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.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Might actually be an interesting point of reference to include in player results. Similar to one reference point of ADP vs the range of picks.
I am kind of shocked to see David Wright on the small standard deviation list. Are we all weighting his 2009 year against his earlier performance in the same way?
Is anyone shocked at seeing two Yankees, and David Ortiz (Beltre too I suppose) at the top of the standard deviation list?
I’m not too shocked. Ortiz has age/performance concerns, AND he’s on a polarizing team. Beltre and Granderson are similar in that they probably had a set of projections made while on offensively challenged teams.
Almost any yankee or red sox player wouldn’t shock me to have above-average std dev.
Wright is somewhat suprising. I guess the range for his anticipated bounceback is pretty small.
Well, there are 3 Phillies and 3 trendy fantasy hype cycle young players also. Is it possible to differentiate from what people thought of beltre before and after finding out he would play half his games in fenway? Granderson’s power number projections might have a similar bias from ballpark change.
Yep, the system captures all that stuff, so it’s possible to see. I’ll take a look, but probably not until tomorrow.
Didn’t the player’s projection pages have a list of fans who liked the team and fans who didn’t affiliate with the player’s team? I think it would also be interesting to see those demographics and if that played much of a factor with the more polarizing teams like the BoSox and Yankees.
When are the CHONE pitcher WAR totals going to be added to the projection pages?
Looks like more than a few hopeful Phillies fans voted.
Or other hopeful NL East fans 🙂
It’s funny that Victorino tops the list. Rollins and Howard have been all over the map the last 3 or 4 years, but Victorino has been pretty consistent.
It would be interesting to see if the std. correlates with the difference between Team Fan’s wOBA and Other Teams Fans’ wOBA.
I disagree on Sandoval too, his wOBA will be around 500 by seasons end. Mostly because he’s just a gamer and having fun out there.
None of the guys on the larger SD list surprise me. 3 Phillies, 2 Red Sox, and 2 Yankees are no surprise. There’s good reason for the other 3 to be full of SD as well.
Several of the guys on the small SD list are more surprising. Adam LaRoche coming off his “tale of two seasons” year, Aaron Hill coming of a career high wOBA, David Wright coming back from a power-drought. Seems there should be more disagreement about what these guys are.
I doubt you’ll do this but i think another fun article like this would be doing this for entire teams. I’d wager 10 bucks the 3 highest Std teams would be NYY, BOS and PHI.
There seems to be some prevailing “logic” that these teams have high std because they have a lot of optimistic/bandwagon/unreasonable fans. I would hazard a guess that the anti-fans of these teams have as much if not more to do with it. They are just polarizing in general, leading to a mix of half full and half empty projections, opposed to simply measuring how much water is in there to begin with.
I’m just happy you included the caveat that fan projections may not be normal. It would be even cooler if you ran some tests and plotted some CDFs one of these days. Down with the Gaussian!
I would almost guarantee that they are going to be normal. How much of a skew could you expect?
The average standard deviation is .017 based on David’s note. So, if you have someone with a .330 wOBA, the normal distribution would say that 68% has him at .330 +/- .017.
How much of a skew could you get? That the median/mode would instead be at .340? That’d be pretty hard to do.
I will guess that the median/mode would be within 1% of the mean in most, if not all, cases.