One of the things you have to get used to when you work with projections is being wrong. Like, All. Of. The. Time. While I’d like to believe that the projections are accurate and it’s just real life that mucked things up, that isn’t quite how they work. There are always events you didn’t see coming, assumptions you made erroneously, and just plain old irreducible error, all of which are going to thwart you.

On a basic level, you’re supposed to be wrong. Imagine a world in which you knew, for an exact fact, that every team was a coin flip to win every game. With this perfect knowledge, you’d still expect nearly a quarter of the league to win either 73 games or fewer, or 89 games or more, through nothing but luck. For the math-inclined, this is a hypergeometric distribution, not a binomial one; the coin flips are not independent because the win totals will still add up to 2,430 and one team’s win invariably is another team’s loss. Here’s a quick table for some of the win totals, showing the probability of a team winning exactly X games and how many of the teams you’d expect to have won up to X games:

As an example, you’d expect 3.4% of those coin flip teams to win exactly 74 games, with 15% of all teams winning up to 74 games.

But we don’t have anywhere near perfect knowledge about how good a team will be. We’re not even in the same zip code as “near perfect”; we just hope to be on the right continent. As a result, our error bars are going to be significantly larger than even the rather erroneous results you still get with omniscient projections. Read the rest of this entry »

1:03	Dan Szymborski: Happy Thursday!

1:03	Dan Szymborski: I don’t specifically spit out a standard deviation, but I do it from the other side: specific events and the probability of those (like a .300 BA, 40 HR, etc)

1:04	Dan Szymborski: And I have projectile percentages in beta right now as I work out the kinks, mainly due to defensive volatility and projections

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This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

While there’s no big MLB update on any start to the 2020 season — nor will there likely be for awhile — the hunkering down of baseball teams, along with the rest of the country, continues. MLB announcing there wouldn’t be any games for at least a couple months has moved the focus, as it ought to be, towards the mitigation of the current situation rather than practical questions about how many games will be played, where, or when.

MLB Clubs Establish a Fund for Ballpark Employees

MLB clubs have committed $30M — $1M apiece — to assist the ballpark employees affected by the delayed start to our season. pic.twitter.com/ZzJOkxGt2e

— MLB (@MLB) March 17, 2020

Ballpark employees are some of the people most affected by the suspension of the 2020 season. There’s no telecommuting or even a skeleton crew still working as you see in many customer-facing businesses, so these employees are suffering de facto layoffs, even if hopefully temporary. With the hospitality industry one of the sectors suffering the quickest in this environment, simply finding another job isn’t an option for many of these workers. These employees tend to make up a very small percentage of a team’s costs, and keeping the team’s trained workforce around is at a minimum an exercise in enlightened self-interest. Read the rest of this entry »

Will there be a 2020 baseball season? How many games will teams play? What will that mean for the 2020 baseball season? Normally, these would be extremely upsetting questions to contemplate; in the world in which we’re currently living, they’re somewhere around the 75,000th most important quandaries facing us. But as someone qualified to serve as a baseball writer rather than an epidemiologist, they’re also the kinds of questions I can actually seek to answer, and the differences between how baseball will eventually look versus what we’re used to are bigger than you might think. Assuming we have a season, that is; if no games are played, the projections will be 100% accurate.

So how much do the playoff races change in a shorter season? To answer this, I spent the weekend reconfiguring ZiPS so that it wouldn’t assume a 162-game season — an eventuality I had hoped not to have to deal with unless or until there was a strike — allowing me to run playoff probabilities for seasons of any length. Let’s start with the baseline projections, how ZiPS saw the races before the world turned upside down:

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12:01

Dan Szymborski: Welcome to SzymChat where the only thing contagious is friendship! And maybe chickenpox.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: No

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t even DONE anything yet.

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The 2019 Yankees may have been the best direct-to-video sequel ever. Usually these types of movies are the worst, mainly cheap forgettable cash-ins missing all the actors who were some of the biggest reasons the original was good. At various times, the Yankees lost Luis Severino, Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Didi Gregorius, Dellin Betances, Miguel Andújar, Aaron Hicks, and others. But surprisingly, everything just kinda worked out. DJ LeMahieu earned a place at the back of the MVP ballot, the pitching held together, and the team got tremendous years from Gio Urshela and Mike Tauchman. The Yankees didn’t win the World Series, but they got closer than almost every other team in baseball, light years away from being, say, A Christmas Story 2 starring Daniel Stern, a movie that actually exists for some mysterious reason.

