On Friday, MLB.com reporter Sarah Langs wrote an article entitled, “Juan Soto is even better than you think he is.” Soto is already good. Like, really good. And he’s only 21 years old. Langs took Soto’s 2020 ZiPS projections and envisioned the continued growth he could see this upcoming season. If the projections hold up, we could be seeing a historic season from the young Dominican, as Langs explained:

“The only players to have multiple qualified seasons with a 140 or higher wRC+ before their age-22 seasons are Mel Ott (3), [Mike] Trout, Mickey Mantle, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby and Ted Williams. Each of those players’ outstanding starts to their young careers resulted in a Cooperstown plaque, except for Trout, who’s still active but by all measures seems headed there, too.”

ZiPS projects a 5.5 WAR season for Soto with a 149 wRC+, a seven point increase over his 2019 mark. Only six other players are projected to accumulate more WAR and just three are projected to post a higher wRC+ than Soto. After placing second in Rookie of the Year balloting and a year after placing ninth in the NL MVP voting, Soto has a strong case to be one of the early frontrunners in the NL MVP race heading into this season:

Read the rest of this entry »

Between 2014 and 2017, Brian Dozier took more major league plate appearances (2,807) than any other player, posting a .348 wOBA and hitting 127 home runs in the process. That performance was good for 18.9 WAR, which was the 11th-best mark posted by any hitter during that period and behind only José Altuve among second basemen. Last fall, he won a championship with the Washington Nationals. This weekend, he reportedly signed a minor league deal with the Padres.

That sequence probably overstates the degree to which Dozier’s stock has fallen. After a catastrophic 2018, his time with the Nationals was a modest success. He brought his offensive performance back to just about league average (99 wRC+), largely on the back of improved selectivity at the plate, and lifted his defense from “atrocious” (in 2018) to “mostly unimpressive” (his career norm). That all added up to 1.7 WAR and a share of a title. In most years, it might also have turned into a major league contract (you predicted a two-year deal worth $18 million). Read the rest of this entry »

Two months after extending Luis Robert, and less than a year after doing the same with Eloy Jiménez, the White Sox have locked in a contract for another young star, reportedly signing 26-year-old groundball specialist Aaron Bummer to a five-year extension worth a minimum of $16 million. The deal also includes options for Bummer’s 2025 and 2026 seasons, for $7.25 and $7.5 million, respectively, with $1.25 million buyouts in each year. If Bummer receives certain awards considerations, the final option year could be worth up to $10 million.

All told, the White Sox have guaranteed themselves a minimum of five and a maximum of seven years of Bummer’s services at a maximum cost of $32 million. Bummer has guaranteed himself $16 million. I suspect both parties will leave this deal feeling satisfied. As Bob Nightengale noted this is the largest extension given to a non-closer who has yet to qualify for arbitration in major league history. While the breakdown in the traditional closer role and the rise of elite sixth- and seventh-inning relievers makes that distinction somewhat less notable than it might have been a few years ago, this is still a major deal.

You may have already read Devan Fink’s detailed analysis of Bummer’s sinker earlier this month, but if you didn’t, here are the numbers that likely prompted the White Sox to put guaranteed money on the table: Bummer’s groundball rate in 2019 was 72.1% (second in the majors), he generated 14 runs on his sinker alone (also second), and he generated barrels on only 2.3% of batted ball events (third). Those numbers look a lot like those of another star reliever of recent vintage, Zack Britton, and it is indeed Britton who Bummer trailed in the first two categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, when giving our playoff odds a quick once-over, I stumbled across something interesting. In translating from player statistics to our projections, we strip out the impact of reliever leverage. That seems intuitively weird, so I wanted to delve into the thinking behind it and see if I could find a workaround.

First, a quick recap of the issue. When we calculate WAR for relievers, we include the impact of leverage. This makes sense — the last reliever off the bench is mostly pitching in blowouts, so their contribution, good or bad, is less important than the closer’s. If you used a dominant reliever in a mop-up role, they’d be far less valuable than if they got to pitch in games where the outcome was uncertain.

How do we adjust for leverage? It’s reasonably straightforward. Take a reliever’s gmLI, which you can find in the Win Probability section. Kirby Yates, for example, had a gmLI of 2.16 last year. gmLI is the average leverage index when a pitcher enters the game. You can find a recap of leverage index here, but it’s essentially a measure of how important a given plate appearance is. A leverage index of 1 means that the situation is exactly as important as the average plate appearance, 2 means the situation is twice as important, and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

Kody Hoese exploded last season at Tulane. In a breakout junior campaign that saw him shoot up draft charts, the right-handed-hitting third baseman slashed a preposterous .391/.486/.779, bashing 23 home runs along the way. Duly impressed, the Los Angeles Dodgers selected Hoese with the 25th pick of the first round.

He proceeded to acclimate well to pro ball. The numbers weren’t nearly as loud as they were with the Green Wave, but his .299/.380/.483 line between rookie-level Arizona and the low-A Great Lakes Loons was more than adequate. In terms of getting his feet wet, Hoese did just fine.

Asking Hoese about the sudden-rise path he took from Tulane to top-shelf prospect unearthed no great revelations. The 22-year-old Griffith, Indiana native feels that he simply matured and grew into having a more-advanced approach at the plate. “There weren’t really any mechanical changes, or anything like that.”

Hoese’s setup and stroke are anything but complicated. He presents with a “little-lower-hands slot” and a simple load where he “kind of gets into [his] back side, and then strides.” He tries to stay balanced — “centered through my body, upright” — with minimal head movement. His primary objectives are a consistent swing path and focusing on driving the ball up the middle and to the opposite-field gap.

Aaron Bates, who tutors hitters in the Dodgers system, offered a similar take when queried about Hoese’s M.O. Read the rest of this entry »

Players have reported to camp, bullpens are being thrown, and batting practice is being taken. Spring training is nearly in full swing with a full slate of games scheduled for Saturday. Every spring, the various position battles being waged on every team’s roster are often the most interesting storylines to follow.

This year, a surprising position battle opened up in Arizona. Last weekend, Mike Hazen, the general manager of the Diamondbacks, confirmed that there would be an open competition for the fifth spot in Arizona’s rotation. With Madison Bumgarner added during the offseason and Robbie Ray still in the fold, it looks like the D-backs have just one open spot. Luke Weaver should be fully healthy after recovering from his forearm strain that wiped out nearly four months of his season last year. Mike Leake, who is dealing with a fracture in his non-throwing hand this spring, likely has a spot in the rotation locked up too. Many assumed Zac Gallen, acquired by the D-backs at the trade deadline last year, would have earned that last spot with his impressive rookie campaign, but apparently that’s not the case. Instead he’ll have some competition in the form of Merrill Kelly and Alex Young.

The fifth spot in the rotation is probably Gallen’s to lose, but both Kelly and Young bring intriguing profiles to the table that make this position battle a little more interesting than it may seem. Here’s a quick look at what ZiPS sees from this trio. Read the rest of this entry »

Black swan events are a defining feature of each baseball season. Like any good sport, the contours of the game elicit a comfortable and familiar warmth. But also like any good sport, the details that make up the fabric of a particular contest or campaign are essentially unpredictable. It’s the round ball, round bat game: Weird stuff happens all the time.

Once they happen though, unexpected events have a way of enmeshing themselves in the game’s broader narrative as if they were just another ad on the outfield wall. Our brains struggle to handle surprises, and so we rationalize them. For a time, it was very weird that Lucas Giolito suddenly looked like one of the best pitchers in baseball; by the time the Cy Young ballots were tallied, his breakout season was just another event from 2019, a feel-good moment and a developmental win but no longer a curiosity. Lucas Giolito is now good and we accept this for what it is.

