Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 2/20/26

Dan Szymborski: Sorry, technical diffculties

Jeff: In your 2026 prospects article, you mentioned that Zips is aware of postseason performance. I agree with this approach. Can you share how you decided to include this data?  It seems to me that many other projection systems do not include post season information.

Dan Szymborski: I just tested it and it was slightly helpful!

Dan Szymborski: I mean it wasn’t going to be a game-changer since it’s not enough games

Dan Szymborski: But isn’t it weird that we don’t “count” the most important games against the best quality opposition?

Dan Szymborski: So, naturally, I tested for it

War2D2: Dan! Real live baseball is going to be broadcast today! Do you plan on watching anything? Any particular spring training position battles that have piqued your interest?

Dan Szymborski: Too early for brain to work! I’ve been finishing up a piece and am working on a mailbag question, so haven’t even LOOKED at the schedule

mindaugas: Hey Dan!  Didn’t you once say that one of your close relatives was Lithuanian?  I went to a concert at The Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania last night and the ambassador was kind enough to take a selfie with me, my brother and the piano player. My Lithuanian was poor but good enough to get by.

Dan Szymborski: No, I have two German grandparents, a Polish grandparent, and a Ukrainian grandparent. Oddly enough, the Ukrainian grandparent was of Sephardi descent, and got there FROM Spain

Mike Elias’s Booger: How much does Westburg’s injury impact Baltimore’s ZiPS?

Dan Szymborski: Not by a ton, though it does affect their depth

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS likes Blaze Alexander. Not enough to be a full replacement for Westburg, but to keep it from being too painful

Guest: Fist timer !!

Dan Szymborski: I won’t make the 12-year-old joke

Dansby Swansong: Will Meyer replacing Clark have any significant impact on the CBA negotiations?

Dan Szymborski: PROBABLY not

Dan Szymborski: My impression is that Meyer is a fighter (in a good way), but he was always going to be a highly influential fighter, I believe

Dan Szymborski: At the end, it’ll still come down to what the players are willing to do

Ooommppphhhh: Long term in mind, Is Max Clark or Kevin Mcgonigle considered to be superior prospect ? Is Clark built more on hype ?  What are there major league comparables looks wise ?

Dan Szymborski: I’ll say McGonigle since he hasn’t conclusively shown he ISNT a shortstop

JC: We reject your tariffs Dan

ChuckNChino: Any thoughts on the Supreme Court ruling?

Dan Szymborski: Hey, I’m a free trade guy!

Dan Szymborski: Haven’t read the decision

Dan Szymborski: My whole ethos is in favor of voluntary interactions between freely consenting parties

Westburg: First they came for our hamates, and I did nothing…

IRobot: Couldn’t AI help you with your ZIPS stuff — there has to be something you could offload to it, right?

Dan Szymborski: I really only use it to check code. If it could help with something, I’m not clever enough to know what it is

Dan Szymborski: See, for me, AI isn’t a work tool

Dan Szymborski: it’s a tool for two purposes: One, I like to simply test what it CAN do competently, out of sheer curiosity. And two, to make amusing stuff that I can’t do on my own to amuse, well, myself

Dan Szymborski: Like, I can write a tune and lyrics and play a piano, and even enough music theory that I can write a passable fugue, but I don’t have a band, and my singing voice is about that of a walrus having its neck slashed by a serial killer

jd: Dan, I’m confused about the Off stat on the zips projections. Does it stand for total offensive stats combined vs. others?

Dan Szymborski: It’s just offensive runs relative to overall average, calculated in the way FanGraphs does

A Boy Named Yu: Once Yu Darvish retires, do I have to change my screenname?

Dan Szymborski: I mean, if he doesn’t have to change his name, I don’t think you need to

robertobeers: Trying to come up with other hall-of-fame starters who made playoff appearances the previous year that would still be unsigned as spring training begins… what’s up with Max?

Dan Szymborski: Problem is that he’s not obviously good

A Boy Named Yu: Do you have any info concerning the delay in players obtaining visas to return for spring training?  I.e. Ballesteros, Bethancourt?

Dan Szymborski: I do not

jjs: How many gms do the Tigers win the Central by??

Dan Szymborski: 5

Kevin: Which teams do you think have the most impactful ZiPS-like system for their own internal use?

Dan Szymborski: This, I really can’t say, simply because a number of teams directly use ZiPS

Dan Szymborski: and the ones that don’t haven’t volunteered anything to me

Dan Szymborski: Well, mostly

Guest: Have you ever played a board game with Keith Law?

Dan Szymborski: I have not. Not that I would be opposed to it!

