Carlos Santana: The Case of the Accurate Projections

It seems as though Carlos Santana has been all figured out. I don’t mean that opposing pitchers have figured him out — that certainly isn’t the case. While pitchers struggle to get him out, various projection systems have him absolutely pegged.

The following table is a combination of various pre-season projections as well as his final line. The accuracy is pretty remarkable.

	AB	R	RBIs	HR	SB	AVG	OBP
Bill James	532	86	91	25	4	.261	.383
ZiPS	499	80	78	22	6	.246	.361
RotoChamp	520	93	83	21	5	.267	.385
2012 Actual	507	72	76	18	4	.252	.365

Everyone give a cap tip (and a follow) to our friend Dan Szymborski. He and his system came the closest to Santana’s actual numbers, but none of the projection systems were too far off base.

The important thing to draw from this is that Santana hit close to what many thought. Though he did take a step back in the power department, his strikeouts decreased as well. Even with the dip in the slugging percentage, Santana continued to bring value with a jump in both batting average and on-base percentage.

His OBP was helped by a mere .2% increase in BB%, his 16 point jump in batting average helped buoy his OBP. The question comes down to what really caused the increase? An similar increase of 15 points of BABIP is sure to help, but that brought him up to a .278 BABIP, still 20 points below the league average. This of course could all just be statistical noise, part of the random variation that occurs when dealing in single season sample sizes, but I think there is more going on here.

There was one — admittedly quirky — statistic that Santana was very nearly at the top of, and that is F-Strike%. In all of (qualified) baseball, only Mark Teixeira had a better rate of first pitch strikes. Santana’s F-Strike% of just 50.6% meant that he basically had a coin flip scenario as to where or not the at-bat would be 0-1 or 1-0. When it went to 1-0, Santana hit .282/.435/.444. When down in the count at 0-1, he fell to .218/.301/.368. Given that the league average when ahead 1-0 in 2012 was .270/379/.443 and when behind 0-1 it was a mere .226/.265/.346, its clear that Santana was above league average in both situations.

His careful batting eye helped him get ahead in the count more often than all but one other major league player and what he did when ahead 1-0 was above average. While his power waned a bit, most of his counting numbers as well as his AVG and OBP were right in line with most of the pre-season projections. It’s hard to be disappointed in the result when you had such a clear picture from the start. Santana proved that he is a well above average hitting catcher and he figures to be an important part of any fantasy league going forward.