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On Monday, we released our first projected standings of 2016, with the Cubs unsurprisingly looking like the best team in baseball heading into Spring Training. More controversially, though, the Steamer projections — which is what our Forecasted Standings are based on currently, and will be until we add in the full ZIPS projections — see the Boston Red Sox as the second best team in baseball at this point, forecasting them for a 92-70 record.

That would be a 14 win improvement over last year’s 78-84 mark, which also notably came after the projections expected big things from the club. Understandably, there’s a decent amount of skepticism surrounding the idea that the Red Sox are really the AL’s best club on paper, so let’s look a bit deeper into the nuts and bolts of the forecast to see what’s really driving Steamer’s belief that Boston’s roster is ready to contend.

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It’s tough to admit that time has begun to pass you by. This is how we end up with middle-aged woman wearing Phat Farm sneakers at the mall or that 60-year-old dude who only shoots threes and never gets back on defense playing basketball at the rec with the college kids every day. And, hey, I’m not here to judge those folks. Matter of fact, I respect the hell out of them. The old dude can really splash and the mom just values her children’s opinion and wants their adoration. I’m sure she’s a wonderful parent, albeit one with a very questionable fashion sense. At the end of the day, it comes down to whatever makes you happy, and if wearing Phat Farm sneakers or being the local wellness center’s version of Mike Miller is what makes you happy, then do it up!

Take the Rockies, for example. Following Tuesday’s acquisition of Gerardo Parra, it’s a near-certainty that the Rockies will be trading an outfielder. The most probable outfielder to be moved is Carlos Gonzalez, at least if the rumors we’ve heard over the last year-plus are any indication. And so if they want to ask for two top-100 prospects in exchange for Gonzalez, then, sure, more power to ’em! If that’s what makes them happy. They’re never going to get two top-100 prospects for Carlos Gonzalez, but there’s no harm in hoping.

There used to be a time when Gonzalez would have commanded two top-100 prospects or better. From 2010 to -13, Gonzalez was a top-25 hitter and a top-25 overall position player, according to WAR. He was a legitimate star. He hit both lefties and righties, he ran the bases well, he was a lock for 20 homers as well as for 20 steals, and the defense graded out fine in the corners. The only thing that ever kept from CarGo from elevating himself from star to superstar status was that he had trouble staying on the field. When he wasn’t hurt, though, there weren’t many better than CarGo.

Thing about injuries, though, is that they’ll take a toll on you quick. Gonzalaz fractured his right wrist way back in the minors, and in 2011, it started hurting again, sending him to the disabled list. The next year it was a hamstring. Then it was a finger sprain in his right hand, then a tumor on his left hand the following year that required surgical removal. The big one came later in 2014 — left knee surgery to repair a torn patellar tendon. Gonzalez remained mostly healthy in 2015, aside from the occasional day off due to “tired legs,” “right knee discomfort,” “sprained left hand,” or the ever-present “flu-like symptoms.” But these last couple years, after the hand surgery and the knee surgery, Gonzalez hasn’t looked like himself.
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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Houston Astros. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Kansas City / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
Whether by accident or design, the current iteration of the Astros does appear nevertheless to reveal a clue as to the method by which the club’s roster has been constructed. Per ZiPS, there are two sorts of player among Houston’s starting nine: those whose projected WAR figures can be rounded comfortably to three wins or higher, and those whose forecasts are rounded merely to a single win. Only two players (Evan Gattis and Jon Singleton) occupy the latter group and — again, whether by coincidence or not — they also happen to occupy those positions which require the least defensive skill (or, in the case of designated hitter, no defensive skill at all). One could reasonably make a case that the club has prioritized acquiring and/or developing players with some manner of defensive value. The case may not be correct, but at least it’s capable of being presented with tolerable credulity.

One player who possesses considerable offensive and defensive talent — and who was also a rookie in 2015 — is shortstop Carlos Correa. On the verge of entering just his age-21 season, Correa is the recipient of the top projection among the club’s entire roster, forecast to produce roughly five wins in 2016 on the strength not merely of average shortstop defense but also the team’s best batting line. Owing to how none of us is immune from the icy grip of the Reaper, Correa won’t be great forever. That said, he appears entirely capable of approximating those early versions of Troy Tulowitzki who avoided injury.

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The 2016 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 really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 9 categories 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 2016, 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 this year 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 show up on the player pages after there have been 5 ballots submitted.

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

Allow me to share with you an unremarkable batting line: .235/.308/.412. It doesn’t belong to Logan Morrison, but it might as well. This line belongs to another veteran, and it covers the last four years, and it’s worked out to a 98 wRC+. You can tell there’s seemingly nothing too special about the bat. To that, I’ll add that the player isn’t a particularly strong base-runner, nor is he a particularly strong defender. Some time ago, he had a $3-million club option declined, and that might just tell you enough. This is a player with some legitimate uses. This is a player with a fairly low value.

As far as 2016 is concerned, we’re talking about a role player. Currently a free agent, he’ll get a shot with someone in the coming month or two. He should be a weapon off somebody’s bench. But what’s most interesting about Ryan Raburn isn’t what he projects to be for the immediate future. What’s most interesting about Ryan Raburn is exactly how he’s arrived at such an uninteresting overall four-year performance.

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We’ve had the 2016 Steamer Projections up on the site for a while now, but until this morning, the only way to look at the aggregate team projections was to look at a team’s total projected WAR and eyeball how that might translate to wins and losses. WAR is a good enough proxy to get you in the right neighborhood, but because of differences between the leagues and the fact that wins aren’t perfectly linear, ideally, you want to run the raw numbers through a run estimator and then use BaseRuns to convert those runs scored and allowed numbers into an expected win total. Well, as of today, we’ve updated our Projected Standings page to do exactly that, taking the individual Steamer projections and the playing time projections from our depth charts to produce estimated win-loss records for every team in baseball.

