Terrible MLB Teams Are Pretty Good at Baseball
How would the Norfolk Tides do if they played in the majors? That might sound like an odd question, but it’s one that I’ve been asked four times in the last week. It even came up on Reddit. What’s driving this curiosity isn’t a sudden surge in rabid Tides fandom, but rather the heavy concentration of offensive talent the Orioles have in Norfolk, which until today, included one of the favorites for AL Rookie of the Year, Jackson Holliday. And since I’m one of a handful people with the exact tools of nerdery to answer this query, I couldn’t let it go unanswered.
So, just how good is Norfolk’s offensive talent? Pretty darn good, actually. In their first 10 games, the Tides have scored double-digit runs six times, including a 26-11 drubbing of the Charlotte Knights on April 3. Holliday was the biggest name before his call-up, but he was far from alone down there. Of the more than 400 players to have a plate appearance in Triple-A this season, only three have a projection above 2 WAR (Jake Alu just misses). One of them is Holliday. Another is Holliday’s teammate, Coby Mayo, another top Orioles prospect. The third, Lars Nootbaar, doesn’t really count, since he’s an established big leaguer down there on a rehab assignment. After Holliday and Mayo, you then have a number of players who may not be projected for 2 WAR, but are comfortably projected above replacement level, such that they’d be useful in the majors: Connor Norby, Heston Kjerstad, Kyle Stowers, Nick Maton, Peyton Burdick, and Maverick Handley all project above 0.5 WAR.
I don’t think we really need to compare Triple-A teams to the good major league teams, but how do they compare to the worst the majors have to offer? The Marlins might have the worst record in the big leagues, but the two teams we project with under .400 rosters are the White Sox and Rockies. And you know what? Mixing in the preseason projections for hitters at Triple-A Norfolk and facing them off against these two cellar dwellers makes the Tides look surprisingly plausible as a slightly competitive team:
| Player | Team | Proj WAR | BA | OBP | SLG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Luis Robert Jr. | Chicago (A) | 3.64 | .267 | .319 | .496 |
| Nolan Jones | Colorado | 3.06 | .277 | .368 | .488 |
| Jackson Holliday | Norfolk | 2.68 | .255 | .341 | .381 |
| Ryan McMahon | Colorado | 2.26 | .240 | .321 | .426 |
| Ezequiel Tovar | Colorado | 2.18 | .259 | .300 | .424 |
| Coby Mayo | Norfolk | 2.03 | .231 | .315 | .402 |
| Yoán Moncada | Chicago (A) | 1.70 | .252 | .325 | .411 |
| Eloy Jiménez | Chicago (A) | 1.44 | .280 | .332 | .473 |
| Brendan Rodgers | Colorado | 1.36 | .279 | .333 | .439 |
| Andrew Benintendi | Chicago (A) | 1.34 | .275 | .345 | .401 |
| Andrew Vaughn | Chicago (A) | 1.32 | .263 | .327 | .453 |
| Connor Norby | Norfolk | 1.31 | .247 | .305 | .399 |
| Heston Kjerstad | Norfolk | 1.20 | .253 | .313 | .400 |
| Paul DeJong | Chicago (A) | 1.15 | .211 | .279 | .388 |
| Nicky Lopez | Chicago (A) | 0.95 | .240 | .313 | .307 |
| Brenton Doyle | Colorado | 0.93 | .235 | .280 | .384 |
| Nick Maton | Norfolk | 0.90 | .223 | .313 | .362 |
| Kyle Stowers | Norfolk | 0.85 | .233 | .311 | .418 |
| Dominic Fletcher | Chicago (A) | 0.79 | .239 | .301 | .360 |
| Peyton Burdick | Norfolk | 0.78 | .198 | .290 | .369 |
