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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 Kansas City Royals.

Batters

The Royals have an extremely bifurcated offense, with three players projected to be solidly above league-average in Adalberto Mondesi, Salvador Perez, and Whit Merrifield, and a fairly large gulf before the next tier of KC hitters. If the Royals were really going the full rebuild route, you’d see Perez and Merrifield — entering their age-29 and -30 seasons respectively — on other teams’ lists, but the Royals seem content to go the “sorta” rebuild route.

Given how thin their talent is, it’s hard to see them having much success going this route and as such, Perez and Merrifield are likely to be either in their declines or in other organizations by the time the performance matters. Winning 72 games instead of 64 in 2019 isn’t going to jumpstart anything.

I’m sure there will be some gnashed teeth about O’Hearn’s projection, given that he hit .262/.353/.597 in the majors in 170 plate appearances in 2018. He also had a .713 OPS in 406 PA in the Pacific Coast League, which is abysmal for an offensive prospect.

Pitchers

This group won’t be as bad as some people think in 2019, and it wouldn’t take a lot of breaks for the team to achieve their pointless Quest for 75 Wins, which is a little like bragging to your drinking buddies that you can deadlift 125 pounds. Danny Duffy isn’t a lost cause and Brad Keller was good enough in 2018 that it couldn’t all have been a fluke. ZiPS absolutely loves Richard Lovelady, but the rest of the bullpen is a big digital yawn. The Trevor Oaks projection isn’t exactly impressive, but I can’t remember the last time ZiPS didn’t actually hate a pitcher with as low a strikeout rate as he is projected to have.

Bench and Prospects

Troubling and not seen in full here is that ZiPS simply projects very few of the hitting prospects in the upper levels of the organization as good bets to be relevant by the time the Royals are good again. It’s essentially Adalberto Mondesi and Nicky Lopez. Khalil Lee and Emmanuel Rivera are the only two other offensive prospects on this list for whom ZiPS gives even an over/under of three WAR over their major league careers. Now, it’s not quite as bad as that considering a couple of the names I’m not yet projecting are Seuly Matias and Nick Pratto, but it’s certainly less than ideal for a team that really ought to be 2 1/2 years into a rebuild by now.

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.

Steve Stone knows a lot about pitching. A savvy right-hander for four teams from 1971-1981, he hurled 43 complete games, and augmented a 101-93 record with a rock solid 3.97 ERA. Stone was especially stellar in the 1980 season, garnering 25 wins for the Baltimore Orioles and taking home the American League Cy Young Award.

He doesn’t lack for opinions. Given his current job, he’s not supposed to. The 71-year-old has been in the broadcast booth for 30-plus years, the last 10 of them with the White Sox. As fans of Chicago’s South Side team can attest, Stone knows his stuff, and he’s not shy about sharing it. Agree with him or not, he’s rarely boring.

Stone sat down for a wide-ranging interview — one that offered some blunt commentary on players and trends alike — during a visit to Fenway Park midway through the 2018 season.

———

Steve Stone on learning as a young pitcher: “I pitched with Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry. I pitched with Jim Palmer and Mike Flanagan. I pitched with Wilbur Wood. One thing I learned … I was very young when I was with Marichal and Perry. I didn’t have Hall of Fame talent, so it was hard to assimilate what they had to show me. Plus, Gaylord wasn’t forthcoming about anything that made him the pitcher he was. Marichal probably would have been, had I been able to understand how he did certain things.

“Perry threw a spitter. He wasn’t going to share that. Not unless I brought $3,000 to the park. That’s how much he said he’d charge to teach me the spitter. I was taking home $8,500. I didn’t want to give him 40% of my yearly take-home pay to try to learn a pitch that very few people can master. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you don’t really follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, you can begin projecting players. There are nine categories of interest for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2018. Hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

Please note that everything is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot, too. This will make changing playing-time projections much easier, as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team or, if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button, which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

FAN Projections will appear on a player’s page after five ballots have been submitted for him.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

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 Texas Rangers.

Batters

Perhaps the biggest disappointment in last year’s projections (and in 2018, really) was the several steps taken backward by Willie Calhoun. Originally, it was believed he would only be in the minors temporarily to beat up minor league pitchers while some service time shenanigans resolved themselves. Problem was, Calhoun never really earned a callup, struggling to hit Triple-A pitchers and only besting an .800 OPS in a single month of the season, a July that was driven by a .364 batting average. The Rangers brought him up when there was obvious playing time for him, but hitting .222/.269/.333 in 108 plate appearances was hardly a strong push for a full-time job. Even ignoring the cameo role in the majors, Calhoun’s power was mostly gone in the minors, which is not good. To be a decent starting left fielder in the majors, you have to be a batting average/on-base percentage deity or be a legitimate all-world talent on defense. Calhoun is neither. I wouldn’t write him off yet, but I’m very worried.

