Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1806: If the Season Started Today

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and FanGraphs writer Dan Szymborski briefly set aside the lockout blues to discuss the current state of rosters and projected standings, touching on how the talent still available via free agency compares to previous offseasons at the same stage, how the division races stack up today, the weakest-projected team positions, the […]

I can't see you, you're lying next to me I can't wake you, I'm trying Astral projection Can't get me out of here Astral projection Hello and welcome to episode 1806 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm all right.

And we are also joined today by Dan Zimborski of Fangraphs. Hello, Dan. Hello. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm enjoying, currently, I'm enjoying the snowfall that's outside my house. Oh, gosh. It's been a few days for me since snowfall I miss it, enjoy it while it lasts Well I wanted to ask you about Some cautious optimism

Of yours that you described in some pieces Published this week at FanGraphs You said you're more cautiously optimistic Than most of your colleagues about the future Of the 2022 season I could use some cautious optimism Right about now It might be damning with faint praise

Because I don't know if anyone's actually optimistic it's always cautiously and and lots of controlling words before that term i don't know it they're they feel far apart but on a fundamental level if you compare this labor negotiation to say the one in 1994 the difference is the gulf is not as large and maybe i'm grasping onto that but nobody's trying to like blow up the structure of of baseball right now so i still think that in the end with the pressure of the season and the relative plausibility of an agreement, I think that they will be able to, but I could be wrong. Well, we hope you're not wrong, but at least for today, we're just kind of going to put our fingers in our ears and go la la la la la and pretend that there is no lockout,

or at least that the lockout will be resolved in time for the season to start punctually, because this was Zips Week at fan crafts this is the the big projections week and you published multiple posts about the state of the projected standings i guess you cannot project labor negotiation so your cautious optimism is not springing from zips it is springing from dan simborski although zips also sprang from Dan Szymborski, but they're different entities. It's a complicated relationship. Right. But you sort of just took a look around the league, both leagues, and summed up where all of the teams are. And then we asked you to do some extra work to look up some of the biggest

holes that teams still have to fill and just the progress of this winter compared to the typical winter in baseball, or at least recent winters, which have been atypical in other ways at times. But yeah, we're just going to pretend that the season is going to start and sum up what that would look like if it happened now and maybe what will happen before that actually does occur, assuming it does at some point. So do you want to do a methodology minute here for anyone who is not that familiar with your process or projection systems in general to give people a sense of how Zips works? Well, I could talk for an hour, but I'll try to give the condensed version.

Essentially, Zips is trying to figure out, one, where a player is, and two, where a player is going. I mean, that's the fundamental thing of any kind of projection. It's how you get around on the GPS in your car. Your car needs to know where it is and where you're going. There's a lot of ways to figure out where a player is. Zips uses stats from recent history weighted more heavily towards recent seasons. Zips uses stats from recent history weighted more heavily towards recent seasons. Zips uses stat cast data and similar measures to try to correct in the baseline projection from, you know, any kind of weirdness like a batting average in balls in play that doesn't really reflect the underlying numbers.

And at that point, Zips established the baseline expectation for players then it compares that baseline expectation to the baseline expectation calculated similarly for every player in the majors going back to 1920 and every minor league player going back to 1960 and it sees who it tries to assemble a large cohort of similar players who had a similar baseline expectation at similar points of their career with similar characteristics. I'm using the word similar a lot. And then it on the fly generates a curve and expected outlook for a player with a lot of error bars because we're dealing with the future, which is notoriously hard to predict. because we're dealing with the future, which is notoriously hard to predict. And then hopefully Zips will peer through the fog a little bit and get us a little bit closer to what happens than just pulling a name out of a hat.

Obviously, last year was a pretty big projection challenge for everybody because projection systems do well when they have more data. You just described all the different points of data you use to try to make your system as precise as possible. And 2020 had a lot less of it because of the shortened season. I'm curious sort of how the challenge of that shortened season is maybe persisting into this year, even though obviously 2021 gave us a much more typical and robust 162 games. It was nice to have a real major league season for many reasons. But for the Zips projections themselves,

you had a whole year of data from major leaguers. And even more importantly, you had a year from minor leaguers. I think that's actually the larger problem. Because when you have a player, say, Joey Votto, missing some data from him isn't ideal, especially because he's an older player approaching 40. But it's not the end of the world. You kind of know who Joey Votto is.

You know who Mike Trout is. You know who Juan Soto is. But the problem with the loss of the minor league season is these were players who already did not have as much data as major leaguers. And sometimes they were missing just key parts of what's a big chunk of their professional career when you just check out a season. I think that's especially difficult for players that might have been in the majors in 2020, but without AA and AAA, they missed like a year to improve, and that data is missing. And Zips tries to close that by using the other data more heavily. But people will always ask me, so Dan, how are you dealing with losing this data? And I

would say terribly, I'm sure, because there's just not much you can do. When the data's gone, the data's gone and there's no magic mathematical trick to get it back. But we have a year of data. And so slowly I expect the accuracy, especially for minor leaguers, to slowly get back to normal. I'm hoping that a full season this year happens for the sake because I don't want to do this again. Yeah. Maybe we'll be blessed with multiple full seasons in a row. Wouldn't that be something? But is there anything new in the system this year? I know you're always working and testing and planning potential tweaks. So have you updated anything under the hood lately? use of stat cast data is I've improved my models the the z stats which are the equivalent of x stats but z for zips which stands for zimborski which is an s but that's a whole other whole

other thing to get into there are other things I'm working on but the main thing I was doing was trying to come to terms with the consequences of that missing season to see how it worked what weights would have worked better uh zips did somewhat better with the hitters than the pitchers. And then you have to deal with, okay, now why is this the case? And what other lessons do you learn? So that's another reason I was hoping to have a full year of data this year, because it's still 2021, 2022 can still tell us things about 2020 and what a missing season's like,

especially if at some point in the future this happens again, when the Sigma variant comes next year or something. of missing seasons like uh especially if at some point in the future this happens again when when the sigma variant comes next year or something maybe i shouldn't jinx that also not an official projection from dan or zips and i'm toying with a lot of things i'm trying to finally make zips project saves but i'm trying to do it without me knowing who the closer will be which is kind of tricky so i've actually i'm actually using a a more machine learning approach to this than zips uses with things like contract length history as a closer salary trying to kind of fudge with the data the decision on who a team makes the closer so that I don't have to.

