2012 Bill James Handbook Projections
The 2012 Bill James Handbook Projections are now available in the player pages. Big thanks to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing us to publish these for the fourth straight year.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
What’s the run environment for these projections? I’d like to see if given players are expected to improve or decline from last year, but I presume the BJ projections will make it look as if every hitter is going to improve (or decline less than they really will) because they project more runs into the system than there were last year. Is there any easy way to adjust the projected wOBAs so that they map onto last year’s run environment? Say, just subtract x number of points from the projected wOBA?
I don’t see why his projections would change the run environment from what it was in 2011.
Related question: are his projections based on the assumption that player’s will be on the same teams, or are they for a park/league-neutral run environment? Anyone know?
And is there also a constant that I can subtract from SPs’ projected ERAs to approximate what they would look like when standardized for last year’s run environment?
I believe the projections are based on the player’s current team and league.
For the same player set as the projetions the league wide wOBA in 2011 is .325 vs the 2012 projections of .334. So, on average it’s about .009 points higher.
Thank you very much. Can you also tell me the difference in average SP ERA?
I remember reading James historical abstract way back when. In it he had written about ryne sandberg that based on his (not overly impressive) numbers from his first full year, it was not all that shocking he went on to become a HOFer, based on position and age curve and skill set
Which makes me wonder why he thinks Starlin Castro is going to hit less HRs and steal less bases as a 22 yr old then he did as a 21 yr old. He already avoided the “soph slump”. His power numbers the 2nd half were much better than the 1st half in 2011. To me that spells a nice spike in power numbers.
Everyting looks better in de hot stove season
James appears to be bullish on the Giants 3-4-5 of Sanodal, Posey, & Belt. Slide Beltran in there and that’s 4 +360wOBA projections. Not bad.
Did he do any projections on Yu Darvish?
Projects lots of innings and great years for Santana and Wainwright. 210 innings for Wainwright coming off TJ surgery? No projection for Strasburg is listed….at least in Fangraphs.
interesting that he projected improvement for Braun 9coming off a career year) across the board in Hits, Runs, HR, and RBI with only a slight drop in SB… this with the next best hitter in the lineup almost surely leaving.
http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=3410&position=OF
yet he projects a pretty drastic dropoff in every single offensive stat for Granderson (coming off a similar career year),even though the Yankee offense is returning intact, and will only be better assuming Montero gets most of the AB’s that Posada had last year.
i know everyone expects Granderson to regress, and im sure he will, but the extremes of these 2 player projections dont really make sense to me
First I think the difference is their ages, second he has Braun slightly regressing in his triple slash stats, he just has his counting stats increase slightly because he projects him to play more games. I’m not sure that James takes into account who a player plays for, a lot of these projections are of FAs.
IIRC, James does he projections not in an attempt to mirror the aggregate, but to try and get the individual projections right, if one could assume health & playing time. Basically, he doesn’t try to regress all players to account for the inevitable injuries and significant under-performers that normally get built in to a projection.
I could be completely wrong, but that was my understanding.
It doesn’t look like there’s any projection for Chris Young (Dbacks). Are all the projections in?
any chance of getting these in a spreadsheet?
yes, a spreadsheet link would be sweet!
i always thought it was weird that they don’t show up in the preseason projections section like the others (marcel, zips, etc) which can be exported to excel/csv.
is there some sort of restricted agreement with the publishers? these would be extremely useful to have available like the others.
James sells these projections for $10 in spreadsheet form. Then releases another set closer to opening day.