Position: Arizona Diamondbacks Senior Baseball Systems Developer

Location: Phoenix
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Position: TrackMan Analytics/Operations Intern

Location: Stamford, Conn.
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The Phillies have acquired long-time Red Sox starter Clay Buchholz in exchange for minor-league second baseman Josh Tobias. Here’s how Tobias grades out by my KATOH system. (KATOH denotes WAR forecast for the first six years of a player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses a similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.)

The Phillies snagged Tobias in the 10th round in 2015, and he’s performed admirably in the minor leagues. He increased his prospect stock by hitting .321/.362/.475 in short-season A-ball to close out his draft year. He had similar success in Low-A last year, but saw his performance crater following a late-season promotion to High-A. He hit a weak .254/.324/.357 at the latter level with a concerning 21% strikeout rate.

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Hello! I’ve spent a little while in one of my spreadsheets, because I’m working up another thing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t provide a smaller thing in the meantime. As I’ve mentioned on a few occasions in the past, I have projected team records going back to 2005. Of course, the methods aren’t all consistent, because certain projections haven’t existed for that long, but all projections follow the same general rules — use a best-guess depth chart and then project player performance based on what those players have done in the recent past. I’m not saying the 2005 projections were as good as the 2016 projections, but they weren’t crazy. So let’s look at a little data! You don’t have anything better to do.

First, and most simply, here are projected wins and actual wins, for all 360 team-seasons.

There’s enough signal there to know the projections are onto something, and there’s enough noise there to keep baseball entertainingly unpredictable. The greatest over-achiever since 2005: those 2012 Baltimore Orioles, who won 93 games after having been projected to win a measly 70. The greatest under-achiever since 2005: the 2012 Boston Red Sox, who won 69 games after having been projected to win an impressive 91. In other words, the Orioles won like the Red Sox were supposed to, and the Red Sox lost like the Orioles were supposed to. I guess you could say the numbers were right, but they were misplaced.

How have the individual team breakdowns looked? I’m not including this because I think it’s in any way predictive. It’s just here to sate some curiosity. I calculated error in two ways. Here’s one, where I took the absolute value of each miss, and then added them up over the 12 years.

The projections have had the greatest error with the Indians, missing by an average of almost 10 wins per season. At the other end, welp, check out the Yankees. The average error there is about three wins per season. The Braves aren’t even particularly close to that. For whatever reason, the Yankees have been reasonably predictable over the past decade and change.

Here’s the other way of calculating error, just subtracting projected wins from actual wins over the time window. Absolute values have no place here.

How to read this: The Rangers have ranked 15th in projected wins, but they’ve been seventh in actual wins. Hence their error of +48. The Mariners are tied for 20th in projected wins, but they’ve been 26th in actual wins, hence their error of -45. The Rangers are out in front here by nine wins; the Mariners trail the next-worst team by 10 wins. I don’t think this means anything about the teams moving forward, but this provides some partial background, when you consider how various fans respond to the 2017 projections over the offseason. Projections have looked wrong before, and they’ll look wrong again. If they didn’t, we’d hate them.

Going into next season, the Nationals are prepared to start a 32-year-old at first base, a 32-year-old who last season recorded a WAR of literally -1.3. That’s very bad! If Ryan Zimmerman had any dwindling chance of building a Hall-of-Fame career record, he effectively kissed it goodbye. It was an extraordinarily frustrating summer.

But is Zimmerman toast now, or what? Spoiler alert: I don’t think so. Story arc: to follow.

It’s worth glancing over this thing I just put up about Tyler Naquin. This small post follows directly from the analysis performed for that bigger post. As the season wore on, there were several articles written about how Zimmerman seemed like he was getting unlucky. I have further evidence to support that. In the linked post, I plotted air slugging against air exit velocity, and I highlighted the Naquin dot. Here’s that again, but with a red highlight for the Zimmerman dot.

According to this, Zimmerman under-performed by 262 points. Only Billy Butler came real close to that, and Butler runs like he doesn’t want to wake up a baby. In the earlier Naquin post, I showed that these differences didn’t appear particularly sustainable between 2015 and 2016. And, say, about that! Zimmerman is highlighted here again.