I’m a little surprised that Texas either couldn’t or wouldn’t close a deal with another team for Shin-Soo Choo, a player whose presence required a losing Rangers team to carry a significant salary after Choo turned in a solid little year and had some trade value. Choo is quickly approaching age 40, and until Nomar Mazara actually turns his impressive raw power into actual counting numbers, Joey Gallo is the only really dependable Rangers hitter. Gallo is what he is, and will likely always have an abysmal batting average. He’s fortunate to not have been born 30 years earlier.

One projection that intrigues me is Christian Lopes’, who was a third-tier prospect for the Blue Jays a very long time ago with a fairly mature approach at the plate coming out of high school. It never really manifested itself in the stats, however, and the knock was that he didn’t have a standout tool otherwise. But he’s made great strides the last couple years and has gotten to the point where he may be a pretty interesting role player, with Texas using him at a lot of positions in the minors.

Pitchers

You can see the skinny rebuild in progress in the Rangers’ rotation. You have a number of OK-ish starters (excluding Yohander Mendez, who ZiPS hates with the fire of a thousand suns), probably none of whom will be part of the next good Rangers team. Drew Smyly, Edinson Volquez, and Shelby Miller are essentially reclamation projects, and at three years and $30 million, Lance Lynn may be the last of the quintet “out” of Texas (Mike Minor is there, too), but if the recovery in his peripherals in 2018 isn’t a fluke, Texas may get a real prospect for him.

ZiPS is a believer in Jose Leclerc at the front of the bullpen, and sees the rest of the group as a fairly boring but quite adequate relief corps, which is fine with the Rangers not seriously contending yet.

Bench and Prospects

One of the most interesting Rangers projections is that of Brock Burke, a former Rays third-rounder who the Rays brought around very slowly out of high school. 2018 was the year in which everything clicked, with Burke seeing a 30% bump in his strikeout rate while also being promoted, striking out almost 12 batters a game for Montgomery. ZiPS doesn’t give him a huge ceiling, but is surprisingly confident in Burke being a mid-rotation starter despite only him only having limited playing time in Double-A.

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.

Pitchers in the Astros organization were K-happy this past season. Thanks to a bevy of power arms and analytics-based attack plans, each of Houston’s full-season minor league affiliates led its respective league in strikeouts. So did their short-season and, most notably, their big-league club.

Given that he’d spent the last six seasons as a high-ranking member of Houston’s front office, I asked Mike Elias if that’s something that could maybe be replicated in Baltimore.

“We’re very much hoping to replicate even a semblance of that success here,” answered the Orioles Executive Vice President and General Manager. “The fact that we have (Assistant GM, Analytics) Sig Mejdal here, and Chris Holt, who was our assistant pitching coordinator in Houston, makes me feel really good about our chances of doing so. There is a little bit of a secret sauce behind that. I’m not going to explain it fully, but we had a great program there. We took a lot of time developing it, and we want to get it in place here as well.”

Hoping to glean at least a little insight into the secret sauce’s ingredients, I suggested that both draft and player development strategies are involved in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

In the abstract, the Mets’ signing of infielder Jed Lowrie to a two-year, $20 million contract is a nice little move. The team gets a versatile, well-regarded veteran who’s coming off such a strong enough year that he might have received double that guaranteed money in a more hospitable free agent market. In the real world, the signing of Lowrie raises more questions than it answers, questions for new general manager Brodie Van Wagenen about how the Mets plan to allocate playing time throughout not just their infield but their outfield, and about how they value the futures of the promising youngsters within both groups.

The switch-hitting Lowrie, who turns 35 in April, has spent the last three seasons with the A’s and is coming off career bests in home runs (23), wRC+ (122, with a .267/.353/.448 line), and WAR (4.9). That comes on the heels of a previous career high of 3.6 WAR in 2017, accompanied by 14 homers and a 119 wRC+. Before that, he had his ups and downs — we’ll get to those — and he has a long history of playing all over the infield, but during this two-year surge, 95% of his defensive innings have come at second base.

