After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Most major-league clubs probably feature multiple players whom one could reasonably designate as the Face of the Franchise. Until recently, that was not the case with the Tampa Bay Rays. Basically ever since his debut in 2008, Evan Longoria has been synonymous with the club — due in no small part, one assumes, to the concurrence of his best years with the best years of the team. Traded to the Giants on December 20, he’s expected to produce roughly three wins for San Francisco.

How the club will attempt to replace those wins remains uncertain at the moment. Christian Arroyo (409 PA, 0.6 zWAR), Matt Duffy (444, 1.3), Daniel Robertson (406, 1.0), Ryan Schimpf (459, 0.5), and Joey Wendle (563, 1.0) are all candidates for the second- and third-base nexus in Tampa Bay, each flawed in his way. I’ve included Duffy, Robertson, and Wendle on the depth-chart image below simply because they receive the top projections from Dan Szymborski’s computer.

The author noted elsewhere recently that Byron Buxton recorded the highest WAR (3.5) of any player in 2017 who also produced a below-average batting line. By virtue of his 2015 season, however, Kevin Kiermaier (474, 3.3) has the top mark by that same criteria of any player since 1997. He’s projected to produce a precisely league-average batting line in 2018 while also saving 14 runs in center field.

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My book Big Data Baseball was published back in 2015. For those unfamiliar with it, it chronicles the Pirates’ 2013 campaign, when the club broke a string of 20 straight losing seasons (a North American pro sports record) and advanced to the NLDS.

There was a misnomer back then that the Pirates were a young team coming of age. They were not. Gerrit Cole was the only prominent prospect who debuted that season, while 90% of the roster was composed of holdovers from 2012. The book documents how the Pirates made a dramatic pivot, in part by residing on what represented the cutting edge of analytical thought at the time.

Pittsburgh’s transformation came in the form of a three-pronged approach, based on framing, shifts, and ground balls. They were the first club to invest significant dollars on the open market in pitch-framing when they signed Russell Martin to a then-club-record, free-agent deal of two years and $17 million. (Yes, that was a record amount.) They increased their defensive-shift usage by 400%. And while they were not the first club to more frequently employ a shift, they were the first — through sequencing, location, and pitch type — to consciously spike their ground-ball rate, to coerce more ground balls into the shifts. The Pirates led baseball in ground-ball rate from 2013 to -15.

The Pirates were also on the cutting edge of communication, the first known club to integrate a quantitative analyst full-time, even on road trips, into their clubhouse. Mike Fitzgerald was there not only to enhance scouting material but to be a conduit in exchanging ideas between the clubhouse and front office. Of course, having peak Andrew McCutchen didn’t hurt either.

When the book appeared on shelves, the Pirates were at their high-water mark, en route to a 98-win season. They were viewed then as a model, sabermetric-leaning organization having engineered a remarkable turnaround. Since 2015, though, both the trajectory of the big-league club and the perception of the organization have turned south.

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The timing of this post isn’t intentional, beyond the fact that I am writing it intentionally. With the market seemingly at a standstill, there’s increasing focus on the conflict between owners and the union, and when those two butt heads, my sense is the owners lose the PR battle. I’m not putting this up because of that. I’m putting this up out of curiosity.

As you might’ve guessed, this is another polling project. A little over a month ago, I asked the FanGraphs community to help me rate all the front offices. In so doing, I asked that you try to exclude the influence of ownership as much as possible. That’s not actually a possible thing to do, not all the time, but I just wanted your best guess. And I wanted to try to separate the two entities so as to allow for this follow-up. I’ve done this before, but it’s been two years. I’d like to see how things have changed, at least as far as opinions go. It’s always fun to get one set of data points, but it’s even more fun when you can look at points moving over time.

Your favorite baseball team has an owner, or it has some owners. Those owners are responsible for bankrolling the whole operation. Of course, it’s the players who are directly responsible for the outcomes on the field. And it’s usually the other front-office people who are directly responsible for those players being around in the first place. Most of the time, owners don’t want to be in the news. But your team has an owner, or owners, and you’ve got opinions. It’s simply part of being a fan.

Below, I’d like you to express those opinions, so I can collect them. Don’t worry about being right or wrong — there is no right or wrong, not as far as we can tell. Just pick the most fitting response, in your estimation, and I’m fully aware the polls are kind of strangely-worded. It should all be pretty simple, and as usual, the results allow for me to see how people feel across the whole baseball landscape. You might have a sense of how people feel about one team. How does that compare to every other team? The FanGraphs community is endlessly useful!

Do you trust the owners to make good decisions? Do you trust the owners to stay out of the way? Do you feel like the owners are sufficiently committed to winning, and winning every year? How much do the owners meddle? To what extent are the owners predictable? Are the owners approachable, or accessible? Have they placed a priority on improving the in-game ballpark experience? There are countless ways for owners to make a difference. You know more about your team’s ownership than I do. So I’m looking for you to share your information, as best as you can. Thank you in advance for your participation, and if everything goes according to plan, we’ll evaluate all the results early next week.

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Episode 796
Meg Rowley has previously served as a contributor both to Baseball Prospectus and Lookout Landing. More recently, she was named as the new managing editor of The Hardball Times. She’s the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 6 min play time.)

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a few recent trade demands (or non-demands), then bring on Yahoo Sports MLB columnist Jeff Passan to talk about what’s behind baseball’s slow-moving labor market, who and/or what is to blame for the sport’s present economic stalemate, and what can be done to avert disaster. Lastly, Ben provides a brief addendum on baseball’s most and least productive names.

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The Marlins have sold off a bunch of valuable pieces this offseason. You might’ve heard. Giancarlo Stanton? Traded. Marcell Ozuna? Traded. Dee Gordon? Traded. Regardless of whether they were good baseball moves, the immediate consequences are obvious: The Marlins are going to be bad. They hope to eventually become less bad. Now, all along, the Marlins have expressed an interest in building around Christian Yelich, who’s under team control for a while, thanks to his existing long-term extension. We would’ve been able to guess how Yelich has felt about that idea, but now his feelings are just…out there.

Christian Yelich’s relationship with the Miami Marlins is “irretrievably broken,” and it would be in the best interests of both the outfielder and the organization if the Marlins trade him before the start of spring training, his agent told ESPN on Tuesday.

In truth, Yelich has only so much leverage. He has to honor the contract he signed, and it wouldn’t help him to tank his own performance out of spite. If the Marlins kept Yelich, he’d essentially have to just deal with it. But it makes sense to trade Yelich anyway, given what else has gone on. The Marlins have already had a number of conversations about sending Yelich elsewhere, and, long story short, we come to Ronald Acuna.

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We haven’t spent much time talking about the Twins this offseason. The last post dedicated to the team was published Dec. 8, when this author wrote about two savvy little trades the club had made after losing out on the Ohtani sweepstakes.

But in what has been a quiet offseason, the Twins have quietly been one of the most active teams, bolstering their bullpen by signing ageless wonder Fernando Rodney, left-hander Zach Duke, and most recently, Addison Reed.

They’ve also made a move with an eye toward improving their 2019 rotation by signing Michael Pineda. Pineda is expected to miss most, if not all, of this coming season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. Given his bat-missing upside, though, the $10-million commitment seems like a prudent value play.

Overall, only 21 of Dave Cameron’s top-50 free agents have signed so far this winter. The Twins are responsible for two of them, however, in Reed and Pineda.

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