After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

2014 sure seems a long time ago when you look at these offensive projections, doesn’t it? What’s especially troubling when you consider them is that as a whole is there just isn’t all that much upside. It wasn’t so long ago that Miguel Cabrera was hitting at an All-Star level, but the reality is that he’s only played in 168 games over the last two seasons and hit an un-Miggy-like .260/.344/.410. It’s good news of a sort that his back wasn’t one of the injury culprits in 2018, but for a 36-year-old (in April) still just a year removed from having two herniated discs, I may be searching for good news.

Nicholas Castellanos has developed into a very good hitter, but like his predecessor, J.D. Martinez, he’s one who really shouldn’t play the field. It was a good idea to give Castellanos a chance in the outfield, but it turns out he’s not much better as an outfielder than he was as a third baseman. If the Tigers want to win a few more games in 2019, I’d just stick him at designated hitter. That is, assuming he’s not traded in the next few weeks as he hopes. Castellanos is likely the only player on the roster who ought to be a trade target; Cabrera’s contract makes him unmovable without eating an obscene amount of cash and the Tigers shouldn’t deal Jeimer Candelario.

Otherwise, the amount of offensive talent, with the exception of Castellanos and Candelario, is almost shockingly scant. With Jose Iglesias not counting since he’s a free agent, minor-league defensive wizard Jake Rogers projects as the fourth-most valuable Tiger given a whole season of play. It’s unusual for a replacement-level offensive player to project so well. ZiPS projected the Marlins and Orioles to have, respectively, nine and 10 position players in their organizations worth 0.6 WAR or better, a murderers’ row compared to Detroit’s four.

ZiPS could, of course, be wrong. The Steamer projections are far more positive. If you’re a fan of the Tigers, that’s the system you’re hoping will be right this year, at least when it comes to the starting lineup.

Pitchers

This is a bit of a flip from the batters, in that ZiPS likes the pitching more than Steamer does. Now, the top-end projections in the rotation don’t even sniff at All-Star level, but there’s a lot more of interest here than there is with the hitters. ZiPS projects a rebound season from Michael Fulmer, but one in which he looks like a solid No. 2 starter rather than the ace the Tigers believed they had after his 3.06 ERA, AL Rookie of the Year debut in 2016. Rating Fulmer’s abilities too highly is what made Detroit so reluctant to trade him absent an enormous return, and I still believe they’ll come to regret it. Don’t get me wrong, Fulmer still has trade value, but as a good-not-great pitcher who still hasn’t proven to be much of a workhorse, the Tigers would get less now than they would have after 2016 or 2017.

There’s a bit of a trap here for Detroit. With Matt Moore, Tyson Ross, and Jordan Zimmermann under contract, to go along with Fulmer and Matt Boyd, the Tigers could very well start the season without any of the mildly interesting prospects and hangers-ons they have haunting Comerica Park roaming the field. I’m not even talking about the organization’s top four or five pitching prospects, which seem to be some combination of Casey Mize, Franklin Perez, Matt Manning, Beau Burrows, and Alex Faedo (stay-tuned to Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen for more on this than this brief little writeup). I’m talking about Daniel Norris; the Tigers really need to figure out whether or not he is a bust rather than let another rebuilding team do so. I’m talking about exploring Blaine Hardy’s potential as a starter more. Matt Hall isn’t a top prospect, but his curve keeps getting batters out as he moves up the ladder and he was excellent in 10 starts for Triple-A Toledo. Even an extended look at a non-prospect like Spencer Turnbull strikes me as more productive than the current rotation plan; there’s little flip potential in Moore, Ross and Zimmermann.

You don’t find Corey Klubers or Dallas Keuchels without taking chances on lesser prospects and non-prospects. Being able to get an extended look at these kinds of players is one of the advantages a rebuilding team has over contenders.

