The pairing was worth the wait: two rookies, both denied well-earned call-ups last year due to service-time shenanigans, not only clubbed their way into the 2019 Home Run Derby at Cleveland’s Progressive Field, but all the way to the finals. In the end, the Mets’ Peter Alonso bested the Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who had done nothing less than steal the show by setting Derby records in every round. Alonso’s 23rd home run of the final round, which landed with around 18 seconds left in regulation time, beat Guerrero’s freshly-set record without his even needing to tap into his bonus time.

Between a more aerodynamic ball that is being launched with record frequency, and a decision on the part of officials not to enforce the rule requiring the pitcher to wait until the previous ball had landed (a source of controversy amid Bryce Harper’s 2018 win), Derby records were demolished left and right. And while it lacked the likes of Harper, Mike Trout, Manny Machado, Aaron Judge, and so on, youngest Derby field ever (average age 25.26 years) threw the spotlight on some of the sport’s brightest young talents. Every contestant except one (Carlos Santana) was 27 or younger. Even with a decided lack of star power — just five of the top 20 players in total home runs participated, none of them previous winners — the head-to-head, single-elimination bracket format, with timed four-minute rounds and 30 seconds of bonus time added for hitting two 440-foot homers (as measured by Statcast), kept things entertaining, though the event did wind up running long.

While the 24-year-old Alonso, who has already homered 30 times for the Mets this year, emerged victorious thanks to a trio of walk-off wins, the 20-year-old Guerrero, the youngest participant in Derby history, and the first offspring of a previous winner to participate (dad Vlad won in 2007) was the star of the night. Due in part to his delayed call-up and some early difficulty adjusting to the majors, the game’s consensus top prospect has hit just eight regular season homers (which might be the fewest of a Derby participant — I’m not sure), but on Monday night he showed poise well beyond his years, particularly during the extended exposure he received in an epic semifinal battle with Joc Pederson. The pair not only finished regulation time tied at 29, which matched the single-round record that Guerrero had just set in the quarterfinals, but they remained tied through a one-minute tiebreaker round and the first three-swing “Swing-Off” in Derby history. More on that momentarily.

Read the rest of this entry »

The past year has been a whirlwind for Liam Hendriks. A little over a year ago, he was designated for assignment by the Oakland Athletics. At that point in the 2018 season, he was sporting a 7.36 ERA with an ugly 6.43 FIP while also missing more than a month with a groin strain. No one claimed him on waivers and he was sent outright to Triple-A. He worked hard to regain his confidence while also honing his repertoire. He was recalled in September and pitched well enough as an opener to get the start in the Wild Card game against the Yankees. However, that game didn’t go to plan after an Aaron Judge two-run homer got the home team on the board early.

Even after all those setbacks, Hendriks has flourished as a critical piece in the A’s bullpen this year. He started the year in a familiar role, making a couple of opener starts and coming out of the pen as a middle reliever. But as the back-end of the Oakland bullpen began to struggle, Hendriks found his way into higher leverage situations. The climax of his year-long turnaround came when he was named to the American League All-Star team as a replacement for Charlie Morton.

Here’s how Hendriks stacks up against his fellow All-Star relievers and a few other top candidates.

Any of the other candidates listed above could have been chosen and no one would have batted an eye (ok, maybe not Ian Kennedy). But Hendriks leads the AL in WAR as well as park- and league-adjusted ERA. He’s been terrific, and the adjustments he’s made since last September are driving his newfound success. Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s Home Run Derby arrives at a time of unprecedented long ball saturation, no matter how one chooses to measure its dimensions. Teams are hitting 1.37 home runs per game, a 9.2% increase over 2017, the year of MLB’s previous high rate. Homers make up 3.6% of all plate appearances and 5.3% of all batted ball events, gains of 8.7% and 10.5% relative to 2017. You can more or less double those increases when comparing this year to last year, during which the frequency (1.15 per game) was merely the fifth-highest of all time, a hair behind 2016 (1.16). It’s getting kind of ridiculous, particularly now that we understand that recent changes to the ball’s materials and manufacturing process have resulted in a more aerodynamic ball that carries further.

