We passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

I went through the American League on Wednesday, so now it’s the Senior Circuit’s turn.

The Mets only averaging 89 wins in the update might feel a bit disappointing, but that negative inclination is misplaced. ZiPS actually likes the team’s talent slightly more than it did in March, with the difference being that the injury situation has been worse than expected. Use the preseason playing time predictions with the up-to-date player projections, and ZiPS believes that New York would have a 93-win roster, good enough to be the third-best team in the National League.

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MLB passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

Let’s start with the American League standings.

I was making a “do not panic” argument on behalf of the Yankees back when they were 5–10 and some people were digging for their doomsday preparedness kits, and while it might not be time to find where you left those water purification tablets, the situation is bleaker now than it was three months ago. Not that the team is actually worse; New York has been on an 88-win pace in the games since that reference point. But an 88-win pace isn’t nearly enough to get out of an early-season hole in a division where there are three other teams with more than detectable pulses. Even projected to play solid baseball the rest of the season, the Yankees have gone from the favorite to the projected fourth-place team.

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Jose Altuve had the worst season of his career in 2020, hitting .219/.268/.344 in 48 games for the Astros for a 77 wRC+ and a near-replacement 0.2 WAR. It didn’t keep Houston from making the playoffs — albeit in a 16-team format with the Astros finishing below .500 — but his annus horribilis was one of the reasons the team dropped to 14th in the majors in runs scored, their worst showing since 2016. As a franchise cornerstone, the organization’s longest-tenured player, and the target of still-mysterious buzzer allegations, he naturally absorbed quite a lot of the heat generated by the sign-stealing scandal. To many, it was a case of just deserts, a cheater watching his legacy fade before his eyes. But reality cares not for made-for-TV storylines. In 2021, Altuve — and by extension the Astros — is having a great year.

A star falling off a cliff in their early 30s isn’t typical, but it does happen, and without any complications from getting caught stealing signs. One of the many cases that jumps out to me is that of Steve Sax, who went from having a nearly 50% chance of 3,000 hits in Bill James’ Favorite Toy to losing his job in the space of about a year; Sax faced more comical allegations of chicanery than Altuve. And one of this generation’s shining beacons of weapons-grade awesomeness, Albert Pujols, had a turning point in his early 30s when he transformed from Jimmie Foxx into Darin Ruf. Altuve did have a couple of relatively minor leg injuries in 2020, but neither could explain a season dreadful enough to have no silver lining.

Like Sax 30 years ago, a projection system (ZiPS in this case) had Altuve on an approach pattern to 3,000 hits. The combined effect of a shortened season and a performance that raised serious concerns about his future more than halved that milestone probability, from 40% to 19%. ZiPS, like the other projection systems, projected Altuve to have a significant bounce-back season in 2021, forecasting a .289/.355/.478, 3.6 WAR campaign. Most players would be quite happy with that result, but that line would only be a return to Altuve’s 2019 level, a drop from his 2014-2018 peak. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 3, 2020, J.D. Davis hit a hard grounder between second and first, fielded cleanly by Freddie Freeman for a simple force out of the runner heading to second. This routine play might have been forgotten if not for the fact that Mike Soroka, the Braves’ consensus ace after a sterling rookie campaign in 2019, took an awkward step while trying to cover first base and limped out of the game. Nearly a year later, Soroka has not returned to a pitcher’s mound, and now, it’ll likely be at least another year until he can do so again, as a torn Achilles tendon — a repeat of the injury that knocked him out last season — will shelve him for the rest of ’21 and probably into ’22.

Last August, Soroka was immediately sent off for an MRI, which revealed that he had torn his right Achilles tendon. You know an injury is serious when a team’s rivals are offering their condolences nearly instantly.

“It kind of makes you sick, honestly,” Mets outfielder Michael Conforto said. “I can tell you a lot of us felt that way, just the way he went down and what we were hearing it was. … We heard it was the Achilles. He’s a bright young star, and we know he’ll come back and be the same guy.”

This wasn’t Soroka’s first major injury setback. After debuting in early 2018, shoulder inflammation shut him down quickly, costing him the rest of that season. He showed few signs of that malady in 2019, throwing 174 2/3 innings with a 2.68 ERA and 4.03 FIP for an even 4 WAR — good enough of a year to rank him highly among other young pitchers in Braves history.

