The Padres used this past offseason to gear up in order to face the Dodgers on equal terms and end Los Angeles’ streak of division titles at eight. One key element in that plan is the presence of Fernando Tatis Jr., the team’s superstar shortstop, who the team recently inked to one of the richest deals in sports history — a 14-year, $340 million pact. But as the poet Robert Burns once wrote, the best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry; in this instance, a mighty swing through an Anthony DeSclafani knuckle-curve on Monday night, resulted in Tatis doubled over in pain on home plate.

Though there’s currently no word how much time Tatis may miss, any absence would be a blow to the Padres and to baseball, too, as he’s one of the sport’s brightest, most marketable young stars. It’s no fun for the owner of the troublesome left shoulder, either, particularly given how Padres manager Jayce Tingler described the injury after his team’s 3–2 loss to the Giants:

[It] comes out, comes back in, and so he’s been dealing with that, and obviously tonight, it was the first time we’ve kind of seen it in game action from swinging or anything like that. So, we’ll see how it goes tomorrow, but he’s going to get more tests tomorrow.

Tatis’ shoulder was acting up during the spring, so it would be hard to describe this as a completely isolated incident, though this is almost certainly the worst one. The injury has been diagnosed as a subluxation, which is a partial dislocation of the shoulder. The pain itself was clearly bad enough, but the larger problem is that the type of injury has a high rate of reoccurrence. While this condition isn’t necessarily traumatic or painful — one of my closest friends had a similar hip condition in high school, and it was only occasionally excruciating — it’s a bit of a problem for someone who makes his living swinging very hard at baseballs. Some experts in the field have already discussed, from afar, the possibility of surgery, which could endanger Tatis’ 2021 return. And while the prognosis is less bleak for hitters than it is for pitchers, shoulder injuries can be problematic long-term.

UPDATE: Padres general manager A.J. Preller announced before Tuesday’s game that Tatis would be placed on the injured list, but that surgery would not be required. Per The Athletic’s Dennis Lin, Preller said that Tatis has a slight labrum tear but that his physical exam was “pretty uneventful,” and that the team will go the “rest-and-rehab route” with the hope that Tatis is ready to return in 10 days.

The resulting consequences of Tatis’ injury are largely unknown at this point, as this happened just last night. But we can probably put some kind of bounds on it: He certainly won’t be in the game on Tuesday, nor did DeSclafani’s pitch literally retire him. Let’s first run some projections for the Padres, based on games through Monday evening, on the NL West both without the injury and in the worst-case scenario that Tatis misses the rest of the season.

The healthy projections are still quite close to the ones to begin the season. While a lot can happen in a week, both of the NL West front-runners have played solid but not spectacular baseball against the division’s lesser lights. The Dodgers have a slightly better position, but ZiPS already expected them to have a slightly better record, given that they opened the season with a four-game set against the Rockies, the computer’s pick for the worst team in the majors.

Losing about 15% of your division-winning scenarios is a significant setback, but Tatis is a terrific player, so this is to be expected. However, a projected worst-case scenario still leaves San Diego at 95 wins, the second-highest total in baseball. They’d win five of baseball’s six divisions with that total. Unfortunately, the division they play in is that sixth one.

I’m not sure it could be classified as good news, but San Diego’s depth mitigates the effect of the Tatis injury. The team has Jake Cronenworth, Ha-seong Kim, and Jurickson Profar available to cover the middle infield, a situation that many teams would be happy with as the Plan A. Imagine if the Padres had instead made no plans this offseason at shortstop, and the team was forced to go with replacement-level talent at the position.

A much worse plan B is enough to send the Padres down into the thick of the wild card race, to the extent that they’d have to fight with the Braves (at least in the projections) to get a guaranteed game at home in the playoffs. It’s even enough to get San Francisco’s divisional odds to round up to a non-zero number!

Other effects, such as loss of performance due to the shoulder problem, are a bit speculative at this stage. An injury like this is always unwelcome, but this is survivable for the Padres. But the best thing for San Diego and fans of baseball as a whole is for Tatis to return, swinging hard, and challenging for the NL MVP title. Even for Dodgers fans, wouldn’t it be more fun to beat your rivals when they’re at their best?

