12:01

Dan Szymborski: I don’t see a reason the Royals COULDNT go after Santander. Or at least Joc Pederson

12:01

Dan Szymborski: and welcome to SzymChat! With me finally done the ZiPS prep and it rolling out, chats are back

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Sadly, I do not expect a clean CBA agreement and I think it’s more likely than not that we miss games

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s that time of the year again. When the last gasps of summer weather finally die and everybody starts selling pumpkin spice everything, that’s when I make the magical elves living in the oak in my backyard start cranking out the E.L.fWAR cookies. Szymborski shtick, Szymborski shtick, pop culture reference, and now, let’s run down what the ZiPS projections are, how they work, and what they mean. After all, you’re going to be seeing 30 ZiPS team articles over the next two months.

ZiPS is a computer projection system I initially developed in 2002–04. It officially went live for the public in 2005, after it had reached a level of non-craptitude I was content with. The origin of ZiPS is similar to Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey, coming from discussions I had in the late 1990s with Chris Dial, one of my best friends (our first interaction involved Chris calling me an expletive!) and a fellow stat nerd. ZiPS quickly evolved from its original iteration as a reasonably simple projection system, and now does a lot more and uses a lot more data than I ever envisioned it would 20 years ago. At its core, however, it’s still doing two primary tasks: estimating what the baseline expectation for a player is at the moment I hit the button, and then estimating where that player may be going using large cohorts of relatively similar players.

So why is ZiPS named ZiPS? At the time, Voros McCracken’s theories on the interaction of pitching, defense, and balls in play were fairly new, and since I wanted to integrate some of his findings, I decided the name of my system would rhyme with DIPS (defense-independent pitching statistics), with his blessing. I didn’t like SIPS, so I went with the next letter in my last name, Z. I originally named my work ZiPs as a nod to CHiPs, one of my favorite shows to watch as a kid. I mis-typed ZiPs as ZiPS when I released the projections publicly, and since my now-colleague Jay Jaffe had already reported on ZiPS for his Futility Infielder blog, I chose to just go with it. I never expected that all of this would be useful to anyone but me; if I had, I would have surely named it in less bizarre fashion.

ZiPS uses multiyear statistics, with more recent seasons weighted more heavily; in the beginning, all the statistics received the same yearly weighting, but eventually, this became more varied based on additional research. And research is a big part of ZiPS. Every year, I run hundreds of studies on various aspects of the system to determine their predictive value and better calibrate the player baselines. What started with the data available in 2002 has expanded considerably. Basic hit, velocity, and pitch data began playing a larger role starting in 2013, while data derived from Statcast has been included in recent years as I’ve gotten a handle on its predictive value and the impact of those numbers on existing models. I believe in cautious, conservative design, so data are only included once I have confidence in their improved accuracy, meaning there are always builds of ZiPS that are still a couple of years away. Additional internal ZiPS tools like zBABIP, zHR, zBB, and zSO are used to better establish baseline expectations for players. These stats work similarly to the various flavors of “x” stats, with the z standing for something I’d wager you’ve already guessed.

How does ZiPS project future production? First, using both recent playing data with adjustments for zStats, and other factors such as park, league, and quality of competition, ZiPS establishes a baseline estimate for every player being projected. To get an idea of where the player is going, the system compares that baseline to the baselines of all other players in its database, also calculated from the best data available for the player in the context of their time. The current ZiPS database consists of about 145,000 baselines for pitchers and about 180,000 for hitters. For hitters, outside of knowing the position played, this is offense only; how good a player is defensively doesn’t yield information on how a player will age at the plate.

Using a whole lot of stats, information on shape, and player characteristics, ZiPS then finds a large cohort that is most similar to the player. I use Mahalanobis distance extensively for this. A few years ago, Brandon G. Nguyen did a wonderful job broadly demonstrating how I do this while he was a computer science/math student at Texas A&M, though the variables used aren’t identical.

