With the start of the regular season just four days away, we find ourselves in the thick of preview season. No matter where you look, it all boils down to the question: what’s 2016 going to look like? At FanGraphs, we’ve just wrapped up our yearly Positional Power Rankings that assess the season through the lens of each position.

As you might have noticed, each team is made up of the sum of these positional projections and they will all start playing together as 30 units in nine-inning contests next week. If you’re into that sort of thing, we offer Playoff Odds that estimates each club’s shot at postseason baseball (explained here).

It’s important to remember, for all the reasons cited in the previous link, that these projected standings are incapable of total precision. In reality, even with a perfect model for individual player projections, you still wouldn’t hit on every team. And we don’t have anything close to a perfect model for individual players. Yet these projections do offer an objective reading of where the teams stand relative to one another based on what we know. They might wind up being wrong, but they’ll be wrong because they’re flawed not because they’re trying to write an interesting narrative.

Despite clear signs of parity, especially in the American League, our projections think only one division is going to be particularly close: the National League East.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adam LaRoche may or may not be retiring. It certainly seems as though he is, and it seems as though his decision was made abruptly. While that may not be 100 percent certain, now seems like a good time to look back on his career. On one hand, LaRoche was sort of a letdown, in that he never really took off the way it seemed like he might. On the other hand, LaRoche was a huge success, and should be celebrated as such.
Read the rest of this entry »

If it weren’t for Bryce Harper, fans of the Washington Nationals might be hard-pressed to admit 2015 ever happened. The team began last season with expectations as high as this year’s Cubs (sorry, Cubs fans) and ended it with a symbolic choke. Nobody could stay off the disabled list — Anthony Rendon, Jayson Werth, Denard Span and Ryan Zimmerman were all hindered by injuries — and the ones who could — Ian Desmond and Wilson Ramos — became liabilities at the plate, seemingly overnight.

But it was the pitching that truly got the hype train a-rollin’ in the preseason — an already star-studded staff with Max Scherzer as the sweetest cherry on top — and the pitching didn’t disappoint. Stephen Strasburg had a rough go of things in the first month and and Doug Fister had his fair share of struggles, but when it was all said and done, the rotation finished with a top-three WAR, a top-five FIP and a top-10 ERA. The expectation was that Washington’s starting pitching would be elite — it ran five deep with proven, quality arms — and Washington’s starting pitching was elite. But even proven arms need to adapt, lest they lose their title of proven. And while, on the surface, Washington’s hurlers for the most part looked like themselves, every member of the starting rotation made an adjustment, all similar in nature but unique to each individual. Unlike a tweak to one’s mechanics or pitch mix, it’s the type of adjustment that alters the very foundation of a pitcher’s DNA — every member of the Nationals starting rotation changed the way they throw their fastball.

Generally speaking, pitchers can be classified as high-fastball guys, or low-fastball guys. Unless you’re Bartolo Colon, you probably don’t want to try your hand at being a down-the-middle-fastball guy, and even a both-sides-of-the-plate-fastball guy like Johnny Cueto shows up as an extreme high-fastballer. High-fastball guys can always throw higher, and low-fastball guys can always throw lower, and last year, the Nationals made an effort toward the extremes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at ESPN today, they published a feature on Bryce Harper. It’s really good, and you should read the whole thing, but there’s one section that stands out; the part where the story shifts from the view of Harper as a person or a player, and to his view of baseball needs to evolve.

He wants to change the game. He wants to change the perception of baseball players, to become a single-name icon like LeBron and Beckham and Cam. “I don’t know much about Bryce,” says his new manager, Dusty Baker, “but I know he’s one of the hippest kids around.” Harper wants to elevate his sport’s profile through his play, through his fashion, through the charisma of his personality, maybe even through the fascination with the size of the first free agent contract ($400 million? $500 million?) that he’ll sign shortly after his 26th birthday. Is this a prodigy’s natural urge to innovate or a sign of youthful hubris?

“Endorsements, fashion — it’s something baseball doesn’t see,” he says. “In soccer, it’s Beckham or Ronaldo. In basketball, it’s Curry and LeBron. In football, it’s Cam. Football and basketball have such good fashion.”

There are impediments endemic to the sport. Everyone knows about Russell Westbrook’s unique couture because he’s wearing it in an interview room. The baseball player, on the other hand, is interviewed at his locker, often shirtless and sporting a hat head that can ruin even Harper’s unique follicle landscaping. As Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman says, “We’re uniformed personnel.”

