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.

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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

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Miguel Cabrera became the 28th member of the 500 homer club last Sunday with a solo shot off Toronto’s Steven Matz. Approaching 40 and about five years removed from being one of baseball’s most feared sluggers, his 500th homer looks to be one of the last big highlights on his résumé; his 3,000th hit is coming as well, but he’s running out of calendar on that one, and it’s likely he’ll end 2021 about 20 or so hits shy of joining that exclusive society.

For a long time, Cabrera looked as if he had a chance to hit 600 or more homers. He had the 12th-most before his age-30 season, bopping 321 through his 20s, with the last ones coming in his Triple Crown season of 2012. But while his 30s got off to a roaring start with 44 homers added to the tally in 2013, it’s taken him nearly eight more seasons to add another 136 to his line — a rather paltry 17 per year — thanks to a combination of injuries and slowing bat speed.

Hitting 600 homers now looks out of reach for Cabrera, who could theoretically remain a Tiger for at least four more seasons, though that would require a shocking reversal of fortune for Detroit to pick up the option years of 2024 and ’25 that are unlikely to vest because of 2023 MVP votes. The most likely scenario is that he plays out the last two seasons and retires with an Old English D on his cap, followed by Hall of Fame induction five years later. While 500 homers may not be as impressive a feat as it once was, it’s still a viable path to Cooperstown; every eligible hitter who’s reached that mark is in the Hall unless they were connected credibly to the use of steroids. Albert Pujols won’t be the exception to that rule, and neither will Cabrera.

Either way, I hope you enjoyed this 500th home run, because it’s actually going to be a decent wait until we see another one. Baseball has an impressive stable of young phenoms, but being young phenoms, they don’t yet have impressive quantities on their career lines. Since Babe Ruth became the first 500-homer hitter in 1929, the average wait for a new member has been a scant 3.4 years. Despite the widespread belief that the relative ease of joining this club is a recent development, it’s actually been happening quite regularly since 1960. When Ted Williams hit his 500th, it had been 15 years since Mel Ott’s 500th. From Williams to the increase in league homer rate in the early 90s, the average wait was 2.7 years. Since then, the typical interregnum has dropped to 2.4 years, and since Eddie Murray in 1996, there hasn’t been a wait of more than five seasons.

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This series of articles looks at players whose careers are cut short due to misfortune, but few of them are cases as sudden or as dramatic as that of former Astros pitcher J.R. Richard, who died one week ago at age 70. The Houston fireballer had emerged as one of the game’s hardest throwing starters and a potential ace when he suffered a stroke 41 years ago and collapsed during the team’s pregame warmups. He never pitched in the majors again.

Richard’s debut was about as brilliant as one can get: a complete-game shutout of the Giants in September 1971 in which he struck out 15 batters. This was toward the end of Willie Mays‘ illustrious career, but how many pitchers can claim to have pulled off a hat trick of whiffs against an inner-circle Hall of Famer in their debut? Those 15 strikeouts tied pitcher Karl Spooner’s debut record; incidentally, Spooner is another player with a short career that was ended by a shoulder injury a year later, but that’s a tale for another time.

As a pitcher, Richard looks more at home in 2021 than in 1970. At 6’8″ with a fastball hitting the century mark and a slider in the low 90s, there was a lot of intimidation and little in the way of pitching to contact here. The only problem was that he was raw mechanically, just two years out of high school, and coaching staffs weren’t as experienced as today at helping pitchers harness such an explosive repertoire; over his 12 remaining innings that season, including a first inning he didn’t finish, Richard walked 13 batters.

The wildness never quite went away, and Richard spent the new few years riding the Triple-A shuttle. But the Astros traded Claude Osteen in 1974 for two recent Cardinals draft picks, and Don Wilson and his son died in January 1975 from carbon monoxide poisoning, and these were the days you couldn’t just go shopping in free agency. So up to the majors came Richard for good.

