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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Hello friends. With the countdown to the season tantalizingly close to zero, it’s time to tell you what we actually think is going to happen this season. We’re not always great at this, and I don’t think you’d want us to always be great at this, because frankly, that’d be terribly boring. But we do like to conduct the thought exercise of who is going to reach the postseason, because it’s good fun and also because it helps us frame our expectations for the season.

Last season, we were able to identify seven of the 10 playoff teams successfully, though not necessarily in their correct postseason positions. Will we do as well or better this season? Only time will tell. As is often the case, some teams got the overwhelming majority of the love, and some teams got coal in their baseball stocking.
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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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If you’re a fan of the movie Remember The Titans, you probably remember the emotional turning point of T.C. Williams’ High training camp. It feels especially prescient when it comes to left efield this season:

The left side, or left field, is definitely a long ways away from being the strong side it used to be. And now that you’re properly fired up, let’s take a look at this year’s graph.

If you read Corinne Landrey’s piece in The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2017, this might not surprise you. In it, Corinne notes that, as a position, left fielders recorded their lowest collective OPS+ since the designated hitter was introduced in 1973. Here’s one of the telling graphs from her piece.

Not pretty. And, as you can see, Barry Bonds propped up left field all by himself for quite some time. Left-field production has been trending downward for a while, and as you can see from our first graph, the projections don’t think this year will be any different. On the high end, it’s the only defensive position that doesn’t include a four-win team. (DH also doesn’t have one, but that’s pretty normal for DH). On the low end, no position has more teams pegged for fewer than 1.0 WAR — and no position has more teams pegged for negative WAR, either. Let’s turn to Cosmo Kramer to succinctly wrap up the 2017 left field outlook:

1. Mets

Name	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA	Bat	BsR	Fld	WAR
Yoenis Cespedes	525	.265	.320	.490	.340	9.6	0.4	5.1	2.7
Michael Conforto	105	.255	.327	.458	.335	1.5	0.0	0.5	0.4
Brandon Nimmo	35	.254	.328	.383	.311	-0.2	-0.1	-0.1	0.0
Juan Lagares	35	.254	.296	.367	.286	-0.9	0.0	0.5	0.0
Total	700	.262	.320	.474	.335	9.9	0.4	6.0	3.2

Last year at this time, Conforto was the one atop the Mets’ left-field depth chart. The young outfielder had a challenging season, though. Now, as far as left field is concerned, he’s in a reserve role, and will be one of the best backup outfielders in the game (if he doesn’t eventually claim the starting right-field job, that is). This isn’t the end of the world from a team perspective, as it puts Cespedes back in the place where he belongs. Cespedes simply doesn’t have the range for center field, and his arm doesn’t play up there like it does in left. The Mets might not have a true center fielder, but they do have a true left fielder. Cespedes is a weapon there.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Sandy Leon was one of the more remarkable stories last season. As Jeff chronicled back in August, Leon took over for the Sox when they really needed a hero. He was that hero, at least for a brief time. He was nothing if not fresh — although that was mostly the result of not having played much at the major-league level previously. Now, he might be one of the most important members of the 2017 Red Sox team.

There are a couple of reasons Leon has become so important. The first and most important is that he has one of the highest (if not the highest) betas on his probable outcomes this season. Is Leon the guy who ran a 158 wRC+ from June to August, or the guy who ran a 44 wRC+ in September (and a 53 wRC+ over the first 107 plate appearances of his career, from 2012 to 2014)? The consensus seems to be something in between, but toward the lower end of that range. ZiPS has him pegged for a 78 wRC+; Steamer, a 74 wRC+ mark. Our depth charts split the difference at 76. The FANS projections are usually wildly optimistic, and that can be useful for players who have odd or small samples or some other manner of extenuating circumstance that might throw off those mean old algorithms. But even the FANS aren’t that optimistic: they have Leon down for just an 80 wRC+.

On the other hand, Leon told Evan Drellich of the Boston Herald recently that when he was signed as a professional, he was signed “because I could hit.” He said that defense was the thing on which he needed to work the most. It’s probably fair to say that, when he was signed, he needed to work on everything. Neither Baseball America nor John Sickels placed Leon among their top-10 Nationals prospect for 2008 — Sickels didn’t have him in his top 20. (Leon signed in 2007, but after both had compiled their Washington lists.) The same was true for the 2009 lists, and by that time, Derek Norris and Adrian Nieto were popping up on the Nats’ lists, so we can’t say that Leon was even the most highly rated catcher in the system.

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