If you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs, it would not be surprising if you describe your feelings about Tyler Chatwood as some kind of frustrated exasperation. Able to survive in the mile-high environment of Coors Field despite occasionally spotty control and an inability to punch out batters, the Cubs expected that Chatwood would do even better in the friendly confines of Wrigley; the days when the wind is blowing out in Chicago weren’t supposed to be much of a problem for a pitcher who largely avoided giving up big home run totals in Colorado. On that assumption, the Cubs signed Chatwood to a three-year, $38 million contract before the 2018 season.

Suffice it to say, 2018 did not go as anyone predicted or hoped, except maybe Cardinals fans. Chatwood’s season started deceptively well, with a 2.83 ERA in April, but 22 walks in 28 2/3 innings suggested trouble. After throwing seven shutout innings against the Brewers on April 29 of that year, he went three months without a single quality start and walked at least two batters in every game. The team’s acquisition of Cole Hamels resulted in Chatwood’s exile to the bullpen, where he was little-used until injuring his hip in an emergency start as a replacement for Mike Montgomery. A non-factor in the pennant race that September, Chatwood’s 103 2/3 innings of work for the season was still enough time to amass a league-leading 95 walks.

2019 went better, but Chatwood’s role was mostly that of a fill-in starter and low-leverage reliever and mop-up guy. His 4.28 FIP in relief didn’t send a tingle down anyone’s spine, and his decision to largely abandon his secondary stuff didn’t seem like a likely ticket back to the rotation. However in the second half, he did tinker with his cutter’s grip after recognizing an issue with the pitch, which he had largely moved away from in 2019:

https://twitter.com/MLBastian/status/1289773139409297408

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12:04

Dan Szymborski: Greetings and hello!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: July.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: More seriously, he’s been a lot of fun so far, but the threshold for me greatly changing my view of a player in a positive direction is quite high when just the season before, they struggled against Double-A pitchers. At least relative to how prospects typically fare.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: It’s tricky. We do try to assign framing credit to the pitcher and hitter. And there’s stuff like passed balls, errors, stolen bases, etc.

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Ted Williams isn’t the typical beneficiary of a trip in the ZiPS time machine. After all, anyone who has the slightest interest in baseball — and many who don’t — know his name, even if they aren’t familiar with every last one of his accomplishments. Williams typified the cerebral, scientific hitter in the same way that Babe Ruth created the archetype of the larger-than-life slugger. The mercurial Ruth likely would have had considerably more trouble adapting to today’s game, but I’m of the opinion that the Splendid Splinter would actually thrive in a world where offense is looked at more as science than myth made true. Perhaps the best modern comparison for Williams is Joey Votto if the latter somehow got a hold of a genie’s lamp.

The list of Williams’ accomplishments is far too lengthy to run down in complete fashion, so we’ll settle for a sampling. He’s first all-time in on-base percentage and second in slugging percentage. He’s the most recent player to hit .400, and a two-time Triple Crown winnner. Ted finished with a .344 batting average, 521 homers, 2,654 hits, and enough black ink in his stats that he could have started his own newspaper.

But Williams’ career was also marked by long absences from the game. He was drafted after Pearl Harbor, initially receiving a deferment because he was his mother’s sole support. He played through the 1942 season, but enlisted in the Navy reserve after its conclusion and served for the next three years.

In terms of baseball, those were prime seasons of his career lost. The 1943-1945 stretch represented his age-24 through age-26 seasons, years when a lot of Hall of Famers turn in some of their most eye-popping campaigns. Taking a look at the list of Hall of Fame hitters through those ages sorted by WAR, there are some truly gigantic numbers involved:

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I’m a big liar, or at least I am thanks to Major League Baseball. Last week, after the longest offseason in modern baseball history, I posted the Final ZiPS 2020 Projected Standings. It turns out, however, that these weren’t quite as final as we hoped. Last Thursday, MLB took the step — unprecedented in major sports, at least in my memory banks — of changing the league’s playoff structure the day the season started. The already-bloated 10-team playoff format became an engorged 16-team one. In are four mediocre teams; out is most of the advantage division winners get for being the best in their divisions.