As an example, here are the top 50 near-age offensive comparisons for World Series MVP Freddie Freeman right now. The total cohort is much larger than this, but 50 ought to be enough to give you an idea:

Ideally, ZiPS would prefer players to be the same age and play the same position, but since we have about 180,000 baselines, not 180 billion, ZiPS frequently has to settle for players at nearly the same age and position. The exact mix here was determined by extensive testing. The large group of similar players is then used to calculate an ensemble model on the fly for a player’s future career prospects, both good and bad.

One of the tenets of projections that I follow is that no matter what the ZiPS projection says, that’s what the projection is. Even if inserting my opinion would improve a specific projection, I’m philosophically opposed to doing so. ZiPS is most useful when people know that it’s purely data-based, not some unknown mix of data and my opinion. Over the years, I like to think I’ve taken a clever approach to turning more things into data — for example, ZiPS’ use of basic injury information — but some things just aren’t in the model. ZiPS doesn’t know if a pitcher wasn’t allowed to throw his slider coming back from injury, or if a left fielder suffered a family tragedy in July. Those sorts of things are outside a projection system’s purview, even though they can affect on-field performance.

It’s also important to remember that the bottom-line projection is, in layman’s terms, only a midpoint. You don’t expect every player to hit that midpoint; 10% of players are “supposed” to fail to meet their 10th-percentile projection and 10% of players are supposed to pass their 90th-percentile forecast. This point can create a surprising amount of confusion. ZiPS gave .300 batting average projections to two players in 2024: Luis Arraez and Ronald Acuña Jr. But that’s not the same thing as ZiPS thinking there would only be two .300 hitters. On average, ZiPS thought there would be 22 hitters with at least 100 plate appearances to eclipse .300, not two. In the end, there were 15 (ZiPS guessed high on the BA environment for the second straight year).

Another crucial thing to bear in mind is that the basic ZiPS projections are not playing-time predictors; by design, ZiPS has no idea who will actually play in the majors in 2025. Considering this, ZiPS makes its projections only for how players would perform in full-time major league roles. Having ZiPS tell me how someone would hit as a full-time player in the big leagues is a far more interesting use of a projection system than if it were to tell me how that same person would perform as a part-time player or a minor leaguer. For the depth charts that go live in every article, I use the FanGraphs Depth Charts to determine the playing time for individual players. Since we’re talking about team construction, I can’t leave ZiPS to its own devices for an application like this. It’s the same reason I use modified depth charts for team projections in-season. There’s a probabilistic element in the ZiPS depth charts: Sometimes Joe Schmo will play a full season, sometimes he’ll miss playing time and Buck Schmuck will have to step in. But the basic concept is very straightforward.

What’s new in 2025? Outside of the myriad calibration updates, a lot of the additions were invisible to the public — quality of life things that allow me to batch run the projections faster and with more flexibility on the inputs. One consequence of this is that I will, for the first time ever, be able to do a preseason update that reflects spring training performance. It doesn’t mean a ton, but it means a little bit, and it’s something that Dan Rosenheck of The Economist demonstrated about a decade ago. Now that I can do a whole batch run of ZiPS on two computers in less than 36 hours, I can turn these around and get them up on FanGraphs within a reasonable amount of time, making it a feasible task. A tiny improvement is better than none!

The other change is that, starting with any projections that run in spring training, relievers will have save projections in ZiPS. One thing I’ve spent time doing is constructing a machine learning approach to saves, which focuses on previous roles, contract information, time spent with the team, and other pitchers available on the roster. This has been on my to do list for a while and I’m happy that I was able to get to it. It’s just impractical to do with these offseason team rundowns because the rosters will be in flux for the next four months.

