After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
On Monday, the author of this post published the ZiPS projections for the Milwaukee Brewers. Among the findings one might have extracted from that document? No Brewers position player receives a forecast greater than 2.8 wins for 2017. Not much better than average, in other words.

Examining the numbers presented here, one finds a similar trend. Among those players currently employed by the St. Louis Cardinals, no batter is projected by Dan Szymborski’s computer to record more than 3.1 wins in 2017. Which is to say, not much better than average.

This might comes as a surprise. While the Brewers weren’t particularly good in 2016 and aren’t expected to be particularly good in 2017, the Cardinals missed the playoffs by a single game in 2016 and have comported themselves this offseason — as they have in many other, recent offseasons — as a team that intends to compete for a World Championship.

Pitching is one variable that separates the Cardinals and Brewers, of course. Another is sheer volume of competent pieces, though. The Cardinals appear to have a distinctly egalitarian approach to roster construction. While none of their starting field players is projected for more than 3.1 wins, all of them are forecast for more than 2.2 wins. They are infested with competence.

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In recent times, pitchers generally been rewarded for three performance skills: strikeout rate, walk rate and ground-ball percentage. The influence of the BABIP Gods has largely been ignored or discounted.

Blaine Boyer has pitched in parts of 10 major-league seasons. He’s never earned more than $1 million in a given year for his efforts.

He had the lowest strikeout percentage – 9.2 % – in all of baseball last season. He’s just one of two pitchers to throw at least 50 innings last season and strike out fewer than 10% of batters faced. Zach Neal was the other culprit.

Since 2014, Boyer has the eighth-lowest strikeout percentage in baseball (12.4%). He’s not an elite ground-ball pitcher. And while he limits walks, he’s not an elite command-and-control artist. His fastball velocity, and modest strikeout rates, have declined three straight seasons. He’s 35. It’s not the most glowing free-agent resume.

But since 2014, he owns a 3.31 ERA – and 3.73 FIP – despite striking out just 88 batters in 171 innings.

Boyer is interesting because he’s a pitcher of extremes. When taking into account exit velocity and pitches barreled, no pitcher induced weaker contact last season. And no pitcher missed fewer bats.

If Boyer’s agent were looking for a gift to help shop his client, it arrived Thursday when MLB.com released a list of its top-five Statcast stunners from 2016. Wrote Andrew Simon for MLB.com:

Out of 265 pitchers who had at least 150 balls put in play against them, Boyer allowed the lowest rate of barrels (1.0 percent), on the strength of an average 86.2 mph exit velocity that ranked 11th.

That avoidance of solid contact is how a pitcher with a fastball averaging less than 93 mph and with MLB’s lowest strikeout rate (minimum 40 innings) managed to survive in the big leagues. Boyer posted a 3.95 ERA across 66 innings, with only 26 Ks.

Want to see some weak contact?

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Part of growing up is realizing that some no-hitters aren’t necessarily great pitching performances. Try telling an eight-year-old that the six-walk no-hitter she’s watching is less impressive than a one-hit, no-walk shutout and she’ll look at you like you’re from another planet. If you explain that same thing to an adult, she probably won’t turn off the TV, but will probably concede you have a point. No-hitters have a magic that transcends the actual logic of the achievement. That’s perfectly fine, of course, as one’s enjoyment of an event doesn’t need to correlate precisely with it’s degree of difficulty.

But it’s worth considering why the no-hitter is magical. Most of it is probably the name and the history, but I’ll propose another reason: it’s a razor’s edge accomplishment. In other words, as soon as the pitcher allows a hit, the entire thing is over. When Barry Bonds was chasing Hank Aaron, if he failed to hit a home run, there would always be another chance. If a batter falls below .400, he can always bring his average back up. When you’re dealing with an accomplishment based on a zero, everything is exciting because it could be gone at any moment.

This is why I was so interested in Chase Utley‘s no-double play season. Every single plate appearance mattered. Well, in preparing last week’s post on Derek Dietrich’s elite ability to get hit with the baseball, I noticed another zero-based accomplishment that’s pretty extraordinary: Coco Crisp hasn’t been hit by a pitch in more than five years.

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We’d like to welcome Effectively Wild to its new home on FanGraphs! Effectively Wild will continue to be hosted by The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh, who is joined by his new co-host Jeff Sullivan. Fans of our existing podcasts need not worry, as Effectively Wild is an addition to our existing podcast offerings, all of which will continue to be produced.

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk about the Mariners' moves while Jeff was away, then answer listener emails about Mike Trout, Barry Bonds, the home run spike, taking pitches, fans on the field, and more.

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We know a few things for certain regarding Mallex Smith, who was acquired by Tampa Bay along with two prospects for left-handed starter Drew Smyly on Wednesday.

For starters, he’s fast.

And that speed allows him to cover considerable ground, and overcome less than perfectly efficient routes, in the outfield …

He has 80-grade speed, according a number of evaluators, and stole bases at a 79.2% rate over five minor-league seasons.

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When it comes to batted-ball exit velocity, its a lot easier to write about hitters. It’s become fairly clear that hitting the ball hard is a skill, and that the numbers are mostly consistent from year to year.