Given that I’m the old crankypants who last week declared that we’ve reached the point of too many homers, you might find it odd that I’m the one touting the Derby, but I see no contradiction. I’m firm in my belief that we can indulge in a bake-off without mandating that everybody eat a whole pie — rather, 1.37 whole pies — per day.

Besides, while it took MLB more than 30 years — there was a derby television show in 1960, and the event has been part of the All-Star festivities since 1985 — to find a Derby format that works, the head-to-head single-elimination bracket setup with timed, four-minute rounds and 30 seconds of bonus time added for hitting two 440-foot homers, as measured by Statcast, really does make for an entertaining event. The fireworks produced by the likes of Giancarlo Stanton at Petco Park in 2016, or Aaron Judge at Marlins Park in 2017, or Bryce Harper at Nationals Park last year were a gas to watch, creating the kind of whizz-bang spectacle that raises the profile of recognizable stars and helps to grow the game. That said, the television ratings for last year’s event set a 20-year-low, so what do I know?

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the effects of the top-heavy American League and the middle-heavy National League was the NL posting a 158-142 record in interleague play last season. While the AL took the All-Star Game in extra innings and the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, the NL won more regular season games. We don’t yet know how this year’s All-Star Game or World Series will play out, but the NL has again taken a healthy lead when it comes to interleague play with an 83-65 record through games on July 1. Last year, the AL appeared to have the edge on paper when it came to the All-Star Game rosters, but the teams seem evenly matched this season.

The graph below shows all position players named to the initial All-Star Game rosters through play on July 6.

The National League has three of the top five spots with Mike Trout and Alex Bregman representing the AL. After Trout, the NL is represented by 12 of the next 17 players. The American League does have some pretty big names with better track records near the bottom of the graph like Mookie Betts, Whit Merrifield, Francisco Lindor, and J.D. Martinez, those players have yet to put everything together this season. The NL has a roughly seven-win advantage at 62.9 to 55.9, which amounts to roughly a third of a win per player. As Devan Fink noted last week, the All-Star starters by WAR weren’t too far off from the actual results, and Xander Bogaerts‘ late inclusion means the top nine players by first-half WAR made the team. Of the top-30 position players by WAR, only Marcus Semien, Max Kepler, Rafael Devers, Yoan Moncada, and Eduardo Escobar failed to make the rosters.

Looking solely at half a season’s worth of games isn’t necessarily the best indicator of talent. One could argue that the best measure of how good a player is right now might be that player’s projections over the course of the rest of the season. Here are those projections in graph form.

That Mike Trout is something else. His 4.2 projection for the second half of the season is far and away ahead of everyone else. His half-season projection would have placed him among the top 30 preseason projections. Put another way, if Mike Trout only played in every other game, he would still be All-Star worthy. We see Betts and Lindor’s talent level rise near the top of the graph above, and the NL can’t quite recover. Before roster changes, the NL had the advantage, but taking away Anthony Rendon from the NL and replacing Hunter Pence in the AL shifted the projections toward the AL with a 33.9 to 32.2 WAR advantage. Even with Trout, the AL still trails the NL in projected WAR, 34.9 to 33.7.

This how the position player side of the rosters break down.

On the pitching side, the AL is bringing two more relievers than the NL, so in total WAR, the NL has a built-in advantage given the innings starters can pile up, though removing Max Scherzer leaves a pretty big dent in the NL squad’s top of the rotation.