Bench and Prospects

The general hope is that the pitching will largely take care of itself. There’s a lot of truth to this; if two of the five pitching prospects named in the last section are good major leaguers, the Tigers are a long way towards becoming contenders again. The chances of building an offense from the minor leagues, on the other hand, look quite low, even if, for the sake of argument, we accept that Christin Stewart meets Steamer’s significantly higher expectations. Daz Cameron has very high variance in the projections, enough to make him a far better prospect than one would initially think from his fairly ugly 2019 projection, but after that, the quality drops off tremendously. Now, a projection system doesn’t really have much to say — yet — about players with limited professional experience like Kody Clemens or Parker Meadows, but every team has several prospects they can say that about. Detroit needs some real wins from the position players or when the pitching is playoff-ready, they’ll likely have to write some big checks to assemble a lineup to match.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Miami Marlins.

Batters

The lineup projections didn’t come out as poorly as I expected, though that may just mean I’m a particularly pessimistic individual. J.T. Realmuto is for real, of course, but that pretty little 3.6 WAR in the graphic may well be replaced with a WAR figure starting with a zero by the time the season actually starts. The effort to trade Realmuto has been a fascinating process, now going on for the better part of a year, with the team making noise that it would take a phenomenal offer for them to part with the catcher. Now, it could be interpreted as posturing, given that the team reportedly asked for the stars for the members of their Giancarlo Stanton/Christian Yelich/Marcell Ozuna outfield and settled for a moon pie. But I’m coming around to the idea that if Realmuto actually could be acquired for an ordinary package, he’d already be gone at this point. With the large-market teams continuing to display a real tendency to avoid spending, there may be a less willingness to part with a large pile of top prospects, those being needed to continue this cheap frugal strategy.

ZiPS isn’t yet impressed with Austin Dean, but outside of his modest projection, the only gaping wound — I’m still more optimistic than ZiPS on Brinson, though my cheerful good nature is dissipating — is at first base, where ZiPS projects the Marlins to have a worse first base situation than the Orioles do. Generally speaking, you’d like your first baseman to be above the Chris Davis Line. O’Brien did have a decent cameo appearance with the big league club, but he has a rather pedestrian minor league record and little defensive value. There’s one caveat though: O’Brien really did show far more patience than he ever had before in his brief stint in Miami, which is at least a good sign. He’s always had power and if his approach at the plate continues to be more scientific than his previous method of smashing lab equipment with a meteor hammer while blindfolded, perhaps he can make the computer look foolish.

There’s very little regression projected from Brian Anderson, which is also a positive note. Well, it’s positive if he does it; Anderson is one of the bigger disagreements ZiPS has with Steamer. If he can, it’ll improve the package the Marlins get in a trade when they’re required to pay Anderson something commensurate with his contributions!

One of the strangest rumors so far this offseason was the late buzz that the Marlins were interested in Nick Markakis. Markakis likely would have been a short-term upgrade over Dean, but it’s hard to see what the point would have been. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that fans will come out to see an additional win or two from a bad team, this is the Marlins we’re talking about. After so much ill will richly earned by the organization, they may be at the point where it takes something of a miracle to grow the fanbase; this isn’t a matter of winning 65 game instead of 64. Markakis has been safely returned to Atlanta, a destination that makes far more sense for him; the Marlins have safely returned to their paltry outfield projection.

Pitchers

The biggest positive here is Pablo Lopez, one of four players picked up from the Mariners in the David Phelps trade back in 2017. ZiPS doesn’t project a Luis Severino-esque breakout season for Lopez, but it does have him as a contributing, if fairly ordinary, starting pitcher. Even more, ZiPS has Lopez as the team’s best starting pitcher, and does so with an unusual level of certainty for a minor league pitcher of the non-elite variety.

Lopez is far from guaranteed a rotation spot in spring training, which strikes me as a mistake. If the team is actually serious about a full-on rebuild, rather than simply lurching from fire sale to fire sale to bide time between new ballparks, it’s important to see as much of pitchers like Lopez, Sandy Alcantara, Zac Gallen, and Caleb Smith as possible.

