PECOTAs are out! Wooooooooo!

DMZ · February 1, 2008 at 7:54 pm · Filed Under Mariners 

I know this shows what a dork I am, but the PECOTA forecasts are out! Even if you’re not a fan of Steve Goldman and Dan Fox, subscribing to BP is worth it just for PECOTA season.

Fun stuff. Random notes:
* Bedard’s 2008 puts him at about +4 wins over a replacement pitcher, making him the 10th-most-valuable pitcher in baseball.
* Jones’s 2008 puts him at about +2 wins over a replacement player, and his comps are not qhat I’d expected: Steve Hosey, Chet Lemon, Larry Hisle, and Jack Clark
* Jones’ upside, which is a measure of his potential over the next five years, is 198. That’s the 19th-highest for hitters in all of baseball
* All of baseball
* It’s just behind BJ Upton and ahead of Curtis Granderson
* Bedard’s is 232, the 7th-highest pitcher number, and just ahead of Felix.
* Jones’ total contribution in 2008 is the highest of any Mariner hitter

Okay, I’ll stop with the Jones stuff. What else…hitters:
* PECOTA still hates Ichiro. I look forward to the annual “you know, I think this year it might be right” post.
* Clement comes off better than I thought he might
* Sexson bounces, but not too high
* Lopez’s line is ugly
* Wilkerson’s at .232/.326/.420, a big step back from Guillen’s 2007
* Vidro hits .282/.346/.373 which is even lower than I guessed at in the “Projecting the 2008 Mariners” post a week ago
* Balentien’s line as a major leaguer is bad
* Small steps back for Beltre, Johjima, Betancourt, Ibanez
* Bloomquist is mercifully left off

As a team, the current lineup looks like it drops 10 points of OBP and 20 points of SLG. Dropping the Ichiro forecast, it’s maybe 5 points of OBP and 10 points of slugging — so offensively, they drop a game in the standings.

Pitchers:
* Progress for Felix
* Little bit of regression for Putz
* HoRam is listed as “swing” and is bad
* Washburn and Batista both go badly (150 IP of worse than 2007)
* Silva’s line is uuuuuuuuugly. Really ugly. How bad? It’s about where Jeff Weaver’s 2008 projection is.
* Sherrill’s the third-best pitcher on the team at +13 runs over replacement (making him+Jones just shy of Bedard’s contribution)

Overall, with Bedard, it’s a low-walk, low-K staff with about a 4.50 ERA, and only one serious groundball pitcher in Felix (only one seems like an odd projection, I’ll have to think about that more). The pitching side improves, but on the whole it doesn’t improve much at all. 30 runs, maybe? I’d have to go crunch that one out — I can’t eyeball pitching stats the same way I can the offensive numbers. It might be less of an improvement, if you threw the defense in there to get to a runs-per-game number.

Anyway — yeah, check it out. I love PECOTA forecasts, and totally recommend them for your forecast needs. Nate does a great job, and I look forward to the more formal player cards. If nothing else, they’ve always served me well in thinking about comparable players, development paths, and giving me a point to challenge my own conception of a player. When the cards come out, even if you don’t normally read BP, it’d be worth a month’s subscription just to be able to browse those things.

Comments

65 Responses to “PECOTAs are out! Wooooooooo!”

  1. Karen on February 2nd, 2008 2:29 pm

    DMZ said in #10: “…That Bedard is ahead of Felix doesn’t mean that Bedard will have a better career from here out, but that the best case for him over the next five is better than Felix’s. That’s reasonable, when you consider where they both are in their careers.

    So, are we supposing the benefits of that 5 years of “better than Felix” will be in a Mariner uniform, or will Bedard toil for the M’s for 2 years and just split?

    (making Bavasi’s negotiating skills even less impressive than they already are)

  2. joser on February 2nd, 2008 3:42 pm

    Well, I’m pretty sure Derek was talking about it from the point of view of the pitchers, irrespective of whatever uniform(s) they might be wearing over that span.

    Of course if Bedard is worth trading away all that young talent, you’d like to hang onto him for more than two years. Since the deal apparently hasn’t happened yet, we don’t know if there’s an extension involved as well. In fact that may be part of what is holding it up, particularly if (as rumored) Angelos also has been trying to get Bedard to take an extension to stay with the O’s. At this point I just have to throw up my hands in bewilderment, because I can’t recall a trade hanging around in semi-public limbo for as long as this one has. (Players holding out into spring training while negotiating a contract, sure, but stalling as a concious tactic doesn’t make much sense here). Even the Texas-Yankees ARod trade, including the abortive detour through Boston and the Player’s Association lawyers, didn’t take this long. I think we have to conclude that the comhination of Angelos and Bavasi is like some perfect storm of negotiational constipation.

  3. 300ZXNA on February 2nd, 2008 3:51 pm

    maybe Bavasi and Angelos are so out of it they think they are in the NBA and are trying to do a sign and trade . . . wouldn’t shock me.