The NL tops the AL 26.9 to 24.9, with the additional starters tipping things to the senior circuit. Given ERA’s relative prominence, we might expect a few more missing players from our WAR leaderboards in the midsummer classic, though we still have a pretty good representation based on WAR. Lance Lynn, the AL’s WAR leader, did not make the squad. The only other pitcher in the top 12 not to make the roster at some point in this process was Stephen Strasburg. In the top 20, Frankie Montas, who is suspended, didn’t make the team for obvious reasons, while Matthew Boyd, Chris Sale, Zack Wheeler, and German Marquez also failed to make the team. Several players in the bottom half of the graph above were their respective team’s lone representative, indicating that some of the choices are more roster filler than picking the most deserving players.

As for the projections, even without Scherzer, the NL still has the top projected pitcher in Jacob deGrom.

Without Scherzer, a sizable NL advantage shrinks down to less than a win. All of the relievers near the bottom along with Baltimore’s John Means and Miami’s Sandy Alcantara help create the NL’s small advantage due to fewer relievers. In terms of projections, Chris Sale is the big name missing. In comparing the pitching staffs, the leagues look like this:

When we put it all together, the NL has the advantage in performance so far this season, but the projections are nearly identical.

Before the injury replacements, the NL’s advantage was sizable. Losing the two Nationals’ stars in Rendon and Scherzer was a pretty big blow and essentially leveled the playing field in terms of talent. At the end of the year, the NL squad is likely to outproduce their AL foes. As for how much this advantage will actually matter in the All-Star Game, it probably won’t. It is a one-game exhibition and the game isn’t played repeatedly over the course of a season. With similar projections, the leagues looked pretty balanced. The American League has won the last six All-Star Games, but that history isn’t likely to matter for this year’s contest.

Dakota Hudson is somewhat of a square peg in a round hole. At a time where four-seamers at the belt are de rigueur, the 24-year-old St. Louis Cardinals right-hander likes to live near the knees. Since debuting last season, Hudson has thrown his signature sinker a full 50% of the time. And he’s done so successfully. Hudson has a 3.31 ERA over 119-and-two-thirds career innings.

He hasn’t always relied on the worm-killer responsible for his MLB-best (among qualified pitchers) 60.3% ground-ball rate. As a young pitcher at Mississippi State University, Hudson was primarily four-seamers from straight over the top, and a breaking ball he couldn’t consistently command. Then came his metamorphosis.

“Butch Thompson was my pitching coach at the time,” explained Hudson. “I was 10 or 11 appearances into my sophomore year, and had just gotten through maybe two innings. He came up to me and said, ‘Hey, are you willing to make a change?’Of course I was. So I dropped down.”

The original plan was to drop all the way down to sidearm, but Hudson couldn’t comfortably get that low. He ultimately ended up closer to three-quarters, with a sinker and a cutter/slider becoming his weapons of choice.

The process of finding the most-optimal arm slot was achieved sans a catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

How would you adjust your pre-draft evaluation of a high school pitcher if you knew he couldn’t pass a physical? That is what teams needed to decide about White Sox righty Dylan Cease, who after a surgery, a year of rehab, and four years of development, will make his first big league start today.

Some version of this scenario occurs almost annually: High school pitcher throws hard during his showcase summer, becomes very famous, comes out the following spring throwing even harder, then breaks. In Cease’s case, he was 93-96 and touching 98 during showcases, then touching 100 early the following spring before he was shut down with an elbow injury that would, as teams knew ahead of the draft, eventually require surgery.

For some teams, the injury shut the door on Cease as an option entirely. He was a Vanderbilt commit whose long arm action some teams had already feared increased his risk of injury, or at least might impede his ability to develop command and a changeup, and funnel him toward a bullpen role.

But Cease also had among the 2014 draft’s best velocity and breaking ball combination. The Cubs properly assessed his signability, and after cutting an underslot deal with Kyle Schwarber for $1.5 million at pick No. 4, they suddenly had a bunch of extra bonus pool money to play with. They ended up signing three high school pitchers to overslot bonuses — Cease, Justin Steele and Carson Sands — and cutting underslot deals of varying amounts at every other pick in the first 10 rounds.

