The full midseason run of the ZiPS projections have been completed, and while the standings updates are always a lot of fun, they tend to move in a similar direction to our FanGraphs standings, so they’re usually not the most shocking. What I find the most interesting are the player projections, and not even the numbers for the rest of the season — the in-season model is simpler, but improvements in the full model are naturally going to be incremental — but the ones that look toward 2024 and beyond.
For today, we’ll start with the hitters with the largest increases in projected 2024 WAR since my original projections and dig a little into what changed for each player. Sometimes it’s performance, sometimes it’s health, sometimes it’s a change in position. Let’s jump straight into the names, since I assume everyone reading this knows that ZiPS isn’t a cheeseburger or a hoodie. Read the rest of this entry »
Shohei Ohtani is a unicorn. No player in 20th- or 21st-century AL/NL history, not even Babe Ruth in his last two seasons with the Red Sox (1918–19), has been able to sustain regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excel at both endeavors. At this writing, the 29-year-old superstar leads the majors in homers (34), slugging percentage (.665), and wRC+ (179), and he’s got the AL’s second-best strikeout rate (32.2%) and lowest batting average against (.191). He currently ranks among the AL’s top 10 in Baseball Reference’s position player WAR (4.0, fourth) and pitching WAR (2.5, ninth), and just over a full win ahead of Ronald Acuña Jr. for the major league lead in combined WAR. Over the past two and a half seasons, he’s been worth 25.0 WAR, 5.9 more than the top position player, Aaron Judge.
Some day, Hall of Fame voters will have to reckon with Ohtani. If he reaches the kind of career numbers that Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS system forecast for him over the winter — 1,809 hits, 404 homers, 124 OPS+, 158 wins, 2,329 strikeouts, 122 ERA+, and 72.1 WAR — the decision will be a no-brainer. I’m already of the mind that if he gets to his 10th season (2027) and is still doing double duty, he’ll have my vote when he lands on the ballot regardless of what the numbers say, because what he’s doing is so utterly remarkable. WAR and JAWS weren’t really built to handle a case like his, and not only because his ability to save his team a roster spot is probably worth some uncounted fraction of a win per year, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Trevor May is a Miguel Cabrera fan. Moreover, he has some favorite Miggy moments. I learned as much when I caught up to the always-engaging 33-year-old right-hander on the Sunday leading into the All-Star break.
“I got my first jersey from another player in our last series,” said May, who broke into the big leagues with the Minnesota Twins in 2014 and now plays for the Oakland Athletics. “We were in Detroit and I got a Miggy Cabrera jersey signed. I’m not a huge memorabilia guy, but he was my first, ‘Oh wow, I’m in The Show.’ It was like, ‘That’s Miguel Cabrera in the box!’ He’s one of the greatest of this generation.”
Nine years later, both players are nearing the end of the line. Cabrera, whose career has him Cooperstown-bound, is set to retire after this season. May, whose accomplishments have been far more humble, faces an uncertain near-term future. He has a 5.32 ERA in the current campaign, as well as a career-low 17.0% K rate.
May’s post-playing-days future is media-focused, and he’s already begun establishing himself in that realm. The Longview, Washington native has been an active podcaster and streamer — gaming is a noteworthy interest, Pat McAfee a notable influence — and just this past week he was part of MLBNetwork Radio’s All-Star Game coverage. His newly-signed jersey is ticketed for his home studio. As May explained, “the background has been kind of sparse, and I wanted to make sure that baseball has a spot there, along with all the nerdy stuff I’m into, whenever I’m in front of the camera.”
May has pitched in front of ballpark cameras many times, and while that includes more than two dozen appearances against the Detroit Tigers, a few of his Miggy moments likely weren’t captured. Even if they were, they went unnoticed by the vast majority of viewers. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re now three months past the last ZiPS projected standings, which ran before the season, and as one should expect, reality has caused a whole lot of changes to the prognostications. Most of the times when I run ZiPS standings, I use data from the in-season player projection model, which is simpler based on the fact that a full batch run of the 3,500 or so players projected, even if I split it up among my two most powerful computers, would take a total of about 30 hours to finish. But I always do the whole shebang in the middle of every month, and baseball’s pause for All-Star Week provides me an opportunity to run projected standings with the best possible model I can come up with, and not have it be a couple days out of date.
