This morning, we considered the catcher position. Now, we turn our attention to the shortstops.

Hello! This isn’t going to be a long intro, because you know what you’re getting into here. What has been called a golden age for the shortstop position continued apace in 2019, with shortstops batting a collective .326/.445/.772 — a 100 wRC+. This was despite several luminaries, such as Francisco Lindor and Carlos Correa, having their playing time limited by injury. There were delightful surprises from longtime players (the ascension of Marcus Semien). There were promising rookie campaigns (the arrival of Bo Bichette). And there were, of course, just plain great seasons from players who are now the usual suspects: Xander Bogaerts, Trevor Story, Javier Báez, et al. Even when plumbing the depths of this list, there are interesting progressions to follow: One can consider the strange season Willy Adames had for the Rays, or the was-it-a-breakout from the Pirates’ Kevin Newman. It’s a fascinating time for the position! Let’s get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

After Dan Szymborski and Craig Edwards surveyed the state of second and third base yesterday, our positional power rankings continue with a look at catcher.

Catcher is a hard position to project even at the best of times — though we are getting better at it — and that difficulty is compounded this year by a short season and the availability of ever-more roster spots at which to stash a backup or two. Taking those complications together, I’d encourage you to take these rankings with a dollop of salt. There’s value in taking a close look at the particular mix of players each team is bringing into this campaign, but it’s probably best understood as an effort to document the catching situation league-wide, bucket teams into tiers, and sketch out the rough outlines of teams’ depth at this position. As such, try not to dwell overly long on the ordinal rankings or the team WAR figures that fuel them; the differences are quite small in some cases.

So what is the league-wide situation at catcher? Given the continued presence of true standouts like Yasmani Grandal and J.T. Realmuto it isn’t all bad, but I think it’s fair to characterize the overall situation as a bit of an ebb tide. As recently as a few years ago, we were treated to career seasons from the likes of Yan Gomes, Rene Rivera, Russell Martin, Buster Posey, and Jonathan Lucroy, with Salvador Perez and Yadier Molina not far off their peaks as well. Now, Martin is unsigned, Posey has opted out, and the rest of the players who were so recently putting up five-win seasons are shadows of their former selves. Catchers as a group generated just 54.3 WAR last year, which, while a five-win improvement over 2018’s figure, was lower than any other season in the last 12. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve read the intro. You’ve read about first basemen and second basemen. Now, as our positional power rankings continue, it’s time to examine the state of third base.

If you scroll through the first half-dozen names on this list, you might note that there are a lot of good third basemen. Of the 10 position players projected for at least 2.0 WAR this year, four are third basemen. In fact, the hot corner accounts for six of the top 14 projected position players, while the top 10 third basemen all rank among the top 30 position players overall. There are so many good third basemen, it probably isn’t useful to quibble too much about each team’s exact placement in the rankings below. It’s a tightly bunched group with a lot more positives than negatives. It’s also a veteran-laden group, but young players like Yoán Moncada and Rafael Devers provide considerable hope for the position’s future. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Jay Jaffe kicked off our positional power rankings series by evaluating the league’s first basemen. If you need a refresher on the series, Meg Rowley wrote a handy explainer. Today, we stay on the infield and turn our attention to second base.

Second base has become a decidedly unsexy position. Teams are more willing than ever to keep players at shortstop, leaving the keystone increasingly populated by the guys with weak arms, not enough glove for short, or not enough bat for third base. Throughout history, shortstops have generally hit worse than second basemen, which makes sense given that short is the tougher defensive position. But in 2018, after years of slowly gaining ground, shortstops outhit second basemen, with a 97 wRC+ vs. 95 at second; in 2019, they did it again (100 vs. 96).

