After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers.

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Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: the Tigers are quite clearly the worst team in the AL Central. They may not be the worst team in baseball — the Orioles, Rangers, and Pirates will likely have something to say about that — but the Royals have made enough short-term improvements and Cleveland isn’t selling off fast enough to drop down into Tigers-territory.

But rather than belabor the point (none of this is remotely controversial), we can focus on some of the green shoots that sprouted during the bizarre 2020 season. These developments are extremely important because while Detroit has an array of quality pitching prospects, their lumber doesn’t match up. Where spot-fillers such as Jonathan Schoop, Austin Romine, Jordy Mercer, and C.J. Cron have been useful in recent years when the cupboard was empty, those types aren’t as necessary this time around. There are few possible stars among this group, but there are several guys who are at least interesting, kind of like the O’s and their supply of Quad-A 1B/DH types. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

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There have been many unpleasant stories in baseball over the last year, but Mike Yastrzemski’s tale is one of the exceptions. Never really considered a prospect — not even close enough to the fringe for a legendary last name to get him undeserved chances — Yastrzemski had to sweat out his opportunities the old-fashioned way, slowly improving his game in the minors. Hard work can always use a bit of good fortune, and Little Yaz got it when the Orioles traded him to the Giants, a team that has generally needed two or three starting outfielders. The best defensive corner outfielder in the minors in 2017-2018 according to the Gameday-based coordinate system ZiPS uses for minor league defense, he hit enough to earn a starting job in 2019. 2020 saw Yastrzemski get MVP votes, and if there had been an All-Star Game, he likely would have added that accolade as well. There’s a real disagreement between ZiPS and Steamer over just how good he is — ZiPS projects him for a 120 OPS+ while Steamer foresees a more modest 101 wRC+ — but he’s a real major leaguer and one of the few current starters who seems likely to be on the team in a few years.

But what will the Giants look like in a few years? The crystal ball is rather foggy on this point. While San Francisco has been surprisingly competitive the last two seasons, flirting with playoff contention both times, it hasn’t actually been a good team. Ownership not blowing up the entire organization has given the franchise breathing room to improve from the 2017 nadir, but it’s still hard to see a lot of short-term upside. There are more adequate starters in the lineup than a couple of years ago, but the offense remains very, very old. Brandon Belt, Buster Posey, and Brandon Crawford all project to still have their moments, but they’re the past, not the future. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels.

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What makes the Angels a serious threat in any given season is fairly obvious: Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon. Trout starts just about every season as the MVP favorite — at least for now — and signing Rendon last winter brought in a second sorely needed superstar. A team that employs these two begins each year as top-tier contender… if they can just build a .500 team around the pair. That’s been the riddle the Halos have found themselves unable to solve; the last time the team had a winning record was 2015, and their last playoff appearance was 2014.

A decade of Trout without a single playoff win represents arguably some of the most wasted baseball potential in history. Sure, there have been examples of the Angels having terrible luck. Albert Pujols declined more quickly and more steeply than anyone imagined he would when he headed to the west coast for a mega-deal after the 2011 season. The problem is the team has frequently doubled-down on bad luck rather than mitigating its effects. Take Pujols. The Angels had little control over his walk off the proverbial cliff, but to keep playing him, hell or high water, was their decision. Nobody made the Angels essentially throw in the towel on having a major league quality first baseman for several years. Whether it’s Justin Upton or the parade of pitcher injuries, the Angels keep throwing good money after bad.

And the clock is ticking. Trout is no longer the young phenom; he’s approaching 30, and given the height of his peak, it’s likely that he’s already had his best season in the majors. The same goes for Rendon, who turns 31 next season. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Milwaukee Brewers.

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Milwaukee’s approach to replacing Yasmani Grandal (.848 OPS in 2019), Mike Moustakas (.845), and Eric Thames (.851) took the form of, well, nothing. That’s possibly a little too cruel, but it wasn’t reasonable to expect Justin Smoak, Avisaíl García, and Eric Sogard to make up for that production. Losing Lorenzo Cain due to his opt-out — and let’s be clear that nobody should fault him at all for this — caught the team by surprise as well, necessitating Garcia as the center fielder. Overall, from 2019 to ’20, the Brewers saw improved offense at one position (shortstop), held serve at a second (center), and lost ground everywhere else. Sum up everything, and the lineup combined for an 89 wRC+, the 10th-worst in team history and a 10-point drop from 2019. To put this into context, this was only slightly better than the Brew Crew did in their one season as the Seattle Pilots.

