One of the things you have to get used to when you work with projections is being wrong. Like, All. Of. The. Time. While I’d like to believe that the projections are accurate and it’s just real life that mucked things up, that isn’t quite how they work. There are always events you didn’t see coming, assumptions you made erroneously, and just plain old irreducible error, all of which are going to thwart you.

On a basic level, you’re supposed to be wrong. Imagine a world in which you knew, for an exact fact, that every team was a coin flip to win every game. With this perfect knowledge, you’d still expect nearly a quarter of the league to win either 73 games or fewer, or 89 games or more, through nothing but luck. For the math-inclined, this is a hypergeometric distribution, not a binomial one; the coin flips are not independent because the win totals will still add up to 2,430 and one team’s win invariably is another team’s loss. Here’s a quick table for some of the win totals, showing the probability of a team winning exactly X games and how many of the teams you’d expect to have won up to X games:

As an example, you’d expect 3.4% of those coin flip teams to win exactly 74 games, with 15% of all teams winning up to 74 games.

But we don’t have anywhere near perfect knowledge about how good a team will be. We’re not even in the same zip code as “near perfect”; we just hope to be on the right continent. As a result, our error bars are going to be significantly larger than even the rather erroneous results you still get with omniscient projections. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after the Boston Globe reported that Chris Sale had resumed throwing following a shutdown, and two weeks after he was diagnosed with a flexor tendon strain but no new damage to his ulnar collateral ligament, the Red Sox have announced that he’ll undergo Tommy John surgery. The going-on-31-year-old lefty joins the Yankees’ Luis Severino on the short list of star pitchers who will miss all of the 2020 season — however long it may be — following UCL reconstruction, and the Astros’ Justin Verlander among players whose decisions to undergo surgery make more sense in light of the delayed opening to the season.

As I detailed three weeks ago, Sale made just 25 starts amid an uneven season last year; he was fantastic in May and June (2.78 ERA, 1.98 FIP in 71.1 innings) but bad or worse on either side of that stretch before being shut down on August 13 due to elbow inflammation. Though he set career worsts in ERA (4.40) and home run rate (1.47 per nine) — both more than double his 2018 rates — his strikeout rate still ranked second in the majors among pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 29.6% K-BB% fourth, and his 75 FIP- 14th. His 3.6 WAR, despite being his lowest mark since 2011, was more than respectable. That said, Statcast data showed that he had the largest year-to-year dropoff in four-seam fastball velocity of any pitcher from 2018 to ’19, 1.8 mph (from 95.2 mph to 93.4), and the second-largest increase in exit velocity, 3.4 mph (from 84.7 to 87.0).

While Sale paid a visit to Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion last August, he avoided surgery, though he did receive a platelet-rich plasma injection. Although many within the industry have been predicting that the wiry lefty would someday blow out his elbow given his violent delivery — you can find armchair pitching coaches calling him “a ticking time bomb” as far back as 2012, if not earlier — there was no public indication at the time that his injection or his injury were related to his ulnar collateral ligament. This spring, the Red Sox continued to give reassurances that his elbow was fine, even as Sale began spring training behind schedule due to a bout of pneumonia. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Justin Dunn, Justin Grimm, and Tyler Mahle — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Justin Dunn, Seattle Mariners

“I had a curveball before I had my slider. I learned it from my dad at 12 years old. He used to play in men’s leagues, and while he never played at a real high level, he loves the game. He’s a student of the game.

“Essentially, I take a two-seam grip and put my thumb underneath, finger through the lace, pressure to the ball.When I was younger, he would tell me to just throw it like a football, to never turn my wrist down. It would be big, loopy, and slow. As I got older, I started to throw harder and understand finger dexterity and about pulling the ball down. I learned that I could pull a little bit more with my middle finger and get it a little tighter, and sharper. Read the rest of this entry »

The worst thing you can do when you put a ball in play is hit a popup. That’s the worst thing usually, at least: right now, the worst thing you can do is be playing baseball at all, because you plus the opposing team makes 10 people, you jerk. But most times, it’s hitting a popup.

You’ve seen the reasoning for this before, but I’ll quickly lay it out again. When you hit a popup, you don’t reach base. Per Baseball Savant, balls hit with a launch angle of 50 degrees or higher produced a wOBA of .016 in 2019. Given that an out is worth 0 and league-average wOBA is .324, that’s pretty close to being an automatic out. Want it in a triple slash line? If you hit the ball at a 50 degree angle or higher, you bat .015/.015/.022. That’s ugly.

There’s good news, however. Want to avoid popping up and slamming your bat to the ground in disgust? There’s a simple solution: avoid swinging at high pitches. I’m no physicist, but the relationship between high pitches and popups seems straightforward. Your bat is likely to contact the ball from below, there’s some angle-of-incidence angle-of-reflection magic, and bam, Eric Hosmer is camping under the ball. Either that or you get some Alex Bregman magic:

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MLB appears to be inevitably headed to a shortened schedule, and at this date, we don’t really have a great idea what that might look like. Fewer games is likely to mean a little more randomness. The 162-game schedule is long by design. With the talent levels of major league teams clustered fairly close together even at the extremes, playing 162 games exacerbates the differences that do exist. In a three-game series where one team has a 65% chance of winning each game, the underdog still wins more games a quarter of the time. If the same teams played a 45-game series, the odds of the underdog winning drop below 2%. That’s an example at the extremes. If a team was favored to win every game 55% of the time, they would still be considered much more talented in baseball terms, yet over 81 games, half a season’s worth, the underdog still wins nearly one in five series.

Dan Szymborski wrote earlier today about how the ZiPS 2020 playoff odds change based on different season lengths. I’m going to take a different approach. To provide some sense of how a different schedule can change outcomes, we can look how things unfolded last season. Here’s what the season would look like if it had ended on September 8, 2019, after roughly 144 games:

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With the announcement last week that MLB would suspend spring training and delay Opening Day by at least two weeks, to say that the season’s future is uncertain would be an understatement. The most optimistic of scenarios — one in which the United States’ response to COVID-19 is suddenly and remarkably better than that of other, similar countries — had major league baseball resuming on April 9. The CDC has now recommended the postponement or cancellation of events with 50 or more people for the next eight weeks, which would prevent even spring training games. Update: MLB has announced further delays with a mid-May start the earliest possible date to begin the season in abiding by CDC guidelines. The two-week delay was merely be the first, with an unknown number of weeks of the season lost. The league’s announcement that spring training facilities would be shuttered, and that many players would be returning home, points to a much longer delay; a second spring training will almost certainly be required to allow players time to ramp back up. Some executives are simply hoping for games at some point in May, per Jon Heyman. We don’t yet know how many games the league will play this season, but we can use potential start dates, with a few October regular season weeks and some summer doubleheaders baked in, and attempt to determine how many games the sport might lose as the country attempts to contain this pandemic.

Shorter regular seasons in baseball have been incredibly rare. While the work stoppages in 1994 and 1995 might be fresh in the minds of some, 23 MLB seasons have been played since then. Ronald Acuña Jr., Cody Bellinger, Rafael Devers, Jack Flaherty, and Juan Soto weren’t even born when the start of the 1995 season was delayed. The graph below shows the total number of MLB games played in every year since 1903, the year of the first World Series:

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Logan Gilbert has all the makings of a quality big-league starter. Drafted 14th overall by the Seattle Mariners in 2018, the 22-year-old right-hander pairs plus stuff with a classic pitcher’s build. Moreover, he’s studious about his craft. The Stetson University product has embraced technology since signing — this per a Mariners executive I spoke to — and he’s using it to better understand, and help fine-tune, his arsenal.

Gilbert debuted professionally last season and went on to excel at three levels. Topping out at Double-A Arkansas, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound hurler logged a 2.13 ERA with 165 strikeouts in 135 innings. Displaying good command, he issued just 33 free passes.