And then there’s the larger obstacle: the game’s stern code. Case in point: Papelbon vs. Harper. It started when Orioles third baseman Manny Machado hit a home run against the Nationals last September and reacted with too much excitement, so Jonathan Papelbon drilled him the next time Machado came to bat, which caused Harper to suggest to reporters that baseball’s code is “tired,” which led to Papelbon berating and then choking Harper four days later after the closer found his teammate’s hustle lacking — a Rube Goldberg display of baseball’s grim underside.

Harper has admitted fault in going to reporters instead of speaking to Papelbon directly (“If I had a problem with Pap, I should have gone up to Pap,” he says), and both men say it didn’t last beyond that day. But that’s not what Harper wants to talk about now.

“Baseball’s tired,” he says. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.

“Jose Fernandez is a great example. Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn’t care. Because you got him. That’s part of the game. It’s not the old feeling — hoorah … if you pimp a homer, I’m going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a game-winning shot … I mean — sorry.”

He stops, looks around. The hell with it, he’s all in.

“If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound, I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun. You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players — Steph Curry, LeBron James. It’s exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton — I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It’s that flair. The dramatic.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Early this morning, the full 2016 ZiPS projections went live on the site. This is probably news to many of you. Surprise! Happy ZiPS day. You can now export the full ZiPS spreadsheet from that link, find individual projections on the player pages, and view our live-updating playoff odds, which are powered by a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer. This is good news for everyone, including us, the authors, because now we have more information with which to work.

And so here’s a post that I did last year, and one which I was waiting for the full ZiPS rollout to do again: previewing the year’s team defenses. It’s been a few years running now that we’ve marveled over speedy outfielders in blue jerseys zooming about the spacious Kauffman Stadium outfield, and now those speedy outfielders in blue jerseys are all World Series champions. People are thinking and talking about defense more than ever, and you don’t think and talk about defense without thinking and talking about the Kansas City Royals. Defense: it’s so hot right now. Defense.

The methodology here is simple. ZiPS considers past defensive performance and mixes in some scouting report information to give an overall “defensive runs above or below average” projection. Steamer does the same, except rather than searching for keywords from real scouting reports, it regresses towards the data from the Fans Scouting Report project compiled by Tangotiger every year. The final number is an average of these two figures, and can be found in the “Fld” section of the depth charts and player pages. It isn’t exactly Ultimate Zone Rating or Defensive Runs Saved, but it’s the same idea, and the same scale.

Let’s look ahead toward the year in defense.

* * *

The Best

1. Kansas City Royals

This is one of my new favorite fun facts: the Royals outfield defense, just the outfield, is projected for 31 runs saved, which is higher than any other entire team in baseball. And with Alex Rios out of the mix in right field and Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando stepping in full-time, Kansas City’s outfield defense should somehow be even better than it’s been in the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two years back, after Zach Britton emerged as an effective closer for the Orioles, he drew a lot of attention for his sinker. At the time, I used PITCHf/x information to try to find some similar sinkers. For the most part it was a forgettable post — most of these are forgettable posts — but there was one thing that stuck with me. One name I haven’t been able to wipe from my mind.

It’s even more interesting now, with Britton having graduated into the class of the elites. You might not yet recognize Britton as an elite reliever, but he for sure most recently was an elite reliever, again driven almost exclusively by his fastball, which he threw 90% of the time. Compared to the year before, Britton generated way more strikeouts. Compared to the year before, Britton trimmed his number of walks. And compared to the year before, Britton somehow increased his grounder rate, which was already absurd.

You look at what Britton did, and you see that he did it mostly with one pitch, and you realize, hey, that’s one hell of a pitch. Wouldn’t you be interested in knowing there’s someone out there who throws an almost identical pitch? It’s time to get to know Blake Treinen. Blake Treinen pitches for the Nationals, and Blake Treinen throws the Zach Britton sinker.

Read the rest of this entry »

You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the offseason, teams are frequently characterized as “winners” and “losers” based on the players they’ve acquired relative to the players who have left. Often, the so-called winners are simply the clubs who’ve been most active, bringing in the most players — regardless of cost — while the losers often are those clubs which have been more idle, making smaller moves to improve their rosters. These characterizations do not always translate to the field, as the case of the San Diego Padres illustrates. The Padres followed an active 2014-15 offseason with a poor 2015 campaign.

