For a while now, I’ve been having fun analyzing how accurate umpires are when calling balls and strikes according to the Statcast strike zone. Honestly, I might be having too much fun. It’s just that there are so many variables that might affect the way the umpire sees a pitch. Today we’re looking into the most literal one: the ballpark. Every stadium is different, and that can affect how easy it is to track the baseball. This is a well-established issue, which is why every ballpark has a batter’s eye, a dark background that’s supposed to ensure that the batter is able to see the ball out of the pitcher’s hand. Those backdrops vary quite a bit, from evergreen trees and ivy in Colorado, to a painted wall in Texas, to tinted glass in the Bronx.

When Drew Smyly nearly threw a perfect game last April, it helped that it was a day game at Wrigley Field, and his left-handed release point was so wide that the ball appeared to be coming not from the batters eye, but from the bleachers in right-center. Last September, in response to multiple public complaints from players, the Astros effectively extended Minute Maid Park’s batter’s eye several feet farther into right field, awkwardly repainting part of a formerly red section of brick and signage green. “It’s like night and day,” one player told The Athletic after the paint job:

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Let’s start with a disclaimer: I don’t expect this to happen. If a Scott Boras client turned down a reported $150 million over six years from the Yankees, he’s not going to settle for a one-year contract. Blake Snell is 31, coming off a Cy Young season, with a less-than-encouraging track record for durability. He should ring the bell now; he’s never going to be more valuable. And he probably will. There will be a lucrative long-term deal for him somewhere, at a high enough dollar figure that Boras can sell it as some kind of record.

But it’s the last proper week of the offseason, and the reigning NL Cy Young winner is still out of work. So let’s speculate a little. More than speculate: Let’s imagine what would happen if Snell and Boras decided to throw caution to the wind and try to max out on a one-year contract. Read the rest of this entry »

With the Dodgers reporting for pitchers and catchers today, this week seems like a good time to run ZiPS projections for all 30 teams. I covered the American League projections yesterday, so today is all about the National League. Let’s be clear up front: These are not the final preseason projections, but they’re the best expression of how ZiPS sees the NL right now. After all, several marquee free agents remain unsigned and rosters will surely change between now and the start of the 2024 season.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial, or more competently, beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which were released Wednesday, meaning there naturally will be some notable differences in the results.

So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion (the computational algorithms, that is — though it would be fun to don a tuxedo and play chemin de fer like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise, this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our ken, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.6 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. In other words, none of the year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

That ZiPS likes the Atlanta Braves can hardly be considered a surprise considering they won 104 games last year, all projection systems everywhere love them, and I’ve been warning non-Braves fans that this would be the likely result all winter. What else is there to say? They’re a great team and there’s no scary number two in the division.

The Phillies project just slightly worse than last year, partially due to some aging risk in their prime offensive players, but more likely than not — really, unless they lose either Zack Wheeler or Aaron Nola to injury — they are going to be a playoff team. Catching the Braves isn’t a futile gesture — we’re talking a roughly one-in-seven chance — but they’ll need some help from Atlanta to win the division.

ZiPS doesn’t think the Mets did enough to patch up their rotation, but if their starting pitchers are better than expected, they should contend for a wild card. The Marlins project a little worse than New York, but they have a high variance in their projected outcomes; their pitching is elite, and that could be enough to make a pretty lousy offense almost unimportant — as was the case last year when they snagged a wild card berth.

Last year, the Nationals remained within bullhorn distance of .500 for much of the late summer, but they aren’t good enough to take a big step forward in 2024. Washington has the worst ZiPS projection for any National League team.

While it may seem like a relief that ZiPS is hedging enough here that I won’t get blamed too badly, no matter what happens, I also won’t get much credit! Fans have a tendency to overrate teams when things are going well and underrate teams when they’re not, and I think the Cardinals are a good example of this. The additions outside of Sonny Gray don’t send a tingle down your spine, but they did successfully patch up the rotation, which was a gaping wound for most of last season. Paul Goldschmidt, 36, and Nolan Arenado, who turns 33 in April, might not be as good as they once were, but if they age gradually instead of all at once, St. Louis should have the necessary depth in its lineup to score enough runs to compete in such a weak division. ZiPS isn’t alone here.

