Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 8/27/26

Dan Szymborski: The appointed time has arrived.

Gerry McDonald: Jay Harry just keeps on hitting and his strikeout numbers have been better in AAA.  What stops him from being a regular major leaguer?

Dan Szymborski: I imagine he *will* get time in 2027, should he keep hitting early next year

opifijikl: Have you ever tracked how ZiPS player comps stick or change through the years? Do you think around 50% would stay the same and 50% would change?

Dan Szymborski: Oh, they do generally change quite a bit, because no two players are truly the same, and paths vary a lot

motown oden: Hey Dan! In your milestones article, Gerrit Cole’s projections seemed a bit odd. It has him winning 30 more games, but fanning less than 400 more batters. In his career, recent and otherwise, he’s at about 1.5 K : win. Even in their 40’s, Scherzer and Verlander didn’t completely crater regarding strikeouts. Not that he’s necessarily their peers.

Dan Szymborski: Unfortunately, I’ve updated the park and league and season to date data in ZiPS since then, so I don’t have the data from the weekend, so I can only give you waht his projection is

Dan Szymborski:

mike sixel: I’d ask the one twins question you get every chat, but I don’t know why I should care when ownership clearly doesn’t….

Dan Szymborski: habits are hard to break!

bkgeneral: Do you see any team claiming Suarez or Friedl?

Dan Szymborski: I can see someone wanting Friedl for a very specific role

Dan Szymborski: You’d have to be crazy or desperate to claim Suarez and pay like $2.5 million for him

Jeremy Fox: What’s wrong with Wheeler?

Dan Szymborski: Well, he performed rather unimpressively during Sherman’s Atlanta campaign

Dan Szymborski: As for Zack, I’m not sure, that Cardinals start was ugly and it wasn’t like he had bad BABIP luck

Dan Szymborski: err Mariners

Dan Szymborski: wtf dan

Dan Szymborski: they don’t even wear the same colors!

Charles Bengal Tiger: Is there any hope for Noelvi Marte?

Dan Szymborski: Some, but I dont’ think a team can count on him

Jeremy Fox: When a ZiPS projection misses very badly on a player one year, the error bars on next year’s projection surely widen. But do they widen enough? And when ZiPS misses very badly on a player one year, is there any bias in the direction of its miss on that player the next year?

Dan Szymborski: Now this one I know off-hand: there’s no year-to-year correlation in the misses

Dan Szymborski: not just a small correlation, but decimal places starting with 0

warpath: Hey Dan, thanks for the chat.

Statcast debuted their swing timing + miss distance metrics this year, but I honestly haven’t seen much discussion of them  around here. Are you or anybody else tinkering with them? They’ve been mentioned so little that I almost forgot they were now public.

Dan Szymborski: Like all Statcast data, I don’t really have a lot of thoughts until I have time to dig into a few year sof data

opifijikl: I think it’s so cool how you provide the percentile outcomes for players, although the ceilings and floors aren’t as extreme as I’d expect. Do you have any feelings on what constitutes a high floor/low ceiling or low floor/high ceiling guy from ZiPS perspective? And what do you think a good blend of the two is?

Dan Szymborski: I dunno, these outcomes are pretty wide!

Dan Szymborski: Like take Raleigh

Dan Szymborski: Percentile2BHRBAOBPSLGOPS+WAR95%2846.265.367.5541627.290%2544.252.356.5331516.480%2240.238.344.5051405.770%2037.230.333.4841315.160%1935.223.325.4691264.650%1833.216.318.4451194.240%1731.208.311.4291123.730%1629.202.303.4111063.420%1526.192.296.390992.910%1223.178.283.361892.25%1121.170.268.344791.4

Dan Szymborski: uggh

Dan Szymborski: dang I wish you could paste images in jotcast

Dan Szymborski: not sure why this one is bright green

Dan Szymborski:

Biscuit: How does Zips feel about Caden Bodine

Dan Szymborski: It’s interested, but big error bars!

Jeremy Fox: How wide are the error bars on Aidan Miller now after missing an entire season due to a fairly rare back condition and surgery?