In 2015, Zimmerman ranked 31st in average air exit velocity, at 94.5 miles per hour. On those batted balls, he slugged 1.016. In 2016, he ranked 32nd in average air exit velocity, at 94.3 miles per hour. On those batted balls, he slugged .760. He followed almost exactly standard performance with extreme under-performance, and if you just bump Zimmerman’s 2016 numbers up to the best-fit line, his overall slugging percentage would move from .370 to .460. Instead of slugging like Jordy Mercer, he would’ve slugged like George Springer. You can accept a first baseman who slugs like George Springer.

Just for the sake of making sure it’s clear, this isn’t conclusive, because we don’t have a lot of Statcast information yet. We don’t know how all of these things work. Maybe Zimmerman is just weird now. It’s also important to recognize he’s had some injury problems, and he’s coming off a career-low walk rate and a career-high strikeout rate. Ryan Zimmerman is by no means in his career prime. One should rightly assume he’s declining, but from the looks of things, one also shouldn’t exaggerate. Zimmerman is better than the results he just posted. He remains an offensive threat, and a player who further deepens the Nationals’ quality lineup.

The first few leaderboard sorts don’t produce many revelations about Junichi Tazawa, but if you finagle the filters and the cutoffs, you start to see why he might be attractive to a club. It’s more about consistency and volume than anything, and that’s a rare quality for a reliever — sufficiently rare, it seems, to earn him a two-year deal worth $12 million, the terms he reached late yesterday afternoon with the Miami Marlins.

Since 2012, Tazawa is 96th among 256 qualified relievers in ERA. He’s 38th in FIP. He’s given up a few homers, though, so let’s check strikeouts minus walks — weird, he’s 38th. So he’s okay.

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Position: Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Research & Development Developer

Location: Los Angeles
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With regard to the ZiPS projections for Cleveland that appeared at this site earlier in the day, a few commenters have observed the statistical curiosities for which outfielder Brandon Guyer is responsible. One reader notes, for example, that Guyer is forecast for a .358 on-base percentage despite just a .272 batting average and 5.6% walk rate. The difference, of course, is a product of the copious hit-by-pitches for which he’s projected. Another reader correctly notes that, in 2016, Guyer was more often hit (20 times) by left-handed pitchers than struck out (17) by them.

Because all of us are beautiful and unique like a snowflake, it’s not surprising to learn that Brandon Guyer is also beautiful and unique like a snowflake. The purpose of this post is to celebrate Guyer’s particular set of skills, while also allowing the author to experiment with the splits leaderboard introduced earlier this week by unassuming hit man Sean Dolinar.

What I’ve done to fashion the definitive Brandon Guyer Leaderboard is to identify both hit-by-pitch and strikeout rate against left-handed pitchers for every batter season (minimum 60 plate appearances) since 2000. The full results of that search can be found here.

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So much of what we do is try to tell the future. So much of what we do is get the future wrong! But still we keep on plugging away, with any noteworthy trade, or any noteworthy signing. One noteworthy signing last week reunited the Yankees and Aroldis Chapman, with the closer getting a five-year guarantee. The history of relievers getting long-term deals isn’t great, but one thing we can’t ignore is that Chapman is kind of extraordinary. By some measures he’s even unique. Baseball doesn’t have an extended track record of Aroldis Chapmans (Chapmen?). Projecting his future is tricky, as it always is.

We know that, if Chapman stays the same, he’ll remain nearly unbelievable. That much, he’s proven. We know that he could snap something after any given pitch. That much, countless other pitchers have proven. But what else might we able to say?

One issue that’s come up is imagining Chapman throwing at lower velocities. Every pitcher eventually loses his zip. Some start at 25, and some start at 35, but it’s a guarantee. There’s no getting around it. For Chapman in particular, there’s one positive sign. Last year, his average fastball was 100.4 miles per hour. That’s the highest mark of his career, and he was around 98 in his first full season. So Chapman hasn’t lost anything yet. Maybe he’ll continue to hang around triple digits for a while to come.

