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 Chicago Cubs. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Dan Szymborski’s computer projects only three Cubs — Kris Bryant (670 PA, 5.8 zWAR), Anthony Rizzo (658, 4.9), and Addison Russell (508, 3.0) — to produce three wins or more in 2018, yet all eight of the positions on the depth-chart image below are forecast to reach that mark (within a rounding error, at least).

The cause of that discrepancy is as obvious as the deep, unabating terror in every mortal heart: the Cubs use platoons often and to good effect. Ben Zobrist (478, 1.9), for example, lacks a set role but is likely to complement Javier Baez (507, 1.7) and Jason Heyward (538, 2.3) at second base and right field, respectively. Ian Happ (545, 2.2), meanwhile, will probably share center and left fields with Albert Almora (437, 1.2) and Kyle Schwarber (511, 1.2).

As for weaknesses, no obvious one exists in the starting lineup as it’s presently constructed. That said, neither Almora nor Schwarber seem to be great candidates for a full-time role on a championship club — or, not according to ZiPS, at least. Were Happ to suffer an injury or fail to compensate for his strikeout rates with sufficient power on contact, then the team might be compelled to look for help elsewhere.

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Mike Shawaryn hadn’t put much thought into it. Finger pressure is instrumental in his success, both as a pitcher and as a musician, but how the two intertwine isn’t a subject he’d addressed. Not until I broached the subject this winter.

A 22-year-old right-hander out of the University of Maryland, Shawaryn is one of the top prospects in the Red Sox system (Baseball America has him No. 8; Eric Longenagen expects to rank him similarly when he puts together his forthcoming Red Sox list). Displaying a power arsenal, he fanned 169 batters in 134-and-two-thirds innings last year between low-A Greenville and high-A Salem.

When he’s not blowing away hitters, Shawaryn is playing the piano and the saxophone — and he’s a neophyte with neither. Boston’s pick in the fifth round of the 2016 draft has been tickling the ivories and blowing on a sax ever since his elementary school days in South Jersey.

Both instruments require dexterous fingers. Ditto pitching, where you’re gripping and releasing an object whose movement is influenced by the placement of digits on seams. Is there a direct correlation?

“I’ve never really thought about it like that, but the feel of the ball in your hand is obviously important,” Shawaryn said after first contemplating the idea. “Now, kind of connecting the dots, I’d say it’s the piano more so than the saxophone. The pressure you put on the keys determines the sound of it, the shape of the music. That’s probably helped me develop a type of feel in my fingers for the seams on the ball — what fingers I need to put pressure on to influence the shape of a pitch.”

And then there are rhythm and tempo. Pitchers change speeds within an at bat, and musicians change speeds within a song. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.

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Episode 799
Kiley McDaniel is a lead prospect analyst emeritus and a current analyst of all baseball for FanGraphs dot com. On this edition of the program, he introduces and previews Prospect Week 2018, which starts on Monday, February 5th, with a top-100 list authored jointly by McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen. Also discussed: what in baseball is like an owl’s curiously large eyes? And: a status update on the black sheep of the 2015 draft.

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 56 min play time.)

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Yesterday, I wrote a post about how the opportunity should be there for some low-spending team to buy a prospect. There are high-spending teams looking to shed expensive commitments, and there are lower-payroll teams who ought to have some nearer-term financial flexibility. The example I leaned on most heavily was the Dodgers and Matt Kemp, since the Dodgers would like to move Kemp if they are to re-sign Yu Darvish and still avoid exceeding the competitive-balance-tax threshold. There’s nothing controversial in here. If anything, it’s all terribly obvious. Of course the Dodgers would like to dump Kemp’s salary, and of course some other teams would be interested in assuming some dead money if it came along with younger value.

The Dodgers have plenty of younger value. Plenty of options, for designing a reasonable Kemp package. This would be precisely the hold-up; other teams want more than the Dodgers have so far been willing to give. Where I ran into some resistance was when I talked specifically about Wilmer Font. That is, Wilmer Font, as a would-be Matt Kemp offset. Font is a 27-year-old righty with seven innings of major-league experience. In those seven innings, he’s allowed nine runs. He’s nowhere high on any prospect list. Even more, I’m given to understand he’s out of options!

Let me quickly try to explain myself. I know that Font seemed like a weird guy to bring up. And I have no idea how many teams might actually be interested in him. But I know for a fact the answer’s not zero. Font has been on few radars, but he’s coming off a truly incredible season.

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“When you’re talking about free agency you’re talking about aging players and the trend of overpaying a player’s aging curves has come to an end across baseball.”

— Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins

“Everybody wants to look up and scream, ‘collusion.’ Everybody wants to look up and scream, ‘This isn’t fair.’ But sooner or later, you have to take responsibility for a system you created for yourself. It’s our fault.”

— Brandon Moss on MLB Network Radio

There have been eight work stoppages in MLB history.

Since the first of those, a strike in 1972 that lasted 13 days and 86 total games in duration, baseball has enjoyed its longest stretch of labor peace. Since the cataclysmic 1994-95 strike, which lasted 232 days and wiped out the World Series for the first time in 90 years, there has been no interruption in play. Revenues have grown exponentially since that strike. By some measures, the sport has never been more popular. No one wants a repeat of 1994-95, when there was no postseason and replacement players showed up for spring training the following February.

But if there were a doomsday-style, labor-unrest clock, it would be inching closer to midnight this winter.

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I probably don’t need to rehash here the stuff we’ve been writing all winter instead of writing about free-agent signings. We all know the market has been remarkably slow. We all know the theories behind the slowness. Most of those theories are probably correct to some extent.

What’s curious to me — and what prompted this article — is that, even after all of the free agents sign, there is a very real possibility that total payroll might actually decrease from a year ago. That’s pretty rare and the implications much worse than I had anticipated.

Near the beginning of the offseason, I took a pretty simple look at how much teams might be willing to spend in free agency. To get those numbers, I took Opening Day payrolls from last season and added 5% to every team — that is, roughly the observed rate of annual inflation of the game over the last few decades. With those numbers, I looked at current team commitments, including arbitration estimates, to get a sense of how much room every team had to spend.

This graph was created with payroll numbers from Cot’s Contracts:

Three months later, that graph is a bit outdated. The market has been slow, yes, but teams have nevertheless made some moves affecting payroll.

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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 San Diego Padres. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
San Diego hitters recorded the lowest collective WAR figure in the majors last year, compiling just seven wins as a group, or about 26 fewer than the Houston Astros’ cohort. This offseason, meanwhile, has seen the departure of Yangervis Solarte — who, for whatever his shortcomings, has nevertheless been the club’s most productive position player over the last three years. This would appear to spell trouble for erstwhile managing editor Dave Cameron and his new colleagues.

And yet, not that. A brief examination of the depth-chart image below reveals a Starting Eight that projects as profoundly average. And while that might not be regarded as welcome news for some clubs, it represents a promising development for the young Padres. There isn’t anything in the way of star-level power here — Manuel Margot (585 PA, 3.2 zWAR) and Wil Myers (648, 3.2) both profile more as above-average regulars than clear All-Stars — but there is also little in the way of glaring weakness.

Of some interest is how the team handles second base. Cory Spangenberg (527, 1.3) earns the top forecast of the players likely to receive time there, but Carlos Asuaje (609, 1.2) started about half the club’s games at second last season. Prospect Luis Urias (558, 1.8), meanwhile, has a better WAR forecast than either of them.

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Earlier this week, we learned about how Lars came to join the Sydney Blue Sox. Today, in the sixth of what is now planned as an eight-part series, the itinerant slugger-cum-wordsmith introduces us to Feathers, Tank, Chuckles, and Numbers. He also explains how his sightseeing plans went awry.

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Lars Anderson: “My ‘permanent’ living situation was still being sorted out when I arrived in Sydney. For the first two nights, I crashed at Tony’s high-rise apartment that he shares with his exceedingly cool wife, Katie. The apartment overlooks Parramatta, a groovy, multicultural neighborhood 30 minutes from the heart of Sydney. Tony is originally from Adelaide. Tony is also an assistant coach for the Australian national team, occupying that role for almost two decades. From what I’ve gathered, he’s a ‘who’s who’ in the baseball community here and seems to be garner nearly unanimous respect.

“When Tony isn’t managing in the ABL, he is a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates and is in charge of all players in the Pacific Rim. He spends his summers scouting in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Australia.

“In my limited time around him, I see why he has earned said respect: he’s been accommodating beyond reason with me off the field. On the field, he is even-keeled, honest, positive (yet stern and serious in the right moments), and he supports and defends his players. After a tough loss in Brisbane, we walked into the locker room to find that there was no postgame meal. Tony, frustrated with the loss and the way Brisbane had played host, walked outside and yelled, ‘Give us some fucking food! You kicked our ass on the field, you could at least throw us a bone off of it!’ The team erupted in laughter, and the bitter taste of defeat was lessened by his calculated antics. It was an uncanny bit of leadership.

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