It hasn’t helped the position that there’s been a talent drain. Chase Utley, Ben Zobrist, Ian Kinsler, and Brandon Phillips are all gone, Robinson Canó, Brian Dozier, and Jason Kipnis are nearly so, and it’s an open question whether Dustin Pedroia plays again. Only José Altuve is all that is left standing of the elite second basemen from the 2010s. Meanwhile, there are only seven second basemen with a future value of 50 or better on THE BOARD, compared to nine at third base and 14 at shortstop. Inevitably, some of the shortstops will end up as second basemen, but that’s kind of the point; the shortstops that shift will likely be the ones who didn’t make the cut at short. Players like Gavin Lux and Nick Madrigal will provide new blood, but they’re likely at least three or four years away from their peak years. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here we are. Welcome to the 2020 positional power rankings. As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer Opening Day. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly after all (thank you kindly), and are well-versed in the goings on of the offseason. You probably know that Gerrit Cole now plays in pinstripes and that Anthony Rendon calls Anaheim home and that Yasmani Grandal is a White Sox. But like so much else in 2020, COVID-19 has rendered an already odd thing stranger, harder. Sadder. In the season’s original timeline, we would have just enjoyed the Futures Game at Dodgers Stadium; I would be preparing to travel home from FanGraphs festivities in Los Angeles. Half a season’s worth of play would be in the books; in that brighter alternate reality, the All-Star game is tomorrow. Instead, the pandemic caused the season to stall out before it could get started. We witnessed a tense, nasty negotiation between the owners and the Players Association to resume play. The amateur draft was only five rounds. Most obviously and devastatingly, more than 135,000 Americans are dead.

How best to proceed with the practical vagaries and ethical quandaries of a season played against such a backdrop, I’m still unsure. I know that you still care about baseball, want to understand the who and how and what of this season. I know that I still care about the game, though I’m uncertain whether it is totally right to do so. We don’t know how much of the season we’ll get to see, just as we don’t know what the long-term consequences of COVID-19 will be for the players who contract it. It all amounts to an uneasy feeling, though it probably won’t be all bad. Strange and fraught as it is, I expect that Opening Day will feel at least a little good, that I will delight in finally seeing Cole take the mound for the Yankees, that I will thrill at remembering that Mike Moustakas plays for the Reds now, or that Mookie Betts – Mookie Freakin’ Betts! – now dons Dodger blue. And so here we are, launching the positional power rankings, hoping for good health and well-played games and for this 60-game sprint to mean something, for it to tell us something we didn’t know; to provide a welcome respite without distracting too much from the far more important task of keeping each other safe. We’ll try to find the right balance between grappling with the low lows of the pandemic and the heady highs of finally having our evenings and afternoons marked by the game’s familiar rhythms. We greatly appreciate you coming along for the ride as we do.

This post serves as an explainer for our approach to these rankings. If you’re new to the positional power rankings, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, I hope it is a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, here is the introduction to last year’s series. You can use the handy nav widget at the top to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2019.

Unlike a lot of site’s season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allow us to cover a roster top to bottom, with stars, everyday staples, and role players alike receiving some amount of examination, while also placing those players (and the teams they play for) in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across the game, and spot places where a well-deployed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is merely good. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of things and a clearer picture of the season ahead, even a weirdo season like this one.

And while we hope you find this way of viewing things useful, don’t worry. If you’re a fan of, say, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and want to view the rankings through the lens of that team, all you have to do is select the Diamondbacks from the “View by Team” dropdown that appears above the rankings in any given post and presto! Snakes on snakes on snakes. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Miguel Castro’s hard changeup caught my eye. It’s a weird, good pitch, and it’s thrown by a pitcher who might otherwise fade into the background. What’s more, he’s still bad against lefties despite a spectacular pitch for attacking them. About the only thing that made sense to me in the whole scenario was that Castro uses his changeup to attack lefties, the way right-handed pitchers are supposed to.

We’ll get to whether that’s true in a moment. First, let me introduce you to a righty pitcher who looks at this conventional wisdom — changeups to lefties, sliders to righties — and says eh, pass. Maybe not introduce you, actually, because he’s a notable pitcher on a marquee team, but at least alert you to his weirdness. Meet Tommy Kahnle, the man who throws his changeup when he shouldn’t.

As a rule, pitchers hate changeups to same-handed batters. Of all the pitches that righties threw to righties in 2019, only 7.1% were changeups or splitters (a splitter behaves almost exactly like a changeup, and pitch classification algorithms sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two, so for the remainder of this article I’ll be lumping both pitches together). On the other hand, they love them against lefties — 17.5% of right-to-left pitches were changeups. It’s pitching 101.

