Who Changed Their 2023 Fate the Most at the Deadline?
Well, that’s the end of that. The trade deadline has come and gone, and whatever teams have is, well, whatever they’re going to have for the stretch run. My colleague Ben Clemens has already done the traditional look at the winners and losers of the deadline, so now it’s the turn of ZiPS, as I do every year afterwards. This is a very targeted look, in that ZiPS isn’t really looking at whether teams did a good job on a general level, only how the deadline affects their 2023 chances. So a team like the Mets ranking at the bottom isn’t a reflection on their competence, but how the deadline changed their postseason probability.
The methodology is simple. I project the rest of the season (after the games on August 1) both with the current rosters and if I undid every single trade made in the final two weeks of the trade period. I’ve included the projections for playoffs, division, and World Series for each of the 30 teams, with the default sort being playoff probability.
| Team | Div% | Before | Change | Playoff% | Before | Change | WS Win% | Before | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas Rangers | 33.4% | 31.7% | 1.7% | 77.6% | 71.2% | 6.4% | 4.7% | 3.6% | 1.0% |
| Chicago Cubs | 33.0% | 31.5% | 1.5% | 46.2% | 41.8% | 4.4% | 2.6% | 1.9% | 0.6% |
| Houston Astros | 60.5% | 58.3% | 2.2% | 89.8% | 86.0% | 3.7% | 11.8% | 9.8% | 2.0% |
| Milwaukee Brewers | 47.5% | 46.3% | 1.2% | 59.4% | 55.7% | 3.7% | 2.4% | 1.8% | 0.5% |
| Minnesota Twins | 74.2% | 70.9% | 3.3% | 74.4% | 71.1% | 3.2% | 3.0% | 3.3% | -0.3% |
| Philadelphia Phillies | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% | 62.6% | 59.8% | 2.8% | 2.7% | 2.5% | 0.3% |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 72.3% | 70.8% | 1.4% | 97.2% | 95.4% | 1.8% | 13.0% | 13.0% | -0.1% |
| Cincinnati Reds | 18.4% | 19.2% | -0.8% | 28.9% | 27.5% | 1.4% | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.1% |
| Tampa Bay Rays | 40.6% | 40.1% | 0.5% | 95.4% | 94.3% | 1.1% | 8.2% | 7.6% | 0.6% |
| Miami Marlins | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 29.4% | 28.4% | 0.9% | 0.5% | 0.5% | 0.0% |
| Baltimore Orioles | 51.2% | 50.1% | 1.1% | 96.8% | 96.1% | 0.7% | 7.3% | 6.7% | 0.6% |
| San Diego Padres | 3.2% | 3.0% | 0.2% | 40.5% | 40.0% | 0.5% | 3.5% | 3.4% | 0.1% |
| Arizona Diamondbacks | 4.4% | 4.0% | 0.3% | 45.5% | 45.3% | 0.2% | 2.0% | 2.1% | 0.0% |
| Toronto Blue Jays | 7.5% | 8.7% | -1.3% | 69.8% | 69.8% | 0.0% | 4.9% | 5.2% | -0.3% |
| Kansas City Royals | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Oakland A’s | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Washington Nationals | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Colorado Rockies | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Atlanta Braves | 99.9% | 99.9% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 23.8% | 25.2% | -1.4% |
| Chicago White Sox | 0.0% | 0.1% | -0.1% | 0.0% | 0.1% | -0.1% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Pittsburgh Pirates | 0.1% | 0.3% | -0.1% | 0.2% | 0.4% | -0.2% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Detroit Tigers | 2.3% | 2.6% | -0.3% | 2.3% | 2.6% | -0.3% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Los Angeles Angels | 1.8% | 2.6% | -0.8% | 13.0% | 13.6% | -0.7% | 0.5% | 0.6% | -0.1% |
| Boston Red Sox | 0.3% | 0.4% | -0.1% | 13.4% | 15.2% | -1.8% | 0.3% | 0.4% | -0.1% |
| San Francisco Giants | 20.1% | 22.2% | -2.0% | 81.0% | 83.6% | -2.6% | 5.4% | 6.3% | -0.9% |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 0.9% | 2.7% | -1.8% | 1.6% | 4.3% | -2.7% | 0.1% | 0.3% | -0.2% |
| Cleveland Guardians | 23.5% | 26.5% | -3.0% | 23.7% | 26.8% | -3.1% | 0.5% | 0.8% | -0.3% |
| New York Yankees | 0.5% | 0.7% | -0.2% | 18.0% | 21.3% | -3.3% | 0.7% | 1.0% | -0.3% |
| Seattle Mariners | 4.4% | 7.5% | -3.1% | 25.9% | 31.8% | -5.9% | 1.5% | 2.3% | -0.8% |
| New York Mets | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 7.4% | 16.8% | -9.4% | 0.4% | 1.3% | -1.0% |