Thanks to 16 teams qualifying for the playoffs, that still wasn’t enough to prevent Milwaukee from October baseball. Like the rest of the NL Central, the Brewers were quietly dispatched in the wild-card round. With a 16-team playoff structure unlikely for 2021, a repeat performance would likely doom any quest for a postseason appearance.

Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Philadelphia Phillies.

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Is this all there is? I imagine nearly everyone asks themselves that existential question at some point in their lives, and it’s definitely one the current version of the Phillies inspires. The Phillies started rebuilding in late-2015 in the midst of their third consecutive losing season, and while that was arguably a bit late, they went about it in earnest. In one of his final pieces at ESPN, our friend Sam Miller explored the ins-and-outs of Philly’s process in detail. Long story short, the Phillies and Braves reworked their rosters over roughly the same time frame but the Braves made the playoffs in three consecutive seasons, while the Phillies are still looking for their first campaign over the .500 mark.

It would be one thing if this was a team on the upswing, but looking at the projected lineup, the roster more closely resembles a club at the end of a cycle of success, not one that’s still working on completing its remodel. For a team that’s had J.T. Realmuto and Bryce Harper in the lineup for two years, the overall results have been quite underwhelming. In terms of WAR, the team’s position players finished 16th in baseball in 2020, just behind the Royals. 2019 wasn’t much better, with the Phillies ranking 15th, and this has been the high water mark in recent years; going backwards from 2019, they’ve finished 22nd, 27th, 29th, and 29th. With Realmuto a free agent, the Phillies rank 21st in our Depth Charts, which, as a reminder, are Steamer-based until the ZiPS run is complete in a few weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

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Intending to compete in 2020, the Diamondbacks spent the first half of the abbreviated season in the hunt for one of the Wild Card spots. Arizona hit their high-water mark the morning of August 19, standing in the thick of the race with a 13-11 record. That’s not to say everything went as planned; the team’s pitching staff had an ERA of 5.17, and the offense ranked in the middle of the pack. But contending is contending, and the projections still looked relatively bullish, with Steamer giving Arizona a 62% chance of making the playoffs and ZiPS a 60% shot. Those prognostications turned out to be very overly-optimistic; the D-backs dropped 11 of their next 12 games, a mortal blow in a season of only 60 games. The result was a club that became an aggressive seller at the deadline. Gone were Archie Bradley, Starling Marte, Robbie Ray, and Andrew Chafin as Arizona signaled a significant rebuild.

The D-backs enters the offseason in a much less commanding position than they did last year. Yes, they have a great deal of payroll flexibility, with an estimated luxury tax number more than $100 million below the penalty threshold. The giant “but” here, however, is that they’re also a team that’s very hard to significantly upgrade, full of middling players but with few stars and few obvious gaping holes. Taking a quick peek at the handy-dandy depth chart graphic, Arizona’s lowest-ranked position is the Carson Kelly/Stephen Vogt combination, projected at 1.2 WAR, mostly due to ZiPS being bearish on the latter player. The Colorado Rockies aren’t likely to actually do much in free agency, but if they did, any free agent they’d sign would likely add more wins to their team than to Arizona’s. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Houston Astros.

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If you want a reason why the Houston Astros are still a dangerous team and were just a game away from making the 2020 World Series despite a losing record in the regular season, look no further than the Big Numbers in the lineup. The Astros have a lot in common with their 2019 World Series opponents, the Washington Nationals, in that they’re both teams that have been serious contenders for a numbers of years, have some extremely talented young superstars, and are suffering depth issues due to veteran attrition. Even with the loss (as of now) of Michael Brantley and George Springer, there are still a lot of highlights on the club. And the weak points of the lineup are glaringly obvious.

One of those is left field, which is a good reminder that our Depth Charts today will not be the same as they are three months from now. I would be extremely surprised if Houston started the season with Chas McCormick and/or Ronnie Dawson in left. McCormick projects better than Dawson does, but as long as the team’s still trying to contend in 2021, this is definitely a Too Soon thing. It would be a little odd to give McCormick time playing time so quickly after Kyle Tucker had to fight for years for an extended shot! Nor am I convinced that Myles Straw actually ends up the starter in center next season, though it’s more plausible than the current situation in left. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Washington Nationals.

Batters

There are a lot of names from the 2019 World Series championship that are no longer here, but the two most important ones are: Juan Soto and Trea Turner. After missing Opening Day due to a positive COVID-19 test result, Soto made up for lost time, playing like a man possessed and hitting .351/.490/.695, one of those lines mainly produced by players with Hall of Fame plaques. He now has a 152 wRC+ in 1,349 major league plate appearances and turned 22 a month after his season ended.

