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2:06	Dan Szymborski: Hello!

2:06	Dan Szymborski: Welcome to our NLDS Game 1 Chat! Which you have likely figured out from the link that was titled as such!

2:08	Dan Szymborski: I imagine a Marlins-A’s World Series would cause Depression-era panic at Fox.

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4:01	Dan Szymborski: And I am here!

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1:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to today’s Wild Card Series Day 2 chat. I’ll be joined here by Dan Szymborski, Tony Wolfe and maybe Meg Rowley in due course

1:01	Jay Jaffe: we’re all going to have baseball coming out of our ears by the time today is over

1:02	Jay Jaffe: Reds-Braves is already going, Astros-Twins about to start, Marlins Cubs at 2 pm ET, White Sox-A’s at 3, Blue Jays-Rays at 4, C, Cardinals-Padres at 5

1:02	Jay Jaffe: (pauses to catch breath)

1:02	Jay Jaffe: Yankees-Indians at 7 ET, and finally Dodgers-Brewers at 10

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7:00	Dan Szymborski: And welcome to the FanGraphs live chat for Yankees vs. Indians!

7:00	Dan Szymborski: I am your currently unsupervised host, Dan Szymborski, also of same site.

7:01	Dan Szymborski: And there is baseball afoot.

7:01	Dan Szymborski: Seems reasonable.

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Asking baseball writers to predict the postseason is unkind under the best of circumstances. Throw in a 16-team field and a best-of-three Wild Card Series where the higher seed’s only real advantage is playing at home, and something is bound to go sideways. Still, our readers demand their answer, so I asked my colleagues to predict which team will emerge from the postseason gauntlet with a trophy, and which squads are bound for early exits. Twenty of us answered the call. Below are the results by league and round, as well as each writer’s complete forecast in a sortable table. Happy playoffs!

American League Wild Card Series

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Well that was busy! Over the past week, the FanGraphs staff has written 35 pieces dedicated to analyzing the 2020 trade deadline, from Jay Jaffe’s Replacement-Level Killers series, which previewed teams’ positions of need, to detailed breakdowns of deadline transactions, to Craig Edwards’ piece today on deadline winners and losers, and Eric Longenhagen’s ranking of the prospects who moved. It’s a lot to sort through, so to assist you in finding anything you may have missed during yesterday’s flurry, I’ve rounded up all of our deadline pieces in one place. You’ll find the broader preview and recap pieces listed first, followed by a team-by-team listing of those transactions pieces that involved your favorite squad, either as buyers or sellers. In instances when we dissected a transaction across multiple pieces — hello, Padres! — you’ll see them grouped together.

As always, all of the pieces linked below are free to read, but they took time, resources, and weekend work hours to produce. If you enjoyed our coverage of the trade deadline and are in a position to do so, we hope you’ll sign up for a FanGraphs ad-free Membership. It’s the best way to both support our work and experience the site. Now, on to the roundup! Read the rest of this entry »

You were supposed to read this yesterday. Yesterday, when the playoffs consisted of just 10 teams and Mookie Betts hadn’t yet registered his first hit in Dodger blue. But as with a great deal else about this season, the 2020 playoffs will be something different than we initially expected. Mere hours before the first pitch of last night’s Yankees-Nationals tilt was scheduled to be thrown, ESPN’s Marly Rivera reported that MLB and the MLBPA had approved a deal to expand the postseason. This new structure will only be in effect for the 2020 season, barring further negotiations between the league and the players. The field will now feature 16 teams; every division winner and runner up will make the playoffs, along with the two teams in each league that have the best records beyond those six. They’ll meet in a three-game Wild Card Series that will be seeded thusly:

Seeds 1-3 will go to the division winners based on record.

Seeds 4-6 will go to the runners-up based on record.

Seeds 7 and 8 will be based on record.

Thus, there is a possibility the third-best division winner actually plays a worse team than the two best division winners.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 23, 2020

All of the games in the Wild Card Series will be played in the home ballpark of the more highly seeded team. In the event of regular season ties, mathematical tiebreakers will be used — MLB isn’t exactly keen to play games deeper into the Fall.

