Lowrie and Encarnacion: Injuries and Projections
Over the past few days, Eno Sarris has been rolling out our consensus ranking for players at various positions. To create my rankings I used ZiPS rest of season stats to compile my rankings. The only time I changed my ranking was because of expected time lost on the D.L. For some players who are having a good 2012 season (Josh Reddick, Jed Lowrie, Allen Craig, Edwin Encarnacion and Trevor Plouffe), my rankings are lower than most people expected. Today, I am going to look at one cause for a player to be out performing his projections: injuries.
Note: I will be looking at lack of past playing time and a measurable change in talent for the other two causes for a player out performing there projections.
Injuries and how they relate to player performance are one of the few last few frontiers in sabermetric studies. This off season, in two separate studies, Mitchel Litchman (MGL) and myself looked at how injuries affect a hitter’s performance. In MGL’s study, he looked at players who went on the DL and how they performed. He found that hitters under performed their SLG in the year of the injury, but the rest of their traits stayed constant. In my study, I looked at players who played through injuries without going on the D.L. and found the same conclusion. In the year after the injury, the player exceeded their projected power numbers.
In my article for FG+, I highlighted 5 hitters (Chris Young, Adam Dunn, Andre Ethier, David Wright and Jason Heyward) who were expected to out perform their projected power because of injuries in 2011. Here is each player’s projected 2012 SLG from ZiPS and their actual 2012 value:
Name: Projected SLG, 2012 SLG, Diff
Young: 0.435, 0.401, -0.034
Dunn: 0.429, 0.502, +0.073
Ethier: 0.447, 0.491, +0.044
Wright: 0.447, 0.563, +0.116
Heyward: 0.427, 0.497, +0.070
On average this season, these 5 players are seeing an increase in the SLG by 54 points. Lowrie and Encarnacion fall into this same situation for 2012.
Encarnacion lost time because of injuries 5 different times last season (wrist, toe, back, left shoulder x 2). He just could not keep himself healthy all year. His 2010 and 2012 power numbers look similar, even though he was also hurt in 2010.
Year: PA, HR, ISO
2010: 367, 21, 0.238
2011, 530, 17, 0.181
2012: 356, 23, 0.293
Besides only missing 3 days for a bruised hand, he has been healthy so far in 2012.
Lowrie only had one main injury in 2011, a sore left shoulder that never seemed to fully heal. Here are all the various instances when he missed games because of the injured shoulder.
May 31, 2011: Missed 1 game (left shoulder injury)
June 9, 2011: Missed 2 games (shoulder injury)
August 8, 2011: Missed 45 games (sore left shoulder)
September 6, 2011: Missed 2 games (left shoulder injury)
September 19, 2011: Missed 4 games (sore left shoulder)
Like Encarnacion, Lowrie had a productive 2010 season that mirrors his 2012 season.
Season: HR/FB%, ISO
2010: 11.4%, 0.240
2011: 4.8%, 0.129
2012: 11.9%, 0.207
2010 and 2012 are almost mirror productions in the power department. He significantly produced better in those 2 seasons than in his injury plagued 2011 season.
Another way to verify if a player is losing any power is to look at their average flyball and home run distances at baseballheatmaps.com. Here are the average distances for the two players:
Encarnacion
Year: Average Distance (ft)
2010: 293
2011: 279
2012: 291
Lowrie
Year: Average Distance (ft)
2010: 298
2011: 268
2012: 282
In both cases, it can be seen that the hitters had suppressed power for the 2011 season. This lower power level led to their projections being suppressed for the 2012 season.
I don’t just use projections as a hard and fast evaluator of talent, but for these power rankings, they are an unbiased approach to get an idea of how players similar to current player have performed in the past. With no known projection systems incorporating injuries into their values, fantasy owners have to do a little leg work and try to find the group players who may have their projections lower than their actual talent levels. They can then buy low on these players.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
Um, you have “Encarcinon” in the title. Looks like you have his name right in the article though.
Thanks.
Can we please stop posting about every little typo on fangraphs? If there is an error that actually makes the article difficult to understand, by all means bring it to the attention of the author.
