Let us know what you think Hideki Matsui can do in 2012! Add your prediction here!
It’s time to ask ourselves:
Last year, in Hideki Matsui’s offense went from good with the Angels (120 wRC+) to woof with the Athletics (93 wRC+).
Is Hideki Matsui done? Could the 38-year-old be worth another 550 PAs?
I say: uh, yes. Exactly: “Uh, yes.” Because I’m not so sure. And neither should you be.
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As noted by David Appelman yesterday, we’ve begun accepting entries for our 2012 FAN Projections. During the offseason, we’ll feature select players as “targets” for projection.
Today, we look at 2011’s main award winners: NL MVP Ryan Braun, NL CY Young Clayton Kershaw, and AL Cy Young/MVP combo package Justin Verlander.
For the fourth consecutive season, Braun improved both his strikeout and walk rates, en route to a 7.8 WAR.
The left-handed Kershaw cut his walk rate by almost 40% and, at 23, became the youngest Cy Young winner since Dwight Gooden in 1985.
Verlander won the AL Cy Young award unanimously, taking all 28 first-place votes, and — whether because of his excellent performance in the advanced metrics, or merely his 24 wins — took the league’s MVP award, as well.
Click here to cast your 2012 projection ballot for 2011’s award winners.
If over a beer and a ball game, a buddy said, “Paul Goldschmidt will outhit Jason Heyward in 2012″, I would have assumed he had had one too many. With the release of Bill James‘ 2012 projections, the SABR legend said just that as the Diamondbacks first baseman is projected to produce a wOBA of .382.
Having scouted Goldschmidt in July, I came away believing he would take advantage of lesser pitching, but struggle with top flight velocity. If Goldschmidt hits to his wOBA projection, then I greatly undersold his overall hitting ability and he’s on the cusp of becoming one of the top-25 hitters in terms of wOBA in all of baseball based on final 2011 leaderboards.
Goldschmidt video after the jump
Last off season, I looked at the chances of a SP going on the DL. I have finally had time to go back and look at how my predictions fared.
The predictions used logistic regression to find the percentage chance that a pitcher would end up on the DL. I used age, games started in the previous 3 years and how many of the previous 3 years did the pitcher go on the DL. The equation I ended up with was:
1/(1+e^(-z))
where:
z = (.2209)(Years with Trips to DL)+(-0.0040)(GS in last 3 year)+(0.0509)(Age in previous season)-1.7692
Using the equation, I projected the chance that a starter would go on the DL and here is a list of those projections.
The Seattle Mariners are enduring a pretty miserable season. After last year’s stinker, the Mariners have followed it up with a .438 winning percentage and a pace-worthy of a scant 71 wins. Well, buck up West Coasters, because the Seattle Mariners should hit better through the season’s end!
In fact, the Mariners should be hitting a whopping 29% better.
For several weeks now, I’ve been playing with fielding-independent-hitting tools, specifically the aptly-named Should Hit metric.
Should Hit (ShH, for short) has a variety of uses, though its best used as a BABIP regressor. For your perusal, I created ShHAP!, a Google Doc that’s free for the world to download and allows anyone to regress a player’s present season (or any stretch of statistics), according to a different BABIP.
Well, today, let’s put this tool to use and look at the Mariners.
When projections begin to be released, everyone seems to have there own opinions on how the projections are wrong. With Tom Tango just releasing his 2011 Marcel Projections, here is a look back at how some various players performed compared to their 2010 projections.
Yesterday, I went through the formula used for predicting which starting pitchers have the greatest chances of going on the DL in a given year. Now here are the projections for 2011. Besides revealing the list, a few other points and possible improvements to the process will be discussed.
First, here are the five most and least likely starting pitchers (>20 GS and >120 innings in 2010) to go onto the DL in 2011 (creating these projections is still a work in progress, so no one should take too much stock in them right now):
I have been wanting to have this win prediction tool available for a while and finally have what I think is rather simple working model. This spreadsheet can be filled out with the players anyone thinks will be playing, along with their all their stats and then the team’s projected wins will be calculated.
Note: An error was found on the spreadsheet dealing with position adjustment and corrected around 4:30 EST on 11/4. If you downloaded it before then, you will need to re-download it. Sorry for the inconvenience. -Jeff
While it can be used to get an idea of how many wins a team might get in the up coming season, I plan on using it to evaluate changes in a team. Those changes could be a free agent signing, a trade, an injury or a rookie called up to the majors. The team’s expect wins before or after the roster change can be evaluated .
Today, I am not going to do look at any team. I just wanted to make it available and once the Royals sign Cliff Lee, I can see how their expected wins compare before and after the acquisition.
While the Fan Projections have only been available for 1 day, there’s already been well over 4000 ballots cast for batters and 2000 ballots cast for pitchers! These will be open all off-season, so this really is a tremendous start to the project.
Now to continue to keep things lively on the Fan Projection front, we’re going to target 3 or so players each day that we’ll encourage people to project. Then the following day we’ll see if anything interesting happened with those players and give you 3 more players to target.
Today’s targets are: Edwin Jackson, Ricky Nolasco, and Jay Bruce.
