CHONE's projections for hitters for 2010 are out
Could the Reds really be better off non-tendering Jonny Gomes, saving the few million bucks, and going with Wladimir Balentien instead? Check 'em out and tell me what you think.
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A lot of players playing a lot of games.
Juan Francisco, 143 games. Wow. Overall, a lot of low batting averages.
Treat playing time estimates as maximum estimated playing time
Those totals are based on past usage (majors & minors), not any knowledge of depth charts.
-j
I write at:
Beyond the Boxscore | Red Reporter | Basement-Dwellers.com | Twitter: @jinazreds
I'm generally not a stats-y person anyways
but Lew Ford > Drew Stubbs? Cozart > Yonder? A lot of that stuff just doesn’t make any sense whichever way you cut it, starting with Heisey as the 7th best hitter in the entire organization.
"And then there was the USAID guy in Kandahar who drove a giant pink Cadillac, which the locals set on fire one day. If you wanted to destroy something symbolic during a riot, you just could not do better than that. Good stuff." - Ghosts of Alexander
These numbers aren't talent estimates
rather they are projections of what a player might be expected to do in 2010. Those are different thoughts. The numbers are simply saying that, based on history, age, etc., this is how we should expect a player to perform at the big league level. Since there is a lot of regression happening, we shouldn’t be surprised to see players who haven’t really played above AA with much lower numbers than we’re hoping for.
Also, a 1-run over 150 game difference isn’t really enough to say who is the better hitter.
Definitely a good argument.
None of the projection systems are high on Stubbs
I think we overrate him some based on how high he was drafted and how good anyone looks compared to Taveras. But objectively, he hasn’t hit or got on base enough to project him as a league average hitter. He got on base 35% of the time in AAA and had problems making contact, with K rates above 25%. I think he’s still a work in progress and has room to grow, but for next year I’d be happy with a .320 OBP.
FTH?
He’s predicting Rosales will play more than Janish?
All Things Bubba: Because how can you not love a baseball player named Bubba?
his system hasn't seen to have taken into account that Jerry Gil is now a pitcher
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
really?
he sure appears to hit like a pitcher
Definitely a good argument.
by Slyde on Nov 15, 2009 6:59 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
rec'd
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
by justin007000 on Nov 15, 2009 7:14 PM EST up reply actions
We go through this every year
so let me be the first to say “playing time is the hardest thing to correctly predict for any projection system.” Do not take the playing time projections at their face value as these systems have no idea who the organization values, who is battling injuries, or who is on the way out or way in with the manager. Either only pay attention to the rate stats or mentally adjust a player for the playing time that you expect.
Definitely a good argument.
Given the numbers projected for Balentien, Dickerson, and Dorn
it might make sense to trade Gomes, depending on how comfortable you are with those projections.
Definitely a good argument.
imagine the talent we could get
for Bailey, Cueto, Wood, Bruce, Dickerson, Stubbs, Phillips, Votto, Harang, Arroyo, Maloney, Heisley, and Masset.
I be we could get some real prospects to build with for the future.
Do it Walt.
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
by justin007000 on Nov 15, 2009 7:17 PM EST up reply actions
Seems a bit too conservative, IMO. I fully expect more power from both Bruce and Votto.
I don’t think I’m a fan of any projection system. I’d rather all the pundits ignore totals and stick to averages. If the averages pan out the way Chone projects, the Reds are in for another year of disappointment.
by wanderinredsfan on Nov 15, 2009 7:14 PM EST reply actions
i like CHONE better than most
but i really prefer to just average them all together and use that number. in the Red Reports we did last year we listed CHONE’s, James’, and ZiPS’. it seems to smooth out the bumps pretty well.
by Charlie Scrabbles on Nov 15, 2009 8:06 PM EST up reply actions
I think there is some value in calculating the totals
so that you can see if a player’s power is because of lower average but high HRs as opposed to a guy that hits a lot of singles and doubles with a high batting average. Also, that will make a big difference for something like wOBA. It’s just important to keep in mind that no system is very good a projecting playing time. That’s just the way it is.
I agree that the Reds are in trouble offensively, especially since the only player that I think might be seriously under based on rate stats is Stubbs, who I expect to be about 20-30 points higher in OBP. Votto and Bruce might have a little more power, but based on those numbers, if Bruce gets 600 PA, he’ll have 31 doubles and 35 HR. That’s a solid projection. I think Votto’s SLG is down in large part because his BABIP drops from .372 to .335, which is realistic. I imagine some of that is expected to lead to a loss of doubles.