Shota Imanaga is my favorite signing this winter, but the Cubs are probably still one more starting pitcher away from being the favorite in this division. I’d certainly like more ambitious solutions at first base or catcher. In recent weeks, the Brewers patched some of their roster holes, signing first baseman Rhys Hoskins, starting pitcher Jakob Junis, and backup catcher and DH Gary Sánchez, but they also opened up a larger, newer one when they traded ace right-hander Corbin Burnes for infield prospect Joey Ortiz and left-hander DL Hall. Ortiz should get the chance to play every day, and Hall could be the latest dominant arm fermented by Milwaukee’s reliever brewery, but the Brewers will feel the absence of Burnes in 2024.

There’s a lot to like about the Reds’ future, but they haven’t done much this offseason to address their shortcomings. They have a logjam of guys who get a lot of their value playing third base, but instead of using some of those players as trade pieces to upgrade elsewhere, the Reds are going to shove them all into the lineup at various other positions, such as first base, DH and corner outfield. That isn’t a particularly lucrative plan. Cincinnati’s starting pitching could be very good, but there is a quite a bit of variance with this group due to consistency and/or injury concerns. A few bad “rolls” here and the rotation could become awful quickly.

The Pirates aren’t a depressing team and have some interesting players to watch, like shortstop Oneil Cruz, outfielder Bryan Reynolds, and third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes. But they do have some holes to fill at other positions, and their starting pitching staff probably peaks at OK. ZiPS is a bigger fan of their bullpen.

The Dodgers are clearly the best team in the NL West, but they’re not invincible. The team’s pitching plan to have about 15 really talented pitchers and hope nine or so are healthy at any given time could work out tremendously – as it has in recent years – but there’s certainly some risk there. It’s hard to capture in preseason projections, but the Dodgers will likely be aggressive in making trades to remedy flaws that pop up with their pitching staff during the season.

Arizona is a good team, but as is the case with the Rangers, there’s a serious risk of overrating a team because of a World Series appearance. The Diamondbacks were an 84-win team last year and their outlook for 2024 would’ve been about the same if the Brewers had eliminated them in the first round rather than vice-versa. That said, Arizona made several moves this offseason and, as a result, appears to be a better team overall than it was last year (and they were a team I talked up quite a bit).

The Giants are underwhelming, in part because they’ve missed out on most of the big free agents they’ve gone after, but that doesn’t mean they are bad. They are solid enough that they could make a wild card push, and their floor is higher than many think. But they need some more production in their lineup, and behind Logan Webb, there are a lot of moving parts in the rotation.

Replacing Juan Soto is a nearly impossible task, so it’s unsurprising that the Padres are projected to take a step back this season. ZiPS projects both the offense and the pitching to rank somewhere in the 17 to 21 range, depending on playing time assumptions. And while San Diego has repaired its farm system quicker than many (including this writer) expected, that doesn’t exactly help much for 2024.

The Rockies aren’t going to the postseason and will probably be well out of the playoff picture by mid-April. But at least they didn’t do anything this offseason to make their long-term outlook worse, which is kind of an improvement. I’m mildly hopeful that they take the proper lesson from the Nolan Jones trade and make it an organizational priority to acquire every interesting 25-year-old from a team that is unsure what to do with him.

And here we have the simple chart – which I’ve been including in all of these ZiPS projected standings, except the times I forget – to show what win totals likely will make the playoffs, rather than the highest median win projection.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about surprising playoff odds, the Astros extending Jose Altuve (26:40), the Brewers signing Gary Sánchez (34:57), the forthcoming Netflix docuseries about the 2024 Red Sox (38:49), a baseball equivalent of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift (45:17), and how trailblazing former first-round draftee Carter Stewart has fared in Japan (55:29). Then (1:03:25) they talk to Paul Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Pioneer League expansion teams the Oakland Ballers and the Yolo High Wheelers, about his efforts to ensure the survival of professional baseball in Oakland in the likely absence of the A’s.

