You might’ve noticed that the regular season is over. As such, all the regular-season numbers are in the books, which gives us some good opportunities for evaluation on the outside. In this quick post, I would like to evaluate the preseason team projections. Last year, at least in the American League, the projections wound up being a mess. I remember there being a point about halfway through where it looked like one would’ve been smarter to bet the opposite of every AL team projection. How’d the numbers shake out in 2016? Below, see plots.

Several times before, I’ve used old team projections from seasons past. Not all team projections included here come from the same sources, because the same sources just haven’t always existed. For recent years, I’ve been able to use FanGraphs team projections. Going further back, I’ve had to search elsewhere, because FanGraphs just didn’t have projections. So I know that’s one potential source of error here, but I think it’s better than just not having data at all. And ultimately, all projection systems are built around similar foundations. You take recent numbers and weigh them and project them for the short-term future. There’s not a lot to change. So! Why don’t we just get to the information?

I have team projections stretching back to 2005. Here is a plot including actual team wins vs. projected team wins. What you see here is the average error per team per season:

This year, the projections fared much better than they did in 2015. I went with the last version of FanGraphs’ preseason team projections, and after the average projection missed by 8.1 wins a year ago, this time the average projection missed by 5.7 wins. That puts this year in line with 2014, as being fairly successful, math-wise. It would be the best-projected year since 2007. I have no idea if that means anything; I’m just putting it out there. This year’s biggest miss was the Twins, who fell an incredible 19 wins short of the March expectation. The word “Twins” has the word “wins” right in it. It also has a T, which looks like the symbol for perpendicularity. Other teams might be content to operate in parallel with winning. The Twins decided to challenge it head-on.

Another thing we can look at: What about BaseRuns wins vs. projected wins? We know there are elements that are just about un-projectable. What if we strip those away?

Last year, the average miss was 7.0 BaseRuns wins. This year, the average miss was 5.4 BaseRuns wins, standing again as the strongest year for the projections since 2007. You might say it’s strange that the projections haven’t improved on a set of projections from a whole decade ago, since that was so far back it was pre-PITCHf/x era. But this is at least evidence that last year’s weirdness was a blip. The biggest miss for 2016: The Red Sox, actually. They were projected for 89 wins, but they finished with 102 BaseRuns wins. Good team, the Red Sox. The Cubs were the second-biggest miss!

Just to close it out, we can leave out the projections entirely. Here are BaseRuns wins vs. actual wins. Are teams finding ways to beat their underlying statistics more often, or is that not the case?

This year, the average difference was 4.2 wins. That’s down from last year’s 5.1, but still, this is the second-biggest error in the sample. So that’s potentially of note. Last year it felt like the BaseRuns model was practically broken. This year has eased some of those concerns, but it’s still worth wondering about. The Rangers finished with 13 more actual wins than BaseRuns wins. The Rays finished with 13 fewer actual wins than BaseRuns wins. Go ahead and figure that one out. At least for the time being, I quit. What’s done is done!

Today is the day without baseball, and without the ability to watch baseball to pass the time, we turn to something even more frivolous: discussing baseball awards to pass the time. MVP and Cy Young thinkpieces have been flying across my Twitter timeline all afternoon, while our own Eno Sarris ponders evaluating managers statistically for his award vote. And, while Gold Glove finalists won’t be announced for another few weeks, the data is all there, so I might as well continue my annual tradition of objectively crowning the year’s best defenders, according to the publicly available metrics on hand.

Regarding eligibility, I used the same qualification rules used by Rawlings for the official award. If you’d like, you can find those here. Only players who qualify for the actual award qualify here. Once having my player pool, I pulled three advanced defensive metrics for consideration: Defensive Runs Saved, calculated by Baseball Info Solutions, Ultimate Zone Rating, calculated by Mitchel Lichtman and used as the in-house FanGraphs metric, and Fielding Runs Above Average, calculated by Baseball Prospectus and used as their in-house defensive metric. I summed the three, then averaged them together to figure a “total” defensive runs saved number.

You already know this, but the numbers don’t always agree. Sometimes, people don’t like that, but it is what it is. That’s why I prefer to look at them all. I’ll always be confident in the defender who’s rated as positive by all three, moreso than the guy rated positive by two and average or below average by another. By the same token, I’ll always be confident in the defender with one excellent grade and two average grades, moreso than the guy with three average grades, because the numbers see something excellent in the first guy that isn’t apparent in the other. That excellent grade isn’t coming from nowhere. The numbers are subject to noise, but they’re not liars, and I think we can all agree that, generally speaking, they pass the eye test.

For catchers, things are a bit trickier, and the model used by Baseball Prospectus is the only one that adjusts for things like the pitcher (on throwing and blocking) and the umpire and batter (on framing), so I’ve just pulled straight from BP’s leaderboards there. UZR doesn’t exist for pitchers, so only DRS and FRAA are used.

Enough of the methodology mumbo-jumbo. Awards time.