But there’s so much more fun to be had with unexpected events. They’re worth celebrating on their own merits. In one form or another, they happen every day and to every team and we should remember the most notable of those surprises. More to the point, one of these is coming for your club in 2020. Like a birthday present waiting to be unwrapped, each team is just a month or so away from discovering something weird about itself. Today we’re going to use recent history as a guide to imagining what that will look like. Read the rest of this entry »

With the release of full ZiPS projections, our playoff odds are up and running. For the most part that means putting a number to things that we already know. The Dodgers are 97.7% likely to make the playoffs, which sounds about right. The NL Central is a four-way tossup with the Cubs out in the lead. The NL East has three teams each with around a one-in-three chance at it. That all tracks with intuition.

Indeed, for the most part, the standings are self-explanatory. That doesn’t mean that everything is obvious and intuitive, however. Let’s take a quick look at a few of the cases where a deeper dive is necessary.

It’s tempting to think of a team’s expected win total as just a sum of their WAR. After all, the W is right there in the acronym! As Dan notes every year, however, adding up WAR totals on a depth chart isn’t a great way to go about things. Rather than just do that blindly, however, we can look at teams whose projected wins diverge the most from their WAR.

To do that, we’ll need each team’s projected WAR totals. Thankfully, there’s a handy page that shows all that data. The Dodgers have the most projected WAR and the Orioles have the least.

With that data in hand, we can work out what win totals every team would have if you could perfectly project WAR onto wins. First, let’s figure out replacement level. There are 1120 projected wins across all the teams and 2,430 total wins available in a season. This leaves 1,310 wins as the amount that replacement level is worth. Spread that across the 30 teams, and that’s 43.66 wins per team. Read the rest of this entry »

Assuming he doesn’t get traded, Kris Bryant appears to be David Ross‘ choice as leadoff hitter this season. It’s not a secret that the Cubs have struggled to find a leadoff man since they let Dexter Fowler walk in free agency after their 2016 championship season. Last year, the Cubs’ .294 on-base percentage and 77 wRC+ from the leadoff spot were the worst in baseball.

Over the last three seasons, nine players have taken at least 50 plate appearances from the leadoff spot.

Some of these are small samples, and while we know Jason Heyward isn’t a player who would put up a 44 wRC+ with more playing time, we also know he probably isn’t going to be much more than average with the bat. Given the importance of the leadoff spot, average shouldn’t be good enough for a contending team. Ian Happ was a little above average, but his .319 OBP leaves something to be desired. Even the .333 OBP he put up in limited time overall last year isn’t great. Daniel Murphy was only with the club for a few months. Kyle Schwarber’s career .339 OBP screams pretty good but not start-the-game-off great, and being below-average against lefties means he couldn’t do it every day. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I took a look at team payrolls, offseason spending, and the outlook for MLB spending on players as a whole compared to the last few years. Today we’ll take a look at one portion of team payrolls most teams would rather avoid. No organization wants to be paying players to play for other teams or to sit in the minors or to simply be out of the game, at least in the abstract. At some point though, teams will kick in money for a trade because the overall savings can be utilized elsewhere, the prospect return is slightly better, or because there is better use of a roster spot. Those payments become dead money.

As in past years, I’ve defined dead money as generally any money a team is paying out to a player who no longer appears on their 40-man roster. There are three types of dead money:

1. Money paid to players who have been released. Those players are free to sign with other teams, but the team releasing the player still owes the money remaining on the contract.
2. Money paid to other teams as compensation for players who have been traded. Generally, we see teams cover a portion of a contract to receive a better return in trade.
3. Money paid to players who are still in the organization but who have been removed from the 40-man roster. Any team could have claimed these players if they were willing to take on the contract, and the player probably could have elected fee agency, but then he would forfeit his right to the guaranteed money.

Here are the teams with the most money on their current payrolls going somewhere other than their roster. Read the rest of this entry »