Player Valuation Analyst

The Pirates Why

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a storied franchise in Major League Baseball who are reinventing themselves on every level. Boldly and relentlessly pursuing excellence by:

• purposefully developing a player and people-centered culture;
• deeply connecting with our fans, partners, and colleagues;
• passionately creating lifetime memories for generations of families and friends; and
• meaningfully impacting our communities and the game of baseball.

At the Pirates, we believe in the power of a diverse workforce and strive to create an inclusive culture centered in Passion, Innovation, Respect, Accountability, Teamwork, Empathy, and Service.

Job Summary

The Pittsburgh Pirates are currently seeking a full-time Analyst to join their Professional Player Valuation team. The Professional Player Valuation team is responsible for producing internal valuations of players and for communicating the insights from their research to others within Baseball Operations. In this role, you will have the ability to influence roster construction and to see the impact of your work on the field. This role will provide candidates with opportunities for growth and the ability to learn from others throughout the organization.

When you submit your application, please include an original piece of research, or a project you have worked on, that you feel is relevant to this position. There is no expectation that this research/project is baseball specific. While not essential for consideration, priority will be given to applicants who submit a sample of their work.

Primary Role Responsibilities:

• Serve as the primary analyst for a subset of the professional player population
• Collaborate with other areas of Baseball Operations on the assessment of professional players
• Assist in the building of models and tools to aid in player skill assessment discussions
• Prepare tools, visualizations, and reports to aid in disseminating information throughout Baseball Operations
• Answer research questions that you think will add value to the organization, as well as those requested by department leadership and other within Baseball Operations

Involvement In:

• Trade deadline meetings.
• Off-season strategy meetings.
• Roster management discussions.

Required:

1. Authorized to work lawfully in the United States.
2. Expertise with R, Python, or Stan
3. Ability to generate insights with testable predictions from complex data sets
4. Experience with programming data visualizations (Rshiny, Ggplot, or equivalent)
5. Demonstrated ability to explain complex models and ideas clearly and succinctly
6. Proficiency in SQL to perform data manipulation with an understanding or relational database structures
7. An understanding of skill-acquisition and development concepts and their applications

Desired:

1. Strong interpersonal skills to communicate effectively with a wide range of individuals throughout the Baseball Operations department
2. Passion for learning, especially in areas outside of individual expertise
3. Ability to apply insights from external fields to baseball. Examples include, but are not limited to, computer science, kinesiology, machine-learning, physics, or psychology
4. Initiative to seek out and perform research on topics of personal interest

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Pittsburgh Pirates.

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Atlanta Braves.

Batters

If you’re wondering why Steve Cohen was willing to spend the GDP of a Pacific island nation on the 2023 Mets, you’re looking at the most compelling reason. The Phillies made the splash by bringing in Trea Turner, but that roster simply doesn’t cause terror in the eyes of their opponents. This one does.

What makes the Braves especially scary? A lot of times when you see a lineup this good, it’s a team full of guys nearing free agency, sure to depart due to the cost of keeping the band together. But these aren’t The Beatles of Abbey Road or Let It Be; Atlanta is still in the Revolver phase. Dansby Swanson was the one guy who departed, and though Vaughn Grissom is a projected downgrade, he still looks like a league-average player, which the Braves will be perfectly content with. In any case, Kyle Wright got Shelby Miller as his top comp, so maybe they can trade him for a new Swanson at some point!

Like the Mariners, the Braves do have that one unfortunate spot in left field. The combination of Eddie Rosario and assorted others feels out of place with the rest of the lineup, as if the Braves suddenly forgot the DH position existed and had to scramble internally once the local press noted that Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabadoo didn’t sound like the name of a real player. As such, it would be nice if they added another outfielder, simply for depth, though it’s not strictly necessary unless an emergency situation happens, such as the loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. or Michael Harris II to injury. Yes, the Braves are an elite team with a lineup hole, but with players in the top tier at catcher, first, third, center field, and right field, and certainly a chance of that at second, this is a filthy batting order regardless.