While Masahiro Tanaka wasn’t recognized as a finalist in the official voting last year, he did place third in this study, and this year, he ought to take home the hardware. Since entering the league in 2014, only Dallas Keuchel and Zack Greinke have more Defensive Runs Saved than Tanaka, who is both efficient at controlling the run game, and also fields his position well, due in part to good fielding stance, quick hands, and athleticism, all of which are on display above. Apparently it’s also beneficial to pitch in Canada with a two-letter first name that ends in “A.”

Iron Gloves: Carlos Rodon (-4), Jered Weaver (-4), Ivan Nova (-4).
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Some time ago, in another InstaGraphs post, I mentioned something that could potentially become true about the 2016 Reds. We spend a lot of time writing about things that could potentially become true, and inevitably, a lot of those paces fall off. There are reasons for that, and that would be a subject for another post. But the 2016 numbers are official now, dammit. There’s no more “on pace for;” there only is. Here is something that is:

That’s bad! Boy, it gets worse. Here are the worst team pitching staffs since 1900, by our version of WAR:

To be absolutely clear about what we have here: By our numbers, the Reds just became the first pitching staff in modern history to finish with a negative WAR. It’s only slight, sure, and the difference between them and those 1915 Athletics is less than one win, but that negative symbol is conspicuous. It pushes the digits over to the right, so they can stand out. The Reds, as a collective, featured a major-league pitching staff that was a worse-than-replacement-level pitching staff. That’s almost unfathomable, is what that is.

Did the Reds really have the worst pitching staff ever? I mean, hell, I don’t know. Their pitching staff had one of the biggest home-run problems ever. By actual runs allowed, they were a little bit better than replacement-level, but you know where we stand on all that. There’s no way to actually compare across seasons or eras, not with the desired level of precision. We just don’t understand pitching that well yet, and we understand it even less the further back we go into history. We can say this: If you wanted to talk about the worst staffs of all time, you might use FanGraphs WAR as a starting point. It couldn’t make the Reds look any worse.

Reds pitchers, month by month:

• April: -1.3 WAR, 30th place
• May: -1.1, 30th
• June: -0.6, 30th
• July: +1.9, 20th
• August: +1.0, 26th
• Sep/Oct: +0.2, 30th

The first half is what did the Reds in. In the second half, they accumulated 3.2 WAR, good enough to edge out the Twins, Braves, and Diamondbacks. In each of the last three months, the Reds’ staff finished in the black. Yet it’s appropriate that, in the final stretch, they were dead last again. All they needed were one or two more good games, to avoid finishing in the…red. But a league-worst September and October locked the Reds into place. They had a chance to run away from history, but instead they suffer its embrace.

A negative WAR. It’s not that there weren’t some success stories. Anthony DeSclafani was pretty good. Dan Straily was all right. Raisel Iglesias adjusted well to the bullpen. Brandon Finnegan got stronger in the second half. But let me tell you: 32 Reds pitchers pitched. Twenty of them finished below 0.0 WAR. Alfredo Simon allowed more runs in 58.2 innings than Jon Lester allowed in over 200. J.J. Hoover allowed more runs in 18.2 innings than Zach Britton’s allowed the last two years combined. For the Reds, 2016 was never going to be about winning. Yet it also definitely wasn’t supposed to be about this.

Depending on your perspective, you might think that Eric Hosmer had a career season. After all, he wasn’t just an All-Star, he was the All-Star Game MVP! He hit 20 homers for the first time — his 25 dingers were six more than his previous season best. And he drove in 104 runs — 11 more than his previous best. And yet, for the third time in his career, he was a replacement player or worse in terms of WAR. Did Eric Hosmer just have the worst 100-RBI season on record?

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Importantly, for the Cubs, this season isn’t over. Obviously, this season isn’t over — in a sense their real season hasn’t begun. We’ve known the Cubs would make the playoffs for something like five and a half months, and only now do they get to compete for the grand prize. Because there are games remaining, this might not seem like the best time to examine the 2016 Cubs through a historical lens.

I believe the opposite, though. At last, we have final, official regular-season statistics. Those are the stats that matter the most. And even though the Cubs are clearly Team No. 1 moving forward, the odds are still better that they don’t win the World Series. They’re probably going to lose, somewhere and somehow. And I don’t want to allow for playoff emotion to color the way people feel about this analysis. This season, the Cubs won eight more games than anyone else. The Cubs had a better run differential than anyone else, by a margin of 68. Clearly, they were really good. But how good, historically, when you’re talking about more than 100 years?

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I’ve got a vote for American League Manager of the Year this season and I’m terrified. My first vote as a member of the Baseball Writer’s Association, and it’s the impossible one.

Maybe impossible is too tough a word. I’m sure I’ll figure something out in time to submit a vote. But evaluating the productivity of a manager just seems so difficult. We’ve seen efforts that use the difference between projected and actual wins, or between “true talent” estimations for the team and their actual outcomes. But those attribute all sorts of random chance to the manager’s machinations.

I’d like to instead identify measurable moments where a manager exerts a direct influence on his team, assign those values or ranks, and see where each current manager sits. So what are those measurable moments?