Cease signed for $1.5 million, which was the slot value of that draft’s 38th pick and is around where high school pitchers with this kind of stuff, albeit healthy ones, typically come off the board these days. It took a fortuitous intersection of several variables: Cease’s talent, the Cubs optimistic evaluation of it and his signability, the opportunity created by the underslot deal with Schwarber, and a level of comfort in taking an injured player aided by risk diversification in the other overslot high schoolers. The high school pitching crop in 2014 was wild, and a few of those players probably contributed to the current reticence to pick a similar guy very early. Read the rest of this entry »

If the other projectionators are anything like me, the projections going awry, afoul, or askew is always something in the back of their minds. Ideally, one should make projections, let the rubber hit the road, and then worry about what actually happened in the fall post-mortems. As much as I’d like to do that, when ZiPS makes an aggressive projection in one direction or the other, especially one that departs from the consensus of the other projection systems, I can’t help but look over my shoulder. Yesterday, I looked at pitchers for whom ZiPS missed the mark. Today, I consider the other side.

Among hitters, no projection has haunted my dreams as much as Juan Soto’s. Yes, Juan Soto was a superstar in 2018. Yes, he was just 19 when he destroyed the National League. Yes, everybody loves him as a player, not just the projection systems. However, in this case, ZiPS went out on a bit of a limb with Soto. Rather than the typical curmudgeonly regressing-toward-the-mean, ZiPS saw Soto playing even better, projecting a ninth-place finish in WAR among position players. Soto hasn’t been a disappointment, and ZiPS hasn’t been totally wrong, but the modest 23-point differential between ZiPS and reality grows larger once you consider that ZiPS missed low on the level of offense around the league.

It’s interesting to see where ZiPS differed the most from the other three projection systems used here. Do note that the “Consensus OPS” will vary slightly from what you see in the following tables, as ZiPS is not included in these consensus stats. ZiPS in 2019 tended to like a lot of the mid-20s “interesting” power prospects while simultaneously liking middling young catchers less than the other systems. That’s something that hadn’t come up in previous seasons, so I’m curious to see whether it continues and what it means. The data used by ZiPS versus that used by the other systems means it isn’t always going to be an apples-to-grenades comparison.

As with the pitchers, ZiPS is very close in accuracy to the consensus projections, but slightly behind (again, as I expect it to be). For the bias-adjusted projections, the consensus has an RMSE (root-mean-square error) of 0.1072 in OPS compared to ZiPS’ .1076. If these were the end-of-year results, we’d all be very depressed, but half-year stats are quite volatile!

Everyone liked Fernando Tatis Jr. over the long haul prior to his debut, but it was an open question whether or not everything would click in 2019. Everything has clicked in 2019. It’s easy to forget that Tatis only played a little more than half of a season in Double-A in 2018, and missed significant time due to a broken thumb. That he has succeeded does not mean it was a certainty coming into the season, so I’ll live with being wrong here. In a way, Tatis’ explosion reminds me of Hanley Ramirez’s back in the day. Not that Tatis and Hanley are or were comparable players, but the magnitude of their respective rookie explosions is similar.

What will haunt me is the Gurriel projection. The consensus was wrong on Gurriel, but if you scroll up to the first chart, ZiPS was really, really wrong on Gurriel. What makes it even more maddening is that I’m still not sure why. Gurriel’s launch angle is up and he’s hitting more barrels, but he’s also exhibiting this weird combination of swinging at fewer pitches and making even less contact than in 2018. ZiPS is coming around on Gurriel, and his rest-of-season projection now stands a stunning 73 points of OPS above his preseason projection. If we used the full-on ZiPS rather than the simpler in-season model that increase would be 94 points! The computer understands the improvement better than I do apparently.

