On Wednesday, I tackled my picks for 2021’s breakout hitters, so now it’s time to look at the pitchers who feel like good bets to reach a new level of performance this season. Pitchers are inherently volatile creatures, so while there’s the potential for looking smart, there’s ample opportunity to end up sitting in the analytical dunce corner with that pointy hat that I’m not sure was actually ever a real thing. Let’s get straight into the names!

Jordan Montgomery, New York Yankees

The Yankees were cautious with Montgomery in 2020, a smart thing to do for a pitcher who was returning from Tommy John surgery in a season in which every good team made the playoffs. The 5.11 ERA in his 10 starts wasn’t impressive, but many of the underlying numbers were. A .320 BABIP meant that his FIP was a much sunnier 3.87, but the good stuff doesn’t end there. Compared to his promising rookie season of 2017, Montgomery walked fewer batters, struck out more, and induced more soft contact. A lot of soft contact, actually; Monty’s average exit velocity of 84.6 mph was the third-lowest in baseball, behind Ryan Yarbrough and Max Fried. Not bad for a pitcher coming off two lost seasons! I don’t think it would be the nuttiest thing in the world if Montgomery ends up playing Andy Pettitte to Gerrit Cole’s Roger Clemens in 2021.

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12:02

Dan Szymborski: Welcome to Dan’s first ever chat using a Ryzen CPU!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I’m not sure, in what sense? As in an automatic tool? I don’t really use automatic tools in fantasy.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Should be next few days.

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One of my favorite yearly preseason pieces is also my most dreaded: the breakout list. I’ve been doing this exercise since 2014, and while I’ve had the occasional triumph (hello, Christian Yelich), the low-probability nature of trying to project who will beat expectations means that every time you look smart, you’re also bound to look dumb for some other reason. Looking back at last season’s breakout list, there were a number of selections I was happy with once the season ended — Eloy Jiménez, Dinelson Lamet, Dansby Swanson, Dylan Bundy — but then I remember Mitch Keller’s walkalicious 2020 and Victor Robles dropping 27 points of wRC+ and my cringe-sense starts to tingle. Since I’m doing separate lists of hitters and pitchers this year, let’s waste no more time with the opening spiel. To the hitters!

Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Toronto Blue Jays

Perhaps not the gutsiest call, but it feels to me like people have soured way too much on Vladito. A 112 wRC+ won’t win any Silver Sluggers, but we have to remember he was just 21 last season. Let’s imagine that Guerrero Jr. wasn’t part of the imperial-Vlad bloodline and was just a guy in Triple-A in 2020 (in an alternate universe where the minor league season existed). If we translate Guerrero’s actual major league performance into a Triple-A Buffalo line, ZiPS estimates that he would’ve been hitting .288/.370/.526 as a 21-year-old in the International League. Would anyone be disappointed with this line? There would be cries of Free Vlad! echoing through the streets by June. I think players like Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr. have spoiled us for normal awesome prospects.

While I don’t usually fall for the whole “best shape of his life” stories in spring, I think I’ve fallen for it this time. Guerrero was carrying a lot of weight for a 21-year-old; I weighed less at 21, and my main aerobic exercise was hauling cases of beer into my house. He dropped a lot of weight this winter, so I take this one more seriously than the usual stories, which involve a guy losing 10 pounds or having some secret abs that people gush about.

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The Royals and corner infielder Hunter Dozier agreed to terms over the weekend on a four-year contract that guarantees him $25 million along with a fifth-year option that could bring the total value to $35 million. The deal starts immediately, tearing up the one-year deal worth $2.72 million that was signed back in December in order to avoid an arbitration hearing.

Dozier’s deal buys out at least two years of free agency (and possibly three). It would be a mistake to think of this in the same kinds of terms as other players with two or three years of service time signing similar contracts: Dozier is not young, nor is he a budding star. It may feel like he’s young given his short history in the majors, but he’ll also be 30 by the end of the 2021 season, which saps his long-term value. Let’s start with the five-year projection for Dozier, with an important caveat that we’ll talk about below.

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By the time Dustin Pedroia officially announced his retirement early this month, it was already apparent that he’d never return to the Red Sox as a full-time player. One of the last active members of the 2007 championship team — Jon Lester is still kicking around, and I don’t believe Clay Buchholz has officially retired — his run ended prematurely thanks to the consequences of a 2017 knee injury. This was no random injury, either; it was the result of a collision at second with Manny Machado buckling Pedroia’s knee on a high-spikes slide. This wasn’t Machado’s first (or last) questionable slide as a baserunner, but the results here were worse than they looked initially. Pedroia played through pain for the rest of the 2017 season, missing most of August with continued inflammation, then had a procedure after the 2017 season to restore missing cartilage to his knee.