Because one of the things about Zips is I want it to be a computer-only projection system as much as is possible. Simply because if someone's using a projection system, they can say, oh, these projections come from the data. They don't include Dan Zaborski's opinion. come from the data. They don't include Dan Zaborski's opinion. Even if Dan Zaborski's opinion improves a particular projection, it's hard for someone to use that because you don't know what part of that projection is data or what part is my opinion and what I'm considering and what my opinion is. And that just makes a huge, messy situation. So before we, as you wrote in your posts, forget about the eternal void that beckons and get to some projections and specific teams and divisions and players and positions, what would you say about the state of the market? This is still undone. There are a lot of moves to be made. There were a lot of moves made in the two weeks or so in a flurry that led up to the lockout. But since then, nada.

So I asked you to take a look at previous off seasons and try to compare where we stand right now in terms of free agents remaining on the market. So what have you been able to discern? the market. So what have you been able to discern? Well, I went back through transactions since 2014 because that's when I officially started using war in the projections. And generally speaking, if you count only players who are projected to have a positive war, by this point in a typical offseason, somewhere between about 75 and 85 percent of the the war for the following season is already off the table and that was a lot less in 2021 uh using the same methodology and during february only 51 percent of the projected war was already called was already signed and locked up for for 2021 going into uh the lockout we were at about 44% based on the projections.

So there's still a lot to do. And it really does demonstrate just how busy those two weeks were. Because generally speaking, I mean, it was a whole month's worth of moves in two weeks. It was quite exciting, but it's a little mixed to offseason odd because we're essentially having two complete distinct offseasons. Right. So it was a month of moves, but not three months of moves, which is, I guess, what could have happened potentially. So we're a little bit behind last year's pace and last year's pace was also slow because of the aftermath of the pandemic and just the general downturn in spending and free agency, et cetera. So that was already a slow winter compared to previous winters.

And this is slightly slower than that. So, yeah, it's what you would expect. There's a lot of outstanding moves to be made. Yeah. Last season at this time, we had, you know, all the theater about how much money the owners had lost. You know, we lost $100 billion. We lost $500 billion.

We are destitute. We're selling off the stadiums. It's a big estate sale. Come on down. Yeah. So are you selling your team for free then since you've lost so much money? No. Yeah, the follow-ups are never quite as complimentary as they want them to be, are they?

Well, I guess now maybe we can kind of pivot to some of the teams that are the most complete, probably relative to their needs, and then the ones that you've identified as having the most work to do. So which teams are striking you as being, I'm going to ask you to think about a particular combination first, potentially competitive and still in need of doing a good deal of work. I think if we talk about a good deal of work, we're kind of talking about those teams who aren't obviously at the top of the league and have significant losses since last season. I think the Giants are a good example of this. Any projection is going to have them giving away

a lot of the wins of last year because last year was crazy it was it was the least accurate zips team projection that there had ever been yeah same went for pakoda i know they beat pakoda by more than any other team ever had and pakoda goes back a long ways yeah luckily misery loves company it would it would feel a lot different if i was the only one that missed by 30 wins on the giants if everyone If everyone else does it too, it's okay. It's, you know, the old joke about two campers running from a bear and one person turns to another and says, are you, you really think you can outrun a bear? And the other guy says, well, we'll, we'll know, but I can outrun you. I think, so I think the Giants have a lot to do, especially because, you know, they lost Buster Posey to retirement. You lost Kevin Gosman to free agency.

And they really do need to shore that up. Yeah, it does seem like that. And you've never considered building in any team-specific adjustment to Zips, right? I mean, if there was a team that had a demonstrated track record of getting more out of players or getting less out of players? I mean, have you ever done anything like that in kind of an algorithmic way where it's like, hey, this is what's happened over an extended period or not? Is that putting your thumb on the skill? It's something that I check for both teams and players to see if a miss has predictive value. Because, you know, if the players, say the players i missed by 100 points of ops

if they had a predictive ability to continue to outperform perform projections even if i can't find the reason why then you can say hey well there's something that i can include to make the the projections more accurate unfortunately there really't. The mistakes for teams and players seems to be pretty random, which is depressing in a way because I can't use it to model this, make the model work even better. One of the nice things about a mistake is you want to be able to use that mistake to learn more. But when the mistakes come out random in this way, it's hard to really find something predictive just to hold on to so we'll see if the giants do it again i'm not convinced they are uh if they do then it'll be

fun to try to figure out what's going on there uh and why their their overperformance was predictive in a manner that say the royals of the mid 2010s weren't or the mariners every few years when they had that big year where they exceed their Pythag by 10 wins. Sorry, Meg. That's okay. So the Giants do have some work to do. I believe the Red Sox are a team that have significant work to do. Their pitching staff is in a better shape than it was going into last season. But you look at their outfield, they need a left fielder,

or depending on how they configure it, possibly two outfielders. Zips projects them to have one of the worst outfields in the majors overall when you look at it. I don't think Jackie Bradley Jr., even if he's fun to have back, is any kind of solution for the team. In the AL East, the Blue Jays at third also look kind of weak. That's been like the one position they haven't found, the son of a former major leaguer who's a star. So, you know, maybe they're checking around high schools to see who's related to who and they'll find it.