ZiPS liked Joey Gallo more than the consensus, but still undershot Gallo’s OPS (so far) by more than 100 points. I can at least get my head around Gallo’s improvement. While a .391 BABIP is unlikely to be sustainable, there’s been a real change in his approach at the plate. In 2018, Gallo swung at 32.2% of pitches outside the strike zone; that ranked him 152nd in baseball if we use 300 plate appearances as our cutoff. In a single year, he’s cut off nearly a third of that, with his 22.5% ranking 21st-best among players with 150 plate appearances. While he’s also swinging at fewer pitches in the strike zone, the dropoff isn’t to the same degree. Even if his BABIP drops precipitously from .391, it may not drop down to previous levels. Gallo had a .250 BABIP in 2017 and a .249 BABIP in 2018, but the ZiPS model for BABIP that uses hit ball data thinks he “ought to” have put up a .301 BABIP over that period. That’s the largest deviation among hitters, suggesting that there was some hidden upside in there. ZiPS only projected a .273 BABIP — the longer a player underperforms, the more likely ZiPS is to believe reality rather than the estimate — but now thinks he’s somewhere around .300 again.

Baseball’s having a low-ball moment. Using Statcast’s strike zone, the rate at which home runs are being hit on low pitches is up 62% from 2018. 409 balls below the strike zone were hit for homers last year; this year we’re already at 347! Does this have an effect on the projections? Looking at the projections as a whole, there’s a real relationship between a hitter’s low-ball hitting ability and him beating the 2019 projections. This is something to come back to in the season’s post-mortem. The number of golf ball homers being hit would make a 1970s hitting coach cringe!

Oh, J-Ram, did you anger a sorcerer? Unless I missed something, if Ramirez’s season ends up with this OPS, it will be the least accurate projection for a batter coming off a five-WAR season in ZiPS history. Now, ZiPS only goes back to the early years of the millennium, but still, that’s not a feather in ZiPS’ cap.

Naturally, coming off a drug suspension, there are eyebrows being raised at Robinson Canó’s disappointing season in New York. It’s tempting to take the bait and worm out of a bad projection, but with nearly 15 years of drug testing, ZiPS still can’t find a pattern of group over-performance or underperformance based on the timing of a drug suspension. I think the more boring story — that a 36-year-old middle infielder is declining rapidly — is the more accurate one.

Danny Jansen fits in the category of “wrong, but in a very weird way.” ZiPS was relatively negative on Jansen coming into the season, projecting a .243/.332/.385 line, a full 61 points of OPS below what the fans estimated. Coming off a .247/.342/.432 debut and a strong performance in Triple-A, people expected more. Readers north of the border let me have it (though politely, because Canada). ZiPS turned out to be wrong, but in the opposite direction: Jansen now at .196/.278/.314 for the Jays.

I’m here today to tell you about a player who has been hitting the ball tremendously hard of late. That’s nothing new — it’s a common genre of FanGraphs article. You know the deal, because I’ve written plenty of them this year already. Josh Bell is great now, Pete Alonso only hits lasers, Niko Goodrum can apparently hit, etcetera. Inevitably, these stories catch players near a performance peak. That’s just the nature of the beast; when you look for noteworthy and exceptional performances to write about, there’s very likely some luck involved, even if the underlying statistics look good.

The ideal form of this type of article finds something that’s truly different about the player, something other than mere batted ball luck. Josh Bell’s simplified stance, for example, really is different. Even so, baseball is a game with a lot of inherent luck to it, and if you single someone out for doing tremendously well, there was probably some luck involved. Today, though, we’re going to subvert the genre. Today, let’s look at a player who is, per the trope, hitting the ball harder than ever and turning fly balls into home runs at the highest rate of his career. There’s a twist, though: Wil Myers is doing all that, but he’s also having his worst season in five years. That sounds like something worth writing about.

Myers has always had power. He’s had a 30 home run season and a 28 home run season despite playing in a home park that suppresses home runs. Despite that, 2019 is seeing the highest HR/FB% of his career. (All stats are through Tuesday’s action.) His exit velocity on line drives and fly balls is in the 97th percentile of hitters with 50 air balls this year, tied with teammate Franmil Reyes. He doesn’t fare quite as well in terms of barrels per ball hit in the air, as he’s been a bit inconsistent, but he’s still in the top 20% of baseball. There are no two ways about it; Wil Myers is hitting baseballs as hard as he ever has.