There are 14 players in major league history with a wRC+ of at least 130 in at least a thousand plate appearances before their age-22 season. The two other active players besides Soto, Mike Trout and Ronald Acuña Jr., are two of the other brightest young superstars in the game (or at least youngish in Trout’s case). Another is Tony Conigliaro, one of the game’s saddest examples of a brutal injury derailing a career. Everyone else on the list is a Hall of Famer. And I’m not talking run-of-the-mill Hall of Famers; this is a list that features Jimmie Foxx, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, and Mickey Mantle. The worst of this group is either Ken Griffey Jr. or Arky Vaughan. As such, Soto gets Ted Williams as his top offensive comp at his age. Not the Ted Williams who played in the minors for the Mariners, not a data error that led to an odd result, but the Ted Williams. I believe this is a first.

No matter where the Nats go from here, the team’s first priority ought to be locking up Soto’s services with a very, very lucrative contract for a very, very long time. Whether rebuilding, retooling, or pushing in the whole stack of chips, Soto is a foundational talent any team can build around. I’m a fan of Bryce Harper, but he was no Soto. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cleveland Indians.

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Even after seeing the public relations fiasco that resulted from the Red Sox trading their franchise player last winter, Cleveland is preparing to do the same, making it abundantly clear that Francisco Lindor will most likely start the 2021 season wearing another uniform. Lindor’s short 2020 wasn’t a triumph, but he’s at that level of superstar where it takes a lot more than 60 games moonlighting as a mortal to change expectations by a significant margin. Now, it’s very possible that the players sent in return for Lindor will add more future wins overall than the star shortstop’s 2021 season will, but with the Indians in a three-way divisional dogfight, we know that they’re giving away high-leverage wins in the short-term. Lindor is on a Hall of Fame trajectory and should he reach Cooperstown, it seems likely that he’ll be more closely associated with his next team than his current one. The logo on Joe Morgan’s Hall plaque is that of the Reds, not the Astros, after all.

While there’s not a lot of good news concerning the lineup, José Ramírez further demonstrating that his late 2018/early 2019 struggles aren’t the new normal falls in that category. Ramírez hit .292/.386/.607 in 2020, leading the AL in WAR. If I had been an AL MVP voter, he would have easily had my first-place vote. He’s no longer a clearly above-average third baseman defensively and the days when it made sense to consider him an option at second on the right roster have probably passed, but his bat is good enough that it’s not really a troubling issue. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets.

Batters

Robinson Canó’s suspension for the 2021 season may be a blessing in disguise from the point of view of the Mets, at least if we trust the second baseman’s ZiPS projection. Canó was surprisingly good in 2020, but there’s a great deal of gravity surrounding him; he seemed to be nearing the end this time last year and Nelson Cruz notwithstanding, the typical decline for hitters in their late 30s would be illegal for roller coasters. The Mets aren’t losing Canó’s 2020, they’re losing what they could have gotten from him in 2021, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. There’s opportunity here to get creative in the infield. Jeff McNeil becomes the obvious second base candidate with J.D. Davis moving back to third. ZiPS is into the former but not the latter, and it would be fun to see the Mets go after someone like Justin Turner at the hot corner.

Even if the Mets stick with what they have, there’s only one real glaring weakness in the starting lineup: catcher. Wilson Ramos looked like he aged fairly quickly in 2020 and the team no longer has much in the way of quality depth at the position, which used to be a necessity due to Travis d’Arnaud’s injury record. If new owner Steve Cohen wants a highly efficient way to splash some cash around, there may be no more efficient signing out there than landing J.T. Realmuto. At this point last year, I figured that the Phillies were certain to extend Realmuto, but now that they’ve lost $20 million, $2 billion, or whatever fictional figure sneaks past an editor, the Mets have an opportunity to poke a finger in a rival’s eye. And, of course, it’s a winning baseball idea!

So long as the team stays healthy, there aren’t any other huge headaches in the lineup. ZiPS isn’t the least bit worried about Pete Alonso despite a slightly disappointing sophomore season and though the computer isn’t fully on Team Giménez, it still sees the shortstop timeshare as adequate, if not terribly exciting. If the players don’t stay healthy, the Mets aren’t particularly deep, so there’s some work to be done this winter even if it’s not of the headline-making variety. There are a lot of solid role players on this projection list, but a very high percentage of them are free agents. Read the rest of this entry »