We're down to the last two awards of baseball's red carpet season, and then the 2017 baseball season will have officially given up the ghost.
While some of the players competing for hardware this year were expected -- you get no credit for predicting Clayton Kershaw to be a great pitcher -- we've had our share of surprises, including Aaron Judge, an intriguing offensive prospect heading into the season, who exploded for 52 homers and found himself in the AL MVP race. Luis Severino struggled to a 5.38 ERA in his first full season and had been booted out of the rotation in 2016, but finished third in the AL Cy Young voting. And who would have predicted Mike Trout not making the final three of the AL MVP voting?
Inconceivable!
Having a projection system isn't all that fun if you don't do cool stuff with it, so while we're relaxing and enjoying Giancarlo Stanton rumors, I'm making ZiPS work and projecting probabilities for the 2018 awards. Such is the life of a PC until the robopocalypse rises up and destroys humanity.
Also, please note that for free agents, I projected them in the American League 50 percent of the time and the National League 50 percent of the time. No free agent makes this list, though J.D. Martinez comes closest, projecting as the 14th-most-likely NL MVP and ranking 16th in the AL. So, on with the projections -- and yes, Trout makes an appearance.
American League MVP
Trout has an even better chance at leading the AL in wins above replacement (44 percent) in 2018 than the MVP projection listed above (16.8 percent), but even if the voting has increasingly reflected modern analytics Triple Crown stats still rule the roost.
A lot of the names you see competing for this year's MVP are projected to repeat their performances in 2018. Even if Judge fails to match his 8.1 Baseball-Reference WAR in 2018, he should still hit a metric ton of homers, which will keep him in the awards mix. Joey Gallo may be the most interesting name in the top 10, because even though he's unlikely to be at the top of the league in WAR, his home run upside is so tremendous that he can slug his way into the hunt.
National League MVP
Projecting Stanton is tricky, given that the Marlins don't have to trade him right now and could choose to absorb his contract for another year. So the free-agent solution doesn't quite work here, and I left him in the NL for now.
Rockies fans were understandably miffed that they struck out on the top three in the NL with both of their MVP candidates, Nolan Arenado and Charlie Blackmon.
While ZiPS is understandably skeptical about Blackmon being quite this good (he still makes the top 10), it also thinks Arenado is the safest bet. Some of the others have injury histories, or are coming off relative down years, or they get too much of their value from OBP to impress the full electorate.
As great as Arenado was in 2017, he was actually just as amazing in 2016 (his 2015 isn't that far behind), is young enough to still have upside, and, unless there are specific larger-than-usual home/road splits that voters obsess over (too much, really), Coors tends to help more than it hurts.
American League Cy Young
There are no flukes at the top of this year's Cy Young ballot, so we'll see a lot of the same hurlers compete next year. ZiPS is more sure of Severino than 2016's surprise Cy Young winner, Rick Porcello.
One thing that's fascinating to me is how positive ZiPS is about Masahiro Tanaka having a bounce-back season. With the Yankees very likely to have an excellent offense in 2018, a Tanaka comeback year -- though I never thought his 2017 was as bad as some did -- could generate a huge win total, which voters do still care about.
National League Cy Young
While he has missed significant time because of nonarm injuries in each of the past two seasons, Kershaw has been so good when healthy that he still merits serious consideration even with the missing time. Simply put, when it comes to pitchers, Kershaw is as dependable as a member of that fragile species can be and is essentially already a Hall of Famer.
ZiPS is high on a more impressive Chicago showing for Jose Quintana and still thinks that Carlos Martinez has that big Cy Young-type breakout season in him.
Some of the names that just miss the top 10 are quite interesting as well: Robbie Ray, in 11th place, is projected to be a real ace, Yu Darvish is at 13 despite being projected as 50/50 to be in the NL, and the Rockies' Jon Gray, in 16th place, is one of the most underrated pitchers in the game.
