After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels.

Batters

The good news: the Los Angeles Angels have Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. The bad news: the Los Angeles Angels play a sport where you have to give almost as many shots to Luc Longley and Stacey King as Jordan and Pippen. The Angels are a very star-driven team, and if something terrible happens to a star or two, it’s going to be hard to eke out first place in a division with four plausible contenders. If you can ensure that Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, Anthony Rendon, and Noah Syndergaard all have full, healthy seasons, I think this is the team that can make the Astros sweat the most this summer. If not, I think the Angels’ playoff relevance will be on life support by the trade deadline. That is, assuming that Rob Manfred’s dystopian fever dream of every mediocre club getting a chance to knock off a 100-win team in the postseason by winning two of three games comes to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Mark Teixeira was not The Natural, but he was a natural, at least. A switch-hitter who was adept at the game from an early age, he was positioned to be a first-round pick out of high school, but instead went to college, where he became not only the best player in his conference but in the entire country — as a sophomore. Despite missing significant time due to a broken ankle during his junior year, he became a top-five pick, and two years later the game’s number one prospect. Forced to learn a new position upon reaching the majors, he won the first of his five Gold Gloves two years later. Upon reaching free agency at age 28, he received the sport’s fourth-largest contract ever, then helped his team to a championship in the first year of that deal.

Teixeira wasn’t flashy or particularly colorful. He was rarely controversial, except when agent Scott Boras was locking horns with owners and general managers on his behalf. He was especially consistent at the plate, reeling off eight straight seasons with 30 homers, 100 RBI, and an OPS+ of at least 120; during his 14-year career (2003-16) with the Rangers, Braves, Angels, and Yankees, only Miguel Cabrera, David Ortiz, and Albert Pujols had more such seasons, and only Pujols did so while playing good defense. That Teixeira kept his streak intact despite changing teams three times in a three-year span from 2007-09 was a testament to his focus and professionalism.

Through his 20s and perhaps even his early 30s, Teixeira appeared to have a shot at making it to Cooperstown. But between the trend towards defensive shifts against pull hitters and a seemingly endless string of injuries — calf, wrist, shin, neck, knee — he was derailed in his mid-30s, and chose to walk away upon completing his eight-year contract with the Yankees. Retiring at 36 years old left his career totals short of the type of numbers that would generate consideration for Cooperstown; indeed, through 52 ballots published thus far in the Ballot Tracker, he’s received just one vote. Still, it’s worth remembering what he did accomplish in his exceptional career. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

Can we just say 87 wins and call it a day? It feels like that’s what I’ve been projecting for the Cardinals for the last 15 years or so. That’s an exaggeration, but not an extreme one: ZiPS hasn’t projected St. Louis outside the 85–90 win range in a full season since 2011. Going back to the first official ZiPS team standings in 2005 — I only did players in the first couple of years — the team’s projections have been below .500 once (2008) and above 90 wins once (2010).

The lineup rarely has superstars at the top, but the Cards have a knack for keeping their floor incredibly high. Does that line sound familiar? It might; it’s what I wrote last year. And it still applies today. For a while, it looked like it wouldn’t happen in 2021, with the team 44-47 right around the All-Star break. Now, if you still considered the Cardinals an 89-win team or thereabouts, the normal thinking would have been to say, “Oh, OK, so they’ll play at an 89-win pace the rest of the way and finish around .500.” But the Cards care not for you and your fancy-pants Gambler’s Fallacy. After a loss against the Kansas City Royals on August 8, St. Louis stood at 55-56. This was the last time they were below .500, as they went 35-16 the rest of the way, capped by a 17-game winning streak in mid-September. The Cards didn’t just sneak back into the Wild Card conversation; they talked over the Padres and Reds and flipped the table, spilling all the hors d’oeuvres onto the floor. In the end, they made the playoffs with seven games to spare. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, sinkers. Wait three years, and the “smart” view of them will change. In the early 2010s, they were the coolest. A few years later, they were a laughingstock, a sure way to make your franchise seem old-fashioned. Between 2015 and 2019, the league abandoned sinkers (and two-seam fastballs, which I’m including in today’s analysis) en masse. In the former, pitchers threw 148,000 sinkers. By the latter, that number fell to 116,000. That trend is still ongoing; 2021 saw only 109,000 sinkers.