The Angels locked up their second baseman on Opening Day, inking David Fletcher to a five-year contract that will keep him in Anaheim through at least the 2025 season. In addition to the baseline guaranteed money ($24.5 million), there are two club option years at $8 million and $8.5 million. Both option years have buyouts for $1.5 million, the first one bringing the contract to the headline figure of $26 million.

Fletcher has been a find for the Angels, and I daresay that he’s outperformed the original expectations for him. Drafted as a shortstop out of Loyola Marymount, he avoided the wacky error totals that many middle infield prospects put up in the low minors. Still, his offensive profile wasn’t seen as having enough upside to propel him to the top of the team’s prospect lists. The consensus going into 2018 was generally that he would be a utility infielder, though a dependable one.

Notably, even the lukewarm evaluations had nuggets of Fletcher’s later success. John Sickels gave Fletcher a C+, but praised his reliability and noted him as a player who could surprise.

David Fletcher, SS, Grade C+: Age 23, a sixth-round pick in 2015 from Loyola Marymount, hit .266/.316/.339 with 20 doubles, three homers, 20 steals, 27 walks, 55 strikeouts in 448 at-bats between Double-A and Triple-A; easy to under-estimate, old-time scouts would have called him an “intangibles” player; runs well, but throwing arm is nothing special and hitting power is below average; all that said, he is a very reliable defensive shortstop how outplays his mediocre defensive tools with positioning, instincts, and impressive reliability: has a .982 career fielding percentage at short; most likely a utilityman but might surprise eventually; ETA 2018.

Here at FanGraphs, Eric Longenhagen gave Fletcher a 40-grade in 2017 but had praise for his contact skills.

A draft-eligible sophomore at Loyola Marymount, Fletcher projects to carve out a big-league job as a utility man capable of competently playing both middle-infield positions, a terrific outcome for a sixth-round pick.

Fletcher is an above-average straight-line runner but not an especially twitchy athlete, and he’s able to play short despite fringey range and an average arm because of polished but unspectacular actions, hands, and good instincts. His bat is quick, his stroke short but effortful. Fletcher projects as a fringe hitter with 40 raw power and less than that in games.

As for ZiPS, it saw Fletcher as merely a .237/.276/.304 hitter with above-average defense at second in the majors in 2018, so I cannot claim that my work nailed his rise either! ZiPS didn’t really start getting interested until after 2018 when it translated his full season at .274/.314/.394 but at 13 runs better than average at second.

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The teams are ready and the rosters are (mostly) set, making it the appointed time for the electrons that make up the projections to dance in their required formations. This is the last run of the projections before the season starts, making these the Official ZiPS Projected Standings© for the 2021 season. Thursday starts the six-month marathon that determines which prognostications will achieve fame and which will attain infamy.

So, how do the ZiPS projected standings work? ZiPS makes baseline playing time projections heavily informed by our Depth Charts; after all, ain’t nobody going to beat Jason Martinez in this space. But rather than assuming that the baseline playing time is the playing time, I use a generalized model to estimate the range of playing times a player might see. So in some ZiPS simulations, Mike Trout will play 162 games. Sometimes he’ll play 130 games or 100 games; less often, he’ll play five games or even none. Then ZiPS fills in the “missing” playing time, giving a lot more playing time to Jo Adell and Juan Lagares in center in those injury seasons. Sometimes they’re injured, too; in projection No. 435,221, center field is primarily covered by Brandon Marsh and Scott Schebler. ZiPS then uses the percentile performance projections to (somewhat) randomize what versions of every player we get. There’s a generalized model here as well, as players will tend to get more time when they’re playing better and less when they’re not. After a million runs of this, using the actual schedules and opponents, ZiPS has its standings.

Yesterday, we looked at the American League. Today, we’ll finish the ZiPS offseason with the final 2021 National League projections.

Read the rest of this entry »

The teams are ready, and the rosters are (mostly) set, making it the appointed time for the electrons that make up the projections to dance in their required formations. This is the last run before the season starts, making these the Official ZiPS Projected Standings© for the 2021 season. Thursday starts the six-month marathon that determines which prognostications will achieve fame and which will attain infamy.

