After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Colorado Rockies.

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If you’ve already seen the Steamer projections that currently make up our depth charts, you’re probably not surprised by the numbers that ZiPS predicts. You may also not be shocked if you’ve seen the Rockies in recent years, a team with an offense that has been buttressed by a couple of MVP candidates every year, now with those MVP candidates removed from the roster or in their decline phases. Steamer has the Colorado lineup a shocking five wins worse than the next-worst team, Cincinnati; the Reds are closer to the 17th-ranked Phillies than the Rockies.

C.J. Cron was an uncharacteristically clever signing by the Rockies. They actually sought out a type of player who may now be undervalued by the market generally: a league-average first baseman. The problem is that league average is still “just” league average, not something that is the foundation of a solid offense. Cron ought to be decent, Ryan McMahon still has some upside left, and Brendan Rodgers is probably the only Rockie with true breakout potential. Outside of these three players, there’s just not much salvageable about the offense, nor any particular reason for optimism about anyone in the minors in 2022 even moving the needle. There have been some genuinely lousy lineups in baseball that ZiPS has projected, but this might be the most depressing of them.
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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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Philadephia Phillies.

Batters

Perhaps there’s a bit of recency bias in play since I just wrote about them, but the Phillies as an organization feel a lot to me like the Angels do. Both have significant high points on their roster: the Angels with Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, and Anthony Rendon, the Phillies with Bryce Harper, J.T. Realmuto, Aaron Nola, and Zack Wheeler. But both teams share some less desirable qualities: ownership that seems to spend mostly in short bursts; major, obvious holes that go unanswered for years; and an unfortunate lack of reinforcements from the minors.

Entering the 2020 season, the Phillies ranked dead last in our positional rankings in center field. The projection was not far off, as they got a .637 OPS out of the position. They did little to address the problem after 2020, and though they did a better job thwarting the projections than the year before, I doubt anybody seriously thinks Travis Jankowski or Matt Vierling is going to be a great long-term option out there. Odúbel Herrera was already showing decline before his release, and the team has done just about nothing at the position since. In left, Andrew McCutchen was never better than simply a temporary stopgap; now that he’s gone, the Phillies don’t have a better idea. There’s still more of the offseason to come, but as of now, fans should be apprehensive about these two positions.
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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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.

Torii Hunter could go get it. Fluid and graceful while patrolling center field, he was renowned for his leaping, acrobatic catches and his willingness to sacrifice his body. He made a strong enough impression upon those who watched him that he won nine Gold Gloves during his 19-year career, more than all but three center fielders, namely Willie Mays, Ken Griffey Jr., and Andruw Jones. Hunter earned the nickname “Spider-Man” for his ability to climb outfield walls to steal home runs — something he did more than just about anybody else during his career — though one attempt to do so at Fenway Park left him with a broken ankle, and another a concussion.

“I’ll do anything to get that little white ball. I’ll put my life on the line,” Hunter told Sports Illustrated’s Albert Chen in 2005, sounding very much like the football player he was during his high school days in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Hunter rose from difficult circumstances in Pine Bluff, including a father who was addicted to crack cocaine and friends who fell into the dead-end life of drugs, guns, and gangs. His athleticism helped him escape, though when he entered professional baseball as a first-round pick of the Twins in 1993, his talent was more raw than most. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres announced Bob Melvin’s 2022 coaching staff earlier this week, and the group is at once progressive and diverse. Notable among the new hires is 27-year-old hitting coach Michael Brdar, who comes to San Diego via the San Francisco Giants organization. Asked about him in Zoom session, Melvin — himself a newcomer to the club — told reporters that Brdar “Talks a language that I don’t talk; he talks the language that younger hitters are talking now.”

Clarifying that he does “talk it a little bit,” the 60-year-old, three-time Manager of the Year went on to say that “You need to be able reach these guys and speak their language.”

Following up on the question posed by MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell, I asked Melvin how much the hiring process has changed since he first joined the managerial ranks in 2003.

“I came here from Oakland, where we did everything pretty much in-house,” said Melvin, whose 11-year tenure with the A’s followed managerial stints in Seattle and Arizona. “We would look in-house to begin with; that was just kind of how the organization flowed. This was a little bit of a different process, knowing we were probably going to bring some guys in from the outside. We wanted it to be diverse in age, we wanted it to be diverse in thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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.

As I continue to play catch-up with my coverage with the holidays approaching, it makes sense to take a fresh look at a trio of pitchers who have done just enough to remain on the ballot. Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, and Andy Pettitte all cleared the 200-win mark during their exceptional careers while producing some big moments and playing significant roles on championship-winning teams, but none ever won Cy Young awards, produced much black ink, or dominated in the ways that we expect Hall-caliber hurlers to do. When Buehrle and Hudson debuted last year, I was skeptical that they would even clear 5% and retain their eligibility, but with the ballot traffic having thinned out, enough voters — particularly those on ballots that went unpublished — found room for them to do so, though the results were hardly resounding. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels.

Batters

The good news: the Los Angeles Angels have Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. The bad news: the Los Angeles Angels play a sport where you have to give almost as many shots to Luc Longley and Stacey King as Jordan and Pippen. The Angels are a very star-driven team, and if something terrible happens to a star or two, it’s going to be hard to eke out first place in a division with four plausible contenders. If you can ensure that Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, Anthony Rendon, and Noah Syndergaard all have full, healthy seasons, I think this is the team that can make the Astros sweat the most this summer. If not, I think the Angels’ playoff relevance will be on life support by the trade deadline. That is, assuming that Rob Manfred’s dystopian fever dream of every mediocre club getting a chance to knock off a 100-win team in the postseason by winning two of three games comes to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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.