Have any questions, suggestions, or concerns about ZiPS? I’ll try to reply to as many as I can reasonably address in the comments below. If the projections have been valuable to you now or in the past, I would also urge you to consider becoming a FanGraphs Member, should you have the ability to do so. It’s with your continued and much appreciated support that I have been able to keep so much of this work available to the public for so many years for free. Improving and maintaining ZiPS is a time-intensive endeavor and reader support allows me the flexibility to put an obscene number of hours into its development. It’s hard to believe I’ve been developing ZiPS for nearly half my life now! Hopefully, the projections and the things we’ve learned about baseball have provided you with a return on your investment, or at least a small measure of entertainment, whether it’s from being delighted or enraged.

When it comes to throwing shade in the playoffs in recent years, nothing has caught as much – not even your least favorite broadcaster – than the concept of home field advantage. The reason for the negative feelings isn’t surprising. Other than a possible first-round bye, home field advantage is the main reward for playoff teams that win more regular-season games than other playoff teams.

It’s true that home teams have struggled in recent postseasons, but they actually haven’t been too bad this year. The 19-18 record of home teams isn’t the most scintillating of tallies, but their .513 winning percentage across 37 games is not exactly a stunning departure from the .522 winning percentage for home teams during the 2024 regular season. The most games a team can possibly play in a single postseason is 22, and nine points of winning percentage works out to only 0.2 wins per 22 games.

Naturally, the data are noisy given the relatively small number of postseason games, even under the current format, but the recent issues with home field advantage seem to mostly be a 2023 thing, when home teams went 15-26, comfortably their worst year. Smoothing out the data a bit doesn’t really do much, either.

You can always find an oddity if you shave data paper-thin like prosciutto, but with data as volatile as this, you’ll mostly end up with bleeps and bloops that don’t really mean anything. Like, sure, teams are 29-31 since 1995 at home in Game 7s and Game 5s, but that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS home teams going 4-12 in their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 one more time, I went back and looked at the projections, both from ZiPS and regular-season record or Pythagorean record. Using each team’s actual 2023 record, the average home team in the playoffs had a .562 regular-season winning percentage; it was .551 for the road teams. It’s a .564/.553 split using the Pythagorean records. But I still have all the projected matchups and rosters at the start of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the results of every actual game that was played. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game basis, with home field advantage completely removed from the equation, the road teams were actually slightly stronger, projecting the average home team at .545 and the average road team at .556. Facing off against each other, ZiPS expected home teams to have a .489 record in the 31 actual playoff games, with an 8% chance of going 15-26 or worse.

Looking at the Wild Card era as a whole, home teams have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs games. In the regular season over the same era, home teams have a .537 winning percentage. In other words, the playoffs just aren’t that different from the regular season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff winning percentage for the home team in a game of exactly equal teams.) So why does it feel so bad? I suspect one reason can be found in the charts above. Home teams had a pretty good run in the mid-2010s, on the heels of the expansion from eight to 10 playoff teams, peaking at a .581 winning percentage from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the feeling that home field advantage is working as intended, and the five-year runs stayed slightly above the historical trend until the 2023 home field crash.

Since that crash feels especially bad, it’s natural that people search for deeper meaning in data that don’t really have a lot to give. One common cry was blaming the long layoffs from the bye round. This argument doesn’t hold up, as Ben Clemens pointed out last postseason.

It also doesn’t have much to do with modern baseball or modern players, either. Home field advantage has been relatively stable in the regular season throughout baseball history.

There’s been some long-term decline, but nothing earth-shattering.

The larger problem is simply that fundamentally, home field advantage just isn’t a big deal in baseball. It’s not as big a deal in other sports as some think, but unlike in the other major sports, the difference in baseball between a great team, a good team, a lousy team, and the Chicago White Sox is not that large. Other sports don’t need home field advantage to be as much of a differentiator, especially in the playoffs. A few years back, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances rate of the NBA playoffs, MLB teams would need to play best-of-75 playoff series. I certainly love me some baseball, but I can’t imagine I’d still watch World Series Game 63 with the same intensity as I do every Fall Classic game now. Besides, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make that a practical impossibility anyway.

