For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Texas Rangers.
Batters
If you were looking to assign blame for the Rangers going from being World Series champions to having a 78-84 season, you’d have a bounty of targets. From a Pythagorean standpoint, the collapse from one year to the next was even worse; the 2024 Rangers bled 12 wins compared to 2023, but in terms of run differential, they dropped an impressive 21 wins. Given the widespread nature of their disappointing season, the latter number is probably closer to the “true” decline.
The offense’s contribution dropped in half, from 34.1 WAR in 2023 to 16.9 WAR in 2024. And unlike the 2014 squad, the last Texas team to so dramatically underachieve, the 2024 Rangers can’t really put the lion’s share of the blame on injuries, at least on the run-scoring side of the equation. Evan Carter missed most of the season with a back injury, but he also only played in 23 regular season games in 2023. Corey Seager typically misses a couple dozen games a year, and while Josh Jung’s fractured wrist was a stroke of bad luck, Josh Smith was a very good replacement. A lot of the lost performance came from healthy, established players, and even worse, a good number of those players are veterans on the back end of their respective career trajectories. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Philadelphia Phillies.
Batters
The quick exit in the postseason at the hands of the New York Mets was a disappointing finale for the 2024 Phillies, but the season as a whole still has to be considered a successful one. Cristopher Sánchez convincingly evaporated any questions about whether his late-2023 performance was a fluke, Bryce Harper stayed healthy and proved to be a more-than-competent defender at first, and the bullpen stayed strong despite a few veteran losses from the year before. But that’s not to say there wasn’t some good fortune involved. I don’t mean that to diminish the Phillies; most great teams have more things go their way than not. The preseason NL East favorite, the Atlanta Braves, saw some of their best players lose most or all of the season with serious injuries, and along those lines, the Phillies didn’t have their depth tested to the same degree. Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: Since it decided not to post in the queue for some reason at 11:40 and I had to force it at 11:57, there’s no queue built up, so feel free to ask any question, no matter how ridiculous
12:02
Dan Szymborski: And there’s a good chance I’ll be able to answer it, since asking me about how I evaluate pretzels or how many weird AIs I’ve made of Lindsey Graham is way better than awkward silence
12:02
Kate: Would Grant Holmes projection be worse if he was projected in the rotation? In terms of how ZiPS projects his role, is that something you do manually?
12:03
Dan Szymborski: As a default, ZiPS will project a player based on their recent usage. It looks at the last four years and VERY heavily weights recent play.
12:04
Dan Szymborski: However, I have clickboxes for “full-time starter” or “full-time reliever” which will cause ZiPS to go back and translate the past baselines for a pitcher into full-time starter or full-time reliever lines, and then make a new projections
For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Atlanta Braves.
Batters
This past year was a bit of a trainwreck for the Braves, but an unusual one, in that with so much going wrong, they still won 89 games and made the playoffs, if by the skin of their teeth. The lineup still looks fundamentally similar to the one that everyone liked going into the season, just one that’s a bit riskier with an extra year of age and an extended recent history of significant injuries. The depth chart graphic below is a bit too generous for my taste with some of the playing time for the injured players, with Austin Riley, Michael Harris II, and Ozzie Albies all with current projections above 650 plate appearances and Ronald Acuña Jr. just below 600. However, even with being a bit more conservative about health, Atlanta should have a lot of dangerous weapons. In other words, even if expectations should be tempered slightly, there’s nothing fundamentally broken about this offense.
ZiPS shares Steamer’s optimism when it comes to Harris. I was a bit surprised by the projection too – and surprised to see Steamer also very high on him – but it’s easy to forget that Harris only turns 24 in March, so there’s still a realistic possibility that he improves, perhaps significantly, and projections do have to account for that. Interestingly enough, both projection systems think there’s some power upside remaining from him, too.
Honestly, there’s not much in the way of actual surprises in the offensive projections. The only significant loss is Sean Murphy’s catching sidekick, Travis d’Arnaud, but this is one of the places where the Braves could afford to let someone walk. Drake Baldwin and Chadwick Tromp may sound like 80s movies antagonists who head up the rich kids’ summer camp across the lake, but they’re more than suitable caddies for Murphy. Baldwin in particular didn’t come out of nowhere, either; he was the no. 30 prospect in baseball in our updated 2024 prospect rankings.
Nacho Alvarez Jr. already projects as a viable replacement for Orlando Arcia when the time comes (probably after 2025), but the projections aren’t bullish on the farm once you get past Baldwin and Alvarez. Atlanta would be smart to be active in the non-roster invitee sweepstakes this winter.
Pitchers
Subtracting Max Fried is a pretty big deal, so adding a pitcher – perhaps Fried himself – should be the team’s top priority. Chris Sale returned to form in a big way in 2024, winning the NL Cy Young award and leading all pitchers with 6.4 WAR, but one can’t be too confident in his health; he turns 36 at the end of March, and the 177 2/3 innings he pitched this year were easily his most in a season since 2017. Reynaldo López as a full-time starter went better than anyone could have reasonably expected, but he’s probably going to give back some of that ERA in 2025. With Strider returning from internal brace surgery sometime early in 2025 and Schwellenbach getting a surprisingly spectacular projection, the Braves should be pleased that Spencers will make up two of the top four in their rotation. I’m just not excited, especially given the injury concerns in the rotation, about not having another option better than Griffin Canning or Ian Anderson for the last slot. From a prospect standpoint, ZiPS doesn’t see a whole lot of upside in the minors beyond AJ Smith-Shawver.
