Welcome back to another edition of the Pod hitter projections. Today I’ll look at one of last season’s biggest surprises, Asdrubal Cabrera. The primary contributor to this breakout was his power surge, as his ISO jumped to .187 and HR/FB spiked to 13.3%, both career highs. He was just 25 last year, so based on age alone, one might believe this is sustainable. Let’s dive into my projection and the thought process behind it.
On Monday, I posted an introduction to my forecasting method for hitters that I developed to help me in my fantasy leagues. I do not actually project any statistics besides the five fantasy categories and those that lead to the calculation of them. As a result, no walks and on base percentage, doubles and slugging percentage or wOBA from me. So just a heads up if anyone wanted to hear what OPS I am projecting, sorry, but I have no projection!
Since I am going in alphabetical order in my projections and haven’t gotten very far, I have decided to start with Dustin Ackley. He is quite the interesting player to project as Jeff Zimmerman is not a fan and Chad Young suggested fantasy owners pass on him and wait for Jason Kipnis later. Early mock drafters aren’t overly optimistic, as his ADP sits at 133, which is the beginning of the 12th round 11th among second basemen.
For the past 10 years or so, I have generated my own projections to use for my fantasy baseball drafts. As you can imagine, the spreadsheet has become more complex every year as I have incorporated more and more formulas in an attempt to increase the precision. Unlike the projection sets you are familiar with, such as ZiPS, CAIRO, Bill James, etc, I don’t actually have a system. It would be fantastic to have the programming and mathematical chops to be able to develop a full-fledged system that takes previous year’s stats and a host of other factors into account and instantly spit out a projection. Unfortunately, my method is very time consuming as I literally project every player by hand, poring over countless metrics on FanGraphs, ESPN Home Run Tracker, StatCorner, and Rotoworld, and in Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster.