Audio intro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG’s playoff odds
Link to Ben Clemens on the odds
Link to PECOTA’s projected standings
Link to Ben L. on the O’s
Link to Baumann on Altuve
Link to Astros Altuve tweet
Link to story on Altuve and cheating
Link to Martino Altuve report
Link to banging data
Link to Clemens on Sánchez
Link to Netflix press release
Link to MLB.com on the doc
Link to Drive to Survive myth
Link to Ben on Swift
Link to Princiotti on Swift
Link to Swift/NFL story 1
Link to Swift/NFL story 2
Link to Swift/NFL story 3
Link to Swift/NFL story 4
Link to Kiley on Stewart in 2019
Link to Jim Allen on Stewart
Link to Manfred on streaming
Link to Nevada teacher lawsuit
Link to Manfred comments
Link to Las Vegas mayor comments
Link to Oakland mayor comments
Link to A’s Opening Day offer
Link to Ballers promo video
Link to Ballers website
Link to High Wheelers website
Link to Pioneer League wiki
Link to Oaklandside on the Ballers
Link to Mercury News on the Ballers
Link to A’s Coliseum veto
Link to Oakland Roots SC wiki

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When Carl Pavano threw the first official pitch at the brand new Target Field on April 12, 2010, there was no Target logo on the mound. Mind you, there were Target logos aplenty all around the ballpark — on the wall behind home plate, just below the press box, up above the bleachers in right and center field, on the signs the fans brought and the hats they wore, and on the video boards on the façade of the upper deck, which often displayed rows of alternating baseballs and Target logos, hundreds of them wrapping around the entire stadium — just not on the pitcher’s mound. Later that year, the interlocking T and C of the Twins logo began appearing in the dirt behind the rubber; the Target logo didn’t start gracing the mound until 2016.

Still, in the early years of 2016 and 2017, the mound was often completely targetless. Even today, there are games where there’s no logo whatsoever — and not just nationally televised games, when the advertising rights can change. Sometimes it’s just the pitcher all alone up there (aside from the rubber, the cleat cleaner, and a couple rosin bags):

I don’t have any good guesses that explain the logo’s occasional absence, but I have so, so many bad guesses. Maybe the grounds crew is hiding the target somewhere else on the field and we’re supposed to be looking for it. Maybe Target leases the space on a per-game basis, and sometimes whoever is in charge of delivering that day’s check gets lost during the half-mile walk from Target Plaza Commons headquarters to Target Field. Maybe — and hear me out on this one — maybe the grounds crew just gets busy sometimes. I don’t know why it’s not always there, but if it’s supposed to be there every game, I hope this paragraph doesn’t get anybody in trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Few positions on the Brewers depth chart are more set than catcher. William Contreras, whom they acquired before last season, was their best player in 2023. He led Milwaukee in hitting and finished third on the team in plate appearances despite shouldering a full-time catching load, which normally limits playing time. Most impressively, he delivered a sensational defensive performance a year after he was one of the worst receivers in baseball. On a team that struggled to generate offense, Contreras was a rare and brightly shining exception.

Naturally, the Brewers just signed the best free agent catcher on the market, give or take DH Mitch Garver. That’d be Gary Sánchez, who is joining the team on a one-year, $7 million contract, as Jon Heyman reported. It sounds bizarre – and it may well be bizarre. But there’s a method to Milwaukee’s madness, so let’s try to figure it out together.

There’s one obvious thing going for the Brewers: They really needed a second catcher. Before they signed Sánchez, the plan was to use Eric Haase, he of the 42 wRC+ in 2023, as their second backstop. That plan was not great, to put it succinctly. Haase probably isn’t that bad offensively, but he’s also not particularly good behind the plate. In his best years in Detroit – he hit a career-high 22 home runs in 2021 and topped out at 1.3 WAR in 351 plate appearances the following season – he wasn’t used as a pure catcher, dabbling in the outfield and at DH and racking up meaningfully negative framing numbers when he did don the tools of ignorance.
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The best pitch in baseball is a well-located four-seam fastball. It is the rhythm guitar of pitching, the rock upon which the church is built. To establish the fastball first is fundamental; to pitch any other way is backwards.

