Estimated Booms and Busts

It’s simply too early to determine how accurate “rest of season” (ROS) projections are. Just like when a player makes weak contact but hustles down the line, a lot can happen. Take Aaron Judge for example. His Steamer ROS projection for home runs is 12. If he came back from injury tomorrow and stayed healthy the rest of the year, you can bet he would outperform that mark. But, we don’t know when he’ll come back and we don’t know if he’ll stay healthy when he does. This type of uncertainty is what makes projection systems projection systems and in truth, what makes baseball fun. With that uncertainty in mind, we can still learn a lot from what has happened so far and what may happen moving forward.

For this exercise, I took steamer pre-season projections, steamer ROS projections, and year-to-date values and ran them through our auction calculator (12-team, default settings). I then added ROS and year-to-date together and compared that with pre-season. By doing this I’m trying to determine which players we can expect to exceed their expected projection and which players we can expect to fall short. Here are the top five players to exceed expectations:

Someday, a book will be written about Shohei Ohtani that may give us a better sense of what he is actually doing. On a daily basis, I see headlines that exclaim he’s once again done something that has never been done. It’s a great time to be a fan. Corbin Carroll is on his way to nearly multiplying his preseason projected value by six. Ketel Marte is one I did not expect to see on this list. The auction calculator showed Marte having negative z-scores in every category except for his batting average. So far, he’s returned positive value (YTD) in every category except for stolen bases, he only has six bags this season. ROS is still not exactly favoring a rebound from Marte and his expected stats:

• AVG: .295 xAVG: .278
• SLG: .526 xSLG: .459
• wOBA: .385 xwOBA: .360

tend to agree. Still, he’s been hitting second in a very potent lineup and has already matched his 24 total barrels from 2022 in the young(?) season. Adolis García has come back down to earth somewhat when looking at his 2023 rolling wOBA:

but he has posted a wRC+ above 115 in every month of the season so far. He won’t do it but by “Games Played %”, he’s on pace for 39 home runs and 12 steals. But let’s just say he keeps his BB% trending in the right direction and starts stepping on the stolen base gas. Could he be a 20-20 player?

There’s not much to write about Ronald Acuña Jr., like Shohei Ohtani, that hasn’t already been written elsewhere. Their projections were good and they are on pace to beat out those really good projections. It doesn’t really matter for fantasy purposes because you either have them or you don’t and you probably won’t find anyone willing to trade.

Now, let’s flip to the players who are not expected to meet their expectations by this procedure. These are the players who need to be called into the office, who may be hiding an injury, and who may just not be what we thought they were:

Oneil Cruz and Aaron Judge had big expectations heading into the season and they both are hurt with no real timetable for returning, although it should be sometime this season. The time they have both lost will, particularly in Cruz’s case, make them miss their expected mark. Like Cruz and Judge, Mitch Haniger has been hit, once again, with injury and won’t be able to meet his expected, though still very low, value. It’s a shame not only for Haniger but for fantasy managers who drafted with the hope of a resurgence. Another injured player at risk of not returning value is Tyler O’Neill, who hasn’t played since early May due to a bad back. His power/speed combination is what made him valuable. Lastly, Jose Miranda has spent too much time in AAA to be gaining any value. He’s batting .257 with only three home runs in AAA and doesn’t seem to be on the fringe of a call-up. Each of these players, except for Judge, has likely been dropped from your roster for good reason.