I was an NL Rookie of the Year award voter in 2019, and though I gave my first-place vote to Pete Alonso, I wasn’t too far from giving it to the young Braves hurler instead. As you might expect, ZiPS was also a huge fan of Soroka going into the COVID year.

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The Mets got a rare bit of good injury news on Wednesday. Marcus Stroman was pulled in the second inning on Tuesday after three pitches due to soreness in his left hip. Given the season the Mets are having in the injury department — there are 13 players on an Injured List as I type this — and really, the seemingly cursed history of the Mets and pitcher injuries, Stroman’s departure caused a lot of worries. But his MRI revealed no damage to the hip that would have resulted in a 14th name on the shelf.

That’s not to say the Mets are out of danger. The same day Stroman tweaked his hip, the team announced that Joey Lucchesi would undergo Tommy John surgery, ending his 2021 (and likely most of his 2022) season, and that Michael Conforto‘s return from the IL would be delayed. Given the team’s dissipating rotation depth, losing two pitchers instead of just one would have been a significant blow. Carlos Carrasco has yet to make his 2021 debut, Noah Syndergaard’s return date was pushed back due to elbow inflammation, and all-galaxy ace Jacob deGrom has had multiple injury scares already this season.

Now, the exercise here isn’t to depth-shame the Mets. In past years, the team had a bad habit of entering the season with interesting five-man rotations and highly worrisome Plans B, C, and D, generally consisting of converting relievers back to starters or leaning on whatever random Quad-A starting pitcher was playing decent ball for Syracuse. The additions of Carrasco, Lucchesi, Taijuan Walker, Jordan Yamamoto, Jerad Eickhoff, and Sam McWilliams provided the team a lot of fallback options on the pitching staff. That’s a notable improvement from a shrug-emoji-or-possibly-Walker-Lockett strategy.

Every team has a point at which they run out of good options. Even teams like the Rays, Dodgers, and Padres would be in dire straits if five starting pitchers suddenly decided to retire and sail around the world or sign with NASA to train full-time for a mission to Mars. The Mets were well-designed to support a number of significant losses, but the limits still exist. And they might have already come up against those limits — players like Johneshwy Fargas, Brandon Drury, and Mason Williams ought to be quite far down the depth charts — if not for the fact that no other team in the division has seized the opportunity. Despite all the injury losses, the rotation exceeding expectations and the division disappointing have been enough for the Mets to only be a single win off from where the preseason ZiPS projections saw them at this point.

ZiPS still projects the Mets as a .563 team going forward, just about where it pegged the club three months ago, and that’s with playing time assumptions in many cases far worse than they were in March. But a four-game lead in the division is not an unassailable position, and outside of not regressing toward the bleak history of Met injury management, there’s not much they can do to prevent a new rash of nasty surprises on that front.

So the question that comes to mind is just how much bad news can the Mets absorb before their postseason positioning proves perilous? Let’s start with updated ZiPS standings as of Thursday morning.

The combination of a poor start to the season and both Wild Cards likely being from the NL West (ZiPS sees 2.8 average playoff spots from that division) has probably rendered the Marlins a lost cause for the 2021 season. However, the other three teams remain threats even if the Mets are the deserving favorites at this point. To get an idea of how much margin for error the Mets have, I ran the 2021 rest-of-season simulation repeatedly, with different assumptions for the Mets roster.

When looking at these two graphs (DanGraphs?), the first thing I notice is the direct effect the Giants are having on the playoff race. If the Mets struggle and don’t win the division, they usually fall behind the Giants or Padres. And when the Mets are good enough to win a Wild Card, they usually win the division anyway.

The Mets’ roster is currently about three wins ahead of the highest-leverage point in their win curve. They don’t really start seeing diminishing returns until one or two additional wins on the roster, making a strong case for the team continuing to be aggressive despite their relatively strong position in the division.