Maybe you don’t need it at all.

In the late 20th century, rock and roll evolved into different popular forms that either de-emphasized the role of the guitar or eliminated it altogether. Some artists went forward and embraced electronic instruments; others went back in time and rediscovered the piano. Of the 603 pitchers who threw at least 250 pitches last year, 49 didn’t throw a single four-seamer. Many of them were quite successful. The anti-four-seamer crowd includes top relievers like Josh Hader, Camilo Doval, and José Alvarado, as well as elite starters like Corbin Burnes and Framber Valdez. Read the rest of this entry »

With the Dodgers reporting for pitchers and catchers on Friday, this week seems like a good time to do run ZiPS projections for all 30 teams. Let’s be clear up front: These are not the final preseason projections – and an ancient curse I saw suggests that if you quote them as such, ghosts will eat your lymphatic system – but they’re the best expression of how ZiPS sees the league right now. After all, several marquee free agents remain unsigned and rosters will surely change between now and the start of the 2024 season.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial, or more competently, beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which were released yesterday, meaning there naturally will be some notable differences in the results.

So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion (the computational algorithms, that is — no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing chemin de fer like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise, this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our ken, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.6 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. In other words, none year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

I’m from Baltimore, but I would hope last year’s projection miss would disavow anyone of the notion that I weight these team standings toward my personal preferences. The Orioles – and last year’s Orioles – do a bit better in my methodology than others, I suspect because of the weight I deal with depth. In those seasons in which they lose players, especially offensive ones, the team’s depth keeps the falloff from being too dire. Even in simulation no. 452,331, in which the O’s lose both Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschmann to season-ending injuries before the first game, the team still finished 84-78!

The Yankees have significant downside given how much of their punch is tied up in a handful of players, but the reports of their death are quite premature. Juan Soto will provide a huge offensive boost this year, even if they don’t re-sign him after the season. They also added two other outfielders, Alex Verdugo and Trent Grisham, who are better than everybody they ran out there last year, with the exception of Aaron Judge.

ZiPS likes Toronto’s rotation and expects the return of Kevin Kiermaier to help, but without Matt Chapman, it sees third base as a major downgrade from last year. The Rays almost always get the most out of their depth, but ZiPS isn’t sure how much production they will get from their DH spot or how they will cobble together their rotation without Tyler Glasnow.

The Red Sox aren’t a dreadful team, but they’re merely OK in a division that has four good-to-great teams. That being said, they’re just good enough that they still have slightly better than a one-in-five chance of making the playoffs.

ZiPS projects Cleveland to be relatively even with Minnesota, in large part because it likes the rotation trio of Shane Bieber, Triston McKenzie, and Tanner Bibee more than other projection systems do. ZiPS doesn’t see the Guardians as significantly below average at any position — Andrés Giménez remains a ZiPS favorite — and it thinks their bullpen is underrated. The Twins won the division fairly comfortably last year, but remember, they won only 87 games and just lost the AL Cy Young runner-up, Sonny Gray, in free agency. The Jorge Polanco trade came from a surplus of infield talent, but the additions of Anthony DeSclafani and Justin Topa won’t compensate for Gray’s loss to the rotation. If you like Carlos Santana, the team’s “big” offseason signing, I’d recommend you not look at the projection for him.

The projections still see more upside for Detroit’s pitching than its hitting, though after Spencer Torkelson’s surge last summer, ZiPS does expect him to keep improving in his third big league season. The Tigers are good enough that they can make a serious run at .500, but they’ll need some good fortune to get enough offense.

The Royals get credit for being active in free agency this offseason, signing veteran starting pitchers Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, reliever Will Smith, slugger Hunter Renfroe, and utility man Adam Frazier, among other players. That said, those are the types of moves a team makes when it already has a strong core in place and is ready to contend, and, at least as ZiPS sees it, the Royals aren’t quite there yet. That’s not the worst thing in the world, considering they just signed shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. to the longest, most valuable extension in franchise history.

