Evan Carter Teaches Us a Lesson About Projected Values

The season is barely over, but we are already on to 2025, and some of the most useful tools for Ottoneu managers are out to help us. Early Steamer Projections are out and Justin Vibber has pulled them into the first push of the Ottoneu Surplus Calculator (SC) which means we have some early, rough values on players for 2025.

How much should we rely on those values? Not very much. Early Steamer projections will be missing a lot of context (like where some players are playing, what roles will look like, and what players won’t be ready for Opening Day) and the default values in Surplus Calculator are rough. They’re designed to be easy to create and easy to use, so Justin is able to share something, but even he’ll tell you he doesn’t use those values for his auctions or keepers or arbitration.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a little bit from these early projections and values. I set out to find some surprising or at least interesting projections and I did – Ronald Acuña Jr. projected to be a top 5 value in just 133 games! Corbin Carroll back in the top 10 OF! And then I stumbled on Evan Carter.

Evan Carter looked like a solid $10 OF a year ago and he had a pretty not-great 2024, so you would expect his projections to reflect some concern. Injuries limited him to 162 PA (note that is PA, not games) and even those 162 PA were not good. After posting a small-sample .435 wOBA in 2023 (and a .398 wOBA in the post-season), Carter slumped to a .278 wOBA this season. That brought his career numbers (regular season only) down to .327.

That’s still pretty good. Only 60 hitters qualified for the batting title while posting a wOBA better than .327 in 2024.

Yet, if you go look up Evan Carter in the Surplus Calculator, you’ll see a big fat goose egg in the “value” column.

That’s right, $0. Zero (0) dollars. That’s not at all what we would expect from a young hitter with a brilliant debut and a pretty decent 299 career PA, including post-season. Why is Steamer so low on Carter?!

Well, Steamer really isn’t that low on Carter. Steamer projects him for a .322 wOBA. That isn’t great, it’s not even up to his career levels, but it’s not $0-level-bad. Here are a few other guys with similar wOBA projections:

Interesting, right? That’s a bunch of dudes with similar values ($7-$8), then Bellinger, Carter, and Vaughn as outliers. So what gives?

One is that not all wOBA’s are created equal. wOBA is the best easily-accessible stat to use for a short-hand for Ottoneu values – it effectively measures a players rate of production utilizing weights very similar to the weights used to calculate points in Ottoneu leagues. But those weights aren’t exactly the same.

Here are three extremely different hitters who all had very similar 2024 wOBA:

Ottoneu points are linear-weights based and yet these three guys put up the same linear-weights production by wOBA but not by points. The gap in in how those players achieved their wOBA.

Raleigh was the most prolific power hitter of the bunch, but had the worst OBP and a horrific batting average. Arraez had a great average and very good OBP, but no power. Abrams had a similar OBP to Raleigh, but a much better average, though less power. But he had way more power than Arraez and he stole the most bases.

wOBA valued all of these guys at the same level, but Ottoneu Points didn’t because Ottoneu points, relative to wOBA, favors hits over walks, HR over all other forms of getting on base, and SB over…uh…not stealing bases.

So go back to that list of projected 2025 values. Not all wOBA is created equal and Carter doesn’t have the power Stanton or O’Neill have, but it’s not like Jake McCarthy is a 30-homer threat. Carter, however, also doesn’t run like McCarthy. So that could explain why wOBA is the same but Ottoneu production isn’t. But I think there is something else at play.

That could be position eligibility, of course. Being 1B only has to hurt Andrew Vaughn. But Juan Yepez is also 1B only and Carter is an OF – which is a pretty weak position these days, I think.

When looking at Arraez, Raleigh and Abrams I compared wOBA to pts/PA and that was intentional. wOBA is a rate stat that effectively measures how much a hitter is producing each time they step to the plate. Two players with identical rates, but over different numbers of PA, will have the same wOBA (assuming each player literally has the same number of hits, doubles, triples, HR, walks, etc., etc., etc., just pro-rated to their number of PA). So wOBA will most closely relate to a per-PA measure of Ottoneu scoring.

But Ottoneu value is derived from points per game. This isn’t hard to understand. Go back and look at Raleigh, Arraez, and Abrams. Which of those three do you want? With just those numbers, you can make a case for Raleigh or Abrams. But what if I told you Arraez had nearly 4.5 PA/G while Abrams was under 4.4 and Raleigh was at 4.1? Suddenly their P/G get much closer, with Abrams still at the top, but Raleigh falling to third and Arraez in the middle.

So let’s add three columns to that earlier table comparing 2025 projections:

Now that is interesting. Every one of those players is projected for 4.19-4.39 PA/G, except Carter, who is down at 3.82. Justin tells me that if he boosted Carter to 4.2 PA/G – no other changes, no improved stats, just an extra 0.38 PA per game – Carter becomes a $5 player.

So is he a $0 player or a $5 player. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Is Steamer accurately projecting that Carter will be a platoon bat, regularly pulled from games before his 4th PA and certainly before a 5th? Or will he hit lefties enough to get over 4 PA/G when he starts? If the former, he might be a $0 player. If the latter, he might be $5 (per Steamer, at this point, anyway).

And, to be frank, none of us really know that. Bruce Bochy might have an idea, but the rest of us are just guessing and your guess is as good as mine. But it makes a big difference.

Of course, this isn’t specifically about Carter. All projected values have this baked into them. Every player has a projected statline and that translates to a projected pts/PA and every player has a projected PA/G that can be merged with their pts/PA to create a pts/G projection and that can finally be used to create a value. Add in positional eligibility and all the assumptions made by the person/system creating the projections and the person/system translating those projections into values and…woof, there is a lot of variability there.

Be sure to be aware of that when you look at any projected value.