| Maverick Handley | Norfolk | 0.64 | .208 | .300 | .310 |
| Kris Bryant | Colorado | 0.63 | .270 | .351 | .449 |
| Lenyn Sosa | Chicago (A) | 0.55 | .242 | .276 | .381 |
| Elehuris Montero | Colorado | 0.49 | .256 | .310 | .448 |
| Ryan McKenna | Norfolk | 0.47 | .215 | .291 | .350 |
| Braden Shewmake | Chicago (A) | 0.36 | .223 | .268 | .360 |
| Charlie Blackmon | Colorado | 0.30 | .272 | .339 | .414 |
| Daniel Johnson | Norfolk | 0.23 | .236 | .293 | .386 |
| David Banuelos | Norfolk | 0.03 | .195 | .254 | .345 |
| Errol Robinson | Norfolk | 0.03 | .206 | .280 | .253 |
| Elias Diaz | Colorado | -0.01 | .258 | .309 | .409 |
| Michael Pérez | Norfolk | -0.11 | .192 | .266 | .312 |
| Billy Cook | Norfolk | -0.20 | .212 | .265 | .352 |
| Gavin Sheets | Chicago (A) | -0.26 | .244 | .304 | .404 |
| Michael Toglia | Colorado | -0.78 | .221 | .294 | .387 |
| Martín Maldonado | Chicago (A) | -1.00 | .175 | .254 | .304 |
When it comes to offense, the Tides are relatively competitive against the White Sox and Rockies. It’s a solid group of hitters. What’s less solid is the pitching, a relatively thin part of Baltimore’s farm system — and the two most interesting prospects last year, Grayson Rodriguez and DL Hall, are no longer around to provide a boost:
| Player | Team | Proj WAR | ERA | FIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drew Thorpe | Chicago (A) | 1.88 | 4.23 | 4.14 |
| Mike Clevinger | Chicago (A) | 1.36 | 4.55 | 4.64 |
| Cal Quantrill | Colorado | 1.32 | 4.93 | 5.06 |
| Erick Fedde | Chicago (A) | 1.20 | 4.86 | 4.70 |
| Cade Povich | Norfolk | 1.14 | 4.43 | 4.40 |
| Kyle Freeland | Colorado | 1.11 | 5.24 | 5.10 |
| Dakota Hudson | Colorado | 1.09 | 5.12 | 5.08 |
| John Means | Norfolk | 1.08 | 4.24 | 4.64 |
| Garrett Stallings | Norfolk | 1.03 | 4.54 | 4.38 |
| Michael Soroka | Chicago (A) | 0.97 | 4.76 | 4.68 |
| Michael Kopech | Chicago (A) | 0.94 | 4.82 | 5.01 |
| Bruce Zimmermann | Norfolk | 0.93 | 4.56 | 4.50 |
| Nick Nastrini | Chicago (A) | 0.92 | 4.90 | 4.80 |
| Austin Gomber | Colorado | 0.85 | 5.32 | 5.01 |
| Ryan Feltner | Colorado | 0.85 | 5.15 | 4.76 |
| Chris Flexen | Chicago (A) | 0.84 | 4.85 | 4.66 |
| Justin Armbruester | Norfolk | 0.81 | 4.67 | 4.73 |
| Chayce McDermott | Norfolk | 0.70 | 4.67 | 4.61 |
| Peter Lambert | Colorado | 0.56 | 5.38 | 5.05 |
| Garrett Crochet | Chicago (A) | 0.51 | 3.98 | 4.08 |
| Justin Lawrence | Colorado | 0.48 | 4.54 | 4.25 |
| Jalen Beeks | Colorado | 0.48 | 5.07 | 4.99 |
| Jake Bird | Colorado | 0.44 | 4.75 | 4.59 |
| Tucker Davidson | Norfolk | 0.39 | 4.71 | 4.51 |
| Matt Krook | Norfolk | 0.38 | 4.85 | 4.75 |
| Steven Wilson | Chicago (A) | 0.19 | 4.50 | 4.54 |
| Brad Keller | Chicago (A) | 0.16 | 5.48 | 5.42 |
| Nick Vespi | Norfolk | 0.16 | 4.18 | 4.08 |
| Tyler Kinley | Colorado | 0.13 | 5.06 | 4.70 |
| Nick Mears | Colorado | 0.05 | 5.03 | 4.98 |
| Bryan Baker | Norfolk | 0.05 | 4.37 | 4.40 |
| Albert Suarez | Norfolk | 0.04 | 5.22 | 5.17 |
| Andrew Suarez | Norfolk | -0.10 | 4.90 | 4.84 |
| Daniel Bard | Colorado | -0.12 | 5.44 | 5.45 |
| Nolan Hoffman | Norfolk | -0.19 | 4.79 | 4.68 |
| Kaleb Ort | Norfolk | -0.22 | 5.10 | 4.81 |
| Wandisson Charles | Norfolk | -0.44 | 5.26 | 5.44 |
While some of the Tides’ fringe arms match up well with the motley crew of Rockies and White Sox pitchers, the back end of Norfolk’s pitching staff is far less competitive.