ZiPS has the White Sox as one of the worst teams in baseball, with little to look forward to outside of Dylan Cease, Luis Robert Jr., and the hope that Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez get back on track. This organization is in a very dangerous position in that, like the Rockies a few years ago, I’m not sure it truly understands where it stands.

ZiPS still sees the Astros as the class of the AL West, thanks to the massive concentration of talent in the heart of their lineup. It wasn’t a busy winter for Houston, but the big addition, Josh Hader, gives a boost to the bullpen. The Astros, though, are not unstoppable. They have a lot of viable arms in the rotation, but the upside isn’t what it was three or four years ago, even if Justin Verlander has another strong season left in his arm.

The Rangers are a well-built team, but a lot of their offensive talent is on the wrong side of 30, and last year was probably the best case scenario for a few of their hitters. Their starting pitching is weaker now than it was at the end of 2023. ZiPS did account for the late-season returns of Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Mahle to reinforce the rotation, but all those games without them count, too, and as of this writing, Texas has not re-signed or replaced Jordan Montgomery.

ZiPS likes a lot of what the Mariners did this offseason. It projects Jorge Polanco as a moderate plus at second base and Luis Urías to be an effective replacement for Eugenio Suárez. Gregory Santos is in the top tier of projected relievers, though his projection will come down just a tad once a fixed error in the ZiPS database propagates to our player pages.

It will be nice for the Angels to get full seasons from Zach Neto and Nolan Schanuel, and the team has spent its offseason quietly beefing up its bullpen. But losing Shohei Ohtani is going to hurt.

I believe I have talked about all the major league teams in the AL West and surely did not forget anyone.

One thing that drive me nuts about the discourse of the ZiPS projections is when someone looks at the top median projection and gets very angry with me that some division can be won with 89 or 90 wins. Since most of the tweets on this subject have an aspect for Mature Audiences Only, I’ve translated an example into something suitable for polite company.

Verily, Szymborski, thou art bereft of wit! How dare thee proclaim that a mere tally of 89 victories shall secure the Astros dominion over the AL Wast! Thy discourse betrays a lamentable ignorance, akin to that of a common dullard. Thy prognostications, I dare say, are as worthless as the dregs of a shire-reeve’s larder after Michaelmas!

Yes, the Astros have the best median projection in the AL West at 89 wins, but that doesn’t mean 89 wins will actually win the AL West. This last chart shows the probabilities that X number of wins will take the division or wild card spot in question. So, 89 wins might win the AL West, but only about 20% of the time. The Orioles project to 90 wins, but in the 36.4% of scenarios in which they won the AL East, they averaged 95.3 wins.

With the additions of Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto on deals lasting 10 and 12 years, respectively, the Dodgers are entering a new era when it comes to their headlining superstars — not to take anything away from Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, both of whom remain at or near the top of their respective games. On Monday, we learned that the next stage of Dodger baseball will also include another familiar superstar: The New York Post’s Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman reported that free agent Clayton Kershaw will return to the only team for which he’s ever pitched.

The exact terms of the deal — which is pending a physical on Thursday — have yet to emerge at this writing, but USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale reported that the deal is a “one-year, incentive-laden contract,” while The Athletic’s Andy McCullough added that the contract includes a player option for 2025. If exercised, that would allow Kershaw to join Ohtani — who won’t pitch in 2024 after undergoing reconstructive surgery on his UCL this past September — in the Dodgers’ rotation.

Player options tend to carry advantages when it comes to Competitive Balance Tax accounting, a significant concern for the Dodgers, who rank second in payroll (both actual and CBT-based) only to the Mets and are nearly $12 million over the fourth-tier tax threshold of $297 million even before adding Kershaw’s salary. For example, Justin Turner’s two-year, $21.7 million deal with the Red Sox last year called for a base salary of $8.3 million for 2023, then a $13.4 million option and $6.7 million buyout. By opting out, Turner made $15 million on a deal whose average annual value was just $10.85 million. Read the rest of this entry »