Bubbly Second Halves

by
July 16, 2008

Dave showed us the other day a group of pitchers due to regress over the remainder of the season based on some quite unsustainable numbers. Here we are going to look at what should be expected of some hitters, projected to have good to great years, that struggled prior to the all star game festivities. As you saw last night I called upon the in-season Marcel to evaluate what Edgar Renteria’s second half and updated seasonal line would look like, and that same projection spreadsheet will be called upon right now.

The reason is that the pre-season projections are based on actual data representing the true talent level of a player. So, if someone expected to OPS .900 only posted a .700 in the first half, it does not mean he will continue to be in the .700 range all season. Based on what we know about the player we would expect him to have a better second half; however, his projection for this season would be updated to an OPS lower than the .900 thought to be accurate before the season.

I looked at the projections entering this season and found ten guys thought to be capable of posting an OPS higher than .820, who posted counts at least 70 points worse in the first half. The numbers below will follow the format: projected OPS, actual OPS to date, difference. There may be more than the following players fitting the aforementioned criteria but, for now, I decided to profile these ten:

Miguel Cabrera: .966, .837, -.129
Ryan Howard: .965, .832, -.133
Paul Konerko: .862, .687, -.175
Robinson Cano: .844, .643, -.201
Ryan Zimmerman: .826, .718, -.108
Ryan Garko: .826, .668, -.158
Todd Helton: .889, .783, -.106
Derek Jeter: .830, .740, -.090
Alexis Rios: .823, .737, -.086
Nick Swisher: .826, .754, -.072

By virtue of having high expectations and falling well short, these ten players are all expected to have better to much better second halves of the season. Here is their projected second-half OPS, followed by their updated seasonal count:

Miguel Cabrera: .936, .879
Ryan Howard: .932, .873
Paul Konerko: .825, .757
Robinson Cano: .797, .708
Ryan Zimmerman: .810, .771
Ryan Garko: .776, .716
Todd Helton: .854, .816
Derek Jeter: .804, .766
Alexis Rios: .798, .764
Nick Swisher: .808, .777

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Of these ten players, the only one whose updated seasonal OPS would come within 50 points of his pre-season projection is Nick Swisher; his OPS was projected to be .826 and is updated to .777. Cano, Garko, and Konerko (is Konerko what you get if you combine the names Cano and Garko?) are all updated to have an OPS over 100 points lower than they were prior to the season. Cabrera, Howard, and Helton should all have very good second halves and they are the only three on this list whose updated seasonal OPS would clock in at over .800. All ten of these players should perform better than they did in the first half but they are also very likely to finish the season worse than we thought they would.





 

Eric is an accountant and statistical analyst from Philadelphia. He also covers the Phillies at Phillies Nation and can be found here on Twitter.

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