I’m probably not being biased at all when I say we offer a lot of different great features here at FanGraphs, but I’m personally a huge huge fan of our projected standings and playoff-odds pages. Now that we have ZiPS folded into the mix, things are pretty complete, and it’s exciting to be able to see the numbers whenever one wants to. The numbers are based on depth charts maintained by some of our own authors, and they’re living and breathing, so you can see the direct impact of, say, the Phillies signing A.J. Burnett. (It lifted their playoff odds about four percentage points.) FanGraphs is always improving, and these additions have been a big recent improvement.

Now, as discussed briefly yesterday, we never want the projections to be actually perfect. Thankfully, that’s never going to be a problem, on account of the damned human element. But we do want the projections to be meaningful, because otherwise, what’s the point? We want the data to be smart and more right than wrong. So that brings to mind the question: how did things go last year, in our first thorough experiment with depth charts and team projections?

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Here’s the thing about projections: we always want them to get better, but we never want them to be perfect. Not that perfect is anywhere within our grasp, but in the hypothetical reality where we knew for sure what was going to happen, sports would be ruined. We don’t want to know the future — we just want to think we do, so we can talk about and analyze things that haven’t fully played out. With that in mind, hey look, we have complete combined 2014 data for Steamer and ZiPS!

We have combined 2014 season projections, and we have author-generated team-by-team depth charts. So what we have is an idea of the projected upcoming standings, an intelligent declaration of how things will go that we know will look kind of silly in six months. Reality always deviates from the projections, but that doesn’t mean the projections are valueless, and I thought it could be worth looking at which teams appear the most and least improved from last season.

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So we’re agreed: it’s interesting to see where different projection systems disagree. After all, the projections are based on the same information, for the most part, so it could be telling where there might be significantly different interpretations. Monday, I compared and contrasted 2014 Steamer and 2014 ZiPS for position players. This is the natural and obvious follow-up, for pitchers.

You’d think this would be just as simple as the position-player version. In truth, it’s more complicated, and analysis required a few more judgment calls. I’m okay with them — I’m the one who made them — but if you’re dissatisfied, you’re free to go into the spreadsheets and run the numbers the way you’d prefer to. One of the neat things about our hosting the projection data is that it’s all so easily exportable. Now then, let’s walk through the process so we can get to the end of walking through the process.

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A short while ago, I wrote a post comparing and contrasting the Steamer projections and the FAN projections. It can be potentially really interesting to see where different projections diverge, but that particular exercise faced two problems: fan bias, and fan-projection sample size. It wasn’t as satisfying an exercise as it could’ve been, and I’m okay with that, but now we have ZiPS all nice and uploaded, and we can try this kind of thing again. On which players do Steamer and ZiPS most disagree? Is there anything to be learned?

This’ll be broken down into two posts — looking at position players today, and looking at pitchers tomorrow. And it’s worth noting this is a slightly different exercise from the one involving the fans. Fans might be informed by observations, or by gut feelings, or whatever. Steamer and ZiPS will arrive at their conclusions based more or less on the same data. So, you’d expect them to be very similar, and of course they are. It’s interesting, then, where they are not.

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All offseason long, Nelson Cruz was thought of as a terrifying land mine. Plenty was written elsewhere, plenty was written right here, and in early November, Dave used the term “land mine”, specifically, to refer to Cruz as an acquisition. It was understood that Cruz was seeking a major contract. It was understood that Cruz was overrated as a contributing player. It was understood that everyone was to prepare to laugh at the team that eventually gave Cruz a whopper of a deal. Cruz became something of an unfunny offseason punchline. Then he signed with the Orioles for a year and eight million dollars. There are incentives, worth a total of less than one million dollars.