Gilbert — No. 45 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list — discussed his four-pitch mix, as well as the extension and ride that help his heater play up, late last week.

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David Laurila: To start, can you give a self-scouting report?

Logan Gilbert: “I try to get ahead with the fastball. Everything for me is getting into good counts, because of how that plays better. I’ve seen the averages — how they change based on the counts — so I go right at guys. But I can also land a curveball, which for me is a big, slow curveball. I also have a harder slider that I used for strikeouts a lot last year; I used it for put-aways. I’ll also mix in a changeup. That’s kind of a fourth pitch, kind of a weak-contact pitch to give lefties a different look.”

Laurila: I understand that your velocity was down for a period of time at Stetson.

Gilbert: “It went down a little my junior year [2018], but last year it was pretty good for the most part. This spring it’s been pretty good again. Last game I was sitting around 94 [mph] for my two innings. In college, I was around 90, so it’s come back up.”

Laurila: Is velocity important to you? Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Minnesota Twins hit, roughly speaking, all of the home runs. That’s not precisely accurate of course, but it’s close enough for government work; they set an all-time record for home runs. Of the 12 Twins who came to the plate 300 times in 2019, 11 hit 10 or more bombs. Bomba Squad isn’t just a nickname; it’s an accurate description of a team filled to the brim with home run hitters.

This article is about that 12th Twin. Luis Arraez had 366 plate appearances last year. He hit just four home runs. That was the sixth-lowest home run total among players with 350 or more PA, and the names below him aren’t inspiring; Billy Hamilton, Tony Wolters, Yolmer Sánchez, Nicky Lopez, and Dee Gordon weren’t exactly offensive powerhouses.

All told, only 29 batters hit less than 10 home runs in 350 or more plate appearances. That reflects the democratization of home runs, but it also means that it’s difficult to contribute offensively without dingers. In fact, 27 of those 29 players had a wRC+ below 100. The only two exceptions? Nick Markakis, who squeaked over the finish line with nine bombs and a 102 wRC+ — and Arraez, who batted .334/.399/.439 on his way to a scintillating 125 wRC+.

It’s not weird, not even a little bit, that players who don’t hit home runs are generally bad at offense. There’s no single outcome as helpful to a team’s cause as a home run. If you had to predict a player’s offensive output and you could only have access to one outcome type, you’d pick home runs, right? Walks might be okay, and doubles might be as well, but singles? Triples? Heck, throw in BABIP and strikeouts if you want. Nothing comes close to home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020’s scariest baseball moment so far, on Sunday, Willie Calhoun’s face took a direct hit from a Julio Urías fastball, leaving Calhoun on the ground in a great deal of pain. Any baseball to the head is a scary situation, and Calhoun hopefully is escaping from this incident with “just” a broken jaw. Further tests are scheduled for Monday, which will tell us more about the extent of the damage to Calhoun’s face. While the team’s first concern should be the health of their player, the Rangers still need to make baseball decisions.

The result, in the short-term at least, appears to be using Nick Solak in left field. Both the ZiPS projections and I are big fans of Solak, but this move likely simply shifts where Solak gets his playing time, and doesn’t necessarily represent a significant increase in usage.

Even before the Calhoun injury, the Rangers’ offense looked the worst of the plausible playoff contenders, at least if you buy into projections. As of this morning, assuming that Calhoun comes back and manages 448 plate appearances combined in left field and designated hitter, our Depth Charts rank Texas position players 28th in baseball. That’s ahead of only the Orioles and Tigers; the Rangers’ 11.3 projected wins are barely half that of the worst-projected playoff teams from last season, the Brewers and Cardinals.

I don’t believe the Rangers think of themselves as being among the most serious of Wild Card contenders in 2020. But I also don’t think they would have signed Kyle Gibson, Todd Frazier, and Robinson Chirinos if 2020 was seen as a lost cause, nor would they have been so insistent on getting a good price for Mike Minor at the trade deadline last year in order to make a deal. The most recent ZiPS run has the Rangers at 77 wins, while the Depth Charts forecast 78 wins; that’s a team that could at least make a little noise if things broke the right way.