Definitely a good argument.
bottom line
a ballclub with only one player with an OBP higher than .350 is going nowhere. simply, the hitters make too many outs.
so sayeth obc. no more need for hitting previews 22 words is all i needed to sum it all up. and i used a stat!
"Nate Silver is a genius" .... BK
can the defense
a rotation of:
Harang
Arroyo
Cueto
Bailey
Maloney/Owings/Wood/Lehr/Lecure/
and a bullpen of:
Coco
Masset
Rhodes
DRH
Bray
and a cast of others
Over come the Reds lack of offense? One can argue that with a little bit of luck the Reds will see more starts from the likes of Harang and Bailey, and less from Wells and Lehr. Assuming that Harang can be a 200+ inning horse that he has been in the past when healthy, and Bailey isn’t a mirage, can this team win with pitching and defense Slyde?
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
by justin007000 on Nov 15, 2009 8:30 PM EST up reply actions
Janish
is projected to hit for more power than Taveras.
He really is our future slugging short-stop!
All Things Bubba: Because how can you not love a baseball player named Bubba?
MLB Network is showing Chris Reitsma's 8 IP, 1 R start from May 8, 2001 right now!
Oh, and Randy Johnson struck out 20 Reds in that game too.
If you think the Reds offense is bad now, at least the outfield isn’t Donnie Sadler, Ruben Rivera, and Alex Ochoa – on May 8th! And Juan Castro is playing 1B. Did I mention this was May 8th? Terrible.
Warning, if you are planning to watch this game while playing the tHom-Diamondbacks drinking game, please have proper supervision on hand.
Definitely a good argument.
what?
You’re not watching the Colts vs. the Patriots?
All Things Bubba: Because how can you not love a baseball player named Bubba?
Well
It’s looking like the Colts will no longer be undefeated…
All Things Bubba: Because how can you not love a baseball player named Bubba?
Can't believe they came back
Holy crap.
All Things Bubba: Because how can you not love a baseball player named Bubba?
You need to get Spellicheck.
"We, as for me all seasons you are affected peculiarly in the edge of my seat and are happy concerning the fact that the Adam Dunn fan has been mixed up exactly." - Reynard-san
by BK on Nov 16, 2009 9:45 AM EST up reply actions 4 recs
i thought you were better than that
stated purely for ironic porpoises.
Yes that was on purpose.
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
by justin007000 on Nov 16, 2009 2:24 PM EST up reply actions
Where were Griffey and Dmitri Young?
Both injured? And Dunn wasn’t up yet? That was a putrid team.
Yeah, those guys and the Cincinnati Reds. They're a terrible football team. / Because they're a baseball team? / Exactly. You know who's the worst football team? The Philadelphia Flyers. - Best Show
by RijoSaboCaseyWKRP on Nov 15, 2009 9:01 PM EST up reply actions
Elmer Dessens was the staff ace
Supported by an illustrious cast of Reitsma, Lance Davis, Jose Acevedo, Osvaldo Fernandez and Jim Brower
Yeah, those guys and the Cincinnati Reds. They're a terrible football team. / Because they're a baseball team? / Exactly. You know who's the worst football team? The Philadelphia Flyers. - Best Show
by RijoSaboCaseyWKRP on Nov 15, 2009 9:11 PM EST up reply actions
don't forget
an injured Pete Harnisch got some starts, along with Brian Reith, Denny Reyes, and who can forget Rob Bell and Scott Winchester, Jared Fernadez, Joey Hamilton,
I just looked up Osvaldo Fernandeze, his number one comp is Micah Owings.
Elmer had a decent run for the Reds in 2001 and 2002. His 205 innings in 2001, made him the last Reds pitcher to throw 200+ innings in a season until Harang did it in 2005. Think about that in 2002, 2003, and 2004 the Reds did not have one starting pitcher who was neither good enough or healthy enough to pitch 200 innings. Due to the Reds my perspective on what made somebody a good pitcher was a little off. I honestly thought Paul Wilson’s slightly below average 2004 was awesome, and he was a true ace.
I was dumb.
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
by justin007000 on Nov 15, 2009 10:13 PM EST up reply actions
Lance Davis through a perfect game
in my MVP Baseball whatever season that was. Oh, and didn’t have massive substance abuse problems, either (that was him, right?)