Dan Szymborski: Would’ve been fun at those ESPN conferences I used to go to for baseball writers, but Keith was never at the ones I went to

A Boy Named Yu: Do you remember Wander Javier being THE Wander before Wander Franco?  Pepperidge Farms remembers…

Dan Szymborski: Wander Suero was a World Series champion!

Oaktown Blues: The postseason performance that ZiPS is aware of includes minor league postseason, right?

Dan Szymborski: yes

A Boy Named Yu: If Johnathon Long of the Cubs has a good spring training while Tyler Austin scuffles, what are the chances they break camp with Long instead?

Dan Szymborski: I think fairly low

Dan Szymborski: Austin’s going to be a role player, and if you like what Long does, you want him playing full time

Surplus Valuez = Stolen Wages: How do we move the rhetoric of the sports fans away from all conclusions either being “unprovenz” and/or “overpaidz(!)”? What was the point of the Moneyballz era lol?

Dan Szymborski: We’re better there than 20 years ago!

A Boy Named Yu: Thoughts on baseball in the Olympics now that the WBC has a decent foothold?

A Boy Named Yu: Is there any gas station food that you trust?

Dan Szymborski: dangit yu, I’m going to have to answer other Qs soon!

Dan Szymborski: I was never big on Olympics baseball. I think the WBC is better than Olympics baseball would be

Dan Szymborski: and Olympics come at wrong time of the year

Dan Szymborski: Frankly, I like seeing sports at the olympics that ARENT the big sports

Dan Szymborski: And baseball is the sport that probalby gets the least benefit

Dan Szymborski: Since MLB is already an international league

Surplus Valuez = Stolen Wages: Why are we all so docile and submissive to power? Its tragicomic when you consider how badass a standard issue westerner sees themselves

Dan Szymborski: The cushier you are, the easier it is to go along with things

GBS42: Which is more awful “chili,” Skyline or Gold Star? This assumes you’ve subjected your taste buds to both, which I understand could be a very incorrect assumption.

Dan Szymborski: I have tried both, and I disliked Gold Star slightly less

Cubs Fan, ZiPS Man: They should let Dan Szymborski play the organ for a game at Wrigley once.

Dan Szymborski: I could go for that!

Dan Szymborski: I’ve played full pipe organs with pedalboard

Dan Szymborski: and when I was in college, they’d let me play the big pipe organ in the chapel if nothing was going on in there

Dan Szymborski: though by “let me” I think it’s just that nobody actually OBJECTED to it. Because now that I think of it, I didn’t really ask for permission

Ryan D: Hi Dan – what does your data infrastructure look like for ZIPS? Do you have a relational database somewhere that you query against or what? Super interested how baseball writers actually work with all the sources etc

Dan Szymborski: I do keep a proper relational database!

Dan Szymborski: But I use excel and visual basic for a lot of stuff that comes from it

Dan Szymborski: As analysts go, I’m actually surprisingly low-tech

Patholer: For your ZiPS lookbacks, do you sort your misses by injury v. non-injury?

Dan Szymborski: I do

Dan Norman Lear: How you feeling about George Valera, the Comeback Kid?

Dan Szymborski: i’m wait and see. it wasn’t like he played a LOT in 2025

drplantwrench: this will probably get stones thrown at me, but as a coder i find AI extremely overrated

Dan Szymborski: The thing is, AI is a lot less popular with the public. Because unlike me, the vast majority don’t use it for personal amusement

Dan Szymborski: Like, I can have AI write a Broadway villain song for FanGraphs. But if I were funding an *actual* Broadway production, I’d fund ACTUAL songwriters

SD: Worried about Freddy Peralta regression? Crazy BABIP and LOB numbers last year that I didnt realize- Mets Fan

Dan Szymborski: Some, but he should still be really good

smirnov: I like chess, as you do.  It’s been years, but now that I’m retired, I’ve been watching chess matches between Marshall and Capablanca.  How would you rank

Dan Szymborski: I like those old chess matches

Dan Szymborski: Players used to be a lot loosere with their moves

Guest: “Wander Suero was a World Series champion!”

Alby: Is there anything worse about Cincinnati than its chili?

Dan Szymborski: No, I like hanging out in Cincy quite a lot

A Boy Named Yu: Breaks my heart hearing about Kris Bryant’s back issues, both for his career and his long-term health.  Have you done a Zips what-if with him?

Dan Szymborski: Not yet, I hate to do it too often when a player is still active

smirnov: Curling is my favorite winter Olympics sport.

Dan Szymborski: I’m a sucker for skiing, especially downhill/super g

TKDC: Have you practiced typing “April” yet? Are you ready?

