Each year, baseball fans and commentators across the nation make bold predictions about what they expect in the coming year. They frequently make outlandish claims like “Adam Dunn is going to hit 50 home runs in Comerica Park!” or “This is the year that Joe Mauer finally hits .400!” but such predictions are far more likely to be high than low. Sure, if you said Jose Bautista was going to summon greatness going into 2010, you looked pretty smart, but anyone who predicts performance seriously knows that you need to hedge your bets. While frequently accused of being overly pessimistic about whoever your Home Nine are, on average, they land high about as often as they land low. This field of “projection systems” grows by the year, but there are significant differences between them. Today, I’ll evaluate their 2011 projections for hitters and pitchers.

Firstly, lets peak at the candidates:

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ERA estimators estimate how well a pitcher pitched in the present, and pitcher projections estimate how well a pitcher is expected to pitch in the future. Naturally, we’d expect projections to more-accurately predict pitchers’ future performances, since that’s what they’re designed to do. But it appears that ERA estimators can figure future performance quite well — and SIERA, in particular, has actually done a better job projecting pitcher performance that than traditional projections.

Projecting pitchers is harder than projecting hitters. Not only do pitchers’ skill levels change often, but simply estimating a pitcher’s skill at any given time is challenging. Differentiating their performances from that of their fielders’ — and removing luck — are difficult tasks necessary to isolate pitchers’ true talent.

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Major League Baseball’s labor market is unlike any other. Seven billion dollars of revenue enter baseball’s coffers annually, and while nearly half goes to player salaries, the vast majority of that is skewed towards the 25 percent of major-leaguers who have at least six years of service time.

Andy Van Slyke once told our own David Laurilia, “I think that baseball, at its core, is the purest form of capitalism that we have in our society.” For an economist who also admired Van Slyke growing up, hearing that statement aged my heart a few months. Fewer statements could be further from the truth. Between the artificial oligopoly limited to 30 teams; a draft determining which one of these 30 teams is allowed to employ players for the entirety of most of their careers; and the reserve clause, baseball’s labor market is largely an artificial remnant of the Collective Bargaining Agreement that’s in place.

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The Major League Baseball Players Association and owners of Major League teams have just completed a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, as the previous agreement expired this December. One of the most underrated differences being discussed among the many changes is how the two sides resolved “compensation” for teams that lose free agents. The previous rule in recent years stated that when a player is ranked as an elite (“Type A”) player by Elias, the team that signs him forfeited their first or second round draft pick to the player’s previous team, and the player’s previous team picked up an additional “sandwich” pick between the first and second rounds as well (as long as the previous team offered salary arbitration to the player). When a semi-elite (“Type B”) player signed with a new team, then the previous team only received the sandwich pick, but no pick was transferred between teams.

On its face, it sounded like a fair gesture to maintain parity, but it really only served one main purpose—to act as a restraint on salaries and drive down the prices teams would pay for players on the open market. The “compensation pick” that a team forfeited when they sign a new player is actually what economists would consider a tax. When an employer has to surrender something valuable other than salary (cash or otherwise) to hire an employee, this has the effect of suppressing salary offers.

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Philadelphia Phillies skipper Charlie Manuel is expected to decide soon that Roy Oswalt will be the fourth starter for the club heading into the postseason. The decision obviously would come at the expense of 23-year-old standout Vance Worley, whose rookie season has made some folks in the City of Brotherly Love wonder if he’s the real fourth ace in this star-laden rotation.

Certainly, Manuel’s decision would have been expected in April when the Phillies entered the season with Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels and Oswalt on staff; but a flurry of ineffective starts — and two trips to the disabled list — have marred Oswalt’s season. Worley, meanwhile, now looks like the guy who should have been manning that fourth spot all along. His ERA is 3.00 — compared with Oswalt’s 3.66 — and Worley’s defense-neutral estimators all are about a third of a run better than Oswalt’s, as well.

So should Oswalt really be such a lock for that start? Well, here’s the way to tell: Tell both pitchers to warm up, and then put the radar gun on the 34-year-old’s fastball. If it’s above 91.5 mph, put in Oswalt. If it’s below — well, you know the answer.

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1. What is SIERA? Sounds like xFIP to me. Give me one sentence on it.

SIERA is an estimator of what a pitcher’s ERA would be with average luck, defense, and park, by looking at other pitchers with similar strikeouts, walks, and ground ball rates in recent seasons, and goes a step further than similar estimators by accounting for the BABIPs and HR/FBs of similar pitchers.

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Please leave questions about SIERA in the comments to this post. I will respond to as many as possible in a follow-up post soon. Thank you all for your interest.

SIERA is now available at FanGraphs, and several important changes have been made to improve its performance, as discussed in parts one, two, three and four. Still, there were some components that I didn’t adopt. For the sake of completeness — and for those interested in what I learned about pitching along the way — I include these in the final installment of my five-part series.

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SIERA’s updated version was unveiled Monday at FanGraphs, and as part of the release, I’ve been taking readers through its ERA-estimation process. I’ve written about SIERA’s ability to predict BABIP and HR/FB, and then I broke down its formula and structure. But like any good analysis, it needed to be tested against other estimators.

So far, the results are pretty conclusive. In fact, SIERA might be the best tool yet to help us understand and better-interpret pitching performance. Read the rest of this entry »

Who’s up and who’s down? Which pitcher will improve upon a stellar season, and who is headed for the trash heap? SIERA and xFIP attempt to answer these questions from year to year, but they’re not totally interchangeable metrics. Why? The biggest difference is the way each uses strikeout rates.

That’s not to say that the two statistics don’t generally say the same thing. In fact, they’re much more reliable – and calculated much differently – than traditional ERA. For a quick example, take a look at the top 10 pitchers in all three metrics during the past four seasons.

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