And speaking of typos, can we also stop all the criticism towards the grammar on this website? This is a website for baseball analysis, not an academic journal. This is analysis, not journalism. The assumption that every author here ought to have a high level of education in English grammar is absurd, not to mention very classist. Some of these analysts might not even be writing in their first language. Go read ESPN and SI if you want your sports analysis to come from journalists.
Most excellent.
(did I just quote Bill & Ted? Damn I’m old.)
San Dimas High School Football Rules!
My fantasy draft(keeper league), was the day after David Wright was announced as having an injury in the spring. Needless to say, after owning him the last couple of years through his many maladies, I cut him loose. 20/20 hindsight I wish I had kept him, These things have so many variables, and with information being so unreliable, I doubt we will ever improve projections much beyond where they are. It has to be more about managing risk.
Let’s try this from the not glass half empty approach the klick clack used above: use projections as one of many useful tools, and make the best decision you can, cutting Wright loose at the time made sense. Projection systems and sabermetrics continue to expand their ability to recognize, define and analyze different characteristics in the game of baseball. There’s been talk of a Field F/X system, we (the public) may never see it, but that would a big step forward in defining a players defensive value which is no doubt very useful to big league clubs when evaluating players. While that doesn’t apply to fantasy, it’s still pretty cool. Further, taking risks in fantasy baseball is one of the things that makes it so damn fun. I’m loving the trade I made that landed me E5 this year, always thought he had it in him!
Nice article Jeff, thanks
Encarnacion is a tough project here, most critically he’s moved from manning the hot corner more often than not to now primarily DHing and backing up at first base. getting out of the field has got to dramatically affect a player’s injury-risk status.
I’m a bit confused – if the projections are suppressed, shouldn’t you rank the players higher than ZiPS would rank them?
I think that’s why his rankings were so much lower than everyone else’s on Lowrie and Encarnacion. He had picked a few guys out whose projections were affected by injuries but he didn’t find everyone, which is why Encarnacion and Lowrie were ranked lower. That’s how I understood it.
I appreciate the explanation, but bringing it back full circle, if you are willing to modify your projection for players who expect to lose time on the DL, why not modify in the other direction when a player’s PT projection is clearly thrown off due to health, a starting spot, etc? These are external factors that the projection system cannot know.
Take Lowrie for example — you have him ranking as the 32nd best SS. This is obviously due to the the fact that ZiPS RoS only projects 48 GP and 186 AB in the second half, resulting in very meager counting stats (21 R, 6 HR, 21 RBI).
However, we all know that PT projection is very unrealistic, he’s healthy, he’s got a starting gig and now is regularly hitting 2nd or 3rd meaning he will get more PA/GP. If you bump his PT by 50% to a more reasonable 72 GP and 279 AB, and simply prorate the projection, he bumps up to 32 R, 9 HR, 32 RBI. These numbers would put him solidly in the 10-15 range with guys like JJ Hardy, Alexei, Seager, etc.
Another FG post also highlights the changes in Edwin’s swing mechanics. That is something that probably shouldn’t be over looked.
Also, bravo to the Blue Jays coaching staff. They’ve made and resurrected careers of Jose Bautista, Colby Rasmus and Edwin Encarnacion in short order. If only they could get some pitching to round that team out, they’d be the Canadian version of the Texas Rangers.
It is coming in the change in talent article. I was looking at combining all 3 articles and it was a mess.
I’d much rather see projection sites provide their estimates based on a full season of plate appearances for every player. If you want to provide a health risk factor and a playing time risk factor great…but do it separately. This gives us risk numbers we can alter using our own feel for each players health and potential playing time opportunity. It’s not like a computer model can project those two categories with any useful degree of certainty anyway.
Disagree. Zimm in particular has had success with pitcher DL projections, and health seems like a demonstrable and age-related skill. Why project Nelson Cruz for a full year when he never does that?
Chris Young is also injured this year, so he should have been taken out of the discussion, particularly given his power before and after the DL stint.
Do any of projection system attempt to recognize possible changes in true talent by searching for the typical signs of false positive results? (i.e. BABiP spikes, HR/FB increases without accompanying FB distance increases, unchanged contact rates, etc.) If not (and I’m not very knowledgeable about projection systems) It seems like a projection system could pretty easily incorporate some of the analysis we do independently and give more credence to recent performance where it’s due. Looking forward to the change in talent article.