With the Dodgers reporting for pitchers and catchers today, this week seems like a good time to run ZiPS projections for all 30 teams. I covered the American League projections yesterday, so today is all about the National League. Let’s be clear up front: These are not the final preseason projections, but they’re the best expression of how ZiPS sees the NL right now. After all, several marquee free agents remain unsigned and rosters will surely change between now and the start of the 2024 season.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial, or more competently, beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which were released Wednesday, meaning there naturally will be some notable differences in the results.

So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion (the computational algorithms, that is — though it would be fun to don a tuxedo and play chemin de fer like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise, this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our ken, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.6 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. In other words, none of the year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

That ZiPS likes the Atlanta Braves can hardly be considered a surprise considering they won 104 games last year, all projection systems everywhere love them, and I’ve been warning non-Braves fans that this would be the likely result all winter. What else is there to say? They’re a great team and there’s no scary number two in the division.

The Phillies project just slightly worse than last year, partially due to some aging risk in their prime offensive players, but more likely than not — really, unless they lose either Zack Wheeler or Aaron Nola to injury — they are going to be a playoff team. Catching the Braves isn’t a futile gesture — we’re talking a roughly one-in-seven chance — but they’ll need some help from Atlanta to win the division.

ZiPS doesn’t think the Mets did enough to patch up their rotation, but if their starting pitchers are better than expected, they should contend for a wild card. The Marlins project a little worse than New York, but they have a high variance in their projected outcomes; their pitching is elite, and that could be enough to make a pretty lousy offense almost unimportant — as was the case last year when they snagged a wild card berth.

Last year, the Nationals remained within bullhorn distance of .500 for much of the late summer, but they aren’t good enough to take a big step forward in 2024. Washington has the worst ZiPS projection for any National League team.

While it may seem like a relief that ZiPS is hedging enough here that I won’t get blamed too badly, no matter what happens, I also won’t get much credit! Fans have a tendency to overrate teams when things are going well and underrate teams when they’re not, and I think the Cardinals are a good example of this. The additions outside of Sonny Gray don’t send a tingle down your spine, but they did successfully patch up the rotation, which was a gaping wound for most of last season. Paul Goldschmidt, 36, and Nolan Arenado, who turns 33 in April, might not be as good as they once were, but if they age gradually instead of all at once, St. Louis should have the necessary depth in its lineup to score enough runs to compete in such a weak division. ZiPS isn’t alone here.

Shota Imanaga is my favorite signing this winter, but the Cubs are probably still one more starting pitcher away from being the favorite in this division. I’d certainly like more ambitious solutions at first base or catcher. In recent weeks, the Brewers patched some of their roster holes, signing first baseman Rhys Hoskins, starting pitcher Jakob Junis, and backup catcher and DH Gary Sánchez, but they also opened up a larger, newer one when they traded ace right-hander Corbin Burnes for infield prospect Joey Ortiz and left-hander DL Hall. Ortiz should get the chance to play every day, and Hall could be the latest dominant arm fermented by Milwaukee’s reliever brewery, but the Brewers will feel the absence of Burnes in 2024.

There’s a lot to like about the Reds’ future, but they haven’t done much this offseason to address their shortcomings. They have a logjam of guys who get a lot of their value playing third base, but instead of using some of those players as trade pieces to upgrade elsewhere, the Reds are going to shove them all into the lineup at various other positions, such as first base, DH and corner outfield. That isn’t a particularly lucrative plan. Cincinnati’s starting pitching could be very good, but there is a quite a bit of variance with this group due to consistency and/or injury concerns. A few bad “rolls” here and the rotation could become awful quickly.

The Pirates aren’t a depressing team and have some interesting players to watch, like shortstop Oneil Cruz, outfielder Bryan Reynolds, and third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes. But they do have some holes to fill at other positions, and their starting pitching staff probably peaks at OK. ZiPS is a bigger fan of their bullpen.

The Dodgers are clearly the best team in the NL West, but they’re not invincible. The team’s pitching plan to have about 15 really talented pitchers and hope nine or so are healthy at any given time could work out tremendously – as it has in recent years – but there’s certainly some risk there. It’s hard to capture in preseason projections, but the Dodgers will likely be aggressive in making trades to remedy flaws that pop up with their pitching staff during the season.

