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Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat - 8/28/25

Dan Szymborski

12:00

And thus the chat began. Suspiciously, it began on time as well.

Philly Fan

12:01

How much of a hit did Phillies' WS prospects take with Wheeler's injury?

Dan Szymborski

12:01

I didn't do an article on the topic, but I did run the numbers and at the time, they dropped from 11.7 to 9.8 in ZiPS purely for the Wheeler injury

Ben

12:01

If/when expansion happens, which cities are you hoping get team? Which ones would you bet on getting a team?

Dan Szymborski

12:02

I hope Nashville gets one. That's purely for selfish reasons - gives me yet another park five hours or less away!

12:03

And I like excuses to visit Nashville. The state of hot chicken in SW Ohio, at least in the Dayton area, is truly sad.

Around here, Popeye's boneless wings with *signature* sauce is the closest to hot chicken I've found around here. Everything else is even moer wrong

Jay

12:04

How badly has Jackson Holliday’s 3 year ZiPS outlook been hurt by his struggles this year?

Dan Szymborski

12:04

Not horribly

OH wait, there was more to the question

12:05

I think Charlotte and Salt Lake City

have good chances

12:06

I dont' think Orlando has a good chance. They'd be better off buying the Rays or Marlins and moving them to Orlando, I doubt baseball wants to put a THIRD team in Florida

Probably have to buy Marlins since the Rays were just sold

Sirras

12:06

What do you think the hardest organization to turn around would be if you were forcibly given leadership of a team in MLB?

Dan Szymborski

12:06

Marlins

Guest

12:08

Any idea why Ryan Pepiot isn't hitting his ceiling? Going by a few metrics he's got 3 above average to plus pitches and a strong swinging strike rate, but for some reason he can't get called strikes, and whenever he does get hit it's a lot of hard contact

Dan Szymborski

12:09

I'm actually not sure what the real problem is with him. It certainly FEELS like his changeup SHOUDL be a more whiffy pitch than it is

But I've never really dug deeply into Pepiot's profile specifically

donkle

12:09

You know how baseball savant has the spread maps of a pitcher's pitches? Do you think it's better for a specific pitch's spread to be tighter or more broad? Better control vs less predictability?

Dan Szymborski

12:09

I think it's situation dependent

Guest

12:09

Thanks for chatting! How do you (Dan) go about interpreting the ZiPS projections? What's your process? You always seem to have good analysis beyond what the numbers say.

Dan Szymborski

12:10

I don't really have a specific *process* I go through. I think of a story, and see if the evidence supports what I think the story is, and if not, what the story really is.

12:11

I'm far less concerned with what numbers *are* than what numbers *mean* and generally, it flows from there.

12:12

It may seem odd coming from me, but I rarely want to write a story about numbers, I just *use* numbers in what I *hope* are interesting ways

NPC

12:12

McLean: ace?

Dan Szymborski

12:12

Not the craziest thing I've heard at all!

Idle wonderings

12:13

Do teams that rely on home runs for offense underperform their run differential because of uneven run distribution? I'm thinking about how in a given game a team needs x runs to score. If scoring is uneven in distribution they will score x+6 runs one day, x-3 the next. It would be better just to score x+1 both days.

Dan Szymborski

12:13

I haven't really found that. One of the nice things about home runs is that even though they're spotty, they're also somewhat *consistent* in the medium term

while BABIP is REALLY volatile

Phil

12:13

So Giolito sure seems likely to hit the 140 IP trigger for his mutual option. Would he take $19M? No, right? What kind of contract would you anticipate if not? I am hoping the Red Sox hang on to him--just don't have a lot of faith that Houck, Crawford, and Sandoval are going to be rotation mainstays next year--but I suspect Breslow won't want to give a lot of years to someone of his age and history of down years.

Dan Szymborski

12:14

I should note that I'm doing a piece sometime next week on the options/optouts

Guest

12:14

Could you pick a top 4 here: Carroll, Wood, Springer, Kurtz and Buxton. Thanks!

Dan Szymborski

12:15

Fantasy? Would probably keep order similar!

Captain ACAB

12:15

Who is the most unique player in MLB right now according to Szyps? By that I mean which player has the least similar comps?