David Appelman and Sean Dolinar have already updated our playoff odds to account for the new format (they are wizards). You can poke around here, but the unsurprising takeaway is this: a lot of teams are a lot more likely to play October baseball than they were when yesterday began. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week and a half, we’ve published our annual season preview, ranking the league’s players by position based on a blend of our projections (a 50/50 split between ZiPS and Steamer) and our manually maintained playing time estimates courtesy of Jason Martinez of RosterResource fame. The result is a document that rivals In Search of Lost Time for length, though we’ve striven to make it a touch more readable. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the handy navigation widget above to catch up. And remember, if you’re a fan of say, the Dodgers, and don’t want to see any other teams’ rankings but theirs, you can use the “View by Team” feature in any of those pieces, and look at that, all Dodgers. No stinkin’ Astros for you.

Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits, but first, it’s important to remember that this exercise captures a snapshot of how we project teams to perform now. Teams aren’t static, however. Since we’ve published our rankings, for instance, Gavin Lux has been optioned. Colin Poche likely needs Tommy John. Jordan Montgomery didn’t make the Yankees’ Opening Day roster. Hell, Franchy Cordero was traded to the Royals about 12 hours before the right field rankings were set to go live. Guys suffer injuries, lose playing time due to underperformance, and get traded. That’s why we maintain a Team WAR Totals page, which lists projected positional WAR by team and updates regularly throughout the season as we learn more about who is likely to take the field every day and what shape they’ll be in when they do. Now, don’t be alarmed — the WAR numbers you see there may vary slightly from what you see on the positional power rankings, mostly because those figures are aware of the injuries and transactions that have altered our playing time estimates since the power rankings went live. The z-scores I include later uses the WAR from the Team WAR Totals page. It’s a good page. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here we are. Welcome to the 2020 positional power rankings. As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer Opening Day. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly after all (thank you kindly), and are well-versed in the goings on of the offseason. You probably know that Gerrit Cole now plays in pinstripes and that Anthony Rendon calls Anaheim home and that Yasmani Grandal is a White Sox. But like so much else in 2020, COVID-19 has rendered an already odd thing stranger, harder. Sadder. In the season’s original timeline, we would have just enjoyed the Futures Game at Dodgers Stadium; I would be preparing to travel home from FanGraphs festivities in Los Angeles. Half a season’s worth of play would be in the books; in that brighter alternate reality, the All-Star game is tomorrow. Instead, the pandemic caused the season to stall out before it could get started. We witnessed a tense, nasty negotiation between the owners and the Players Association to resume play. The amateur draft was only five rounds. Most obviously and devastatingly, more than 135,000 Americans are dead.

How best to proceed with the practical vagaries and ethical quandaries of a season played against such a backdrop, I’m still unsure. I know that you still care about baseball, want to understand the who and how and what of this season. I know that I still care about the game, though I’m uncertain whether it is totally right to do so. We don’t know how much of the season we’ll get to see, just as we don’t know what the long-term consequences of COVID-19 will be for the players who contract it. It all amounts to an uneasy feeling, though it probably won’t be all bad. Strange and fraught as it is, I expect that Opening Day will feel at least a little good, that I will delight in finally seeing Cole take the mound for the Yankees, that I will thrill at remembering that Mike Moustakas plays for the Reds now, or that Mookie Betts – Mookie Freakin’ Betts! – now dons Dodger blue. And so here we are, launching the positional power rankings, hoping for good health and well-played games and for this 60-game sprint to mean something, for it to tell us something we didn’t know; to provide a welcome respite without distracting too much from the far more important task of keeping each other safe. We’ll try to find the right balance between grappling with the low lows of the pandemic and the heady highs of finally having our evenings and afternoons marked by the game’s familiar rhythms. We greatly appreciate you coming along for the ride as we do.

This post serves as an explainer for our approach to these rankings. If you’re new to the positional power rankings, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, I hope it is a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, here is the introduction to last year’s series. You can use the handy nav widget at the top to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2019.

Unlike a lot of site’s season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allow us to cover a roster top to bottom, with stars, everyday staples, and role players alike receiving some amount of examination, while also placing those players (and the teams they play for) in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across the game, and spot places where a well-deployed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is merely good. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of things and a clearer picture of the season ahead, even a weirdo season like this one.

And while we hope you find this way of viewing things useful, don’t worry. If you’re a fan of, say, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and want to view the rankings through the lens of that team, all you have to do is select the Diamondbacks from the “View by Team” dropdown that appears above the rankings in any given post and presto! Snakes on snakes on snakes. Read the rest of this entry »