Were Going to Ride Again Brantley Gilbert

Hope abounds, even in this crazy quick ramp-up to the season after a long labor battle, and so it's time for bold predictions. These predictions are meant to be rooted in something more than a gut feeling — there will almost always be some sort of number attached to each one — but they are supposed to reach beyond the middle-of-the-road world of projections. Those systems are meant to regress every player and every team to the mean on some level. They are intended to push everything towards the middle because they're aiming for the meat of what usually what happens.

But the games aren't played in a spreadsheet, and fun things happen, so it's worth trying to stretch beyond those pure projections. Like last year, when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. went off, and the Cardinals had a top-ten corner outfield, and the Rays had a better offense than the Yankees — those things were in our bold predictions last season. Don't look at the rest, of course. Some were disastrously wrong.

That's the point though. Let's get three of these right, that's about the going average. Just bold enough to be useful and interesting, hopefully.

Joey Votto will hit 40 homers for the first time in his career, at age 38.

15 seasons. 8,128 plate appearances. Joey Votto has never hit 40 homers in a season. That'll change this year, despite his being projected to hit ten to fifteen fewer homers than that.

"Ok," said Votto when confronted with this entry on this yearly list, "but that's not that bold, man."

Everyone's a critic. But, as Votto has aged and fallen from his peak, he's adjusted his approach. A focus on bat speed and hitting the ball harder has replaced what used to be striving for perfection.

"My goals are to hit the ball far and hard now," he said late last season. "I said this in my prime: I tried to be the perfect hitter. I've put that style on pause. I had to go back to what I did since I was 18 which is driving the ball, having a sloppy strike zone but driving the ball."

After a visit to a golf instructor, the first baseman's ability to swing faster has improved dramatically over the last two seasons. Here are estimated bat speeds for Votto over the last five seasons, courtesy Dan Aucoin, an analyst with Driveline Baseball. These are created by using observed relationships between outcomes and measured bat speeds in their lab and then fitting those onto Statcast stats.

Joey Votto's improving bat speed

Season	Estimated Bat Speed
2017	69.5 mph
2018	69.5 mph
2019	70.3 mph
2020	71.7 mph
2021	72.5 mph

That's going from around the 25th to 35th percentile in the league to 74th percentile last season. That's the kind of change that working with weighted bats can afford a player, but Votto's not divulging all his secrets about how he got back that missing swing speed. He's just smiling about all the dingers.

"Hitting homers and driving in runs is easy," Votto joked, and now he'll show us just how easy 40 homers is.

No pitcher throws 200 innings for the first time in a full major league season.

A grand total of 5,407 pitchers have thrown 200 inning seasons since we started tracking these sorts of things. All the way back in 1892, Bill Hutchison threw 602 innings! But things have changed. The last time someone threw 300 innings was Steve Carlton in 1980. And in the last 40 seasons since, even the 200-inning starting pitcher has become rare.

Of course there have been a few times where there have been very few pitchers with 200 innings — the strike seasons and the shortened 2020 — but this season is supposed to be a full 162, like last season. And last season, only four starting pitchers crossed the 200 inning threshold: Zack Wheeler, Walker Buehler, Adam Wainwright, and Sandy Alcantara.

With Wheeler currently coming back from shoulder tightness, you can see how we might easily lose candidates for this list from all the injuries that come from stopping and starting and having uncertain start times for the season. We saw a spike in injuries in 2020 when we started, some evidence of some added injuries after the sticky stuff enforcement this past season, and then we added a 90-day lockout in which pitchers couldn't speak with their coaches for good measure. Oh and a shortened spring training! We're probably going to see more injuries this season than you would in a typical season.

And that's all on top of how teams build their pitching staffs these days. They're spreading around the innings and using the bullpen more than ever as they try to optimize for the best results. And teams have just been given two extra spots for the first month in order to compensate for the short spring. Those two spots will almost certainly go to relievers, who will steal a handful of innings from even the most prepared starting pitchers.

Just look at the end of that graph. The days of the horse may be over already.

The Rookie of the Year will be a Guardian.

If these haven't been bold enough so far, this one has to qualify. This isn't necessarily meant to throw any shade on Bobby Witt, Jr., or Julio Rodriguez, Spencer Torkelson, or Adley Rutschman — really. It's just hard to project a player who has never played in the big leagues, and then there's the question of opportunity. Plate appearances can disappear because the big league team is too good, or the veterans have made for a roster crunch, or the team just isn't good enough for the front office to want to start that player's clock. As good or as bad as any of this reasoning is in the grander context of baseball, they are truths that lead to surprise Rookie of the Year winners like Devin Williams, Michael Fulmer, Kyle Lewis (though we boldly predicted that one!), Jeremy Hellickson and the like.