So, how do the ZiPS projected standings work? ZiPS makes baseline playing time projections heavily informed by our depth charts; after all, ain’t nobody going to beat Jason Martinez in this space. But rather than assuming that the baseline playing time is the playing time, I use a generalized model to estimate the range of playing time. So in some ZiPS simulations, Mike Trout will play 162 games. Sometimes he’ll play 130 games or 100 games; less often, he’ll play five games or even none. Then ZiPS fills in the “missing” playing time, giving a lot more playing time to Jo Adell and Juan Lagares in center in those injury seasons. Sometimes they’re injured, too; in projection No. 435,221, center field was mainly covered by Brandon Marsh and Scott Schebler. ZiPS then uses the percentile performance projections to (somewhat) randomize what versions of every player we get. There’s a generalized model here as well, as players will tend to get more time when they’re playing better and less when they’re not. After a million runs of this, using the actual schedules and opponents, ZiPS has its standings.

Let’s start with the American League.

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Earlier today, Eric Longenhagen previewed baseball’s lesser bullpens. Now, Dan Szymborski takes a look at the relief corps projected to be the league’s best.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, there have been gradual changes to how bullpens are built and deployed. Clubs are more willing than ever to admit that their closer is simply the best pitcher on their roster rather than one blessed with magical abilities, able to secure the final outs of a game where lesser men would fail. Closers are still a fairly big deal, mind you, but the trend of late has been to talk more about bullpens in terms of the entire unit, rather than just the closer and his backing band. As such, that’s how we rank them. There’s not a lot of turnover this year, with 11 of the top 15 teams from last season returning.

It will be interesting to see what effects the shortened 2020 season has on bullpen usage in 2021. By the time we get to October, it will have been two years since any pitcher threw 200 innings, and teams are likely going to protect their starters more than usual this season. Nobody really knows what the long-term effects will be of throwing pitchers into a 162-game marathon after a weird, shortened sprint season, one that featured two spring trainings set three months apart. Tommy John surgery may have a high success rate these days, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to flirt with it.

We sometimes pooh-pooh the value of bullpens because of their volatility, but the fact is, the share of innings thrown by relievers has steadily increased over the last half-century, with their proportion of innings going from just over a quarter in the mid-70s to nearly half last year.

Forty-four percent of innings in 2020 were thrown by relievers and there’s no reason to expect a sudden reversal in 2021. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that 20 years from now, there’s no actual distinction between starters and relievers, with those classifications largely considered a relic. That’s still speculative, but for now, even if a reliever can’t match the value of a Jacob deGrom, bullpens have a very real effect on who makes the playoffs and who pops bubbly in late October. Read the rest of this entry »

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Hello, been trying to figure out why it’s not on the front page!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Oh wait, NOW it is!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: lol

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I don’t know who is in it yet!

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I want to see some 19th century mustache petes

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It may seem a little bit early to start talking about postseason hardware, but what’s the fun of a projection system if you’re not looking at every way to separate the best of the best? In any case, it’s not as interesting an exercise when the season ends, given that we already know what happened (though it’s way more accurate).

Naturally, voting is not going to be a simple ranking of WAR. Each award has 30 different voters, all with differing priorities and philosophical beliefs in the way of excellence. Rather than kidnapping my colleagues and subjecting them to a series of lab tests about voting, our best solution is to use past votes to infer how they’ll vote going forward.

While using a neural network is always tempting, we’re handicapped by the real scarcity of data; 30 votes per award is not a lot to work with. As I’ve worked with the models over the years, the other issue is that there does seem to be a change in how voters are voting, enough to have an effect on who is winning the awards and by how much. I’ve found that chucking out anything before 2000 improves every model and every approach I’ve tried. By and large, we’re not voting on WAR, but it and other analytics have affected the results both directly (more sabermetric-friendly writers joining the BBWAA) and indirectly (influencing existing voters). I could probably make a very accurate model for how I vote, but we’d be treading far too deep into meta territory at that point.

So, what’s new this year? One variable I’ve added to the mix is past award performance — something I wish I had checked in the past, but better later than never. Essentially, players who have received votes recently tend to do slightly better than equally excellent players who have not received votes recently.

Let’s jump right in.

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Earlier today, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s positional power rankings. As a quick refresher, all 30 teams are ranked based on the projected WAR from our Depth Charts. Our staff then endeavors to provide you with some illuminating commentary to put those rankings in context. We begin this year’s series with first base.

In last year’s positional rankings, Jay Jaffe wrote that first base just “ain’t what it used to be.” The diminished status of what was once one of baseball’s premier positions went unchanged in 2020. Even worse, one of the few young players near the top of those rankings, Pete Alonso, took a step back. First base has almost become baseball’s oldies station, chock-full of memories of the early hits of Albert Pujols or Joey Votto or Miguel Cabrera, but never airing their newest singles.