The winners start with the Rangers, with an important caveat. ZiPS still slightly prefers the Astros, on the strength of their pickup of Justin Verlander, but adding Jordan Montgomery and Max Scherzer were two thumbs up in the projections. As for that caveat: this is actually the smallest playoff projection change for a team on the top of the chart in all of the years that I’ve been doing this. I prefer Texas’ acquisitions to Houston’s, but adding Verlander and Kendall Graveman does lessen the impact of the Rangers’ moves. It also amuses me a little that both their topline acquisitions were Mets, meaning the Mets were like the antagonist in a movie that sells weapons to both sides in a war.
The Cubs rank next because ZiPS really likes Jeimer Candelario. Just like the Rangers lost some of their gain by Houston doing stuff, the Brewers were also relatively active in getting Mark Canha, Carlos Santana, and Andrew Chafin. Some of the improvement in both teams comes from sweeping up some of the crumbs left in St. Louis’ rapidly diminishing playoff chances.
After the Astros and Brewers come the Twins, and I think them ranking this highly is a good way to highlight what felt like a lackluster trade deadline. Minnesota is the fifth most-improved team, at least in terms of making the playoffs, but its World Series chances actually went down. Basically, the Twins tread water, but that results in a significant improvement solely because the Guardians went backwards. ZiPS now has a 24% chance that the winner of the AL Central will have a losing record. The NL Central teams did enough that ZiPS only gives that a 1% chance of happening in that division. In the battle of the moribund middles, the NL Central edges the AL Central in effort made.
The Phillies improved with Michael Lorenzen and the Marlins with David Robertson and Jake Burger, but both franchises were hampered by the fact that even if they had acquired Shohei Ohtani, they’d still need a tremendous collapse from the Braves to win the division. They can only add wild card probability, which means that their World Series chances move less than they would if they played in, say, one of the Central divisions.
The Orioles and Rays both improved marginally and largely cancelled out their gains. This was an unusually quiet deadline for a wide-open AL East.
At the bottom come the Mets, which everyone should expect. That’s not to say they did a poor job, but they intentionally threw in the towel on their 2023 chances, and we’re measuring, well, the towel. The Cardinals are in a similar boat.
I won’t share that kindness for many of the other teams at the bottom. While the Mariners were fading out of playoff contention, even if you accept that they shouldn’t have made big acquisitions and try to reverse that, I’m disappointed in their retooling. I’m not sure why Teoscar Hernández and Tom Murphy are still there, and I find the return for Paul Sewald to be rather underwhelming. The Guardians literally made their roster worse, and if they actually play AJ Pollock, you can argue the Giants did the same.
That the Angels appear on this list has to be rather embarrassing. Lucas Giolito was a nice start to the trade deadline season, but while his acquisition — or a pitcher of similar value — was probably necessary, it wasn’t sufficient to get them into the thick of the playoff hunt. The Angels have managed the odd feat of rostering C.J. Cron both before and after he was actually good, and Randal Grichuk’s “big” season in Colorado is basically that of a league-average corner outfielder, which is above what the expectations for him are the last two months of the season.
In the end, I think some of the issues of this deadline is that there just weren’t any teams truly willing to push all their chips. Even the larger moves were simply value-based ones rather than wild gambles; the Astros and Rangers snagged their Mets pitchers with good prospects, but that was because the Mets were willing to cover huge chunks of the freight for their veteran aces. Some of this is the general long-term trend towards conservatism in front offices, and some of it is driven by the fact that playoff spots get easier and easier to land (and I’m sure that MLB will try again to expand playoffs during the next CBA fight). In a very real sense, this deadline is as much about the players who weren’t traded as the ones who were.