To get a final number, I constructed a fictional league in which teams play all 30 major league teams five times and then, for the missing 12 games, played the AL teams one more time, minus the White Sox, A’s, and Royals. Since this is a simulation, I had the Rockies and White Sox play themselves in order to keep the opponent mix identical for all teams. For the Tides, I constructed a depth chart based on their current roster, minus the rehabilitating John Means. In the end, the Rockies averaged 68 wins and the White Sox 60. As for the Tides, while they put up a fight against the Pale Hose and would beat them in some simulations (about 34% of the time), they only averaged 56 wins. In other words, even when I let the Tides keep Jackson Holliday — he was literally called up as I was writing this paragraph — they aren’t as good as any of the current big league teams.
But are the Norfolk Tides even the right team to consider here? To answer that question, I repeated the exercise I had just done with the Tides with the 29 other Triple-A teams instead:
| Team | Wins |
|---|---|
| Norfolk | 56.1 |
| Sacramento | 54.6 |
| Toledo | 53.4 |
| Worcester | 53.2 |
| Memphis | 52.9 |
| Nashville | 52.8 |
| Buffalo | 51.6 |
| Gwinnett | 51.3 |
| Reno | 50.7 |
| Indianapolis | 49.9 |
| Durham | 49.7 |
| Syracuse | 49.5 |
| Jacksonville | 49.2 |
| Columbus | 48.8 |
| Iowa | 48.4 |
| Rochester | 48.2 |
| Sugar Land | 47.6 |
| Round Rock | 47.3 |
| Scranton/Wilkes-Barre | 46.6 |
| Charlotte | 46.4 |
| St. Paul | 46.1 |
| Lehigh Valley | 45.8 |
| Omaha | 45.7 |
| Tacoma | 44.7 |
| Oklahoma City | 44.4 |
| El Paso | 43.8 |
| Las Vegas | 43.4 |
| Louisville | 42.4 |
| Salt Lake | 42.2 |
| Albuquerque | 38.6 |
As it turns out, the Tides are in fact the best projected minor league team. Now, this shouldn’t necessarily be considered a farm system ranking, as every minor league roster is populated with a lot of non-prospects. While every Triple-A team has a number of players who are plausible major leaguers and sometimes even pretty decent ones, once you get to, say, the seventh-best hitter or fifth-best pitcher, things start looking bleak, much more so even than with lousy major league teams. The White Sox and Rockies may be two of the worst teams in the majors, but in the big picture, they’re still pretty good at baseball.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
Dan, when you say “Sacramento”…
The River Cats, the Giants AAA affiliate. That’s a stacked system.
The As look better than the Rockies so far, honestly. Maybe not a healthy White Sox team, but I honestly think the Rockies are worse. JJ Bleday, Zack Gelof, JD Davis, Brent Rooker, Ryan Noda, and potentially Shea Langeliers have the makings of an above-average offense. Their pitching hasn’t been great, but I’m more willing to bet on Sears, Wood, Stripling, and Blackburn than I am on most of the Rockies rotation options. Mason Miller looks like a legit back-of-the-pen guy as well.
I mean, that is WAY closer than I would have thought going into this exercise. It’s pretty wild that a minor league team would have a 1/3 chance to be better than a big league club.
Also, given where Povich ranks among the pitchers, it seems like if the Tides had a one game playoff with either team, it would be close to a coin flip? Crazy.
Even the Isotopes have a 1 in 4 chance. The difference in talent isn’t THAT much, and there’s a lot of randomness in any given batted ball result.
Right in spring training you see mlb teams lose to their milb affiliates (I know minors guys are on mlb team) and they have even lost to college teams a few times. Anything can happen in baseball!
I think that it is important to note that this assumes the White Sox three best position players aren’t out until the All Star break. Even then, they get beat by a AAA team a third of the time.
Good thing Jerry Reinsdorf hired Getz because he can turn the team around fast!
I tested this in OOTP by putting the Tides into the AL East in place of the Orioles. They tied the 2003 Tigers for the worst record of all time, going 43-119. So I guess ZiPS likes them a bit more than OOTP does.
The 1962 mets (40-120) and 1899 Cleveland Spiders (20-134) object to calling the 2003 Tigers the worst record of all time. It may be the worst record of a team that was MLB in both the preceeding and following years.