Even giving the team with more wins home field advantage in every single game doesn’t drastically weight the dice. Assuming a .535 home winning percentage and evenly matched teams, the home team would require a best-of-13 series to become a 60/40 favorite; to increase its odds to 2-to-1, we’d have to make it a best-of-39 series. Just to experiment, I simulated series with the normal postseason distribution of home field advantage (one extra game) between two teams, the one in which the home team is .020 wins better than its opponent (just over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for how often the better team would be expected to win, based on series length.

So what does this all mean? In all likelihood, home field advantage in the playoffs hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. And isn’t really all that big of a deal in the first place. Without altering the very nature of the postseason significantly — aggressive changes such as requiring the lower-seeded team sweep in the Wild Card series to advance — baseball has a very limited ability to reward individual playoff teams based on their regular-season results. Home field advantage isn’t broken; it’s working in the extremely limited way that one should expect. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series this year, it probably won’t be because they were rewarded one more possible home game.

Once considered the natural successor to Clayton Kershaw as The Man in the Dodgers’ rotation, Walker Buehler’s career hit a rocky stretch in 2022. Coming off arguably his best season in the majors, Buehler was pulled from a June start with elbow pain, starting a journey that ended with a Tommy John surgery, the second of his career, two months later. After some unrelated injury setbacks this spring, Buehler returned to the Dodgers, but as a shadow of his former self. He finished 2024 with a 5.38 ERA and a 5.54 FIP, and might not have even made the postseason roster if not for the fact that most of the organization’s other plausible starters don’t currently have working throwing arms. His no-strikeout, six-run outing against the Padres in Game 3 of the NLDS wasn’t an inspiring sign that he’d turn things around in the playoffs.

And yet, in Game 3 of the NLCS against the Mets at Citi Field, Buehler had opposing batters flailing at his shockingly nasty repertoire in a short but effective four-inning start. He left with a two-run lead, but after the Los Angeles offense kept tacking on and the bullpen threw five scoreless innings, the Dodgers left the ballpark Wednesday night with an 8-0 win and a 2-1 advantage in the best-of-seven series.

One of the problems with Buehler in his return this year was that he was just so darn hittable at times. Before 2022, his four-seamer was the foundation that his out-pitches were built around, but even before his elbow surgery, the effectiveness of the pitch had practically disappeared. From 2021 to 2022, he bled about 200 rpm off his fastball’s average spin rate. Batters apparently took notice, suddenly slugging .618 as his heater lost some of its rise. Buehler returned from surgery, but the four-seamer’s effectiveness did not, and the pitch became a smaller part of his toolset. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now down to our final two teams in the American League, the New York Yankees and Cleveland Guardians, who will hash things out in the best-of-seven ALCS starting Monday in the Bronx. Baseball, like most sports, is at it’s peak for fun when there’s something to prove and a little bit of competitive vengeance worked into the mix.

It’s now been 15 years since the Yankees last won the World Series. Unlike their last long championship drought, during their mediocre 1980s and early ’90s, the Bombers have mostly been good since their 2009 title. They’ve made the postseason 10 times in that span and have played in five Championship Series (though they’ve failed to advance each time). Yes, the franchise that was once accused of destroying baseball because it was winning too many championships now draws scrutiny for lately having won too few. There are a lot of reasons for the organization’s relative lack of success lately, but many fans point to a mysterious blend of Brian Cashman, too much analytics, not enough bunting, and Aaron Boone, who at various points has been accused of being the worst manager to have ever existed. Until the 11th time’s the charm for the Yankees, nobody’s going to fear Mystique and Aura.

If the Yankees face a drought, the Guardians are dealing with one of Joadian proportions. Where the Yankees were emblematic as the big evil franchise, the theme among Cleveland baseball for a long time was ineptitude. When they filmed the movie Major League, there was little controversy as to which franchise would play the doormat protagonists. At least the Cubs were considered losers of the lovable ilk. The last 30 years represent the most successful epoch for Cleveland baseball, but the franchise is still lacking a World Series trophy during that span. The last time Cleveland won it all, in 1948, neither of my parents were even born yet, and I’m a man approaching 50 at a distressingly rapid rate. In three of its last four playoff appearances, Cleveland met its demise courtesy of the Yankees. So, of course, the Guardians’ path to the World Series runs through New York; eliminating the Yankees surely would elicit an extra dose of satisfaction.