There’s unlikely to be much of a market for Wei-Yin Chen or Dan Straily no matter how long you “showcase” them. There are only so many roster spots and it will be harder to give pitchers like Lopez an extended audition with some of the pressure from below (Nick Neidert, Edward Cabrera, Jorge Guzman, etc.). If the Marlins want to be eternally “thrifty,” then they need to run the roster in such a way where they can find the inexpensive players who will actually make that strategy possible.

Bench and Prospects

It’s galling, but ZiPS isn’t terribly hopeful about the chances of the team getting any core players from the Stanton/Yelich/Ozuna dealing. My colleagues Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen are more optimistic, and Marlins fans have to be pulling for them to make the computer look foolish. What it comes down to is that ZiPS wants to see, at some point, the raw power actually become game power for Isan Diaz, and in the case of Monte Harrison, for him to not strike out 200 times in Double-A. Brinson’s struggles in the majors have been well-documented, and you don’t want me to tell you what projection percentile Magneuris Sierra has to meet in order to match the dizzying heights of Tom Goodwin.

Overall, the minor league system is still in the below-average range, but it’s certainly improved from the desolate days of recent yore, when a mannequin dressed up as Nolan Ryan might have made the team’s top 20 list.

If I apply human feelings to ZiPS, I think it would like to see Miguel Rojas get a chance at being a stopgap shortstop for someone. It would have to happen fairly quickly, as he’ll turn 30 next month, but with 2.4 WAR in 834 PA over the last two seasons, a projection in the same time zone as two wins for 2019, and the ability to play multiple positions well, he could be a solid fill-in for someone in an emergency. I mean, a major league team* actually voluntarily played Alcides Escobar in 2018.

*Legally, the 2018 Royals were part of major league baseball.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

Because of who they are, and because of their extensive resources, the Dodgers have long been linked to Bryce Harper. When Harper’s market didn’t develop quite as expected, the Dodgers seemed a more likely fit. When they cleared some money by means of a large December trade with the Reds, the Dodgers seemed all the more likely a fit. Harper’s market at the moment isn’t entirely clear. We know the Phillies are in there. We don’t know who else is in there, if anyone. The Los Angeles connection has been increasingly easy to draw.

But now, it would seem the Dodgers have officially gone in another direction. Harper was maybe baseball’s best player in 2015, and while he’s been good since then, that season set the expectations awfully high. In a sense, Harper’s been a minor disappointment. Much of the same could be said of A.J. Pollock, who broke out to become a top-ten player in 2015. He hasn’t been quite the same player since. But he is now the newest player on the Dodgers. He’s getting, technically, a $60-million guarantee, spread over five years.

Pollock doesn’t completely close the door on Harper, in theory. The Dodgers could make it work if they wanted. We know they’re sufficiently creative. Yet it looks like the Dodgers are now focused on trying to add J.T. Realmuto. I wouldn’t say their Harper odds have improved. It’s Pollock who’s the man of the hour.

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Edgar Martinez sits at the center of my first really clear baseball memory. I have others, hazier ones, with moments that snap into more specific relief. I remember walking up the ramps of the Kingdome. I remember the brief moment of chill you’d experience when you entered its concrete chasm, separated suddenly from Seattle’s July warmth. I remember baseball guys doing baseball things, but which guys and what things are lost. Liking baseball, loving it, has persisted, but I don’t remember specific home runs any more than particular days of kindergarten, even though I still know how to read.

I have a hard time sussing out what of the rest of Game 5 of the 1995 ALDS is real memory and what is the result of having rewatched it, over and over and over, when I was in need of a good thing to hold on to. I do not feel confident that my impressions of Randy Johnson in relief, entering as he did to “Welcome to the Jungle,” are borne of the moment; nine-year-old me would not know to smirk at how much of his warmup was broadcast, would not have thought the hairstyles of those in the crowd funny. That’s what hair looked like in 1995.

But The Double is there. The Double I know. The Double I remember back through the years and into the corners of my living room. I recall the moment before the pitch was delivered. I remember my step-mom nervously fidgeting with the stakes of the moment and the gnawing concern about how long the game might go, how close to bedtime it would stretch. I remember yipping for joy, in that high-pitched way that kids have, annoying but pure. I remember, even if I didn’t yet quite have the vocabulary to talk about obsession and yearning, thinking, “Oh, I have to do this again.” I remember believing that Edgar Martinez was great. (I do not recall a single pitch of the Mariners loss to the Indians in the ALCS. Sometimes our memories spare us.)

