For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the first team to go this year is the Boston Red Sox.

Batters

The Red Sox finished fourth in the American League in runs scored in 2022, but there’s no denying that removing Xander Bogaerts and J.D. Martinez from the roster is a giant hit for the team to take. They may replace the missing value (if not all of it), but it’s a roster with a lot of work to do to be an elite unit. The projections see the offense as being driven mostly by Rafael Devers and Trevor Story, with Story getting quite the bullish projection. Having Triston Casas on the team would be helpful on average, and he has far more upside than either Eric Hosmer or Bobby Dalbec, but as of right now, the team will unfortunately be able to find quite a lot of playing time for the latter two, at least as the roster currently stands. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the rebuilding Pirates took a $6.7 million flier on 36-year-old Carlos Santana, who at this point in his career splits his time between DH and first base. In Pittsburgh, he joins the recently acquired Ji-Man Choi and Lewin Díaz as 1B/DH options; regardless of a positional surplus, perhaps Pittsburgh felt he was too tempting to pass up with the shift ban going into effect next season. It’s hard to think of a player who has more to gain from that rule change than the switch-hitting former catcher, who is a pull hitter on grounders from both sides of the plate: 61.9% from the right side and 70.6% from the left.

As a switch-hitter, Santana sees most of his plate appearances as a lefty, his even more pull-happy side. That brings his overall pulled-grounder percentage up to 67.2%, a mark that puts him sixth among the 203 players with at least 1,000 grounders since his debut in 2010; the only active player ahead of him, Eugenio Suárez, has hit 1,100 fewer grounders in his career. Moving the threshold to 1,500 puts Santana squarely at the top of that list (inactive players included). Read the rest of this entry »

No National League team benefited more from the universal DH this year than the Philadelphia Phillies. The torn UCL Bryce Harper suffered in April would’ve been a season-ending injury for any Phillies outfielder from 1883 to 2019, but Harper was able to get a platelet-rich plasma injection, grit his teeth, and DH the rest of the way. You’re probably familiar with what ensued: Philadelphia’s first playoff berth in 11 years, numerous loud home runs and memorable GIFs, “swing of his life,” and so on and so forth.

Unfortunately for Harper, eventually someone had to open up his throwing arm and see precisely what had gone wrong in there. Last week, Dr. Neal ElAttrache — there’s a name you never want to see in a news story about your team’s best player — broke out his scalpel and went spelunking.

For months, Harper and the Phillies settled into a position of anxious uncertainty; perhaps the damage to his elbow wouldn’t be so bad. An Opening Day start in right field was probably too much to ask for, but maybe he could rehab in the offseason and get back to throwing by mid-spring. This is a situation that ought to be familiar to anyone who’s sat in their mechanic’s waiting room and hoped that the phrase “blown head gasket” would not be part of the day’s conversation.

Unfortunately, Dr. ElAttrache was forced to perform another dreaded proper noun: Tommy John surgery. In short, you can take that depth chart with Harper in right field and throw it right in the trash. Now, the party line is that Harper will return to the lineup as a DH around the All-Star break, and maybe start playing the outfield again by the end of the 2023 regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Financial implications aside, how the Oakland Athletics fared in the August 1 trade-deadline deal that sent Frankie Montas and Lou Trivino to the New York Yankees in exchange for Cooper Bowman, Luis Medina, JP Sears, and Ken Waldichuk won’t be known for at least a few more years. Two of the players who headed west made their big-league debuts last summer, while the others finished their respective seasons in Double-A and High-A. The extent to which the foursome goes on to thrive — or flop — can’t be predicted with any degree of certainty.

David Forst is understandably bullish on the quartet. Three-plus months after he pulled the trigger on the trade, I asked Oakland’s GM what he found appealing about each acquisition.

“We think Waldichuk has a chance to be a top-of-the rotation arm, and we certainly saw glimpses of that in the big leagues,” Forst said of the 24-year-old left-hander, who is No. 69 our Top 100 Prospects list. “With him, it’s the physicality, the fastball command, and the swing-and-miss he gets with three different pitches. I think Ken has a huge upside.

“Upside is the whole conversation with Medina,” continued Forst. “Huge arm, huge fastball. Whether he remains a starter or not, we’ll see. He’s pitching really well in the Dominican [Winter League] right now. I know that he wants to remain as a starter, but he has to improve his command.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh convenes a roundtable of hitting analysts—Robert Orr from Baseball Prospectus, Esteban Rivera from FanGraphs, and Ryan Parker, formerly of Baseball Prospectus and the Los Angeles Angels—to diagnose the problems with free agent Cody Bellinger’s much-diminished bat and recommend how to revive it. They also discuss their approaches to analyzing hitting, coachability, the differences between public and private hitting analysis, the importance of mashing mistakes, the Angels, and more. Then (1:15:03) Ben closes with a Past Blast from 1934 and a few followups about Bellinger, tweets, and assists on strikeouts.

Audio intro: Wednesday, “Cody’s Only”
Audio outro: The Killers, “Cody”

Link to Dan Szymborski on Bellinger
Link to story on Bellinger’s shoulder
Link to story on Bellinger’s leg
Link to Chris Gilligan on Bellinger
Link to Ken Rosenthal on Bellinger
Link to Prospects Live on Bellinger
Link to Bellinger vs. Musgrove K
Link to Versalles SABR bio
Link to SwingGraphs
Link to SwingGraphs data
Link to Esteban on Acuña
Link to Esteban on vertical bat angle
Link to Robert on crushing cookies
Link to Rosenthal on Angels moves
Link to Joon Lee on the Angels system
Link to EW with Clay Bellinger
Link to 1934 story source
Link to Biele article series
Link to story on Ella Black
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to MLBTR on Harper’s TJ
Link to Blue Jays tweet
Link to Canseco at Vice
Link to Canseco on time travel
Link to assists story 1
Link to assists story 2
Link to assists story 3
Link to assists story 4

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Hunter Renfroe was probably getting tired of Milwaukee anyway. After spending the first four years of his career in San Diego, he will join his fifth team in five years as the Brewers sent the 30-year-old outfielder to the Angels in exchange for pitchers Janson Junk, Elvis Peguero, and Adam Seminaris.