But who will come out on top? I usually start with the ZiPS projections, because it would be an awfully strange approach to not use the projection system I have on my PC.

There will no doubt be some shifting as the series progresses, but I don’t think ZiPS would have a change in the basic story: These teams are fairly well-matched. All seven projected games stay within that 55/45 split, so it would be tough to call anyone a significant underdog. ZiPS is going a bit against the grain here; it was one of the outliers in liking the Guardians in the preseason.

So, where are the imbalances in this matchup?

The Yankees have the edge on offense because of their talent at the top of their lineup. Yes, José Ramírez is my pick for the most underrated player of this generation, someone who should be seen as a probable Hall of Famer despite rarely getting anywhere near the commensurate attention nationally. But he’s the Guardians’ only elite offensive talent, and we’re putting him up against Aaron Judge and Juan Soto at their peaks, which is a whole different tier of awesomeness. Looking at the Judge/Soto projections vs. Cleveland’s pitching makes clear just how perilous that portion of the Yankees lineup is going to be for the Guardians.

ZiPS thinks enough of Emmanuel Clase to make Judge mortal and thinks Matthew Boyd is just a good enough starter with a lefty split to stymie Soto a skosh. But you can’t avoid these two, and the Guardians don’t have any comparable sources of terror in their lineup. There’s a part of me that wonders if every team should use a solid reliever as an opener against the Yankees if it has a deep enough bullpen, simply because of the certainty of facing Judge and Soto in the first inning.

The drop-off after Judge and Soto is tremendous, however. Of the remaining seven hitters, ZiPS expects Gleyber Torres to have the highest on-base percentage (.335) and Giancarlo Stanton to be the only one with a slugging percentage above .450 (.462) against Cleveland’s lefty pitchers. Against righties, Jazz Chisholm Jr. has the highest projected OBP (.326) and SLG (.443) in the non-Judge/Soto department.

This gives the Guardians some interesting tactical possibilities using their bullpen. With the Yankees having two players with an unusually large proportion of their offensive firepower, it should be a bit easier for the Guards to sprinkle in lesser relievers based on just where they are in the lineup.

The difference between the rotations aren’t as large as one might think. While ZiPS thinks the Guardians have one of the weaker rotations in the playoffs this year, after Gerrit Cole – the best projected starter on either team – the Yankees aren’t all that frightening either. Carlos Rodón has the next best projection, but the Guardians have had a notable platoon split that favors matchups against lefties this season. Luis Gil is having a great rookie season and ought to appear prominently on most AL Rookie of the Year ballots, but ZiPS still sees him as a guy with an expected ERA someone around four, with Clarke Schmidt faring slightly worse.

Cleveland’s rotation finished 2024 with a 4.40 ERA and a 4.51 FIP, both toward the bottom of baseball. But the rotation isn’t that bad, simply because it has largely eliminated most of the sources of this lousiness. None of Carlos Carrasco, Triston McKenzie, or Logan Allen will face off against the Yankees this upcoming week. When looking at the four starters most likely to get starts for the Guardians, ZiPS sees Gavin Williams as the one with the highest projected ERA (4.17). ZiPS is less enamored with emergency options like Ben Lively and Joey Cantillo, but still has both of them on the sunny side of a 4.50 ERA/FIP. Cleveland’s starters don’t have a lot of pizazz, but like the breadsticks at Olive Garden, they’re serviceable and there’s a lot of them. Because they Guardians have a deep rotation, they don’t need to cobble together bullpen games just to survive, which allows manager Stephen Vogt to comfortably utilize the best projected bullpen in baseball right now in the highest-leverage situations.