I’ve spent the last week working on and testing an addition to the ZiPS standings model to factor in the problem that preseason projections have with temporality. Basically, you can project teams based on who they have in the organization at the time of the projection, but you can’t easily do it for players not in the organization who will eventually be. If I knew at the start of 2022 that the Padres would have Juan Soto for most of the summer, it would have had an effect on the preseason projections! Like any model that people continually work on, ZiPS doesn’t have substantial bias in almost all categories: there’s no systematic tendency to overrate or underrate any specific type of team (bias in exercises like this is easier to iron out than inaccuracy). But there’s an exception: ZiPS in the preseason slightly underrates teams that will eventually add value to the major league roster in the form of trade and overrates those do the opposite.
This is something I’ve long wanted to try to deal with in as effective a way as I could. So what I’ve done is gone back and re-projected every team at June 15, July 1, and July 15 since I started ZiPS, then, with the data of players each team added at the major league level, used the playoff projections at that date, the team’s payroll (it does have a factor), the weakness of the team’s worst positions, the time since last playoff appearance, and the team’s farm system ranking (where possible) to make a probabilistic model of increases and decreases in roster strength due to the trade deadline. Overfitting is a concern, so I’ve cross-validated to do my best to ensure that isn’t an issue, and while it’s less than a half-win in final accuracy, any shaving off of error is a helpful thing. So these standings represent some increased chances that teams like the Orioles and Rangers have a slightly stronger roster than what is currently available from August 1 on, and that teams like the A’s and Tigers have weaker ones. The changes in projections are small because this is a noisy, inaccurate thing, but I’ll be tracking in future years both standings with and without this model to see how they fare. Read the rest of this entry »
Having reached the post–All-Star break world, you may find yourself perusing various stat leaderboards trying to get a grip of who has performed to, above or below expectations. I consider myself a relatively positive person, so when somebody isn’t performing to par, I like to explore their profile in search of a hint of their previous self, or in the case of a prospect, their best future self.
For this piece, I’m going to dive into a group of these players. The criteria aren’t too strict; I’m generally looking for players who are roughly 15 points or more of wRC+ below their preseason ZiPS projection. Other than that, there is some combination of batted ball data, mechanics, and a splash of subjectivity affecting my choices. With that said, let’s jump into it, starting with a former top five prospect. Read the rest of this entry »
Lance Lynn was phenomenal in his final start before the All-Star break, going seven innings, striking out 11 batters, and allowing just three baserunners. By game score, his outing against Toronto was among the top 20 starts of the year. But if you prefer to focus on factors solely within a pitcher’s control — strikeouts, walks, and home runs — it wasn’t even the best of Lynn’s season. By FIP, his most dominant performance was a 16-strikeout gem against the Mariners a few weeks prior. Over seven frames, he walked only two and kept everything in the ballpark. Even more impressive, all but one of his strikeouts came on a swing and miss, as Lynn collected 33 whiffs on the evening, the most by any pitcher in a single outing this season. His 16 strikeouts were also the most in a single game this year; no other pitcher has topped 13.
Lynn has two more double-digit strikeout games this year, one each against the Rays and the Twins. Only eight other pitchers have four or more double-digit strikeout games, and only four have multiple starts of seven-plus innings, double-digit strikeouts, two or fewer walks, and zero home runs: Kevin Gausman, Zac Gallen, Logan Webb, and Pablo López. (The White Sox, being the 2023 White Sox, went on to lose all four contests, but that’s hardly a reflection of Lynn’s efforts on the mound.) Read the rest of this entry »
One of my favorite kinds of baseball trade is the one that sends major league talent both ways, between teams ostensibly interested in being competitive, each giving from surpluses to meet immediate needs. It’s certainly the safer option for a front office just to take the passive route and stick with the guys you’ve got, but I appreciate the boldness of swapping a player who’s poised to contribute to your club for one you think might give you more, solve some piece of the positional puzzle, or be able to be a more significant part of your plans down the road.
Such was the case for the Marlins and Twins in January when Luis Arraez (who seems poised to defend his title) was dealt to Miami in exchange for Pablo López and prospects Jose Salas and Byron Chourio. This wasn’t a straight big leaguer-for-big leaguer swap, but both teams were trading for the present. López, 26 at the time, had been the Marlins’ second most productive starter in 2022 and a stalwart of their rotation for the better part of five seasons; the 25-year-old Arraez was coming off a batting title and had been one of the game’s truly elite contact hitters over four seasons of his own. The Twins needed pitching, the Marlins an offensive jolt, and a deal was struck.
