Rick Porcello’s time with the Mets in 2020 began by allowing seven runs in two innings to the Braves. A normal season would have offered him many more starts to help his numbers recover from that performance, but as it was, he took to the mound just 11 more times. So despite giving up two runs or fewer in five of his remaining appearances, his ERA for the season landed at an unsightly 5.64 — the second straight year in which it finished above 5.50.

With that in mind, it isn’t a huge surprise that Porcello, 32, is still unemployed one week before the regular season begins. Throughout his 12-year career, his value rests more on the quantity of his innings than the quality — over 2,000 in total now, and a pre-2020 average of 185 a year. It makes sense that teams would want to be cautious if his skills seem to be deteriorating. I’m not convinced that’s the case. The Porcello of last season bore a lot of resemblance to the Porcello of years before, including the one when he won a Cy Young award. He’s still deserving of a big league job. Let’s find him one.

It’s hard to assess how good or bad Porcello actually was last year. His ERA was the worst of his career, but his 3.33 FIP was his best. At 1.7 WAR, he was just inside of our top 25 pitchers in baseball, tied with Sonny Gray. Mets fans likely thought of him as a disaster, but he actually would have been the most valuable pitcher on 14 different teams.

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Earlier this year, we released our team expected win totals and playoff odds for the 2021 season. These projections are based on the FanGraphs Depth Charts, which blend Jared Cross’ Steamer projections with those of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS, with playing time allocated by our own Jason Martinez of RosterResource fame; the playoff odds then simulate the season 20,000 times, taking strength of schedule into account.

We thought it’d be interesting to duplicate that process, instead using the Average Total Cost (ATC) Projections.

The ATC player projections have been available on the pages of FanGraphs since 2017. Similar to the Depth Charts model, ATC is an aggregation of other projections. While most other accumulation models typically apply equal weight to all their underlying data sources, ATC assigns weights based on historical performance. The method is similar to what Nate Silver does with his political forecasting model at FiveThirtyEight.com. You can read more about how ATC works in the introductory article here.

Over the past few years, ATC has consistently been one of the most accurate baseball forecasting models. Indeed, according to FantasyPros, the ATC projections have been the most accurate baseball projections over the past two seasons. The success of ATC stems from minimizing parameter risk across the player pool. You can read more about inter-projection volatility, how to use the ATC projections on the FanGraphs site, and what is new for ATC in 2021 here. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Atlanta Braves. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, we’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, we’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in our opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on team lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

Between the fireworks shows put on by 21-year-olds Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr., and the big numbers put up by teammates Freddie Freeman and Marcell Ozuna, Ronald Acuña Jr. didn’t command as much attention as his talents merited last year. A two-week stay on the injured list didn’t help, particularly when it came to posting eye-opening counting stats. Even so, and even in abbreviated form, Acuña turned in his third straight stellar campaign. As he heads into his age-23 season, his place among the game’s elite shouldn’t be ignored.

Acuña entered the 2020 season on a high note, following up his 2018 NL Rookie of the Year campaign with his first as an All-Star. Playing in 156 games in 2019, he hit .280/.365/.518 (126 wRC+), bashed 41 homers and stole a league-high 37 bases in 46 attempts; three more steals, and he would have joined Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, and Alfonso Soriano as the only members of the 40–40 club. Back in the Baseball Abstract days, Bill James introduced a simple stat called Power-Speed number, which takes the harmonic mean of a player’s home run and stolen base totals. Acuña’s 2019 season is tied for 16th overall, and sixth among players 25 or under:

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Episode 915

On this edition of the podcast, we are joined by a major league broadcaster before we dig into the latest spring training happenings as we tick down to Opening Day.

• At the top of the show, David Laurila welcomes Robert Ford, radio voice of the Houston Astros. They discuss how important it is to get name pronunciations right in their respective lines of work, college basketball allegiances, the dearth of African American broadcasters in the majors, how important broadcasting is to the minor leagues, the future of Kyle Tucker, and more. Robert also explains the important difference between being critical and negative when covering baseball, and discusses working with Dusty Baker and Steve Sparks.[2:35]
• After that, Eric Longenhagen and Jason Martinez chat about the state of baseball as teams begin to make their final roster decisions. What will the White Sox do following Eloy Jiménez’s injury, and what is the plan in the Cardinals’ outfield? Eric also shares his thoughts about the side effects of a league changing rules in response to team behaviors. Finally, the pair look ahead to their staff predictions, with a particular eye on the American League West. [36:58]

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Yesterday, Kevin Goldstein and Brendan Gawlowski reviewed the state of things in left and center field across the majors. Today, Jay Jaffe turns his attention to right fielders.

It’s not the happiest inevitability to contemplate, but there will come a day in the future when Mike Trout will no longer be the best player in baseball. When that day comes — and we’re not saying it’s tomorrow, or even in 2021 — there’s a very good chance that one of the game’s top three right fielders will be the player who claims the crown.