For the Dodgers-Padres NLDS preview, I ran a simulation for how the probability changed if both teams had a game in which the starting pitcher got knocked out after two innings and the teams played one 15-inning game. In that one, the Padres gained five percentage points in the projection based on this scenario. The Guardians, meanwhile, gain 10 percentage points if we use the same two hypothetical events, going from slight underdogs at 47% to a mildly comfortable favorite at 57%!

Cleveland’s other advantage is having the better bench. The Guardians have myriad platoon options — David Fry or Jhonkensy Noel against lefties or Will Brennan and Kyle Manzardo against righties — and being able to deploy them for the right matchups is a small but real bit of value. Combine bench and bullpen and ZiPS thinks the Guardians have the edge in one-run games by a 54%-46% margin and a 52%-48% edge in games decided by two runs. Blowouts are most likely to go in the Yankees’ favor, but in those hard-fought close contests, the Yankees are slight underdogs.

The Yankees or Guardians will not face a juggernaut in the World Series if they make it through the ALCS. The Mets have some significant team weaknesses, and injuries have resulted in the Dodgers’ being kept together with a roll of duct tape. Whichever team wins these next (up to) seven games has a good chance of finally ending its title drought.

The postseason is at its most fun when both teams have something to prove. The ZiPS projections may have been bullish on the Cleveland Guardians coming into the season, but the computer was in the minority, with most observers thinking the Minnesota Twins were the clear favorites in the division. The Guardians are no longer the habitual losers they were from the 1960s-80s, but their last World Series championship was still in 1948. For their part, the Detroit Tigers dominated the AL Central 15 years ago, but lost both of their World Series, dropping eight of nine games. And Detroit wasn’t even supposed to be here; the team traded Jack Flaherty at the deadline and if someone had bowled them over with an offer, Tarik Skubal might be wearing a different uniform this month.

Game 4 was do or die for Cleveland, with the Tigers’ plan of “Tarik Skubal and then pitching chaos” winning two of the first three games. With a bullpen whose second-half performance led the American League with a 2.50 ERA and 3.0 WAR (the Tigers weren’t far behind with a 3.00 ERA and 2.8 WAR), the Guardians had high hopes that they’d be able to send the ALDS back to Cleveland for one winner-take-all showdown. And that’s precisely what they did, winning a closely fought game that was one of the most entertaining we’ve seen so far this October.

Cleveland struck first and in old-school fashion, with a single and a stolen base from Steven Kwan, and singles by Kyle Manzardo and Lane Thomas, the latter of which scored Kwan. But Will Brennan’s groundout on a low changeup allowed Detroit starter Reese Olson to escape the first having only surrendered one run. Read the rest of this entry »

The NL West race may have been settled in favor of the Dodgers this year, but everybody goes back to the starting gate in the playoffs. The only difference is the possible extra home game the Dodgers get in each individual series, though home field advantage has been far from a valuable perk for teams except for sales of tickets, hot dogs, and $59 foam fingers. With Los Angeles getting a few extra days to try and heal up a little more, the Padres got here the hard way, having to win the best-of-three Wild Card Series against the Atlanta Braves, a team that still managed to squeeze out 89 wins without Spencer Strider and mostly missing Ronald Acuña Jr.

While some of baseball’s best rivalries are the classic ones that have endured for the last century, such as Yankees-Red Sox and Dodgers-Giants, this one between the Dodgers and Padres is a good example of how new rivalries can pop up and be a lot of fun, too. Despite the fact that the two teams have played in the same division for more than five decades, only in recent years has the so-called I-5 Rivalry really heated up. San Diego has infrequently sustained runs of relevance – this is only the second version of the Friars to string together three winning seasons in a row – leaving Dodgers fans with few nightmares featuring a brown-and-mustard palette. But these Padres have been aggressive, and unlike in the past when short-term bursts of ambition were tempered quickly with brutal fire sales, they’ve consistently tried to make the Dodgers uncomfortable at the top of the NL West. Even as the Padres traded Juan Soto over the winter, they acquired their Wild Card Series Game 1 starter Michael King in that deal and then traded for Dylan Cease, who’ll start Game 1 of the Division Series, just before Opening Day. Yet, ultimate success has proven elusive for San Diego, with two disappointing playoff misses in 2021 and 2023 and still no returns to the World Series since 1998’s debacle.