Dan Szymborski: Probably larger than ZiPS can comprehend

Dan Szymborski: there’s only so much injury granularity

Dan Szymborski: Here’s how error bars are going so far in 2026

Dan Szymborski:

Jeremy Fox: I would be interested in an article that compared how much ZiPS projections degrade if you drop various bits of the model one at a time, to how how important those bits of information are. Like, how bad are the projections if ZiPS doesn’t know about aging curves? How bad are the projections if it doesn’t know about injury history? How bad are the projections if it doesn’t know about performance more than one year ago?

Dan Szymborski: It might be interesting, though it’s hard to find a good “in” to write about it. I tend to usually like to write things connected to stuff that’s going on. I don’t like writing pure technical pieces, mostly because they kinda bore me

limron: Are we really going to let 1930s baseball Sal Stewart take away hardware from a 5 WAR 2B?

Dan Szymborski: I mean, you gotta value a great mustache

Dan Szymborski: I’m 25 years older than him and I can’t grow half as good a mustache

Dan Szymborski: (like the hair on my head, my facial hair is too fine to ever have much heft)

Dan Szymborski: I would give the nod to wetherholt, though it’s probably a little closer than WAR

Dan Szymborski: thing is, stewart’s not having some crazy offensive season. He’s got a 116-107 lead over Wetherholt in wRC+

Dan Szymborski: And it’s fair to say that defensive measure is volatile, so you may not actually consider a short-term +20 D to be accurate enough to give “credit” for all that when voting for an award. But at +5, he still has more WAR than Stewart

Dan Szymborski: And unlike defense, we *can* measure offense quite well and quite quickly. Basically, Wetherholt is having a better season if you care at *all* that he appears to be a solid defensive 2B

Dan Szymborski: I’m not an NL ROY voter this year though, I’m an NL Reliever voter this year

Dan Szymborski: (For those for forgot, we’re debuting a new award this year for relievers)

Dan Szymborski: Five-man ballot, just like Cy and the updated ROY ballots

Jeremy Fox: How much do you think ZiPS projections would improve (especially in season, on time scales of days to a couple of months) if all players had to send you daily updates on whether they were a little banged up?

Dan Szymborski: Might help a little bit in the short term

Dan Szymborski: but the practicality of turning that into data is a nightmare for me!

evanm: Dan, what should the Guardians do with Ralphy Velazquez? you want to keep him off the 40 man due to the lockout but he could be a huge addition for the playoff/division push

Dan Szymborski: I think they shoudl focus on 2026 and get him on the roster

oaktownblues: It looks like the park factor was updated for Sutter Health Park a few days ago and its now considered even more hitter friendly – can you confirm? A’s hitters all lost 5-6 points of wRC+ overnight. (Also that feels like kind of a big change; is it normal for a park factor adjustment to have that big of an effect?)

Dan Szymborski: Honeslty, I don’t know the background story of this, but I can find out for next chat!

Dan Szymborski: Guys, you have to remember, while I’m a very longtime analyst, I’m not a coder or a programmer, and I don’t really do anything on updating the website, so I frequently don’t always know specifics of something going on unless we’ve talked about it on Slack

Dan Szymborski: My job is to write, tinker with projections and models, and provide assistance to any FanGraphiérs who either need ZiPS help or something with a model

scottsjunk1981: Do you get statcast defensive stats for AAA? How about lower levels? And, if you don’t, do you know if teams are? (I’m assuming that if you’re able to license it, it means the teams have it too.)

Dan Szymborski: I don’t honestly know the status of those. I do have quite a bit of data however, some not easily obtained by the public, that goes into my probabilistic measure that ZiPS uses for minor league defense (and can go down to rookie level)

Dan Szymborski: If we ever get public FRV up and down the minors, that will be better than my model

Philip Christy: If Schwarber makes it to 500 home runs, will he become the worst player enshrined in the Hall?

Dan Szymborski: Did they throw out Tommy McCarthy?