Arizona is a good team, but as is the case with the Rangers, there’s a serious risk of overrating a team because of a World Series appearance. The Diamondbacks were an 84-win team last year and their outlook for 2024 would’ve been about the same if the Brewers had eliminated them in the first round rather than vice-versa. That said, Arizona made several moves this offseason and, as a result, appears to be a better team overall than it was last year (and they were a team I talked up quite a bit).

The Giants are underwhelming, in part because they’ve missed out on most of the big free agents they’ve gone after, but that doesn’t mean they are bad. They are solid enough that they could make a wild card push, and their floor is higher than many think. But they need some more production in their lineup, and behind Logan Webb, there are a lot of moving parts in the rotation.

Replacing Juan Soto is a nearly impossible task, so it’s unsurprising that the Padres are projected to take a step back this season. ZiPS projects both the offense and the pitching to rank somewhere in the 17 to 21 range, depending on playing time assumptions. And while San Diego has repaired its farm system quicker than many (including this writer) expected, that doesn’t exactly help much for 2024.

The Rockies aren’t going to the postseason and will probably be well out of the playoff picture by mid-April. But at least they didn’t do anything this offseason to make their long-term outlook worse, which is kind of an improvement. I’m mildly hopeful that they take the proper lesson from the Nolan Jones trade and make it an organizational priority to acquire every interesting 25-year-old from a team that is unsure what to do with him.

And here we have the simple chart – which I’ve been including in all of these ZiPS projected standings, except the times I forget – to show what win totals likely will make the playoffs, rather than the highest median win projection.

When Carl Pavano threw the first official pitch at the brand new Target Field on April 12, 2010, there was no Target logo on the mound. Mind you, there were Target logos aplenty all around the ballpark — on the wall behind home plate, just below the press box, up above the bleachers in right and center field, on the signs the fans brought and the hats they wore, and on the video boards on the façade of the upper deck, which often displayed rows of alternating baseballs and Target logos, hundreds of them wrapping around the entire stadium — just not on the pitcher’s mound. Later that year, the interlocking T and C of the Twins logo began appearing in the dirt behind the rubber; the Target logo didn’t start gracing the mound until 2016.

Still, in the early years of 2016 and 2017, the mound was often completely targetless. Even today, there are games where there’s no logo whatsoever — and not just nationally televised games, when the advertising rights can change. Sometimes it’s just the pitcher all alone up there (aside from the rubber, the cleat cleaner, and a couple rosin bags):

I don’t have any good guesses that explain the logo’s occasional absence, but I have so, so many bad guesses. Maybe the grounds crew is hiding the target somewhere else on the field and we’re supposed to be looking for it. Maybe Target leases the space on a per-game basis, and sometimes whoever is in charge of delivering that day’s check gets lost during the half-mile walk from Target Plaza Commons headquarters to Target Field. Maybe — and hear me out on this one — maybe the grounds crew just gets busy sometimes. I don’t know why it’s not always there, but if it’s supposed to be there every game, I hope this paragraph doesn’t get anybody in trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

Few positions on the Brewers depth chart are more set than catcher. William Contreras, whom they acquired before last season, was their best player in 2023. He led Milwaukee in hitting and finished third on the team in plate appearances despite shouldering a full-time catching load, which normally limits playing time. Most impressively, he delivered a sensational defensive performance a year after he was one of the worst receivers in baseball. On a team that struggled to generate offense, Contreras was a rare and brightly shining exception.

Naturally, the Brewers just signed the best free agent catcher on the market, give or take DH Mitch Garver. That’d be Gary Sánchez, who is joining the team on a one-year, $7 million contract, as Jon Heyman reported. It sounds bizarre – and it may well be bizarre. But there’s a method to Milwaukee’s madness, so let’s try to figure it out together.

There’s one obvious thing going for the Brewers: They really needed a second catcher. Before they signed Sánchez, the plan was to use Eric Haase, he of the 42 wRC+ in 2023, as their second backstop. That plan was not great, to put it succinctly. Haase probably isn’t that bad offensively, but he’s also not particularly good behind the plate. In his best years in Detroit – he hit a career-high 22 home runs in 2021 and topped out at 1.3 WAR in 351 plate appearances the following season – he wasn’t used as a pure catcher, dabbling in the outfield and at DH and racking up meaningfully negative framing numbers when he did don the tools of ignorance.
Read the rest of this entry »

The best pitch in baseball is a well-located four-seam fastball. It is the rhythm guitar of pitching, the rock upon which the church is built. To establish the fastball first is fundamental; to pitch any other way is backwards.