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.
2023-2025= 4th or 5th place for the Mets and Yankees every year. Buying titles doesn’t work anymore.
Tell that to the Rangers
what have the rangers won?
It’s necessary but not sufficient.
Yup that’s the best way to put it. It’s very hard to go to the WS without spending, but even if you spend the odds are against you making the WS.
There definitely is a theoretical tipping point where if an owner is willing to spend X amount of dollars, the team can be good enough to overcome all the randomness and injuries and regression risks that may happen in a season. But that amount is much more than what any owner is capable of realistically spending.
I think an advance sabremetrics can make is to find a better way to value wins; there is no ‘arbitrage free’ framework which can reduce a win to a universally agreed dollar amount.
The focus on the ‘marginal value’ of a win per player obscures the reality that each team values a win differently, and not just in the context of the current season’s records or objectives.
That’s an interesting question. I am trying to think of a teams recently that has won a championship without spending a reasonable amount of money, either to extend the window of a core or to get free agents, and I am blanking.
The Astros in 2017 and 2015 Royals might actually fit, but I’m not confident in that. Aside from that, the closest one I can think of are the Braves in 2021, who had a pretty big payroll but almost all of it was tied up in extensions for guys who would have been under team control anyway.
Aside from them…you might have to back before the strike in 1994.
If you expand the inquiry to teams that were IN the World Series rather than simply won, there are a more (Guardians, Rays x2, Rockies, Royals x2)
The way I see it, if you are in the Series , whatever you did amounted to a championship level team and the last few games simply didn’t go your way
The spending floor for being WS competitive seems to lie at around 50% of the first spending cap, plus/minus 10%.
The wildcards muddy the waters and reward “frugality” with the cheaper goal of postseason play but “crapshoot” luck has its limits. C.f., 2016.
I would count the Rays of 2020, even if they lost (you could argue that a higher payroll still matters there, but in a short series, once you’re there, it’s as much as dice roll on health and fatigue as anything else)
I think the 2020 Rays was greatly aided by the shortened season. The attrition issue that their pitchers tend to face didn’t truly come into play in 2020.
Eh, it didn’t help/hurt them anymore than it helped/hurt anyone else. If they’d performed poorly, you could just as easily say the opposite, which makes me feel like this is a post-facto explanation. And it’s not like the favored-Dodgers were harmed by it.
The Angels scrambled to patch the holes in their ship, while the Mets jettisoned several key players, yet on August 2nd ZiPS saw their championship odds as nearly identical. The Playoff %’s now diverge sharply, but that is still quite a contrast in perspective on the deadline.
Could I suggest expanding on this piece (in a Zips or non Zips way) to somehow include the value of the entire trade package? EG, the Mets have clearly blown it up; IMO Steve Cohen did the right thing being all in to acquire minor league talent; a ‘net ZIPS’ comparison isn’t informative when you are looking past this years’ time horizon.
In other words, if the expected cumulative WAR value (or other metric) is greater than the money Cohen paid to unload Verlander and Scherzer (most obviously), then it could be a great trade for the Mets…just not for this season.
(Guess what team I follow?).
Asking for feedback, rather an opinion.
Dan says it’s because teams weren’t willing to buy, but I think it’s also that teams weren’t willing to sell. Only three teams were active in trading multiple good players away: The Mets, White Sox, and Cardinals. And in the latter two cases, they were only interested in trading good players on expiring contracts. Other bad teams have largely traded all of their valuable players (Nationals, A’s, Royals, Rockies) or think they have a shot of doing something in 2024 or 2025 (Pirates, Tigers).
Now, the Cardinals and White Sox might have said they were willing to trade players who would contribute in 2024, but there’s a rumor the White Sox were asking the Orioles for Jackson Holliday and the Cards probably misread the market for Dylan Carlson (who I think deserves to start somewhere, but they’ve demoted to a backup role at least twice this year already!).
This is what happens when literally 20 teams think they are in playoff contention.