Pitchers

The rotation isn’t as exciting as the lineup, especially after Max Fried and Spencer Strider, but the Braves get some very solid projections here. There are questions about the three pitchers in the back end of the rotation: can Wright repeat? Does Charlie Morton have a bounceback left? Can Mike Soroka stay healthy?

ZiPS is cautiously optimistic about all three of them, but the projections do like quite a few of the pitchers the Braves have in reserve. It sees Ian Anderson and Bryce Elder as legitimate major league starters and has a lot of positive math-generated feelings about Jared Shuster and Kolby Allard. Huascar Ynoa would have been included in that final group of reinforcements if not for Tommy John surgery already all but ending his 2023.

Even with the loss of Tyler Matzek to Tommy John surgery, the bullpen remains incredibly deep. Here’s a game to play: go down our depth chart for the Braves and find the names that ZiPS sees with an ERA+ under 100.

[…]
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[…]
(eats a taco)
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[…]
[…]

You don’t get a reliever ZiPS doesn’t like — or even one with a projected ERA+ under 110 — until you get down to the eighth man on the depth chart, Dennis Santana. Go farther down and there’s still Nick Anderson (projected ERA+ of 111), Jesse Chavez (102), Jackson Stephens (106), Seth Elledge (100), Victor Vodnik (104), and Michael Tonkin (107) to go. The Gwinnett Stripers might have the 20th-best bullpen in the majors in 2023.

It’s not just ZiPS liking Atlanta because Alex Anthopoulos secretly deposits gold into my accounts in the Caymans; Steamer also ranks the Braves as having the top bullpen in baseball. The WAR projection on the depth chart would have been even better but for the fact that ZiPS uses leverage index and automatically had to reduce the projected leverage index of some of the pitchers, as there just weren’t enough high-leverage appearances to go around for everyone.

The Braves ought to be one of the teams competing to lead the majors in wins in 2023. And ZiPS believes they have the highest floor of all the reasonable contenders — the Mets, Cardinals, Dodgers, Padres, Yankees, Blue Jays, and Astros. This is an excellent team.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2023 due to injury, and players who were released in 2022. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Death Dixieland Bubblegum Ska-Funk band, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.22, above 2022’s level of offense but lower than other years. Pitchers who appear to have a fairly definite change in the majors from start-to-relief or vice-versa from these projections will receive reconfigured updates in the spring.

Hitters are ranked by 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 that appear in the 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.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by flaws in the physical reality of the universe or by skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter.

Last season was a fun one for the Baltimore Orioles. Coming off of five straight sub-.500 seasons and a particularly torturous 110-loss campaign, the Birds had a 24-35 record before starting to turn things around in late June. Just before the All-Star break, they went on an improbable 10-game winning streak to jump over .500, and after the break, they kept the momentum moving their way, even making a short-lived run at the third American League Wild Card spot (they ultimately fell just three games short). It started to look like the dawn of a new era in Baltimore, and much of the spark came from a revamped lineup. Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson made their highly anticipated big league debuts and did not disappoint – particularly the former, who turned in one of the finest rookie seasons by a catcher in recent memory. Cedric Mullins followed up his breakout 2021 with another solid season. Anthony Santander set a new career high with a team-leading 33 home runs. And then there was Ryan Mountcastle.

After leading the Orioles with 33 homers and 89 RBI in 2021 in his full-season debut, Mountcastle’s offensive production faded last season. He hit just 22 home runs, while his slugging dropped from .487 to .423, his wOBA from .335 to .316, and his wRC+ from 111 to 106. His defense improved enough to allow him to reach 1.6 WAR, a new career high, but for a player whose calling card is power, his waning surface-level thump was at least indicative of a sophomore slump and at most a cause for concern.

