FanPost

Individual Player Actual Production vs. Projections YTD



I meant to get this up yesterday during the off day, but I had a couple of things come up (work. What a drag.) that made this take a while longer to get done than I had hoped.

With all of the gnashing of teeth over Lee and Ramirez and the pleasant surprises out of the outfield, I was interested to see just how our team had fared to this point versus the pre-season projections. I used Bill James for the projection numbers, and, in the interest of full disclosure, I was a little lazy and didn't factor in any reached on errors into my wOBA calculations, so they may be a touch low for a couple of guys that have reached on errors so far. All disclaimers aside, see the chart below.

NAME
Projection wOBA Difference %difference
Castro xxx 0.399 xxx xxx
Lee 0.386 0.303 -0.083 -21%
Ramirez 0.375 0.222 -0.153 -41%
Soto 0.362 0.385 0.023 6%
Byrd 0.335 0.373 0.038 11%
Soriano 0.346 0.430 0.084 24%
Fukudome 0.349 0.398 0.049 14%
Theriot 0.319 0.298 -0.021 -6%
Baker 0.346 0.293 -0.053 -15%
Fontenot 0.334 0.335 0.001 0%
Colvin 0.316 0.400 0.084 27%
Nady 0.347 0.304 -0.043 -12%
Hill 0.289 0.204 -0.085 -29%

For those of you who aren't familiar with wOBA, see a good, easy explanation here.

The weighted average of the wOBA for the players listed above to this point is .342 for those of you that are wondering. The league average is typically around .335. I put Castro's numbers in there mainly for curiosity sake. There is a small sample size issue here still, but the kid is off to a GREAT start.

Now a couple of things stand out to me here. First of all, our outfield is flat out mashing. When you have a guy in Colvin with a .400 wOBA sitting behind three other guys, you have a pretty strong OF. This probably won't continue all year, but these guys are significantly outperforming expectations. Soriano specifically is having a fabulous year so far. Let's hope that he keeps it up. The only other two players on the roster that are outperforming their expectations are Castro (he didn't have a number, but he is certainly outperforming what would have been projected) and Soto by a slim margin. The gaping holes are obvious and everyone knows about them. Even knowing this, though, I was surprised at the gasping sucking sound coming from our third baseman. That is epic under performance right there. Surely it can't continue. Right? Anyone? Bueller?

One other observation. Given the lack of walks and lack of doubles power from Theriot, even his high batting average places him well below the team average of .337.

I thought this interesting information and thought that some of you might be interested as well, so I wrote it up and posted it a day late.

Discuss away.

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