With the release of full ZiPS projections, our playoff odds are up and running. For the most part that means putting a number to things that we already know. The Dodgers are 97.7% likely to make the playoffs, which sounds about right. The NL Central is a four-way tossup with the Cubs out in the lead. The NL East has three teams each with around a one-in-three chance at it. That all tracks with intuition.

Indeed, for the most part, the standings are self-explanatory. That doesn’t mean that everything is obvious and intuitive, however. Let’s take a quick look at a few of the cases where a deeper dive is necessary.

It’s tempting to think of a team’s expected win total as just a sum of their WAR. After all, the W is right there in the acronym! As Dan notes every year, however, adding up WAR totals on a depth chart isn’t a great way to go about things. Rather than just do that blindly, however, we can look at teams whose projected wins diverge the most from their WAR.

To do that, we’ll need each team’s projected WAR totals. Thankfully, there’s a handy page that shows all that data. The Dodgers have the most projected WAR and the Orioles have the least.

With that data in hand, we can work out what win totals every team would have if you could perfectly project WAR onto wins. First, let’s figure out replacement level. There are 1120 projected wins across all the teams and 2,430 total wins available in a season. This leaves 1,310 wins as the amount that replacement level is worth. Spread that across the 30 teams, and that’s 43.66 wins per team. Read the rest of this entry »

Assuming he doesn’t get traded, Kris Bryant appears to be David Ross‘ choice as leadoff hitter this season. It’s not a secret that the Cubs have struggled to find a leadoff man since they let Dexter Fowler walk in free agency after their 2016 championship season. Last year, the Cubs’ .294 on-base percentage and 77 wRC+ from the leadoff spot were the worst in baseball.

Over the last three seasons, nine players have taken at least 50 plate appearances from the leadoff spot.

Some of these are small samples, and while we know Jason Heyward isn’t a player who would put up a 44 wRC+ with more playing time, we also know he probably isn’t going to be much more than average with the bat. Given the importance of the leadoff spot, average shouldn’t be good enough for a contending team. Ian Happ was a little above average, but his .319 OBP leaves something to be desired. Even the .333 OBP he put up in limited time overall last year isn’t great. Daniel Murphy was only with the club for a few months. Kyle Schwarber’s career .339 OBP screams pretty good but not start-the-game-off great, and being below-average against lefties means he couldn’t do it every day. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I took a look at team payrolls, offseason spending, and the outlook for MLB spending on players as a whole compared to the last few years. Today we’ll take a look at one portion of team payrolls most teams would rather avoid. No organization wants to be paying players to play for other teams or to sit in the minors or to simply be out of the game, at least in the abstract. At some point though, teams will kick in money for a trade because the overall savings can be utilized elsewhere, the prospect return is slightly better, or because there is better use of a roster spot. Those payments become dead money.

As in past years, I’ve defined dead money as generally any money a team is paying out to a player who no longer appears on their 40-man roster. There are three types of dead money:

1. Money paid to players who have been released. Those players are free to sign with other teams, but the team releasing the player still owes the money remaining on the contract.
2. Money paid to other teams as compensation for players who have been traded. Generally, we see teams cover a portion of a contract to receive a better return in trade.
3. Money paid to players who are still in the organization but who have been removed from the 40-man roster. Any team could have claimed these players if they were willing to take on the contract, and the player probably could have elected fee agency, but then he would forfeit his right to the guaranteed money.

Here are the teams with the most money on their current payrolls going somewhere other than their roster. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the last of a set of articles I’ve written over the past few weeks. Each one tries to determine what’s real and what’s noise when it comes to the outcome of a plate appearance. For the batted ball articles, the conclusions generally tracked. Variations in home run rate are largely due to the batter. Pitchers and batters both show skill in groundball rate. And line drives and popups are somewhere in between — batters exhibit a little more persistence in variation than pitchers, though neither does so strongly.

Strikeouts and walks are a different beast. It’s pretty clear that pitchers and batters can be good or bad at them. No one looks at Chris Davis or Tyler O’Neill and thinks “eh, that’s pretty unlucky to have all those strikeouts, I bet they’re average at it overall.” Likewise, Josh Hader isn’t just preternaturally lucky — he’s good at striking batters out.

So rather than attempt to prove that pitchers can be good or bad at striking out batters and vice versa, I’m interested in whether one side has the upper hand. I’m adapting a method laid out by Tom Tango here, but I’ll also repeat the same methodology I used in the previous pieces in this series. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about walk-off balks, a Zack Greinke oral history, and how teams will use the new 26th roster spot, break down the responses to a Jayson Stark survey of baseball insiders about the winter and upcoming season, and answer listener emails about players’ outspoken criticisms of the Astros’ sign-stealing and Rob Manfred’s response, and which transgressions might merit vacating a team’s title, plus a Stat Blast about the ultra-rare walk-off catcher’s interference.

Audio intro: Clem Snide, "Don’t Be Afraid of Your Anger"
Audio outro: Neil Young, "Speakin’ Out"

Link to post about walk-off balks
Link to Greinke oral history
Link to Schoenfield on the 26th roster spot
Link to Stark’s survey
Link to Ben on the endless sign-stealing scandal
Link to story about players speaking out
Link to story about Astros immunity
Link to Olney on Manfred protecting the Astros
Link to Emma on players’ use of social media
Link to order The MVP Machine

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For the first time in several offseasons, a slow winter for free agency was not the theme of winter. Not that a slow winter wouldn’t have been overshadowed by the Astros cheating scandal, but free agency activity started at a fairly brisk pace and nearly all the good players were signed by January. As camps open up, only Yasiel Puig remains unsigned from the FanGraphs Top-50 Free Agent list. The winter was notable not just for the pace of signings, but also for the amounts as well as Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, and Anthony Rendon all exceeded expectations. With nearly all spending complete this offseason, it’s an appropriate time to check in on where teams stand with their payrolls and how much has been spent, including in comparison to 2019 figures.

First, here’s a look at where every team’s payroll is as of today, per our Roster Resource pages. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this offseason, I wrote a few articles about whether pitchers or batters had more influence over different events. There’s nothing groundbreaking about my conclusions — in fact, they specifically reinforce prior studies. Despite that, however, I think there’s value in these refreshers.

Concepts like “batters control home runs” and “pitcher groundball rate matters” are implicit in many of the statistics that you see on this site and certainly in many of the articles that you read here. When we cite xFIP or talk about what a pitcher can do to control his groundball rate, we’re drawing on these concepts.

You don’t need to know these basic concepts to accept the conclusions, but it certainly helps. Appealing to authority (hey, these stats are good because smart people made them) is a pretty bad way to convince someone, and understanding the reason behind a metric is the quickest way to accept its conclusions.

In that spirit, I thought I’d round out the series by looking at a few more common events and working out whether pitchers or batters do more to influence them. Today I’ll be looking at line drive rate and also popup rate, the percentage of fly balls that become harmless popups. Later this week, I’ll cover walks and strikeouts. Then we can move on to more pressing matters, like I don’t know, José Altuve tattoo investigations or what would happen if Mike Trout knew what was coming.

Before looking at line drive rate, I had a rough idea of what to expect. There are plenty of hitters I think of as line drive machines — peak Joey Votto, Miguel Cabrera, even Nick Castellanos. I had trouble placing a pitcher in the same category, unless you count “your favorite team’s fifth starter.” Read the rest of this entry »