I think much of baseball’s fastidious statistical chronicling is attributable to a native curiosity, a desire to be able to answer how this thing over here relates to that thing over there, even when the this and that are separated by generations. But I think a not-small part of our motivation to catalogue lies in an anxiety over the state of our own memories, whether we’re still sharp. We don’t just seek to make sure the deserving are immortalized; we seek to trust our own mortal lives, to know that we know things as they were. That we are reliable narrators. That the moments around which I built my fandom and my professional life, the root of this thing I sometimes recall more carefully than the details of my own biography, is as I thought it to be. That something so foundational need not be met with the same disquieting sensation I experience when I can recall what the third reliever on the Reds’ depth chart looks like, but for a moment, can’t muster up his name.

Edgar Martinez was a Hall of Famer, only for a long time he wasn’t one. And you start to wonder in those moments, despite knowing so many who agree with you, whether we haven’t all gotten it wrong, whether we aren’t a little less smart than we thought. Whether he was great.

And so I think it helps us to feel complete when we are affirmed in this way. We feel our memories and lives rich with detail, our mental pictures not only accurately rendered but placed in their proper context. Perhaps it takes me a beat longer than it used to to recall a player’s name from 1995, but this thing I know. I used to, as a very young person, think that Dan Wilson was a Hall of Famer. I was tiny and dumb and enamored with catchers, and there he was, our catcher and so the best catcher. But he was not the best. To Cooperstown he could only credibly go as a visitor, a witness to his friends’ greatness. I didn’t know what it meant to be great in any sort of a rigorous way back then; good childhoods aren’t often marked by an excess of rigor. I didn’t know. Except maybe on occasion I did.

After all, Edgar Martinez is a Hall of Famer, just like I remember him.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

Jerry Dipoto’s may be a one-man Hot Stove League, but at least based on the roster as of now — everybody could be traded by March — Seattle seems to still be in something of a no man’s land when it comes to rebuild. The Mariners aren’t actually bad, but it’s hard to envision them being that relevant in the AL West. There are a lot of older players here, but not many who really have all that much flip-potential. Sure, you can play some combination of Ryon Healy and Jay Bruce at first, or shift Edwin Encarnacion to first and make Bruce the full-time DH, or play Tim Beckham more than J.P. Crawford, but to what end?

ZiPS is still rooting for a Kyle Seager comeback, but I’m a little less sanguine at this point. On the plus side, it thinks Mitch Haniger is for real and sees at least some value in Dan Vogelbach, even if the Mariners don’t seem to. And yes, I know Ichiro is pretty much just coming back for the M’s and A’s games in Japan, but ZiPS doesn’t know those circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »

Everything here is always handled on a case-by-case basis, but there are certain free-agent contracts that get signed that just don’t rise to the threshold where we feel like it’s worthy of a post. Martin Perez recently signed one of those contracts with the Twins. Wilmer Flores recently signed one of those contracts with the Diamondbacks. Jordy Mercer signed one of those contracts with the Tigers. Matt Adams signed one of those contracts with the Nationals. Editorially, some moves have it, and some moves don’t. You sort of know them when you see them.

Interestingly enough, Nick Markakis has now signed one of those contracts with the Braves. Or, you’d think so, based on the terms — Markakis will make $4 million in 2019, and then there’s a $6-million club option for 2020, with a $2-million buyout. This is in that money range where we frequently ignore the transaction. But Markakis is again going to be a regular player. And he’s also coming off a year in which he made the All-Star Game for the first time in his 13-season career. It’s almost impossible to suggest the Braves aren’t getting a team-friendly deal. Markakis was evidently willing to take a discount. This just isn’t the impact move Braves fans have been looking for. It’s re-signing a 35-year-old Nick Markakis.

