Crowdsourcing Yu Darvish’s 5×5 Stats

Now that Yu Darvish has officially agreed to a deal with the Rangers, we can spend some time looking at his potential fantasy value without worrying that it might all go for naught. None of us really know what to expect out of the big right-hander this coming season, but there’s a reasonable defense for almost every possible outcome. He could take the league by storm like Tim Lincecum did a few years ago, follow in the footsteps of Kei Igawa and be a total dud, or about a million things in between.

Since we do not yet have a player page or fan projections for Darvish, we’re going to use everyone’s second favorite pastime to predict his fantasy value: crowdsourcing. This week we’re going to keep it simple and focus on the traditional 5×5 categories, meaning wins, saves, strikeouts, ERA, and WHIP. If this goes well, we’ll move on to the more complicated ottoneu level stuff in the future. I rounded up what some of the various projection systems had to say about Darvish last week, but I’ll re-post them here to give everyone something to reference.

	W	IP	ERA	WHIP	K/9	WAR
Oliver	n/a	193	2.45	0.99	10.3	6.4
ZiPS	13	194	3.62	n/a	7.8	4.5
CAIRO	14	190	3.44	1.25	7.1	n/a
RotoChamp	15	200	3.33	1.17	8.1	n/a

Remember, projections are not predictions, just a reasonable estimate of talent level. These systems aren’t telling us how they expect Darvish to perform next season, so don’t take them to heart.

The poll below will remain open through the end of the weekend, then I’ll compile the results and present them next Monday. With any luck we’ll get enough responses for the data to be somewhat meaningful, which we could then use to determine an appropriate draft position and auction value. Just to be clear, the questions are asking about the 2012 season only. Happy polling.