Relative to the rest of the league, third base and catcher feature on our depth charts as the team’s weakest spots, making those positions arguably the best places to add wins. That seems unlikely behind the plate; I was never much of a fan of a four-year contract for James McCann, but it doesn’t seem likely the team would make an upgrade here. The rotation is hardly a source of weakness, but I still think that given Syndergaard and Stroman’s status as free-agent-to-be status and deGrom’s injury risk, adding a starting pitcher would be helpful. The Mets should not be panicking at this point, but continuing last winter’s aggression at the trade deadline would be a welcome sight.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: CHAT BEING NOW

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I don’t have a real basis for saying which team will benefit from this really. It’s all an unknown right now

12:04

Dan Szymborski: But the Giants have enough wins bagged that they probably just need to go .500 the rest of the way to make the playoffs

12:05

Dan Szymborski: He’s been lousy enough that you *should* think a little worse of him. But not *that* much.

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In 2020, the San Diego Padres finally had their breakout season, going 37-23 in the pandemic-shortened sprint, good enough for the third-best record in baseball. A lot of players were responsible for getting them to where they ended up, but one of the best bits of news for the team was that Eric Hosmer was one of them. After signing a long-term contract prior to the 2018 season, Hosmer hit .259/.316/.412 in his first two seasons with the Friars, for a wRC+ of 93 and -0.5 combined WAR that placed him near the bottom of the ranks of baseball’s first baseman. But in 2020, with the highest average launch angle and lowest grounder percentage of his career, he hit .287/.333/.517, giving some hope that would turn things around.

If the first three months of 2021 are any indication, those hopes have mostly evaporated, ninth inning, game-tying home runs aside. Hosmer’s still hitting the ball very hard, but he’s largely back to his old, pre-2020 habits, hitting an inordinate number of pitches straight into the dirt, knocking out more ants than opposing pitchers. Since 2015, Statcast has kept track of what they call the “Sweet Spot” or pitches hit with a launch angle between eight and 32 degrees. Only twice has Hosmer been over 30%: in 2020 and his equally excellent 2017 season. For 2021, that mark has dropped to his lowest number yet, 22.3%. As a result, even with a better average exit velocity than last year, he’s missing 150 points of slugging percentage:

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Vladimir Guerrero spent 16 years in the majors, hitting .318 with 449 home runs and nabbing scores of overambitious baserunners with his cannon of an arm. Just a couple years ago, he gave his induction speech in Cooperstown after breezing into the Hall of Fame on his second appearance on the ballot. For a son getting into the same profession, matching those accolades is a tall order, one of Jon Rauchian proportions. But after a so-so start to his major league career, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is having a breakout season and now threatens to do something Dad never did: win a Triple Crown.

That the younger Guerrero is quite adept at hitting a baseball shouldn’t shock anyone, though his first two stints in the majors were admittedly more middling than magical. But hype is difficult, and I suspect that if he played under a nom de guerre rather than a nom de Guerrero, people would likely have been far more patient before starting to worry about him. As I wrote about Guerrero in my preseason breakout picks:

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 he was one of my favorite breakout picks, I certainly can’t claim to have seen a breakout on this particular level. If we look back at the preseason projections, neither could ZiPS:

Now, he hasn’t yet completed 2021 with a wRC+ of 206, but if he did, that’s in 99th percentile territory. I’ve been working on calibrating this model since the start of the season, and projected right now, his 90th percentile wRC+ gets a bump to 163, but 206 still would have been seen as a one-in-50 shot to happen.

As of Tuesday morning, Guerrero leads the American League in batting average, home runs, and RBI, baseball’s Triple Crown components. His sterling performance has been enough for a wRC+ bump of an impressive 27 points since March in ZiPS’ estimate of his current level of ability. At this point, it’s hard to argue his ceiling has been raised; the main question is how high. In the updated projections, which combine year-to-date with the rest-of-season projections, ZiPS has Guerrero leading the league in home runs and RBI and finishing second in batting average behind Michael Brantley. Steamer has Guerrero leading in all three categories.

Even if the stats were reset to zero, Vladito’s projections have improved to the point that he’d have a fighting chance to lead in the three stats, and be in the top 10 in each.

What this doesn’t tell us is the probability that Vlad does, in fact, win the Triple Crown. For that, I used the ZiPS season simulation and projected the rest of 2021 a million times for the American League, then added to the stats already in the books, counting — by computer, not by hand, of course– how many times each player led the league in the Triple Crown categories.