That’s where Yasiel Puig comes in. The Rangers are light on offense, light on corner outfielders, and light on power from the right side. Puig is a fairly limited player these days, no longer the kind of star he was when he broke into the league. What Puig does remain, however, is a roughly league-average slugger who will give you right-handed power and not embarrass you in the outfield. After two years of lefties throwing fastballs against Puig with impunity, he finally made them pay in 2019. My colleague Jay Jaffe wrote more about this, but Puig slugged just .203 with a single homer against lefty fastballs in 2017-2018 combined. In 2019, Puig flipped the script, slugging .540 against lefty fastballs.

While a lot of teams would be able to find fill-ins for Calhoun from their backups or minor-league depth, outside of the starters and Nick Solak, the Rangers don’t really have any interesting options. If you don’t believe me, here are the ZiPS projections for the at least minimally possible internal options in left, with everyone re-projected as a left fielder:

Not a single one of these options projects as better than replacement-level in left. Suffice it to say, Puig murderizes these projections.

Even Puig’s 10th-percentile projection adds a win over a full season compared to the rest of the team’s options (he forecasts as an average player in 62% of his projections, an All-Star in 12%, and replacement level in just 3%). He’s also good enough that, like Hunter Pence was last year, he can carve out a significant role even as a non-starter, though he likely won’t match Pence’s surprising 2019 production.

Texas would be smart to treat a Puig signing with a bit of urgency rather than taking a wait-and-see approach. Puig was ineligible to receive a qualifying offer from the Indians, so unlike last year’s free agent stragglers, most notably Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel, there is no particular incentive to force him to spend April in street clothes. Nor are the Rangers the only team with a reason to give Puig a call. The Yankees are now without Aaron Judge and while Giancarlo Stanton ought to return from his calf injury soon, his recent injury record is likely enough to give the Yankees’ front office pause.

The Rangers already had a narrow path to the playoffs, and losing Calhoun and his possible upside makes that path even narrower. Texas is absolutely awash in cash, nowhere near any of the luxury tax thresholds, and Puig can help the team long after a Calhoun recovery. Sign Puig. Do it yesterday.

Time is the ultimate badass. No matter how great you are, no matter how amazing you are at planning, time always wins in the end. And so it is in baseball as in other things. Mike Trout is, in many ways, the reigning king of baseball, that rare player who enters every season as the nearly-undisputed best in the game. Trout is no longer the young phenom and will turn 30 in just under 18 months, the threshold past which your baseball youth is symbolically gone. Young talent debuts every year while Trout inches closer and closer to retirement, and the day will come when he’s no longer baseball’s clear best.

Just being the best player projected coming into the season is practically enough to ensure your baseball immortality. I went back to the start of the modern era (1901) and collected the top WAR projection for every season, instructing ZiPS to calculate a Marcel-like method for the seasons prior to 2003, when the ZiPS projections did not exist. This is a quick way to demonstrate Trout’s dominance compared to other elite players in baseball history:

There are a couple of oddities in there, mostly caused by the difficulty of projecting a player who missed seasons due to war service, but otherwise it’s a Who’s Who of the Hall’s inner circle. I’d wager that in 50 years, all but two of these players will be in the Hall of Fame, with Charlie Keller likely on the outside, and Snuffy Stirnweiss certainly so. (If I’m still around in 50 years to test this prediction, I also wager I’ll be a very shouty, curmudgeonly 91-year-old.)

In terms of the number of years at the top of the heap, Trout’s eight seasons already puts him in third place in modern baseball, behind only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. In terms of uninterrupted reigns, Trout’s eight consecutive seasons ties Bonds’ 1992-1999 stretch, meaning that if he has the top projection entering 2021, he’ll have earned his spot as the giocatore di tutti giocatori in baseball.

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