Updates to ZiPS Three-Year and ZiPS Depth Chart Projections!
There have been a few updates in our ZiPS projections section.
First, we have updated the ZiPS projections for the roughly 300 players in the minor leagues who are in different organizations now than they were when the first run of ZiPS projections went live about six weeks ago. Free agents are still projected as if they were on their most recent team.
Second, the ZiPS three-year projections are now live for everyone in baseball. As usual, these are playing-time agnostic projections; I’m far more interested in a complex set of algorithms estimating a player’s performance than I am in team usage. A projection for a career minor-leaguer of .000/.000/.000 conveys little useful information. I find knowing how a player may perform for a team to have greater utility than a model predicting who front offices and managers will like. ZiPS assumes offensive levels similar to those of the last four years with the most recent years weighted more heavily, and is using the same estimated level of offense for 2022 and 2023 that it does for 2021. It’d be nice to know what effects changes in the ball will have, but as that’s mostly guesswork, ZiPS takes a neutral stance.
The full-season ZiPS comes in two flavors. New this year arethe ZiPS DC projections, which are ZiPS projections already pro-rated for the playing time used in our Depth Charts. Many of you were already manually adjusting ZiPS in this manner, but now it will be done automatically, which should aid in using ZiPS for fantasy purposes.
There are more ZiPS developments in the works. Let us know in the comments what things you’d like to see that I haven’t talked about yet! Our readers frequently have ideas I never thought to do myself and ZiPS has a great deal of flexibility in what it can be manipulated into doing.
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.
In other words, does this mean ZiPS weighs the 2020 “season” most heavily?