All along, it was assumed Cruz would end up with something statistically unreasonable. What he got instead is something that’s more or less fine for that kind of player, and this is one of the dangers of reaching conclusions about the market before the market reaches a conclusion about a player. As Dave has illustrated, or will illustrate, it’s interesting that this is what Cruz was reduced to. Something else that’s interesting is how the Orioles’ earlier acquisition of Ubaldo Jimenez in part allowed the Cruz signing to take place.

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If you’re not much of a hitter, you might be considered to play a lot anyway for one of two reasons: you’re a pitcher, or you’re an outstanding defender. Juan Lagares isn’t much of a hitter, and he doesn’t project to be much of a hitter, but the evidence and the eyes show he’s an outstanding defender, and that’s why he’s in the mix to start in center field for the Mets. That’s why he’s probably the favorite, or at least, that’s why he probably ought to be. The Mets also happen to be big believers in Eric Young, and that’s their right, and I don’t intend to address that part of the conversation.

What Lagares has on his side are some incredible defensive numbers. We all know to be cautious with those, when we’re talking about individual seasons. The words of this rival team official read like FanGraphs in the newspaper. There’s no question that Lagares is highly talented in the outfield, and that no amount of regression can make him look anything but skilled. But with Lagares in particular, the situation’s a little different, and the numbers have to be treated a little differently.

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Aroldis Chapman doesn’t throw all the hardest pitches in baseball, but he does throw most of them. Last year, PITCHf/x captured 41 pitches of at least 102 miles per hour. Of those, Chapman was responsible for 27. He throws the kinds of rockets that make even rival spectators gasp, and indeed, the heat has long been his calling card. It’s one of the most exceptional abilities in the game.  Chapman throws a lot harder than just about anyone. But what if he didn’t?

In a sense, this is a hypothetical. In a sense, this can be investigated. What if we chopped a few miles per hour off Chapman’s average fastball? We can’t know for sure what that pitcher would actually be like, but we can make something of an educated guess, based on Chapman’s history. So let’s try it, just to see. Big thanks to Brooks Baseball for making this fairly easy.

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When Ryan Dempster walked away, it was pretty clear what the Red Sox needed to do. Though Dempster’s salary was too high, the pitcher served an important function as swingman and rotation depth. So it was up to the Red Sox to find a replacement, and the most obvious replacement on the market was Chris Capuano. Capuano was both a starter and a reliever just last year, and with Boston, he could compete with Felix Doubront for the fifth rotation slot in camp. In short, it’s not a surprise at all that, Thursday, Capuano and the Red Sox agreed to terms, pending a physical.

What’s more of a surprise are the terms themselves. Capuano signed for one year, despite having looked for two earlier in the offseason. And his guaranteed base salary is just $2.25 million, with incentives that could push the deal up to a maximum of $5 million. Granted, there might’ve been a discount because the Red Sox just won the World Series. Granted, there might’ve been a discount because Capuano grew up in Massachusetts. But if there were substantially bigger offers out there, it stands to reason Capuano would’ve taken one of those, so it’s curious that he was available so cheap.

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As much fun as it can be to criticize, the reality is that nearly every decision made by an MLB organization is justifiable. It’s a competitive business, after all, with great potential rewards, so organizations have to look out for themselves, and they have to make sure they’re going down the right path. Decisions have to be made rationally, intelligently, and that’s what makes the occasional transaction so extraordinary. There was simply no reasonable explanation for, say, the Angels trading for Vernon Wells. Likewise, there was no reasonable explanation for the Tigers getting so little for Doug Fister. These decisions have stood out specifically because of how unambiguously bad they were. Decisions of that ilk are few and far between.

The Phillies, as an organization, are no stranger to criticism. This is a team that has yet to rebuild, the same team that gave Ryan Howard way too big of a contract. It’s an aging team, a team that’s easy to mock, a team that might believe it’s more than it is, but the latest issue with the Phillies has nothing at all to do with the payroll or major-league roster. It has to do with the draft, and with the Phillies turning in unsigned collegiate players to the NCAA for dealing with professional agents.

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