Of course, less than six weeks ago, the Mets traded for an eight-time All-Star second baseman in Robinson Cano, and just this past summer, in the second half of an otherwise lost season, they stumbled upon a productive, homegrown second baseman in Jeff McNeil. As with their outfield of the past two seasons — a collection light on capable center fielders, and populated with more lefty-swinging corner outfield bats than any reasonably assembled roster needs — it’s not at all clear how they intend to fit all of the parts together into a coherent whole. They do intend to play Lowrie every day, according to Newsday’s Steven Marcus, but with position(s) to be determined.

I’ll attempt to sort all of that out below, but first, Lowrie is worth a closer look. Before his big 2017 and ’18 seasons, you’d have to go back to 2013 to find a similarly strong campaign on his resumé. He was below replacement level in 2016 before missing the final two months of the season due to surgery to remove a bunion and repair a ligament in his left big toe, and from 2014-2016 hit for just an 89 wRC+ with 2.2 WAR in 292 games while missing additional time due to a fractured right index finger (2014) and a torn ligament in his right thumb (2015).

Lowrie, who lists at a modest 6-foot and 180 pounds, has cited improved lower body conditioning and late-2016 surgery to repair a deviated septum — a procedure that improved the quality of his sleep and his ability to recover from workouts — as reasons for his recent improvement. He speaks like a man aware of the flood of data available to players these days. “I look back at the success I’ve had in my career hitting, and the focus has always had to be on my legs, getting the most out of my legs as I can,” Lowrie told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser last April. “Some guys are strong enough to manipulate their mechanics and get an ideal launch angle. I’m trying to maximize bat speed to maximize exit velocity.”

As he told Sports Techie’s Joe Lemire in September:

“I check [Statcast] regularly. We have our system upstairs in the clubhouse, so if you see me leaving the dugout, 99 percent of the time it’s to go up and look at either video or exit velocity and launch angle. I use that information more as a debriefing. I can figure out that if I take the swing that I wanted to mechanically on a pitch that I know I can hit hard, but the exit velocity wasn’t what I expected it to be, then maybe it’s because my legs aren’t underneath me.”

By and large, Lowrie’s 2017 and ’18 Statcast numbers are better than his 2015 and-16 ones:

He’s elevating the ball more consistently and hitting it harder, which explains why he’s been more successful at ages 33 and 34 than earlier in his 11-year major league career, which began with the Red Sox (2008-2011) and has included multiple stays with both the Astros (2012, 2015) and A’s (2013-2014, 2016-2018). That should mitigate some fears about an expected fall-off in his mid-30s.

On the defensive side, Lowrie made 132 starts at second base in 2017, and 133 in 2018; he was above average there in the latter season (6.1 UZR, 1 DRS) after three straight years in the red by both metrics (-5.5 UZR, -12 DRS). He last played shortstop in 2016, and that was for just three innings, with 16 starts in 2015; his metrics had slipped far enough into the red prior that he’s best regarded as an emergency solution at the position these days. He’s played only a smidgen of third base recently (three innings in 2017, 14 starts in 2018); his most extensive work at the hot corner came in 2015, when he played 47 games and was within a run of average via both UZR and DRS.

In terms of his recent usage, Lowrie doesn’t look like the second coming of Ben Zobrist, Kiley McDaniel’s admiration notwithstanding, but the Mets, who lost out on the real Zobrist in December 2015, when he signed with the Cubs, are planning to move him around. Not only is second base overpopulated, but third baseman Todd Frazier is under contract for one more season and $9 million. Oh, and Lowrie, like Cano and Frazier, is a former Van Wagenen client. Things could get awkward as these guys fight for playing time, and in the meantime, it’s fair to raise an eyebrow regarding this agent-turned-GM’s penchant for collecting his aging former clients.

Indeed, right now, it’s hard to make sense of how Van Wagenen and manager Mickey Callaway plan to piece this together. Not only did they trade for Cano, they just added utilityman J.D. Davis for a rather steep prospect price. They got a nice 63-game rookie season out of McNeil and a not-so-nice sophomore campaign from shortstop Amed Rosario. They have last year’s first base prospect, Dominic Smith, and next year’s first base prospect, Peter Alonso. I don’t even dare crack wise about another reunion with Jose Reyes, as his 2018 season and the Mets’ justifications for keeping him were both terrible.