The scouts have formed a consensus around the top three, and none of them are Guardians. You have to go all the way down to 22nd on the list for the betting odds to find the first Guardian, Steven Kwan. There are reasons to really like Kwan: Only four players in all of the affiliated minor leagues (minimum 300 plate appearances last year) struck out less often than Kwan, and none of those had a slugging percentage as nice as Kwan's .527 number. He also had a double-digit walk rate … he could easily come up and put up a good batting average with a handful of homers and steals, and his team probably needs that sort of offense at his position, so the opportunity is rife. Opportunity plus talent is the math you have to do in these sorts of things.

But there's another sort of math at play with this vaguer prediction. Over at FanGraphs, Dan Szymborski did a pure numbers-based projection of prospects in the minor leagues to produce a top 100. And guess who had the most players in the top 100 on that list?

Most ZiPs-projected top 100 prospects

It might not even be Kwan; this list has four players from the Guardians ahead of him. That also means picking the Guardians was a bit of hedging the bets on this one — we're just picking the team with the most ping pong balls in the tumbler. Hey, when you're betting against the consensus top four prospects in baseball, you have to have some evidence on your side.

The Rays will have the best pitching staff in baseball.

What might happen to pitchers early this season, after a three-week spring training and a three-month lockout that didn't allow the pitchers to talk to their organizations? Injuries, right? We even have precedent for this: In 2020, there was some stopping and starting and a short spring, and voila, a huge spike in injuries early that season arrived as we all expected.

If those injuries are again coming, it follows that what matters a great deal to teams this year will be pitching depth. the teams that have the ability to withstand the coming storm will come out better on the other side. Here's a look at which teams have the most projected above-average pitchers, using Fielding Independent Pitching projected by THE BAT on FanGraphs as our barometer.

Who has the best pitching depth?

Given the news that the first month of the season will include two extra roster spots (which will most definitely go to relievers) and given the Rays' propensity to muck around with traditional pitching roles (openers! bulk guys! five closers!), it almost doesn't matter how many of these pitchers are starters or relievers. They've got 11 to start the season, and then they'll welcome some intriguing arms back from injury at different points this season — arms like Tyler Glasnow, Yonny Chirinos, Jalen Beeks, Colin Poche and others. In the minors, they've got a high spin curveball from Calvin Faucher, and a command-and-control righty with excellent ride on his fastball in Tommy Romero.

Depth only matters if it's quality, though. Once Shane Baz comes back from what, by all accounts, was minor surgery, they'll have top-end talent in the rotation as well as the pen. Shane McClanahan, Luis Patiño, Drew Rasmussen and Corey Kluber all ended up in my top 75, which makes sense, because those rankings take into account a wide variety of statistics but also depend heavily on Stuff+ and Location+. And, well, the Rays do pretty well there overall. Here's how this year's Rays stack up using lasts year's + numbers, weighted by their projected innings pitched.

The Right Stuff+ (and Location+)

"Projection systems have the hardest time with minor league talent and depth," said an executive in Arizona about the Rays, "They have sneaky good quality of both things, and plenty of quantity."

The Washington Nationals will have the worst pitching staff in baseball.

It's painful, but now we have to look at the other side of the list, the teams lacking stuff and command. The yin to the yang above. The sad part of the list. The bottom teams by Stuff+.

As you can see, the teams at the bottom of this list are not created equally. There are some teams that have seemed to make a few bets on command, like the Cubs, Athletics, and Diamondbacks. The thinking there could be that the marketplace doesn't value command as much, and so they're buying undervalued assets when they get pitchers like Cole Irvin, Merrill Kelly, and Alec Mills. Those pitchers certainly came with undersized price tags, and those teams have decent Location+ values, at least.

Then there are some rebuilding squads that have revamped their rosters, their player development personnel, or both. The Pirates have undergone seismic changes under the hood while Ben Cherington has been in charge, and those might only just be beginning to bear fruit. Smaller innings projections for better players on rebuilding squads matter, too — the Pirates have Miguel Yajure and Roansy Contreras coming, and the more innings they get, the more the teams' Stuff+ numbers will change for the better. To various degrees, this last could be true for teams like the Royals and Rangers too.

But then there's the Nationals, with the worst combination of Stuff and Location in the big leagues. To be fair, someone like Stephen Strasburg getting healthy could make a big difference. But one man alone cannot rescue this staff. Only three pitchers on the entire roster projected for more than 40 innings next season had above-average Stuff+ last season: Tanner Rainey, Austin Voth, and Sean Doolittle. And Stuff+ is very sticky year to year.