Maybe you don’t need it at all.

In the late 20th century, rock and roll evolved into different popular forms that either de-emphasized the role of the guitar or eliminated it altogether. Some artists went forward and embraced electronic instruments; others went back in time and rediscovered the piano. Of the 603 pitchers who threw at least 250 pitches last year, 49 didn’t throw a single four-seamer. Many of them were quite successful. The anti-four-seamer crowd includes top relievers like Josh Hader, Camilo Doval, and José Alvarado, as well as elite starters like Corbin Burnes and Framber Valdez. Read the rest of this entry »

With the Dodgers reporting for pitchers and catchers on Friday, this week seems like a good time to do run ZiPS projections for all 30 teams. Let’s be clear up front: These are not the final preseason projections – and an ancient curse I saw suggests that if you quote them as such, ghosts will eat your lymphatic system – but they’re the best expression of how ZiPS sees the league right now. After all, several marquee free agents remain unsigned and rosters will surely change between now and the start of the 2024 season.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial, or more competently, beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which were released yesterday, meaning there naturally will be some notable differences in the results.

So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion (the computational algorithms, that is — no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing chemin de fer like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise, this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our ken, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.6 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. In other words, none year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

I’m from Baltimore, but I would hope last year’s projection miss would disavow anyone of the notion that I weight these team standings toward my personal preferences. The Orioles – and last year’s Orioles – do a bit better in my methodology than others, I suspect because of the weight I deal with depth. In those seasons in which they lose players, especially offensive ones, the team’s depth keeps the falloff from being too dire. Even in simulation no. 452,331, in which the O’s lose both Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschmann to season-ending injuries before the first game, the team still finished 84-78!

The Yankees have significant downside given how much of their punch is tied up in a handful of players, but the reports of their death are quite premature. Juan Soto will provide a huge offensive boost this year, even if they don’t re-sign him after the season. They also added two other outfielders, Alex Verdugo and Trent Grisham, who are better than everybody they ran out there last year, with the exception of Aaron Judge.

ZiPS likes Toronto’s rotation and expects the return of Kevin Kiermaier to help, but without Matt Chapman, it sees third base as a major downgrade from last year. The Rays almost always get the most out of their depth, but ZiPS isn’t sure how much production they will get from their DH spot or how they will cobble together their rotation without Tyler Glasnow.

The Red Sox aren’t a dreadful team, but they’re merely OK in a division that has four good-to-great teams. That being said, they’re just good enough that they still have slightly better than a one-in-five chance of making the playoffs.

ZiPS projects Cleveland to be relatively even with Minnesota, in large part because it likes the rotation trio of Shane Bieber, Triston McKenzie, and Tanner Bibee more than other projection systems do. ZiPS doesn’t see the Guardians as significantly below average at any position — Andrés Giménez remains a ZiPS favorite — and it thinks their bullpen is underrated. The Twins won the division fairly comfortably last year, but remember, they won only 87 games and just lost the AL Cy Young runner-up, Sonny Gray, in free agency. The Jorge Polanco trade came from a surplus of infield talent, but the additions of Anthony DeSclafani and Justin Topa won’t compensate for Gray’s loss to the rotation. If you like Carlos Santana, the team’s “big” offseason signing, I’d recommend you not look at the projection for him.

The projections still see more upside for Detroit’s pitching than its hitting, though after Spencer Torkelson’s surge last summer, ZiPS does expect him to keep improving in his third big league season. The Tigers are good enough that they can make a serious run at .500, but they’ll need some good fortune to get enough offense.

The Royals get credit for being active in free agency this offseason, signing veteran starting pitchers Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, reliever Will Smith, slugger Hunter Renfroe, and utility man Adam Frazier, among other players. That said, those are the types of moves a team makes when it already has a strong core in place and is ready to contend, and, at least as ZiPS sees it, the Royals aren’t quite there yet. That’s not the worst thing in the world, considering they just signed shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. to the longest, most valuable extension in franchise history.

