| 9:08 |
: Hello friends
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| 9:08 |
: Welcome to Friday baseball chat
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| 9:08 |
: Hello, friend!
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| 9:08 |
: Hello friend
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| 9:08 |
: Is Boston’s outfield going to be all time great on both sides of the ball?
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| 9:10 |
: Allow me to say this much —
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This is another post about the standings and the projections. We’ll do other stuff soon. Just not yet. All right, so, these are our current projected standings for 2017. The top six teams, along with their projected win totals:
One quality representative from every division. That’s a pretty damn even spread. I also recently opened the team projections up to community debate. Earlier today, I analyzed the results, and here’s the community’s top six teams:
There are some slight single-game shifts in there, but the level of agreement is strong. The projections identify six obvious favorites, and you, as a group, expect similar results. There’s nothing particularly strange about baseball having a tier of elites, but this time around we’re talking about six teams projected to win at least 90 games. That’s uncommon!
Now to analyze my favorite polling project every year. We’re a site known for its math and projections. Most of the time, we just do the math and supply the projections, and that’s the end of it. Less attention is given to community feedback. In this project, you, the community, fed back!
This is a link to our projected-standings page, which tries to forecast the 2017 regular season based on Steamer, ZiPS, and our manually-maintained team depth charts. You see projected records there, but that doesn’t mean you have to like them or agree with them. On Tuesday, I asked you all to weigh in on the American League projections. On Wednesday, I asked you all to weigh in on the National League projections. I don’t know why I just linked to those posts, because there’s no point in voting anymore, because I’m already analyzing the results right here. Two things I can tell you right off the bat: The community is high on the Rockies, and down on the A’s.
The intentional walk, as we’ve known it, is dead, and that’s fine. Pitchers no longer will have to lob four baseballs, as a batter can now be put on by means of a simple signal. This will not, of course, turn baseball from being a slow game into being a fast game, but it will take care of a small amount of pointlessly active inaction. While I do understand the appeal of this video:
…such memorable events are incredibly rare. The natural parallel is to the NFL’s extra point, which was made more difficult a short while ago because it used to be a gimme. The NFL did what it could to make the extra point a little more interesting. There was no way for baseball to make an intentional walk more interesting, so the whole active portion of it has been eliminated.
There will be intended consequences, and I’m sure there will also be unintended consequences. Among the lesser-known consequences is that this effectively erases what was probably baseball’s least-enforced rule. So that I am being absolutely clear, this is not a fond-farewell kind of post. I will not miss this rule. Mostly because no one’s ever had to pay attention to this rule.
Hello and welcome to the second part of this community polling project, in which I ask you all how you feel about the various team projections, now that we’ve included both the Steamer system and the ZiPS system. If you missed it, here’s Tuesday’s polling post, about the American League. Now to examine the National League landscape:
| Team | W | L |
|---|---|---|
| Cubs | 95 | 67 |
| Dodgers | 94 | 68 |
| Nationals | 91 | 71 |
| Giants | 87 | 75 |
| Mets | 85 | 77 |
| Cardinals | 83 | 79 |
| Pirates | 82 | 80 |
| Marlins | 78 | 84 |
| Rockies | 78 | 84 |
| Diamondbacks | 76 | 86 |
| Braves | 73 | 89 |
| Phillies | 71 | 91 |
| Reds | 70 | 92 |
| Brewers | 69 | 93 |
| Padres | 65 | 97 |
All in all, it seems fairly uncontroversial. Last year’s top six NL teams: the Cubs, Nationals, Dodgers, Giants, Mets, and Cardinals. This year’s projected top six NL teams: the Cubs, Dodgers, Nationals, Giants, Mets, and Cardinals. There hasn’t been much of a shakeup at all, because the majority of the NL is either trying to win now or rebuilding. That being said, just because this looks similar to a year ago doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything. Rosters have changed, and outlooks are altered. This is why I run this project in the first place. Let me know where you disagree. (Also let me know where you agree. That part is important too.)
Again, [copy, paste] something I’d like for you to keep in mind: Please vote according to what we know now. Don’t vote anticipating midseason additions or subtractions. It’s one thing if you think a team will or will not call up a top prospect, but don’t vote planning on trades. I think everything else is self-explanatory, so, have fun. For each team and each poll, I’ll offer brief commentary that serves little purpose since I don’t want to actually bias anything myself. I think that’s it for the intro. Thank you and I love you!