I’m still hopeful this is solely a 2020 issue; the agreement between MLB and the Players Association was only for this year. Baseball’s regular season is the most important in major team sports, after all. Plus, it’s in the interests of the players to avoid further decoupling championships from team quality, as that would inevitably create a further drag on salaries. Assuming 2021 reverts to normal, it still leaves the question of 2020 projections. After a three-day weekend immured in my Fortress of Statitude, I’ve reconfigured ZiPS for the umpteenth and hopefully last time, and present the final, actually official 2020 projected standings. All the commentary in my original article still stands, but now the numbers are quite different.

Warning: There are lots of charts coming.

Let’s start with new start-of-season projections. For these standings, ZiPS knows nothing about what has happened so far this season, whether it’s wins, losses, player stats, or injuries. Whatever it knew last Wednesday, it still knows.

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We made it! It took a four-month journey through a still-raging pandemic and some still-burning baseball economic issues, but Opening Day of the weirdest season we’re likely to see in our lifetimes is here. The 2020 season is not a marathon, but a sprint, so we’re already in the home stretch. We’re not starting at square one, of course; if this were Monopoly, the bank would be out of hotels and everyone playing the game would hate each other, especially that jerk who has Boardwalk and Park Place.

Projecting such a season presents some unique challenges a prognosticator doesn’t normally face. It’s not projecting the individual players’ production that’s the problem so much as all the stuff around it. How many players will miss time due to the league’s COVID-19 protocols? How do we adjust for injuries when teams will play just 37% of the games, but players’ recovery from hamstring and elbow woes won’t be similarly prorated? Will top prospect talent have the same short-term upside when they’re riding the bench or practicing at their team’s alternate site that they would if they were playing actual games in the minors? How will the strange, crowdless games and the stresses of keeping up social distancing guidelines affect play?

No, I’m actually asking! I can make educated guesses that I hope aren’t preposterous, but I don’t actually know the answers to these questions. For someone who models stuff, it’s a maddening situation. But it’s a challenge I can’t avoid given that projecting stuff is, well, a big part of my job! But you’re not here to commiserate with me, humor my self-indulgent wordsmithing, or dig out where I make a reference to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, so let’s go straight to the final projected standings. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the ways that the baseball of yesteryear was different from baseball today was the importance of batting average. With a pitching philosophy that envisioned lots and lots of balls being hit into play and no gauntlet of modern relief pitchers to face, far more at-bats ended with a ball being handled by a defensive player. In 2019, 63% of plate appearances ended with a ball being hit into play. In 1919, that figure was 81%. With half as many fieldable balls, it’s hardly a shock that league batting averages have declined. The effect would be even larger, too, but batting average on balls hit into play was higher in 2019 (.298) than in 1919 (.282).

Hitting .400 was never an easy feat, but it wasn’t some wild, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence when it did happen. The .400 mark has been eclipsed 34 times in major league history, give or take (the number varies depending on just what you consider a major league team in the wild world of 1870s baseball). Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941 and that was it, the last time a major leaguer hit .400 over a season. It’s more than just the lower league batting averages. Baseball’s .252 batting average in 2019 was still higher than in 17 seasons before 1941. Baseball has trended in a more competitive direction and as a league becomes more competitive, you generally expect the differences between players to shrink. That’s true for batting average, too. Just look at the simplest measure of dispersion, standard deviation:

The standard deviation has gotten smaller as time has progressed. Using this simple method, Ted Williams’s .406 in 1941 was 4.46 standard deviations better than the mean batting average of .262 (z-score). A z-score of 4.46 in 2019 only represents a .370 batting average. Nobody’s hit that mark recently, either, but .370 certainly doesn’t feel like anywhere near the same hurdle.

Since it’s the obvious next question, here are the best batting averages by Z-Score. Again, there are more robust ways to look at this, but we’re scrawling on envelope-backs, not landing astronauts on the moon:

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Earlier today, Paul Sporer took you through baseball’s 16th-to-30th ranked rotations. Now, we get to the good stuff.

What is a starting pitcher? While baseball’s rules have been relatively stable throughout the game’s history, being a starter in 2020 means something very different than it did in 1870, 1920, or even 1970. A starting pitcher in the 1800s was frequently the pitcher in any given game. When Hall of Fame pitcher (and later, Twitter superstar), Old Hoss Radbourn pitched for the 1884 Providence Grays, he started 75 of the team’s 114 games, completing 73 of them.

Being a starter meant something else in the early 20th century. They were still workhorses expected to finish a large percentage of their games, but they were part of a pitching staff, not lone wolves. Jack Chesbro was the last 50-game starter, in 1904. Four-man rotations became the standard and league leaders in games-started ranged from the high 30s to the low 40s. The only exception was one last surge in the early 70s from rubber-armed knuckleballers Wilbur Wood and Phil Niekro. The four-man rotation then became a five-man affair, and it’s now been 33 years since a pitcher started 40 games (Charlie Hough, 1987) and 40 years since one threw 300 innings (Steve Carlton, 1980). Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Hello friends! And enemies! (We don’t have any kind of wall that would distinguish between the two)

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Gentrification continues. The trendy bars have pushed away a lot of the old historic businesses.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: (Sorry, Austin Meadows always sounds like an obnoxious trendy city neighborhood)

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t heard much about what was going on with him.

12:07

Dan Szymborski: I wonder if he’d do what I’d do if I was an MLB player? I’d probably use this opportunity to get a vacation right up until opening day by being vaguel absent! Maybe cough a few times

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A report Tuesday from MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand indicates that Yasiel Puig will sign a one-year contract with the Atlanta Braves. The 29-year-old Puig hit .267/.327/.458 with 24 home runs for a 101 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR while playing for the Reds and Indians in 2019. The former Rookie of the Year runner-up spent most of last season in Cincinnati before heading to outfield-deficient Cleveland as part of the three-way trade that sent Trevor Bauer to Cincinnati and Taylor Trammell to San Diego. The exact financial terms of the deal are not yet available, but it’s unlikely that Puig’s one-year contract is for an exorbitant amount of cash from the team’s point of view.

From a pure “how good is Puig?” standpoint, completely divorced from context, this signing is an underwhelming one. Puig hit the market unencumbered by the possible loss of a draft pick upon signing (he was ineligible to receive a qualifying offer because of the trade), but even still, his free agency garnered a tepid reception this winter. Now, this offseason’s free agent market featured a lot more action than other recent ones, but that was driven by elite free agents such as Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon. Teams were still generally uninterested in first basemen and corner outfielders, with few getting multi-year deals and only José Abreu and Nick Castellanos getting more than $20 million guaranteed. Puig drew some interest, but nobody seemed all-in on bringing him in before spring training or when transactions were recently unfrozen. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Jay Jaffe kicked off our positional power rankings series by evaluating the league’s first basemen. If you need a refresher on the series, Meg Rowley wrote a handy explainer. Today, we stay on the infield and turn our attention to second base.

Second base has become a decidedly unsexy position. Teams are more willing than ever to keep players at shortstop, leaving the keystone increasingly populated by the guys with weak arms, not enough glove for short, or not enough bat for third base. Throughout history, shortstops have generally hit worse than second basemen, which makes sense given that short is the tougher defensive position. But in 2018, after years of slowly gaining ground, shortstops outhit second basemen, with a 97 wRC+ vs. 95 at second; in 2019, they did it again (100 vs. 96).

It hasn’t helped the position that there’s been a talent drain. Chase Utley, Ben Zobrist, Ian Kinsler, and Brandon Phillips are all gone, Robinson Canó, Brian Dozier, and Jason Kipnis are nearly so, and it’s an open question whether Dustin Pedroia plays again. Only José Altuve is all that is left standing of the elite second basemen from the 2010s. Meanwhile, there are only seven second basemen with a future value of 50 or better on THE BOARD, compared to nine at third base and 14 at shortstop. Inevitably, some of the shortstops will end up as second basemen, but that’s kind of the point; the shortstops that shift will likely be the ones who didn’t make the cut at short. Players like Gavin Lux and Nick Madrigal will provide new blood, but they’re likely at least three or four years away from their peak years. Read the rest of this entry »