  4. gwangung on February 2nd, 2008 4:38 pm

    Given Bill Gates, Paul Allen, et al…tell me again WHY is being a nerd an insult?

  5. msb on February 2nd, 2008 4:45 pm

    what are JJ’s Pecota numbers? will it be worth heading out to “J.J. Putz Soul Patch Night” in ’08?

  6. scott19 on February 2nd, 2008 6:38 pm

    53: Well, that strategy seemed to work out (at least somewhat) last year for Vancouver’s Canucks — who managed to trade about seven games worth of Todd Bertuzzi (and his baggage) to the Florida Panthers for four years worth of Roberto Luongo.

    Not a bad haul if you can get it, I’d say…but yeah, the old “sign-and-trade” can sometimes be a tricky proposition.

  7. JI on February 2nd, 2008 7:35 pm

    Via VEB:

    “For the growing number of baseball executives bent toward statistical analysis, a certain anticipation builds every off-season for the release of what is known simply as Pecota, Baseball Prospectus’s überforecast of every player’s performance the next season. Most front offices have an employee who consults it – particularly during the free-agent season.

    No organization uses Pecota in a vacuum, instead incorporating it with other projection techniques like traditional scouting reports. . . .

    “Everyone in baseball is in the guessing business,” the Mariners executive Dan Evans said. “This makes it a little bit less of a guess.” ”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/sports/baseball/13score.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

  8. gwangung on February 2nd, 2008 7:46 pm

    “Everyone in baseball is in the guessing business,” the Mariners executive Dan Evans said. “This makes it a little bit less of a guess.” ”

    Hm.

    I don’t know quite what to say to that.

  9. doorbot on February 2nd, 2008 8:01 pm

    Sorry Derek, I just noticed that using the old rough estimate of 10 runs equals one win you’d get the same wins over replacement as in your post.

    If anyone is interested, PECOTA has 5.3 WARP for Jones and 6.0 WARP for Bedard. That’s supposed to include defense, which Upside includes as well.

  10. doorbot on February 2nd, 2008 8:02 pm

    Sorry Derek, didn’t mean to imply anything. I had just noticed that using the old rough estimate of 10 runs equals one win you’d get the same wins over replacement as in your post.

    If anyone is interested, PECOTA has 5.3 WARP for Jones and 6.0 WARP for Bedard. That’s supposed to include defense, which Upside includes as well.

  11. JMHawkins on February 2nd, 2008 10:00 pm

    Given Bill Gates, Paul Allen, et al…tell me again WHY is being a nerd an insult?

    No, no, no. It’s “geek” that’s not an insult. Nerd still is. Geeks can do math, nerds can’t.

    “For the growing number of baseball executives bent toward statistical analysis, a certain anticipation builds every off-season for the release of what is known simply as Pecota, Baseball Prospectus’s überforecast of every player’s performance the next season. Most front offices have an employee who consults it – particularly during the free-agent season.

    But, um, isn’t free-agent season pretty much over by the time PECOTA comes out? I guess they could use last year’s numbers.

  12. gwangung on February 2nd, 2008 10:38 pm

    No, no, no. It’s “geek” that’s not an insult. Nerd still is. Geeks can do math, nerds can’t.

    So…they’re saying Dave and Derek can’t do math??? Given this blog????

    I’m getting confused…

  13. JMHawkins on February 3rd, 2008 12:07 am

    So…they’re saying Dave and Derek can’t do math??? Given this blog????

    Dave and Derek can do math, making them geeks, not nerds. Geeks can do math, nerds just dress funny. Dave and Derek dress fine. Well, I’ve never seen what Derek wears on a long ride, so I’ll leave a caveat in there. If he looks like an Italian soft drink can on a bicycle, he could be both…

    Oh, as far as

    “Everyone in baseball is in the guessing business,” the Mariners executive Dan Evans said. “This makes it a little bit less of a guess.”

    I’d prefer crap shoot to guessing game. “Baseball’s a crap shoot. This just gives you a little bit better idea of the odds.”

  14. Breadbaker on February 3rd, 2008 1:16 am

    While I think there is some regression toward the mean in BP’s system, players are also assumed to follow a particular progression that is based on assumptions about aging as well as relating to the progression of their most comparable players. It’s not as simple as “up until 27 and then down later,” but takes into account that most players lose speed and gain power as they age, for instance. Outliers like Ichiro become really hard to predict in such a system. I also wonder if they have had to adjust their system based on juicers. If Mark McGwire is a comparable for you at an early age, but you’re not a juicer, I’d imagine you were more likely to have less power over time, but less likely to simply fall off the shelf and retire.

  15. Evan on February 4th, 2008 4:07 pm

    We’ve talked about Ichiro’s projections here before. The distilled version is that the only player like Ichiro is Ichiro, and by reaching way out to find comparable players, it does him a disservice.

    The disservice is in only looking at players since 1956. I think you’d find some good comps for Ichiro in the deadball era (Hall of Famer Willie Keeler, for example).

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