Ben and Sam preview the Brewers’ season with Ken Funck, and Pete talks to MLB.com columnist Mike Bauman (at 19:37).
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Everybody’s aware that, by and large, spring-training results are meaningless. Not everybody always acts like it, but everybody gets it, on some level. The stats don’t really matter, and the wins and losses don’t really matter. But spring training can still serve some purposes, for us as fans. As we discussed yesterday, spring training can generate highlights as good or almost as good as the highlights generated during the regular season. That is, of plays in isolation, separated from context. And there’s also some analysis that can be done, if done carefully. Previously, Michael Saunders never demonstrated any ability to hit to the opposite field or cover the outer half of the plate. Between 2011 and 2012, he re-worked his swing, and in spring 2012, he covered the other half of the plate. It was promising, and, sure enough, Saunders had a breakthrough season. Spring training isn’t entirely devoid of substance.
Which brings us to the matter of Domonic Brown, on Tuesday, February 26. On this Tuesday, Brown generated a highlight, and he also did something maybe worth talking about for analytical purposes. Behold, what Domonic Brown did to a thrown pitch by a member of the Yankees organization:
With the ZIPS projections now loaded onto the site and the player pages, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at a few examples where ZIPS and Steamer — probably my two preferred projection systems at the moment — differ this year, and whether there’s anything in particular we can learn from those differences.
First, I wanted to whittle down the population of players that I was dealing with. While I appreciate Steamer’s pluckiness, 4,136 projections for position players might be a little bit of overkill. I, for one, am not overly concerned with how Jeyckol De Leon is going to perform this year. Maybe it’s just me.
ZIPS projects a slightly more sane number of position players — 1,046, to be exact — but even that is still a little unwieldy, as a good chunk of those guys are sub-replacement level minor leaguers who aren’t going to see the Majors this year. By and large, we care mostly about the projections for players who are going to see substantial regular playing time in the big leagues this year, or at least, I do. Carson can care about all the fringe prospects he wants; I’ll leave that to him.
So, in order to get a list of projections for guys we care about, I excluded players who had never been in the majors or were projected to be below replacement level, leaving us with 601 Major League position players. That was still a little unwieldy, though, so I took the top 180 players by the average WAR of the two systems, which gave us a good selection of players that are projected to be league average or better by one of the two systems.
From there, it was a pretty simple sorting task to find some big differences, but many of them are driven by assumptions about playing time rather than big gaps in the actual projections. For instance, ZIPS lists Brett Jackson as a +2.5 WAR player, while Steamer comes in at just +0.9, which seems like a huge difference of opinion until you realize that the ZIPS number is based on 626 PA and the Steamer number is based on 274 PA. Rescale them both to 600 PA, and the gap is just 2.4/2.0, showing that the two systems are essentially in agreement on Jackson’s overall profile for 2013.
Since I care more about the differences in the projected performances than in the playing time gaps, we’ll focus on the big discrepancies in projections per 600 plate appearances (or 450 PA for catchers). Putting things on the same playing time scale will inflate the numbers of part-time players and injured guys while depressing the numbers of durable iron men, but we’ve already gotten rid of most of the part-time guys with our filtering, so that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. Oh, and thankfully, the two systems were already on almost identical scales for these players, so there was no need to make any adjustments to the numbers as we did with the Fans projections last week.
Long introduction finished… on to the differences. We’ll start with the 14 players where Steamer projects at least +1 additional WAR per full season (600 PA non-catchers, 450 PA catchers):
Spring training games are underway. The hot stove stories that kept us going all winter have been replaced by stories about non-roster invitees trying to make a major-league roster, behind-the-scenes looks at what your favorite player did over the winter, and columns drawing conclusions about spring statistics. And Alex Rodriguez stories. There are always A-Rod stories.
So it was on Sunday when several outlets reported that A-Rod’s cousin was selling Rodriguez’s 2009 World Series ring. And not just any cousin, but Yuri Sucart, the person A-Rod fingered as the person who convinced him to take steroids while he played for the Texas Rangers. Sucart was later banned from MLB clubhouses but his name recently resurfaced in news reports about Biogenesis, the Miami anti-aging clinic that purportedly supplied PEDs to A-Rod and others.
A-Rod. Traitor. Biogenesis. PEDs. Greedy cousin. Perfect storm.
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. The Best Players Without Starting Roles, Now for ZiPS
2. Mostly Unhelpful Video: Scott Rolen, Defensing in 2008
The Best Players Without Starting Roles, Now for ZiPS
Last week, the author utilized his widely praised capacity for “sorting through leaderboards” to identify the top forecasts for rookie-eligible players, according to the ZiPS and Steamer and FAN projection systems — where “top” was equivalent to “highest projected WAR” and nothing else.
Yesterday, the author performed a similar exercise — except for, instead of identifying the top rookie-eligible players, the author identified the best field players per Steamer who are currently without a starting role.
Today, the author once again looks at the best players sans a starting role, except with using the ZiPS projections, which were officially released at the site on Monday afternoon.
Below are the 11 players (because there was a tie for 10th place) who most aptly fit that description. Below that are some brief comments by the author to give the impression that he has not merely assembled a Table of Numbers.
First, though, five notes:
1. “Best” in the context of this exercise is equivalent to “projected WAR per every 650 plate appearances.”
After taking a look at how scouting grades for tools might grade out statistically, I’m back to look at how some of our other commonly used metrics measure in regard to standard deviations. On Tuesday my goal was to look at each tool individually, and I focused, as a result, on making sure there were enough innings pitched and at-bats to at least indicate there was something going on. Today, I’ll look at metrics that look more at the whole player, so while I’ll continue to use the 20-80 shorthand, we’ll also talk about where players slot in the grand scheme of things. As you will see, some of the bins will match up with some of our preconceived notions, but it’s always good to confirm some things. Without further ado …
Ben and Sam preview the Cardinals’ season with Ken Funck, and Pete talks to St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Joe Strauss (at 18:06).
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They say that, when it comes to understanding anything about the subsequent regular season, you should never pay attention to numbers in March. That’s good advice, and it doesn’t even bother to mention numbers in February. Today is February 25, spring-training competition has only just begun, and nothing matters. To whatever extent any baseball matters, February baseball matters less than April baseball, which matters less than September baseball, which matters less than October baseball. Today’s baseball is only one step ahead of intrasquad action, and there’s not much of anything to be read into.
But even meaningless baseball can generate baseball highlights. It’s been a long time since we were given fresh, new baseball highlights, and earlier Monday, Miguel Cabrera did a mean thing to a Jonathan Papelbon delivery. It doesn’t matter that the game was meaningless; Papelbon wasn’t trying to give up a home run, he threw a normal pitch, and Cabrera blasted it out. Within pointless baseball, there are glimpses of regular baseball, and here is some video for you.
