For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognosgtications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Cincinnati Reds.

Batters

When I look at Cincinnati’s offense, I’m incredibly confused. By “confused” I don’t mean that the offense is lousy, just that its construction is utterly bizarre in a lot of areas. For example, even if you write Matt McLain and Elly De La Cruz in permanent marker at second base and shortstop, respectively, you still have a team that’s overflowing with plausible third base candidates: Jonathan India, Noelvi Marte, Spencer Steer, and Christian Encarnacion-Strand to start. Given this hot corner glut, the Reds signed… one of the best third basemen available, in the form of Jeimer Candelario, but not, mind you, to be the starting third baseman. And while he’ll see time there, it’s extremely likely he’s going to get a ton of time at first base and designated hitter. One of the main reasons to like Candelario is that he hits like he does while playing a very competent third base. The more time he sees at 1B/DH, the more it’s the equivalent of buying a sports car to use as a step ladder to change the light bulb in your garage.

What’s more, many of the players who’ll be shifting down the defensive spectrum doesn’t really have much in the way of synergy. Candelario, Steer, and Encarnacion-Strand are all essentially right-handed hitters in profile (Candelario has the splits of a right-handed batter), so it’s not like one of those sneaky Gabe Kapler platoons.

Given how much ownership has cried poor, I don’t want to discourage the Reds from spending, but if they’re going to grow payroll, why not spend to address actual team weaknesses? Spending more money and getting bang for your buck are not mutually exclusive propositions. When I expressed confusion on Twitter about the Reds earlier this offseason, I was assured by fans of the team that the roster would make more sense after all the trades they were certainly going to make. Well, those moves haven’t come.

But who knows? The Reds do have a lot of talent on the roster, even if their players are deployed in a rather odd way. McLain is terrific, and I think De La Cruz’s late-season drop-off removed the over-exuberance that he was going to be Fernando Tatis Jr.; he’s now about properly rated for what he is. Tyler Stephenson ought to have a better season than he did in 2023, and ZiPS projects the outfield to be adequate if healthy, though the computer can hardly be described as enthusiastic. ZiPS is kind of interested in Blake Dunn as someone who could eventually push Stuart Fairchild off the roster. As we’ve seen with them before, the Reds likely missed the window to get a good return for India, but he’s still probably a roughly league-average player and isn’t going to get any more valuable as a role player.

I’ll be generous and give the team the benefit of the doubt that there’s a plan to trade off some of the surplus talent here before it’s frittered away by time and attrition. But they’re running out of time to do it before the start of spring training.

Pitchers

ZiPS likes a lot of Cincinnati’s hitters, but it’s less enthusiastic about the pitching. That’s not so much a rotation problem, though several of the starters have worse projections than last year. It’s really odd that the Reds made a playoff run and it turned out that it have very little to do with breakouts from Hunter Greene, Graham Ashcraft, or Nick Lodolo, all three of whom were some combination of mediocre and injured in 2023. ZiPS is a believer in Andrew Abbott in the sense that he’s a deserving part of the rotation, but its expectations are tempered a bit. Greene, Ashcraft, and Lodolo all have worse outlooks than they did at this time last year, though that can hardly be a surprise.

[One of the Greenes came out as Green, and this has been fixed -DS]

Unlike some of the other Cincy signings, I really like the Frankie Montas pickup. There’s a good chance that he doesn’t contribute anything at all in Cincinnati, but the upside, given his history, is really quite interesting. I wish the team signed players like this more often, ones who represent a real jackpot for the team if they hit, say, their 70th percentile projections and stay healthy. The computer likes Nick Martinez as a useful swingman.

ZiPS absolutely hates the bullpen, though in the end, it has the group projected for the same 2.3 WAR that Steamer does. ZiPS likes Alexis Díaz, Fernando Cruz, and Martinez when he’s used in relief, but is lukewarm everywhere else.