"And then there was the USAID guy in Kandahar who drove a giant pink Cadillac, which the locals set on fire one day. If you wanted to destroy something symbolic during a riot, you just could not do better than that. Good stuff." - Ghosts of Alexander
by Cy Schourek on Nov 15, 2009 10:57 PM EST up reply actions
I think he was a wife beater
that may have been connected to substance abuse though. he spent 2007 and 2008 pitching for the Long Island Ducks, he was reunited with Reds team mate Danny Graves in Long Island in 2007.
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
by justin007000 on Nov 15, 2009 11:08 PM EST up reply actions
Nice, I was just going to tell people about this. Why's this being replayed?
Just wondering, how cool!
bases loaded walk to lose the game, thanks for coming Danny.
Somebody shoot Mark Grace for me. Up 3-1 and Graves finding every bat or missing the plate by a foot.
Somebody wake me up from this nightmare.
if i have question about WAR that perhaps Justin or Slyde can answer
according to Fangraph’s Arroyo 2009 WAR is only 1.8, his 2008 WAR was 2.4. Overall Bronson threw more innings and had a better ERA and ERA+ in 2009, I know that isn’t true about all his peripherals but I don’t care to look them up.
Is WAR an addition and subtraction stat that goes up and down throughout the season. Like Bronson pitched a bad game so for that day his WAR was -.2, but the next start he dominated and had a WAR of .5 would his WAR than be .3, with those two numbers added together? Rather than averaging those two numbers together giving him a WAR of .05?
Please note that my single game wars are completely made up, i have no idea how much one game can effect a pitchers WAR.
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
Fangraphs bases WAR for pitchers off of FIP
Arroyo’s ‘08 FIP was 4.50. ’09 FIP was 4.78. There’s your difference.
The way it’s calculated is, more or less, to take the difference between a pitcher’s FIP and a replacement pitcher’s FIP in a given year, and then extrapolate that per-9-inning difference to a full season.
-j
I write at:
Beyond the Boxscore | Red Reporter | Basement-Dwellers.com | Twitter: @jinazreds
I think I'm most amused with the fact it says that Gomes will continue to be a platoon player
While I think they’ll treat him as an everyday player early in the season, he’ll play his way into a platoon.
…. a close 2nd for my amusement is a realistic projection (in my opinion) of the real Drew Stubbs, combined with Heisey getting over 400 PAs, and Wes Bankston also getting over 400 PAs.
I know it’s silly to project playing time, and this really drives home the point, in my opinion.
Honestly, everything in the CHONE projections is amusing to me
so the thesis of your argument is you are amused?
"There is no harder thing than to have Glenn Beck outlive your child."-The Onion
by justin007000 on Nov 15, 2009 11:33 PM EST up reply actions
Yes
I should title it “Amused: a closer look at the 2010 Cincinnati Reds through the eyes of CHONE”
And then I need to give a special thanks to Mads, for putting things into perspective
by Highlifeman21 on Nov 16, 2009 10:58 AM EST up reply actions
Yes
Wlad could be a more valuable player than Gomes next year, especially when defense is factored in.
But the problem is, this (along with every other projection system out there) is crap. Completely, totally, worthless crap:
- As Slyde stated, playing time is a guess.
- The projections are based on aggregates – in baseball history, every player of Stubbs’ age and past performance is averaged out, and that’s Stubbs’ projection. So the projection isn’t based on Stubbs, but on players who superficially look like Stubbs.
- Then, when all is said and done, everyone is regressed to average. It is assumed that no exceptionally good or exceptionally bad player really is that good or bad – everyone is more average than their career shows them to be.
Of course, at the end of the year, each of the projection systems will look at players in aggregate, and say “Look, we were right!” Well, duh; the entire league by definition will be average, so unless you screw up the projected league scoring environment, your league-wide projection will by definition match the league results.
This is one area where I think stats guys give themselves way too much credit, especially compared to the scout guys.
"You never know how you look through other people's eyes"
the system is only crap if you expect them to actually predict the future
and I’m not certain but I don’t believe the advanced system regress players to the overall average but to the average of their similar players group. I may be wrong on that though. And technically, this is what scouts are doing to when they project players – “so-and-so reminds me of a skinnier whatshisname.”
I don’t look at the system and say, “Uh oh, Joey Votto’s only going to hit .297 next year.” If someone is doing that, then they are misusing the system. What you can see though is that the realistic expectation for Votto is that we’ll see some regression in his production. Frankly that should be a big “no duh.” What I like about projections is that they remind us that most player’s careers tend to travel along a fairly smooth curve. They help level out the peaks and valleys a bit and give us a baseline of expectation for the player. This is why I also prefer systems like PECOTA and CHONE (eventually), which give us percentile projections, which are essentially error bars on the data.
