francisco’s astounding 2021 season was built on shocking seasons from established veterans coupled with a solid bullpen built on a shoestring budget, a feat California teams all seem to have an odd affinity for managing. Brandon Crawford had his best season at age 34. Buster Posey and Evan Longoria thought it was 2012 or 2013. Darin Ruf, a journeyman role player who looked to be wrapping up his career in Korea, had a 143 OPS+. Read the rest of this entry »