The Astros According To PECOTA (Part 1)
by CRPerry13 on Feb 9, 2012 12:38 PM CST
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Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus released the first 2012 iteration of their annual stat projection system, PECOTA. Please note that this is a projection system, not a prediction system. It's a fine line and sometimes BP writers get huffy when PECOTA is incorrectly labeled.
As the release of the inaugural PECOTAs are always, for me, a momentous occasion on par with Christmas, Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I gleefully neglected work and family to fire up Microsoft Excel to wade through the prognostications.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with PECOTA, it's a baseball stat projection system named after Bill Pecota, as average a player as there ever was. The projections are based on quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and super string theory, where the end result is a collection of stats that represents the weighted average of the different calculation iterations.
For the type of people who fight Saber Boy for a living, what this means is that the projections represent the most likely performance of a player. I'm done trying to explain it. If you want to know more, Google is available.
Anyway, I dove into the Astros' PECOTA projections, starting with the hitters, and my comments are below.
NOTE: The article image has nothing to do with the Astros or with this article. I just thought it looked funny.
- PECOTA lists Carlos Lee at 200 pounds. I've heard of people being in the best shape of their life at Spring Training, but dang. If PECOTA is right, Carlos Lee now only weighs 30 pounds more than Jose Altuve and makes Chris Snyder look like Goliath at 220 lbs. Maybe all of the misplaced mockery from the Astros.com message boards finally got to him? Carlos, man, it's time to pick up the hamburgers again or we'll have to change your nickname to El Caballito.
- Chris Johnson is projected for 54 plate appearances. We spent last week discussing if Johnson is primed for a breakout and should get the majority of the starts at third base. If PECOTA is correct, then Johnson is headed back to AAA. I'm going against PECOTA on this one. CJ will get at least 55 plate appearances.
- Catchers are only projected for 307 plate appearances. This projection implies that the Astros will be playing catcher-less for about half of the season. While of dubious legality, this is certainly a strategy that has never been tried before, and it should be interesting to see if the ploy is successful. Perhaps the Astros will play Downs and Paredes at third simultaneously in lieu of a catcher, in order to negate infield defensive problems.
PECOTA also includes a fun section of player comparisons. Based on the player's projections, the algorithm looked at players who have had similar seasons in the past and lists the top three "comps". Below are some fun comps from the 2012 projections.
- Brett Wallace's top comp is Justin Morneau
- Fernando Martinez' top comps are Nick Markakis, Dwight Evans, and Dominic Brown. I hope PECOTA is right.
- Jimmy Paredes' top comps include Ryne Sandberg and Dave Roberts
- Jose Altuve's top comps include Paul Molitor and Roberto Alomar. We shall see.
- J.D. Martinez' top comps include Gary Matthews, Sr. and Adam Lind
- Matt Downs top comps are Kelly Johnson, Ryne Sandberg, and Brandon Phillips. Somebody please remind me why this guy isn't getting regular playing time?
If anybody would care to dispute these projections, post it in the comments and at the end of the year we will see who is smarter -- Man or Machine. Or sophisticated baseball algorithm. Whatever.
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I just noticed this
But apparently, Paredes is projected for a break-out, but under-performing season. It’s going to be a confusing year, folks.
Playing with out a catcher might be interesting. I mean the only down side is the ump has to retrieve the ball on every pitch and we better not allow a base runner or they will have free reign on the bases. But other than that, I think it could provide a nice little offensive boost for our team. Plus the extra infielder/outfielder depending on the batter should improve our defense.
Miss-placed Houstonian living and going to school in the wilderness of Wyoming.
No No No
no catcher until a batter has two strikes , or a there is baserunner. Until the then the catcher is a roamer – or plays first – maybe set up between shortstop and third
Couple of problems though – There will some bruised umpires.
The time it takes to put on and take off the equipment could slow down the game.
If there is not a rule requiring a catcher , then there will soon be one.
Astros fan for life
by Joe in Birmingham on Feb 9, 2012 9:35 PM CST up reply actions
Maybe
PECOTA is far more advanced than we realize and is projecting that Wandy will be traded at the deadline for a catcher and that catcher will take the other 300 PA. If that’s the case, we just need to figure out which team has an extra 300 PA projected at catcher and PECOTA will tell us Wandy’s destination.
(I know BP says PECOTA is a projection system not a prediction system, but they probably don’t realize how powerful it is either.)
by Hal J on Feb 9, 2012 11:44 PM CST up reply actions 1 recs
Blocker
Since he’s already decked out in body armor, let’s put the catcher right in front of the plate. When the pitch comes, he dodges out of the way and if the batter swings, he goes for the block. That might do wonders for ratings.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. If they get mad, you're a mile away AND you have their shoes.
Bugs Bunny was able to pitch and catch when he went on to defeat the Gashouse Gorillas.
by MadMartygan on Feb 9, 2012 1:10 PM CST via mobile reply actions 3 recs
Baseball Prospectus says that they have made radical changes to PECOTA this year, and they believe they will have a “unique” or unconventional set of projections compared to other projection systems. As I understand it, their new projections give more weight to a player’s earlier performance than most systems. I won’t hazard a guess as to whether this will improve the accuracy of their projections.
In recent years, PECOTA has fallen behind other projection systems, as well as more simplistic Marcel forecasts, in terms of accuracy compared to actual results (as measured by various studies). I think B-Pro is searching for some changes to set their projections apart from other systems and perhaps (if they are lucky) improve their accuracy when studies of projection systems are conducted in the future.
