Brandon Belt, Freddie Freeman, First base xRBI

Check out the first baseman end of season rankings. Brandon Belt hit .280 with 18 homers and nine stolen bases. He was the 15th first baseman, worth almost ten dollars. Freddie Freeman hit .276 with 18 homers and three stolen bases. He was the 21st-best first baseman, worth under five bucks. Huh.

You know why they ended up on different ends of the spectrum, of course. Partially because Freeman was hurt a bunch this year, and partially because the Braves offense was Lilliputian, the Braves’ first baseman had 128 runs plus RBI, while Belt had 141. It may not be fair that Belt was worth twice as much as Freeman because the Braves offense was no good, but it happens.

Let’s take the team stats out and re-run the rankings.

Turns out, Brandon Belt and Freddie Freeman were both equally hurt by team factors, as they both move up nine spots in the rankings once you take out runs and RBI. Belt’s home park may have something to do with this.

Do you know who moves up the most in this ranking? Marwin Gonzalez. Marwin. Gonzalez. He moves up 19 spots to 15th because he hit 12 homers and stole three bases and had a decent average. Amazing.

Other teams that penalized their first basemen: Reds, Angels, Padres, and Rays. To some extent, these things may be true again next year. As good as Joey Votto is, he can’t get on base in front of himself. If you want him to be *better* next year, you’re basically depending on Billy Hamilton to improve. The other three have ballpark problems that won’t be fixed any time soon.

The flip side finds players in good offenses in good parks. Baltimore, Texas, the American League Chicago team, and Texas gave the biggest boosts. But you already knew that it’s good to get good players in offensive parks.

There are a few that move up and down based on playing time concerns, and in that way, Runs and RBI are also proxies for playing time and plate appearances, as well as team quality. It’s not *only* about teams.

And much of this is baked into projections. Projections consider past injuries and try to project future games played based on past games played. They also consider team projections when putting together Runs and RBI — teams in nicer run environments, or with stronger lineups, will beget bigger Runs and RBI projections.

But there is one last wrinkle. Teams do not sequence their events equally or equitably. Things happen randomly, and sometimes a team will give one batter more chances with runners in scoring position. Because of that, Jeff Zimmerman once created a way to project runs and RBI based on a player’s own stats and place in the lineup and quality of the team around them.

Let’s do this for the top 30 players because it takes some time to figure it all out. Here are their xR, xRBI, actual R, actual RBI, and the difference between the two. You’d have to call this the team luck factor, since these players played to a certain level on a certain team and somehow over- or under-performed their team stats.

Oh boy. No player underperformed his expected RBI total more than Joey Votto last year. Just going to leave that there, really.

It is interesting that Edwin Encarnacion, despite being great, underperformed the lineup around him. They scored over five runs per game, and he was right in the heart of it, and that’s good enough for crazy numbers.

Those two will have comfortable projections next year, so it might not matter. But Prince Fielder was probably better than his ranking, considering the Rangers should have given him almost fifty more runs and RBI combined this year, given his walk and homer totals, their general run scoring, and his position in the lineup.

Oh and look at that. Freddie Freeman actually over-performed given his team situation. His problems were mostly injury-related, it looks like. He’s certainly no Joe Mauer.

Team factors are incredibly frustrating. Not only do we have to think about the player and his true talent, but we have to consider how the team will change around him, and how that player will fit the team’s lineup. And, it turns out, we have to consider that the interaction between the team and the player in the past might have been uneven. Certainly the Rangers did more for other players than they did for Prince Fielder, and that seems like something to consider next year in drafts.