Dan Szymborski: I was born ready

Dan Szymborski: OK, maybe not, since I was born in June

A Boy Named Yu: What is the Summer Olympics sport equivalent to Curling?  Not literally, but a sport no one really plays that enraptures people once every 4 years like Curling does during the Winter games.

Dan Szymborski: that has the audience? there rpobably isn’t a comparable one

Dan Szymborski: maybe dressage?

Dan Szymborski: I see a LOT of horse dancing tweets when summer olympics comes around

Dan Szymborski: though more people should pay attention to modern pentathlon, because the mix of events is batshit wonderful

Dan Szymborski: (running, obstacle course, laser pistol, swimming, fencing)

Dan Szymborski: It’s literally similar to playing Skyrim

Dan Szymborski: (with archery in for the pistol)

Oaktown Blues: Is max EV a direct input in ZiPS? I know ZiPS must account for EV in some way, but I’m curious which of max/90th percentile/average it utilizes

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS uses average and 80th

Ryan other than D: Assuming days rest is a decent predictor of relief pitchers’ performance, do teams’ tendencies ever make a meaningful impact in projecting relief performance? For instance, teams less likely to pitch top relievers in consecutive days?

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t found a large factor

Daniel: I’m sorry to ask such a common and probably annoying question, but are we really sure teams value defense at anywhere close to the level that war is implying? Specifically, kind of bad defense at positive positional adjustment positions. ex: Eugenio Suarez signed with the reds as a 1B / DH. Its reasonable to expect him to end somewhere between -10 and -15 runs (defensively) in 2026. As a 3B, at the very least, you could’ve expect him to be around ~0.0 runs in 2026 (he’s had at least 0.0 def as a 3b in each of the last 4 years). Zips has him at a 1.3 war proj with this -15.7 def, and it’d probably be closer to a 3.0 proj if he was at 3b. There are countless other examples, but, if the value of a kind of bad 3B was really that much more than a DH, then wouldn’t Eugenio Suarez get paid more money and sign as a 3B somewhere? There are a bunch of other examples too. He could put up a decent amount of WAR if he only played catcher, and this would line up with a higher salary than the 2M he’s getting paid.

Dan Szymborski: I tihnk teams are a few runs less generally, but are pretty close to WAR in thinking along these lines

Dan Szymborski: few runs fewer sorry

Dan Szymborski: If they weren’t, you wouldn’t see them back off 1B/cOF big deals compared to last generation

Dan Szymborski: and if they didn’t care about positional value so much, Suarez does way better than 1/15 after his season!

Guest: Anyone who thinks themself badass now is selling something

Dan Szymborski: Thankfully, I’ve never tried to sell myself as badass

Dan Szymborski: I have the Doughy Weirdo monetization

Brooklyngail: AI is Cliff Notes for Wikipedia.

Dan Szymborski: AI is funny

A Boy Named Yu: You should have AI write a musical about the Black Sox Scandal.  Or the 1998 Home Run chase.

Dan Szymborski: I think a Moneyball musical would be great fun. Though written by an actual composer of course

Oaktown Blues: When ZiPS comes up with nearest offensive comps, are there any variables that you force it to match? E.g. handedness, position, age

Dan Szymborski: nothing is FORCED

Dan Szymborski: well, except players ahve to actually exist

War2D2: I kind of doubt @mindaugas was referring to me, but I believe I’ve mentioned my Lithuanian grandma before in-chat. I only know (and phonetically at that) three words/phrases in Lithuanian: Papyte (grandpa), Mamyte (grandma), and something like “Jazus Madia” (like I said, phonetic) which was what my grandma would say when she was mad at us.

Dan Szymborski: My german grandmother (born in bremerhaven 1922) had all sorts of german phrases, but she also had phrases that I think she just completely made up

Dan Szymborski: like if you were getting into trouble, she’d say you were in something like muckesen vonkuckus but I never figured out what that was

Dan Szymborski: and if something was just too bad, she’d say it was tough schmuggies. I have no idea the etymology of that one either

Dan Szymborski: She was a secretary for Dönitz and translated for the British at the war trials (which is how my grandfather met her)

Dan Szymborski: It was really tough when she was well into dementia but could still have conversations. She had no control over what language she was saying things in, which is a problem with someone who could speak four languages (english, german, french, italian) like a native

A Boy Named Yu: Dressage is a good one, especially with people using more modern music for their routines.

Kevin: ZiPs and all the other systems are pretty bullish on an Austin Riley rebound, can you offer any insight into that? His last two years were both below his projected performance for this year and there is a clear downward trend in his performance.