But Mountcastle’s Statcast profile and expected stats tell an entirely different story. In 2021, the slugger was in the middle of the pack, with an average exit velocity of 89.1 mph (45th percentile) and a 39.7% hard-hit rate (41st); his .245 xBA and .326 xwOBA placed him in the 36th and 47th percentiles, respectively. By these measures, his 2022 was one of the better year-over-year improvements in baseball. He added 2.2 mph to his average exit velocity, the seventh-largest increase among players who qualified in both years, and 6.6 percentage points to his hard-hit rate, the sixth-most in that group. Just four hitters added more to their xBAs than his .032 points, and the only hitters who managed to improve their xwOBAs more than his .036-point jump were Yordan Alvarez (.073), Christian Walker (.048), and Aaron Judge (.045). His was one of just 40 player-seasons in the Statcast era with 60-plus barrels. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday’s trade that saw Pablo López and a pair of prospects go from Miami to Minnesota in exchange for Luis Arraez made sense for both teams. The Twins, who my colleague Ben Clemens wrote got the better of the deal, received a quality pitcher who will slot into their starting rotation, plus the promising-but-raw minor-leaguers. The Marlins got a 25-year-old infielder who just won a batting title and is a .314/.374/.410 hitter over 1,569 big-league plate appearances.

Miami’s top prospect is a big reason why parting with a pitcher of López’s quality is perfectly defensible. While recently-signed Johnny Cueto will take Lopez’s rotation spot in the near term, it is Eury Pérez who promises to make an already-good rotation even better. Arguably the best right-handed pitching prospect in the game — Baltimore’s Grayson Rodriguez and Philadelphia’s Andrew Painter are also on the short-list — Pérez has a Sandy Alcántara-ish ceiling. The 6-foot-8 native of Santiago, Dominican Republic excelled in Double-A this past year as a teenager, and there is a real chance that he’ll reach the big leagues at age 20.

“This kid just has an incredible presence about him,” said Miami GM Kim Ng. “His fastball is 96-99 [mph] with ride, and he’s got a really good breaking ball. And again, the presence, as well as the poise, is unbelievable. He’s not talented beyond imagination, but it’s close.”

Asked who the youngster comps to, Ng initially demurred. As she pointed out, not many pitching prospects are Pérez’s size. When she did ultimately offer a name, it was a notable one. Read the rest of this entry »

Trades aren’t inevitable. We hear rumors of some player being on the block all the time. Sometimes, that ends in an actual trade. Frequently, though, it ends in nothing: some team shops a mystery player around, no one bites, and then everyone goes about their business as if the initial trade rumor never happened. But sometimes the rumors are just so strong that they’re bound to come true eventually. To pick a name at random (note: not random), the Marlins have reportedly been looking to trade Pablo López for eons. They can’t hit, they have plenty of starting pitchers, and López seems like the best trade option when considering the combination of potential return and expendability.

Likewise, Luis Arraez has intermittently been the subject of trade speculation. He’s a good hitter and versatile defender, but the Twins have enough infielders that they’ve been reduced to playing the 5-foot-10 (generously) Arraez at first base. When Carlos Correa returned to the fold, it looked like another year of Arraez at first base, so it didn’t take a rocket scientist to surmise that the Twins might look to move an infielder. They needed pitching. The Marlins needed hitting and crave contact ability. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an exceedingly movable object? The trade that had to happen, of course.

As Jeff Passan reported, Luis Arraez is now a Marlin after the Twins traded him for López and two prospects: Jose Salas and Byron Chourio. Both Arraez and López are the kind of player that smart front offices love to build around. They have multiple years of team control remaining at below-market rates thanks to the arbitration process. They’re both borderline All-Stars, and both have utility on more or less any team — Arraez because of his versatility and López because everyone needs pitching. Players like these two form the backbone of every sustainable winner, so it’s no surprise that each team demanded such a player when trading one away. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past five seasons, Brian Anderson has been one of the few steady presences on the Marlins. With a long list of big names leaving town semi-regularly, one of the only things fans in Miami could count on was seeing Anderson’s name every day somewhere in the middle of Don Mattingly’s lineup card. But after starting just 155 games over the past two seasons and suffering numerous injuries, Miami’s front office decided to let him go too, non-tendering him into free agency. And now he is taking his talents to Milwaukee, inking a one-year deal with the Brewers worth $3.5 million.

