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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.