Kahnle surely took pitching 101; he just doesn’t seem to care. His changeup is his best offering, and he absolutely leans on it against lefties. 59.6% of his pitches to lefty batters in 2019 were changeups. It can’t even properly be called a secondary pitch; it’s just a primary pitch! Nothing to see there — a changeup-heavy pitcher throws a lot of changeups to opposite-handed batters. Where it gets interesting is when he faces righties. What does he do there, in the matchup his pitch wasn’t designed for? Why, he throws a changeup 44.2% of the time, of course.

He’s not alone in this weirdness — Héctor Neris and Tyler Clippard, just to name two, do similar things. But Kahnle interests me, because he wasn’t always this way. In 2017, he was spectacular. A 2.59 ERA, a 1.84 FIP, a Gerrit-Cole-facing-minor-leaguers 37.5% strikeout rate and a minuscule 6.6% walk rate — he was nothing short of dominant. That year, he threw a changeup to righties 14.7% of the time. Huh? Read the rest of this entry »

This is the seventh in a series of baseball-themed lessons we’re calling FanGraphs Prep. In light of so many parents suddenly having their school-aged kids learning from home, we hope is that these units offer a thoughtfully designed, baseball-themed supplement to the school work your student might already be doing. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth units can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Overview: A short unit centered on calculating rolling averages. Calculating the mean, median, and mode are fundamental concepts in math. But when we’re dealing with a dataset spread out over weeks, months, or years, simply calculating the average value for the entire dataset hides the data’s peaks and valleys. For a baseball player, those are the hot and cold streaks that everyone goes through during the season.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify and apply a rolling average.
• Explain how changing an interval affects interpretation.
• Consider the potential uses of a rolling average in baseball.

Target Grade-Level: 9-10

Daily Activities:
Day 1
Khris Davis famously hit .247 four seasons in a row from 2015–2018. If we take his total hits and total at-bats over those four seasons, it’s no surprise that his combined batting average is .247.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the defining features of late 1990s baseball was the battle between three young, superstar shortstops: Alex Rodriguez of the Seattle Mariners, Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees, and Nomar Garciaparra of the Boston Red Sox. There were the occasional interlopers, such as Barry Larkin in his late-career surge and Jay Bell with the Diamondbacks in the midst of his second wind, but A-Rod, Jeter, and Garciaparra were the big three at the top of the leaderboards. The debate surrounding these three shortstops was very much in the public eye, with the trio at the top of the sport in terms of both name recognition and performance.

We’ve been blessed with a flurry of phenom shortstops since then, but having three multi-talented players at the position who were also elite offensive performers was rather novel at the time. Cal Ripken Jr., Alan Trammell, and Robin Yount came the closest in living memory, but that fight was short-lived as Yount eventually moved to the outfield. To find another three this good, you’d have to jump back 60 years to the days of Lou Boudreau, Luke Appling, and Arky Vaughan. Read the rest of this entry »

In what’s becoming a weird tradition on FanGraphs, I wrote an article about bunting last week. It included the usual disclaimers: these are rules of thumb rather than absolutes, managers should absolutely consider edge cases, and so forth. Disclaimers are for nerds, though, and writing about bunts is a sure way to get a good amount of “Hey you have to consider the specific players doing it, stop using neutral contexts.”

Most of the time, I’d just ignore it. All players aren’t created equal, and yet rules of thumb exist. Surely managers are bright enough to realize that if Mike Trout is up there, maybe you should reconsider your guidebook written for average major leaguers. Today, though, I was looking for a topic. So let’s get Mike Trout up there! Let’s put Jeff Mathis on deck! Let’s create those corner case scenarios that everyone always mentions when writers talk generic rules.

The first scenario is simple: let’s put Mike Trout at the plate in a tie game in the bottom of the 10th. You probably already know the simple math: if instead of Trout a generic batter had the first at-bat of the inning, bunting would be a wise choice. Instead, we’re starting with Trout, followed by an exactly average team behind him. Read the rest of this entry »

Predicting breakout candidates is one of the hardest and most frustrating tasks for anyone who tries their hand at baseball soothsaying. By its very nature, a breakout (or breakdown) projection is a low probability event. If it wasn’t, it would be the basic projection! Your big hits will be next to some embarrassing mistakes. For example, if I were of a mind to gloat about having said in this 2018 piece for ESPN that Christian Yelich had a peak Joey Votto/Will Clark season in him, I couldn’t get around the fact that the player listed right after Yelich was Danny Salazar, who has appeared in one game since that article ran.