Baseball probably far closer than other major sports. Dan Patrick recently asked DraftKings to set a line on UCONN against the Pistons; they set it at DET -45
Relatedly, I think the largest line I remember seeing on a regular season NCAA game this year was around 38.5, maybe touched 39.5. I don’t remember seeing one 40+. So basically UCONN is to Mississippi Valley State as the Pistons are to UCONN.
You’d have to do it as a G-League team, though. UCONN vs Pistons would be like asking DraftKings to set a line of Colorado Rockies vs LSU Baseball. Tides vs. White Sox is like the 2023 Delaware Blue Coats vs. the 2023 Pistons.
The gap in talent is so large between college and pros, even the secondary leagues are clearly better.
Many years ago, the NFL champion used to play an exhibition game against an all-star team of college seniors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_College_All-Star_Game. The pros went 31-9-2. The game seems to have become uncompetitive during later years, for various reasons.
The Japanese pro American football league only recently (2022) stopped doing something similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_Bowl Also in a similar type of category was the old cricket “Gentlemen vs Players” game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen_v_Players
I think you should lump in the AA pitching (where a lot of the smarter clubs hide their aces).
Yeah, this struck me too as the problem with the comparison. More broadly, since AAA is really a weird amalgam of the taxi squad/MLB reserves and the actual talent-developing minor leagues, the more interesting question might be the competition between an imaginary Organizational All-Minors Team and MLB.
May we interest him in another article?
It may not be feasible to project to a decent level of accuracy how AA (or even lower) players would perform as teammates of AAA players playing against MLB players.
I’m less interested in knocking down the straw man claim that the Tides would crush the worst MLB team. For me, it’s much more interesting and surprising that the Tides aren’t *that* much worse than the White Sox. I’d have thought the gap between the worst MLB team and the best AAA team would be much larger than 4 projected wins over a 162 game season.
So, is this an unusually small gap? I don’t feel like the White Sox have an unusually bad projection, compared to the typical worst team in MLB in a typical season. But are the Tides an unusually good AAA team?
Thinking about it more, I realize that the table covering all AAA teams answers my question. The Tides come out on top, but only by a bit, and there are several AAA teams that project as 50+ win MLB teams. And it can’t possibly be the case that AAA as a whole is way better right now than it typically is. So I was just wrong to guess that the best AAA team would typically be something like a 50-win MLB team.
Now want to think more about how this squares with the conventional wisdom that the biggest gap between adjacent professional levels is the gap between AAA and MLB. The conventional wisdom is that that’s the biggest leap for a young player to make. But is it? If you repeated this exercise to compare, say, the best AA team to the worst AAA team, or the best A team to the worst A+ team, or etc., what would you find? Would you find a gap of just 4 projected wins/season at every level? (Note that, to do this, you’d have to project both, say, the AA and AAA team against the same AAA schedule, not against an MLB schedule.)
I mean, it’s not *that* far off. Only nine teams cleared 50 and the single team that cleared 55, Norfolk, wouldn’t without Holliday now.
Is Jim Bowden a nincompoop? Yep!
But he is a real person. And a real person who made this exact argument. And he wasn’t the only one putting this idea forward. A number of publications ran real stories about this exact argument.
By definition this is not a straw man argument. I’m not even sure whose argument Dan would be misconstruing to attack or what that argument would be that wasn’t “Norfolk would beat Oakland”, but a more reasonable statement that Dan chose to interpret as “Norfolk would beat Oakland”.
I would argue that from purely an offensive (no defense, no pitching) standpoint, the Tides’ lineup is better than several of these teams. It’s hard to tease out of the numbers above because they’re WAR based, but I would speculate if the bet weren’t “which team is better” but rather “you put each lineup against the same pitching, who scores the most runs”, it has to be much closer. I would expect Norfolk beats or comes very close to beating the As, Nationals and White Sox on that front
Nats are much better, so far, than you think.
The Tides are giving up 7.8 runs per game so far, to minor leaguers, so I would imagine they’d have a tough time scoring enough to compensate for that against big leaguers.
Big leaguers were all at some point AAA players and were mostly at least pretty good far that level, and should mostly be at least as good if not better than they were then. This isn’t as silly as the Alabama/[worst NFL team] comparisons, but thinking about it for half a second should make it obvious that any MLB team will be better than a AAA team.
If you look thru basically any milb filter (ops, obp, wrc, hrs) it is always heavy with guys who have been in the mlb prior and couldn’t cut it. Major leaguers who put up 70wrcs go down to the minors and dominate all the time.