I don’t pay much attention to “playing time” projections. If I want to use the projections, I will look at the rate stats projections. But none of these systems are good at projecting a player’s usage—-not much better than guesses. I don’t think the creators of these systems would argue very much with this statement. (The playing time projections wil affect “team projections,” of course.)
Base on what you have told us about PECOTA, I think we can tell that B-Pro’s W/L projection for the Astros will be really, really bad.
It’s hard to take you up on the “machine vs. man” challenge without seeing the actual projections. I will say this:
I project that Carlos Lee will not get his weight down to 200 pounds.
I think the odds are that at least one of two, Altuve and Martinez, will have a batting average above .275 and I think the chances aren’t bad that both will.
I project that Altuve won’t grow 2 more inches in height.
haha
Most of my comments were tongue-in-cheek, I’m sure you’ve noticed. I love reading BP for their writing, but I haven’t noticed that PECOTA has been particularly accurate except in the most obvious cases. The playing time projections are obviously garbage, evidenced by the catcher thing.
I’m going to look at Runs Scored and Runs Allowed in part two. I can say that the Astros are projected to score 601 Runs, which is 14 less than last season.
I think Bourgeois leads the team in stealing bases.
Follow my ramblings on Twitter .
by Timothy De Block on Feb 9, 2012 1:47 PM CST reply actions
Quintero
Need I remind you…stealing bases is one of his five tools.
by Its Gonna Happen on Feb 9, 2012 4:15 PM CST via mobile up reply actions
I second that.
The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world.
by Stupendous Man on Feb 9, 2012 9:04 PM CST via mobile up reply actions
Love the post. Especially the catcher projection. It’s so crazy, it might just work. Maybe if the pitchers throw hard enough they can get the ball to bounce back off the backstop?
Fernando Martinez’ top comps are Nick Markakis, Dwight Evans, and Dominic Brown. I hope PECOTA is right.
Seriously? God, I’d love to see it. I like me some Markakis (something about that sounds dirty) and Brown and Evans are great comps to have. Don’t know if I see Altuve as a Molitor or Alomar, but he may get close. He’s definitely the type that could prove a lot of folks wrong to judge him on his size. You know, “three apples tall” and all that. #smurfy
Keep it coming, man. I’m digging it.
"Up your butt, Jobu."
by Wrigley Faithful on Feb 9, 2012 7:22 PM CST reply actions
That is a good article by Bill James….but it is long, probably too long. In talking about Dwight Evans, it highlights a long time James theme—that players who do many things well, but are not the best at one thing, are underrated. He was one of the first writers to identify Biggio as a future hall of famer, for that very reason, that is, Biggio does many things well.
Also, he makes in depth comparisons of Evans with his peers, which includes Cesar Cedeno. James says Cedeno is “Hall of Fame caliber”, refers to Cedeno’s prime Houston years as a "hall of fame glide path,’ and ultimately concludes that Cedeno, Dave Parker (another peer), and Evans are Hall of Fame worthy, but that Evans’ case is better than the Cedeno and Parker.
Dwight Evans played CF for the Red Sox in the original RBI Baseball on the NES.
by Reverend Koosh on Feb 11, 2012 6:46 PM CST up reply actions
Oh, and I linked to your post on my site. I’m all for promoting good blogs.
Shameless Plug for TCB from TGOG
"Up your butt, Jobu."
by Wrigley Faithful on Feb 9, 2012 7:50 PM CST reply actions
What is with the player comps.
Three of our players are compared to Hall of Famers, one of which being a bench player on a 100 lose team. Another, who couldnt go a whole season without being sent down is being compared to an MVP. Sounds like we should be headed up quickly and that our entire coaching staff should be fired.
When I saw the Justin Morneau comp for Brett Wallace, I refrained from asking whether that was pre- or post- concussion. Well, I guess I quit refraining .
Jimmy Paredes and Ryne Sandberg? That’s not a comp that immediately came to mind.
As for Altuve and Paul Molitor…..well, Jose needs to start taking some walks to make that comp look good. Molitor had a career 9% walk rate and was consistently over 10% in his best years with Milwaukee.
Actually, the Downs comp to Kelly Johnson makes sense to me. (But Sandberg and Phillips? Not so much.)
I’ve always found PECOTA comps to be more a cause for giggling than serious consideration.
I think the comparables are for a single season. So Altuve’s projection might be comparable with Molitor’s worst season. My guess is that Altuve’s comparable is Molitor’s rookie season, where he went 73-6-45-30 .276. That’s pretty close to what PECOTA projects Altuve for this season.
I’ve always found PECOTA comps to be more a cause for giggling than serious consideration.
Exactly. “We’ve been PECOTA’d.” mlb network could do a spin-off of Punk’d. That’s what cable networks do, after all. And it would beat seeing yet another repeat of “The Nine Best Double Plays in the AL Central, 1983.”
Good post.
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Houston Astros
Monday, May 28, 2012, 2:10 PM CDT Wandy Rodriguez vs Juan Nicasio Sunny. Winds blowing in from center field at 5-10 m.p.h. Game time temperature around 70. |
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NL Central Standings
| W | L | PCT | GB | STRK | |
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St. Louis
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23 | 24 | .489 | 4 | Won 3 |
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Houston
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15 | 32 | .319 | 12 | Lost 12 |
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