Mookie Betts already outdid Trout for the 2018 AL MVP award with a single-season WAR (10.4) slightly higher than anything our Halo’d hero has mustered (a max of 10.2 in 2013), and he’s only heading into his age-28 season, having already done the Trout-like thing of surpassing the average Hall of Famer’s seven-year peak in WAR at his position. What’s more, Betts has now played a central role in two championships, having helped the Dodgers get over the hump in 2020’s pandemic-shortened season thanks in large part to his October heroics at the plate, on the basepaths, and in the field.

If it’s not Betts who dethrones Trout, it may very well be 22-year-old Juan Soto, a new convert to the position whose production to date and projection going forward both place him in the midst of inner-circle Hall of Famers. And if not Soto, then perhaps 23-year-old Ronald Acuña Jr., whose speed makes him a threat to become just the fifth member of the 40-homer, 40-steal club. A year ago, Dan Szymborski projected Acuña as the most likely heir to Trout’s title, though today Soto might be the one, with Fernando Tatis Jr. perhaps elbowing his way into the picture as well.

As a group, right fielders outproduced all other positions in wRC+ for the first time in the history of our splits (which go back to 2002) in 2019, with a 108 wRC+. In the pandemic-shortened season, with Cody Bellinger and Christian Yelich having switched positions, the group “slipped” to 106, five points below that of first basemen, but even so, good players having big years such as Michael Conforto and Bryce Harper, late bloomers like Mike Yastrzemski and Teoscar Hernández, and on-the-rebound players such as Wil Myers and Jason Heyward helped to uphold the position’s high standard for offense. Moves by Soto and Kyle Tucker, the maturation of Dylan Carlson and the return of Mitch Haniger should help keep that going, even if not all of the pandemic’s top producers can replicate last year’s punch. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, the revolving co-host chair heads to the Bronx as I’m joined by Emmy award-winning filmmaker Randy Wilkins. We discuss Yankees fandom, our mutual feeling about 2017, and how the 2021 season might end up being defined by injuries. Then it’s more creative talk as we discuss how we view our audiences, the current state of film, Spike Lee stories and more. As always, we hope you enjoy.

Music by Conan Neutron & The Secret Friends.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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The week before the regular season begins is usually extension season, as teams and players scramble to complete deals before the day-to-day rigors of playing baseball for six straight months get in the way of discussions. While this year hasn’t seen many extensions so far, it hasn’t seen none; on Wednesday, the Astros signed Lance McCullers Jr. to a five-year, $85 million extension, as FOX 26’s Mark Berman first reported.

McCullers would have reached free agency after this year; all five years of his extension would have been free-agent years, which makes comparisons easier. This deal is essentially a pre-agreement to a free-agent contract, with none of that squirrely nonsense of buying out arbitration years or extra team options on the end. Five years and $85 million, simple as that.

How does that rate look next to comparable free agents? For once, I’m stumped. The pandemic-shortened season, and teams’ subsequent financial retrenching, makes using past years as a guidepost a poor idea. Madison Bumgarner, for example, signed a five-year, $85 million deal — the exact terms! — but did so before the world changed. This offseason, no comparable pitchers hit the market; the only pitcher who signed a multi-year deal with an average annual value above $10 million was Trevor Bauer, and that’s not a useful comp here either.

You could, if you were so inclined, use Dan Szymborski’s research from last week that estimated the cost of one WAR in future years. The estimate has wide error bands, because it’s based only on multi-year contracts signed this offseason, but it looks like so:

With that in hand, we next need to estimate how good McCullers will be in the relevant 2022–26 timeframe. Luckily, ZiPS has us covered there as well:

With the projection in tow and a cost per WAR (I added $250,000 per year after the years in the table), we can just do the math. That’s a 9.3 WAR projection overall, and after applying the relevant yearly multipliers, the projections would suggest a $75 million contract. That implies the Astros overpaid, but take a gander at those innings projections. McCullers’ past injury history leads ZiPS to a pessimistic playing time assumption. An extra 15 innings per year would move the deal up to fair value. So would four seasons of 150-inning production and a single missed season. In other words, it comes in pretty close to what we’d expect after accounting for his skill and risk factors.

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This morning, Kevin Goldstein kicked off the outfield rankings in left. Now we shift our attention to center field, home to the game’s best player.

What a fun time for center fielders. We still have Trout, but there are only a couple of genuine stars after him. Instead, a changing of the guard is afoot. Luis Robert, Ramón Laureano, Trent Grisham, Kyle Lewis, Cristian Pache. All of those players could conceivably headline our list in future years, and we get to spend 2021 learning who will take the jump. At the same time, a handful of veterans have remained productive into their 30s, headlined by Aaron Hicks, Starling Marte, and Lorenzo Cain. There are a ton of plausible All-Stars here and quite a few players who probably won’t be back for next year’s edition.

As you might expect, our rankings get very jumbled in the middle. Marte and Lewis rank 16th and 17th, for instance, and I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash if they were 10 spots higher. These are not anyone’s personal rankings, but rather a projection based on ZiPS, Steamer, and our playing time estimates. Go ahead and disagree with the list; you won’t be alone. Read the rest of this entry »

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Hello, been trying to figure out why it’s not on the front page!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Oh wait, NOW it is!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: lol

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I don’t know who is in it yet!

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I want to see some 19th century mustache petes

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