So what’s caused the collapse in the Q Score of the game’s first basemen? Offense is still sexy, but the truth of the matter is that home runs are cheap and plentiful. In baseball’s last full season, 135 players qualified for a batting title, and only five of them failed to finish with double-digits home runs. In 2009, there were 31 such players. There were 27 single-digit sluggers in 1999; in 1989, before the early-90s offensive explosion, there were 47. There aren’t just more home runs in baseball, they’re spread more widely among its players. Teams finding more guys who could play shortstop and hit home runs didn’t magically result in the game’s first basemen also thumping more round-trippers.

What’s more, it sometimes seems like there aren’t any actual first base prospects anymore, just prospects at other positions that teams eventually settle for playing first. The Jays haven’t totally given up on Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at the hot corner, and one of the few genuine phenom first basemen to come up in recent years, Cody Bellinger, has turned out to be a dynamite center fielder instead. The Tigers have made no secret of the fact that they would prefer that last year’s number one overall pick, Spencer Torkelson, play at third, a position he didn’t even play in college. It makes one wonder whether Jim Thome and Pujols, both third basemen in the minors, would have been moved to first so quickly if they had been born later.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that baseball fell out of love with the position, but I’d highlight November 28, 2016 as a key date in the story. That was when reports came out that the Milwaukee Brewers weren’t going to tender Chris Carter, the National League’s home run leader, a contract for the 2017 season. And no one seemed especially shocked! The AL’s home run leader, Mark Trumbo, was also a free agent that offseason and neither he nor Carter attracted significant interest in free agency. Trumbo eventually settled for going back to the Orioles in late January; Carter signed a one-year deal with the Yankees and was done as a major leaguer by midseason.

Will first basemen ever return to prominence? Not everything is cyclical after all, and I think you’d need a change in how the numbers work in baseball to make first basemen desirable again. Perhaps a deadened ball will hurt the less-impressive power hitters at some point, resulting in first basemen reemerging as the game’s princes of power. Or maybe ball or rule changes will result in more balls in play for first basemen to field, giving a top player at the position the potential to post truly significant value on defense. But for 2021 at least, look for more of the same, with lots of familiar names and only a few players who excel enough at every aspect of the game, like Freddie Freeman, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with baseball’s elites. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And greeting! Sorry about no chat last week, but I was not feeling well!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: He’s certainly played well! I haven’t seen him play though, so I can’t say much for the change. Spring stats are *slightly* meaningful, but it’s smart to be careful about excitement.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Yo!

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How do projected wins translate into salaries in free agency? That’s a fundamental question that front offices have to answer and, in fact, have had to answer ever since free agency opened up baseball’s labor market after the 1976 season. No, no GM back then was using Wins Above Replacement or fancy-pants computers spitting out ZoRPs or Stonker projections. But decisions are always based on some kind of projection, whether that exercise is explicit or not. When Grizzled Greg the GM went after a player for X hundreds of thousands of dollars after the 1976 season, he was still estimating how the player would play in the future and whether that benefit was worth the cost. Heck, I’ve never made a taco-based projection system. Still, when I see a taco, I’m projecting whether or not the DAR (Deliciousness Above Refrigerator) is worth the dollars that will be debited from my bank account.

Naturally, one of the ways we estimate player salaries has been a linear relationship between dollars and wins above replacement. There’s still a debate over whether player salaries should be treated in this way. Many analysts have argued that the price of wins should not be linear because of the efficiency of getting a lot of wins from a single player. After all, there’s a limit on roster size and utilization; you can’t just sign five one-win first basemen and combined them into a horrifying amalgamation whose twisted, fear-inducing form approximates a Freddie Freeman season. And even if you could, I wager that the MLBPA would file some kind of grievance about players being used for twisted medical experimentation. Well, at least players on the 40-man roster.

Matt Swartz is probably the most prominent advocate for the opposite view, that worrying about whether to add a four-win player instead of a pair of two-win players don’t really come up in the real world all that often. I’ve come to side more strongly with the majority in recent years than I used to, simply because I believe — though I can’t prove it conclusively — that good teams are becoming better at not leaving as many obvious holes. For teams like the Rays, Dodgers, and Padres, as well as other teams that prize serious depth, replacement level is probably higher than replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »