2019 ZiPS Are Live
If you’ve perused FanGraphs’ player pages this morning, you may have noticed that the 2019 ZiPS Projections have now officially been added into the database, with players all projected based on their most recent organization as of late Sunday, February 24th.
ZiPS projections are also now included in this season’s Projected Standings, mixed in along with the Steamer projections. So if you find yourself with a particular urge to praise or curse your favorite team’s projected record today, that might be why.
Coming up, at a date still to be determined, will be the 2020 and 2021 projections from ZiPS. While ZiPS has spit out multi-year projections since about 2006, I’ve generally greedily hoarded those projections for my own nefarious uses, but even Ebeneszym Scrooge can occasionally see the light. I will not be buying a Christmas goose for Tiny Tim Collins, however.
The WAR listed for players on the ZiPS 2019 projections page has also been moved over to the FanGraphs WAR, in order to be consistent across the website, allowing you to compare apples to apples instead of apples to battleships (apples and oranges aren’t really that different, after all).
A few things stick out to me when looking at the projection set as a whole:
- The Yankees have overtaken the Red Sox for the most projected wins in baseball with 98, up from 96. Boston, meanwhile, drops a win, going from 96 to 95. That’s not a lot, but it is enough to push their projected win total behind that of the Astros, who now have the second highest projected win total with 96. The Marlins now have the (dis)honor of baseball’s worst projected record with a paltry 62 wins, slipping behind the Orioles.
- The Brewers got their expected ZiPS bump, as they did last year, with ZiPS simply being more of a believer in the adequacy of their starting pitching than most. Stirring ZiPS into the stew is enough to get the Brewers above .500 and into third place in the NL Central, above the Pirates and Reds.
- Even after all the other teams have gone live, ZiPS still holds a special place in its hard drive for Cleveland’s rotation. Especially notable is Shane Bieber, who ZiPS projects as 13th in WAR among pitchers, meaning the computer loves Bieber more than you or I have ever loved anything. And that’s still only good for fourth best in the rotation! One can perhaps understand why the Indians were open to trading Corey Kluber.
- Most pitchers would be very happy with a 3.9 WAR projection, but I believe this is the first time Clayton Kershaw’s has dropped below that in ZiPS since his rookie season.
- ZiPS sees third base as the most talented position on the field right now, with the five players projected at five WAR or greater and a whopping 11 players projected to hit the four WAR margin. That’s out of only 13 and 34 total position players respectively.
So enjoy the projections and remember: even if Carson Cistulli is no longer with us here at FanGraphs, he can still be at fault for all the projections that are wrong.
Is there something you’d like to see in ZiPS on FanGraphs? Let us know!
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
As Tiny Tim Collins would say, God bless us everyone!
What about Tiny Tim Lincecum?
In terms of losers, it looks like the Pirates, Angels, Blue Jays, and Rays lost a couple of games. The Rangers also lost 3 games. But more dramatically, ZiPs also hates the Marlins, dropping them below the Orioles (!). The Marlins lost 4 games off their projection once ZiPs got folded in, which is kind of amazing considering where Steamer thought they were on the win curve.
It’s worth noting that in addition to the Brewers, folding in ZiPs increases the record of the Athletics by a bit. ZiPs likes the young, breakout teams more than Steamer does.
do you guys know why Padres are projected to finish with worse record than Rockies/diamondbacks but more war?
Less heart and will to win
Fighting Spirit.
This is a glorious day. Soto at #2 highest wOBA is a sight to behold. And don’t feel too bad, Dan, the United States ranked 193rd in the world alphabetically, falling behind many developing countries.
So is Depth Charts also updates?
Depths charts are always updated!
“Is there something you’d like to see in ZiPS on FanGraphs? Let us know!”
I’d love to see preseason ZiPS from however many previous years you have it for, please. In general, it would be great to have archived preseason projections from as many systems as possible for as many years as possible. I know the Steamer archives are available as downloadable CSV files on their site, but everything is better as a FanGraphs sortable leaderboard.
I would love to see projected righty-lefty splits for hitters.
There are 2 Hitter Shohei Ohtanis
I’m guessing he is projected as a DH and as a Pitcher when playing in NL parks? Presumably his plate appearances are the only real difference unless a dip in performance is predicted when he’s pitching.
No, both have identical lines
At least they are consistent.
Good.
As long as we’re talking about things we’d love to see on Fangraphs, I would love to have an article that projected out every free agent over the duration of their contract, using ZiPs. We’ve been getting some of that already, but it would be great to have it all laid out to calculate out $/win prospectively.
As happy as I am to see the Yankees projected #1… I suspect their projected war total should be a bit lower since there is no way Didi’s projection is right. 3.5 war is fine for a full season but Zips has him doing that in 143 games which is not happening this year.
Not sure if adjusting his playing time pushes them to the Astros level though.
The team projections are based on the playing time predicted by Depth Charts, not ZIPS. Depth Charts has Didi with less than 300 PA.
Thanks for the this!
I see that ZiPS has also been added to the auction calculator – any chance we can get depth charts there?
On the player page: Can you place the ZiPS projections below (or above) the Steamer projections instead of beneath the Fans?
(only a ‘problem’ when 5 or more votes are cast, obviously)
Shane Bieber love is real, wow.
As I believe Dan said in his article: Find yourself someone who looks at you the way ZiPs looks at Shane Bieber.
Me thinks zips has his biebers confused…thus the excitement in its hard drive.
Hi Dan. We’ve had projected standings based on Steamer (and playing time projections from the Depth Charts) to look at for months now. Can we get ZiPS projected standings as a standalone similar to what we saw when it was Steamer-only? I’d love to see how ZiPS sees the lay of the land similar to how I know what Steamer & PECOTA had. Thanks!
I’ll be doing those the week before the season starts!
I thought Depth Charts projections simply were an average of Steamer and ZiPS. That does not appear to be the case with at least some player projections (David Dahl, for example). Did that change in the last year or two? How are DC numbers calculated?
I think that Depth Charts are ZiPS and Steamer combined but that the playing time is set by Fangraphs writers – in this case I think it’s Dan.
Do the projected standings take schedule into account?
Can’t say about the FG – when I publish mine, they do.
“Is there something you’d like to see in ZiPS on FanGraphs? Let us know!”
I’d really love it if the projections were available in the projection page and player pages before the review of every team finishes in March.
And … when will Depth Charts projections be available in the Auction Calculator?? Thanks!
I believe Depth Charts are available in the Auction Calculator; it’s just an issue with the drop down menu. Go to the Auction Calculator and make all your selections and leave the projection system as, e.g., Steamer and then click Generate Projections. Then manually change “steamer” in the URL to “fangraphsdc” and hit enter. For example, leaving default league settings but switching to Depth Charts projections:
https://www.fangraphs.com/auctiontool.aspx?type=bat&proj=fangraphsdc&pos=2,1,1,1,5,1,1,1,0,1,6,3,0,10,0&dollars=260&teams=12&mp=20&msp=5&mrp=5&mb=1&split=&points=c|0,1,2,3,4|0,1,2,3,4&lg=MLB&rep=0&drp=0&pp=C,SS,2B,3B,OF,1B&players=
Dan’s uncle.. Nefarious Szymborski had to hack Alcides Escorbar’s ZIPs numbers to make them look bad. The Orioles don’t sign bad players.