But I don't think they're going to fix that quickly. So in the AL East, those are the two teams, I think, or two pretty weak spots in the AL East. I think the Yankees probably could use some pitching depth, but they're a really hard team to upgrade. I don't want to take us on too far of a tangent, but I actually do have two sort of, let's call them AL East methodological questions that I think might be interesting to people. You said that you don't correct or attempt to correct for under-projection for particular teams, but I know you noticed this in your piece, and I think it's something that you've said before, that zips in some ways, I think,

deals with the raise a little bit better than our depth chart projections do. You tend to be closer to their win total on the zip side than we often are on the depth chart side. So I wonder if you could talk about that. And then I noticed that some people who perhaps hadn't clicked through the entire piece or read the entire piece were a bit surprised by some of the totals in the ALEs just given the strength of

those teams. So I wonder if you can talk also a little bit about how team strength and division strength interact with one another, because here again, the Red Sox might be a good example of people not quite understanding what the projections are getting at. Well, when I talk about zips versus our depth charts, zips, since I am running a simulation, I can be a little more dynamic with how I treat playing time to do it on a website on a daily basis. There's only so much you can do. You project the playing time for players and then you run the numbers through because it's hard to do anything else with the time that you need to have updates. We have to have updates in minutes, not hours or days.

What I do with Zips is Zips has a probabilistic model for playing time. So occasionally Chris Sale will pitch the full season. Occasionally he won't. And then we have kind of a profile of the Red Sox risk upside and downside over a million seasons. of a profile of the Red Sox risk upside and downside over a million seasons. And then I sim the teams against each other using the actual perspective schedule. I simulate a million years of that. Each simulation picks one of the million simmed Red Sox teams. And then you see what happens.

So Zips tends to do better with teams that have depth, but Fangraph's methodology will do better when a team is healthy than Zips will. For example, the Red Sox last year. Zips saw a lot of doomsday scenarios with the Red Sox simply because in the simulations when they lost a picture or two, the depth was not projected to be very good there, and their win total would drop off very rapidly. So the Red Sox had a pretty large variance

between their upside and downside, more than the other teams in the division last year. But they were healthy, so Fangraff's methodology was a lot closer with that. It's the best methodology I can think of to do this, but I mean, you can always say, there's always different assumptions you can make, which is not good news, but maybe puts them a little bit less behind the leaders than one might expect, given the strength of, say, the Dodgers in recent years. And Dodgers are still projected to win this division, according to Zips, but with a win total of 94 right now, which is not overwhelming. And even their projections have been stronger in recent years. And you do have the Padres between those

two, despite their second half collapse last year, they're back up at 90 wins as a projection for games behind the Dodgers. But there's some uncertainty there too. I mean, somehow the Trevor Bauer situation is still unresolved. His status is still undetermined for the Dodgers, which affects not just who's in their rotation, but how much money they potentially have to spend to make upgrades there. So that's kind of a question mark for them, more so than their rotation has been in recent years, I suppose. So probably good news for Padres fans. You know, if 81 wins is disappointing for Giants fans, Padres fans are probably pleased by the regression in the other direction, right? And this is not, hey, we have Bob Melvin as our manager

now. This is just, hey, we have a pretty talented team that just fell apart for a couple months last year. Yeah, that was brutal. I mean, you look at their record, and even into August, they still were on pace for a 90-win season. That's just how large the collapse was. It was one of the largest late-season collapses in history, really. I tracked it. I don't have it offhand, but it was pretty terrible compared to even other disappointing teams in history.

The good news for the Giants with the Dodgers is you look at the Dodgers pitching staff, and a lot could go wrong. I mean, just looking at our depth chart right now, you have Andrew Heaney pretty high up, and I like him, but he's certainly not a guarantee. David Price, I mean, you can't call him a rock-sol solid guarantee. You touched on Bauer. No one ever knows if Bauer is even going to ever pitch another game in the majors. Dustin Mays coming off injury. It's a rather thin team from a pitching standpoint, and there's not really a lot of pitching available left in free agency. Some of the more interesting names are already off the board. The Dodgers can't throw money at Kevin Gosman at this point because

he's gone. They can't throw money at Robbie Ray because he's gone. I think the Dodgers are still the best team. I think Zips is correct there. But there are more questions than I think in other recent Dodgers teams. I think maybe a team that we can lump into that same group, although their Zips projections were not quite as sterling as Los Angeles's were last year, is the Astros. So as we look at the West, you still, or rather Zips still has Houston leading the West and pretty comfortably despite the departure of magnitude of the lead here and do we attribute that more to Houston having done a better job of sort of papering over some of the losses of their core players or the teams below them not having done enough yet it's kind of a mix the matters projection is going to be a lot better than it was last year simply because we do know more things about the team we they have been aggressive so far in the offseason.

But with the Astros, one of the questions that Zips had coming into the season, similar to the Red Sox, was their pitching staff. The Astros have bled off a lot of their core pitching from the 2010s. Most of the pitchers who were a part of 2017, 2017 18 19 aren't even on the roster anymore so there was a lot of questions surrounding kind of their stable of highly interesting arms sometimes with control issues and they had a lot of these guys but they pretty much all worked out for the team in in 2021 so we can feel a lot better about them than we did last year at this time they they do get justin verlander back which i mean you're not going to project him at his normal level,

but just having him back and hopefully eating some innings is helpful to the team. And the A's don't look strong, and they could get weaker because, you know, they do seem to hint about trading Matt Olsen or Chapman. I think that the Astros probably would look a lot weaker if they were in the AL East. That would be an interesting thing for me to run if we swapped kind of the Astros and the Orioles. I think that would kind of mess up travel schedules, but as a theoretical construct, it might be interesting. Then there are the Angels, who I remember asking you about right at the end of the regular season.

