Fan Projections: Not All Fans Agree

As you might have guessed, not all baseball fans agree when it comes to evaluating baseball players, and the Fan Projections are a great example of how many different opinions there are of various baseball players.

If you look at all the players’ projected wOBA and the spread of how individual people projected wOBA, you get a standard deviation of about .017 on average. What this means is that assuming the Fan Projections have a normal distribution (which may not be the case), about 68% of the fan projections are within +/- .017 of the fan average when it comes to projecting wOBA. Over 600 plate appearances, that works out to about +/- 8.5 runs above average (wRAA).

It’s particularly interesting to see just which players fans happens to be more or less in agreement about, so here are the top 10 regular players with at least 50 votes where the fans agree the most:

                  wOBA      Std   Votes
Adam LaRoche      .350     .009      65
Brian Roberts     .358     .010      65
Aaron Hill        .348     .011      77
Juan Pierre       .316     .011     107
Bobby Abreu       .365     .012      89
David Wright      .396     .012     153
Matt Holliday     .396     .013      99
Todd Helton       .388     .013      51
Felipe Lopez      .333     .013      71
Ryan Zimmerman    .376     .013      81

With these players, people seem to have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Keep in mind that every additional .001 of wOBA ends up as an extra .5 runs above average over 600 plate appearances.

Here are the top 10 players people disagree on the most:

                  wOBA      Std   Votes
Shane Victorino   .350     .024      65
David Ortiz       .362     .024     105
Ryan Howard       .388     .023     107
Pablo Sandoval    .384     .022     113
Alex Gordon       .364     .021      49
Alex Rodriguez    .418     .020     263
Jimmy Rollins     .342     .020      92
Justin Upton      .393     .019     102
Adrian Beltre     .345     .019     151
Curtis Granderson .376     .019     137

With all of these guys – just on batting alone and not even looking at defense or playing time – you’re looking at at least a +/- 1 win difference within one standard deviation assuming a minimum of 600 plate appearances.

As the ballots keep coming in, we’ll continue to look at the Fan Projections in various ways. There really is a wealth of data in these projections that goes beyond just what goes into the single projection line on the player pages and hopefully we’ll all be able to learn a lot from them.