Definitely a good argument.
Except you are
From above:
The numbers are simply saying that, based on history, age, etc., this is how we should expect a player to perform at the big league level.
I don’t think you can say that with alot of confidence, though, for the reasons I stated.
While a scout may say “Drew Stubbs reminds me of Willy Taveras”, he also might add “but Stubbs really seems to have turned a corner, and has much better plate discipline now” which the projections wouldn’t show.
Yea, I think they regress players to their comps, but again they will by definition look pretty accurate when all is said and done because they’ll compare their projections to the entire league average. What’s worse, in my mind, is that if there is a systematic error in a projection system, there’s no way of identifying it because the entire projection is going to look spot on as long as they assume the right scoring environment for the whole league.
"You never know how you look through other people's eyes"
I forgot to add
You said we “should expect” a player to perform to these numbers – I don’t see any caveats there at all; that makes it look like you are expecting them to predict the future, at least one year at a time.
"You never know how you look through other people's eyes"
the caveat is in the word "expect"
projections are just a guideline for what type of player a player is and what direction he is heading in his career. It’s impossible to precisely project an individual player. So when I say expect, I mean we should expect Joey Votto’s will have a fall off. We should expect that Stubbs’ power isn’t as big as what we saw in the majors this year. We should expect that Willy Taveras will be the shitty player that we know he is. We should expect that Bruce will rebound to some pretty good numbers. Could any of these players blow away their projections? Definitely. You and I both know that is true. The point is projecting a player’s production level based on their age and skill path. There are obviously error bars on this though.
And by no means would I suggest this should replace scouting. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to learn from these projections.
Definitely a good argument.
OK
But I don’t need a projection system to tell me any of that. As much as we love Joey, we all know he isn’t one of the top 5 hitters in the league; we know it’s unlikely Stubbs has 30 HR power; we know Taveras sucks (maybe not as bad as last year, but he’s never been any good) and Bruce doesn’t (because he’s always hit much better than he has last year).
So if that is true, what are the projections telling us? They’re putting actual numbers to what we already know. However, you seem to be saying the numbers can’t be taken with much confidence because “(i)t’s impossible to precisely project an individual player”. So why do the projections?
The other thing I keep going back to is testing the systems to see if they work. Because of how they’re set up, if Stubbs comes out and does become a 30 HR monster, it will be seen only as a new data point, not a failing of the system. The systems cannot fail because they’re measured league-wide. If you took the table in the link above and completely randomize the names, it would still be considered an accurate projection at the end of the year because the totals will look the same.
"You never know how you look through other people's eyes"
yes you know all of this because you follow the Reds very closely
but look at the Twins projections, or the Mariners. There are players on there that you may not know much about. The projections can give you some context on those players. Heck, I’m sure there are people that read this site that think that Bruce’s projection is way out of line or that Stubbs clearly has more power than what the projections show. Just because the two smartest guys on the site (by that I mean, you and me) get it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily obvious. :)
When I say "it’s impossible to precisely project an individual player" I mean that projecting a .297 batting average doesn’t mean that Joey Votto is for sure going to hit .297. It means that given his presumed talent level, normal progression, and normal luck, he’s somewhere around a .297 hitter. However, given the normal volatility of a batting average (or whatever stat you want to pick), he’s not likely to be right on that number but could probably land 30 points in either direction. That’s why I keep pushing the error bars. Maybe you don’t find that useful, but I do. It helps me stabilize what to expect from a player without having to do all of the heavy lifting to figure out things like aging curves and such.
I’m pretty sure the way these things are usually tested is by running a correlation on individual players with a certain level of playing time met (to balance out the normal small sample fluctuation). That’s why you’ll usually see a comparison say something like CHONE has an r-squared of .66 or whatever. So it’s not just a matter of saying the league average is the league average. It’s actually comparing a large group of player’s projections to their actual projections and I don’t believe those sets are aggregated first, at least I would hope they wouldn’t be.
That being said, the best projection systems still only get two-thirds of the way there. There is still a lot of noise, but honestly it’s a helluva lot better than I would do if I tried to project what every single player in the league was going to do in 2010.
Definitely a good argument.
yeah, thanks for stating clearly what I was trying to say.
"And then there was the USAID guy in Kandahar who drove a giant pink Cadillac, which the locals set on fire one day. If you wanted to destroy something symbolic during a riot, you just could not do better than that. Good stuff." - Ghosts of Alexander
by Cy Schourek on Nov 16, 2009 10:33 AM EST up reply actions
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