And at the time, with your extra preliminary Zips projections, you had them as a 500 team. And now, months later and many moves later, you still have them as exactly a 500 team, despite the fact that I believe you have both Trout and Otani projected as seven-win players, which has got to be pretty rare, I imagine, for a team to have two players projected to be seven wins or more. And the team still being 500. Yeah. The Angels just have not, they've done a great job finding the best player of his generation

and one of the most exciting young players in baseball in Otani and not much else I mean Jared Walsh is a fine guy to have starting at first for the next you know three or four years but the rest of the roster is just so completely underwhelming it's a 67 win team with two massive superstars. I just don't know how they get out of this kind of trap they're in. And they tend to believe things just because they want to believe them. Like, they want Justin Upton to get back to where he was, say, during his Atlanta days. And they keep hoping for that to happen, but it's not happening at this point.

But they're going to keep going on with that, just like they always thought that this was going to be the year that Albert Pujols would be Albert Pujols again. It's frustrating. I can't imagine how frustrated Mike Trout is because he's basically spending his entire prime of a future Hall of Fame career for a team that just doesn't seem all that interested in being, any ambition beyond monetizing Pujols milestones and just riding trout for a while it's it's got to be frustrating yeah it does it's frustrating for us so I can only imagine how it feels for him let's stay in the American League for a second and look at the central I'm intrigued here you said that this is basically similar to last year where there are the White Sox and then there's everyone else. Also, it's just so nice to be able to put Guardians in a table instead of just Cleveland. But I'm curious here about, not Zips this year for the Central, but a couple of the teams that you've identified as being potentially intriguing going down the road. Talk to us about the Tigers and the Royals. Well, one of the problems with the Tigers is their pitching staff has started to come together,

especially the rotation. So you see some of the players like Casey Mize and Matt Manning and so on, and you're intrigued with their future. They're not all going to work out, but some of them will. And that's a huge thing, especially in a, let's be honest, it's going to be a weak division no matter what. But now you have Spencer Torkelson about to hit the majors. You have Riley Green and Zips gives both of them very aggressive projections. Zips doesn't project a lot of rookies to be worth three wins in a season, but Zips has both Torkelson and Green around that threshold if they played a full season.

And going into, it was improved a lot in 2021, but before that, the Tigers during their rebuild have had such a struggle developing offense. Nothing has really worked out. They always had kind of an outfielder every year who they thought was going to be the next big thing, like Kristen Stewart or Daz Cameron, and that never really worked out. They always had kind of an outfielder every year who they thought was going to be the next big thing, like Kristen Stewart or Daz Cameron. And that never really worked out and never really was going to work out. But Torkelson and Green, they have a really good shot of working out. So that gives the Tigers some interesting upside. If they get them on the roster, they do

have those early breakouts. And the Royals, they do have some interesting offensive talent in the upper minors as well. I'm talking about Nick Prado, MJ Melendez, Vinny Pascantino, and Bobby Witt Jr., who I still think they should keep him at short until he proves he can't, but that's kind of a rant for another day. But you have pieces of young talent, and then all of a sudden, you don't need to do as much to be a competitive team because Cleveland is not a dangerous team. And while the White Sox are dangerous right now, they're not going to be forever. They don't have an ownership that's going to use money to stretch that window, to keep that window open longer than it would be otherwise. So I think there is some really fascinating possibilities for both teams in the next two, three, four years.

Yeah, you have the Twins projected to be barely better than they were last year, and they were a huge disappointment last year. They finished in last 73-89. You have them, well, finishing fourth, I suppose. So that's an improvement by only one game over Kansas City with a 75 win total. And I guess the problem is that they just don't really have a rotation to speak of, right? It's hard to be a winning team or even a break-even team if you just don't have pitchers. And they don't. So they've sort of gone in a couple different directions. I mean, they made the Brios trade, which I think was defensible, and they certainly got a lot of talent back. And then they also committed to Byron Buxton. So,

you know, I was reading the Joshian newsletter recently where he was like, guys, pick a lane to the Twins front office. But right now it seems like the lane is just hoping to hit a lot, I guess, because they're not going to be able to pitch very well. It doesn't seem like. And there aren't really a lot of difference making arms still left on the market. Yeah. The pick a lane thing has been kind of my objection to the twins. They're like someone who doesn't know if they want to make gumbo or a cake. So they go down the aisle at the grocery store and they buy shrimp and chocolate and flour and okra and then they get home and they can't make a cake or gumbo because some of it makes sense like if they're not going to rebuild then why not keep a rios

for one more season especially in a weak division because right now if you go to roster resource and you look at the twins depth charts their, their ace is Dylan Bundy. It's not, I mean, I like Dylan Bundy, but he's a guy you have as your fourth starter because you think he might eat some innings. That's the scenario in which you have Dylan Bundy on your contending team. Zips actually projects the offense to be above average. This is a lousy team largely because of their pitching. Zips does like Joe Ryan, but not really anyone else on the roster. Well, Taylor Rodgers, if we're talking relievers.

Right. But they would have to have a lot go right, and they don't seem to be, at least before the lockout, all that interested in going after a Gaussman or a Ray. A few years ago, I mean, they were in the talks for Hugh Darvish, but they didn't land Darvish. They didn't seem to spend that money otherwise. Joe Maurer is gone. They don't have that money on the payroll anymore.

