Archive for the 'Season Preview' Category

In an annual tradition for the Replacement-Level Yankees Weblog, they plugged their CAIRO projections into depth charts from the terrific MLBDepthCharts.com, and came up with some early expectations for the upcoming season:

Replacement Level Yankees Weblog - CAIRO v0.6 and Still Too Early 2011 MLB Projected Standings

Jim Edmonds is off to a fast start with the Brewers after sitting out all of 2009. Not that long ago we had a good debate about his HOF candidacy. With more than 500 votes, the poll that went with that HOF post has him at 56-to-42 against his deserving the HOF.

Anyway, in looking more at Edmonds numbers I have concluded that he has had a really weird career. I'm going to post a long list here, of all players since 1901 to play in 1900 to 2000 games. Bear with me for putting a long table here, but pick up my commentary at the bottom.

I've set the default sorting to name, but remember that you can click any column heading to re-sort the list.

So we have here 67 players who played in between 1900-2000 games, excluding further games that active players will appear in. Plus, two players (Lajoie and Leach) played some before 1901 and those years are not included here.

You can play along at home at re-sort the table above in the following ways:

• Sorting by hits, Edmonds is in the bottom half of the pack at #38 out of 67. His hit total is similar to those of Claudell Washington, Chet Lemon, and Benito Santiago. Those guys were not bad players, but it's certainly not HOF company. Incidentally, the guy with the fewest hits in this group is Lenny Harris, who of course appeared in many games as a pinch-hitter. He had a similar number of games and similar BA to Jack Clark but almost 800 fewer hits than Clark due to a much smaller number of plate appearances. Many of the other players towards the bottom of the list were catchers, whose game totals may have been boosted by coming in as a late-inning defensive replacement without getting a full game's worth of PAs. Paul Blair fits that bill as well.
• Sorting by OPS, Edmonds is 4th overall, behind only Walker, Giambi, and Piazza. This isn't too meaningful, though, as its partially a product of the era in which Edmonds played. After all, the top 8 guys all played as recently as 2000. This sort of search doesn't calculate OPS+ which is too bad because I suspect Edmonds would be further down the list.
• Sorting by strikeouts, Edmonds and Dave Kingman are way out in the lead. Interesting, in fact, that in a similar number of games and PAs, Edmonds and Kingman have similar RBI totals, despite Edmonds playing in a higher-offense era.
• Looking at triples, do you believe that in a similar number of games, Edmonds has fewer triples than Lance Parrish, Tony Pena, Brad Ausmus, and Jim Sundberg? Wow.

Jamie Moyer has been named the Phillies fifth starter and that gives him a very good shot at being the oldest player to start a game in a long time.

Here are the oldest players (age as of June 30th of that year) to start at least one game in a season since 1901:

I took the list as far as Moyer himself last year. Assuming that Moyer does actually start a game this year (which now seems very likely barring an injury) he'll jump to the third oldest guy to start a game. Since he probably won't start in the first couple of weeks, he'll likely be about 47 years and 140 days old when he does start.

Check out the oldest pitchers in individual games (as with all box score searches these days, this is 1920-1939 and 1952-present). The full list is here. Moyer should slot in around #42 or so depending on exactly when he starts. If he sticks in the rotation for the whole season, he could place as high as 28th, as he'll be a bit older than Jack Quinn was in his 1931 start.

I got curious about possible matchups Moyer could have this season against other older starting pitchers. His best shots, Randy Johnson and John Smoltz, are not likely to pitch this year. (Johnson definitely not and Smoltz probably not.) There's a remote possibility Moyer could faceoff with 43-year-old Tim Wakefield. Other outside shots include Paul Byrd and Pedro Martinez. Too bad he's teammates with 38-year-old Jose Contreras.

NOTE: This is my attempt to predict the standings for the 2010 MLB season using Tom Tango's Marcel projection system. For NL East projections and more background info on how these projections work, go here. Other division projections: NL Central, NL West, AL East, AL Central.

1. Texas Rangers

What a typical Texas World Championship season looks like:

2. Los Angeles Angels de Anaheim

What a typical Angels World Championship season looks like:

3. Seattle Mariners

What a typical Seattle World Championship season looks like:

4. Oakland Athletics

What a typical Oakland World Championship season looks like:

2010 Playoff Projections
Standings:

ALDS:
Yankees over Rangers
Red Sox over Twins
NLDS:
Cardinals over Phillies
Braves over Dodgers
ALCS:
Yankees over Red Sox
NLCS:
Cardinals over Braves
World Series:
Yankees over Cardinals

NOTE: This is my attempt to predict the standings for the 2010 MLB season using Tom Tango's Marcel projection system. For NL East projections and more background info on how these projections work, go here. Other division projections: NL Central, NL West, AL East.

Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: This is my attempt to predict the standings for the 2010 MLB season using Tom Tango's Marcel projection system. For NL East projections and more background info on how these projections work, go here. Other division projections: NL Central, NL West.

1. New York Yankees

What a typical Yankees World Championship season looks like:

2. Boston Red Sox

What a typical Boston World Championship season looks like:

3. Tampa Bay Rays

What a typical Tampa World Championship season looks like:

4. Baltimore Orioles

What a typical Baltimore World Championship season looks like:

5. Toronto Blue Jays

What a typical Toronto World Championship season looks like:

NOTE: This is my attempt to predict the standings for the 2010 MLB season using Tom Tango's Marcel projection system. For NL East projections and more background info on how these projections work, go here. For NL Central projections, go here.

Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: This is my attempt to predict the standings for the 2010 MLB season using Tom Tango's Marcel projection system. For more background info on how these projections work, go here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone loves projected standings at this time of the year, since it gives us another baseball-related topic to argue about before the games start to count for real in a few weeks. With that in mind, I thought I'd throw another batch of projections out there to join the great work by Sean Smith, Baseball Prospectus, and others. The projection system of choice? Marcel the Monkey, of course, since it's completely open-source, surprisingly accurate given its simplicity, and at the very least should provide a decent sanity check against other, more sophisticated methods.

The other component of any team-projection method is allocating playing time, and for that I used a great site that's only been around for a year or so, called MLB Depth Charts. They offer downloadable depth charts in spreadsheet form, updated every day, so you should definitely check them out (the set I used was from last Thursday, 3/11/2010). I allocated playing time based on how teams over the past 3 years had used their players: AL teams gave 90% of their outs to their 9 starting batters and top 4 bench players, NL teams gave 84% of their outs to their top 8 hitters and top 5 bench players, teams in both leagues gave 31% of their pitching outs to their top 7 relievers, etc. This method isn't perfect, but it's also fairly accurate without me having to introduce any biases into the process, which was important if this was going to be done in the spirit of the Marcels (motto: the "dumbest" possible projections).

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