Despite the downward trend in usage, sinkers are cool again. When the league switched to Hawkeye tracking technology in 2020, the public could suddenly see the impact of seam-shifted wake, an effect that creates movement that previously wasn’t being measured. Pure transverse spin — like a backspinning four-seam fastball — is one way to create movement. Seam-shifted wake is another, and sinkers have it in spades, though they also generate plenty of movement from spin.

What does that word salad mean? Basically, sinkers drop and fade more than you would expect given the spin that pitchers impart on them. It’s not like sinkers started moving more in 2020 when cameras caught this effect, but quantifying something makes it easier to look for and teach.
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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

In my previous multi-candidate roundup, I lumped together four 10th-year candidates — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa — about whom there’s little left to be said at the tail end of a decade’s worth of debate, and few minds likely to be changed. Three of those candidates were linked to PEDs, and all four have some pretty dark corners beyond the baseball diamond. As a means of completing my coverage of the major candidates before the December 31 voting deadline, it made sense to group them into a single overview while inviting those readers wishing to (re)familiarize themselves with the specifics of their cases to check out last year’s profiles.

As the holiday season approaches, I’m still playing catch-up with my coverage, but the two candidates in this roundup don’t have the same type of underlying connections. Both hit a lot of homers during their long careers, both were sometimes overshadowed by more famous teammates, and both have struggled to generate a ton of support through multiple election cycles to the point that neither is likely to get to 75% via the writers before their 10 years run out. Beyond that, they’re very different players and cases.
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In the last installment of this series, we looked at improbable home runs. I love a good wild-swinging home run, and Eddie Rosario and friends certainly delivered. It’s one of a small sliver of baseball moments that somehow makes the pitcher look good at the same time he gives up a home run. Likewise, the batter looks foolish and yet triumphant. There’s something for everyone.

Today, there isn’t something for everyone. This article is just GIFs of hitters looking bad. To hit a home run on a bad pitch, it has to be at least somewhat hittable; otherwise, you couldn’t hit it. If a pitch is in the opposite batter’s box, or bounces three feet in front of the plate, well, there’s no home run happening. To swing and miss, well: you just need a pitch.

There are no hidden heroes here. If anything, there are hidden goats. The pitchers who threw these pitches shouldn’t have expected to get a swing for their troubles. Almost exclusively, they missed their target. They just had the good fortune to mis-throw it to just the right guy. Let’s get started.
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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins.

Batters

Hey, that doesn’t look half bad! I’m talking about the hitters, mind you, and it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise given that the Twins returned the entire lineup that was roughly middle-of-the-pack in offense in the American League. Given that last season was certainly more than half bad as a whole, and I’m going to get grumpy below, here’s the chance to say some nice things.

This is one place where I believe the ZiPS estimate of Byron Buxton’s playing time more than I do that of our depth charts. Minnesota’s extension was a fair deal on both sides, I feel, simply because you’d be lying or batty if you said that his health didn’t represent a significant risk that impacts his value in the open market. A seven-year contract worth $150–$200 million probably just isn’t out there, even if he were a free agent right now. It’s hard for the Twins to walk away, though, since a healthy season from Buxton, while possibly a unicorn, remains one of the biggest sources of possible upside on the roster.

Elsewhere, the offense generally looks fine. The only real position you could call an actual problem is perhaps the Trevor Larnach/Brent Rooker mix in left, with ZiPS not entirely enthralled with either. The Jimmy Kerrigan defensive projection turned my eye enough that I double-checked it, but ZiPS gave him the best defensive performance of a corner outfielder in the minors it ever has. If his glove is anywhere near what the computer thinks, he’s a more interesting back-of-the-roster talent than, say, Jake Cave.

