It shouldn’t be surprising, but after 2024, it feels somewhat dissonant
It’s not surprising that the recently-released 2025 ZiPS projections for the Atlanta Braves seem the roster as a star-studded baseball production machine… but we all just lived through the 2024 season, where things definitely didn’t play out that way, and are all hoping that sort of thing doesn’t happen again. The projections, though, despite baking in the 2024 performance downturns and the like, haven’t really downgraded the roster. Take a look at the preview helpfully provided by Dan Szymborski himself:
A sneak peek at the ZiPS Projections x @FanGraphs Depth Chart for the next team to go in ZiPS, the Atlanta #Braves.#ZiPS25 pic.twitter.com/hEb3iVBsBT
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) November 20, 2024
The main thing that strikes me here is something the Braves were direly short on in 2024: consistently great player-level production. Specifically, the graphic above has 11 players putting together an above-average season, of which eight are projected for a central estimate of 3+ WAR at the playing time assumptions underpinning this run. Meanwhile, the actual 2024 Braves had just four such players, and of those four, only two exceeded 4 fWAR. Here, meanwhile, the projections have two starting pitchers and four position players in the 5+ WAR range. Pleastayhealthypleasestayhealthypleasestayhealthy.
Projections-wise, then, the Braves don’t appear to be in too different a place than where they were headed into 2024. About a year ago, this looked like the best on-paper roster in MLB, and maybe one of the better on-paper rosters ever assembled. These days, as you can tell, the competition for preseason roster strength champs is perhaps a little tougher, but the Braves are still up there.
A few other things I found interesting, while you’re here:
- Sean Murphy had a 2024 to forget for various reasons. ZiPS has him as essentially an All-Star caliber producer even despite that, and is more bullish than Steamer by about a win over a full season (not a full catcher season, I mean a full 600-PA season).
- ZiPS is similarly higher on Austin Riley by about a full win, with a lot of that difference attributable to expectations of his defensive aptitude. Riley’s defense has been an interesting evolution, from really bad to just regular bad to surprisingly average, but backslid to 2021-2022 levels last year.
- ZiPS has the tentative left field platoon look much more reasonable than Steamer; the latter really doesn’t think Ramon Laureano is worthy of being considered anywhere near a regular, with some pretty poor projections (e.g., a sub-.300 wOBA).
- ZiPS is much higher on Reynaldo Lopez — 3 WAR in about 130 innings — than Steamer, which has him at a lower total in 179 innings. Lopez is a nightmare to project, so this isn’t surprising,
- There appears to be this tendency for projection systems to assign Quad-A starters this sort of generic, median fourth starter projection. I get why it happens, and honestly, the state of backend pitching in MLB is not great given the preponderance of injuries, so it’s not even wrong. Still, it amuses me these days see guys like Bryce Elder getting essentially league-average run prevention projections, because workload management aside, teams have been paying crazy prices for free agent pitching to avoid committing innings to those types of guys.