From 2018 to ’20, Anderson was a consistently above-average performer, with a 115 wRC+ and 7.3 WAR across 341 games. He did basically everything at a solid or better level: he drew his fair share of walks (and was plunked a non-insignificant number of times), his strikeouts weren’t a problem, and while his plus raw power didn’t fully actualize due to a high groundball rate and the unforgiving dimensions of his home ballpark, he still slugged 44 homers during that stretch. He basically defined what it meant to have 50 or 55 grades on every offensive skill, making him successful all around.

After an uneven 2021 season and a left shoulder injury that required offseason surgery, Anderson’s production seemed to rebound at the beginning of 2022. He missed most of June with a back issue but had a very solid 117 wRC+ through the All-Star break, right in line with his best seasons. But on July 23, Anderson dove for a ground ball and landed on his left shoulder — his third left shoulder injury in a little over a year, and one that landed him on the IL for three weeks. After returning, his numbers fell significantly below his career norms, as he slashed just .188/.276/.318 in 174 plate appearances the rest of the way. This prolonged slump dropped his season wRC+ to 90, setting a career low for the second consecutive year. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

With his wiry frame, Rockette-like leg kick, and flowing blond locks — once upon a time, braided into cornrows — Bronson Arroyo certainly cut a memorable figure on the mound. The tall right-hander (sources ranged between 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-5) made just one All-Star team while spending parts of 16 seasons in the majors from 2000–17, but he established himself as one of the game’s most durable workhorses while pitching for several contenders, first in Boston, where he was part of the drought-ending 2004 champions (and the last player active from that team), and then in Cincinnati.

Arroyo didn’t have dominant stuff. In fact, based on data going back to 2002 from Baseball Info Solutions, his average fastball velocity never cracked 90 mph, but the combination of his breaking and offspeed pitches and the deception produced by his delivery and variable release points helped him produce plenty of soft contact. He was among the game’s best at generating pop ups and suppressing batting average on balls in play.

A willingness to improvise helped. “Maybe I’ve never thrown a fricking sidearm changeup, but you know what, I can’t get this m———– out, so I’m going to throw him a sidearm changeup and get him out,” Arroyo told Sports Illustrated’s Ben Reiter in 2013. “To be honest with you, there ain’t many people who have ever played this game who are going to keep up with me mentally, picking hitters apart with the s— that I have.” Read the rest of this entry »

Owen Caissie has a high ceiling and a long way to go to reach it. Acquired by the Chicago Cubs from the San Diego Padres as part of the December 2020 Yu Darvish deal, the left-handed-hitting outfielder is 20 years old and has just 159 professional games under his belt. Moreover, he was drafted out of cold-weather Burlington, Ontario. As Eric Longenhagen noted when ranking the 2020 second-rounder No. 3 on last year’s Cubs Top Prospects list (and just outside of our overall Top 100), Caissie “had never played a night game in his life until the Arizona Complex League opener in 2021.”

Looking mostly at the raw numbers, Caissie’s future looks less sunny than it did prior to last season. Playing in High-A South Bend, he slashed an uninspiring .254/.349/.402 with 11 home runs in 433 plate appearances, and that was followed by an even more lackluster .220/.270/.356 line in the Arizona Fall League. Perspective is needed; Caissie was a teenager for the first half of the season, and his tools, originally crafted in Canada, are both projectable and loud. He simply remains relatively raw.

Caissie, who is listed at 6-foot-4, 190 pounds, discussed his early-career development during his stint in the AFL.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your development as a hitter. How have you evolved since entering pro ball?