I think it’s more that there’s no buyer like Theo Epstein who was generous in surrendering top prospects for Chapman and Quintana and no seller was offering a 3+ win player who had 3+ years of control. Also, the Dodgers’ FV55 Cartaya is hitting like .188 at AA and Bobby Miller, their other 55, is needed in the majors. Finally, there aren’t any FV65’s right now, so the FV60’s are exceedingly precious.
Why aren’t teams willing to buy? Could it be because too many of these rentals perform like Lucas Giolito has?
I think part of it is that the playoffs become even more of a crapshoot as more teams are added. There is a lot of value in getting into the playoffs, but there isn’t as much of improving beyond that. The best teams rarely win it all anymore.
I think that to the extent that this is a buyer-side issue and not a seller-side one (which I am not quite convinced of yet), it’s because teams are still in prospect-hoarding mode. This is might be what happens when almost half of the teams in the league come out of the Shapiro-Chernoff (Cleveland), Friedman (Tampa Bay), or Luhnow (Houston) front office pipeline. Interestingly, the Epstein school (Boston) is typically more aggressive at the deadline but I guess the Cubs and D-Backs weren’t in a position to go all-in.
Guys coming out of those four front offices are currently running 14 teams in MLB, and I feel pretty confident that it will be 15 whenever a job opens up that James Click thinks is worth taking. As for the rest…here are the total list of teams who are run by someone who doesn’t come out of one of those four pipelines:
Braves (have almost no prospects left, and almost no needs)
White Sox (sellers)
Reds (not sure why they didn’t buy)
Rockies (sellers)
Astros (traded their top two prospects)
Royals (sellers)
Angels (sellers)
Marlins (not sure why they didn’t buy more)
Mets (sellers)
Yankees (not really in a position to buy)
Athletics (sellers)
Phillies (not sure why they didn’t buy)
Padres (have almost no prospects left, not in a great position to buy, and not a lot of needs)
Cardinals (sellers)
Rangers (traded two of their better prospects)
Nationals (sellers)
So I’m not sure why Dombrowski or Krall or Ng didn’t buy more–I would guess it is because there were so few sellers. But them being more active probably would have been the ceiling.
Uh, Angels sellers?
Have I slipped into the Twilight Zone? 😵
Whoops. That should have been “emptied out the rest of the farm system.” I was thinking of the Giolito trade and forgot which team I was on.
Athletics were not sellers. They had nothing to sell.
“SOLD OUT”
FWIW, if the Padres hadn’t swept the Rangers, they might have traded Snell.
If they aren’t planning on resigning him, keeping Snell was more aggressive than trading him.
Dan, in the case of the Blue Jays, is the change likely due to the trades themselves lowering the team’s chances, or could it be due to their best hitter going on the IL within 24 hrs of the trade deadline?
I only unwound the trades themselves. So Bichette is no more healthy in the before roster version than the current.
Okay, thank you.
Insufferable Dodgers fan here. I’m curious how much of a difference ZiPS thinks ERod would have made had he signed off on the trade sending him to the Dodgers.
Insufferable Dodger Fan is a good monicker
It’s so Angels to have them push all-in and still have their playoff odds go down. They missed a real chance to re-stock the farm.
Also, Braves are 100% for playoffs? There wasn’t even one simulation where everybody got hurt and they collapsed down the stretch?
It’s probably a combination of rounding error and a bit of overconfidence in the prediction. But it is true that it’s hard to see how they would miss the playoffs. They have 69 wins and 56 games left, so if they won just under a third of their games (18) they would still finish with 87 wins. Last year, an 87 win team nabbed a wild-card spot, so even in the worst case scenario I could imagine they would still have some shot. And that would depend on the best team in baseball (both in the past and in terms of projection for the future) losing 2/3rds of their games.
“High odds” ways for Atlanta to miss the playoffs.
They could be passed by all of the Dodgers, Giants, Marlins, Philies, and Mets. (Note: Yes, all of them, and that’s the just sold the farm Mets.)
Alternately, if you really don’t like the Mets chances:
They could be passed by all of the Dodgers, Giants, Marlins, Philies, Reds, and Brewers.
I think I’ll take the Met’s Miracle over that odds-wise.