Dan Szymborski: I’m not sure anything particularly insightful I have to offer. Trends aren’t super useful – baselines still work best

Guest: Do you think that Judge’s accelerated awesomeness in his his 30s might be attributable, in part, to the umpires getting better with calling balls and strikes? Per a Bryan Hoch article this week “Since Judge’s first full season in 2017, no hitter has had more called strikes against him on pitches out of the strike zone”. Could it be that the improvements by the umpires have juiced his game a bit?

Dan Szymborski: I think that’s *too* eleventy dimensional chess

Fargus: Is this theoretical fangraphs villain song just theoretical?

Dan Szymborski: No, I guess I could stick it on my weird bandcamp

Dan Szymborski: Or could just link it directly

Polar Bear: 1st O’s home run, in the books.

Dan Szymborski: should exhibition games be considered the books?

Dan Szymborski: maybe the pamphlets?

matt w: How are the cats? Round here, right now Penne is on the box of CDs that Mango likes to loaf on, waiting for snacks. Earlier Mango jumped up there with him and they fought a little which made me very apprehensive.

Dan Szymborski: Pretty good! I adopted a pair of bonded kittens a few weeks ago and I’m working to integrate them with the big cats

Dan Szymborski: Here’s a better link as I had to do some phonetical corrections of what it did

Dan Szymborski: Sorry, wrong one https://suno.com/s/XiXI7vydam5ogYhH

Cromulent: Reading War2D2’s comment makes it seem like Jesus Made is Lithuanian.

Zippy: PCA or Riley Greene for 2026 fantasy value?

Zippy: Oh, and I love you

Dan Szymborski: PCA unless OBP league

I know a little German: And he told me that “Mucks dich nicht, zum Kuckuck!” would be kind of like saying “behave yourself, darn it!” or “don’t stir things up, for heaven’s sake”

Jake: What do you think of Tony Vitello’s comments on his hiring process? It’s a big story in the Bay Area but seems like a big nothing burger. What’re you thoughts

Dan Szymborski: Nothing burger I think

Oaktown Blues: Follow up on ZiPS comps: So things like handedness/position are considered as inputs, but ZiPS is okay comping, say, a righty to a lefty if everything else looks similar? Do I have that right?

Dan Szymborski: Yeah, pretty much

Dan Szymborski: it WANTS to find the perfect comparison, but that rarely happens

Dan Szymborski: I use Mahalanobis distance

Copilot user (not by choice): If you ever have the misfortune of using Copilot, just type up a random innocuous paragraph and then have it turn it into a poem.   The result will make the average book of third grade poetry they print to sell to parents look like Shakespeare.

Krusty: Please settle a debate! How “real” do you think something like Sean Manaea’s post-tweak 2024 was, after he overhauled his delivery/mechanics/repertoire midseason?  Obvi, he regressed a ton last year, & that seems to be because he was hurt and couldn’t maintain his new lower arm angle/slot. I’m not really asking if you think he’ll get back to that form, but rather how “real” you think his 2024 stretch run was, given how dramatic the change was in his delivery, movement, results & periphs, etc. & given that teams seem more willing than ever to invest in that kind of measurable breakout, even in small samples (Also, sorry for being verbose! And VERY appreciated in advance! Thank you!!)

Dan Szymborski: I’m probably not going to settle the debate because I’m kind of on the fence with Manaea

Dan Szymborski: Baseball is a game of adjustment and re-adjustment and re-re-adjustment

Zippy: I still love you and no I would never use that statement just to get you to answer my question

Scott: I was surprised to see Yeremy Cabrera on the Zips top 100. Surface stats for age and level look good but not great to me. What is Zips seeing under the hood that makes him stand out?

Dan Szymborski: That’s always a tricky Q, but he was very young, and he had a big uptick in contact rate, which ZiPS sees as a big deal for a guy with speed

Kauffman: Will we notice any real numbers changes in projections based on a change in dimensions? If so, which things might change meaningfully?

Dan Szymborski: You’ll notice that the ZiPS projections are more likely to be biased in one direction or another (non-park adjusted ones at least)

Farhandrew Zaidman: Other than the obvious (USA, DR, Japan, maybe Venezuela) which WBC team would be playoff caliber over 162?

Dan Szymborski: Ask me next week, I’m still trying to think how I could possibly do an article on this lol

Alby: Italian was my father and uncles’ first language, but my uncle would make up Italian, or mangle, Italian words in his own private language. Think of Snoop’s “shizzle” stuff. Always cracked his brothers up.

Dan Szymborski: On that note, I do have to go pretty tightly at three today since I have a doctor’s appointment at 3:30

Dan Szymborski: thanks for coming all!