…but thinking about it for half a second should make it obvious that any MLB team will be better than a AAA team….
Norfolk is projected to win 56 games in the MLB, at least in this article. There have been a decent number of MLB teams that have had less than 56 wins in a season. So I disagree that thinking about it for half a second should make it obvious at all.
Norfolk’s current numbers are heavily inflated by their series in Charlotte. Not only is Truist small (150+ park factor for HRs!), but the wind was blowing out at 20mph for most of those games. Kjerstad’s homers would have been out anywhere, as he is red hot, but a lot of the others should have been relatively routine fly balls.
Is defense better in the majors or AAA?
The answer is probably the majors. But the minors have a lot of younger guys who aren’t that good at hitting and the majors have a lot of older guys who are not as fast but can hit.
I think that in the 2000s, when there were so many older players in the majors and teams seemed to not mind as much having older, defensively challenged players in the majors, the gap between MLB and AAA defense might have been smaller.
If you had an “All MLB Defensive Team” vs an “All minor league defensive team (all levels)” the minor league team might be better as there are so many more players to chose from.
I once read that defense peaks younger, but declines slower, than most other baseball skills.
Defense declines slower?
Does that mean that players are more likely to retain their defensive ability after their offensive ability has faded away?
I do not think I can agree with that. There are so many players who are good at hitting and fielding, they move to DH or a less demanding position. In fact, that is pretty much expected.
Am I misunderstanding you?
The argument is that offense generally declines even faster than that, which I can buy considering how many guys lose the ability to hit at a decent level by their mid-30s, and how many Gold Glovers remain as above-average fielders late in their careers (or even being the one reason that keeps them in the Majors at that point).
Guys like Nelson Cruz are the major exceptions.
There is still a fair amount of sluggers in the mlb who play positions who would have been dh only if they came up with same skill set now.
It has taken Crochet all of 3 starts to surpass the .51 projected WAR
Whitesox “luck”, he turns in negative WAR the rest of season and falls back below! 😯
How would a minor league all-star team stack up?
This one might have a strong shot at being better than the worst MLB teams.
I’d imagine they are closer to an average team.
The Nationals hosted an exhibition game against all their top prospects at Nats Park a couple days before Opening Day. Basically the Nat’s regular lineup against a lineup featuring Crews, House, Wood, Hassell, etc etc. A lot of talent! Got to see most of the players in the Soto trade lol. Wood hit a ringing double off Gore, Jarlin Susana topped out a 102, TJ White hit a monstrous dinger.. but that was about it for the prospect Nats. Big league Nats absolutely wiped the grass with them. Not even remotely close. Sometimes it’s easy to take for granted just how good at baseball even fringe major leaguers are.
It was a super fun event though, hope it becomes a regular thing!
Yeah, some orgs might get a bit of a boost by considering AA and AAA together.
Poor Rockies. In the writeups of WAR rankings by position, the Rockies were in the bottom three at just about every position, and looking at the above list, it looks like the cupboard is bare in the minors too (at least AAA, maybe their low minors is better, but in any event, reinforcements don’t appear to be on the way to the majors anytime soon). It’s “stick out like a sore thumb bad”
So, how many games would the best DSL team project to win in a 162 game MLB season? 0? 30? Or what?
The WAR projection on Kris Bryant is pretty rough; and he is only in year 3 of a 7 year, $182 million contract.
Great stuff, Dan! Thanks for using your tools to satisfy some curiosity among fans. This article was brief but touched on nearly everything someone would want. Thanks again!
way over values prospects. all of these major leaguers you show had higher mlb projections when they were still in aaa then they do now. almost everyone of them.
The flip side is that if the major leaguers shown had met their projections from their time in AAA, their teams wouldn’t be in the running for worst in MLB
The new White Sox ad campaign: We’re still pretty good at baseball.
Chicago White Sox Baseball…it sure beats a root canal…unless it’s a double header.
The Chicago White Sox….still in the major leagues!
OK, I borrowed these two from something I saw back when the early 1980s Atlanta Braves were terrible. I wish I could remember some of the others.
This is the same stupid discussion about how an Alabama football team could beat the worst NFL team. No, they couldn’t. Just stop.
You’re right, but I wish we can see something like this ONCE.
Oh Dan, you ruin all the fun 😛
On a serious note, that was an interesting exercise and had been thinking about it since it was brought up on Effectively Wild last week – I suppose the fact that even with thin pitching the Tides get close to the White Sox in so many scenarios really says a lot.