Morning Mound Visit: sabermetrics news - 3/9/19

FanGraphs | Dan Szymborski: With every two weeks Luis Severino misses due to shoulder injury, the Yankees’ odds of winning the AL East drop 2%. If he is out for the season, their odds go from ~64.8% to hair under 50%. While ZiPS finds Jonathan Loaisiga a competent replacement, it thinks much more lowly of Luis Cessa and Domingo German, and options outside the organization will be harder to come by after Opening Day.

Baseball Prospectus | Rob Arthur: PECOTA has limits, as does every projection system, and that weakness is basically around predicting divisions. While a single team has error bars—let’s say the Cubs win between 73 and 85 games (or whatever your bell curve looks like), that error bar exists for the Reds and Cardinals and Pirates and Brewers. So the combinations of division records multiply for the number of teams, meaning there are literally hundreds of combinations of team records and division placements. That means that no matter how accurate PECOTA gets, it will always be a “guess.”

Bill James Online | Mark Simon: Bryce Harper’s defense will be a question in 2019, and one of the biggest issues was allowing runners to advance. He had -6 Outfield Arm Runs in 2018, tied with teammate Rhys Hoskins, tied for second-worst in baseball. His other concerns could be overblown, but not this element of his game.