I think the Emilio Pagán signing was the worst bullpen addition any team has made in free agency so far this winter, but I was surprised that ZiPS likes Pagán even less. I see this as a good example of a team thinking that the season before is the same thing as a projection, and ignoring the red flags. Pagán was basically successful because he suddenly went from being a terrible home run pitcher to a great one. Home runs allowed is a terrible stat, so terrible in fact that it makes xFIP useful, when it really should not be. Pagán has a long history of allowing a lot of homers in pitcher-friendly environments and actually had the worst average exit velocity allowed in his career in 2023. He remained a fly ball pitcher, and now he goes to one of the worst environments in baseball for a pitcher who allows a lot of flies. This is like the anti-Dodgers signing. That’s not a guarantee that Pagán will be lousy — relievers are quite volatile — but I really don’t like the odds.

So what does this all add up to? If the projections are to believed, about a .500 team, just where the Reds finished last year. Given the team’s young talent, I wish this franchise was taking a more practical approach to actually improving the roster.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.

Here are how the ZiPS percentiles worked out in 2023 for pitchers and hitters in in 2023.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2024 due to injury, and players who were released in 2023. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Belgian Death Metal Skiffle Band that only plays songs by Franz Schubert, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.33.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by flaws in the physical reality of the universe or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter.

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Milwaukee Brewers.

Batters

The Brewers won 92 games in 2023, enough to coast to a division title with nine games to spare, though it didn’t really have much to do with their offense. After a respectable 2022 season, the team’s wRC+ dropped to 92, ahead of just six teams (four of which won fewer than 62 games). In a season that saw an upswing in baseball’s offensive environment, the Brewers only slugged .385, their worst showing in 30 years.

That’s not to say there weren’t bright spots, but of the four players who put up a wRC+ of at least 100 in a minimum of 100 plate appearances, two (Carlos Santana and Mark Canha) are no longer on the team. Of the two who still call Milwaukee home, William Contreras is the best bet to maintain his 2023 production, though one-year framing numbers did a lot of heavy lifting. Meanwhile, Christian Yelich had a nice little bounce back, but he’s still a 32-year-old coming off two-and-a-half far less impressive seasons. ZiPS is grumpier than Steamer with respect to Yelich, but even Steamer has him falling short of 3 WAR, and that’s in a scenario where he has nearly perfect health. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Minnesota Twins.

Batters

This set of batters probably looks familiar because, well, apart from the Luis Arraez trade to the Marlins, this is pretty much the same collection of hitters the Twins have had available the last several years. Edouard Julien isn’t the exact same type of player as Arraez, but he more or less fulfills Arraez’s role of “interesting offensive talent who the Twins can play at second base, but would prefer not to.”

Can Byron Buxton stay healthy? Just sticking him at DH isn’t a satisfactory answer — one of the reasons a healthy Buxton is so valuable is because he has played a transcendent center field when he’s been able to. Playing DH, he’s basically just Jorge Soler, which has value, but not that star-level sizzle. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Batters

Even after committing something in the neighborhood of a billion dollars to bring in Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, inspiring the chattering classes to bemoan the super team that’s buying a World Series — as if that would be possible in a sport as volatile in baseball — if you look at the Dodgers depth chart, you see an awesome team, but a rather ordinary awesome team. The Dodgers are solid everywhere, but when looking at the Braves, the natural comparison, they’re short in the projections in terms of their best player (Ronald Acuña Jr. practically laps the field in ZiPS), and the computer likes Austin Riley a lot better than the combination of Max Muncy and Miguel Vargas.