Injuries have been a red flag for Brantley, but he’s been healthy enough to qualify for the batting title in three consecutive seasons after missing more than 200 games in 2016 and ’17 combined. Assuming perfect health, ZiPS would give him about a 43% chance of taking the batting title, but with him already having missed time with a hamstring injury, he has a smaller margin of error in getting the required plate appearances. ZiPS sees Vlad at the back of the top 10 in rest-of-season batting average, but he’s got a 23-point cushion over the non-Brantley candidates. Also providing an assist is that two of the bigger threats, Mike Trout and Luis Arraez, are almost certainly going to fall short of 3.1 plate appearances per game (or lose too much BA if they fall just short in PA).

ZiPS still sees Matt Olson and Giancarlo Stanton as better home run hitters, but the four-homer edge to date is enough to leave Vlad the favorite over either. The computer projects him with a 44% shot to beat his dad’s career-high of 44; it surprises me too, but Vlad Sr. never led the league (or finished second) in any Triple Crown stat. The projections give him a 28% chance to pass the 50-homer threshold.

José Abreu isn’t repeating his 2020 season, but he’s still a player who should hit for power, even in a relative down season. As importantly, Abreu hits third or fourth in a White Sox lineup that’s been surprisingly potent for a team that’s lost Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert. Nobody has more plate appearances with runners on base this season than Abreu. But the Jays are no slouches, and as with the other categories, Guerrero has the lead right now.

If you wanted to be lazy, you’d multiply Vlad’s probability of leading each category together and get 2.6%, decent odds of getting into the record books. That, of course, is something you cannot actually do since these aren’t independent variables. The hundred games of baseball that leave Guerrero with the home run title also leave him with the RBI title most of the time. Batting average isn’t as highly correlated with the others, but if Guerrero hits .340, well, many of those hits will be homers and/or drive in runners. All told, ZiPS gives him a 19.1% chance of winning the Triple Crown. Not a bad shot at something that’s been done once in the last half-century.

Leading all of baseball in the Triple Crown categories — the Triple Crown Magnifique, as I like to call it — is a trickier challenge. That one hasn’t been done since Mickey Mantle in 1956, and Vlad has tough competition in this one. Fighting against Fernando Tatis Jr. and Ronald Acuña Jr. in a battle for junior supremacy drops his chances from 19.1% to well under 1% (0.2%).

Whether he wins the Triple Crown or not, it appears the Vladimir Guerrero Jr. era is in full swing. I don’t have kids, but I’m at least of the belief that most parents hope to see their children exceed their accomplishments. Vladito has a long way to go, but 2021 looks like the start of a run that may end with him achieving just that.

The 2020 Cubs won the NL Central, but they did it in a fairly unusual way, getting minimal contributions from Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, and Javier Báez. In 151 combined games, their trio of stars combined for a mere 1.6 WAR, mostly coming from Rizzo (1.0); back when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, Bryant alone racked up nearly eight wins. Last season, players like Ian Happ and Willson Contreras were the ones who propelled the team to October baseball, not the old core.

With Báez, Bryant, and Rizzo all set to enter free agency this offseason, the Cubs, as in many a heist movie, hoped to bring back the old crew for one last big score in 2021. But unlike many good yarns about high-stakes thievery, the Cubs largely ignored the supporting cast. The studio had cut the budget, an obvious necessity what with the Cubs playing in a tiny, small-market city, boasting merely the fourth-best attendance in baseball in 2019, and the reality that no owner in baseball history has ever made money. Yu Darvish was off to film a high-budget action movie in San Diego; the only primary member of the 2019 rotation still on the roster in ’21 is Kyle Hendricks.

Without much in the way of new blood, they needed their old core to shine one last time. And luckily for the Cubs, this is largely what has happened. In a similar number of games as the 2020 season, our troika of protagonists has combined for 4.8 WAR, tripling their contribution from the prior season. With the addition of Nolan Arenado, the Cardinals got most of the preseason NL Central ink but the Cubs have been more impressive at the box office. Read the rest of this entry »

11:59

Dan Szymborski: dangit

12:00

Dan Szymborski:

12:00

Dan Szymborski: There we go, third time’s the charm!

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Doing a piece on the Cubs Big Three FA for tomorrow!

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