FanGraphs Baseball

The 2016 season hasn’t started yet, but we already know one thing; everyone loves the Cubs this year. Whether you go by projection systems, gambling odds, expert predictions, or general pre-season hype, it’s pretty clear that the Chicago Cubs are the team to beat in 2016. Our forecasts expect them to win nearly 60% of their games and our playoff odds give them a 94% chance of reaching the postseason. Expectations couldn’t really be much higher.

But if there’s one thing baseball is particularly good at, it’s reminding us all how uncertain we should be about predicting a specific future for one player or even one team. In the aggregate, we can do a decent job of forecasting large groups, but for individuals or single teams, the range of possible outcomes is still really large. Last year, for instance, the Nationals had almost exactly the same projections as the Cubs do now, with a .585 projected winning percentage and a 94% chance of reaching the postseason. But instead, they won 83 games and watched the playoffs at home.

So, before the Cubs start playing games that count and things start threatening to go wrong, let’s take a look at what could cause the Cubs to follow in the Nationals path.

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Oh my, it’s prediction time. Can you feel it? Another season is upon us. Another chance for us to look like huge idiots. Like last season, when none of us pegged Kansas City to make the playoffs, and just five of us pegged the Mets as a playoff team. Being wrong on the internet can be an annual thing, but rarely do we crystallize just how wrong we are in one single location. Yes, it’s good to be back.

This year, there are a couple of no-doubt teams, according to everyone who voted. Chicago and Houston enter the season as our two locks to make the postseason. Considering that, as recently as 2013, these teams won 66 and 51 games, respectively, this seems pretty remarkable. We can save the tanking discussion for another day, but no matter your name for it, these franchises have really built themselves up into something. Houston has had an especially sharp transformation. Last season, they got zero votes for the postseason, and this year they got every single vote.

The Astros and Cubs aren’t the only teams in which we’re big believers, of course, but let’s get right to looking at the actual predictions.

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Spring Training stats don’t matter. Right? Right. Well, mostly. It’s true — you shouldn’t be paying attention to things like batting average, ERA, or even home-run figures in the spring. There’s just too little time, too much volatility in the statistics, and too much uncertainty surrounding the quality of opposition for those numbers to have, well, any meaning. But last year, Dan Rosenheck’s excellent work in The Economist, later nominated for a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award, revealed that certain peripheral Spring Training statistics actually can have some predictive value for the regular season.

It needs to be stressed: even then, the effects are small. Nothing that happens in Spring Training should drastically alter your perception of a player. And for most guys, nothing should change. But, for the few players at the very end of each spectrum in these particular statistics, it’s okay to move your expectations up or down a tick or two.

You should read Rosenheck’s article and also view the slides he used to present his research at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I’ll briefly summarize his findings here anyway:

• For batters, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and isolated power on contact.
• For pitchers, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and ground-ball rate.
• Each player’s Spring Training figures should be compared against his own projections to find the largest outliers.
• We can learn the most in the spring about younger players, who have less major-league playing time, therefore less significant data to fuel the projections, therefore more uncertainty within those projections

Using those four basic principles from Rosenheck’s work, we can fairly easily use the Spring Training leaderboards from MLB.com and our depth chart projections here on the site (a mix of ZiPS and Steamer projections with author-updated playing-time estimates) to find the players who changed their outlook the most this spring (though still not that much!).

The Hitting Winners

Jake Lamb

• 2016 projections: 25.6 K%, 8.4 BB%, .200 isolated power on contact
• 2016 spring stats: 24.2 K%, 19.7 BB%, .405 isolated power on contact

By this measure, Arizona’s third baseman Jake Lamb has had the single most encouraging spring of any batter in baseball. He’s still striking out more than the average batter, but he also has the highest walk rate of any qualified batter in the spring — more than double his projected rate — and he’s doubled his power output, perhaps thanks to a change in his swing path, inspired by his teammate, A.J. Pollock.
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Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York (AL) / New York (NL)  / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / St. Louis.

Back in November, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Atlanta Braves. In this companion piece, I finally get around to looking at that same Atlanta farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Braves have the 13th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, in a spring-training game against the Braves, Miguel Gonzalez was basically pitching for his rotation slot. That might’ve been surprising enough, given how much Gonzalez has meant to the Orioles in the past, but he did have a rough 2015 and a rougher month of March. Anyhow, Gonzalez went five innings, allowing a run with no walks and four strikeouts. The results were solid, even if they could’ve been worse. Yet Gonzalez still got released. Something just wasn’t good enough, and the Orioles decided to go with other options.