The weakest spot is likely left field, even with the addition of Teoscar Hernández, but it’s better than it looks. In the original version of this depth chart, left field was listed at 1.4 WAR rather than the current 1.8, but the total gain, once you calculate the domino effect of how the other positions change, combines for nearly a full win. Chris Taylor was an adequate stopgap, but the offensive workload of a corner outfielder is quite heavy and his .239/.326/.412 line over the last three years is not really what you want to see out there. In any case, one of the best things about Taylor is his versatility, and just sticking him in an outfield corner and calling it a day would be a bit like buying a Swiss army knife just to use the nail file. Signing Hernández makes it easier to make use of Taylor’s versatility and frees up Margot for more time in right field, with Mookie Betts available more often at second base. Hernández’s $20.4 million AAV is a bit steep in terms of rough $/WAR, but it’s hard to really overpay anyone on a one-year deal. Plus, the Dodgers need certainty more than dice rolls, and only $15 million of the deal is in 2024 salary, with the rest deferred.

You might be a bit disappointed with Ohtani’s projection as a DH, but it’s important to remember that his 180 wRC+ in 2023 can’t be assumed to be a baseline quite yet. As magical as he is, all players, from metahuman to Bill Bergen, are subject to the whims of the Roman god Mediorus, the deity of scales and balance and regression toward the mean, who I may have also just made up this minute.

Elsewhere, there are no real surprises. Betts projects well as a second baseman because, well, he’d project well doing anything in life, and Freddie Freeman and Will Smith receive the expected top-notch forecasts. ZiPS is a little cool on Gavin Lux in light of his lost 2023, but I can hardly quibble with that.

Pitchers

There has been quite a bit of upheaval here, more than just the additions of Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow, and the eventual one of Ohtani. None of the pitchers in the rotation graphic last year return to the Dodgers in 2024 (remember, Tony Gonsolin is out with Tommy John surgery). It’s especially sad to see Clayton Kershaw no longer listed here, as he’s unsigned and likely to miss a huge chunk of the season after surgery, and there’s still a chance he decides to hang it up. Whether or not The Claw’s ever again in Dodger Blue — Game 1 of the NLDS is a bad place to leave it — he’s got my Hall of Fame vote.

Yamamoto’s projection may not seem particularly aggressive, but that’s in large part because projection systems know the attrition rate of pitchers. ZiPS has only given out three four-WAR projections for pitchers, and it doesn’t yet know that one of those hurlers (Sandy Alcantara) is already out for the season. Yamamoto does show up on the depth chart graphic past this threshold, but ZiPS tends to be more suspicious of general pitcher health than our depth charts. If Yamamoto isn’t a good bet to be a top starter, than very few pitchers are, whether they play in the US or Japan. Ohtani obviously won’t meet the pitching projection listed in the table below this season; it’s just there for the curiosity value.

There’s certainly some risk with the Dodgers. They have a lot of talented arms, but they have very little certainty in terms of who will be available, when, and for how long. If they manage to get five of Yamamoto, Glasnow, Bobby Miller, Walker Buehler, Gavin Stone, and Emmet Sheehan all in the rotation at the same time, this is a very dangerous unit. The Dodgers have been happy to assemble rotations on the fly, but while that has worked out in recent years, it’s no guarantee going forward.

ZiPS isn’t as high on the ‘pen as Steamer is. Joe Kelly’s projection is one of the biggest sources of disagreement between the two projection systems when it comes to pitchers. ZiPS sees a few warning signs, such as the occasional spikes in his walk rate and the fact that he’s entering his late 30s. It’ll be interesting to see which system is right, but I’m personally closer to Steamer than ZiPS on this one.

ZiPS does like the quartet of Evan Phillips, Brusdar Graterol, Caleb Ferguson, and Alex Vesia, who will get most of the rest of the high-leverage innings. The computer isn’t in on Yency Almonte, but then again, Steamer’s not particularly enthralled either.

Right now, ZiPS sees the Dodgers as the second-best team in baseball, behind the Braves. But they’re not in different tiers; it’s not a 90/10 probability, but something more along the lines of 60/40. Many writers and teams have made the mistake of underestimating them in spots where they don’t look deep in the past. The Dodgers aren’t just a dangerous team, but a creative dangerous team, one with a shockingly good record of turning straw into gold, making them a deadly foe.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.