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The 2021 Los Angeles Dodgers might be having one of the greatest disappointing seasons in MLB history. Despite being on a 97-win pace, an accomplishment that nearly every team in baseball would celebrate most seasons, they find themselves in second place in the National League West, four games behind the surprising San Francisco Giants. They’re even underperforming their preseason expectations, a notable feat considering how rare it is for projection systems to forecast a team to have more than 97 wins.

One of the primary components of this terrific-but-underwhelming paradox is Cody Bellinger, 2019’s NL MVP. Just 24 at the end of the 2019 season and sporting an ultra-spicy .305/.406/.629, 7.8 WAR line, Bellinger was quite rightly considered one of the best young players in baseball. A slugging first baseman who somehow converted into being a solid center fielder, little seemed out of reach in those salad days. Yet just two years later, at the ripe old age of 26, Bellinger is currently a platoon player.

Entering the season, ZiPS projected Bellinger for a 133 wRC+, a notable bounce-back from the decidedly middling 114 wRC+ he posted in the shortened 2020 season. And ZiPS was actually the grumpy one here; the other projections housed here at FanGraphs pegged him for a wRC+ of anywhere from 141 to 148. The results haven’t been in the same galaxy as those forecasts, or even his 2020 results. Bellinger’s 65 wRC+ is a shining beacon of misery. To put this in context, Chris Davis put up a 63 wRC+ from 2017-20 and a 60 the last time he got significant playing time in 2019. You don’t want history to rhyme, let alone repeat, when the comparison is Davis.

Of course, one mitigating factor is that Bellinger has suffered a string of injuries over the last year. First, there was a dislocated shoulder while celebrating a World Series dinger. Then this season, he’s missed time with a hairline fracture in his left fibula and a hamstring strain. We’ve seen players struggle while coming back from shoulder injuries in the past, and his maladies this season haven’t allowed for much of a run. So case closed, he’ll be fine? Not really. Read the rest of this entry »

Just as the Joey Gallo trade ended an era of Rangers baseball, the Cubs’ flurry of moves at this year’s trade deadline closed the door on Chicago’s championship core. While Kyle Hendricks, Willson Contreras, and Jason Heyward still remain from the 2016 team, the trades of Javier Báez, Kris Bryant, and Anthony Rizzo send things out with an exclamation point rather than the Texas comma. Five games below .500 and with a much weakened roster, we now project Chicago to finish 74-88; the last time the franchise finished with a worse record was 2014.

In a very real way, the 2010s Cubs did accomplish one very important feat: they won a championship. While I don’t subscribe to the notion that a great run for a team must involve a title, I also have not yet been placed in the role of some brutal autarch who determines how the history books are written. The Cubs won the World Series, and the Rangers did not, and both teams will be remembered differently as a result.

Still, the way it ended leaves a curious dissatisfaction about the Cubs. The dizzying heights of 2016 faded quickly, and the subsequent single NLCS appearance and pair of wild card losses were not the stuff of legend. The sudden turning-off of the cash spigot didn’t help, either; after spending $217 million in free agency after the 2017 season, Chicago has spent a total of $21 million in the offseasons since, or roughly half what the Rays have paid out in that span. (The mid-June 2019 signing of Craig Kimbrel to a three-year, $43 million contract is one of the lone splurges.) In the end, the farm system and those low-key signings couldn’t make up for the attrition elsewhere, and the Cubs’ domination of the NL Central was a brief affair.

Before last winter, team president Jed Hoyer talked about the Cubs going into a retooling phase rather than a full teardown, which left me skeptical. But Chicago still has some advantages that suggest a return to playoff relevance might not be that far away.

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12:01

Dan Szymborski: The appointed time has arrived.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I think it’s just a bad run

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Dunno, grandmaster Szym would be better than actual Szym

12:03

Dan Szymborski: And I think all the good gambits have probably been discovered?