At the time, the belief was that Pedroia would be able to return in 2018, though not likely at the start of the season. Instead, he only totaled nine more games in what ended up being the rest of his career, with continual cycles of the knee feeling better followed by significant setbacks. More operations were required, and while he theoretically could have returned in 2020, he never got anywhere near returning to the field, and after the Red Sox agreed to pay him his full 2021 salary, he walked off into the sunset.

My colleague Brendan Gawlowski has already covered Pedroia’s retirement and what he meant to Red Sox fans and to baseball as a whole. Here, I’m using the ZiPS time machine once again to take a look at the bittersweet what-ifs.

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12:03

Dan Szymborski: It is a chat.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: No idea where, but I imagine we’re now at the verge of looking at 1 year deals, probably under $10 million

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I use unsupervised learning in awards model and my still experimental Hall model, but I mostly use more traditional techniques with ZiPS itself.

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In the weirdest year of baseball history so far, 2020 featured a gigantic playoff field introduced right as the season began, turning a 10-team postseason into a 16-team format. Changing the basic structure of awarding the sport’s championship with no advance notice would have been an odd choice in a normal season. But given the 102-game reduction in the league’s schedule and its resulting small sample size season, it kind of made sense. When the decision was made, it wasn’t a surety that there would even be a season, to the point that people would have been happy if extra-inning games were decided by closers riding ostriches and jousting.

Before the World Series was even completed, commissioner Rob Manfred expressed the league’s desire to keep the new format in a normal season. The players need to agree to changes like this, of course, and that permission wasn’t granted after all MLB offered in exchange was a universal designated hitter. One of the concerns, not officially made public, is that a playoff system that is more of crapshoot will further reduce the already eroded incentives for teams to spend money to improve their rosters. That’s hardly a shock; at the 2020 trade deadline, 10 teams already had projected playoff probabilities above 97%. Combine that with the absence of the normal advantages afforded to higher seeds, and you had a trade deadline that saw only a single team, the San Diego Padres, aggressively improve, and even their moves were almost certainly made with an eye toward 2021 and beyond.

So what is the ideal playoff system? That’s a difficult question, one that’s impossible to answer to everyone’s satisfaction. I can only answer for myself, and for me, there are a few requirements that are particularly important. Basically, I want a system in which regular-season performance matters, thus maintaining one of the core aspects of the game. I also want a playoff system that more heavily awards quality over randomness without making the result a preordained one. The more a championship is decided by randomness, the less incentive there is for teams to innovate and invest. Read the rest of this entry »

For the sixth year, ZiPS returns to crank out its top 100 prospects for the upcoming season. If you’re unaware of what the ZiPS projections are or the purpose they serve, please consult this article as well as this one while I reconsider my public relations strategy.

I like to think that I’ve developed a pretty useful tool over the years, but don’t get me wrong: a projection system is not even remotely a substitute for proper scouting. While ZiPS and other systems like it can see patterns in the data that are hard for humans to extract, humans have their own special tricks. Projecting prospects is hard, as you’re mostly dealing with very young players, some of whom aren’t even done physically developing. They play baseball against inconsistent competition and have much shorter resumés than established major leaguers.

That last bit is an especially tricky puzzle for 2021. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t have a minor league season. Some prospects were left to train at home, while others saw time at their team’s alternate site or in Fall Instructional League. But those environments can’t replace live opponents who are trying to crush your hopes and dreams, and they didn’t generate much in the way of useful statistics.

You will also notice, as usual, that there are a few players who appeared on Eric Longenhagen’s Top 100 who are missing here, simply because they have only played in high school and no professional games. It’s not that ZiPS dislikes them or doubts their future, it’s just that the system doesn’t have anything useful to say. ZiPS has the capability to use college stats when it has little choice — which is why you’ll see Spencer Torkelson and Austin Martin appear — but there’s just nothing for ZiPS to work with when we’re talking about someone like Jasson Dominguez. Read the rest of this entry »

This week may be Prospects Week here at FanGraphs, but for MLB, this has been Minor Signings Week. The long offseason dance is just about over, and everyone’s now at risk of going to homecoming alone. So rather than a long spiel that sees me reference a historical battle or obscure 18th-century literature, let’s get straight to the moves.

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The A’s continued to stockpile relievers over the weekend, signing free agents Yusmeiro Petit and Sergio Romo to one-year contracts, both for a little over $2 million for the 2021 season.

Petit is a familiar face in Oakland and will likely play a similar role as he has since 2018: pitching mostly mid-leverage innings, mainly in the sixth through eighth innings. He was rarely used for longer than an inning in 2020; the odd shape of the season and the more expansive roster made this less desirable and less necessary. Still, in the past, he’s been one of the closest players to the old long reliever archetype that has largely faded out of baseball.

Among active pitchers, only Stammen has made more two-inning relief appearances. Compared to history, though, 106 appearances only gets Petit into a tie for 323rd all-time, behind the relief stars primarily from the 1960s, 70s and 80s who dominated this usage.

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