So, what have the offensive rewards of Myers’ bruising new power been? He’s batting .218/.314/.399, good for a 91 wRC+. His batting average is the lowest of his career, and his OBP and slugging percentage are higher only than his disastrous 2014 Rays campaign. That batting average is especially jarring when you consider that it’s not BABIP-driven; he’s batting .316 on balls in play, higher than his career average and significantly higher than his Depth Charts projections. High BABIP and low batting average? Strikeouts have to be the culprit here, and my goodness, Myers has struck out a lot this year — 35.6%, to be exact. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I saw Dodgers lefty Clayton Kershaw in person for the first time. While he’s no longer the dominant force of nature he was at his peak — Kershaw’s fastball now sits 89-91, rather than sitting 92-94 and touching 97 as it did 2015-2017 — he’s still a very effective big league starter, on pace for a 4 WAR season, and the owner of a 3.51 xFIP across just under 100 innings pitched ahead of the All-Star break.

This is far from the first piece on this website to chronicle what makes Kershaw great as, over the last decade, he’s improved his command, and altered his pitch mix and pitching approach. What I suggest today is that part of his continued success also has to do with, simply, how he releases the baseball, and that this trait is identifiable in prospects.

It’s probably obvious to you that things beyond mere raw velocity contribute to fastball effectiveness. You can probably deduce what some of those things are through simple pattern recognition; the System Summary from this prospect list is an example of that. From having done this for a while now, there are common, visually identifiable characteristics shared by pitchers whose strikeout results outperform what we might anticipate given just their velocity, just as there are common mechanical/stuff-related attributes targeted by successful teams in the draft. (Those teams have also made mechanical and/or approach alterations to players they’ve acquired.) Spin rate, extension, vertical and horizontal approach angles, and spin direction/efficiency all play a role, too, as does command.

The more those traits serve to support vertical movement — a.k.a ‘rise’, life, carry, Z-break — the more swings and misses a fastball tends to generate. And when a fastball exhibits several of these traits, you can end up with a dominant heater despite limited velocity. Without them, I’ve been bamboozled by otherwise visually pleasing stuff. And indeed Clayton Kershaw’s fastball has some of these attributes. At 88-91, his fastball is still fine. In the mid-90s, it was utterly dominant.

The way we talk about these traits in scouting and player development is not yet entirely consistent across baseball. I was on the phone with an in-office analyst last week discussing what would eventually become this article, and we were using the same terms to describe different things, which caused us to argue for about 10 minutes before we realized we were simply miscommunicating. This video and these two articles provide a great foundation for understanding how pitches need to spin in order to create vertical movement. The version that has been most intuitive for me is the Rapsodo/TrackMan version, which describes spin direction by using a clock face from the pitcher’s perspective. The closer fastball tilt gets to 12:00, the more backspin it has. For the purposes of this article, I’m just looking at lefties, but you’ll be interested to know that some frequently-asked-about prospects like Zac Gallen (12:30 spin axis on the fastball), Astros RHP Jose Urquidy (91-95, up to 97, plus changeup and command, smart breaking ball usage, a 12:30 spin axis on the heater), and Ashton Goudeau (90-93, also has 12:30 spin axis, plus split/change) have some of the traits I’ve talked about.

It’s fair to watch a pitcher’s arm angle and assume that vertical arm slots create the kind of backspin we’re looking for, but we can better see the ball/hand relationship, including sub-optimal ones, using our high-speed camera, Slomie. If you didn’t read the Driveline and Laurila background articles, we’re looking for something close to pure backspin and seam uniformity. You’ll be unsurprised to see Clayton Kershaw exhibit both. At peak, he was averaging over 12 inches of Z-break on his fastball. He’s closer to 10 inches now, which is still above league average:

Spin rate is a factor here, too, and we have those for most of the minors. So based on information we have, here some lefty pitching prospects who I think also exhibit some of these Kershawian traits. I don’t anticipate any of them becoming as incredible as Kershaw, but they do possess mechanical characteristics that will enable them to get the most out of their stuff. Full scouting reports for most of these players can be found on THE BOARD.