Note that these teams play each other, which reduces the chances of them all passing the Braves below what you’d get from pairwise comparisons.
I have no trouble believing that it rounds off to 100.0%, and I’d not be at all surprised if a million runs of the projection system gave no simulation where they missed, as the projection system doesn’t include sudden plane/bus crashes (which are themselves pretty low odds and might not be enough).
Since someone will notice, you could also have them passed by the Marlins, Philies, and three teams from the west, or even just one of the Marlins and Philies, and four teams from the west. But that runs into the fact that even with more even schedules, those west teams play each other a lot and don’t play the Braves all that many times, so those are also very poor odds things to happen.
The Braves have an 11.5 game lead on the Phillies and a 13 game lead on the Marlins. The Braves also have a 12.5 game lead in the wild card standings. Looking at the numbers above, the Marlins, Mets, and Nats have a 0% chance to win the division. Even if the Braves and Marlins tied, the Braves have already won the season series and the tiebreaker. So the only way the Braves are out of the playoffs is if they fail to get a wild card berth.
The Braves have 56 games left to play, If the Braves went 18-38, a .333 winning percentage, the rest of the way, they would end up at 87-75… the record of the Phillies last year, who were the 6th seed in the playoffs.
If the Braves were tied for the last wild card spot with the Reds, Marlins, or Brewers, since the Braves won on head-to-head record, the Braves would win the tiebreaker. So that limits the teams that could knock the Braves out if they tied.
For the Braves to miss the playoffs entirely, the Phillies, who have a tougher schedule than the Braves, would have to play out of their minds and win the division, while the Braves would have to play the next 56 games worse than the Royals or A’s have been playing this year, and 5 other teams would have to win at least 30 out of the next 52-56 games to have better records.
The Braves magic number to win the division is 44. Even if the Phillies played .700 the rest of the way, with 16 losses, the Braves would only need 28 more wins to clinch. The Braves are still playing the Pirates in 7 games, the Mets in 7 games, the Rockies in 3 games, the Cardinals in 3 games, and the Nationals in 7 games. That’s 27 games against teams that are below .500.
I’m sure that 0.1% where the Phillies win the division are when the AAA Gwinnett Stripers have to come up when everyone gets hurt. Because otherwise, there’s no reason for the Braves to lose the division, let alone miss the playoffs.
The Mariners improved 2B and whatever role Pollock was serving and got worse odds. Lame. Is this mostly to how much the other teams in our division improved?
I’d say at least half (probably over 75%) of the reduction comes from the Rangers, Astros, and Angels improving their rosters (i.e., the Angels still lost odds, too). Going to really tough for the Mariners to jump one of Texas and Houston for a WC spot. Basically, Mariners are mostly down to fighting Blue Jays, Red Sox, Yankees, and Angels for one WC.
It’s like the Twins odds going up by as much as Cleveland’s went down.
They were nearly tied in the Division Nobody Wants to Win so staying pat leaves them first by default.
I don’t know what the computer says about the chances of Kolten Wong bouncing back versus the chances of Josh Rojas bouncing back but I would guess it is a wash. (I, personally would give Josh Rojas a better chance of bouncing back…but it’s marginal. And there’s not a lot of evidence to support Rojas bouncing back more). I bet they could have cut Wong and just played whoever was in AAA and the computer would register it the same as getting Rojas.
Then they also traded one of their better relievers, one with a decent track record. So this is probably a worse team now.
And the Rangers and Astros and Angels went out and got a whole bunch of better players, and they probably play them a lot and are their main competition for wild card spots.
And then the Orioles and Rays and Blue Jays went out and made (marginal) improvements, and they’re the other competition for a wild-card spot.
Me, I think they could still make it. They’ve underperformed, they’re still probably a better team than the Angels and about tied with them, a game behind the Red Sox (and probably better than them too) and 3.5 games behind the Blue Jays (and they’re probably about the same level of team). But in terms of odds, there are a lot of reasons why their probability of snagging that wild card spot is worse now than before.
