It’s probably no surprise to you that I’ve always loved baseball. It hasn’t always been in the way I love it now. These days, I read about the sport all day and watch more games than I can count every week. It’s a self-enforcing cycle; the more I like it, the more baseball I get exposed to, which makes me like it more, on and on like that.

That’s not what made me like the sport in the first place, though. I’ve loved baseball for as long as I can remember. Every March, as I anxiously await the start of the season, I find myself reminiscing about how I ended up here. This year, those memories have come on even more strongly, because my dad’s birthday lines up with the start of the season and he’s turning 75 this year. I’m feeling so strongly, in fact, that Meg was kind enough to let me write about what got me hooked on the sport when I was a kid.

I didn’t grow up in a “baseball market.” We didn’t get Cardinals games on TV; for most of my childhood, we didn’t even have cable. But most of my fondest memories of being a kid revolve around the sport anyway. My parents got to work early on me, and they kept it up until I was a lifelong fan.

No baseball on TV? It was no problem, because my uncle taped a St. Louis promotional spot titled “Ozzie, That’s a Winner” and mailed it to us. It was a gas station advertisement, if I’m remembering correctly, with clips of great defensive plays interspersed around The Wizard talking about where he filled up his tank. I didn’t care about that part even a little bit. I watched that video until the tape wore out and tried to mirror Ozzie’s moves in our family room. Credit my mom and dad for sitting there without laughing while a small left-handed child tried to make himself look like the best defensive shortstop of all time, because they never once told me how doomed my dream of being the next Ozzie was.
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After an offseason marked by big trades and a slow free agent market, the 2024 season is almost upon us; we made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule by trying to predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Such is the prognostication business.

We asked the staff to predict the playoff field, as well as the pennant and World Series winners, and the individual award recipients. Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in. Here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Webb was my pick for NL Cy Young last season, and while the prediction didn’t come to fruition, the San Francisco Giants right-hander did come close to capturing the honor — this despite an 11-13 record. (We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?) He finished second in the voting to Blake Snell, who is now his rotation mate, and while Webb’s major league-leading 216 innings certainly captured the attention of the electorate, many of his other numbers stood out as well. He ranked fourth among qualified National League pitchers in both ERA (3.25) and FIP (3.16), and his 1.29 walks per nine innings was second to none. Moreover, his 62.1% groundball rate was the highest in either league.

He hardly came out of nowhere. Webb was already good, as his stats over the past three seasons attest. Since the beginning of the 2021 campaign, he has a 3.07 ERA and a 3.00 FIP, and his signature sinker-changeup combination has been responsible for a 59.9% groundball rate. A comparably humble 23.1% strikeout rate over that span (21.4% last year) notwithstanding, the 27-year-old worm-killing workhorse is one of the best pitchers in the game.

Webb sat down to talk pitching at San Francisco’s spring training facility earlier this month. He’ll be on the mound later today when the Giants open the regular season in San Diego.

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David Laurila: How have you evolved as a pitcher since coming to pro ball?

Logan Webb: “I’ve changed probably four different times. I was a sinker guy when I first started. Then I had Tommy John, and when I came back, so did the velo — it was back to the reason why I was drafted.”

Laurila: You were drafted [by the Giants in 2014] because you threw hard? Read the rest of this entry »

If you were searching for evidence of the changing of the guard in the major leagues — or of the occupational hazards faced by starting pitchers — look no further than this year’s slate of Opening Day hurlers. As the 2024 season launches with what was supposed to be a full schedule on Thursday — the Brewers-Mets and Braves-Phillies games have both been postponed until Friday — the absences of so many of the game’s most renowned pitchers due to injuries and other issues loom large. If there’s good news, it’s that we still have plenty of top arms on tap.

Consider, for example, the fact that neither of last year’s two Cy Young Award winners, Gerrit Cole and Blake Snell, will be taking the hill on Thursday. After being diagnosed with nerve inflammation and edema earlier this month, Cole — one of just two pitchers to throw at least 200 innings in both 2022 and ’23 — will start the year on the injured list and won’t even begin throwing again until early or mid-April. A best-case scenario has him returning around the start of June; in his place, the Yankees will start Nestor Cortes. Snell, who reached free agency after winning his second Cy Young last year with the Padres, didn’t even sign with the Giants until March 19 and isn’t built up enough to be on the Opening Day roster, let alone take his turn. Instead, Logan Webb will get the call for San Francisco for the third straight season, though that might have been the case even if Snell had signed in a timely fashion.

This is more or less a once-every-couple-of-decades occurrence. According to ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian, the last time neither Cy Young winner started the following Opening Day was in 2005. That year, despite their hardware, both the Astros’ Roger Clemens and the Twins’ Johan Santana yielded to teammates with longer tenures with their respective clubs, namely Roy Oswalt and Brad Radke. Before that, you have to go back to 1982, when neither the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela nor the Brewers’ Rollie Fingers (a reliever) started. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week and a half, we’ve published our annual season preview, ranking the league’s players by position and team based on a blend of our projections (a 50/50 split between ZiPS and Steamer) and our manually maintained RosterResource playing time estimates courtesy of Jason Martinez. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the navigation widget above to catch up.

Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits in a moment, but first, it’s important to remember that this exercise captures a snapshot of how we project teams to perform now. Teams aren’t static. Since we began publishing our rankings, Wyatt Langford, our no. 2 overall prospect, officially made the Rangers’ Opening Day roster, while Jackson Holliday, our no. 1 overall prospect, learned he’d be starting his season at Triple-A Norfolk. Cardinals outfielder Dylan Carlson suffered a sprained AC joint in his left shoulder during a collision with teammate Jordan Walker. He’ll start the season on the IL, paving the way for speedster (and no. 83 overall prospect) Victor Scott II to debut. And mere hours after our starting pitching rankings went live, Jordan Montgomery signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks, pushing them from 13th all the way up to fourth. Heck, while I was writing this summary, news broke that Reds infielder Matt McLain underwent shoulder surgery, putting his season in jeopardy. Read the rest of this entry »

After all the rumors and money and projections, here we are, back at 0-0, with every team having at least some theoretical level of hope for the coming season. Beginning Thursday, actual games will turn these projections to shreds, but this is the best algorithmic projection I have the ability to make for 2024. Just a note that I have not committed an act of decimal cheating; ZiPS does not know that the Padres and Dodgers are 1-1.

The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, meaning there naturally will be some important 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 PAs/IPs for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically (and proportionally) fills in playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings. The model’s had a lot of updates since the pre-spring projections, so probabilities may have moved slightly more than you might have expected from the changes in wins.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. 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. This is actually much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less mind-blowingly 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 astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in service of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.7 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. With one major exception, most of ZiPS’ problems now are about accuracy rather than bias. ZiPS’ year-to-year misses for teams are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. Now, correlations with fewer than 20 points aren’t ideal, but the individual franchise with the highest year-to-year r-squared is the Mariners at 0.03, which isn’t terribly meaningful. If you think that certain franchises have a history of predictive over- or underperformance, you thought wrong, and I’d bet it’s the same for the other notable projection systems.

If you want to check out the pre-spring projections, which talk about the biggest things to happen up to that point, here are the links to the AL and NL projections. Since it has been requested, for these official 2024 projections, I’ve also added 80th and 20th percentile win totals to the standings tables.

Since the last set of projections, the movement here can mostly be attributed to starting pitching. Corbin Burnes provides a huge boost to the Orioles, but some of the benefit of his addition is negated because of less optimistic innings totals for the injured John Means and, more significantly, Kyle Bradish. The injury to Yankees ace Gerrit Cole diminishes their outlook a bit, though they still have the American League’s third highest playoff probability. Lucas Giolito wasn’t expected to pitch the Red Sox to the postseason, but his injury makes a Boston playoff berth even less likely.

People might still be shocked to see the White Sox with a 1.5% chance of making the postseason, but one of the things I’ve learned after doing this for 20 years is that people – even the most sophisticated ones – tend to underrate how often improbable things happen. Luckily, with so many years in the books, I’ve had the ability to do a lot of calibration! In most simulations, the division features a fairly tight race between the Twins and Guardians for the title and the Tigers finishing third. And because the Central is relatively weak, a Royals playoff appearance would be unlikely but not unreasonably so.

The big change here is a slightly more negative distribution of the innings for Astros pitchers, narrowing their lead over the Rangers and Mariners. I appreciate ZiPS’ bringing the M’s just that much closer to the Seattle Mariners .540 meme. The A’s now project to finish a fraction of a win ahead of the White Sox in the AL basement, which is some kind of victory, I guess.

ZiPS does give the Braves a 1% chance at winning 116 games! Atlanta lost a bit in the probabilities because of some changes in the generalized playing time model that fills in the backups. Even if ZiPS sees the playoffs as a bit less certain for this team than it did six weeks ago, the Braves still have the highest projected win total in the majors. The Marlins took a sizable hit after some negative injury news, a pretty big deal for them since the pitching staff is their source of upside. It sure ain’t the hitting!

ZiPS loves Pete Crow-Armstrong and is suspicious of Cody Bellinger matching his 2023 numbers, but bringing him back was still enough to push the Cubs into a near-statistical tie in what was already projected to be a very close race. The Brewers took a hit with the loss of Burnes, and as a result, they slightly boosted the projections for the other four teams in the division.

The NL West contenders fighting with the Dodgers – which means the three other teams that are not the Rockies – all received a boost because, since the pre-spring projections, they each added one of the top starting pitchers available, either in free agency or via trade, this offseason. The Diamondbacks, Giants, and Padres are better after having acquired, respectively, Jordan Montgomery, Blake Snell, and Dylan Cease, but the moves haven’t changed the relative positions of these teams in the projected standings. Even so, these deals — along with San Francisco’s signing of Matt Chapman — have created more scenarios in which the Dodgers can be bested for the divisional title, though they remain the favorites.