Let’s put these guys in a table:

Alonso, Smith, and Davis all have minor league options; so does Rosario, but lacking a ready alternative at shortstop, we can ignore that. Worth adding to the picture is the knowledge that Smith’s stock is very low, that Davis is a bench piece for now, that McNeil didn’t seem to have any problems against southpaws as a rookie (124 wRC+, albeit in 62 PA), that Frazier suddenly struggled against lefties in 2018 (52 wRC+ in 129 PA), which may just be a fluke, and that Lowrie’s been about average versus lefties over the past two years while mashing righties. That still leaves a fierce game of musical chairs.

If the Mets go around the horn with Ye Oldest Lineup, Frazier-Rosario-Lowrie-Cano, then not only are they playing their marquee offseason acquisition at a position where he’s got just 14 games under his belt — and he’s still quite playable at second base (2.8 UZR in 2018) — but they need to figure out how to get enough playing time for McNeil, who hit .329/.381/.471 (137 wRC+); they clearly aren’t calling up Alonso (.285/.395/.579 with 36 homers split between Double-A and Triple-A) anytime soon in this scenario. If they go Lowrie-Rosario-McNeil-Cano, they’ve got two corner guys playing their lesser positions, a second baseman on whom the jury is still out defensively (0.4 UZR, -2 DRS), a bench player making $9 million, and again no clear path for Alonso. McNeil-Rosario-Lowrie-Cano trades a comparatively minor question about second base for a major one about whether McNeil can handle third, something the Mets appeared reluctant to find out in 2018. McNeil-Rosario-Cano-Lowrie? The new guy has a total of 28 major league innings at first base, all of them in Boston in 2010-2011; that’s 11 more innings than McNeil has played at first in the minors, lest you think about swapping those corners. Frazier-Rosario-Cano-Lowrie may as well be Lowrie-Rosario-Cano-Frazier; the Toddfather might be the better defender at both positions.

All of this is reminiscent of the Mets’ mismatched outfield of the past two seasons, with Jay Bruce, Curtis Granderson, Yoenis Cespedes, Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, and no true center fielder besides the oft-injured Juan Lagares. Granderson was traded to the Dodgers in late 2017, Bruce went to Seattle in the Cano trade, Cespedes may not play at all in 2019 after surgery to remove bone spurs in both heels, Nimmo has established himself as one of their top hitters, and they just acquired Keon Broxton in a 3-for-1 deal, so it’s a stretch to say they’ve got things sorted out there beyond some kind of Conforto-Lagares/Broxton-Nimmo arrangement. Reportedly, they plan to find time for McNeil in the outfield, though he has just nine minor league appearances totaling 65.1 innings out in the pasture. At whose expense will that playing time come?

I don’t know those answers, and right now, I’m not sure the Mets do, either. The fear is that they’re now overly stocked with infielders in their mid-30s who are cutting into the playing time of infielders and outfielders in their 20s, but it’s worth acknowledging that Opening Day is 2 1/2 months away (gah) and that this move probably means others are in store. Perhaps they trade Frazier in a salary dump, or deal Conforto for another young, controllable player who fits their lineup better.

For all of the above hand-wringing, the good news is that Van Wagenen continues to add useful players, and that the Mets are projected to win 85 games, which should put them in the thick of the NL East fight. Van Wagenen’s vision of a competitive 2019 squad may not be my vision or your vision, but it’s certainly more visionary than what we’ve seen in Queens in the past couple of seasons, and that counts for something.

I’ll grant that trying to answer this is unavoidably subjective. The Nationals just signed Brian Dozier, and a bone bruise might’ve clipped four wins from his WAR. The Braves are crossing their fingers for a healthy season from Josh Donaldson. Corey Seager is returning to the Dodgers after missing almost the whole year. The Cubs are looking for Yu Darvish to rebound. The Angels are looking for Zack Cozart to rebound. Dustin Pedroia should be coming back. Michael Pineda should be coming back. Buster Posey should be coming back. And so on and so forth. Baseball players get hurt. They try to put those injuries behind them. They try to get back to being what they were.

But as I think about this — certain recoveries are more predictable than others. Certain recovering players have bigger error bars than others. In a sense, the purpose behind this post is simply to remind you of the existence of Jimmy Nelson. But I think he really is the biggest injury wild card for the season ahead. The Brewers will play in a division with at least three and possibly five competitive teams. As of this moment, the Brewers are projected to have a below-average starting rotation. Jimmy Nelson might be a zero, as he was in 2018. Or he might be an ace, as he was in 2017. I don’t know which it’s going to be. The Brewers don’t, either.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the World Series Champion Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.