Time to kick off the latest edition of what’s always my favorite polling project every year. For a while, on the site, we’ve been showing you the Steamer projections. Just in the last day or two, we’ve folded in all the ZiPS data, meaning now we’ve got projections that shouldn’t budge anymore, barring injuries or roster moves. Here is the projected American League landscape!
| Team | W | L |
|---|---|---|
| Red Sox | 93 | 69 |
| Indians | 92 | 70 |
| Astros | 91 | 71 |
| Blue Jays | 86 | 76 |
| Angels | 83 | 79 |
| Mariners | 83 | 79 |
| Rangers | 83 | 79 |
| Rays | 82 | 80 |
| Orioles | 81 | 81 |
| Tigers | 81 | 81 |
| Yankees | 81 | 81 |
| Athletics | 79 | 83 |
| Royals | 75 | 87 |
| Twins | 74 | 88 |
| White Sox | 69 | 93 |
Overall, I assume things look more or less acceptable. Every division has a clear favorite, and we know the White Sox have initiated a rebuild that’s likely to cause them to suck in the short-term. The Twins, also, could suck in the short-term. The A’s and Rays are forever projecting to play around .500. And so on and so forth. But every year I like to see what the community thinks, because there isn’t otherwise an easy way to express disagreement with the numbers being provided. Do some of the projections just feel wrong to you? Say that in the polls below. We’ll look at the National League on Wednesday, and then I’ll examine all the results at the end of the week.
Something I’d like for you to keep in mind: Please vote according to what we know now. Don’t vote anticipating midseason additions or subtractions. It’s one thing if you think a team will or will not call up a top prospect, but don’t vote planning on trades. I think everything else is self-explanatory, so, have fun. For each team and each poll, I’ll offer brief commentary that serves little purpose since I don’t want to actually bias anything myself. I think that’s it for the intro. Thank you and I love you!
In the middle of last July, rumors started to spread that, come free agency, Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal. Then, in the second half of the season, Hosmer batted .225, with a 76 wRC+. Now, in a new article from Ken Rosenthal, it’s expressed the Royals believe Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal.
Hosmer is represented by Scott Boras, and you can see here how Boras effortlessly presupposes Hosmer’s significance:
“We all know that Hos is a franchise player, a world champion. He’s done all this at a very young age,” Boras said.
World champion? Sure, that happened. Very young age? Hosmer is still only 27 years old. But, there’s that first thing. We don’t all know that Hosmer is a franchise player. The majority of people would actually disagree with that notion. This is a phenomenally easy idea to argue against.
Over the course of their admittedly limited franchise history, the Marlins have had a catcher win a Gold Glove Award three times. The first winner was Charles Johnson in 1995, a season in which, according to Baseball Prospectus, he was one of the less-valuable defensive catchers in the game. Johnson then won again in 1996, and BP ranks his defensive value 96th out of 100 that year. And then Johnson won again in 1997, with BP ranking his defensive value 95th out of 96. That would be worst, were it not for the flabbergastingly-bad Kirt Manwaring.
This isn’t to say anything about the voters themselves. This was back when the Gold Gloves were among the least scientific awards in existence, and Johnson, to his credit, was pretty damn good at blocking and throwing. Those are a catcher’s most conspicuous skills, and Johnson was fantastic at preventing those extra bases. His statistical downfall is that he rates as having been a lousy receiver. If it’s any comfort to him, that’s kind of been an organizational problem.
| 9:06 |
: Hello friends
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| 9:06 |
: Welcome to Friday baseball chat
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| 9:06 |
: Hello, friend!
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| 9:07 |
: Hello friend
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| 9:07 |
: Jeff, why is MLB literally willing to do anything to speed up games except for the most obvious problem of not enforcing the pitch clock and making batters stay in the box?
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| 9:08 |
: So, the staying-in-the-box part, yeah, enforcement has gotten pretty relaxed. Batters have gone back to pushing that
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The major story of the playoffs, obviously, was the Cubs winning the World Series. But that’s something we only got to know after the fact, and in the thick of things, the playoffs are a random jumble of assorted other stories. There was Trevor Bauer and the drone. There was the surprise appearance of Ryan Merritt. There was Clayton Kershaw pitching in relief. And there was Pedro Baez demonstrating a reluctance to ever be pitching at all.
Baez is not baseball’s only slow worker, but he probably became the new face of the group. When he was a rookie in 2014, he averaged 29 seconds between pitches, ranking him tenth-slowest. The next year, his average increased to 29.8, ranking him first-slowest. Runner-up Junichi Tazawa made himself slower by seven-tenths of a second, so Baez responded by making himself slower still, bumping that average to 30.2, again the slowest mark in the game. It’s something that’s simultaneously subtle and ever so noticeable. Baez’s nickname, according to Baseball-Reference, is The Human Rain Delay, and that’s because whenever he gets summoned from the bullpen, the umpires get together to discuss whether they should just call the thing and go home.