If it weren’t a fun enough swap to begin with, it got better when López and Arraez represented their new clubs at the All-Star Game, with Arraez staying true to form with a 2-for-2 night on the winning NL side and López throwing a scoreless ninth inning for the AL. In doing so, the duo became the first pair of players to be dealt for one another and make the next season’s All-Star Game since Josh Hamilton and Edinson Vólquez, who were swapped by the Reds and Rangers in 2007 and emerged as All-Stars the following summer. Read the rest of this entry »
Dane Dunning is excelling in Texas. Now in his third season with the Texas Rangers after debuting with the Chicago White Sox in 2020, the 28-year-old right-hander is 8–2 with a 2.84 ERA over 92 innings. And though he’s fanned just 59 batters, that suits him just fine. It’s not that he doesn’t like strikeouts; he very much does. It’s just that he lacks the power profile of your prototypical modern-day ace. Epitomizing the term “crafty righty,” he effectively limits damage by mixing and matching with one of baseball’s most expansive repertoires.
Dunning discussed his atypical approach, and the arsenal that goes along with it, when the Rangers visited Fenway Park prior to the All-Star break.
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David Laurila: Let’s start with your repertoire. How many pitches do you throw?
Dane Dunning: “Sinker, four-seam, cutter, changeup, slider, curveball. So six. I guess you could say that I’m a jack of all trades, master of none.”
Laurila: How long have you had such a diverse repertoire?
Dunning: “Well, the four-seam is kind of new this year. I’ve thrown it on certain occasions, probably in my last four, five outings. The cutter I started focusing on last year, and this year it’s kind of come into its own. The sinker and slider I’ve had my entire life. The curveball has kind of been my entire life. I’ve always thrown a curveball, but it’s been like, ‘Let’s throw the curveball, let’s not throw the curveball.’ It’s sort of gone back and forth. I brought it back this season, because last year I was throwing two different sliders and they kept blending together. I had to get rid of that.” Read the rest of this entry »
Before this season, Nick Madrigal had spent just one inning at third base. It was in a showcase game; he was a high schooler. Madrigal played a fair bit of shortstop at Oregon State, but he has always primarily been a second baseman. Then in December, the Cubs signed Dansby Swanson, bumping Nico Hoerner over to second and Madrigal into a utility role.
Madrigal took the change in stride. He started a long toss regimen to improve his arm strength, and said all the right things to the press:
Bench coach Andy Green even flew out to Arizona to spend a week helping him get up to speed at the hot corner. All of that work seems to have paid off. So far this season, Madrigal has spent 53 innings at second and 303.2 at third. As a third baseman, DRS and OAA both have him at +4, DRP has him at +1.1, and UZR has him at -0.1. Again, that’s after exactly playing exactly one inning at the position when he was a teenager.
It looks like Madrigal’s regular playing time at third is coming to an end, though. Patrick Wisdom is returning from the IL, and Madrigal just started his own IL stint due to a right hamstring strain. It’s a disheartening development for many reasons: Because he needed season-ending surgery on that same hamstring in 2021; because it makes his spot on the Cubs’ roster even more precarious; because he was on pace to have the most productive season of his young career; and because he does something really fun when he plays third base. I’ve been struggling with how to put it into words, so before I make my attempt, let’s see if you can spot it for yourself.
I don’t have a good sense of whether or not you’ll notice what I want you to notice. Maybe you saw it right away. Maybe you’re a Cubs fan and you already noticed it earlier this year. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that you don’t notice until someone points it out, and then you can never not notice it. To make it a little easier, I combined two frames from that clip: I took the moment when Madrigal fielded the ball, then I added the moment when he threw it over to first.
Those two Nick Madrigals are in very, very different places. The first one is fielding the ball in a normal position roughly 15 feet behind the bag. Somehow the second one is way over on the right, about to make his throw with a foot on the infield grass. That’s a whole lot of infield to traverse right in the middle of a routine groundout. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t want to be rude, but here’s a fact of life: I pay less attention to the Nationals than the average team in Major League Baseball. It’s not because I have a grudge against them or anything; I went to college in Virginia and have a ton of family in the D.C. area, so I know an absolute ton of Nats fans. They’re just not that interesting at the moment, and there’s a lot of baseball to watch, so someone has to slide down the priority queue.
When I have paid attention to the Nationals, though, I’ve liked what I’ve seen. I thought they made some smart signings this offseason. They’ve done a good job of giving plenty of playing time to interesting players. Lane Thomas might never have found a regular home if the Nats hadn’t come calling, Joey Meneses is being given every chance to play out of a season-starting slump, and Hunter Harvey looks like a nice bullpen arm for the trade deadline.
In my chat this week, someone mentioned that the Tigers would be in the thick of the AL Central race if they’d merely held onto Jeimer Candelario and Isaac Paredes. And that drove a realization for me: Candelario looks good again. Is he the real deal? Can some contending team plug him in at third base and have an All-Star–level contributor? Let’s find out. Read the rest of this entry »
