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

Batters

The outfield, the DH, and the catcher from the 2017 championship team are long gone, yet the Astros have carried on with nary a regret. Joining them on the ex-Astro list is the team’s former phenom, Carlos Correa. One could hardly call him a bust by any stretch of the imagination, but his injury history appears to have been enough to scare Houston off making a decade-long bet on him. The franchise has moved on from stars before, and it will again. But will it pay a serious short-term hit in the win department?

Honestly? No. Now, there’s no denying that a downgrade at shortstop is inevitable. But given Correa’s injury history, you can’t really pencil him in for 150 games. It was likely that the Plan B’s would get at least some playing time, and if 2022 was anything like 2017–19, that time could be substantial. ZiPS projects that we’re talking about a three-win hit for Houston. When you have a shortstop prospect slugging .600 in Triple-A, as Jeremy Peña just missed doing in 2021, it’s hard not to use that player! The more Peña and the less Aledmys Díaz that Houston gets, the better the post-Correa era will feel at the start.

Elsewhere, the Astros don’t really have much in the way of surprises. They have some dizzying highs in the trio of Alex Bregman, Kyle Tucker, and Yordan Alvarez, and they avoid being awful anywhere. Even the catcher projections aren’t really that lousy. With catcher defense extremely tricky to quantify, I’m certainly open to the idea that Martín Maldonado’s defense is better than our crude numbers have captured.

As usual, I have zero faith in Yuli Gurriel’s projection. He’ll eventually suffer age-related decline, but I don’t know if it’ll be at 38 or 48 or 58. I’m not sure that when the sun enters its red giant phase, the last vestige of life on Earth isn’t going to be Yuli still hitting .290.
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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cincinnati Reds.

Batters

The offense’s resurgence from 13th in the National League in runs scored in 2020 to fourth in ’21 was one of the big reasons the Reds stubbornly hung on to the edge of the Wild Card race for most of the second half of the season. Jonathan India not only survived in the majors but thrived, winning the Rookie of the Year award with a borderline star season and providing the team a significant boost. Tyler Stephenson wasn’t too far from a Rookie of the Year vote of his own, at least on my ballot. Joey Votto pushed back Father Time yet again, at least for the one season, and Nick Castellanos hit like the Reds expected him to when they signed him. Kyle Farmer was hardly a great shortstop, but the position would have been an even worse problem if Cincy’s wild plan to make the former backup catcher their shortstop had not worked out acceptably. 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Chicago Cubs.

Batters

Losing Javier Báez, Anthony Rizzo, and Kris Bryant hurt the offense, but the drop-off may not be all that significant. The first two weren’t amazing offensively, simply solid. And even amid some of the surprising breakouts from their Quadruple-A players, the Cubs got little out of second base and right field; Joc Pederson may have had some 2021 heroics, but they happened in Joctober, not Jocpril or Jocly. 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Batters

The offensive projections are kind of bleak, but they also represent the 2022 highlight for the Pirates, at least if ZiPS is correct. The offense basically consists of three highly interesting (in a good way) players.

When all is said and done, Oneil Cruz may end up having the best career of the three. The team’s sixth-ranked prospect entering 2021, Cruz destroyed minor league pitching on his return to Double-A. In a week for Triple-A Indianapolis, Cruz went 11-for-21 with five homers in six games, resulting in him getting a call-up for the final weekend of the season. Cruz is a physical anomaly, a 6-foot-7 player who can credibly play shortstop and run the bases very well. While there will naturally always be whispers about a shortstop that big staying at the position — and Cruz has gained about 30 pounds since his early prospect days — the Pirates aren’t in a position that should preclude them from letting him play there as long as he can. It’s what the O’s should have done with Manny Machado years ago, but they instead prioritized J.J. Hardy. The projection is even more exciting when you realize how few games ZiPS is projecting for Cruz due to various injuries and the missing COVID 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cleveland Guardians.

Batters

The overlying theme here is a state of averageness, and that’s not so bad. For a number of years, Cleveland’s outfield situation has been rather bleak, generally toward the bottom of the league, with little investment to make it better. This is the first time in a while that ZiPS sees some hope there. No, the Guardians didn’t pull a 180 and sign Starling Marte and Michael Conforto, but the likely players manning the outfield have better projections than most of those used out there in recent years. The most notable are Myles Straw and Steven Kwan, both of whom get projections that, in an entire season, put them a skosh above average. ZiPS doesn’t think they likely get any surprise star performances, but it’s a better situation.