Man, Jose Miranda. I admit to not really having paid much attention to his season in the minors, but he killed it in 2021 after a rather uninspiring history, and given his straight-up performance, he really ought to be considered one of the team’s top prospects. ZiPS is getting antsy about Royce Lewis, and really, he hasn’t actually been healthy and playing well since 2018. ZiPS may be too pessimistic about his mean projection long term, but I think he really ought to tumble down the prospect lists considerably. It’s hard to miss two years of development time.
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Ben Lindbergh concludes a short series of conversations with baseball content creators who work mainly in a medium other than writing or podcasting by talking to singer-songwriter Dan Bern about his origins as a baseball fan and musician, rooting for different teams at different times, his songwriting process, sneaking into Wrigley Field, composing his first baseball song, the tools of his trade, what makes a song a baseball song, the most fitting subjects for baseball songs, the best baseball songs by other artists, the pandemic’s impact on musicians, writing bespoke songs, appreciating multiple eras of baseball history, and more. Dan also performs his songs “Ballpark” (15:40), “The Year-By-Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds” (18:50), “Slowly Turn Around” (19:47), “Everything’s Better Than it Used to Be” (45:36), “This Side of the White Lines” (49:45), and “Seven Miles an Hour” (55:25).

Audio intro: Dan Bern, “When My Buckner Moment Comes”
Audio outro: Dan Bern, “Merkle”

Link to Dan’s website
Link to Dan’s song store
Link to Dan on Bandcamp
Link to Dan on Facebook
Link to Dan’s Doubleheader album on Spotify
Link to Dan’s Rivalry album on Spotify
Link to NYT piece on Doubleheader
Link to Dan’s 10,000 Crappy Songs podcast
Link to Dan’s discography
Link to Dan’s lyrics
Link to press coverage of Dan
Link to “Ballpark”
Link to “The Year-By-Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds”
Link to “Slowly Turn Around”
Link to “Everything’s Better Than it Used to Be”
Link to “This Side of the White Lines”
Link to “Seven Miles an Hour”
Link to “The Golden Voice of Vin Scully”
Link to EW episode about baseball music
Link to Ben on Get Back
Link to Neil Young’s “Old Black”
Link to Conan’s old-timey baseball video
Link to EW episode about old-timey baseball
Link to EW episode about discovering sports late
Link to Patreon trivia contest
Link to stream Stove League via Viki

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Ben Lindbergh continues a short series of conversations with baseball content creators who work mainly in a medium other than writing or podcasting by talking to painter Graig Kreindler about Noah Syndergaard, Nick Adenhart, and the best way to pay tribute to past players via uniform number, how Graig got started as a baseball fan and artist, how he began to unify the two hobbies into a calling and career, the combination of inherent ability and practice, the tools of his trade, parting with completed pieces, how his portraits draw on but differ from photographs, his rigorous research process (and the heightened challenge of researching Negro Leagues players), blending preparation and passion, correcting mistakes, his artistic aspirations, his favorite paintings, and much more.

Audio intro: The High Llamas, “Painters Paint”
Audio outro: The Band (Feat. Bob Dylan), “When I Paint My Masterpiece”

Link to Sam Blum on Adenhart and Syndergaard
Link to first EW episode about number tributes
Link to Graig’s website
Link to Graig on Instagram
Link to YouTube video about Graig
Link to NYT piece on Graig
Link to Sports Collectors Digest on Graig
Link to Todd Radom on Graig
Link to National Review piece on Graig
Link to Graig’s Negro Leagues Project gallery
Link to Graig’s “large works” gallery
Link to Murderer’s Row (1927 Yankees)
Link to The Dutch Master (Johnny Vander Meer)
Link to Foreign Reinforcement (Josh Gibson)
Link to Big Sam (Sam Thompson)
Link to Advice From the Big Kid (Ruth)
Link to In a Fog (Ernie Banks)
Link to Graig’s Bautista bat flip
Link to Tom Shieber EW interview
Link to Tom’s Baseball Researcher site
Link to history of perspective in art
Link to NFTs explainer
Link to EW episode about discovering sports late
Link to Patreon trivia contest
Link to stream Stove League via Viki

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Read the rest of this entry »