When it comes to pitching, however, things are much less clear. Given the outcomes for individual batted balls based on exit velocity — even in the absence of the complementary launch angles — suppressing exit velocity appears to be a benefit for pitchers. Given how much control hitters exert over exit velocity, it stands to reason that pitchers have considerably less control. Whether they have any control at all is something we can begin to determine by looking at Baseball Savant’s full-season data from 2015 and 2016.

First, let’s take a quick look at the relationship between exit velocity and ERA and FIP compared to a few other stats: K/9, BB/9, HR/9, and BABIP. I took a look at the 93 pitchers who recorded at least 100 innings in both 2015 and 2016 for comparison. The chart below shows the r-squared figures between the single-season stats for ERA and FIP with the stats mentioned above. The higher the number, the stronger the relationship.

As we might expect, strikeouts, walks, and homers all have a pretty strong relationship with FIP. Those, of course, are the three variables used to calculate FIP. BABIP has zero relationship with FIP, which isn’t surprising, given that FIP purposefully excludes balls in play. Exit velocity doesn’t have an incredibly strong relationship with FIP, but it does seem like one exists. On the ERA side, exit velocity has the same r-squared as in FIP, but BABIP becomes more of a factor for ERA, bringing homers down some, walks down a little, and strikeouts down to close to the same relationship on ERA as a pitcher’s average exit velocity.

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The New York Yankees are supposedly rebuilding — and, in a sense, it’s true. They didn’t make the playoffs last season, and they haven’t seen the American League Division Series since 2012. They started the winter by trading the guy who had been their starting catcher for the past three seasons. Those are all some traits that might be representative of a team in transition.

On the other hand, they haven’t dropped below .500 in forever. You have to go back to 1992 to find the last time the Yankees failed to break even. They’ve never been the bad team that one now commonly associates with a tear-down effort. Also, they’ve spent some money in free agency this offseason, on Aroldis Chapman and Matt Holliday. These aren’t the types of players/deals — closers, short-term deals for aging superstar — that teams who are far from contention typically sign/make.

So who are the Yankees? If you had to pick between pretender and contender, you’d have to land on the latter. Let’s take a look at the potential starting lineup. As always, the venerable Mike Axisa has done much of the legwork for us. In his recent piece on how the Yankees may split Brett Gardner and Jacoby Ellsbury in the lineup, here was his best guess as to how the Yankees’ lineup will shake out this season.

1. LF Brett Gardner
2. 2B Starlin Castro
3. C Gary Sanchez
4. DH Matt Holliday
5. SS Didi Gregorius
6. CF Jacoby Ellsbury
7. 1B Gregory Bird
8. RF Aaron Judge
9. 3B Chase Headley

Not bad, right? Let’s take a look at the projected wOBAs for all of the AL teams, according to our current depth charts.

The Yankees are in the middle of the pack, but there are a few caveats here. First, the projections may be conservative on Bird and Sanchez, which is understandable in both cases. Certainly, we shouldn’t expect Sanchez to repeat his blistering .425 wOBA from last season, but the .348 wOBA for which he’s pegged for seems like it could be a little conservative. The early returns from our FANS projections seem to agree, pegging him for a .355 wOBA.

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The Seattle Mariners made a pair of moves yesterday, the first of which featured the acquisition of OF Mallex Smith from Atlanta in exchange for pitching prospects Thomas Burrows and Luiz Gohara. They then turned Smith around and sent him to Tampa along with teenage INF Carlos Vargas and LHP Ryan Yarbrough for LHP Drew Smyly. Below are scouting reports on the prospects involved — as well as for Smith himself.

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The Mariners continued their early-January flurry of activity yesterday, swinging two trades in short succession. First, they dealt left-handed pitchers Thomas Burrows and Luiz Gohara to the Braves for Mallex Smith and intriguing arm Shae Simmons. They promptly flipped Smith, along with prospects Carlos Vargas and Ryan Yarbrough, to the Rays for Drew Smyly.

The most interesting players in this deal are likely the two who’ll make an immediate big-league impact — Smith and Smyly — the former of whom KATOH adored heading into 2016. But the other players changing hands also have their merits. Here’s what my KATOH system has to say about the players who spent most of 2016 playing in the domestic minor leagues.

Note that new Atlanta prospect Burrows is omitted due to a lack of professional experience; new Tampa prospect Vargas, because KATOH doesn’t account for Dominican Summer League numbers, which are the only sort Vargas has produced. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar a methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

*****

Luiz Gohara, LHP, Atlanta (Profile)

KATOH: 3.1 WAR
KATOH+: 2.7 WAR

Gohara posted an ERA well above 5.00 over his first three seasons as a pro, but really found his groove last year as a 19-year-old. In 15 starts across two levels of A-ball, he pitched to a dazzling 3.04 FIP on the strength of a 29% strikeout rate. Gohara was one of the more dominant arms in the low minors.

KATOH isn’t completely sold yet, though, as Gohara has a few negative variables in his profile. For one, he was decidedly bad as recently as 2015, which wasn’t terribly long ago. He’s also never pitched above Low-A, meaning he’s largely untested against high-quality hitters and still has a few years of development that have yet to occur. Even his strong 2016 numbers came in a small sample — 79 innings — so KATOH’s a bit skeptical of the track record he does have.

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