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It’s sad to say farewell to what I think was the best trade deadline in the years I’ve been covering baseball, but at least there’s still an autopsy to do! With the league moving to a single trade deadline after eliminating the August waiver-trade shenanigans, this was the last, best opportunity for teams to make changes as we head into the season’s closing chapters.

So who won, who lost, and who finished in the murky middle? To aid us in answering those questions, I ran two sets of ZiPS projections. First, I ran the projections as of Monday morning with each team’s post-deadline roster. Then I ran ZiPS again with today’s standings and current injuries, but having undone all the additions over the two weeks before the trade deadline (including differences in WAR between players). I then compared the pre- and post-deadline projections. Some differences surprised me. Others … did not. Read the rest of this entry »

This deadline had its share of earthquakes, but it also featured smaller aftershocks, as teams improved their depth or addressed smaller, specific needs. So let’s run down some of the deals that might get buried by the higher-Richter scale shakes of the likes of Max Scherzer and Kris Bryant.

The Houston Astros acquired pitcher Phil Maton and catcher Yainer Diaz from the Cleveland Guardians for center fielder Myles Straw

This trade is actually a slightly unusual one, as the team in the playoff shot — it’s not Cleveland — is the one giving up the best player. Straw’s offensive profile will likely prevent him from being an actual star at any point, but he’s fast, plays enough defense, and gets on-base at a respectable enough level to be an average or even better starter in center; he’s already hit the 2-WAR threshold, after all. UZR, our defensive input for WAR, has him at +6.6 runs, while OAA has him at +5 runs and DRS has him at +2. I don’t think I’d ever play him except in a pinch, but Straw’s theoretical ability to at least stand at second or short in an emergency has some additional value, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Some moves are made for getting a team to the playoffs or helping them win a fight for the division. But with the largest lead of any first-place team in baseball in a division where all the other teams are either treading water or selling, the White Sox could basically stick their roster on cruise control and maybe casually stop off and grab a sandwich. But even with the advantage that is the AL Central, they did make a trade on Friday, and it’s about one very specific thing: brutally destroying any hopes or dreams of late-inning comebacks for any playoff opponent who is behind in the late innings. By acquiring closer Craig Kimbrel from the Cubs for second baseman Nick Madrigal and pitcher Codi Heuer, they’ve done just that; pairing him with Liam Hendriks and the rest of what’s already a good bullpen is as frightening as any slasher-movie antagonist.

Kimbrel is having his best season in a long time, with a microscopic 0.72 ERA, 1.08 FIP, and 64 strikeouts in 36 2/3 innings to go with his lowest walk rate since 2017. Given his poor first two seasons with the Cubs that were full of both command issues and injury setbacks, some may worry about a possible pumpkinification for the 33-year-old righty. I’m not. ZiPS and the other projection systems all saw quite a bit to like even in Kimbrel’s pedigree, enough to consider him at least an adequate reliever coming into 2021. And there’s little whiff of a fluke in this season’s stats; with a rebounding first-strike rate and batters having their least effective contact year ever, ZiPS thinks that his strikeout and walk rates are right in line with how well he’s actually pitched.

Kimbrel is succeeding the way he did in the old days: a blazing fastball and a knuckle-curve located where batters both have trouble keeping the bat on their shoulders and actually hitting it. Unlike a nasty slider where the goal is to make the batter look foolish on a pitch that is a zip code away, Kimbrel’s knuckle-curve needs to be a borderline pitch. When he can’t spot it, it’s ineffective, as it was in 2019 and ’20. This year, he’s got the heat map of olden days.

Does adding Kimbrel give the White Sox the best bullpen in baseball? ZiPS thinks so, and when our depth charts are fully updated, I suspect they’ll show up at the top there as well. That could be the case next season, too, as Kimbrel is not a pure rental for the White Sox unless they want it to be. With a $16 million option and a $1 million buyout for 2022, it’s basically a one-year, $15 million decision. The White Sox certainly have the ability to pay that should they end up happy with this signing.

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