12:03

Dan Szymborski: And happy Thursday!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: The last 9/16/21 of your lifetime.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Dank Frank Schwindel or Dank Dizzy?

12:06

Dan Szymborski: No

Read the rest of this entry »

There were a lot of reasons Gleyber Torres was fascinating as a prospect. Most of them were based on his offensive potential, but if we turn back the clock four years, there was also hope that Torres would be an adequate enough shortstop that he wouldn’t necessarily need to move down the defensive spectrum (at least not right away) thanks to a strong arm that could compensate for other shortcomings. Both Eric Longehagen and Dan Farnsworth expressed that hope here at FanGraphs, though Eric wasn’t quite as bullish. The Yankees are perhaps the foremost experts in winning lots of games with a defensively unimpressive shortstop who more than makes up for it with fantastic offensive contributions; the height of that ideal, of course, is recently-inducted Hall of Famer Derek Jeter.

Torres had mostly played second base in his rookie campaign, with mixed results, but when incumbent shortstop Didi Gregorius underwent Tommy John surgery, the Yankees had an opportunity to give him an extended look at the position. That seemed to pay off. At -5 runs per 150 by UZR and -6/150 by DRS and OAA, Torres wasn’t a great shortstop by any stretch, but he wasn’t in “let’s see how Todd Hundley does in the outfield” territory, either. Plus, hitting .278/.337/.535 with 38 homers at age 22 has a nice way of neutralizing concerns about mediocre defense.

The wheels came off that particular apple cart last season. He played poor defense, and while he still got on base, his power completely disappeared. All told, Torres hit just three homers in the abbreviated 2020 campaign, and his isolated power dropped in half, from .256 to .125. Last season was a weird year for obvious reasons, but Torres hasn’t bounced back at all in a more normal one, hitting .249/.320/.349 through Monday’s games. At this level of offense, it gets much harder to carry a defensively unimpressive shortstop. In 151 combined games in 2020 and ’21, basically a full season, Torres’ numbers at short have been -6 runs by UZR, -7 by OAA, and an extremely troubling -21 in DRS. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, my colleague Kevin Goldstein shared his experience of scouting José Abreu back in 2013 as a member of Houston’s front office. Kevin suggested that if Abreu had been able to play his entire career in the majors, I would be writing pieces about the slugger’s chances of reaching even bigger milestones. And since I probably would be, why not actually do that?

Abreu’s not the first player whose success in a foreign league and long enough career in MLB have compelled us to ask what if? Ichiro Suzuki is another such player, and in 2016, I ran his NPB translations alongside his actual major league statistics. I’ve since added his final MLB numbers to this chart:

The translations bring him tantalizingly close to Ty Cobb and Pete Rose, giving us an even better understanding of his abilities over his full career. Joining the 4,000-hit club is cool and all, but Ichiro aged so well and continued to play for so long that you don’t really need his NPB career to give him a Cooperstown case. Abreu’s a different story. Unless he proves to be as amazingly durable as Ichiro did and cranks out another six or seven years of 30-plus homers, he’s not going to hit the important thresholds for home run hitters when it comes to Hall voting. ZiPS projects a fairly normal decline path for a mid-30s slugger:

Eighty-nine additional homers (85 in those projections and four more in 2021) get Abreu to 316 MLB home runs, and I don’t think that quite does it, leaving him in the mythical Hall of Very Good along with sluggers like Joe Adcock and Torii Hunter. But what if? We have Abreu’s stats from his time in Cuba and a history of players who have gone from Cuba to other professional leagues, so we can at least estimate what his performance would have looked like in the majors:

Even with the Serie Nacional de Béisbol playing just over half the games per season as MLB when Abreu was playing there and some pretty steep adjustment factors, the translations still add another 117 homers to the tally. While this is speculative, it feels right for Abreu, given that he basically played at the level of his final Cuban two-year average in the US. His projections at that point look like a typical Abreu season:

Abreu has actually been a little better than ZiPS expected, so it’s hard to say the translations overrate him. ZiPS had him at 24.3 WAR through 2021, which is pretty darned close to the 23.1 he is at now (and ZiPS didn’t know about COVID in 2014!):

Combined, while I’m still not sure I’d vote for José Abreu for the Hall — his is a career that looks like Jim Rice’s, who also a very borderline candidate for me — it’s a case I’d have to seriously consider before not ticking the box next his name. With an excellent reputation both generally and for mentoring other Cuban players specifically, and with no suspensions for PEDs hanging over his head, I think this version of Abreu gets into the Hall of Fame.

