After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Boston Red Sox. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
In Stephen Drew, Jacoby Ellsbury, Mike Napoli, and Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Boston has lost to free agency a foursome that accounted for over 2100 plate appearances and 16 wins in the club’s championship 2013 campaign. A difficult thing, is what that would appear to be. One notes, however, that a team never loses a departed player’s performance from the previous season, but from the one ahead. Napoli and Saltalamacchia, for example, are unlikely to match their plus-.350 BABIP figures from 2013. ZiPS discounts their likely 2014 value accordingly.

One notes also that Boston isn’t entirely ill-equipped to deal with those departures. Two of the organization’s more promising young players, Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley, appear to be reasonable — and very cost-effective — alternatives to Drew and Ellsbury. A.J. Pierzynski, meanwhile — whose signing was announced as this actual paragraph was being written — will likely provide as much in the way of wins as Saltalamacchia would have, with less of an investment. Some combination of Mike Carp and Daniel Nava ought to approximate Napoli’s two-win projection at first base. All told, the Red Sox are probably at a deficit of something like two wins.

This, of course, ignores how Boston might choose to utilize the payroll freed up by the aforementioned departures. That same foursome was paid about $30 million collectively in 2013. With a well-established starting rotation, Boston is in a position to focus its resources on upgrades among its field players. Pierzynski is one step in that direction. One supposes that an upgrade at first base/left field could be another.

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The Phillies re-signed Carlos Ruiz to a 3-year, $26 million deal. Also: Brayan Pena and Geovany Soto have locked down their 2014 teams (the Royals Reds and Rangers respectively). And now it appears Jose Molina is in the final stages of returning to St. Pete for another two years of expertly framed and eh, who cares about blocking? pitches.

So where does that leave the catching market? As far as I have seen, the Yankees, Red Sox, Rockies, Angels, Rangers (still), Blue Jays and Twins have all been connected with free agent catchers on MLBTR. Using their handy free agents leaderboards (with a few additions), we can examine the remaining free agent catchers and try our hand at predicting the right fits for each.
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The 2013 season was a banner season for players going on the disabled list. The DL was utilized 2,538 times, which was 17 more than the previous 2008 high. In all, players spent 29,504 days on the DL which is 363 days more than in 2007. Today, I take a quick look at the 2013 DL data and how it compares to previous seasons.

To get the DL data, I used MLB’s Transaction data. After wasting too many hours going through the data by hand, I have the completed dataset available for public consumption.  Enjoy it, along with the DL data from previous seasons. Finally, please let me know of any discrepancies so I can make any corrections.

With the data, it is time to create some graphs. As stated previously, the 2013 season set all-time marks in days lost and stints. Graphically, here is how the data has trended since 2002:

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The posting system — the agreement that governs player movement between the teams of Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan and Major League Baseball in America — looks like it’ll be changing this winter. We tackled the reasons why this might happen during the first round of rumors, but it’s worth revisiting now that more particulars are coming to light.

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There’s an interesting comparison to be made between Jacoby Ellsbury and Michael Bourn, which is why I’m beginning this post with a couple paragraphs about Bourn before moving on to the meat. Bourn, you’ll remember, was a free agent just last offseason, and while he didn’t bring star power to the table, it would’ve looked like he did just by WAR alone. The big draw was supposed to be Bourn’s legs. Agent Scott Boras called him “by far the best defensive center fielder in the game.” He could run on the grass, he could run on the dirt, and he was a leadoff hitter who hardly embarrassed himself with the stick. Bourn was to be a fine hitter who really excelled in other areas.

There’s one thing, though, that did and still does get me fascinated. Bourn’s a little guy, and he doesn’t hit for pop. His spray charts convey as much, occasional dinger be damned. You don’t sign Michael Bourn in order for him to drive multiple runners to the plate at a time. But I played around on the ESPN Home Run Tracker, and according to the site, in April 2009, Bourn hit a home run 457 feet. Or, 456 feet, under standard conditions. He’s never come close to reaching that distance otherwise, which is a big reason why that discovery came as such a shock, but the way I took it was that that established a ceiling. Somewhere in there is a hitter capable of hitting a baseball 450 feet, because Bourn had done it before in a game, once. Maybe that’s a stretch, but then it’s a tough homer to fake.

