Last week, I made the ill-fated choice to bench Seth Lugo at Toronto based on my impression the Blue Jays lineup was a strong, albeit underperforming unit. Upon digging into the numbers, I was a little surprised to learn Toronto projects for just the 16th best offense by OPS (BatX) for the rest of the season. BatX is a projection system developed by Derek Carty. The data is available on Fangraphs.
The Blue Jays numbers got me thinking. Has Toronto’s team projection changed materially from the preseason? Can team projections move faster with multiple slow starters? Did any other teams make big moves?
To-date, the average team has seen a decrease of five points from their preseason OPS, probably reflective of the lessened offensive environment in the first month. Toronto has lost more OPS than average, but they were only 13th preseason. The three biggest fallers were the Rockies (-22 points), the Angels (-18 pts) and Tampa Bay (-16 points). From the Rockies, Kris Bryant, Brendan Rodgers, and Sean Bouchard have all seen their projections slashed by over 30 points of OPS. In Anaheim, injuries to Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon are pulling down the team average. Lastly, Tampa Bay sluggers Yandy Diaz and Randy Arozarena have also seen massive drops in their projection (Diaz .819 to .779, Arozarena .791 to .765).
Multiple players struggling has led to a massive change in how the projections perceive these teams. The Rockies team OPS has dropped from 8th to 18th, the Angels have dropped from 6th to 10th, and the Rays have dropped from 22nd to 27th. The Angels scenario also raises the question of the impact injured on a current team’s quality, and how big a difference this can make. Chart 2 compares current rest-of-season team OPS projections vs team OPS projections with injured players removed.
Unsurprisingly, the Angels pop on this list as the team with the biggest loss in OPS due to injuries. Using the OPS from just the healthy members of the Angels roster they are now projected for a .713 OPS, 21st in baseball, and a massive drop from the number six offense they started the year with. The Cubs (Seiya Suzuki, Cody Bellinger) and the Twins (Byron Buxton, Royce Lewis) are the other two teams that saw a 10 or more point drop in OPS when filtering out injured players.
Moving forward, when evaluating opposition quality, it is important to perform a more granular analysis of opponent quality, than perpetuating priors from the preseason, or making gut calls. Hopefully this article has shown just how quickly, and drastically team quality can change (even within projections).