Along those same lines, we talked a bit about Yuli Gurriel on our Twitch watch-along of last week’s Mariners-Astros game. Gurriel didn’t even get the advantage of playing his late 20s in the majors; Abreu was in his sixth season of MLB play at the same age Yuli debuted with the Astros. He’s proven to be amazingly resilient to the vagaries of aging, showing little indication of decline, and at 37, Gurriel is arguably having his best season in the majors, hitting .315/.385/.467 in 125 games for 3.3 WAR. ZiPS has regularly been low on his projection for the simple reason that the computer doesn’t understand why the fourth dimension doesn’t apply to him!

Given that we know he could play in MLB, and that he was already a legend in Cuba by the time he came to the US, it makes sense to give his Cuban numbers the same treatment. With his translations, ZiPS projects another 317 hits from Gurriel, putting him at 1,028 hits starting at age 32:

Even with the huge hit in the numbers from a translation, Gurriel still ends up with just under 2,500 hits despite never getting to a play in a 100-game season until he was in his 30s.

This kind of exercise brings up some philosophical issues with our conception of the Hall of Fame. We wouldn’t put Mark Prior in Cooperstown for projections, but projections and translations aren’t really the same thing. Translations just try to adjust for context, no different than park-adjusting or league-adjusting stats, even though the calculations are trickier. A career projection for Prior involves giving him credit for seasons he never played, but Abreu and Gurriel actually played those years of baseball; through little fault of their own, that play just happened to be in leagues that MLB does not consider to be major leagues.

But when you examine MLB’s history, what constitutes a major league is quite gray, especially in the early years. While we can say that today’s Triple-A leagues are not the majors, I’d argue that from a competitive standpoint, 19th-century baseball didn’t consist of major leagues either, a state of affairs even perhaps stretching into the 1910s and ’20s. The standard deviations of numbers for starters around the league didn’t start to resemble those of modern baseball until the mid-1920s (you expect more competitive leagues to have tighter spreads of ability than less competitive leagues do). And even if we say “No, the American League from 1901 and the National League before that are still major leagues,” MLB gives credit for stats from the Players League, the Union League, and the Federal League, all extremely uneven leagues, with the first two also being very unstable (as was the early American League).

If we have a good faith basis to believe that Yuli Gurriel and José Abreu didn’t suddenly become awesome baseball players the minute they were able to play in the US, why should the performances that pre-date their debuts here be summarily ignored when bestowing baseball’s highest honor? I’m not sure either Gurriel or Abreu have the career numbers to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but let’s make sure we’re considering all the times they played this grand game. It’s messy to estimate what could have been, but just because answering a question is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

In one of the oddest twists of the season, the Atlanta Braves have seen their playoff odds skyrocket after losing one of the league’s best players, Ronald Acuña Jr., to a torn ACL that prematurely ended his 2021 season. Now up to 81.9% odds of making the postseason from a low of a 7% chance — the 2019 Nationals never dipped under 22% in our projections — the Braves seem much more likely to be successful than not. And regardless of whether the season ends on a positive note, all of Atlanta’s key contributors are under team control in 2022 with one exception. But that exception is quite notable: 2020 National League MVP Freddie Freeman.

The general assumption around baseball — one that I also hold — has been that Freeman will of course be back with the Braves in 2022. After 12 seasons in Atlanta, during which Freeman was quite purposefully kept as the face of the team even while the Braves were aggressively rebuilding several years ago, seeing him in another uniform would just seem odd, almost on par with seeing Derek Jeter in Dodger Blue or Cal Ripken Jr. in green and gold. But the fates don’t care about looking bizarre, and the fact remains is that we’re entering mid-September, and player and team have yet come to an agreement on a contract extension. Jon Heyman reported on Thursday that there was still a gap between Freeman and the Braves:

Freddie Freeman and Braves have been talking but there’s still a gap so free agency appears a surprisingly strong possibility. Both sides want to get it done and that’s the likelihood eventually. Reminiscent of Turner/LAD and HOF Jeter/NYY talks, great FA who stayed. @MLBNetwork

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) September 9, 2021

Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And the chat has started, at the promised time!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Development isn’t always a neat little line!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Though 2022 seems like a good bet.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Sure, let me run this while I answer a few more questions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks before the trade deadline, I shared a depressing series of projections for the Mets based on Jacob deGrom’s health. The team’s ace, who spent much of the early going making a run at Bob Gibson’s modern ERA record, had been sidelined by forearm pain and tightness, though he was reportedly returning soon. Still, you never know with either pitcher injuries or the Mets, so I decided to run some numbers on what New York’s fortunes would look like with either minimal or no deGrom. The results were … less than reassuring for the folks in Queens.

Me: ZiPS, without knowing precisely what deGrom's outlook is, would you say it's time for Mets fans to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?