Owen Caissie: “I feel like what has changed the most is… I mean, I did make some swing adjustments. When I got drafted, I was kind of bent down, and now I’m straight up. But what’s really changed is my approach, my pitch selection, my ability to kind of keyhole the ball in the middle. I’ve never read my scouting report. I wouldn’t even know how to get to it. But there are obviously holes in my game that I need to close up.”

Laurila: What type of hitter do you consider yourself?

Caissie: “I like to classify myself as a hitter over a power hitter. At least that’s what I try to be.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since breaking into the big leagues back in 2011, Lance Lynn has featured one of the most fastball-heavy approaches in the majors. Now, that’s a little reductive, as he throws three different fastballs that he can ride, cut, or sink depending on what the situation calls for. Still, over 80% of the pitches he’s thrown in his career have been classified as a four-seamer, sinker, or cutter; that’s the third-highest rate of hard stuff thrown by a starter since his debut. And Lynn’s approach has only been amplified in recent seasons. In the last five years, over 85% of his pitches have been fastballs; no other pitcher has crossed the 80% mark.

When Lynn isn’t throwing a heater, he mixes in a curveball and a changeup, though neither pitch has been all that effective during his career. His four-seamer is a devastating pitch up in the zone, and his cutter and sinker allow him to work laterally to either side of the plate if needed. Utilizing all three of his fastballs effectively leaves little room for secondary offerings in his pitch mix. Why change an approach that’s worked for more than a decade?

Baseball is a game of constant adjustments, particularly in the context of the pitcher-batter duel at its center. In December, after announcing he’ll be pitching for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic, Lynn gave a fascinating quote about the adjustments he’s had to make in an interview with The Athletic’s James Fegan:

“People get so caught up in ‘Oh, you just throw fastballs.’ If you actually pay attention to the game, there’s speed differentials, there’s bigger breaks or smaller breaks. Part of evolving as a pitcher is giving the hitters different looks. Over time, you’re locking in the things that make you good, and you’ve got to figure out things that are maybe not as good as they can be. Over the last couple of years, Ethan [Katz] and I have been able to really concentrate on grips, different spin axes, and things of that nature that have really helped develop a pitch that comes out of a slot where it gives hitters difficulty.”

Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Miami Marlins.

Batters

Well, I guess we’re getting the bad news out of the way first! There is a lot to like about the Miami Marlins’ roster and almost none of it is contained in this section. I say almost none because Jazz Chisholm Jr. is a very talented player who is a blast to watch when he’s healthy and things are going well. Any pitch he connects with has the potential to be the perfect blend of velocity and launch angle. He combines that offensive ability with decent defense at second base, below-average glove work at short that still avoids being disastrous, and speed that will hopefully remain fully intact in 2023. And while you’ll notice Javier Báez on his comp list, his contact skills are less bleak and he’s nowhere near as over-aggressive.

If Chisholm is the Marlins’ Thelonious Monk, the rest of the lineup is, well, your neighbor’s tone-deaf 10-year-old son who got a guitar for Christmas and suddenly discovered Korn. There’s just no realistic scenario in which the offense is a significant plus for the team. The Fish’s third-best projected hitter is an over-30 catcher who had a .584 OPS last year. Using the ZiPS plate appearances, only four players in the organization project to have a 5% chance of a 4-WAR season in 2023. That’s fewer than teams like the Rockies and Pirates. What makes this especially unforgivable is that the Marlins intend to contend with this team now. There’s nothing wrong with a contender adding Jean Segura, but the team needs so much more than him; he’s not the finishing piece in an otherwise playoff-worthy lineup here. There’s no one in the organization who projects to be a difference-maker in the years before the pitching gets expensive, meaning that there’s no one in the organization who projects to be a difference-maker before Miami trades its pitchers to larger-market teams for prospects. Read the rest of this entry »