So it's hard to say that there's a natural excuse for this, but I don't know what the twins are doing. It just feels like they're seeing every transaction as kind of sui generis, like it's this one only and without any fitting into a longer term strategy. Maybe we can shift to the NL Central now. I was a bit surprised. You were surprised that the Cubs didn't fare better in this. I was a bit surprised that they fared as well as they did, which is perhaps ungenerous on my part. But basically, Zips has the Cardinals up top, the Cubs near the bottom, the Pirates remain the Pirates. How much movement within these standings do you think there is the potential for before opening day? Because I don't want to say that the Cardinals will always just project to the top of this division. At some point, 88 to 92 wins is probably not going to be enough,

but it remains enough right now. So how much movement do you anticipate here? I expect less movement in this division than possibly any other division. We saw that last year where until the Nolan-Arenado trade, the NL Central as a whole really did just about nothing. It was uncanny. It was like this division was wide open, but nobody really wanted to seize it. And that was, of course, disappointing. I mean, I'm an Orioles fan, but I want every team to reach their destiny somehow, grab their opportunities when they have them, and no one really did up until the Arenado trade. For a long time, I think I had Jace Peterson

as one of the best projected free agent signings of the offseason. I think Daniel Robertson was actually the top until like January, which is absolutely absurd. Each one of those NL Central teams does have a flaw. The Cardinals' bullpen's not great. The Brewers, they don't have the offense they had a few years ago. The Reds seem to be wanting to trade all their good things in their pitching staff, the whole Wade Miley thing, which is a whole issue.

And the Cubs, they could go after and drop a lot of money and get back to $500 this year. I don't think they will. I think you'll see larger amounts of spending in future seasons. But I thought they'd be a little bit closer. Maybe I'm a little more optimistic about some of the pitching. But yeah, they have a lot of work to do if they want to at least pretend to be contenders in 2022. How long has it been that the Cardinals have been in that very limited, just good enough range? I know that you and Ben Clements have joked about how long it has been that they've been projected like, you know, 88 to 92 wins, as Meg said.

And they're right there with 89 this year, which puts them a game ahead of the Brewers' projection. They've pretty much been in that for about a decade. I think it was like 2007 when I had them out of that range. Wow. They're a very, very consistent team. In their offense, if you look at it, their war as an overall unit, the last time they were in the bottom 10 in the league was 1988. Every other team has been in the bottom 10 since 2000. Every team has been in the bottom 10, even the Dodgers.

But the Cardinals, 1988. Okay. So I think that we have covered most of the... Oh, we need to talk about the NL East. What a dummy I am. Good grief. Somewhere an Atlanta fan is yelling, but Meg, we just won the World Series.

How dare you forget us? All right. So let's shift our attention to the East really quick. I'm actually going to start at the bottom of this division because we cannot pass up an opportunity to talk about juan soto how much of the nationals like shockingly close to competent projection is juan soto responsible for all on his own it's a lot of juan so zips projects yeah since zips is you know a little foggy on how much how healthy fernando

tatis jr will be given his history. Zips projected Soto with the most war in baseball. He's not, you know, the best all around player likely if you talk 10 years, but he's the best hitter since Albert Pujols, I think. Just his plate discipline at his age is just unbelievable. You don't see a lot of players who can barely drink legally able to give Joey Votto plate discipline lessons. And, you know, he punishes those pitches. It isn't like he's an ultra passive hitter. Zips has him right now at 75 wins. But, you know, seven or eight of those is Juan Soto. And I think he breaks Zips slightly because his 10th percentile projection was like 11 war, which is just feels almost counterintuitive. It was just an unreal number. It was like a 524 on base

percentage. It was like a Barry Bonds season around the turn of the century. And I'm like, okay, Zips doesn't know what to do with Soto. He's just a fascinating hitter. And then sort of looking toward the top of that division and the reigning World Series champions, you note here that Atlanta's projection assumes that Freddie Freeman will depart in free agency and will not return to Atlanta. I think that the sort of industry consensus is likely that he will find his way back there. They seem like a pretty good fit, all things considered. So what would re-signing Freeman do to bump up sort of the margin of error that Atlanta has here? It is a big improvement because right now, based on what happens with Austin Riley, whether he's third or first, Zips sees the position that he's not at being a sub-one win position.

So adding the three to four win guy in Freeman, those are just pure extra wins there. Zips currently has the Braves with a two win edge. And this is after the Mets have done. They were pretty active prior to the lockout. But you add Freeman in and you almost like you're talking a 93 94 win projection, which should put them at a decent with a decent cushion at the top of the division. Obviously, there's a lot of error in these in these projections. Zips only projects right now the Braves to have a 49% chance to win the division and still miss the playoffs a third of the time. As I said, predicting the future is really, really tricky, unfortunately.

But, you know, I expect Freeman to be back too, but as I say, if he were guaranteed to be back, it would mean that he has a contract right now. And the fact that he doesn't have a contract should tell you that there's a chance that he won't have a contract because that's how life works sometimes. Yeah, I felt for Mets fans even more than I normally do when I looked at these projections because I think the Mets were kind of the consensus winners of the offseason. And by offseason, I mean that two-week compressed period. But they did a lot during that time, and they definitely got better. And yet here they are still looking up at the thus far Freeman-less Braves. And I remember last year going into 2021, I think the Mets were

projected to win this division, right? And it looked like they would for much of the season. And now, even though Atlanta hasn't made the biggest move that it may yet well make, the Mets are still in second place looking up. So that's sort of sad, I guess, although maybe they could make up that ground somehow before opening day. Zips had the Mets and Braves tied at 91 wins going into last season. One of the things, though, about the signing is even if none of the individual players were a superstar, it wasn't like adding Max Scherzer. Well, obviously they did, but there was only one Max Scherzer addition. The out adding what they did, Marte and Kena and so on, Escobar.

