I think we had some fun with these community projections last year, so I figured we would do them again for 2008.
Kicking things off will be Jay Bruce, timely since he had a profile piece written on him by John Fay yesterday:
Jay Bruce was in Cincinnati to accept Baseball America's minor-league player of the year award.He wore his Sunday best - tailored suit, white shirt, tie. Adam Dunn jumped on the chance to apply the needle.
"Why didn't you just wear your normal stuff?" Dunn asked. "Why you gotta try to impress everyone?"
"I'm getting the minor-league player of the year award," Bruce replied.
"When I got my award, I just wore my usual stuff," Dunn said.
"Was it for the Reds organization or all of baseball?" Bruce said.
Touché.
Bruce is pretty much a can't miss now to be a solid regular, the real question is just how good he'll be. The ceiling for the guy is higher than anyone the Reds have had come along since Adam Dunn.
Which as an aside, and I hate doing this because I think the steroid what if game is pretty dumb, but isn't Adam Dunn a little more valuable and impressive now? Unless you think there's even a 1% chance of him having used something (I guess anything is possible).
But anyway, I think Jay Bruce is going to put up some pretty impressive numbers in the next few years. He hit a ton of doubles last year, and it's not crazy to think some of those might leave the year once he finishes filling out. 40+ home runs a year doesn't seem impossible, and I'm sure playing in Great American will benefit him. But that is eventually. In 2008 he might struggle, and it's hard to tell how much playing time he'll get.
I'm going to project him at .270/.320/.510, with 19 home runs, 45 RBI, and 4 stolen bases, and make that in about 105 games. I could see him surprising me with the average, but with the strikeout numbers he put up in the minors I could see him struggling to make contact a little bit. I also could see the Reds starting him off at AAA and then limiting him against lefthanders once he is up with the team.
Leave your projection for the same stats as above (AVG/OBP/SLG / HR / RBI / SB / Games) (and add commentary saying why you feel that way) and we'll get them accumulated and tallied up.