The Dodgers enter the Division Series with something to prove as well. While they do have a World Series trophy from the COVID-shortened 2020 season, with five 100-win seasons in the last seven normal years, they crave to have more hardware to show for their success. Sure, we’re used to the idea that when you have large playoff formats, winning the World Series takes a lot of luck, but neither fans nor history care much about that. Winning the World Series this year would wipe out most, if not all, of that disappointment; taking care of business in this series would get the Dodgers one step closer to that while also giving them a little revenge against the Padres for knocking them out in the 2022 NLDS, after Los Angeles won a franchise-best 111 games.

So, how do the teams stack up? Let’s start with the ZiPS projections. As I type this, Joe Musgrove has been officially ruled out for the NLDS due to his elbow injury, which has now been confirmed to require Tommy John surgery. That means no Musgrove this postseason – or next season – but for now, we’ll just deal with the impact of the news on this series.

For contrast, here are the projections for if Musgrove had been able to pitch in this five-game set.

Replacing Musgrove with Martín Pérez, likely the next man up, basically flips the win probabilities for Game 4. Where every game previously favored the home team in the projections, now the Dodgers are expected to win on the road against Pérez.

Even though the Dodgers are favored to win with Musgrove out, it would still be wrong to call them overwhelming favorites. This is a close series overall, but also a swingy one, with four of the five games projecting to be at least a 55-45 split, meaning that for the most part, these games aren’t projected to be coin flips despite the tightness of the series as a whole. “Breaking serve” here by winning on the road has quite a lot of value. If the Padres can get to Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Jack Flaherty and win one of the first two games, they would expose one of the Dodgers’ current weaknesses: a thin rotation due to injuries. Walker Buehler had only three quality starts out of his 16 outings since returning from Tommy John surgery in May; his performance was shaky enough that in mid-June the Dodgers optioned him to the minors, where he spent two months trying to get right, before they brought him back up to start on August 20. And despite a superficially appealing ERA, Landon Knack would be about the 12th choice for Los Angeles if everyone were healthy. If the Dodgers are able to get out to a 2-0 lead without any bullpen-exhaustion events, like an 18-inning game, they might be in a position of strength to run a bullpen game and axe one of their uncertain starters from the NLDS rotation.

Where the Dodgers have the advantage is their front-line offensive talent, which gives them what appears to be the superior offense overall, an edge large enough that it isn’t erased if you view players such as Jurickson Profar and Donovan Solano with less skepticism than ZiPS does.

Dylan Cease is a terrific pitcher, but ZiPS thinks the Dodgers’ Big Four of Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, and the good platoon side of Max Muncy has a fighting chance of getting to him. It’s more of an uphill climb against Yamamoto; ZiPS has Luis Arraez as the only San Diego batter projected to have a .300 OBP against Yamamoto, and it gives none of the Padres a .450 SLG projection against him. Now, contrast that with the projections at home against Knack and Buehler.

One of San Diego’s other advantages, at least in the eyes of the computer, is its bullpen. While ZiPS has both teams performing similarly overall, it much prefers the depth of the Padres’ unit. To test their bullpens, in each simulation, ZiPS was instructed to knock out both starters after two innings in one game and have another game last 15 innings; in these scenarios, the odds of the Padres winning the series go from 42% to 47% – nearly a coin flip. In a short series, things like roster construction can make a real difference. Look at the way the Nationals were configured in 2019, with four good starters, two relievers they trusted, and a dumpster fire behind them. That kind of distilled performance meant that even when Washington won 13 fewer regular-season games than Los Angeles that year, ZiPS projected the teams as nearly equal when they met in the 2019 NLDS.