MacKenzie Gore, San Diego Padres
Gore has all the components: the velocity, the spin axis, the seam uniformity, elite athleticism, some natural mechanical deception. He doesn’t spin his curveball as well as Kershaw, but his changeup is better. He’ll be in Sunday’s Futures Game.

Joey Wentz, Atlanta Braves
Wentz doesn’t have the quality breaking ball but his fastball plays well above it’s 88-91, and he has good changeup feel.

Ethan Small, Milwaukee Brewers
The Brewers 2019 first rounder is Kershaw’s mechanical doppelgänger. In 2019, he struck out 176 hitters in 107 innings for Mississippi State, most of them in the SEC, while sitting 88-92.

Joey Cantillo, San Diego Padres
Cantillo, a 2017 16th rounder out of a Hawaii high school, only sits about 88-92, but the life on his fastball and the quality of his secondary stuff has him missing lots of bats in the Midwest League. He hasn’t allowed more than one run in a start since April 26.

Tarik Skubal, Detroit Tigers
Skubal’s full report is on The Board. He ranks 14th in the minors in swinging strike rate.

Erik Miller, Philadelphia Phillies
He doesn’t get into his legs the way Kershaw does, and the velocity fluctuations Miller has experienced over the last year and a half is a bit concerning, but he has the pitch specifications I’ve outlined above and knows how to mix his stuff.

Burl Carraway, Dallas Baptist University
I anticipate Kiley will have high speed of Carraway in the coming days, as he’s been electric for Team USA recently, up to at least 97 with a knockout breaking ball.

Drew Dowd, Junipero Serra HS (CA) and Ross Dunn, Cottonwood HS (UT)
These were the two high schoolers at PG National whose fastballs I thought played up above their velocity for the reasons I’ve outlined above, though Dowd might be better off working with a four-seamer.

If the other projectionators are anything like me, the projections going awry, afoul, or askew is always something in the back of their minds. Ideally, one should make projections, let the rubber hit the road, and then worry about what actually happened in the fall post-mortems. As much as I’d like to do that, when ZiPS makes an aggressive projection in one direction or the other, especially one that departs from the consensus of the other projection systems, I can’t help but look over my shoulder.

Two of the projections keeping me up at night the most from the preseason are those of Shane Bieber and Giovanny Gallegos.

Coming into 2019, ZiPS projected Bieber to go 13-8, with a 3.71 ERA, a 3.49 FIP, and 3.8 WAR. Those numbers were a bit sweat-inducing given that 3.8 WAR was enough to rank Bieber 13th in the majors entering the season. Bieber had a 3.23 FIP in his rookie season, but posted a 4.55 ERA and appeared to lack an out pitch against left-handed batters. Players with fewer projected wins included reigning AL Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Stephen Strasburg, German Marquez, and Patrick Corbin. Thankfully, this was one projection where ZiPS had company, with the rest of the projection systems housed at FanGraphs (Steamer, THE BAT, ATC) joining in. Whether your preferred quote about friendship is “I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light,” or the considerably darker “Misery loves company,” we all went down the Bieber road together.

But ZiPS went out on the Giovanny Gallegos branch nearly alone. Gallegos was in the top 10 of pitchers ZiPS was the most optimistic about. Indeed, with a 0.57 ERA difference between ZiPS and the consensus, ZiPS was only more optimistic about three other pitchers: Brad Brach, Mychal Givens, and Juan Nicasio. ZiPS is losing those battles so far, but Gallegos has been terrific for the Cardinals, striking out 13 batters a game; he was recently moved into higher-leverage spots. Read the rest of this entry »