Maybe “stunning” would be too strong, but the reality of Gonzalez getting released is unexpected. The Orioles are anything but deep in the rotation, and apparently Gonzalez’s former teammates are less than ecstatic. It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, given Gonzalez’s presence, but it seems to me there are three ways to think about this. One of them, I prefer over the others.

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Ben and Sam preview the Dodgers’ season with Vice Sports editor Eric Nusbaum, and Jeff talks to Los Angeles Times Dodgers beat writer Andy McCullough (at 21:22).

Perhaps you already thought it inevitable, but now it’s official: Out of the gate, Travis Shaw will be starting for the Red Sox at third base, over Pablo Sandoval. Through the end of his contract, Sandoval is owed more than seventy-five million dollars. Shaw, meanwhile, is owed an amount of money you could actually imagine in your own bank account. This is surprising, because of the commitment the Red Sox made to Sandoval the previous offseason. But this is not surprising, because Sandoval was a disaster. Hanley Ramirez might’ve been a more conspicuous disaster, but Sandoval managed to beat him, ever so slightly, in negative WAR.

There are just a few things that have to be said in response to the news. The first, which is critical, is this is non-binding. I mean, Shaw will start on opening day, but beyond that, no one’s really said anything. It stands to reason Sandoval is going to play; he’s not going to be a full-year pinch-hitter. It is legitimately unusual for a team to rule against its own financial commitments, at least this soon. And then — well, this decision was probably easy. This is the right time to give Shaw his chance. He might just be a better baseball player than Sandoval is, and after back-to-back seasons of misery, the Red Sox are in the business of maximizing wins.

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I got my first look at Blake Rutherford (Chaminade College Prep, Calif.) at USA Baseball’s Tournament of Stars showcase last summer. The 18-year-old outfielder, whom evaluators considered a top 10-draft prospect entering the spring, reinforced that status at last weekend’s National High School Invitational at the USA Baseball complex in Cary, NC, perhaps elevating himself given the underwhelming performances of some of his similarly talented peers.

The video below merges Rutherford’s batting practice from Tournament of Stars and his four at-bats from the Chaminade Prep vs. Walton HS (Ga.) contest at NHSI.

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There was a time when Cory Luebke seemed to be on the cusp of stardom. That was back in 2011, when he was still a member of the San Diego Padres. The following season, he pitched just 31 innings before falling down a rabbit hole of injury. He has re-emerged this spring, and today we received word that he made the Pirates’ Opening Day roster. That has to feel pretty spectacular.

In 2011, Luebke, then 26, embarked on his second season in the majors. His previous experience coming solely in September 2010, this would be his rookie season. He didn’t disappoint. He would pitch out of the bullpen for the first three months of the season before getting the call to start on June 26th against the Braves. Here are the lines from his first three starts:

• 6/26/11, vs. ATL: 5 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 6 SO
• 7/2/11, @ SEA: 6 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 7 SO
• 7/7/11, @ SF: 6 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 1 BB, 8 SO

Hell of a way to start a career as a starting pitcher, don’t you think? While the strikeout totals wouldn’t be as robust in his next few outings, Luebke was pretty consistent for the remainder of the season. He never allowed more than five runs in a start, and in his 17 games started, he struck out at least seven batters in eight of them. Here are the K% leaders for that season:

2011 Starting Pitcher K% Leaders

Name	K%
Brandon Beachy	28.6%
Zack Greinke	28.1%
Cory Luebke	27.3%
Clayton Kershaw	27.2%
Tommy Hanson	26.3%
Brandon Morrow	26.1%
Cliff Lee	25.9%
Justin Verlander	25.8%
Michael Pineda	24.9%
Tim Lincecum	24.4%

Minimum 100 IP as a starting pitcher; 137 pitchers in sample

This table is both impressive and a cautionary tale. Neither Beachy, Morrow, Lee or Lincecum finds themselves at the top of their games any longer, and unfortunately Tommy Hanson has passed away. That all sucks. Until recently, we would have included Luebke in this category. But perhaps now we won’t have to.

Perhaps the guy who had a better K% than Clayton Kershaw in 2011 can find his way back to the mound on a regular basis, back in the bullpen once again (though his role hardly matters). That is the victory we should be hoping to see this year from Cory Luebke. If he does so, and is also good as a member of the Pirates’ bullpen, well that would be doubly awesome. But just seeing him take the mound and throw a baseball — after nearly four years remove from a major league mound — that’ll be a beautiful thing.