Here’s what I get from these reams of data: The Dodgers should stay the course with what’s worked for them all year, trust their elite hitters, and avoid the temptation to get too cute with their managing tactics, but the Padres ought to be aggressive. If they see an opening to get to Yamamoto or Flaherty, treat that game like it’s Game 7 of the World Series. San Diego can’t afford to save any wacky tricks for later. If the Padres can push the Dodgers back on their heels quickly and early, the latter may run out of time to right themselves.

One thing you’ll hear a lot (in all four series), especially early on, is the claim that the layoff is a big disadvantage for teams. Don’t believe it. If the Padres upset the Dodgers here in the five-game series, it won’t be because Los Angeles was too rested. Instead, it’ll be because the Padres played better.

For eight innings on Thursday night, the New York Mets’ bats barely spoke above a whisper. Unfortunately for the Milwaukee Brewers, the ninth inning was the charm in Game 3, as the Mets loudly ended the Brew Crew’s 2024 season with a 4-2 win, largely thanks to a dramatic opposite-field homer from Pete Alonso.

The climactic action may have involved a trio of round-trippers, but for six innings, we got a classic pitchers’ duel between two starters with very different styles. Starring for the Mets was Jose Quintana, who played the crafty veteran lefty trope to perfection here, throwing leisurely fastballs and sinkers where hitters could neither drive them or ignore them, while mixing in a healthy dose of changeups and curves that threatened the dirt.

ZiPS was a bit worried about how Quintana matched up against the Brewers coming into the game; while he’s maintained enough of a reverse platoon split over a long career to be confident in it, Milwaukee has a lot of right-handed hitters who can make a southpaw’s evening unpleasant in a hurry. But William Contreras and Rhys Hoskins went hitless, and ultimately it was the lefties who provided most of the team’s offense. It certainly wasn’t from lack of trying; Brewers hitters offered at 60% of Quintana’s fastballs, including more than half of the ones thrown out of the zone. What’s more, they connected with every Quintana fastball they swung at, but it only resulted in two hits. Quintana didn’t throw a single fastball for a called strike all evening. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: If the White Sox get to stay together, the M’s certainly do

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Maybe they should bring back the trident logo as primary

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t found that much value on it

Read the rest of this entry »

Which characteristics cause a team to either excel or struggle in the postseason? It’s a long-standing debate, and most baseball fans have a preferred theory. Some think it’s having an ace. Others think good contact hitting, or a team’s momentum, is what pushes a club over the top. Some people — the ones most likely to get annoyed when they read my work — think that clutch performances or having veterans with playoff experience on the roster is what causes a club to shine in October. Sadly, the best answer is rather boring: What makes a team play well in the postseason is simply being the better team overall. In 2022, I examined 63 team characteristics throughout baseball history to see if any of them presaged clubs’ fall fates. Outside of leaning more heavily on home runs to score — top pitchers who struggle in the playoffs are far more likely to be felled by homers than issuing walks or failing to strike hitters out — and a barely significant tendency for younger teams to overperform, there just wasn’t much there, there.

But that’s not to say that playoff baseball is identical to regular season baseball. After all, the former is a sprint while the latter is a marathon, and the challenges in each scenario are different. When I ran the numbers for the aforementioned article, the focus was on how the playoff teams played, rather than who played. I specially used a playoff model that estimated team quality as being different in the regular season due to roster construction considerations. Teams are better able to leverage their front-end talent over a few crucial weeks than a six-month period. The qualities of a team’s fifth starter (not to mention their sixth, seventh and eighth) are less crucial to their success come October, and the key bats in the lineup (if healthy) are almost always going to be playing, thanks to the additional days off that clubs get in the postseason. As the 2019 Washington Nationals demonstrated, you can even paper over half your bullpen being a train wreck. Read the rest of this entry »