The problems that faced Atlanta elsewhere this season mostly spared the bullpen, which finished the season ranked third in WAR and second in FIP in the majors. It’s still a unit that’s in pretty good shape, with five of its six relievers used in the highest leverage situations already under contract for 2025. (A.J. Minter is the free agent.) But free agent departures have thinned out the bottom half of the ’pen considerably, and Joe Jiménez will miss most, if not all, of the 2025 season, so the Braves are probably going to have to do more than stand pat here. That said, because they’re looking for depth, they don’t necessarily have to fish in the deep end of the free agent pool.
So, where are the Braves now? They ought to enter the season with one of the best win projections in baseball, somewhere in the mid-90s. A healthy Strider and Acuña alone would have been more than enough to get the relatively disappointing 2024 squad to that level. This is a top franchise, but there’s a little more risk this time around.
Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.
Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.
Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.
For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Seattle Mariners.
Batters
For the third time in the last four years, the Mariners hung around the playoff race for most of the 2024 campaign, before falling just short by the season’s denouement. When it comes to winning 85 to 90 games a year like clockwork, Jerry Dipoto’s ship is airtight and his sailors always on the ball. But so far, St. Louis Cardinals: Pacific Northwest hasn’t been quite as effective as the original series — the Mariners aren’t going to have as easy a time stealing division titles as the Cardinals did, playing as they do in a harder division. While the Mariners aggressively add players and make trades, there’s a basic conservatism here that limits the team’s ultimate upside; despite seven winning seasons in the last 11 years, Seattle has maxed out at just 90 wins. This isn’t a new thing either — the franchise only has one 95-win-or-better season in its history (the 116-win 2001 season, of course). Read the rest of this entry »
Baseball’s awards season is in full swing this week. Tonight, the National League Rookie of the Year award, officially known as the Jackie Robinson award since 1987, was awarded to Paul Skenes, who was impressive enough to also be a finalist in the NL Cy Young award voting. Skenes finished with 23 first-place votes to Jackson Merrill’s seven.
I’m not here to praise or criticize the results. Instead, I’m here to perform what I see as my journalistic duty. I was an NL Rookie of the Year voter this year (my sixth time voting for the award), and I have always felt that it’s important to give a detailed explanation of the reasoning behind my choice. As usual, I spent most of the final weekend of the season agonizing over my choices, because while being asked to vote for one of these awards is admittedly really cool, it’s also a weighty responsibility that demands care as well as candor. Offering a breakdown of my vote hasn’t always been fun — in 2021,my decision to vote forTrevor Rogers over Jonathan India resulted in my social media mentions being inundated with a combination of threats and insults — but I think I owe it to the fans and the players involved to explain myself. (OK, some of the brouhaha in 2021 was fun, like the suggestion that the Cincinnati Reds should fire me, a notion that still amuses me on many levels.) Read the rest of this entry »
For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Colorado Rockies.
Batters
Are the Rockies a good team? No, they are not. Are the Rockies even a middling team? Again, no. But things may slowly be getting better. Colorado will still have a lousy offense in 2025, but you can at least see the light at the end of a (very) long tunnel, most obviously when looking at the lineup. No one would confuse the Rockies with the Rays in terms of the cleverness with which they construct their roster, but the utter disaster that is the Kris Bryant signing does appear to have to had some kind of effect on their organizational decision-making. Since the start of 2023, they’ve done some very un-Rockies things. Jumping on the opportunity to snatch up an upside play like Nolan Jones isn’t something this team would have done in the late 2010s. The old Rockies would have found a way to play a mediocre veteran over Ezequiel Tovar, and there’s no way Brenton Doyle would have been given anywhere near enough rope to stick around for a possible breakout. Can you imagine past Rockies teams being patient with fringy prospects like Michael Toglia, giving an opportunity to a veteran journeyman like Jake Cave, or releasing Elias Díaz, a veteran catcher who made the All-Star Game the year prior, to find playing time for a prospect? Now, it hasn’t all worked out, but it at least represents some movement away from the strategies that slammed the competitive window of the last good Rockies team closed. You can’t get out of a hole until you stop digging. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the first team up is the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Batters
Last year in this space, ZiPS was optimistic about the Diamondbacks bettering their 2023 win total. A big part of that was the computer predicting that the offense would be somewhere around average or (mostly) better everywhere except designated hitter. That’s generally what happened, and they even improved on that projection a bit, signing Joc Pederson at the end of January. The Snakes did, in fact, improve on their won total, going from 84 to 89 wins even though that wasn’t enough to squeeze into the postseason this go-around. Arizona actually led baseball in runs scored, edging out the Dodgers, and the team wasn’t even really aided by Chase Field, which is a much more neutral offensive environment than it used to be. 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:
Top 50 ZiPS Offensive Player Comps for Freddie Freeman
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 Economistdemonstrated 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.
Dan Szymborski