The continuing issue of player development problems in Washington has to be some part of the cause of this. One part is the aging starting rotation, yes, but then there's been a real problem developing young pitchers to replace any of those aging starters. A couple relievers is all they have to show for recent efforts, and even those two have trained at non-team facilities and realized the benefits of that outside assistance. Looking under the hood doesn't make it much better — the Nationals are bottom third in the league when it comes to coaching velocity. That's only one part of making good pitchers, but it gives us a window into some of the dysfunction in this organization.

Byron Buxton finishes in the top three for the American League MVP.

When healthy, Buxton is a force. (Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)

The easy part first: Byron Buxton is a really good baseball player. One of the very best center fielders in the game defensively, his bat has grown to meet his glove in recent years. Last year he was so impossibly white-hot in his 254 plate appearances that he led the league in slugging (minimum 250 plate appearances) while hitting .306 and stealing nine bases to boot. It's tempting to call that work just a lucky small sample thing, but he absolutely deserved the results that he got on the field. Before he was hired by the Astros, analyst Max Bay created something called 'expected extra-base hit percentage' — a stat that looked at the quality of the balls put in play by every player, plus their contact rates, that ended up with more predictive power than even Barrel rate offers. Here is the top ten last year in xXBH%:

Expected extra base hit leaders

So, yeah, pretty good. But of course the debate surrounding Buxton has much less to do with the quality of his play than the quantity of his play. Only once has he even cleared 350 plate appearances in a single season in his career, and the list of injuries is long and complicated. Some of the injuries are of the soft-tissue type that you'd consider worrisome: there are some groin strains, hamstring strains, hip strains, and back spasms that have cost him time. But then there are also collision-type injuries that seem more unlucky: he's lost time to fractured toes, thumbs, and concussions that have little to do with maintenance and more to do with the random things that happen in baseball.

Injury projection is a tough game, and if there's one takeaway, it's just that. We think we know who is injury prone, but projecting their lost time in any one season is guesswork. One of the best attempts — by Rob Arthur over at Baseball Prospectus — came up with a model that's wrong, on average, by about 30 days. Those are huge error bars.

If we plug Buxton's missed time over the last three seasons into Arthur's equation, we get 25 missed days in the coming season. If he does that, he'll be in the conversation for the MVP. Heck, even if he misses just 55 games (adding that error back in), he might be able to hang. After all, last year he was 19th in the American League in WAR in only 61 games.

And then there's always the chance the error goes the other way and he plays nearly 162 and we all get to see his excellence in bulk.

Nate Lowe hits 30 homers.

The best hitters make good swing decisions, make contact a lot, and hit the ball hard. When you say it like that, seems simple. The best ways to measure these three things are probably O-swing percentage (how often a hitter swings at a ball), swinging-strike rate (how often they miss), and barrel rate (how often they hit the ball hard in the right angles for power). Check out this murderer's row of players who do all of these things well.

"That's a good sign, right?" Lowe said of his inclusion on this list, and it just has to be. It represents a great collection of abilities at the plate, and most of the names around him are really great hitters.

Of course, they're not all of exactly equal quality, and the paradox of predicting a breakout is that the player is already doing good stuff, but needs to have some sort of negative on his ledger that he can overcome to be even better. And for Lowe, that negative is his work against fastballs.

Nate Lowe versus the world

	Count	Batting Average	Isolated Slugging
Fastballs	2,412	0.256	0.123
Breaking Balls	828	0.239	0.203
Changeups	436	0.311	0.270

That's not normal. Most of the league slugs against fastballs and whiffs against secondaries. So how is Lowe going to conquer this demon and break out?

"That comes from having a good game plan, and with the group we have now, we have a bunch of guys that are willing to commit to getting better," said Lowe of the improving lineup around him. "Being able to feed off great players in the lineup is going to help me get better."

He also has some help on the coaching staff, as Donnie Ecker is the new bench coach and offensive coordinator, fresh off of coaching the Giants to some eye-popping numbers last year. With Ecker, Lowe is working on one simple thing, and using a newly popular tool to do so.

"We're cleaning some things up," Lowe said of working with Ecker. "He's working with me to consistently to push me towards the middle of the field and working down to get the ball up is going to be really good."

That tool? Foam balls that accentuate movement in pitching machines.

"The foam balls defy gravity and seem to defy physics and move a little different," Lowe said. "It overemphasizes the little wrinkles that make a big difference."

"It's like facing the nastiest, bendiest stuff you can imagine," said Mitch Haniger of the foam balls in Seattle camp.

Both liked the fact that these balls move a ton, yet reward good contact with the right feel, and also don't blow up a hitter's hands if they get the ball off the handle.

Maybe some yellow foam will be one of the reasons Lowe hits 30 bombs this year.

The Giants will once again score 800 runs and nobody will understand how.

"There's no way they can do it again, right?" said one executive about the Giants in Arizona this week. And yet, they tailed off at the end, like it just might happen.

