Jay Jaffe: HAPPY OPENING DAY! And welcome to FanGraphs’ Opening Day chat
2:11
Jay Jaffe: Thrilled to be here, particularly in light of how bleak things looked regarding the start of the season just a few weeks ago. We’ve all made it through a very tough winter
2:12
Jay Jaffe: We’re gonna be clickety-clacking along this afternoon, starting with the Brewers-Cubs game. In the meantime, I’d like to pass along a quick message from Meg:
earnest tweet alert: It pales in comparison to (gestures at everything) but the last two years have been a pretty stressful time to be in the baseball website biz, so as we celebrate another Opening Day, thanks for sticking with @fangraphs. It has made all the difference 🥰
7 Apr 2022
2:12
Harry Jerry: Just a note to say thanks for all the great content you all provide. Really kept up quality work even through a pandemic and then a lockout. You all are the best and I especially wanna say make Meg Rowley EIC For Life.
2:13
Jay Jaffe: Thank you for following along!
2:13
Wireless Joe Jackson: 38 degrees, windy, and a rain/snow mix in Minneapolis today. Why did they schedule the game there instead of Seattle where there’s a roof?
After an offseason that saw labor acrimony bookended by two frenetic free agency periods, the 2022 season is almost upon us; we made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule and predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Last year’s Braves? Our staff thought they’d win the NL East. Last year’s Angels, Mets, Twins, and Padres? Whoops! Such is the prognostication business.
We asked the staff to predict the expanded playoff field, pennant and World Series winners, and the individual award recipients. Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in; here are the results. 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 and team 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. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the navigation widget above to catch up.
Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits in a moment, 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. Since we’ve published our rankings, Austin Meadows, AJ Pollock, Reese McGuire, and Zack Collins have been traded. The Mets’ starting pitcher situation continues to deteriorate. A number of top prospects, including Spencer Torkelson, Julio Rodríguez, and Bobby Witt Jr., officially made their respective teams’ Opening Day rosters, but Oneil Cruz was sent down to Triple-A to game his service time get reps in left field.
This being baseball, players will tweak elbows and hamstrings, lose playing time to underperformance, and get traded for prospects. 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. It’s important to note that the WAR numbers you see there may vary 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 rankings went live; the Z-Scores I’ll include later also use the WAR from the Team WAR Totals page. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the 2022 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 to Opening Day. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly, after all — a fact for which we are very grateful — and are well-versed in the goings on of the offseason. You know that Carlos Correa signed with the Twins and that Kris Bryant now calls Denver home, and that the Mets remade part of their rotation and a good bit of their lineup. And yet after a protracted lockout and the subsequent frenetic conclusion to free agency, you’re still keen to know more about the game and what it might look like between now and October. The positional power rankings are our answer to that impulse.
This post serves as an explainer for our approach to the rankings. If you’re new to the exercise, 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 navigation widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2021, a year during which the projections were feeling the effects of 2020’s COVID-shortened slate.
Unlike a lot of sites’ 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 allows us to cover a team’s roster from top to bottom. Stars, everyday contributors, and role players alike receive some amount of examination, and those players (and the teams they play for) are placed in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can more 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-constructed 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. Read the rest of this entry »
In the days since the lockout lifted, baseball has seen a flurry of trades and free agent signings. It’s a lot to sort through, so to assist you in finding anything you may have missed, I’ve rounded up all of our post-lockout transaction pieces in one place. You’ll find links to some of our offseason, free agency, and prospect resources listed first, followed by a team-by-team listing of the transaction analysis that involved your favorite squad. In instances where we dissected a move across multiple pieces — hello, Matt Olson — you’ll see those pieces grouped together. This piece will be updated as more players find new homes and we publish new work.
As always, all of the pieces and tools listed here are free to read and use but took time and resources to create. If you enjoy our coverage 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 experience the site and help ensure its sustainability. Now, on to the roundup! Read the rest of this entry »
The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, and the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America.
To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.
Results will be announced and presented at the SABR Virtual Analytics Conference, March 17-20, 2022. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.
Meg Rowley and guest co-host Eric Longenhagen discuss the conclusion of the World Series, including how Brian Snitker and Dusty Baker managed their depleted pitching staffs, the future of postseason pitching, Jorge Soler’s pyrotechnics, when they realized Atlanta was going to win the Series, and what’s next for the Astros and the Braves. Then they turn their attention to winter ball, including the balance of talent between pitchers and hitters in the Arizona Fall League, the challenges the AFL presents as an evaluation environment, the players who have impressed Eric so far, including Curtis Mead, and finally, the prospects and playing environment in Liga de Béisbol Profesional de la República Dominicana. Read the rest of this entry »
Meg Rowley and erstwhile Effectively Wild co-host and current Tampa Bay Rays employee Jeff Sullivan discuss World Series game start times, how Jeff’s job has changed compared to the 2020 season, Wander Franco, the Rays’ uniforms, what it is like to root (and work) for a team in the playoffs, the Rays’ ALDS against Boston, our emotional experience of momentum, and what it’s like to prepare for an uncertain offseason. Read the rest of this entry »
Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent seasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract crowdsourcing project, with the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2021-22 free-agent market.
In recent years, we’ve added a few features to the ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor-league contract, or won’t receive one at all. Numbers are prorated to full season where noted. The projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2022 Steamer600 projections.
Below are ballots for six of this year’s free agents — in this case, another group of starting pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »
Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent seasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract crowdsourcing project, with the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2021-22 free-agent market.
In recent years, we’ve added a few features to the ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor-league contract, or won’t receive one at all. Numbers are prorated to full season where noted. The projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2022 Steamer600 projections.
Below are ballots for seven of this year’s free agents — in this case, a group of starting pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: HAPPY OPENING DAY! And welcome to FanGraphs’ Opening Day chat