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The 2016 regular season has come to an end, and tomorrow, the postseason begins. The Blue Jays and Orioles square off for a winner-take-all game to determine who advances to play the Rangers in the ALDS, and then on Wednesday, the Giants and Mets do the same to see who gets to try to take down the Cubs. Both games look like they could be a lot of fun, with lots of homers possible in the AL Wild Card game, and lots of strikeouts likely in the NL match-up, which will feature Noah Syndergaard and Madison Bumgarner.

I know the play-in games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m a fan of this format. The Wild Card games are some of the best drama baseball provides, and starting off the postseason with a couple of elimination games allows the playoffs to get off to a very exciting start.

It is, of course, a wild and dramatic change from MLB’s regular season. That six month marathon tests teams on their depth, on how well they can mix and match different pieces when injuries strike, on whether they have enough good role players throughout the roster to make up for the inevitable slumps from the star players. The postseason is much more of a sprint, a three week attempt to have a couple key guys get hot and carry the team to 11 or 12 wins in 15 to 20 games. Rotations shrink, bullpen usage goes up dramatically, and one player really can make a dramatic difference in a team’s results.

Postseason baseball is a very different game than regular season baseball. And because of that, it is both great and terrible at the same time.

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One can be forgiven for having forgotten about the Wyckoff v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball lawsuit. The class action case — filed back in July 2015 by Jordan Wyckoff, a former scout for the Kansas City Royals — accused Major League Baseball and its teams of violating both federal antitrust and employment law by colluding to deprive amateur and professional scouts both of the minimum wage and overtime compensation. Specifically, the case contended that MLB teams have unlawfully agreed not to compete with one another for the services of their scouts, with the result that wages for these employees have, in some cases, been depressed to as little as $5 per hour once all of their various job duties have been accounted for.

Late last year, MLB filed a motion asking the court to dismiss Wyckoff’s antitrust claims under its historic antitrust exemption. At the same time, MLB also argued that the suit’s minimum-wage claims should be dismissed against all but the Royals, since Wyckoff — the only plaintiff named in the suit who was asserting a violation of the minimum-wage and overtime rules — had never been employed by any of the other 29 MLB clubs.

Since then, the parties have waited… and waited… and then waited some more for the court to issue a ruling. That wait mercifully came to an end this past Thursday when Judge Paul Gardephe finally released his long-anticipated decision, more than nine months after MLB’s motion had first been filed.

In his opinion, Judge Gardephe granted MLB all of the relief it had requested, dismissing the overwhelming majority of Wyckoff’s case. As a result, while Wyckoff can continue to pursue his claim for back-pay from the Royals, any hopes he may have had that his suit would spur more systemic changes to the market for MLB scouts appear to have fallen short.

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David Ortiz was feted at Fenway Park yesterday. The 40-year-old slugger will retire following the postseason, and he’s deserving of any and all accolades that come his way. “Big Papi” finished the regular-season portion of his career with 541 home runs, 4,765 total bases, and a .931 OPS.

His October exploits are legendary. Ortiz has 17 home runs and 60 RBI in postseason action, many of which have come in key situations. The Red Sox have captured three World Series titles — their first since 1918 — since he joined the team in 2003. His slash line in those Fall Classics is .455/.576/.795.

The Dominican Republic born-and-raised slugger is a Boston icon for more than his on-field accomplishments. His charitable endeavors have been exemplary, his engaging personality omnipresent. His larger-than-life persona has captivated his adopted home. Ortiz will long be remembered for his words following the Boston Marathon bombing: ‘This is our f-ing city.”

Myriad people throughout the game have shared their thoughts on the soon-to-retire superstar in recent weeks. I collected quotes from 15, including players, managers, executives and broadcasters.

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Dusty Baker, Washington Nationals manager: “I’d have loved to have had David Ortiz on my teams. The postseasons he’s had… he’s carried them by himself, through sheer willpower. David Ortiz is one of the best that’s ever played this game. To me, he’s one of the best leaders that’s played this game. People gravitate toward him. That’s what being a leader is about. If David Ortiz wants it… what Big Papi wants, usually Big Papi gets.”

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Matt Carpenter did something special last night, on the final day of baseball’s 2016 regular season. I’ll get the anticlimactic part of this all out of the way right now: it didn’t matter. Of course, none of this actually matters, but through the lens of the St. Louis Cardinals’ year and postseason implications, what Carpenter did wound up not meaning a thing. It could’ve meant a thing; Carpenter and the Cardinals had everything to play for. Their only shot at a playoff berth came through a win, and what Carpenter did helped the Cardinals win one of their biggest game of the year, 10-4, over the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But the Cardinals needed some help alongside their win to potentially clinch that playoff berth, and with a loss to the San Francisco Giants, the Los Angeles Dodgers did not provide the necessary help. The win over the Pirates was for nought; the Cardinals were eliminated from postseason contention. Carpenter, though, did all he could — including pulling a trick out of his bag that he’d been waiting more than six years to use.

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