The Weakest Positions on National League Contenders

Remember the 107-win Giants, the only team to take an NL West flag away from the Dodgers over the past decade? Last year’s crash to an 81-81 record marked a rude awakening, as the post-Buster Posey era got off to a rocky start following the future Hall of Famer’s abrupt retirement after the 2021 season. Now the Giants enter the post-Brandon Belt era as well, as the regular first baseman from their last two championship teams joined the Blue Jays in January.
I mention the Giants because in this National League counterpart to my examination of the weakest spots on American League contending teams, their catching and first base options occupy the first two spots, as they did little to address either position over the winter — a point that’s been overshadowed by the Padres’ spending spree and the Dodgers’ free agent exodus (a phrase I’ve now used for three straight articles and expect to deploy at this year’s Passover seder). The Giants are projected to finish third in the NL West with 84 wins, and while they do have a 41.8% chance of making the playoffs, improvements in both spots could have bumped them up by a good 20 percentage points.
As with the AL installment, here I’m considering teams with Playoff Odds of at least 10% as contenders; that threshold describes 10 NL clubs (all but the Cubs, Pirates, Reds, Rockies, and Nationals). It’s worth noting that because of the general tendency to overproject playing time and keep even the weakest teams with positive WAR at each position (in reality over 10% of them will finish in the red), our Depth Chart values at the team level are inflated by about 20%. That is to say, instead of having a total of 1,000 WAR projected across the 30 teams, we have about 1,200. Thus, I am discounting the team values that you see on the Depth Chart pages by 20%, and focusing on the lowest-ranked contenders among those whose adjusted values fall below 2.0 WAR, the general equivalent of average play across a full season. The individual WARs cited will remain as they are on the Depth Chart pages, however, and it’s worth noting that many of the players here — particularly youngsters with shorter track records — don’t project particularly well but aren’t without upside; hope springs eternal. Read the rest of this entry »