After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Colorado Rockies.
If you’ve already seen the Steamer projections that currently make up our depth charts, you’re probably not surprised by the numbers that ZiPS predicts. You may also not be shocked if you’ve seen the Rockies in recent years, a team with an offense that has been buttressed by a couple of MVP candidates every year, now with those MVP candidates removed from the roster or in their decline phases. Steamer has the Colorado lineup a shocking five wins worse than the next-worst team, Cincinnati; the Reds are closer to the 17th-ranked Phillies than the Rockies.
C.J. Cron was an uncharacteristically clever signing by the Rockies. They actually sought out a type of player who may now be undervalued by the market generally: a league-average first baseman. The problem is that league average is still “just” league average, not something that is the foundation of a solid offense. Cron ought to be decent, Ryan McMahon still has some upside left, and Brendan Rodgers is probably the only Rockie with true breakout potential. Outside of these three players, there’s just not much salvageable about the offense, nor any particular reason for optimism about anyone in the minors in 2022 even moving the needle. There have been some genuinely lousy lineups in baseball that ZiPS has projected, but this might be the most depressing of them.
One of the odd paradoxes of the Rockies is that they somehow figured out one of the hardest things: putting together a starting rotation that can survive Coors Field relatively intact. A front four of Germán Márquez, Antonio Senzatela, Kyle Freeland, and Austin Gomber isn’t an elite quartet, but it’s a good one, and better than that of many teams that will finish with more wins in 2022. It could have been better if the effort to retain Jon Gray had been more serious; the general belief, as Patrick Saunders noted in the Denver Post, was that the Rockies would have been interested in a three- or four-year deal worth somewhere around $11 million a year — a rather unserious offer. That they didn’t give him a qualifying offer or trade him when they had the chance is a very Rockies thing to do.
If the front four is as healthy as the depth charts hope, the Rockies could again win 70 games, or just enough to keep ownership from once again having any interest in changing course. If injuries strike, the wheels likely come off the rotation very quickly, as they have as little depth here as everywhere else on the field.
Colorado’s bullpen looks like it will be toward the bottom of the league again, though if we’re ranking the team’s sins, this is a small one. From the Rockies’ perspective, an inexpensive failure is much preferable to an exorbitant one, and with so many problems elsewhere, it’s not as if there will be a whole bunch of wins for the relief corps to let fly out the window.
The Rockies are the worst-run team in baseball, and it’s not particularly close at this point. And the sad part of it is that this was a perfectly predictable thing.
With the talent they developed, there was *no reason* the Rockies couldn't become the next Astros or Indians. Instead, they look like a team that'll have a couple wild card relevant seasons and then meander off into the mediocrity mire meaninglessly.
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) April 9, 2018
Until there is a drastic overhaul of how this organization is run and how they think about baseball, the Rockies are doomed to follow this same path. It’s not something that’s going to be solved by hiring good people on the analytics side, or even by a better GM. It has to be a whole culture change, and one driven by ownership, which is fundamentally the largest problem with the team right now.
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 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.
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 that 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 2022.
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.
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.
One of the things that bothers me is when teams dramatically change their evaluations of players. When you refuse to trade a guy for anything less than a major haul and then sell at their lowest possible point, it speaks badly about the evaluation. Either you were wrong before or you’re wrong now; it’s a lose-lose.
There are a lot of examples like that with the Rockies but Jon Gray is the one that stands out to me right now. I didn’t mind the Rockies not trading Jon Gray but then letting him go without even issuing him the QO was pretty bad. The team’s not good by any means, and Jon Gray’s fastball is pretty bad, but it’s so hard to find pitchers who can pitch at Coors successfully. If they had a consistent rotation they could maybe they could spend their way into being a .500 team, like by getting some tweener outfield types in the corners and a stopgap in CF like Odubel Herrera. But now even that looks a bit iffy.
It is not at all difficult to find pitchers who can pitch at Coors successfully. They only need to pitch a bit better than the opposing pitcher – who never pitches much at Coors.
What is difficult is finding a pitcher who can pitch at both Coors (using metrics that are going to be UNIQUE for a successful pitcher at altitude) and on the road (using the sorts of metrics that every other team in baseball – non-altitude – uses to define a successful pitcher). It’s a very similar problem to the Rockies hitter problem on the road. It’s the road that is the problem. Not Coors.
Funny cause i think the opposite. Changing your evaluations of players is a good thing, it shows an openness to be “wrong” and not just be hard headed into your initial view.
As it relates to Gray though, nothing changed, he’s the same guy he’s usually been. He stated through the media that he wanted to be back and not join a super team, my guess here is the Rockies thought that meant he’d take a big discount. Which obviously isn’t the case, they misread it like usual. Don’t think their eval of gray has changed.
“Either you were wrong before or you’re wrong now; it’s a lose-lose.”
Yeah, I side with Matt here – if you were wrong before but reevaluated to become more “right” now, that’s a win, not a loss. That could be a “we over-evaluated this guy and he’s a bum, let’s cut bait” – if you’re right now and you realize he’s not worth the time or trouble, that’s a win. Or if it’s “we under-evaluated this guy and now realize he’s a franchise cornerstone, or we can get a haul for him!” that’s also a win.
Unfortunately the Rockies DO go lose-lose most often, in a myriad of ways. Sometimes it’s over-evaluating their own talent and then sticking with them when it’s painfully obvious they’re nothing special; or mis-evaluating and overpaying free agents (a long and rich history from Denny Neagle and Mike Hampton right up through Ian Desmond); or under-evaluating their own guys and then selling them off for little to nothing or letting them walk entirely (like Gray). They find new and inventive ways to go lose-lose.
This is going to sound weird, but the Rockies problem is that their evaluation of players is extremely present-focused instead of thinking about what their future will look like. Players who are playing well are off-limits. Players who are playing badly must be shipped off. The idea that maybe they should just wait for players to start playing well again or that they should trade a guy before his stock totally plummets is not part of their thought process.
To some extent this happens to every team; the Brewers would have been better trading Villar after he 2015 than shipping him out with a prospect for Jonathan Schoop, and the Twins would have been wise to move on from Brian Dozier after 2017. But with the Rockies it happens repeatedly. The Rockies have somehow managed to mishandle all of Nolan Arenado, Trevor Story, DJ LeMahieu, and Jon Gray in roughly the same way. Of those, Gray is probably the most egregious, simply because they let him go for nothing, and LeMahieu is probably the least egregious. But it’s enough of a pattern that I don’t think it’s an accident. If Marquez gets off to a slow start again I half expect them to dump him for pennies only for him to rebound elsewhere.
I agree with this entire tweet except for the Márquez part. The chances of him getting traded are below 0%.