For the most part, projection systems fall in line with public perceptions of players. Yordan Alvarez is going to be very good next season, but Raimel Tapia won’t be. Shohei Ohtani is the eighth wonder of the world, and so on. But once in a while, they produce a head-scratcher that becomes the subject of debate. This leads to a lot of takes, some of them good but many of them bad. The worst are variations of “Projection X thinks poorly of Player Y, whom I like, and therefore it must be illegitimate.” They’re sometimes funny to read, though they’re mostly annoying because they stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what projection systems are trying to achieve.

Let’s cut to the chase. The reason I’m writing about this is because Steamer projects Alek Manoah, who placed third in Cy Young voting and served as the Blue Jays’ ace, to put up a 4.09 ERA next season. That seems outlandish, even with the knowledge that projection systems are conservative by design. Manoah isn’t just a one-season wonder. His excellence extends back to his rookie campaign in 2021, and his sophomore effort seemed like a natural progression. The narrative is there: A great starter blossoms into a phenomenal one. Asserting that Manoah will go from an ERA in the low 2.00s to one in the low 4.00s is more or less a rebuke of it.

Of course, Steamer doesn’t think Manoah will land precisely on a 4.09 ERA – more on that later – but considering it’s the expected middle outcome, the shock is understandable. And while I’m not here to endorse it, I do want to point out that it’s not an indication the system is broken, or holds a grudge against your favorite player. You have your reasons, and so does Steamer. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance over collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.

Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a hard slider learned from teammate Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 800 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Batters

There’s a lot not to like about this organization, much of which concerns ownership and its commitment to investing in the Pirates’ on-field product. Contrary to the opinions of a surprising number of people, I don’t think the Frank Coonelly/Neal Huntington era was a failure, at least in terms of their contributions. In sharp contrast to the prior efforts of Dave Littlefield or Cam Bonifay, Coonelly and Huntington built up the Pirates in the down years and there was even a brief moment when the team was a real contender. Problem is, when it was time to push the team over the top, to spend all those savings from the leanest of the slash-and-rebuild years on a contender, the investment in the roster never actually came. It turns out that in the eyes of ownership, an even better use of the savings was to not spend it at all and simply keep it. Those Pirates were left to die as ownership served up the Requiem aeternam.

But looking at the players the Pirates have currently, there are some things to like. Now, not a lot of things to like, but there are players scattered throughout the roster who are very good at major league baseball, and the guys who aren’t are at least interesting rather than 32-year-old journeymen (with a couple exceptions that I’ll get into). Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t too long ago that it was a delightful novelty when position players pitched. When Casper Wells came in from the outfield to chuck batting practice fastballs at the plate, it signified that the game had gone into a zone of silliness. Either the game was such a blowout there was nothing to be gained by taking it seriously, or it had gone on so long that both teams had run out of pitchers. In the latter case, that usually happened well after midnight, with all the slap-happy antics exhausted people tend to get up to.

But seeing a position player on the mound is no longer cause for giddiness and mirth. It’s almost commonplace; so much so that MLB had to institute a rule prohibiting position players from pitching in games where the score is closer than seven runs. Like a Foster the People song, the position player pitching got overexposed and lost its luster. What was once a reason to turn a game on is now a signal that you might as well turn it off.

Why are so many position players pitching nowadays? Well, there’s the serious answer, which has to do with bullpen construction and the proliferation of the max-effort relief pitcher. And then there’s the truth, which is that in baseball, unlike curling, it’s considered indecorous to concede a game you’re going to lose. That’s what the position player pitching usually means now: The game is out of reach, so let’s just get it over with, ideally with as little expenditure of time and effort as is practicable. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros capped off a dominant postseason run with a World Series title that showed off a well-rounded and star-studded organization. They won with great starting pitching, great relief pitching, powerful hitting, and excellent defense. This wasn’t a case of a few guys getting hot and carrying a moribund offense, or a heroic member of the rotation piling up innings that no one counted on. The team stacked with good players up and down the roster simply deployed them as expected, and got a parade for its trouble.

It’s funny, in that context, to note that one of the best offenses in baseball had a clear hole at first base. Yuli Gurriel, the longtime incumbent at the position, had an abysmal year, compiling a .242/.288/.360 batting line that represented his second-worst performance in the majors (and his second poor showing in three years). The Astros scored runs at a gaudy clip despite his decline, but they didn’t bury their heads in the sand about Gurriel; they traded for Trey Mancini at the deadline to shore up their first-base options.

Bad news: Mancini wasn’t very good either. He and Gurriel combined to rack up -1.4 WAR with Houston. Yeesh. By the time the playoffs rolled around, the Astros were using unheralded rookie David Hensley as a right-handed DH in lieu of Mancini. It worked well enough to win, but it was a strange look for a team already punting on offense at catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the first team to go this year is the Boston Red Sox.

Batters

The Red Sox finished fourth in the American League in runs scored in 2022, but there’s no denying that removing Xander Bogaerts and J.D. Martinez from the roster is a giant hit for the team to take. They may replace the missing value (if not all of it), but it’s a roster with a lot of work to do to be an elite unit. The projections see the offense as being driven mostly by Rafael Devers and Trevor Story, with Story getting quite the bullish projection. Having Triston Casas on the team would be helpful on average, and he has far more upside than either Eric Hosmer or Bobby Dalbec, but as of right now, the team will unfortunately be able to find quite a lot of playing time for the latter two, at least as the roster currently stands. Read the rest of this entry »

No National League team benefited more from the universal DH this year than the Philadelphia Phillies. The torn UCL Bryce Harper suffered in April would’ve been a season-ending injury for any Phillies outfielder from 1883 to 2019, but Harper was able to get a platelet-rich plasma injection, grit his teeth, and DH the rest of the way. You’re probably familiar with what ensued: Philadelphia’s first playoff berth in 11 years, numerous loud home runs and memorable GIFs, “swing of his life,” and so on and so forth.