The Yankees survived the injuries, but it certainly wasn’t the desired outcome going into the year. Unfortunately for the Bronx Bombers, history has started repeating itself very quickly, leaving the team with the prospect of entering the 2020 season with a whole new slate of crucial injuries.

At the time of the ZiPS projection post for the Yankees, they were forecast for an obscene 102-103 wins (which would have been the best-ever ZiPS win projection). While this wasn’t with injury-free assumptions — ZiPS was already skeptical about the health of Hicks, Stanton, Severino, and James Paxton — this projection assumed that most of the stars would have healthier seasons. Paxton’s surgery to remove a cyst from his spine and the initial reports of Severino’s forearm soreness reduced these playing time estimates, dropping the Yankees to a “mere” 100 wins in the first public ZiPS run for the year. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020’s scariest baseball moment so far, on Sunday, Willie Calhoun’s face took a direct hit from a Julio Urías fastball, leaving Calhoun on the ground in a great deal of pain. Any baseball to the head is a scary situation, and Calhoun hopefully is escaping from this incident with “just” a broken jaw. Further tests are scheduled for Monday, which will tell us more about the extent of the damage to Calhoun’s face. While the team’s first concern should be the health of their player, the Rangers still need to make baseball decisions.

The result, in the short-term at least, appears to be using Nick Solak in left field. Both the ZiPS projections and I are big fans of Solak, but this move likely simply shifts where Solak gets his playing time, and doesn’t necessarily represent a significant increase in usage.

Even before the Calhoun injury, the Rangers’ offense looked the worst of the plausible playoff contenders, at least if you buy into projections. As of this morning, assuming that Calhoun comes back and manages 448 plate appearances combined in left field and designated hitter, our Depth Charts rank Texas position players 28th in baseball. That’s ahead of only the Orioles and Tigers; the Rangers’ 11.3 projected wins are barely half that of the worst-projected playoff teams from last season, the Brewers and Cardinals.

I don’t believe the Rangers think of themselves as being among the most serious of Wild Card contenders in 2020. But I also don’t think they would have signed Kyle Gibson, Todd Frazier, and Robinson Chirinos if 2020 was seen as a lost cause, nor would they have been so insistent on getting a good price for Mike Minor at the trade deadline last year in order to make a deal. The most recent ZiPS run has the Rangers at 77 wins, while the Depth Charts forecast 78 wins; that’s a team that could at least make a little noise if things broke the right way.

That’s where Yasiel Puig comes in. The Rangers are light on offense, light on corner outfielders, and light on power from the right side. Puig is a fairly limited player these days, no longer the kind of star he was when he broke into the league. What Puig does remain, however, is a roughly league-average slugger who will give you right-handed power and not embarrass you in the outfield. After two years of lefties throwing fastballs against Puig with impunity, he finally made them pay in 2019. My colleague Jay Jaffe wrote more about this, but Puig slugged just .203 with a single homer against lefty fastballs in 2017-2018 combined. In 2019, Puig flipped the script, slugging .540 against lefty fastballs.

While a lot of teams would be able to find fill-ins for Calhoun from their backups or minor-league depth, outside of the starters and Nick Solak, the Rangers don’t really have any interesting options. If you don’t believe me, here are the ZiPS projections for the at least minimally possible internal options in left, with everyone re-projected as a left fielder:

Not a single one of these options projects as better than replacement-level in left. Suffice it to say, Puig murderizes these projections.

Even Puig’s 10th-percentile projection adds a win over a full season compared to the rest of the team’s options (he forecasts as an average player in 62% of his projections, an All-Star in 12%, and replacement level in just 3%). He’s also good enough that, like Hunter Pence was last year, he can carve out a significant role even as a non-starter, though he likely won’t match Pence’s surprising 2019 production.

