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 San Francisco Giants. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Oakland / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
With regard to their field players, San Francisco doesn’t currently feature so much a stars-and-scrubs sort of configuration as they do a Buster-Posey-surrounded-by-roughly-average-players one. Posey is projected by ZiPS not only to record the highest wOBA among Giants hitters by over 20 points but also to play slightly above-average defense at a position that receives the largest positive adjustment in the calculation of WAR.

Of some note, perhaps, is ZiPS’ seeming pessimism regarding Hunter Pence. After averaging five wins per season over the last two years, Pence is forecast to produce only half that figure in 2015. In fact, there’s probably less decline projected for ZiPS than one might think at first glance. Pence, for example, has recorded nearly 1.5 wins due to baserunning alone over the last two years after having posted mostly just average seasons by that measure before that. Even just applying regression here accounts for some of Pence’s seeming decline.

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The Winter Meetings revelry has passed. We’re still waiting on a few big trades to finally ‘consummate,’ but the list of free agents is less attractive by day. Before you turn down a chance at glory with the guys left waiting for a team, it’s probably a good idea to look at how badly you need them. This is not dating advice, but it sort of feels like it.

To that end, I’ve taking our depth charts and calculated a quick stat for ‘neediness.’ By averaging team WAR over 13 roster spots — the portion of the 25-man roster usually used for offense — and then looking at the difference between that average WAR and each position WAR, I’ve found a way to show where the biggest remaining lineup holes are.

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The list of non-tenders is out. Time to dream!

It’s actually a very tough place to shop, even if there are a few names that seem attractive this year. Only about one in twelve non-tenders manages to put up a win of value the year after they were let loose. Generally, teams know best which players to keep, and which to jettison.

You’re not going to get 12 non-tenders in your camp in any given year, but there is a way to improve your odds. It’s simple, really: pick up a player that was actually above replacement the year before. If you do that, you double your chance of picking up a productive major leaguer. So let’s look at this year’s market through that lens first.

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Most of the Arizona Fall League attendees have been seen enough that the scouting community has a well developed opinion on each player before they arrive in the desert. Even that year’s draftees (such as Nick Howard and Trea Turner this year), while new on the pro scene, were heavily-scouted, top-of-their-class players who many have seen at least a time or two and have some sort of background with. This year saw three reasonably high-profile Cuban prospects get Fall League reps in Raisel Iglesias, Rusney Castillo and Daniel Carbonell who had scarcely been seen on domestic soil by scouts.

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Whether or not the deal for Pablo Sandoval was a good deal, the Giants are now faced with the unenviable task of finding a replacement in a bad market for third basemen. The good news is that they probably have close to $100 million they can spend on finding a solution. What might be their best way forward?

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The Boston Red Sox, as you might have heard, currently have an outfield glut. There is ten pounds of outfield meat in their five pound bag. Something has to give, and that something is likely Yoenis Cespedes.

When the Sox acquired Cespedes from Oakland in the Jon Lester trade, it felt more like a rental than a long-term investment in the player. Cespedes’ unique contract allows him to become a free agent at the end of the 2015 season, so Boston put themselves in an enviable position. They received an established big leaguer in exchange for their walk-year ace and got an up-close and personal look at a potential big free agent bat.

Whether or not a look under Cespedes’ hood informed their decision to sign both Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, that’s the route they went down. Now Cespedes is trade bait, the precious “right-handed power” commodity in a marketplace clambering for those skills. He’s headed into his age-29 season, he’s owed $10.5 million this year, and there’s going to be a line around the block to bid for his services. Where might he land?

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If you focus on his age and overall production so far, the reported near-$100 million that the Red Sox are handing Pablo Sandoval for his next five years are reasonable. He’s a young man with an established bat at a scarce position. But if you focus instead on some of the aspects of his production, things look a little different. They look a little scarier.

First, read Dave Cameron on why even a sixth year wouldn’t have been crazy, given the right salary numbers. Basically, as the number of years go up, average annual value goes down. The sixth year might be the premium that gets the signature, but it’s not a sixth year at the same price as year one. Given that the salary pretty much exactly follows the breakdown that Cameron showed, this isn’t a terrible contract if you call Pablo Sandoval a 3.5-win 28-year-old third baseman. Even if it’s a little more than the median five-year $80 million contract the crowd wanted to give him.

But what if you call him other things?

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Pablo Sandoval is perhaps the most interesting free agent of the offseason. He’s both good and fairly young for a free agent these days, so there’s an argument to be made that his contract might not carry him very far into the steepest of the aging curve, which is when teams have often gotten burned with big money deals. Of course, he’s also a big guy, with the body type of the kind of player who often ages poorly, and he’s spent a significant chunk of time on the DL during his tenure with the Giants.

This makes him a bit of a unique free agent, as you can argue that he’s either lower risk (due to age) or higher risk (due to body type), depending on which one you one put more stock in. And both arguments have their merit. Projecting future playing time is difficult enough for a normal player, much less a guy on the extreme ends of two variables that offer different conclusions.

So, it seems inevitable that whatever Sandoval signs for, it’s going to be a polarizing contract. Especially if he lands the six year deal that he’s seeking. From his agent, Gustavo Vazquez, via Henry Schulman:

“Pablo is 28,” Vasquez said. “He is still young. Maybe if he was 30 or 31 we could talk about four or five years. But he’s 28. He deserves more than that.”

The immediate reaction is to imagine what a 34-year-old Sandoval might look like, and shrink back from the idea of guaranteeing real money to, as Grant Brisbee put it, a “less athletic David Wells.” The odds of Sandoval still being a highly productive player in 2020 are pretty slim, and a six year deal would make it very likely that the signing team would have paid a hefty premium for a pinch-hitter or part-time platoon guy by the time the contract ends. However, in and of itself, that doesn’t make a six year contract for Sandoval a bad idea.

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Madison Bumgarner pitched quite a bit this past season. Including the regular and post season, he threw a total of 4,074 pitches, which wasn’t even the season’s top total; James Shields bested him by throwing six more, for a total of 4,080 pitches in 2014, not including spring training. So with all of the pitches thrown this season (and one month less of rest), how should we expect these two to produce next season? Let’s look at some comparable pitchers.

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Imagine if, for some reason, you completely missed Game 7. Not only did you miss it — you didn’t hear anything about it, from friends or from family or from the Internet. You get home, and this is the first thing you see:

What on earth has to be going through your mind? It requires special circumstances for a third-base coach to end up with a postgame interview. And why is this one smiling? He must’ve made one hell of a decision. You know what the rules are, with regard to attention paid to base coaches. They only get it when they’ve done something controversial.

People want there to be a controversy here. The way the World Series ended was final, conclusive. Salvador Perez, 100% absolutely, made the last out on a foul pop-up. There is no what-might-have-been with Perez’s at-bat. So many have turned to the play before, when Alex Gordon was stopped at third after sprinting on a single and an error. It’s a frantic search for closure that resembles a frantic avoidance of such, and without any doubt in my mind, if Gordon had been waved around, it would’ve made for an all-time moment regardless. But while we can’t say for sure that Gordon would’ve been toast, since the play never happened, it sure seems to me the odds were too strongly against him. Mike Jirschele did the smart thing, and Alex Gordon did the smart thing, and Salvador Perez did the following thing. Barring a miracle, sending Gordon would’ve just ended the game a few minutes sooner.

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