Starting with the Los Angeles side of the deal: the Angels know what they’re getting in Renfroe. He’s a bat-first corner outfielder who relies on power to make up for what he lacks in on-base ability. After a poor showing in 2020, he bounced back with a 113 wRC+ in ’21 and posted a nearly identical season in ’22, good for a 124 wRC+ in the tougher offensive environment. He hit 60 home runs between the two seasons and posted a .315 on base percentage in both. He’s projected to make $11.2 million in arbitration this year, then move on to yet another team in 2024 as a free agent.

Renfroe owns a career wRC+ of 136 against lefties versus 97 against righties and has often been viewed as a platoon candidate. He improved his wRC+ to 120 against righties in 2022, however, after putting up 101 wRC+ in 2021. And while his defense isn’t to OAA’s liking, DRS and UZR both tend to rate him right around average, and his excellent arm helps to make up for what he lacks in range. He’ll slot into the outfield next to Mike Trout and Taylor Ward. Steamer projects the trio for 10.3 WAR — a big improvement after Los Angeles got just 0.3 WAR from its left fielders last year, good for 27th in the league. Even though Steamer expects Renfroe to take a step back next year, his projection of 2.0 WAR would patch a significant hole. Read the rest of this entry »

These 2023 projections are guaranteed to be awful, wrong in many ways ranging from tragic to comic. But despite being absolutely premature and littered with horrible misses, projected standings at this point are actually quite useful, and useful is the best description any kind of predictive model can strive for. Standings at this point are a poor predictor of the 2023 season — and even the eventual 2023 projections themselves — but what they are able to do is give a “state of the union” estimate for each team. These standings represent the best estimates ZiPS can make at this point about where a team sits in the league’s pecking order, based solely on the players currently under contract with the team. It’s hard to get where you want to go if you don’t know where you’re starting.

The methodology I’m using here is the same one I use in the regular season, and as such, it isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings. So how does ZiPS calculate the upcoming 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 an initial starting 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 baccarat like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk, which change the baseline PAs/IPs selected for each player. Of note here is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time baked in than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list (proportionally) to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 free-agent market is crawling with former league MVPs. The recently crowned Aaron Judge is coming off one of the best position player seasons in recent memory. Multiple contenders have already checked in with 2020 AL winner José Abreu, who at age 35 is still quite a productive hitter. The 2011 AL MVP, Justin Verlander, is about to turn 40 but is nonetheless one of the top pitching targets available after a unanimous third Cy Young Award season. Andrew McCutchen seems to have played a thousand careers since his MVP win in 2013 and is on the lookout for a new home after playing out a one-year deal in Milwaukee. And then there’s the youngest of the bunch, 27-year-old Cody Bellinger, who was non-tendered by the Dodgers last Friday nearly three years to the day after his crowning as the 2019 NL MVP. The centerfielder was projected by MLB Trade Rumors to earn around $18.1 million in his final arbitration year in 2023; instead, with a high ceiling at a relatively low cost, he’ll be the archetype of a bounceback candidate wherever he lands.

Bellinger’s struggles since his MVP campaign have been well documented. After a mediocre follow-up season in the COVID-shortened 2020, his production dropped dramatically in ’21, as he hit .165/.240/.302 and was one of 16 players to finish with -1.0 WAR. He’s battled a string of injuries in that period, too, including multiple shoulder dislocations and a fractured left fibula, that led to missed time and a steep decline in contact quality and production; his wOBA fell from .414 in 2019 to .337 in ’20 to .237 in ’21. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you explain a fall in performance from a superstar player in their age-24 season? It’s hard to make any concrete conclusions, but there are always certain observations that can help us understand what happened, and when it comes to Ronald Acuña Jr., many of us are eager to know. In the first four seasons of his career, he was undeniably one of the best players in baseball, and in the last two, albeit both shortened for different reasons, his power had begun to take off. In 2020 and ’21, before he tore his ACL, he maintained an ISO above .300.

Oh yeah, about that ACL. It’s not a common injury in baseball, so we don’t have much history to go off, but there is no denying its impact on Acuña’s swing and athleticism. Depending on the stage of your career and sport you play, an ACL tear can impact you differently. When it came to Acuña, a special athlete, I thought there would be an immediate bounce back. Perhaps that was an unfair assessment. This is a major injury for such an explosive player, and it’s understandable that it would take time to recover and get the necessary level of proprioception back. That’s not to say he wasn’t successful in 2022; he put up three months with a 130 wRC+ or better and ended at 114 overall. But that isn’t close to his pre-2022 career mark of 140. I’m confident he can get back to that point. How? He’ll have to reignite his ability to keep the ball off the ground and in the air.

Sorry to simplify things so much. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine to say a hitter just needs to stop hitting so many groundballs; it’s such an obvious suggestion for any hitter or swing type. But it’s the case here. From 2019 to ’21, Acuña didn’t have a ground ball rate above 38%; in ’22, that figure skyrocketed to 47.7%. That was a career high, 5.4 percentage points higher than his rookie season. Even in the months where he was stellar, it wasn’t because he returned to his previous batted ball profile; he only had one month all year with a groundball rate under 42%. Read the rest of this entry »