Dan Szymborski: Tommy McCarthy is basically like having David DeJesus in the Hall

Dan Szymborski: Even with a reduced DH penalty, which we’ll do at some point, Schwarber would probably be among the lowest

Dan Szymborski: But that doesn’t mean I don’t freaking love Schwarber

leoneforthird: Thoughts on Kade Andersons first outing and what do the Mariners do with their  rotation through the end of the year? Also thank you for chatting today appreciate it.

Dan Szymborski: Not an ideal start, but you gotta trust your talent

Dan Szymborski: As for the M’s, there’s no way I can be more insightful in 45 seconds than Ryan Blake’s piece this week! https://blogs.fangraphs.com/mariners-hope-kade-anderson-can-save-their…

opifijikl: Regarding ZiPS comps changing, here’s Gunnar’s
2026 Hanley Ramirez Joe Cronin Jim Fregosi
2025 Hanley Ramirez Alex Rodriguez Joe Cronin
2024 Grady Hatton Yoán Moncada Bill Madlock
2023 Tommy Harper Gavin Lux Bobby Grich
2022 Giomar Guevara

Jeremy Fox: Are pitchers with very unusual mechanics or pitch mixes harder to forecast? I’m thinking of submariners and knuckleballers.

Dan Szymborski: It’s knuckleballers that seem to be the problem

ImKeithHernandez: Carson Benge has been worth about a win more than Sal Stewart, but it seems like Stewart is still seen as the more serious ROY runner-up. Is that just because of when their hot streaks happened or traditional stats? Both?

Dan Szymborski: Both

Dan Szymborski: plus RBI

scottsjunk1981: You only answered Jeremy Fox’s question about YoY bias, but his other one is more interesting (to me, at least). Does Zips adjust to its misses by increasing its uncertainty about a given player or type of player? And, more generally, what kinds of patterns have you seen in variance of projections beyond just longer track records reducing it? Do you have “boom or bust” markers that you can look out for?

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS adjusts in the sense that the data pool it has to look at keeps growing

Dan Szymborski: though it doesn’t increase uncertainty ABOUT a player

crew87: you’ve said how you have ZiPS hidden in a park. Do you keep up to date with the park’s plans to make sure they’re not going to pave a road over it, or chop down the tree you’ve hidden it in? Or dredge the lake you scuba’d to the bottom of to bury it?

Dan Szymborski: I do not. I update it when I pass by every couple of years

Dan Szymborski: Let’s just say it’s a location that’s extremely unlikely to change

krob4385: Sal Stewart!!? How’s about Carson Benge and Nolan McLean? Could they steal some hardware from that dude in St. Louis?

Dan Szymborski: The thing about Benge is that if you appreciate Benge’s season, you probably are of a certain frame of mind that also has you appreciating Wetherholt

Dan Szymborski: Like yeah, if you’re using WAR, you’ll prefer Benge to Stewart, but if you’re the person doing that, you’ll prefer Wetherholt to benge too

Dan Szymborski: McLean is the most interesting theif

Dan Szymborski: thief

Dan Szymborski: theif? WTF dan

drplantwrench: whats the most fun slack channel?

Dan Szymborski: I’m not sure FUN is a thing really. Our Slack tends to be pretty by the numbers

Cameron Crain: what’s for lunch

Dan Szymborski: nothing

crew87: do you have set hours you’re supposed to be working or is meg just like “eh you wrote a few articles this week, great!”

Dan Szymborski: No set hours. The thing is, David and Meg have put together a bunch of people who are real self starters in this regard, and *want* to write things and can be trusted to work.

Dan Szymborski: I can only speak for myself, but I’m always tinkering with something, and I do a lot of radio/podcasts, and Meg usually messages me on the weekend what I have planned for the week so far, and I give her a semi-confusing rundown of what I’m thinking on. And when stuff pops up, someone will usually jump up and grab it in the main channel

Dan Szymborski: Now, there are certain timed things, like the deadline, where you kinda need to be around

Bud Smith: How do I get my 15 year old cat to stop peeing JUST outside the litterbox? It’s like he’s an umpire who has expanded the zone a bit too much, but I can’t ABS the pee back into the box

Dan Szymborski: You might need to get a senior litterbox that has very low sides (and put a larger mat underneath to catch litter). Sometimes, the climbing in the box can be awkward for an older cat if they have arthritis. Had that problem with Mercutio after about 16

cyanocitta: I asked this question previously, and received this from Jay Jaffe: “compounding probabilities and distribution tails” are lyrics to the type of song that Dan Szymborski and Ben Clemens tap their toes to. You’re better off asking either of them than me

Dan Szymborski: I don’t know many statistical probability songs!

Dan Szymborski: Weirdly, the two songs I’m most likely to randomly just start rambling to myself are Barbie Girl and Belle and Sebastian’s Get Me Away From here I’m Dying

Dan Szymborski: The first one will frequently have random baseball lyrics about whatever I’m watching

Dan Szymborski: and I don’t even realize I’m doing it

Uncle Spike: Does consistency matter?  If two guys end up with the same line at the end of the season with similar peripherals, does it matter if one guy maintained a wRC+ between 100-120 every month of the season while the other guy varied between 50-200?  What about for a 22 year old rookie who struggled for the first 4 months but finished with a strong final 2 months?

Dan Szymborski: It probably matters, but it’s never really a case where it comes down a decision of x vs. y player because of consistency, so it matteers in the sense of small potato

Nils: Regarding Tommy McCarthy, why does his HoF plaque say he stole 108 bases in 1888 but his FG stats say 93?

Dan Szymborski: Because, frankly, record-keeping of early baseball sucks

Dan Szymborski: Even well into 20th century

Dan Szymborski: Hack Wilson’s plaque says 190 RBI, but we’re pretty sure it’s 191

Dan Szymborski: and ty cobb 4189 hits

oaktownblues: Thanks for your response re: park factors. Assuming the park factor at SHP has indeed gone up, would that have changed the conclusion of your “when will the A’s be competitive again” piece? Like, maybe the offensive core isn’t as good as we thought?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think it drastically changes things

Dan Szymborski: the thing is, I calculate park factors on my own end, so if there was a FG blooper on the PFs, I wouldn’t have been affected

Dan Szymborski: I calculate basically everyone myself that I can and rely on research that I run and replicate myself

Dan Szymborski: I’m from the early days of internet statnerdery, remember, where you had to get all the data, and run all the things yourself

crew87: MLB The Show is a free game on PS+ this month. Do you think that’s a sign sales are slower, and will it cause them to make updates to the game in the next year or two?

Dan Szymborski: No, I think it’s to make PS+ more valuable. Sales always slow down this time of year for MLB the show I believe

crew87: ZiPS is in a cave! what if a bear eats it?

Dan Szymborski: Then that copy is gone!

Dan Szymborski: It’s not like I RELY on that copy

swieker: Definitely nervous what Gunnar’s 2027 comps are gonna be!  I strongly suspect Hanley and Cronin are off the table.  Starlin Castro/JJ Hardy?  [Sad face]

Dan Szymborski:

Dan Szymborski: These are as of 8/20

crew87: kid has expressed an interest in learning piano. what do I need to be aware of going into it before shelling out for lessons (or an instrument!)

Dan Szymborski: Just the general that kids taste can change pretty quickly

Dan Szymborski: also, you can get used pianos that are perfectly fine for a student nearly for free

Dan Szymborski: there are all sorts of mid-grade pianos around that people can’t do anything with and just want people to take it off their hands

war2d2: Dan! You’ve mentioned multiple times you’re not really a coder. Do you think you’d get much ROI if you did sit down and force yourself to learn Python or R? I’m guessing you’d probably be able to cut full-fat ZiPS run time by quite a lot (probably not half, but maybe?). For your purposes I’m not sure how much of a value-add that would be.

