Yesterday, Jay Jaffe and Leo Morgenstern examined the state of first and second base. Today, we wrap up the infield positions, starting with a look at third base.
Third base has featured some truly top-tier stars in their prime for a while now. Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, and José Ramírez are all either 30 or 31 (Arenado turns 32 next month), and all are coming off seasons so spectacular that no projection system worth its ones and zeros would predict a repeat performance. Alex Bregman turns 29 in just a couple of days, and the projections see him notching another five wins in 2023. All of this to say, enjoy peak third base while you can, because aging curves bend but they rarely break. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier today, Jay Jaffe covered the league’s first basemen. Now, Leo Morgenstern examines the state of the keystone.
Second base is going to be a fascinating position to watch this season. Under the new rules limiting defensive shifts, teams must have “at least two infielders completely on either side of second base,” and those players “may not switch sides” within an inning. Consequently, second basemen will no longer have help from a shifted shortstop or third baseman, making defensive range all the more important at the keystone. On the other side of the ball, second basemen could have their best offensive season in years. While excellent bat-to-ball skills aren’t a requirement to play the position, the two often go hand in hand. Second basemen are consistently the best contact hitters (and some of the worst power hitters) in the sport. This means their performance is more dependent on BABIP, so with the distinct possibility that league-wide BABIP will rise this season, second basemen could stand to benefit quite a bit.
And it’s not just about the new rules! Second base is projected to have the most even distribution of talent, from the Rangers at the top to the Nationals at the bottom. It’s the only defensive position where no team is projected for more than 5 WAR, and yet 28 teams are projected for at least two wins. The bottom-ranked Nationals are still projected for 1.8 WAR – the highest among last-place teams at any position. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s rankings, while Dan Szymborski examined the state of the league’s catchers. Today, we turn our attention to first and second basemen.
First base was “The Goldy and Freddie Show” in 2022. Paul Goldschmidt and Freddie Freeman both topped 7.0 WAR, becoming the only first basemen to reach that plateau since 2015, when Goldschmidt and Joey Votto both did so; since 2009, Chris Davis (2013) is the position’s only other player to reach such heights. Goldschimdt hit for a 177 wRC+, the highest mark by a first baseman since Votto in 2012, and became the first first baseman since Votto in ’10 to win an MVP award in a full-length season (Freeman and Abreu took home the honors in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign).
What goes up must come down, though, and so just as 2021 found the majors’ first basemen combining for their highest wRC+ (114) and WAR (70.2) since ’17, last year they collectively fell off. They still posted the highest wRC+ of any position (111), but their combined WAR dropped to 51.1, a decline of about 0.6 WAR per team. Christian Walker was the only first baseman within three wins of Goldy and Freddie’s 7.1 WAR, and just eight players who spent a plurality of their time at the position topped 3.0 WAR, down from 10 in ’21. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier today, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s positional power rankings. As a quick refresher, all 30 teams are ranked based on the projected WAR from our Depth Charts. Our staff then endeavors to provide you with some illuminating commentary to put those rankings in context. We begin this year’s series at catcher.
As usual, we begin our annual positional power rankings examining the position that’s the most clouded in mystery, the one where our best baseball praxis still leaves us with the most unanswered questions. Catchers remain unique in their significant and meaningful interaction with pitchers and the art of pitching. We’ve come a long way in evaluating much of the job of catching, with pitch framing statistics the most recent and one of the most valuable developments (at least until the inevitable day when balls and strikes have their locations called by a brigade of cameras and computers), but there are still things we can’t yet quantify. Still, that skills might be hard to capture with numbers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re nonexistent, just that they’re difficult to measure. Even if baseball didn’t collect a single statistic, teams would still need to consider how and why and whether player X helps them win games more than player Y, while fans would still argue over who is better than who. Our framework for evaluating catchers may be imperfect, but there’s still a lot we can say about those who don the tools of ignorance, and we get a little better at it every year. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the 2023 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 was a Giant before becoming a Met before winding up a Twin again, just as you’re aware that Carlos Rodón now pitches for the Yankees and Sean Murphy now catches for the Braves. And yet, 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 2022, a spring that saw a burst of trades and signings as the sport emerged from the lockout.
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 »