Those were good additions that kind of reduced the downside of the team. It makes them less likely to Mets up the season, you know, where everything is a disaster and the entire roster hates each other in July. And the New York Post has like 12 baby headlines about it. So there's there's less of a chance that they met out. Their pitching could still use some depth. I love Scherzer, but I don't know if that could be the only thing that they do in the rotation this offseason if they want to scare the Braves. But I'm very curious to see how they act once we have our second offseason. Right. And you have for now the Phillies projected to repeat their record from 2021, 82 and 80. And that's basically where they've been for a few years now, hovering right above or below or at 500.

Then you have the Marlins just a couple of games back of the Phillies. And as you say in your piece, I guess you would rather be the Marlins at least long-term than the Phillies, because it seems like the Phillies, even though they have made great free agent signings that have helped prop them up, they just have not developed the complementary cast, and so they have not been able to break through. Whereas the Marlins, you know, I know they've made the playoffs during the pandemic shortened season, but they seem to be a team on the rise and they seem to be making some moves or trying to make some moves that were geared toward translating their pitching depth and advantage into a better balanced roster. And they're still not there.

But that is one of the things I am most curious to see this year and in future years is how do they take this wealth of starting pitching and turn it into an actual major league lineup hopefully yeah zips has sandy alcantara in the top 10 for pitching war zips is a huge fan of the rotation it's just the offense and the phillies are a little like me at a party in high school i would go to the party but i didn't i wasn't particularly active at the party i just kind of hung around there and figured would go to the party, but I wasn't particularly active at the party. I just kind of hung around there and figured that going to the party was enough. And that's how the Phillies have acted. They show up for the season, they spend some of the requisite money, and then they just say, okay, we've done enough. We don't need to do more than this. And then they seem surprised

when they win 81 games. And then they do things like say, oh, it's because we don't have a manager who knows how to win. And the manager they brought in to know how to win also made them a 500 team. So it's hard to be just that excited about the Phillies. Okay. Now that we have not neglected the NL East and can avoid angry emails, I want to move on to some of the positions. This is maybe a slightly different version of the question I asked you earlier, but you looked at the positions that are sort of the weakest on the team level prior to recording. And I'm curious which ones you view as sort of the easiest to upgrade once the offseason

resumes. Well, I think Angel's shortstop has to be one of them simply because Carlos Correa is out there. He is a shortstop and the Angels theoretically could sign him. It would be a massive improvement and it's improvement for a team that projects around 500. really valuable in pumping up their their their likelihood of making the playoffs so i'd love to see the angels do that a lot of teams have outfield needs but the problem you run into is there's not a lot of great outfielders available at this point this was never going to be the richest offseason for outfielders you know a lot of teams are eyeing suzuki uh coming over from japan but there's only one of him and only one team is going to sign him. And there are a lot of teams that could be interested. You know, Rays, Giants, Mariners, Mets. Everyone is going to be in on them.

So they can't necessarily all. The Red Sox can't sign a man. The Angels can't sign a man. The Phillies can't sign him. Obviously, I still have Braves first base is one of the big problems. And that's the easiest to solve. You just sign Freddie Freeman. Is that cheating? Is that cheating is that cheating no no definitely not no that should be at the top of the to-do list yeah any others you have i also have guardians

catcher zips isn't really impressed with their with their tandem there but i don't really expect the cleveland to really do anything because that isn't what Cleveland does. They just kind of have, what's your offseason plan? Their offseason plan is to have Jose Ramirez on the team. Maybe. Maybe. I'm sure the Guardians fans would be thrilled to hear that that is part of their plan. They have committed to that. They can have the motto, you know, new team name, same old strategy.

Well, I guess this is sort of a related question. And, you know, we got into this a little bit when it comes to Kansas City and some of the prospects that are looming for Detroit. And I imagine that when we do Prospect Week, you will bless us with your Zips Top 100. But, you know, obviously signings aren't the only way that teams can bolster their big league rosters are there any that strike you as having guys in the high minors who are ready to be impact players who could address big league needs right now this this isn't a contending team but i really think that the orioles do have some potential for improvement obviously Adley Rutschman is the obvious one. I can't imagine that they really keep him down very long. They have to fiddle with the service time clock first

because that's what teams do, but I expect him up pretty quickly. And Grayson Rodriguez also has a pretty solid rookie projection. And when you're the Orioles, any improvement is a good improvement. You saw what I wrote for the Orioles in my previews piece. Their goal is to play 100, is to complete 162 games and win some of them. That's all. Right. Yeah, you actually, I mean, we talked about the top of the AL East and how closely at least a few of those teams are clustered. Yankees on top, Blue Jays a game back, Rays two games back, Red Sox seven games back, Orioles 26 games back to win 64, that would be the most that they've won in five years, I think. So Orioles fans would probably be pleased, sadly, with 64 wins. It's a tough division and the Orioles are kind of hamstrung by the fact that they have the toughest schedule in baseball because bad teams tend to get treated a little unfairly in the schedule because bad teams can't play themselves. There's no way to physically have the Orioles play the Orioles. So the Yankees get to play the Orioles, but the Orioles don't. And that's fundamentally unfair. Right. And I noticed that the Orioles do have a playoff percentage that rounds to 0.1.