ZiPS has the White Sox as one of the worst teams in baseball, with little to look forward to outside of Dylan Cease, Luis Robert Jr., and the hope that Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez get back on track. This organization is in a very dangerous position in that, like the Rockies a few years ago, I’m not sure it truly understands where it stands.

ZiPS still sees the Astros as the class of the AL West, thanks to the massive concentration of talent in the heart of their lineup. It wasn’t a busy winter for Houston, but the big addition, Josh Hader, gives a boost to the bullpen. The Astros, though, are not unstoppable. They have a lot of viable arms in the rotation, but the upside isn’t what it was three or four years ago, even if Justin Verlander has another strong season left in his arm.

The Rangers are a well-built team, but a lot of their offensive talent is on the wrong side of 30, and last year was probably the best case scenario for a few of their hitters. Their starting pitching is weaker now than it was at the end of 2023. ZiPS did account for the late-season returns of Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Mahle to reinforce the rotation, but all those games without them count, too, and as of this writing, Texas has not re-signed or replaced Jordan Montgomery.

ZiPS likes a lot of what the Mariners did this offseason. It projects Jorge Polanco as a moderate plus at second base and Luis Urías to be an effective replacement for Eugenio Suárez. Gregory Santos is in the top tier of projected relievers, though his projection will come down just a tad once a fixed error in the ZiPS database propagates to our player pages.

It will be nice for the Angels to get full seasons from Zach Neto and Nolan Schanuel, and the team has spent its offseason quietly beefing up its bullpen. But losing Shohei Ohtani is going to hurt.

I believe I have talked about all the major league teams in the AL West and surely did not forget anyone.

One thing that drive me nuts about the discourse of the ZiPS projections is when someone looks at the top median projection and gets very angry with me that some division can be won with 89 or 90 wins. Since most of the tweets on this subject have an aspect for Mature Audiences Only, I’ve translated an example into something suitable for polite company.

Verily, Szymborski, thou art bereft of wit! How dare thee proclaim that a mere tally of 89 victories shall secure the Astros dominion over the AL Wast! Thy discourse betrays a lamentable ignorance, akin to that of a common dullard. Thy prognostications, I dare say, are as worthless as the dregs of a shire-reeve’s larder after Michaelmas!

Yes, the Astros have the best median projection in the AL West at 89 wins, but that doesn’t mean 89 wins will actually win the AL West. This last chart shows the probabilities that X number of wins will take the division or wild card spot in question. So, 89 wins might win the AL West, but only about 20% of the time. The Orioles project to 90 wins, but in the 36.4% of scenarios in which they won the AL East, they averaged 95.3 wins.

“Jose Altuve will be an Astro for life,” read the club’s announcement on Tuesday afternoon. Under different circumstances, that could be construed as a threat. But Altuve will be well-remunerated for the remainder of his time in Houston: His new contract extension will run for five years, starting in 2025, and pay him a guaranteed $125 million.

This is the third long-term contract Altuve has signed with the Astros, the club that signed him as a 16-year-old out of Venezuela all the way back in 2007. By the time it’s over, he will have spent some 23 seasons in the organization, 19 of them in the major leagues. The phrasing of the announcement is a little more concrete than any prediction about 2029 ought to be. It’s possible that Altuve will continue playing once his deal expires. But when it does, he’ll be seven months short of his 40th birthday. That seems like as good a time as any to plan on wrapping things up. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there, FanGraphs reader. Great news! Our playoff odds just went up for the 2024 season. These odds, as always, are mostly enlightening, but also a tiny bit mystifying. The model itself remains simple: We take projections for each player, aggregate them up to the team level based on playing time projections, and then use that to create expected team run scoring and prevention numbers. From there, we simulate out the season 20,000 times and note what happened in each instance. The odds are just a summary of those simulations.

As simple as the process is, it’s also inscrutable. How good are the projections? We think they’re very good, as they’re a combination of ZiPS and Steamer. But those projections inevitably differ from people’s perceptions of both individual players and teams. So in what’s become an annual tradition, I’m going to give you a guided tour through the projections and point out the notable points in each division, then explain how our model got there and what I think of it. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, just four days after the Brewers traded perennial Cy Young candidate Corbin Burnes to the Orioles for a package of promising young players and a competitive balance draft pick, Milwaukee signed a pitcher with an even better FIP to take his spot at the front of their rotation.