AL Rookie of the Year
Projecting the Rookie of the Year award provides a more complex challenge. With all of those MVP and Cy Young candidates above, we're pretty confident about their playing time as long as they're healthy. With rookies, you not only have to project performance, but figure out who will get the playing time.
Michael Kopech may be the most fascinating player on this list simply because ZiPS is all over the map on this prospect. Kopech is one of the most unhittable prospects in recent years, but he still hasn't mastered control of his stuff. Some of these guys become Randy Johnson. But others become Jonathan Sanchez or Daniel Cabrera. Kopech has the potential to explode on the league and earn this ranking -- or make the team in April and then get sent down in a month with a 6.50 ERA.
It's also interesting to see the Orioles, despite a very weak and shallow farm system, to possibly also have their second straight Rookie of the Year candidate in catcher Chance Sisco, their current top prospect. Welington Castillo's free-agent status (and likely departure) practically guarantees he gets a shot.
NL Rookie of the Year
You can see some of the difficulty of projecting rookie playing time when you see J.P. Crawford, a player ZiPS projected as a Rookie of the Year candidate for 2016 too.
ZiPS projects a .263/.316/.425 season with 17 homers for Acuna in his rookie season. Given that he's a solid center fielder, that's good for a projection for 2.7 WAR as a rookie, meaning he already projects to be an above-average player, not too shabby for a player at age 20. To get better rookie-year projections, you have to turn to players such as Kris Bryant or Mike Trout. The top of ZiPS' offensive comparisons is a who's who of young center-field stars: Adam Jones, Melvin Upton Jr., Rocco Baldelli, Bernie Williams, Rondell White, Matt Kemp and Andrew McCutchen. Rob Ducey too, which provides a quick reminder that even the best player's fortunes aren't guaranteed.
Lewis Brinson didn't exactly have the best cup of coffee in 2017, but one should be careful about taking 47 at-bats too seriously. To quote a variant of Voros' Law, named after noted sabermetrician Voros McCracken, anybody can hit anything in 50 at-bats. I remember a few years ago, George Springer started off his career hitting .182/.262/.218 in his first 55 at-bats and I got flooded with questions in chats about whether he was a bust or not.
I told everybody to take a deep breath, and it worked out just fine.
There's a Red on this list (and one, Jesse Winker, who just misses being a rookie in 2018), highlighting their still-ongoing rebuild. It'll be interesting to see if they shuffle their lineup enough and quickly enough to get Nick Senzel (and Winker) significant playing time in 2018 as Adam Duvall and Scott Schebler were only average at best despite their home run totals.
Manager of the Year
American League
National League
But, Dan, how can you objectively project how a manager does with a projection system? You don't even know who the Yankee manager will be, and he's at the top of the list! And three of the guys just got their jobs since the end of the World Series!
Yes, there's an explanation coming.
A projection system will obviously do a poor job at projecting who will be the best manager. But what we're projecting here is who will earn an award for being the best manager.
When it comes to the history of the Manager of the Year award, you can build a highly accurate model of who wins the award simply by knowing three things:
• How many wins a team earns over the course of the season
• How many wins a team improves from the previous season's win totals
• By how many wins a team exceeds its projected win total coming into the season
Just knowing this and absolutely nothing directly about how the manager manages, you'll have a pretty good idea who will win the award. Going back to the MLB strike year of 1994, only a single winning manager was projected by ZiPS' simple model out of the top three: Joe Girardi in 2006.
So as long as your team wins 20 more games in 2018 than 2017 and finishes with 95 wins, it won't matter if the manager is a genius tactician or forgets how to execute a double-switch on a daily basis and accidentally pushed the ace into the Grand Canyon. That manager will be a favorite for the Manager of the Year award.
Editor's note: This story was updated after Braves prospect Ronald Acuna won the Most Valuable Player award in the Arizona Fall League to provide some additional information about his outlook for 2018.