Yeah, they got one this year. Yeah, everyone has a chance, at least right now. That could change before opening day, but every fan should have a reason to root for the lockout to end and the season actually to start, because whether it's the Rockies, the Pirates, the Orioles, everyone rounds up at least to 0.1% chance to make the playoffs, unlike last year. So you're saying there's a chance for everyone, at least to 0.1% chance to make the playoffs, unlike last year.

So you're saying there's a chance for everyone, at least today. Yeah, I think everyone got at least a 0.1%, unless I'm forgetting someone. That's an improvement on last year, because the Orioles did round to zero. And I know there was some great consternation in the local Baltimore press that Fangraphs had the Orioles at 0.1%. Can you really say there are more than 1 in 1,000? I mean, seriously. Yeah, well, we can't say in retrospect whether you were right or not, whether they did have a 0.1% chance or a 0% chance,

but they did not make the playoffs, so you were right about that. Yeah, that's the frustrating thing about projections is you still in the end are guessing how accurate your projections are because you never really know what the underlying probability truly was but as long as we're talking about teams with players who could really break out this year if the rangers were to make a run i don't think they are i think they have too many holes right now but if they were one of the reasons will be that Josh Young was brought up very quickly and had a rookie of the year type season. I think if that happens, all of a sudden, they're interesting. Maybe. Yeah. I'll just list for posterity. You've talked about some of these

already, but the weakest team positions, according to Zips, I think these were positions Where teams are projected to be Worth less than one win And this is also teams That had some shot had What a 5% chance or more To make the playoffs so we've Talked about Red Sox left field Blue Jays third base Guardians catcher Angels right field and shortstop

A's right field Atlanta first base Marlins Center field Phillies left and Center field they have outfield problems Every year it seems like A's right field Atlanta first base Marlins center field Phillies left and center field They have outfield problems every year it seems like At least in the non-Brice Harper position Padres left field And then Cubs starting pitchers

A's relievers Cubs relievers Cardinals relievers Giants relievers And Royals and Tigers and Twins have some of these too Royals center field Right field first base starting pitcher Tigers DH and relievers and royals and tigers and twins have some of these two royals centerfield right field first base starting pitcher tigers dh and relievers and twins left fielders and starting pitchers so probably touched on most of those but technically speaking the angels project poorly at two outfield

positions but if you look at our depth charts we we have Trout dividing time between two of the outfield positions. And he's so good that his halftime boosts up the Brandon Marsh percentage of center field so that that's not a problem. Yeah. Well, speaking of Trout, you do have him projected for seven war, or at least that's the Zips projection filtered through the current FanCraft's depth chart projections. That's the Zips projection filtered through the current Fangraft's depth chart projections. But it seems like there is a little changing of the guard here because Mike Trout does not have the highest war projection this year. I guess that is partly because of playing time. The Fangraft's depth chart have him at 147 games right now, which I would take given his recent injury issues. But above him this year, you have Juan Soto at 156 games and 7.6 war. And then Fernando Tatis Jr. at 151 games and 8.4 war. Padres fans would probably

be pretty pleased with 151 games from Tatis as well. But this has got to be the first year in like a decade that Trout does not have the highest war projection, I would imagine. Yeah. A few years ago, I wrote a piece. I think it was something called To the Effect of the Imminent Demise or the Inevitable Decline of Mike Trout, in which I projected the projections, which is an extremely meta thing to do. Like, I'm going to write about my own projections. But that's what happens time always wins and at this point it's unlikely that trout has an extra gear left it feels weird to say but i mean he's not the young phenom anymore before by the time this season ends he's gonna be a 31

year old he's a player who's you know approaching the back end of his career as weird as that sounds but it's it's been a decade already even if it doesn't seem like it's been that long and tatis and soda we still don't know what their ceilings are and so that kind of gives them better projections overall simply because there's that unknown upside that trout probably doesn't have anymore yeah now the straight up zips projection for Trout has him at 103 games and in light of his recent injury history going back five years, I don't think

that's that far off unfortunately. He's not at Eric Davis status where you could barely count on Davis until he became a DH to play more than 50 games because he just couldn't stay healthy. But there are a lot of concerns about that.

Yeah. And I guess I should also say that Otani, I believe, is also projected just slightly ahead of Trout if you combine his pitching and batting. He's at like 7.2 or something like that. Well, you have to combine the pitching. Yes, of course you do. That's like defensive value. Yes. It's just a different leaderboard that I had to you have to combine the pitches. Yes, of course you do. That's like defensive value. Yes, it's just a different leaderboard that I had to click on to add that up. But yes, you expect him to retain most of his performance from last season.

I mean, there's a part of me that is greedy and looks at how good he was as a pitcher later in the season once he got over maybe some of the rustiness and the aftermath of the Tommy John and all of the other injuries. And then fantasy combines his early season offense with his late season pitching and comes up with an even more unstoppable Otani. So maybe that's his something percentile projection that happens, but even the baseline, pretty good. I think my favorite fact about Otani is if you think of pitching as defense, because it is, essentially he was a DH with the most valuable defensive season in baseball history. I don't think there's any complimentary version of Otani you could present to Ben where he'd say,

no, that's too much. It's too much. You need to relax with that. Calm down. Speaking of percentile projections, and we kind of touched on this with a couple of the teams, but I wonder which teams had the biggest spread between their, say, 10th and 90th percentile projections? Which are the teams where the sort of extremes were as far apart as possible? The Yankees had grown considerably. The Yankees don't have... I briefly mentioned that in the projection piece, but the Yankees now have a much larger variance

than in previous seasons. The Brewers do. The Angels do simply because in the scenarios in which they lost Trout and Otani or both, it did not go well. The Giants had pretty large error bars. The A's did. The Royals did.