I think more than getting better/worse, the Mariners added variance to their projection. Filling the 18-22 innings that Sewald would have pitched ROS, while needing to be filled, comes from an area of depth and will be handled by low leverage relievers. Rojas has a higher defensive floor and is currently hitting better (a very low bar). Then they added another Quad-A outfielder to their pile in the hopes one of them decides they can hit major league pitching.
While none of that screams improvement (and in my opinion, regression), their real problem is the only realistic path to the playoffs is through the final wild card slot.
Screw Derek Falvey. You can’t add one relief pitcher?! No one?!
Maybe the Twins will win 82 games and we can give him a 2000 year extension.
I seriously don’t know why I bother watching the games anymore. This team is NEVER going to win anything.
And yes, I’m aware of the Lopez for Floro swap, which was just a rearranging of the deck chairs. One bum out, another one in.
Julien is now leading all Twins position players with 1.7 WAR. Correa and Buxton are 8th and 10th respectively, with a combined 1.7 WAR. I don’t even really know what to say about that.
The Twins profiting not from having made any moves, but because the cruddy teams in the division went fire sale, is very on brand
They traded prospects for Jorge Lopez and Tyler Mahle last year, and obviously that didn’t work out well at all. Hard to blame them too much IMO.
While the Twins have been incredibly frustrating to watch, I’m not sure they had a lot better play than stay the course and hope Correa and Buxton remember that they’re supposed to be the offensive stars.
For what it’s worth (which isn’t much after another strikeout with RISP) BaseRuns still thinks they’ve been the third best team in the AL behind the Rangers and TB.
O’s improved by T-3rd most, but sure, they are massive deadline losers that deserve public ridicule.
Geez Nick Markakis is so touchy in his autumn years…
“The Orioles and Rays both improved marginally and largely cancelled out their gains.”
More savage Szymborski negativity!
Snarky but correct.
And, equally on point, the O’s are already basically guaranteed (95+%) to be in the playoffs according to Zips (after the Braves, Dodgers, and Rays). Winning the World Series seems to be as much about luck as talent. If so, it would seem sensible not to trade away a lot of value in prospects just for a modestly better chance of winning it all. Particularly if the O’s current record already reflects a lot of good fortune (per BaseRuns).
While the trade deadline is fun in terms of suspense and speculation, there is something fundamentally odd about playing the last two months of the season with teams that are different from those that played the first four months. That’s tempered a bit by the end of 40-man roster Septembers but that also makes the trade deadline anomaly more distinct.
I’m in the minority, but I would like the trade deadline for postseason eligibility to be earlier in the year. I’d still let trades happen after the deadline; The players just wouldn’t be postseason eligible. I hate that the smart thing for teams to do that are out of it is to dump guys in the last year of their deal.
I would say that though this was a small potatoes deadline overall, it was fascinating seeing the Mets sell how they did and witnessing a Cardinal rebuild as well. I also rather liked the Marlins acquisitions, though I am sort of confused by them as well. Cleveland…idk what to make of. Why did they do any of the things they did? And for all those reasons, I had more fun at this deadline than usual tbh.
Is it that no team really wanted to push in their chips, or that not much was available? There weren’t a ton of difference makers who we could realistically expect to go who didn’t – can’t think of anyone other than Ohtani, who didn’t move because his team, foolishly or not, decided to go for it.
Per the Trades That Didn’t Happen article, when Teoscar Hernández, Adam Duvall, Lane Thomas, Dylan Carlson, and Tyler O’Neill, are cited as the “significant” names that didn’t go, you’re talking about a pretty bare cupboard. All those guys are having bad to very bad years, except for Thomas whose peripherals indicate that he’s a mirage.
Cease still has two years of arb left, and the White Sox still expect to contend next year. Whatever happened with E-Rod happened with E-Rod.
I think it was just a random year when there wasn’t much out there.
I give zero credence to Zips. They have whiffed badly on the Orioles for two straight years. Yeah, they are finally giving them some props as the math of wins and losses forces them to. But their predictions are bunk
“Tell me exactly what will happen for all 30 teams in baseball or your model doesn’t work”
sure glad i’m not an angels fan. that organization has failed tremendously
I mean, you’d get to watch Trout and Ohtani. That doesn’t suck. I can think of some other California teams whose fans have it a lot worse.