ZiPS: Yes I would, Dan. pic.twitter.com/teimAJsmak

— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) July 18, 2021

The “worst-case scenario” had the Mets retaining a 37% shot of making the playoffs; that turned out to be excessively sunny. A team that once held a 55–48 record and a four-game lead in the NL East as July turned to August is now in tatters, with a 14-21 record since then and trailing both Atlanta and Philadelphia in the division. As for deGrom, he had a setback not long after the deadline and still hasn’t returned to the active roster (and may not return at all this season). As of Tuesday morning, New York’s chances are down to 6.8% in our projected standings, and ZiPS is barely more bullish at 7.1%. The Mets don’t need much to go wrong to end up playing golf in October.

Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Hits too close to home!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Morninternoon everyone!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: A few minutes late, I was grabbing Wander Franco comps.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Reyes is up there, but so are a number of the triple guys – Vaughan, Lazzeri, Frisch, Furcal, Fernandez

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, rookie sensation Wander Franco extended his streak of getting on-base at least once to an impressive 31 games. There’s still quite a ways to go before you make the shade of Ted Williams wonder if his 84-game (!) streak is in jeopardy, but it’s a mighty impressive feat for a 20-year-old.

That said, Franco is no ordinary rookie. As much a consensus No. 1 prospect as anyone I can ever remember, he didn’t exactly sneak up on anyone who was paying attention; his 80 Future Value grade — a first on our prospect lists — wasn’t something given out recklessly. At 18, an age at which minor league prospects are just getting started in the “real” professional leagues, he was already terrorizing the full-season Florida State League, hitting .339/.408/.464. That would be great for a first base prospect; for a young shortstop, it’s astounding.

Despite losing a key developmental season in 2020, Franco didn’t need much time to get going. Skipped right to Triple-A this year, he hit .315/.367/.586 for the Durham Bulls and was called up six weeks later. Outside of a home run in his very first game, the first week or two was an adjustment period; through 14 games, his line stood at .211/.274/.351 with 13 strikeouts in 57 at-bats against five walks. But since starting his on-base streak, he’s hit .314/.385/.504, also with 13 strikeouts but in 121 ABs.

Every streak has some element of good fortune, but in Franco’s running plate discipline numbers, you can almost see him adjusting to pitchers. And those numbers tend to be “stickier” than most other offensive numbers; short-term changes in results are more likely to be real compared to, say, batting average.

After his first two weeks in the majors, Franco’s contact rate increased despite him simultaneously swinging at more pitches. As pitchers in recent weeks have started throwing fewer strikes against him, that swing rate has responded accordingly, but his rate of contact has continued to rise. His performance during the streak isn’t exactly a galaxy away from his ZiPS minor league translation of .291/.335/.503 at Durham; combine that with the real improvements in plate discipline, and you can make a good argument that we’re seeing the bonafide Wander Franco in these waning days of summer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in March, all we had to look at for the 2021 season was projection; we’re now on the cusp of September, with just over 80% of the games already played. To the consternation of a percentage of fans, projections on sites like this one look unreasonably grumpy to teams like the Giants, who have played above their projections in 2021. It’s undeniable that they have been off for teams, which is something you should expect. But are these computers actually wrong when predicting middling play from these high-achieving surprises going forward?

The Giants, in particular, have already outperformed their original preseason projections by somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 wins. With a month to go in the season, it wouldn’t be a total surprise if San Francisco ended up with 25 more wins than the predictions. Yet our assembled projections only list the Giants with an expected roster strength of .512 over the rest of the season. Using ZiPS alone is sunnier but also well off the team’s seasonal pace through the end of August.

Yes, ZiPS projects the Giants as the slight favorite to win the NL West now, but that doesn’t take a lot of mathematical courage given that they’re already in first place with most of the season done. With the help of a little math, you can see that the computer projects San Francisco to go just 16–16 the rest of the season; to be more precise, ZiPS thinks the Giants have a roster strength that indicates a .521 winning percentage with their average opponent for the rest of the season having a .520 roster strength, resulting in a mean projection around the .500 mark. That’s up quite a bit from the preseason, when ZiPS thought the Giants were a .467 team with a .502 schedule, ending up with a 75–87 preseason estimate. But it almost feels a bit disrespectful to the team leading the league in wins for most of the season.

So why are projections so grumpy? In a nutshell, it’s because they’re assembled based on empirical looks at what baseball’s history tells us, not (hopefully) the aesthetic valuations of the developer. And in the baseball history we have, seasonal projections do not become this all-powerful crystal ball when it comes to projecting how the rest of the season goes.

Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: GAFTERNOON

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I think he’ll be OK. I have nothing to prove it, but he’s a guy who has had limited time in the upper minors before the majors, so he’s not quite there with the adjust-readjust cycle that’s necessary for long-term success

12:07

Dan Szymborski: I don’t usually use FV personally since I think that’s better for scouting, but I’m bullish on both of them now.

12:08

Dan Szymborski: Unless they changed parks and I missed it, NW Arkansas doesn’t play anywhere crazy that would explain Melendez and Pratto absolutely killing it this year

Read the rest of this entry »