Unfortunately for Harper, eventually someone had to open up his throwing arm and see precisely what had gone wrong in there. Last week, Dr. Neal ElAttrache — there’s a name you never want to see in a news story about your team’s best player — broke out his scalpel and went spelunking.

For months, Harper and the Phillies settled into a position of anxious uncertainty; perhaps the damage to his elbow wouldn’t be so bad. An Opening Day start in right field was probably too much to ask for, but maybe he could rehab in the offseason and get back to throwing by mid-spring. This is a situation that ought to be familiar to anyone who’s sat in their mechanic’s waiting room and hoped that the phrase “blown head gasket” would not be part of the day’s conversation.

Unfortunately, Dr. ElAttrache was forced to perform another dreaded proper noun: Tommy John surgery. In short, you can take that depth chart with Harper in right field and throw it right in the trash. Now, the party line is that Harper will return to the lineup as a DH around the All-Star break, and maybe start playing the outfield again by the end of the 2023 regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Financial implications aside, how the Oakland Athletics fared in the August 1 trade-deadline deal that sent Frankie Montas and Lou Trivino to the New York Yankees in exchange for Cooper Bowman, Luis Medina, JP Sears, and Ken Waldichuk won’t be known for at least a few more years. Two of the players who headed west made their big-league debuts last summer, while the others finished their respective seasons in Double-A and High-A. The extent to which the foursome goes on to thrive — or flop — can’t be predicted with any degree of certainty.

David Forst is understandably bullish on the quartet. Three-plus months after he pulled the trigger on the trade, I asked Oakland’s GM what he found appealing about each acquisition.

“We think Waldichuk has a chance to be a top-of-the rotation arm, and we certainly saw glimpses of that in the big leagues,” Forst said of the 24-year-old left-hander, who is No. 69 our Top 100 Prospects list. “With him, it’s the physicality, the fastball command, and the swing-and-miss he gets with three different pitches. I think Ken has a huge upside.

“Upside is the whole conversation with Medina,” continued Forst. “Huge arm, huge fastball. Whether he remains a starter or not, we’ll see. He’s pitching really well in the Dominican [Winter League] right now. I know that he wants to remain as a starter, but he has to improve his command.” Read the rest of this entry »

Before we get to the 2023 ZiPS projections, there’s still some unfinished work from 2022 to do. Looking at which projections went the most wayward is definitely an exercise that makes me soul cringe a bit, but in any model, being wrong is an important component of eventually being right. Calibration is a long-term project, and while chasing greater accuracy in mean projections isn’t likely to result in any huge bounty — there’s a reason projection systems are so tightly clustered — there’s still improvement to be had in things like calibrating uncertainty and long-term data.

Let’s start with how teams performed versus their projections:

Teams have gotten a bit more polarized in how they’re run in-season. Looking at the in-season ZiPS projections, roster strength has varied much more in recent years than when I started doing this. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the mean absolute error — for an exercise like this, I want to use the simplest tool that gets the point across — creep up over time. That is the case here, as the MAE of 8.3 wins is above the ZiPS historical average of 7.5 (not including 2020). ZiPS underperformed its usual matchup vs. Vegas, only going 17-13 in over/unders as of the date of release (April 6); historically, ZiPS has averaged 19-11. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were waiting for a time when the discussion around the BBWAA’s annual Hall of Fame voting didn’t center around Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling, then I have good news: After 10 years of increasingly polarized debate, they all fell short of the 75% needed for election and have run out of eligibility on the ballot. They’re now candidates on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot — a problem for another day — but they’re not part of the 28-man slate unveiled by the Hall on Monday. That’s not to say that this ballot is devoid of controversial figures, or that debates about character are a thing of the past, but we can finally move beyond the cast that hit the 2013 ballot and spent 10 years monopolizing discussions and draining some of the fun out of the whole process.

The 2023 ballot doesn’t come without controversy, particularly in relation to the top newcomer, Carlos Beltrán. A nine-time All-Star and three-time Gold Glove winner who racked up 2,745 hits, 435 homers, and 312 steals, he’s got numbers to appease traditionalists, and likewise, he checks the advanced stat boxes by ranking eighth in WAR and ninth in JAWS among center fielders, thanks in no small part to the extra value he provided on the bases and in the field. For all of that, Beltrán is the player most closely identified with the Astros’ illegal sign stealing scandal, less because his own performance benefited (his 2017 season was below replacement level) than because The Athletic’s reporting and commissioner Rob Manfred’s subsequent report placed him at the center of the efforts to decode opposing catchers’ signs using the team’s video replay system.

Whether that is an offense grave enough to cost Beltrán a chance at Cooperstown is a matter for debate; his involvement in the matter already cost him his job as the Mets manager before he oversaw a single game. He returned to baseball this past year as a broadcaster for the YES Network, though no team has considered him for an in-uniform job since he left the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »