Ben and Sam preview the Mets’ season with Jason Wojciechowski, and Pete talks to Newsday baseball columnist David Lennon (at 22:11).
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In my Monday post about the White Sox recent success beating preseason projections, I included a statement that I’ve mentioned a few times over the last few years:
But also, please just keep in mind that projections are not predictions. They are a snapshot of what we think a team’s median true talent level might be, and it should be understood that there’s a pretty sizable margin for error based on things that projection systems simply can’t forecast, and also the errors that come from having imperfect information or imperfect calculations.
I wrote about this distinction a couple of years ago, but I think it’s worth delving into the differences again. For one, FanGraphs has gotten a lot larger over the last few years, so many of you might not have read that piece, but also, I think there’s a few things that I could have stated better in that article, and I want to give more context for why I see the distinction as meaningful rather than being a semantical argument with no practical use.
Let’s start out by acknowledging that predictions are a subset of projections. Or, to put it another way, predictions are projections, but a projection isn’t necessarily a prediction. I know that’s a bit of a tongue twister, and seems like a semantical difference, but think of it like this: Mothers are women, but not all women are mothers. No one would suggest that it is simply semantics to clarify whether a women is or is not a mother. There’s a meaningful difference there.
On the surface, Brett Myers seemed to handle his 2012 transition from the rotation to the bullpen pretty well. He notched 19 saves and eight holds between stints with the Astros and White Sox against just two blown saves. He posted a sharp 3.31 ERA, good for an 81 ERA-.
But it wasn’t all happiness for Myers, as he was on the unfortunate end of four walk-offs. Hunter Pence hit a solo home run off Myers with one out on May 15th. The other three times, Myers’s game ended with runners still on base in threatening situations: a runner on third and one out after a Dexter Fowler walk-off triple on May 28th, runners on first and second and nobody out after a Hector Sanchez walk-off single on July 14th, and a runner on second and two outs after a Jamey Caroll sacrifice fly on July 28th.
Those four situations — the runners he stranded (all allowed on by him, although one reached on an error) and the outs at the time — resulted in a combined run expectancy of 3.25. Myers pitched just 65.1 innings in 2012. Even accounting for the nine outs Myers would have needed to record to finish those four innings (and therefore realize the full run expectancy), these 3.25 runs would increase his ERA to 3.59 — a significant difference.
Last summer, I wrote a little post titled 2009 Was a Million Years Ago that discussed how fortunes had changed greatly for a few players over just three years. Obviously, I could not cover everything, but I really missed something by not including the Blue Jays’ Adam Lind. In 2009, Lind finally got full season of playing time in Toronto and broke out at age 25, hitting .305/.370/.562 (140 wRC+) with 35 homers. Sure, he was a lousy defender in the outfield, but his bat looked like it would be good enough going forward so that it would play anywhere. The Jays certainly thought so, and bought out the rest of his arbitration years with a four-year, $18 million contract through 2013 that also included club options for 2014-16. It seemed like a no-brainer.
Fast forward to the present: Lind is in the last guaranteed season of that contract, and given his hitting over the last three seasons (combined with a lack of defensive value), it is probably a safe bet that his option for 2014 will not be picked up. Hope springs eternal, especially at this time of year. Lind is hoping that new (old) manager John Gibbons‘ approach with his players and coaching staff will lead to better communication, and thus to better results at the plate for Lind. There may be something to this, but after three consecutive seasons and more than 1500 plate appearances of poor hitting, this sort of seems like grasping at straws. Toronto made some big moves in order to turn itself into a contender, but while their lineup looks different in many ways, Lind is still set to be the team’s primary DH as they make a run at the playoffs in 2013. It is a conspicuous hole on a team clearly built to win now. Is there really any point to running Lind out there again?
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. Some Brief and Mostly Important Disclaimers
2. The Top-Six Rookie-Eligible Hitters, According to the Fans
3. The Top-Five Rookie-Eligible Pitchers, According to the Fans
Some Brief and Mostly Important Disclaimers
Over the last week, the author has considered the top forecasts for rookie-eligible players, both according to the ZiPS and Steamer projection systems — where “top” was equivalent to “highest projected WAR” and nothing else.
What follows is the product of an almost identical exercise — except for, instead of ZiPS or Steamer, the author has sorted the FAN projection leaderboards, instead. As the name suggests, these are projections crowdsourced from readers of the site.
Below are the the top-six hitters (because there was a tie for fifth) and top-five pitchers who most aptly fit the aforementioned criteria. Alongside each player’s name are listed his 2012 line (for the level at which he spent the most time) and his 2013 projection. Finally, the author has appended brief comments to each entry to give the impression that he has not merely assembled a List of Numbers.
First, though, here are four caveats:
1. The FAN projections, unlike ZiPS, include playing-time projections.
2. FAN projections are generally optimistic, but also in a generally regular way. I asked managing editor Dave Cameron about this, and he replied: “I think we’ve seen an historical overprojection of total WAR by 15-20%. It might even be 25%. If you go with 20%, you’ll probably be in the ballpark.”
3. There are three players who appeared on either the ZiPS or Steamer top-rookie posts who have not reached the eight-ballot threshold for their projections. Those players are: Boston’s Jackie Bradley, Pittsburgh’s Kyle McPherson, and Seattle’s Mike Zunino. Click on their names to submit your projections for them.
4. In homage to Jonah Lehrer, the author has copy-and-pasted many of his comments below from the two earlier top-rookie posts.
As vice president of on-field operations, Joe Torre is Major League Baseball’s point man on rule changes. If Torre doesn’t think a rule change is warranted, a proposed change isn’t going to get very far. He’s not the final arbiter — rule changes are made only by a vote of the owners and the players’ union — but he is the gatekeeper of rule-change ideas.
In the past several years, Torre’s been fending off requests to consider rule changes on home-plate collisions. Those requests reached a fever pitch in May 2011 after Scott Cousins voilently collided with Buster Posey, knocking the Giants’ catcher out for the season. Just days later, Astros’ catcher Humberto Quintero and Pirates’ catcher Ryan Doumit suffered serious injuries after home-plate collisions. Torre is a former catcher, and many hoped his experiences behind the plate would make him receptive to protecting catchers from head-on collisions. But, in fact, the opposite has been true.
Ben and Sam preview the Phillies’ season with Paul Sporer, and Pete talks to CSNPhilly.com Phillies Insider Jim Salisbury (at 19:27).
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When scouts evaluate the players on the field, they use a 20-80 scale as shorthand to describe a player’s tools and/or his overall ability. Receiving a 50 on the scale means that one is major-league average, and for every 10 points up or down the scale, the scout believes the player is one more standard deviation above or below major-league average. An 80 is incredibly rare because one would have to be 3 standard deviations above the mean (or in the top 0.1-0.2 percent of players), and it’s a representation of the truly, truly elite. But the question becomes what those grades represent. When someone says that a player is an [insert grade], what should we actually expect them to do statistically at the major-league level? Armed with some advanced statistics and z-scores, I went to find out.