Texas would be smart to treat a Puig signing with a bit of urgency rather than taking a wait-and-see approach. Puig was ineligible to receive a qualifying offer from the Indians, so unlike last year’s free agent stragglers, most notably Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel, there is no particular incentive to force him to spend April in street clothes. Nor are the Rangers the only team with a reason to give Puig a call. The Yankees are now without Aaron Judge and while Giancarlo Stanton ought to return from his calf injury soon, his recent injury record is likely enough to give the Yankees’ front office pause.

The Rangers already had a narrow path to the playoffs, and losing Calhoun and his possible upside makes that path even narrower. Texas is absolutely awash in cash, nowhere near any of the luxury tax thresholds, and Puig can help the team long after a Calhoun recovery. Sign Puig. Do it yesterday.

Time is the ultimate badass. No matter how great you are, no matter how amazing you are at planning, time always wins in the end. And so it is in baseball as in other things. Mike Trout is, in many ways, the reigning king of baseball, that rare player who enters every season as the nearly-undisputed best in the game. Trout is no longer the young phenom and will turn 30 in just under 18 months, the threshold past which your baseball youth is symbolically gone. Young talent debuts every year while Trout inches closer and closer to retirement, and the day will come when he’s no longer baseball’s clear best.

Just being the best player projected coming into the season is practically enough to ensure your baseball immortality. I went back to the start of the modern era (1901) and collected the top WAR projection for every season, instructing ZiPS to calculate a Marcel-like method for the seasons prior to 2003, when the ZiPS projections did not exist. This is a quick way to demonstrate Trout’s dominance compared to other elite players in baseball history:

There are a couple of oddities in there, mostly caused by the difficulty of projecting a player who missed seasons due to war service, but otherwise it’s a Who’s Who of the Hall’s inner circle. I’d wager that in 50 years, all but two of these players will be in the Hall of Fame, with Charlie Keller likely on the outside, and Snuffy Stirnweiss certainly so. (If I’m still around in 50 years to test this prediction, I also wager I’ll be a very shouty, curmudgeonly 91-year-old.)

In terms of the number of years at the top of the heap, Trout’s eight seasons already puts him in third place in modern baseball, behind only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. In terms of uninterrupted reigns, Trout’s eight consecutive seasons ties Bonds’ 1992-1999 stretch, meaning that if he has the top projection entering 2021, he’ll have earned his spot as the giocatore di tutti giocatori in baseball.

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While the Brewers showed a disappointing inclination to cut costs this winter in a division that’s ripe for dominating, they didn’t disappoint when it came to their franchise player, Christian Yelich. Some of the team’s secondary talent, names like Eric Thames, Gio González, and Travis Shaw, were left to find richer pastures, but the Brewers made sure to lock up the services of the player who was truly indispensable. Yelich didn’t get Bryce Harper or Gerrit Cole money, but that was never in the cards with free agency years away, him hitting the market in his 30s, and coming off a significant injury. My colleague Jay Jaffe has smithed up many additional words on Yelich which you should go read now.

When seeing the Brewers close a long-term pact with their superstar, it’s not hard to contrast it with the behavior of the Cleveland Indians. A team with a larger market but worse attendance, the Indians were very close to the Brewers in revenue in the most recent Forbes estimates, with $282 million in revenue compared to $288 million for the Brew Crew. There’s some give and take in these numbers with baseball’s books not being open for all to peruse, but the figures probably aren’t that far off the mark. After all, compared to companies in other industries with similar revenues, baseball teams are relatively simple corporations. The big-ticket revenues and costs are in fact quite well-known, so there’s only so far these numbers can miss.

My fellow FanGraphier Craig Edwards convincingly argued last week that the question of the Indians being able to afford to extend Francisco Lindor a new contract is more a question of willingness than ability. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, the rebuilding San Diego Padres made a big free agent splash, signing first baseman Eric Hosmer, late of the Kansas City Royals, to a five-year, $105 million contract. If Hosmer decided not to exercise his opt-out clause after the fifth year, the contract would become an eight-year, $144 million pact, then the largest deal signed in the history of the San Diego Padres.

The argument against the Hosmer signing was pretty simple: Eric Hosmer wasn’t very good. Among first basemen from 2011-2017, the years since Hosmer’s rookie season, he ranked just 17th in WAR. When a rate stat like wRC+ is used, Hosmer drops to 26th among first basemen with 1000 plate appearances:

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