It’s that time of the year. This past Friday, Dan Szymborski of ESPN released his 2018 Yankees ZiPS projections. If you need a refresher, ZiPS is a projection system developed by Szymborski himself while he was at the Baseball Think Factory and it is considered one of the most accurate predictors in the industry. It takes a player’s recent performances + the career aging curve + park factor to count as many current indicators as possible to figure out the 50th percentile outcome.
Remember, projections are not predictions. Their main job is to try to figure out a player’s skill level.