With that caveat having been made, many have declared the Washington Nationals losers this offseason not simply because Ian Desmond, Drew Storen, and Jordan Zimmermann are gone — replaced by a relatively modest group including Shawn Kelley, Daniel Murphy, Ben Revere — but mainly because they failed to land Yoenis Cespedes, Jason Heyward, or Ben Zobrist in free agency. While the team might be hidden winners of the winter, the Nationals are claiming their failure is due to a tightened budget caused by the Baltimore Orioles’ refusal to pay market value for their television rights.

For those who might not be aware, the Orioles — principally Peter Angelos, through regional sports networks MASN and MASN2 — air the Nationals broadcasts. The Orioles control the Nationals broadcasts as a result of negotiations with the team when the Nationals moved to Washington, D.C., thus encroaching on the Orioles’ television territory. Nathaniel Grow characterized the situation like this after the last major decision in the legal dispute between the teams:

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

The Orioles believed they should pay the Nationals roughly half the amount the arbitrators awarded and appealed, getting the decision thrown out due to conflicts with the Nationals’ counsel. (For more on the decision, read Grow’s full piece linked above.) The case is still ongoing without a resolution and the Nationals are pushing the Orioles to head back to arbitration. The Nationals retained new counsel, and have filed a motion to compel the parties to arbitrate the case and set a value for the television rights. In their recent motion, the Nationals indicated that the Orioles’ failure to pay fair-market value for television rights has hamstrung the team in signing free agents to multi-year contracts.

“MASN’s underpayment of rights fees has already required the Nationals to fund payroll and other expenses from its own reserves, and further delay could require the Nationals to seek new financing,” says the team’s memorandum. “This is not only burdensome in its own right, but it places the Nationals at a competitive disadvantage to other baseball clubs, which typically receive fair market value from their regional sports networks for their telecast rights. Without this added income, the Nationals are handicapped in their ability to invest in efforts to improve the team. For instance, without this added and steady income, the Nationals cannot bring full economic confidence to investments in multi-year player contracts to keep up with the fierce competition for top players — especially when such control over finances is in the hands of a neighboring club.”

This might sound a bit like whining coming from a billionaire owner who just one year ago signed Max Scherzer to a seven year, $210 million contract, and reportedly made offers to Jason Heyward for roughly $200 million and Yoenis Cespedes $100 million, but those claims do have some merit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two things were dumped on the DC area over the course of the weekend: an unfathomable volume of snow, and the news that Yoenis Cespedes was turning down the Nationals’ offer and returning to the Mets. In Washington, Cespedes would’ve replaced someone who’s already a decent center fielder. In New York, Cespedes will replace someone who’s already a decent center fielder. But now Juan Lagares is valuable depth, instead, and for either team, Cespedes represented some sort of improvement. So it was a damaging blow, effectively concluding what for the Nationals has been a frustrating offseason of almosts. The Mets, on the other hand, have reason to celebrate. They kept Cespedes, and on their own terms.

In a way it’s an extension of the Nationals’ narrative of disappointment. It’s also an extension of the Mets’ narrative of triumphant underdogging. There’s carryover from the last regular season, when the Nationals were one of the most disappointing winning teams in memory. That’s going to remain the most recent baseball until there’s even more recent baseball, but for the Nationals it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. Spoiler alert: this is going to be another poll post. I’m going to ask you to pick the top of the NL East. I’ll offer my own pick, but I’ll put it down in the comments, so as to avoid any bias.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 Washington Nationals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
This set of ZiPS projections for the Nationals represents the 23rd post in this offseason series. A brief examination of the 22 previous installments reveals that no field player has received as robust a forecast yet as Bryce Harper (579 PA, 6.9 zWAR) does here. The other top contenders? Josh Donaldson (6.6 zWAR), Buster Posey (6.3), and Andrew McCutchen (6.0). Conspicuous by his absence from that brief list, of course, is Mike Trout. As for when Szymborski intends to release the Angels’ projections, one can only speculate as to that heartless monster’s plans.

Apart from their outfield wunderkind, the Nationals’ collection of batters is rather ordinary. Third baseman Anthony Rendon (512 PA, 3.3 zWAR) has the benefit both of youth and also a six-win season in his recent past. Otherwise, no starting field player receives a projection that reaches even the two-win threshold, the recently acquired Daniel Murphy (606 PA, 1.9 zWAR) representing the best of the remaining six.

Read the rest of this entry »