This year's MLBRank has been fully revealed, and you're either delighted or angry or both at whom we honored and whom we snubbed. One yearly tradition I look forward to is when I really get the opportunity to tear into our results and see what the mean ol' ZiPS SuperComputer© says about how we did. While I did participate in the vote, I was just one of many and I didn't just go off what the projections produced by my model say, simply because ZiPS and I don't always agree. I usually get the upper hand because I can unplug it.
A reminder: This exercise is about where we believe the players are now, not necessarily where they have been before, though the past does play a part in predicting the future.
Where ZiPS thinks we were too high
Ryan Zimmerman, Washington Nationals
ZiPS Rank: 462 | MLBRank: 32
I guess to make my point about disagreement, we'll start off with one in which I'm way more optimistic than the algorithms. While ZiPS is a good deal more bullish on Zimmerman, predicting an .807 OPS the rest of the season, a giant leap from the preseason .696 projection, I think it's still being a bit too negative here.
Even when a model can take injuries into consideration, there's a lot of variance there on just how well players will recover from injury and just how much injuries affect them. Is Zimmerman really one of the best players in the National League? Going forward, probably not. But is he a very good player? I'm more convinced on that one, simply because while it has been a while, he was once a legitimate superstar, especially in that 2009-2010 period. Maybe this is cognitive dissonance, but I still think he'll also be a solid defensive first baseman, despite the below-average numbers he has there so far.