The two likely meaningful breakouts in the roster are Nolan Jones and George Valera. ZiPS is happy with the latter’s entrance into the high minors, but there is concern about the former; that ceiling gets a lot lower if he doesn’t improve on 2021 and an unexciting .787 OPS for Triple-A Columbus. One can’t blame the ankle injury that ended Jones’ season, either, which was significant enough that he couldn’t play through it.

The middle infield is a similar story as the outfield. ZiPS sees more upside remaining for Andrés Giménez, and Amed Rosario is far from a problem. First base is a weak spot, with the computer holding out little hope for Bobby Bradley. It was a lot easier to excuse his underwhelming numbers when he was 22, but he’ll be 26 next season, and he didn’t even hit Triple-A pitchers all that convincingly last year. Speaking of players with offense that displeased ZiPS, let’s just say “Austin Hedges” and leave it there.
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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

ZiPS doesn’t usually catch me completely by surprise, but the Tigers’ 2022 offensive projections are, as a group, a solid step or two ahead of what I expected. In fact, the difference is enough to make me think a bit more positively about exactly where the Tigers are in the American League Central. Detroit didn’t hit all that well in 2021, but they were a galaxy ahead of a ’19 season when they literally scored about 200 fewer runs than the average offense. Last season, they almost clawed their way to the middle of the pack, and that was without really getting all that much good fortune. Sure, they got a very good year out of Jeimer Candelario and Akil Baddoo seemingly came out of nowhere, but nobody really hit a level of performance that looks like it will be a challenge to repeat. 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

I feel a bit of disquietude when projecting the 2022 Giants. Following up on your biggest team projection miss in nearly 20 years of making said projections doesn’t feel great. Even worse is when your current projection is far closer to the previous year’s very wrong forecast than it is to the previous season’s actual win total. It’s a challenge to convince people that I didn’t write a model for sour grapes and reassure them that I’m an egalitarian who hates every team equally, no matter which one you root for!

In this case, I generally agree with ZiPS that the most significant regressions toward the mean will come on the offense. Let’s start with catcher. At least with the bat, Buster Posey matched some of his best seasons with his stunning 2021 campaign, this despite sitting out the entire 2020 season. With a 35-year-old catcher, it was already likely that some of those wins were going to melt off San Francisco’s total, but Posey’s retirement makes the position even more uncertain. Joey Bart is an outstanding prospect, but even just replacing Posey’s 2022 projection is going to be a tall order. ZiPS does like Bart’s bat a little better than Steamer does, but I don’t think he’s going to make fans forget their retired franchise player particularly quickly. 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

This is one case where just taking a glance at the depth chart graphic could lend the wrong impression. In the below graphic, two of the four most valuable ZiPS-projected hitters have their contributions split among multiple positions, with lesser players bringing down their overall numbers, and a third isn’t even on the depth chart. What’s more, the Mariners have reasonably good depth, especially offensively, and while the ceiling on most of the lineup isn’t exceptionally high, I do think they have a pretty high floor. I also don’t believe that Evan White has anywhere near enough remaining rope to get 300 plate appearances in 2022 if he matches his projection below. 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Baltimore Orioles.

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The history of the post-Earl Weaver Orioles has not been a happy one. Over his first stint with Baltimore, from 1968 to ’82, they were the winningest team in baseball, with 1,570 total wins, and averaged four wins per season more than the next-best team, the Reds, during that stretch. At no time during this era did the O’s finish below .500, and that even leaves out their last World Series championship in 1983. Weaver wasn’t just one of the best managers in baseball, but a very modern manager who used what analytics were available at the time.

But the failure of the O’s isn’t just a failure of managing. Weaver was great, but the team’s assembly line of young talent was a pivotal piece to the puzzle. While there are certainly some notable successes, the Orioles simply haven’t produced that much talent over the last 20–30 years. It certainly didn’t help that they placed a low priority on finding talent in Latin America for a long time, depriving them of a source that pretty much everyone else in baseball happily accessed. 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Like most teams that lose 110 games, the 2021 Diamondbacks were lousy. But they’re not completely hopeless. Indeed, when perusing the projections from top to bottom, the overall feeling you get isn’t one of a lineup full of disasters and voids but rather an overpowering rush of underwhelmedness, which I’m not sure is an actual word. There are some 20 organizational players listed here (some are now minor league free agents) with projected WARs between 0.5 and 1.5 wins. These are players who have value and can contribute to a winning team, but who aren’t going to win divisions on their own. Ketel Marte projects to stand clearly above the rest of the lineup in 2022, giving Arizona’s offense the look of a bowl of Lucky Charms that has had all the marshmallows picked out. Read the rest of this entry »