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Last year’s Reds won 67 games. They won just four more games than the Marlins, and they won just five more games than the White Sox. They won 29 fewer games than the division-rival Brewers, and they won 28 fewer games than the division-rival Cubs. The previous year, the Reds had won 68 games. The year before that, they’d won 68. The year before that, they’d won 64. There’s been a running joke that the Effectively Wild podcast never talks about the Reds. That’s not actually true, but they’ve rarely been brought up on purpose.

And now, as you know, the Reds are making noise. They’re not signing Bryce Harper, and they’re not signing Manny Machado, but they did acquire Yasiel Puig, and they did acquire Alex Wood. They traded for Tanner Roark, and, on Monday, they traded for Sonny Gray. Gray is the one player under contract beyond just 2019. The Reds haven’t given the farm away or anything like that, but they have depleted their own longer-term resources. Clearly, the Reds have grown tired of being forgettable.

And that might well be the biggest behavioral driver. As an organization, they might’ve simply decided they wanted to be more competitive. It’s what so many people have wanted to see from more teams. As a fan, you want to go into a year with higher expectations. But there could also be a particular opportunity here. It’s worth examining the context in which the Reds are going to play.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Baltimore Orioles.

Batters

Well, at least expectations have been tempered quite a bit. After all, this is a team that finished last in the American League in runs scored with Manny Machado for half a season, and even if Jonathan Schoop was disappointing and Adam Jones is in steep decline, they at least combined for an OPS above .700, which is … something. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2016, the Reds’ rotation ranked last in the majors in WAR. The next year, they improved, sliding all the way up to 29th. This past season, they wound up in 26th, and over the combined three-year sample, we find the Reds in 30th place out of 30 teams, nearly a full six WAR behind the next-worst White Sox. It hasn’t been for lack of talent; it’s been for lack of execution, for lack of development. The Reds, at some point, decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. Earlier in this offseason, the rotation added Alex Wood. Earlier in this offseason, the rotation added Tanner Roark. And now we have a holiday three-team exchange, bringing just another starting arm to Cincinnati.

Reds

• GET:
  • Sonny Gray
  • Reiver Sanmartin
• LOSE:
  • Shed Long
  • Supplemental draft pick (No. 36)

Yankees

• GET:
  • Josh Stowers
  • Supplemental draft pick (No. 36)
• LOSE:
  • Sonny Gray
  • Reiver Sanmartin

Mariners

• GET:
  • Shed Long
• LOSE:
  • Josh Stowers

Wood is going into his contract season. The same is true of Roark. The same is also true of outfield acquisition Yasiel Puig. The same is true of Matt Kemp. The same was true of Gray, but as a part of this trade, Gray and the Reds have agreed on a three-year extension, beginning in 2020 and worth $30.5 million. There’s a $12-million club option for 2023, and there are various salary escalators involved. The Reds are paying a high price here, but at least they’re doing it for a long-term player. And from the Yankees’ perspective, they knew it was going to get here eventually. Playing in New York, Gray just couldn’t succeed. Now it’s the Reds’ turn to work with the same puzzle pieces.

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While the baseball world has waited for the Yankees to become involved in the Manny Machado sweepstakes, they re-signed CC Sabathia. They traded for James Paxton. They re-signed J.A. Happ. They signed Troy Tulowitzki. They re-signed Zach Britton. They signed DJ LeMahieu. And now, on Thursday, they’ve signed Brooklyn native Adam Ottavino. You can say that Machado would still be a fit — indeed, Machado would still be a fit — but you can’t accuse the club of inaction. Brian Cashman and his staff have been busy.

Ottavino is signing for three years, with a $27-million guarantee. While so far we’ve seen just two contracts of three or more years given to position players, this is the fourth of the offseason for a reliever, with Ottavino joining Britton, Joe Kelly, and Jeurys Familia. At 33 years old, Ottavino counts as the elder statesman of the group. Teams now tend to be disinclined to give such multi-year guarantees to players entering their mid-30s. But the thing about Ottavino is that he’s great.

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