One thing you see a lot on social media, especially from sites that repost these projections, is outrage that “the best team will only have X wins.” The Orioles are projected to have the best record in the AL, at 91-71, but that doesn’t mean that ZiPS projects 91 wins to lead the AL. Those 91 wins represent Baltimore’s 50th percentile performance in those million simulations, and it is astronomically unlikely that all 30 teams hit their 50th-percentile projections. On average, you should expect three teams to hit their 90th percentile, six to hit their 80th, nine to hit their 70th, and so on and so forth. But again, it’s rarely going to be that neat. So here’s the percentile matrix for the number of wins it would take to secure each of the six playoff spots.

I’m not a bold predictions kind of guy. Maybe it comes with the territory of writing so much: On average, my views are pretty down the middle because I just have so many views. There’s so much baseball bouncing around in my brain all the time that it tends toward the mean. Or maybe that’s just a cop out, a way to pre-excuse my lack of boldness. Because it’s time for my annual attempt at it. Here are five things I think will occur that hopefully will shock you a little – but not too much, because I’m hoping that at least two or three of these actually will transpire.

1. The Mets Will Lead Baseball in DH WAR
Our projections hate J.D. Martinez, and there’s a reason why: He’s 36 and squarely in the back half of his career. Over the past four years, he’s posted a 120 wRC+, which is great but not otherworldly, and he struck out 31.1% of the time in 2023. This kind of general trajectory is what projections feast on; they recognize early and commonly shared signs of decline and then extrapolate from there.

Doubting those projections wouldn’t really count as a bold claim in my book, though, because Martinez is a very good hitter. Also, the way that projections work means that he’ll exceed those numbers roughly 50% of the time even if they’re a good approximation of his true talent. We need to be much bolder than that. So let’s kick it up a notch and imagine how good Martinez could feasibly be.
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Earlier today, we looked at the teams in the bottom half of the league’s rotations. Now to close out the positional power rankings, we look at the game’s best.

The ever-changing landscape of pitching is present throughout the upper tier of the rotation rankings. With fewer workhorses across the league, rotations are often relying on upwards of eight guys to make a significant impact, as teams now understand that the six-month grind will churn their staff and could leave their April and October iterations looking very different. The margins are tiny, with the top three teams separated by fractions of a win and the next 11 split by a mere 1.6 WAR. Six of the teams ranked 16-30 last year have graduated into the upper class, but a key injury or an overperforming prospect from one of clubs in this year’s bottom tier could be enough to flip things drastically. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Schanuel got to the big leagues in a hurry, and he wasted little time proving himself once he arrived. Called up less than six weeks after being drafted 11th overall last summer by the Los Angeles Angels out of Florida Atlantic University, the left-handed swinging first baseman hit safely in each of his first 10 games. Moreover, he reached base in all 29 games he appeared in and finished with a .402 OBP. Indicative of his calling cards — plus plate discipline and quality bat-to-ball skills — he drew 20 walks and fanned just 19 times in 132 plate appearances.

The one knock on his game is he doesn’t hit for much power. Schanuel homered just twice after reaching pro ball — once each in Double-A and the majors — and while that profile isn’t expected to change markedly, he did leave the yard 19 times in his final collegiate season. At 6-foot-4, 220 pounds, he also possesses the frame to become more of a long-ball threat as he further acclimates to big-league pitching. Just 22 years old (as of last month), he has plenty of time left to grow his game.

Schanuel talked hitting at the Angels’ Arizona spring training complex earlier this month.

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David Laurila: It’s not uncommon for modern day players to identify as hitting nerds. In your opinion, what constitutes a hitting nerd?

Nolan Schanuel: “There are so many ways you can put it. I think it’s somebody that studies not only their own swing, but also other people’s swings, seeing what works for them. Growing up, I looked into dozens of swings. Barry Bonds, Ichiro [Suzuki] — seeing what works for them and kind of trying to put it into mine. So, I would say that being a hitting nerd is studying other people and kind of inserting some of what they do into themselves.”

Laurila: You just named two hitters with very different swings. Were you ever trying to emulate either of them?

Schanuel: “I wouldn’t say emulate. I would say that I tried to pick out pieces of what they did really well. I didn’t really know my swing when I was first doing this, so putting things into it kind of made it what it is today.”

Laurila: What did you take from Ichiro? Read the rest of this entry »

It remains a heartbreaking but immutable fact of baseball life that you cannot steal first base.

So over the weekend, Cleveland Guardians outfielder Myles Straw passed through waivers. He’s no longer on the 40-man roster and will start the season in Triple-A, despite having a guaranteed three years and $20.45 million remaining on his contract.

On this, the day (at least idiomatically) of Ezequiel Tovar’s contract extension, Straw serves as a solemn reminder of the dangers of getting too attached to a fast guy with questions about his bat. Read the rest of this entry »