Mark Teixeira was not The Natural, but he was a natural, at least. A switch-hitter who was adept at the game from an early age, he was positioned to be a first-round pick out of high school, but instead went to college, where he became not only the best player in his conference but in the entire country — as a sophomore. Despite missing significant time due to a broken ankle during his junior year, he became a top-five pick, and two years later the game’s number one prospect. Forced to learn a new position upon reaching the majors, he won the first of his five Gold Gloves two years later. Upon reaching free agency at age 28, he received the sport’s fourth-largest contract ever, then helped his team to a championship in the first year of that deal.

Teixeira wasn’t flashy or particularly colorful. He was rarely controversial, except when agent Scott Boras was locking horns with owners and general managers on his behalf. He was especially consistent at the plate, reeling off eight straight seasons with 30 homers, 100 RBI, and an OPS+ of at least 120; during his 14-year career (2003-16) with the Rangers, Braves, Angels, and Yankees, only Miguel Cabrera, David Ortiz, and Albert Pujols had more such seasons, and only Pujols did so while playing good defense. That Teixeira kept his streak intact despite changing teams three times in a three-year span from 2007-09 was a testament to his focus and professionalism.

Through his 20s and perhaps even his early 30s, Teixeira appeared to have a shot at making it to Cooperstown. But between the trend towards defensive shifts against pull hitters and a seemingly endless string of injuries — calf, wrist, shin, neck, knee — he was derailed in his mid-30s, and chose to walk away upon completing his eight-year contract with the Yankees. Retiring at 36 years old left his career totals short of the type of numbers that would generate consideration for Cooperstown; indeed, through 52 ballots published thus far in the Ballot Tracker, he’s received just one vote. Still, it’s worth remembering what he did accomplish in his exceptional career. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

Can we just say 87 wins and call it a day? It feels like that’s what I’ve been projecting for the Cardinals for the last 15 years or so. That’s an exaggeration, but not an extreme one: ZiPS hasn’t projected St. Louis outside the 85–90 win range in a full season since 2011. Going back to the first official ZiPS team standings in 2005 — I only did players in the first couple of years — the team’s projections have been below .500 once (2008) and above 90 wins once (2010).

The lineup rarely has superstars at the top, but the Cards have a knack for keeping their floor incredibly high. Does that line sound familiar? It might; it’s what I wrote last year. And it still applies today. For a while, it looked like it wouldn’t happen in 2021, with the team 44-47 right around the All-Star break. Now, if you still considered the Cardinals an 89-win team or thereabouts, the normal thinking would have been to say, “Oh, OK, so they’ll play at an 89-win pace the rest of the way and finish around .500.” But the Cards care not for you and your fancy-pants Gambler’s Fallacy. After a loss against the Kansas City Royals on August 8, St. Louis stood at 55-56. This was the last time they were below .500, as they went 35-16 the rest of the way, capped by a 17-game winning streak in mid-September. The Cards didn’t just sneak back into the Wild Card conversation; they talked over the Padres and Reds and flipped the table, spilling all the hors d’oeuvres onto the floor. In the end, they made the playoffs with seven games to spare. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, sinkers. Wait three years, and the “smart” view of them will change. In the early 2010s, they were the coolest. A few years later, they were a laughingstock, a sure way to make your franchise seem old-fashioned. Between 2015 and 2019, the league abandoned sinkers (and two-seam fastballs, which I’m including in today’s analysis) en masse. In the former, pitchers threw 148,000 sinkers. By the latter, that number fell to 116,000. That trend is still ongoing; 2021 saw only 109,000 sinkers.

Despite the downward trend in usage, sinkers are cool again. When the league switched to Hawkeye tracking technology in 2020, the public could suddenly see the impact of seam-shifted wake, an effect that creates movement that previously wasn’t being measured. Pure transverse spin — like a backspinning four-seam fastball — is one way to create movement. Seam-shifted wake is another, and sinkers have it in spades, though they also generate plenty of movement from spin.

What does that word salad mean? Basically, sinkers drop and fade more than you would expect given the spin that pitchers impart on them. It’s not like sinkers started moving more in 2020 when cameras caught this effect, but quantifying something makes it easier to look for and teach.
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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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.

In my previous multi-candidate roundup, I lumped together four 10th-year candidates — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa — about whom there’s little left to be said at the tail end of a decade’s worth of debate, and few minds likely to be changed. Three of those candidates were linked to PEDs, and all four have some pretty dark corners beyond the baseball diamond. As a means of completing my coverage of the major candidates before the December 31 voting deadline, it made sense to group them into a single overview while inviting those readers wishing to (re)familiarize themselves with the specifics of their cases to check out last year’s profiles.

As the holiday season approaches, I’m still playing catch-up with my coverage, but the two candidates in this roundup don’t have the same type of underlying connections. Both hit a lot of homers during their long careers, both were sometimes overshadowed by more famous teammates, and both have struggled to generate a ton of support through multiple election cycles to the point that neither is likely to get to 75% via the writers before their 10 years run out. Beyond that, they’re very different players and cases.
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