And the Diamondbacks did. Those teams had the most variance. And how do you account for depth? Because I know that's something that has been kind of a knock on projection systems, or maybe even you have acknowledged that there are ways in which it's tough for a projection system to account for, say, the Rays, for instance, having like twice as many good players as you can actually fit on a roster at any one time. It's always hard to construct a simulation to reflect reality because there's simply a lot of possibilities. As I mentioned briefly before, Zips has a probabilistic model. So sometimes Chris Sale pitches a full season, sometimes he doesn't.

And then when he doesn't, Zips tries to fill in other pitchers below him in priority. So some seasons, teams will be very healthy in the simulation, and some you'll see a lot of just minor leaguers and even occasionally a double-A player to get playing time. And that's kind of the goal is to kind of capture this as best we can, which you can't do perfectly. But in a simulation that you can actually run and get the results of, it seems pretty decent-ish.

There's always going to be some unknowns that we can't adjust for. We don't know who will be traded at the deadline. People are always like, well, can you simulate that? I'm like, I don't really know how to do that without making everything just a nightmare without adding any kind of accuracy. What it comes down to in the end is there's only so many things you can model. No matter how clever I am about things or think I am about things. There's always going to be things that I cannot account for and I can't realistically ever hope to account for. But that's the fun of baseball.

If I could predict everything with 100% accuracy, I mean, I would be wealthier, but it wouldn't be as much fun. Yeah. And before we close, I know that you always do your series of breakout and collapse picks going into each season, which is always a lot of fun. And sometimes you hit on those, and that is probably pretty good for bragging rights. But just preliminary now, is there anything that you are particularly interested in seeing when baseball business resumes? I mean, I'm sure you're interested in seeing when baseball business will resume.

resumes. I mean, I'm sure you're interested in seeing when baseball business will resume, but if and when it does, any particular players you are really excited to see, or maybe you differ from zips and want to figure out which one of you is right. It must be weird when the system that you created disagrees with you. Yeah, it has a lot of nerve to do that. I did well on the breakouts last year. Yeah, I think you did. Better than I should have. I was lucky there. Yes, I will link to those on the show page so that you can get credit for your prescience.

But whether it's players or teams or division races, anything you're particularly looking forward to seeing this season? I'm not sure if you can count it as a breakout i think that logan webb established himself as a regular cy young contender going into this season in in in 2022 i think that he he's he's part of the conversation yearly after this season that's my biggest one i think i i think that even with the giants playing so well i think he was a little bit underrated from what he did. Another breakout guy I still think is probably one of the best second basemen in baseball, and people aren't on him, is Brandon Lau Lo. I can never remember which one's Lau and which one's Lo. Yes, the base one.

See, there's Nate, Brandon, and Josh. Yes. Two of them are Lo, one of them's Lau, and I can never remember which one it is. Yes, Brandon Lau,. Yes. Two of them are low. One of them is loud. I can never remember which one it is. Yes. Brandon Lau, I believe. It's extremely rude to have a last name that's common, but you pronounce it differently than everyone else. At least they're not on the same team anymore. Yeah, that's a plus.

It's like the old Greg Gagne versus Eric Gagne thing. Right. All right. Well, we will hope that your cautious optimism is justified and uh that the lockout will be resolved in some satisfactory fashion in time for the projections to play out over a full season but you have already simmed the season you've simborskied the season and we will link to these posts on the show page for anyone who wants to dig into the details. But thanks very much, Dan, for helping us pretend that this is a normal time

and that opening day is right around the corner. Maybe dreams will come true. Maybe. All right. Well, there you have it. The season preview podcast we promised you. Okay. No, that wasn't our season preview series, but it's a start. However, while we were all having that conversation, the news broke that MLB had informed the MLBPA that the league will in fact not make a counteroffer to the union, despite saying a couple days previous that it would. Also, MLB has requested a federal mediator to assist in the bargaining talks. So when we all discovered that news after we finished recording, Dan adjusted his cautious optimism slightly downward, unfortunately. So be aware of that. We all want bargaining updates, but sometimes the updates

are not great. Maybe more on that next time. One of the interesting questions for me, assuming that the lockout is resolved at some point, is how quickly we will see teams make moves. You're really not supposed to have talked to any free agents during the lockout, But it would be highly suspicious if any free agent deals got done the second the lockout ended, unless something was right at the finish line and they just didn't have time to sign their names at the end of the contract before they had to put their pencils down. However, trades could happen. Teams can have been talking to each other about trades, so it's possible, I suppose, that we will see a spree of trades happen after those moves can

become official, and then that might help guide which signings have to happen. And all of this will be done, of course, with the time pressure of a perhaps compressed lead-up to opening day and the need to get to spring training as quickly as possible if there is a normal spring training. So if the two weeks leading up to the lockout were wild, the few weeks following the lockout could be equally frantic. And so we will see how quickly teams decide to strike, or at least I hope we will see that. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. And the following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks while helping us stay ad free sh brandon lee brian hamilton daniel watkins and greg thanks to all of you of course if you sign up for patreon

you can get access to our monthly bonus episodes for patreon supporters one of which we posted earlier this week and you can also hang out and commiserate about opening day being in doubt in the Patreon only Discord group. You can join our Facebook group for free, aside from signing your soul away to Facebook, at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and many other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Meg. We will likely answer some next time, so send them to podcast at fangraphs.com or send them to us on Patreon if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild

subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. And we will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. She said she's burning When optimism's flamed Oh, wait, wait She said she's burning I bought a gift to change Oh, wait, wait She said she's burning

When optimism's flamed Oh, wait, wait