Inevitably, though, there will be decline. And what then? To attempt to answer that, I want to try something. How might Chapman perform at lower velocities? Well, we can look at how he’s already performed at lower velocities.

Tables, ahoy! I looked at Chapman’s game log from 2012 to 2016. For every single game, I grabbed Chapman’s average fastball velocity, and then it was a matter of putting numbers together. In this first table, Chapman’s numbers are split into six groups.

That’s fairly informative already, but let’s increase the sample sizes. We’ll do that by condensing from six groups to three.

Surprise! When Chapman has thrown his hardest, he’s been his best. He hasn’t allowed many hits, and he’s allowed only two home runs. The home-run category here might be the most dramatic, but it’s also the noisiest, since Chapman hasn’t allowed many homers overall. Even when Chapman has worked around 96-97, he’s still been a strikeout machine. For reference, he’s a top-10 table since 2012, looking at strikeout rate minus walk rate. Chapman leads all pitchers, overall, but I took him out and replaced him with the three versions of himself.

The hardest-throwing Chapman is in first, easily. The medium-throwing Chapman is in fourth. The slowest-throwing Chapman is in ninth, out of 776 pitchers. Ken Giles just missed this table. So did Sean Doolittle. And maybe that’s older Chapman: some kind of healthier Sean Doolittle equivalent. Doolittle has sometimes given up his home runs, and he hasn’t been considered one of the highest-tier relievers, but he has been excellent when he’s pitched. So Yankees fans can be somewhat encouraged.

Aroldis Chapman, at some point, will lose some velocity. Aroldis Chapman, at some point, will get worse. But, of course, he has a lot of velocity to give. And when he’s worked at lower speeds before, he’s been only somewhat less incredible. Chapman comes with a lot of what you might consider wiggle room.

In a weak free agent class, no team looked as vulnerable to being picked clean in free agency like the Dodgers; by our rankings, they were potentially set to lose the #2, #6, and #8 free agents in this class, in Justin Turner, Kenley Jansen, and Rich Hill. Last week, they made sure they’d bring back at least one of the three by signing Hill to a three year, $48 million contract; today, it sounds like they’re going to get the other two as well.

Sources: #Dodgers close on both Turner AND Jansen.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 12, 2016

Hear #Dodgers Turner were close at 4 yrs, $64M, but could be higher total with deferrals to keep current value down.

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) December 12, 2016

Dodgers source confirms 5yrs $80m with Jansen

— Jim Bowden (@JimBowden_ESPN) December 12, 2016

In prior years, the Dodgers preferred to eschew free agency, making trades to round out their roster instead, often taking on salary in order to build up their base of young talent. This year, the Dodgers are just using their hoards of cash to keep their roster together. The three will cost about $50 million per year for the next three years, then Jansen and Turner will cost about $35 million per year for the final two years of their deals, so clearly, the Dodgers resources are being put to use here.

But it’s also worth noting that, for what they’re getting, these seem mostly like pretty good deals. I had Turner and Hill rated as my top two free agent bargains headed into the winter, and that was at presumed prices of 4/$82M for Turner and 2/$48M for Hill. In the end, they got both for significantly less than what I expected.

You can certainly quibble with giving $80 million to a reliever; the odds of Jansen still being a lights out reliever in a few years are pretty slim. That one is definitely a win-now move with some likely long-term pain associated with the cost of acquiring an elite bullpen arm. But whatever overpay you think Jansen might be getting, Turner is likely to offset that with his expected savings.

At 4/$64M, Turner is getting just a bit more than Josh Reddick, but, uh, Turner is a lot better than Reddick.

Our projections from the Top 50 free agents post.

Turner is not that much worse of a hitter than Edwin Encarnacion, only he can also play the field. The power isn’t the same, and teams continue to pay less for singles and doubles than home runs, but Turner gets to a similar overall value, and when you toss in the ability to play third base, 4/$64M in this market seems like a steal.

We’ll have more on these signings once they become official, but the Dodgers have made it clear that they’re going for it again, and this time, they’re just doing it the old fashioned way.