Sorry, that was misleading. Let’s try this again: After spending five years in Kansas City and two years in San Francisco, right-handed pitcher Jakob Junis has agreed to a one-year, $7 million deal with the Milwaukee Brewers. Kiley McDaniel reported the signing, which according to Ken Rosenthal includes a $4 million salary in 2024 along with a $3 million buyout on a mutual option for the 2025 season. While the Giants moved Junis to the bullpen in 2023, the 31-year-old is expected to join Milwaukee’s starting rotation. After the team non-tendered the injured Brandon Woodruff and traded Burnes, the rotation was looking particularly threadbare, relying on Freddy Peralta and a series of other pitchers with question marks surrounding their health, stuff, age, or some combination of the three.

Peralta, who was worth 3.0 WAR over 30 starts and 165.2 innings in 2023, had excellent stretches last season, including taking home NL Pitcher of the Month honors in August. Still, his 3.86 ERA, 3.85 FIP, and 1.41 HR/9 were all the worst marks he’d put up since the shortened 2020 season. Wade Miley, back on a one-year deal, has been fantastic over the last three seasons, but the Brewers will need him to continue his contact suppression sorcery at age 37. Colin Rea put up 0.8 WAR in 2023; the Brewers are hoping he can post back-to-back seasons with a sub-5.00 ERA for the first time since 2015 and 2016. DL Hall, who came over in the Burnes trade, is a truly exciting young pitcher, but he’s also dealt with injuries over the last two years and ended up in Baltimore’s bullpen in 2023. After a shoulder injury, Aaron Ashby pitched just seven minor league innings last year, while Joe Ross, coming off his second Tommy John surgery, threw 14 minor league innings and hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates have an above-average farm system that includes a number of high-ceiling pitching prospects. Paul Skenes is the most notable — the 21-year-old right-hander was selected first overall in last summer’s draft — but he’s far from the only electric arm in Pittsburgh’s pipeline. As many as half a dozen hurlers will populate the first 10 names when our Pirates top prospects list comes out this spring. Whether any of them will help propel the Bucs to playoff contention remains to be seen, but in terms of potential, the group presents a tantalizing mix of talent.

I asked Pirates General Manager Ben Cherington about a few of those promising young arms during November’s GM Meetings.

———

David Laurila: How happy are you with your pitching pipeline?

Ben Cherington: “We’re excited about it. We also know that pitching development never stops and there are things ahead of all those guys. Part of the reason we’re excited is the talent, but the truth is, no matter how well you do in pitching development there is usually attrition of some kind. You need some volume to make it work, and we think we’re starting to develop some volume. So again, we’re excited. Every one of those guys has targets that we’re working on this offseason, and we’re anxious to see where they’re at come spring training.”

Laurila: Has your pitching program evolved in the last few years?

Cherington: “We believe so. We’ve got some signal on that. It’s improving in some areas, and in other areas we still need to be better. We can’t ever be satisfied with it. But we’ve made some strides with things like breaking ball pitch design, pitch usage, sequencing in the minor leagues. We’ve made some strides with deployment, getting better at identifying what skills fit in different roles and getting guys into those roles. At the same time, there are more things to get better at. All of it is important.”

Laurila: Which of your pitching prospects most stands out for his stuff? I’m thinking pitch metrics. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year’s Mets were a bit of a mess. After entering the season as a projected powerhouse, things fell apart quickly. They jettisoned their two highest-paid pitchers at the deadline for prospects and finished with a lackluster 75 wins. There were multiple reasons for such a disappointing season — their bats stalled and only one starting pitcher reached 130 innings — but perhaps no loss was more devastating than that of closer Edwin Díaz. Before the season, his injury dropped the Mets from second to 19th in projected bullpen WAR; they ended up 29th.

The Mets knew that Díaz would be back in 2024, but they still entered the offseason needing to improve a bullpen that way too often turned to the likes of Trevor Gott, Tommy Hunter, and Jeff Brigham. And in a wave of recent moves, they’ve done just that, signing Adam Ottavino, Jake Diekman, and Shintaro Fujinami to one-year deals. Read the rest of this entry »