So what constitutes a breakout season? Is it a player making a significant change in one aspect of their game? A bounce-back season? Is a top prospect showing improvement a breakout? Or is it a sudden step forward along broad lines? I’d argue that it’s any and all of these things. I used to try to statistically define a breakout season, but in the end, I found no purely mathematical estimation that was satisfactory. As I’ve written this piece over the years, I’ve gone with a more abstract definition: when a player, capable of contributing to a playoff contender, is able to fundamentally change what we think of them.

Predicting breakouts and breakdowns for 2020 is even tougher than usual thanks to the 60-game season, which will complicate knowing if I’m right even if it is somehow miraculously played to completion. But it’s part of the job, so let’s get to the bet-making instead of the bet-hedging. Here are my 10 favorite breakout picks for 2020.

Eloy Jiménez, Chicago White Sox

Eloy Jiménez had a vaguely disappointing rookie year in 2020, with a .513 slugging percentage in a pinball season not enough to balance out the .315 on-base percentage and mediocre defense. What keeps me a believer is that he was a more well-rounded hitter in the minors than he’s displayed in the majors and it’s way too soon to peg him as a low-OBP slugger. It was encouraging that his plate discipline numbers improved over the course of 2019, and ZiPS thinks his second-half .337 BABIP is closer to his real number than his .275 over the season’s early months.

I don’t think a year similar to Yordan Alvarez’s .313/.412/.655 2019 would be all that shocking. Neither does ZiPS; in a 600 PA season, it put his 90th percentile home run total at 54.

I kind of wanted to put Nomar Mazara here as a tandem, but I resolved to stop picking him after doing so for three consecutive seasons and whiffing each time. A breakout is still a possibility for Mazara, but if I pick him for a decade and he finally does break out, I’d just be the blind squirrel finding the nut.

Adrian Houser, Milwaukee Brewers

You’d be excused for not getting excited about Adrian Houser as a prospect; he was never especially enthralling in the minors. What was exciting, however, was Houser’s two-seamer/sinker, which he used to great effect in 2019. Pitch-classification algorithms can have issues with a pitcher like Houser, but while he upped his grounder game considerably last season — useful for a right-handed pitcher given Miller Park’s history as a haven for left-handed sluggers — he did it while avoiding the somewhat dated approach of simply constantly throwing hard and down.

Houser did have considerable splits last year depending on his role, with a 4.57 ERA as a starter compared to 1.47 in relief. But in a rotation that seems overstuffed with third and fourth starters, Houser’s upside is interesting.

Dinelson Lamet, San Diego Padres

One thing people forget about Dinelson Lamet is how little experience he actually has as a pitcher, with only 500 professional innings under his belt. I think there’s a good chance that if not for the Tommy John surgery, he’d be a legitimate ace right now for the Padres; his change was a work in progress at the time. Lamet has been 16 runs below-average with his mid-to-upper 90s fastball — which came back faster post-surgery — but I don’t think this is a case of Nathan Eovaldi, a pitcher who had trouble turning his velocity into outs. Lamet just hasn’t the time to refine his potent fastball-slider combination yet.

Luis Urías, Milwaukee Brewers

It strikes me as odd that in some circles Luis Urías is already thought a bust despite just turning 23. After sitting out the spring with a recovering from surgery on a broken hamate bone, Urías’ poor injury luck has continued; he tested positive for COVID-19 prior to the Brewers’ intake procedure for training camp. His case was reported to be asymptomatic and while we have little practical evidence of how cases like that will affect elite athletes, Craig Counsell appeared optimistic about Urías’ chances of rejoining the team in fairly short order. Urías had a disappointing stint in the majors in 2019, but even taking a huge chunk out of his .315/.398/.600 Triple-A effort due to the league offense and the level, there’s strong evidence that his baseline is well above his .223/.329/.326 major league line last year.

