Looking Back at Some 2010 Marcel Projections
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.
First, here are the top ten projected hitters by wOBA for 2010 and how they actually performed:
The projections overestimated a on a few players (Mauer, Sandoval, Ramerez, Rodiguez), underestimated on some others (Votto and Holliday) and was fairly close with the rest. When looking at the average of the 10 hitters, the number of home runs projected and actual ended up exactly the same at 27. Yep, dead on.
The hitters did under performed their projected wOBA by 0.016. With this small sample of 2010 data, Marcels pin pointed the home run total and were a little optimistic with projecting wOBA.
Besides the hitters, here are the top 10 projected pitchers according to their ERA:
These pitchers did much better in 2010 as group compared to their Marcel projections when looking at their counting stats. They averaged 1.5 more wins across the board along with a almost 40 strikeouts. The key here was that the group was generally healthy throughout the season. Removing one pitcher pitcher from the group (subtracting 13.5 wins and 190 strikeouts from the total) numbers puts the win total almost exactly on projected value and the strikeout closer in line. This group of pitchers is relatively young and healthy and may not need to be regressed as much to the league average.
On the other hand, the ERA value was about identical (3.29 vs 3.27). The pitchers’ overall talent is farirly predictable with a system like Marcels, but the ability to predict the inning pitched is much harder.
As a whole Marcels held up pretty good when looking at 2010 projections and the actual results of the top hitters and pitchers. The key is for other projection systems to take projecting a step further and fill in the extra information that Marcels doesn’t include.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
Kind of bizarre to see Jair Jurrjens on the list of top 10 projected pitchers but not Cliff Lee.
I am pretty sure Lee was #11, but yea, the list of pitchers was a little weird.
It’s because he started the season injured.