Probably to no one’s surprise, the Cubs currently stand atop the projections with a 95-67 forecasted record. The Cubs were excellent a year ago, built around a core of exciting young players, and then added Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and John Lackey in free agency. Yes, they’re projected to win two fewer games than a year ago, but that’s simply a function of the fact that projections are attempting to project context-neutral performance, not accounting for wins that can be added (or lost) due to clutch performance; taking away the effects of sequencing naturally results in a smaller spread from top to bottom.

So, instead of looking at the projections relative to a team’s 2015 win-loss record, here are the current Steamer projections — these can and will change as more free agents sign, trades are made, and the depth charts become more clear as we get closer to the season — compared to each team’s own BaseRuns expected record from a year ago.

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Next week, in a federal courtroom in New York City, the future of televised baseball will be at stake. On one side, attorneys representing baseball fans at-large will contend that MLB’s existing broadcast policies violate the Sherman Antitrust Act by illegally limiting competition and consumer choice, ultimately increasing the price we pay for televised baseball. On the other side, lawyers for Major League Baseball will seek to preserve the status quo by arguing that the league’s restrictions increase both the quantity and quality of games aired on television, to the benefit of fans.

The case — Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball — may not be the highest-profile lawsuit currently proceeding against MLB. But from the league’s perspective, it’s almost certainly the most important.

Long-time Fangraphs readers are probably already familiar with the Garber suit, as we’ve previously covered the case on a number of different occasions. By way of a brief recap, though, the lawsuit essentially alleges that MLB violates federal antitrust law by assigning its teams exclusive local broadcast territories (the same rules that also give rise to MLB’s infamous blackout policy).

Not only do the plaintiffs allege that the creation of these exclusive territories illegally prevents MLB teams from competing for television revenue in each others’ home markets, but they also contend the rules restrict teams from competing with the league itself in the national broadcast marketplace (preventing teams from signing their own national television contracts, for instance, or offering their own out-of-market pay-per-view services in competition with MLB Extra Innings and MLB.TV).

Thus, the Garber suit presents a direct challenge to MLB’s existing television business model, one that could revolutionize the way in which baseball is broadcast in the future.

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Kansas City / Minnesota / New York AL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
While not particularly relevant to the 2016 edition of the Mets, it’s difficult to examine the ZiPS projections below without also acknowledging the system’s relative optimism concerning free-agent outfielder Yoenis Cespedes (629 PA, 4.4 zWAR). The gap between Cespedes’s forecasted win total and Michael Conforto’s second-best mark is equivalent to the gap between Conforto’s mark and the average of the club’s 11th- and 12th-best hitter projections. In other words: for whatever Cespedes’s flaws, his strengths appear capable of compensating for them at the moment.

Which isn’t to ignore another of the system’s perhaps surprsing outputs — namely, the projection for Conforto himself. Entering just his age-23 season, Conforto began the 2015 campaign as the left fielder for the High-A St. Lucie Mets. He’s expected to play that same position for the actual New York version of the team on opening day this year — and, it would seem, is a candidate to produce wins at a higher rate than any of his teammates.

In general, what the Mets feature is essentially the antithesis of a stars-and-scrubs configuration. The success of the club relies not on elite performances by one or two players, but rather the competence of the entire starting eight.

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No one hacked into the Houston Astros database 40 years ago. Had that been possible, they could have gleaned valuable information by doing so. Tal Smith is the reason why.

Smith was ahead of his time. While serving as the Astros director of player personnel, he began accumulating and cataloguing data “around 1969 or 1970.”

“This was only a few years after the advent of the amateur draft, and I thought it was important,” explained Smith. “I wanted a backlog of all the draft choices —where they were coming from, out of high school, out of college, and so on — and to track those players’ progress. We inputted all that data. This was back in the old keypunch days.”

His colleagues weren’t as enamored with his efforts. Smith left to work for the Yankees in 1973, and when he returned to Houston two years later he found that no one had maintained the program. It was necessary for him to start over. Read the rest of this entry »

It was surprising when Jim Edmonds got knocked off the ballot in his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility when results were announced a couple days ago. It was surprising that Ken Griffey Jr. received he highest percentage of votes in history, or it was surprising that he wasn’t unanimous, depending how you want to look at it. It was a bit surprising, maybe, that Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines didn’t make it, and it might have been surprising how much ground Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens seemed to make up. There’s always little surprises. That’s life.

To me, though, the biggest surprise of them all was the fact that Trevor Hoffman nearly became a first-ballot Hall of Famer. In his first year of eligibility, the longtime Padres closer received 67.3% of the vote, the fifth-highest total on the ballot, just behind Bagwell and Raines and just ahead of Curt Schilling, Clemens, and Bonds. History has shown us that voters who receive such a high percentage of the vote at any time in their eligibility, let alone the first year, are bound to make it in eventually. Trevor Hoffman is going to be a Hall of Famer. It might even happen next year.

There are dissenting opinions with regards to the place of closers in the Hall of Fame, and it’s probably something worth thinking about and discussing. Hard to come away worse from a thoughtful discussion. For some folks, Hoffman is a clear Hall of Famer, and should have been in on the first ballot. For others, he was nowhere near the 10 most deserving players, and might not even garner a selection with an unlimited number of votes per ballot. In the interest of full disclosure, my position has been closer to the latter than the former, though I’m open to seeing the other side. That’s what this post is for.

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