Victor Robles, Washington Nationals

It seems a little weird with the benefit of hindsight, but Victor Robles was always supposed to be the new hotness before Juan Soto exploded onto the roster in 2018. Robles isn’t going to catch up to Soto any time soon — or likely ever — but he showed signs of being a fairly complete hitter as a prospect and his defense in center field has been about as good as advertised. His main problem remains that he makes very soft contact, especially on groundballs, and I think his tendency to be overaggressive on the first pitch and top a soft grounder is hurting him here; he just doesn’t have the contact skills of a David Fletcher. Victor Robles will never hit for power like a Joey Gallo, but better pitch selection would give him a shot at retaining his 2019 home run bump. Too much of his current plate discipline comes from simply being willing to take a hit by a pitch.

Dansby Swanson, Atlanta Braves

Poor Dansby Swanson is at risk of becoming the new Gregg Jefferies, a player who is always measured versus our lofty initial expectations, found wanting, and ends up underrated by “only” being a B+ player in the majors. Swanson hit the ball harder in 2020 than he ever had before in the majors, with his barrel rate more than doubling his 2017 and ’18 numbers and his weak contact hits dropping considerably. It didn’t show up in his overall stats, but ZiPS “thought” he should actually have been a .492 slugger instead of the .422 mark he posted. zSLG isn’t an outlier, either; Statcast’s xSLG had Swanson at .480.

Dylan Bundy, Los Angeles Angels

My working theory on Dylan Bundy is that he needed a change of scenery more than practically any pitcher in the majors, both figuratively in terms of coaching and literally in terms of a park better configured to contain his mistakes. Bundy came out of high school nearly a decade ago as a hard thrower, a pitcher who regularly hit the high-90s and was clocked at 100 as an amateur. Years of injuries killed off the fastball, but Bundy continued to pitch as if he was still that pitcher, aggressively challenging hitters with a 91-92 mph four-seamer. That doesn’t actually work against major league hitters; for his career, he’s allowed a .542 SLG on four-seamers, including a .574 in 2018 and a .642 in 2019.

Bundy has to reinvent himself the way Frank Tanana did after his injury. There were signs of progress at times in 2019, with Bundy trying to change speeds more often. I still think there’s upside here if the Angels convince Bundy that his comps fall along the lines of Doug Fister, not Randy Johnson.

Byron Buxton, Minnesota Twins

Byron Buxton thrived last season when the Twins finally did what they’d resisted doing for years: sticking him in the lineup, letting him play, and not panicking every time he had a bad week. ZiPS gives Buxton a 10% chance at a 130 OPS+, enough that it would make him a superstar when combined with his defense. The shoulder is a concern, but he’s also had the luxury of more time to recover because of the pandemic’s long layoff.

Mitch Keller, Pittsburgh Pirates

I can’t think of a scenario in which Mitch Keller’s .475 BABIP in 2019 represents an actual ability. I’m not convinced that Mitch Webster, coming out of retirement and converted to pitching, would allow a .475 BABIP. Historically, hitters being dragooned as pitchers have a BABIP allowed in the .330 range, which I think sets a soft ceiling of minimal pitching competence. But it was such a wacky number that even ZiPS is having trouble coping and I’d take the under on the .328 projection, even with Keller having similar issues in the minors, though not to the same extreme. Like Lamet above and my eternal example, Kevin Gausman, I think Keller really needs an offspeed pitch he can count on, but the talent is there. It’s hard to strike out 12 batters a game and have no idea what you’re doing.

Tyler Anderson, San Francisco Giants

There’s a chance that this is personal bias since his windup always gives me nightmares in MLB: The Show, but Tyler Anderson was always on the verge of breaking out as command-type pitcher in Coors and with a better outfield defense and a friendly park in San Francisco, I think he could have a Kirk Rueter-type run of success. And yes, I know he’s more of a strikeout pitcher than Rueter — the comp isn’t perfect. Having the extra time to recover from major knee surgery will be helpful, I feel.

These are my breakout candidates. Next, I’ll reveal the sad side of the coin: the breakdowns.