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Standing in between Arizona Fall League All-Star teammates Byron Buxton and man-child Jorge Alfaro is Boston’s soon-to-be-star: Mookie Betts. Maybe you didn’t notice the 5’9″ second baseman or his less-than-impressive numbers when you were scanning the AFL leaders, but that would be a mistake. Because the last time he struggled, he made adjustments and went on a tear that will have him zooming up prospect lists this winter.

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The 2013 postseason was a wild ride. We witnessed crazy endings, ill-timed errors, bizarre managerial gaffes, and plenty of the usual heroics. Perhaps you may be interested to learn how certain plays affected a team’s odds of winning the World Series. Luckily, we have a stat for that.

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The Hall of Fame buzz around David Ortiz is understandable given the amazing World Series he just had. With few exceptions, Ortiz has been an outstanding hitter since coming to Boston in 2003, a performance that will certainly make him an intriguing candidate for the Hall of Fame. I do not know whether he will get elected to the Hall, and there are others who are good at such analysis.

But when we as fans argue about the Hall of Fame, we mostly argue about whether a player should go into the Hall of Fame. In this context. Ortiz’s career usually draws comparisons of his career numbers with other players who were primarily DHs like Frank Thomas and (more often) Edgar Martinez. Obviously, this is not an either/or proposition. Just because Thomas and Martinez are (in my mind) clearly worthy of enshrinement does not mean Ortiz cannot be. Thus the “Edgar first” position is not all that interesting to me.

I do happen to believe that Thomas and Martinez are worthy and that Ortiz is not, but rather than getting into that way of looking at the issue , I want to take a different approach. If Ortiz’s career to date makes him worthy of being in the Hall of Fame, what other players might also be worthy based on their numbers? Exactly how large are Ortiz’s advocates willing to make the Hall?

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On Oct. 1, 2011, Koji Uehara made his playoff debut and pitched in relief for the Rangers. He faced three batters, retiring none and allowing a dinger. In his next appearance in the playoffs, after ten days, he allowed a dinger. In his next appearance in the playoffs, he allowed a dinger. Uehara wouldn’t pitch again in that postseason, having completely lost Ron Washington’s trust. That is, if he ever had it. It felt like Uehara and the Rangers was never a marriage; rather, they were assigned lab partners, thinking wistfully of other lab partners. They didn’t work well together, and that’s half the reason the Rangers regret giving up Tommy Hunter and Chris Davis.

These days it’s impossible to imagine that version of Uehara ever existed. A vulnerable version, even if the extent of his vulnerability was a wee bit exaggerated. Uehara has always been good, but you might not even realize just how amazing he was with the Red Sox. He allowed a .400 OPS. His OPS allowed was almost half that down the stretch. FOX liked to show a graphic saying that Uehara had walked one batter since the All-Star break. That held true all the way through the playoffs, in which Uehara pitched 13 times, facing 46 batters, walking none, whiffing 16. In the playoffs he allowed a .413 OPS. That’s actually worse than what he allowed in the season.

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In the little picture, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The better baseball team clinched the World Series, on its own home field. One of the truths about the MLB playoffs is that the format doesn’t always reward the best team in baseball. This time, though, the Red Sox have a hell of an argument, and they’re a more than deserving champion. In the big picture, also, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The Red Sox won their third title in a decade. They’re always thought of as a powerhouse. The magic is in the medium picture. The picture in which you realize the Red Sox did go from worst to first. Just one season ago, the Red Sox lost 93 games. This season, the Mariners lost 91 games. The Mets lost 88 games. The Padres lost 86 games. There was a lot of talent already in place, but the Red Sox badly needed some work, and the franchise identity shouldn’t blind people to the near improbability of the turnaround. No World Series champion has ever had a worse previous season.

For Sox fans, this was another opportunity to celebrate, and an opportunity to celebrate a Series win at home for the first time in almost a century. For Sox fans and all other fans too, this made for a relatively stress-free game by the middle innings. The top of the seventh offered a glimpse of possible stress, but there was no real stress to be felt after the Sox went up 3-0 in the third and double that in the fourth. Stephen Drew’s homer put Boston’s win expectancy over 90% and it never sank back down below. For several innings, the Sox all but had the clincher in the bag, after chasing the un-chase-able Michael Wacha.

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