Dan Szymborski: Probably not enough return on investment

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think I could ever get it down to a point that the full-fat model could be run daily

Dan Szymborski: which would be kind of the “break point” to make it worthwhile

Dan Szymborski: *This* PC can run a full set of batting or pitching down in about 8 hours now, which is much improved from even the 5900X

Dan Szymborski: (My daily driver is a Ryzen 9950x3D)

Dan Szymborski: I normally run stuff on the 5900X and the 8700K simultaneously so that I’m not using my main rig though

Dan Szymborski: And also, the area of the basement with the 5900X and the 8700K gets pretty warm when they’re cooking up ZiPS

Dan Szymborski: Everything will be faster when there’s a NEXT rig, but I’m probably years away from an upgrade

Dan Szymborski: the 64 GB of RAM alone would be like $900 now because shit is crazy

Bud Smith: Thanks Dan! We just bought a box with higher sides hoping it would catch the stray but presumably well intentioned pee, but it looks like we went in the wrong direction

Dan Szymborski: It’s worth trying a few things

Dan Szymborski: You shoudl also have a vet appointment and have blood work done. Could be early kidney issues to watch out for, and they can change a cat’s pee behavior

Dan Szymborski: Most older cats will end up with kidney issues to SOME degree. It’s the limiting factor on a large percentage of cats lives when they get into the 17-20 range

Dan Szymborski: Galileo at 20 still had very good kidney values, so he probably could have kept on chugging a few more years if not for the very quick infection+shock from an abscess on his chin

Dan Szymborski: In Mercutio’s case, he was in very early kidney disease, but at about 17 1/2, he had what the vet believes was pancreatitis, and then accelerated the kidney decline into multi-organ collapse

crew87: if you were given a seat behind home plate, but a few rows up at great american ballpark, but had to call balls and strikes, what % do you think you’d get correct? I bet I could get above 60%

Dan Szymborski: that sounds about right. I have pretty good vision, but you don’t really have a perfect angle fo rhtat

Matthew VanWinkle: I’m a Schwarby girl, in a Schwarby worrrld. Life’s fantastic! It’s Statcastic!

drplantwrench: ABS for Cat Pee is a great song title

opifijikl: Who have been your biggest baseball resources or gave you the most food for thought or inspiration over the past few years? Teams? Writers?

Dan Szymborski: Honestly, the biggest food for thought I’ve gotten is questions people ASK me. Because the population of people not me is much alrger than the population of me

MarkZ: you’ve said how you have ZiPS hidden in a park

Dan Szymborski: a state park, not a baseball park

Dan Szymborski: it’s also encrypted, so you’d need assistance from me or my will executor

Long Suffering Guardians Fan: Hi Dan, thanks as always for the chats. I always enjoy your takes on baseball and the occasional life hack (senior cat litter box). No question today but I’d love to start this chant for all Long Suffering Guardians Fans – Free Ralphy! Free Ralphy! Free Ralphy!

Dan Szymborski: Poor Alan knows that there are weird things in my will, but he does not know how many weird things there are that

Dan Szymborski: And since he’s a good dude, he’ll try to fulfill everything

Dan Szymborski: Same Alan as in this article

Dan Szymborski: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/which-teams-are-built-to-be-the-most-dange…

Dan Szymborski: But hey, I didn’t give him shit when he shut my thumb into a car door and then stood there confused when I was in pain and trying to get him to unlock the car so I could open the door

illardfillmore: Is the knuckleball dead?

Dan Szymborski: at the moment it is, but everything’s ripe fo ra coemback

drplantwrench: i took piano lessons for 15 years – my advice is that about 7-8 years in everyone wants to quit, but do your best not to let them!! everyone who does always seems to regret it, and people who push through that hump always are glad they did (in my anecdotal experience)

Dan Szymborski: It’s hard to not let a kid do something

Dan Szymborski: I’m 48 and if my mom calls me and tries to TELL me to do something, I will still refuse to do it out of spite

Dan Szymborski: I’ll be happy to come over and check your tire pressure, but don’t TELL me to do it

cyanocitta: Another flavor of this question may have already been asked, but here goes… Considering ZiPS, projected depth charts, and remaining SOS for all involved teams, what are the projected deciles (e.g., 10th through 90th percentiles) for the expected number of wins to claim the final AL Wild Card spot? With seven to eight teams in the thick of the conversation, I see this as an exercise in compounding probabilities and distribution tails—one which is better left to the calculators!

Dan Szymborski: we’ll end on this note, but I hve to open the sim

Dan Szymborski: still opening

Dan Szymborski:

Dan Szymborski: And that’s our show!