The explanations for last year's run production usually start with luck, and maybe there's a little something to that. The Giants were sixth in outperforming the expected slugging percentage on their balls in play last year. They probably got a little lucky.

Then there's the coaching staff, biggest in the business, and excellent at connecting with each individual player on the roster to get the most out of their abilities. Brandon Crawford had the best OPS of his career by a hundred points, but he wasn't alone — four Giants veterans had the best barrel rates of their career. That coaching staff did lose Donnie Ecker, but also added Pedro Guerrero and is still poised to be the biggest on-field staff in the game.

Under the hood, the Giants had the right process, as you can see from how they ranked in reach and barrel rates among the teams last season.

Teams that were top ten two ways

Only four teams ranked in the top ten in both metrics, and it was largely a good sign for the offenses that did so.

But at the same time, the way this roster is constructed should continue to lead to success. The signing of Joc Pederson was just another underlining of the fact that this team likes to mix and match and platoon its way to victory. Here are their top hitters and their career work against pitchers of each handedness:

The Giants' potential platoons

This is by wRC+, which is just like OPS+, so you can see that 100 = league average. The color coding tells the story though: they have good platoon bats and enough versatility to mix and match their way to success again. The coaching, the process, and the roster construction will all be the same as last year, so why shouldn't the results follow?

Rafael Devers cracks the 1.000 OPS level for the first time.

When a dangerous hitter starts to clean up his one remaining flaw, you have to sit up and take notice. Rafael Devers slugs against every type of pitch — a .481 lifetime slugging against sinkers hardly counts as a huge hole — and doesn't strike out that much in today's game. He even walks a little.

He is, however, among the league's worst in one category. Only 11 players have amassed 2000 plate appearances since 2017 and reached at more pitches outside the zone. He can be a little aggressive, and it doesn't serve him that well. He slugs .601 on pitches inside the zone, and that number drops to .317 on pitches outside the zone.

The good news is, he's starting to be more selective. Here are the biggest changers last year in o-swing percentage, comparing the first two months of the season to the last two months.

Devers is also among the five players that improved their reach rate most from year to year, joining Yuli Gurriel, Carlos Correa, Robbie Grossman and Kyle Schwarber on that list. Given how different his outcomes are in and outside of the zone, this could be huge for the Red Sox third baseman.

Only Vladimir Guerrero Jr and Bryce Harper had OPSes over 1.000 last year. Maybe it'll be a three-man crew in 2022.

Logan Gilbert has the best season of any Mariners starting pitcher.

A first-round pick that blew through the minor leagues, Logan Gilbert had a rookie season that might not look impressive to some. An ERA near 5.00, a three-start stretch in which he gave up 19 runs, a struggle to find secondaries that he could pair with his fastball — it wasn't what he wanted after all the work he put in on his way up.

"You can't prepare for what it's like," he said about his debut.

Most surprising might have been the fact that his curveball wasn't an asset.

"The curve was always there for me, but then up here I was missing a big part of what I do and was trying to figure it out on the fly," Gilbert said of his season. "I got my fastball, but I was changing my slider, trying to figure that out, curve wasn't there, changeup was good but not in the zone."

There was good news in his debut, though. He had the most extension among starters in baseball last year (minimum 1,000 fastballs), and top-ten vertical movement. He averaged 95 on the fastball, which felt even harder because of how closely the tall righty was releasing the ball to the plate.

The rest of the good news comes from the work he's done on his secondaries over the course of the last year.

Slider: "I was trying to sweep it and it wasn't really sweeping and the command was terrible. So I looked for the best sliders, people like Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer, looking for something I could throw in the zone. I need the harder slider that I can put where I want to do."

Curve: "I felt kind of weird because I didn't have my curveball, I just didn't have feel for it. Last year, my wrist was looser on my curveball, and now I'm locking it out with a stiff wrist and it's way better."

Changeup: "The changeup, the movement was really good, I struggled with throwing it in the zone. I had terrible command on this pitch because it would just roll out, it's tough to throw anything like this off of your ring finger. I've been committed to this grip, with a new grip seam-wise, and I can command it better off this, which makes sense because it's a stronger finger."

Logan Gilbert's changeup late last season (left), which he "this one's retired" and now (right). (Eno Sarris)

In his last four starts of the season, Gilbert's Stuff+ on his four-seam, slider, and changeup were all well above average. The curveball is the pitch he's had the longest, if he's really figured that out and is a 6-foot-6 95-mph close-to-the plate monster with four above-average pitches, being the best starter on his team doesn't even seem that bold.

(Top photo of Votto: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)

morganshettlees.blogspot.com

Source: https://theathletic.com/3187448/2022/03/25/sarris-ten-bold-predictions-for-a-wacky-mlb-season/

Share this post