ZiPS 2021 Projections: Cleveland Indians

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cleveland Indians.

Batters

Even after seeing the public relations fiasco that resulted from the Red Sox trading their franchise player last winter, Cleveland is preparing to do the same, making it abundantly clear that Francisco Lindor will most likely start the 2021 season wearing another uniform. Lindor’s short 2020 wasn’t a triumph, but he’s at that level of superstar where it takes a lot more than 60 games moonlighting as a mortal to change expectations by a significant margin. Now, it’s very possible that the players sent in return for Lindor will add more future wins overall than the star shortstop’s 2021 season will, but with the Indians in a three-way divisional dogfight, we know that they’re giving away high-leverage wins in the short-term. Lindor is on a Hall of Fame trajectory and should he reach Cooperstown, it seems likely that he’ll be more closely associated with his next team than his current one. The logo on Joe Morgan’s Hall plaque is that of the Reds, not the Astros, after all.

While there’s not a lot of good news concerning the lineup, José Ramírez further demonstrating that his late 2018/early 2019 struggles aren’t the new normal falls in that category. Ramírez hit .292/.386/.607 in 2020, leading the AL in WAR. If I had been an AL MVP voter, he would have easily had my first-place vote. He’s no longer a clearly above-average third baseman defensively and the days when it made sense to consider him an option at second on the right roster have probably passed, but his bat is good enough that it’s not really a troubling issue.

Whether Cleveland realizes it or not, making the decision to trade Lindor, when combined with the having already parted with Mike Clevinger, more or less commits the club to either fully rebuilding or throwing a lot of its saved cash back into the roster. Since the team does not seem all that sanguine about the latter, trading Ramírez seems like a necessary, though sad, follow-up to moving Lindor. And as good as Ramírez is, the rest of the lineup looks middling-to-worse at every position. The Mookie Betts trade didn’t restock Boston’s farm system single-handedly and neither will a Lindor trade. That ZiPS projects Nolan Jones as the third-best position player on the roster before he’s even reached Triple-A is a good sign for Jones but a bad one for an alleged contender next year.

Pitchers

As with the lineup, Cleveland’s penny-pinching has slowly drained the team’s depth, resulting in the few remaining stars having to carry more of the burden. Shane Bieber had an amazing 2020, somehow making as large of a performance leap from 2019 to 2020 as he did from 2018 to 2019, but the rotation as a whole looks a lot weaker than it did in 2017 and ’18. Carlos Carrasco recovering from chronic myeloid leukemia was one of the best stories of the year, so there’s reason to be positive about him, but the rest of the starters look fairly ordinary. Now, ordinary isn’t a negative, per se — that’s a typical description for most teams’ back-of-the-rotation starters. But Cleveland needs stars to balance out some of the team’s holes, such as its yearly exercise in outfield malpractice.

Zach Plesac and Aaron Civale both project as perfectly reasonable mid-tier starters, but they’re not so good that they have “extra” performance to paper over the fact that the team doesn’t project as all-that-impressive at catcher or first or second or left or center or right. Triston McKenzie projects as just a bit below-average and ZiPS is a big fan of Joey Cantillo, one of the players who came to Cleveland in the Clevinger trade.

While I grumbled about waiving Brad Hand like most of baseball’s Twitterati, Cleveland’s bullpen is likely to be good enough at the top that won’t be a gigantic loss. If you subtracted Hand’s WAR from the 2020 Indians, they still would have finished in the top 10 in baseball. Emmanuel Clase, James Karinchak, and Phil Maton form a solid top three and ZiPS is more optimistic about Nick Wittgren than Steamer is. The team should still add bullpen depth rather than simply reassign the losers in the fifth-starter competition there, but this might actually be possible, as there are likely some good deals to be had in this environment for a team not wishing to spend money.

Add the pitching into the hitting and assume that a Lindor package doesn’t add a ton to 2021 and this looks a lot like a .500 team without a huge amount of upside. I think Cleveland’s now the third-best team in the AL Central.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2021 due to injury, and players who were released in 2020. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Finnish industrial death metal fourth-wave ska J-pop band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. ZiPS is assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2021; if it does not, there will be widespread minor adjustments across the board come April.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter or something.