Archive for projection

I semi-recently had the honor of presenting at PitcherList’s PitchCon online conference, which raised a good chunk of money for Feeding America. My presentation, “ERA Estimators: Past, Present, and Future,” discussed, well, exactly what it sounds like. Over three posts, I will recap and elaborate upon various talking points from the presentation.

However, if this does happen to be your first exposure to ERA estimators or you are familiar with them but don’t necessarily understand their innards, then I hope you find this launching-off point beneficial.

ERA Estimators, Part I: Past

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A month before the season started, I introduced a model that predicts a Minor League hitter’s chances of Major League success based on his statistics during his most recent AAA stint. I will use that same model now to update the list of the National League’s top MLB-ready outfield prospects, the key term here being MLB-ready, not prospect — the goal is to identify players who scouts may not love but stats do.

The model looks at how a hitter once performed in AAA and compares it to his known career outcome, ultimately calculating probabilities that a certain career outcome will occur. These probabilities can then be applied to current Minor League players in order to project their currently unknown career outcomes. I discuss the model’s nitty-gritty, as well as its similarities with and potential shortcomings to Chris Mitchell’s KATOH, in the link provided in this post’s first sentence. Both models share the same goal and their methodologies are almost identical, so their results can be considered comparable; mine simply takes a more subjective approach, as I will explain shortly. This is not a turf war.

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… if this nonsense with his agent(s?) ever clears up.

I feel like Debbie Downer from the classic Saturday Night Live sketch. I found reasons to dislike Yasmany Tomas, and now I’m here trying to find reasons to dislike Hector Olivera. It’s largely because I’m stubborn and would rather die by own fantasy baseball sword than someone else’s. But I haven’t seen any assessment of Olivera’s Cuban National Series (CNS) statistics beyond he hit an impressive .323/.407/.505 in his 10 years in Cuba, so I’ll attempt to expand on this.

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The baseball community — owners, scouts, fantasy analysts et al. — is slowly learning how Cuban hitters plucked from the Cuban National Series (CNS) perform in Major League Baseball. Unfortunately, the sample size is not increasing very quickly. The common fantasy owner is helplessly resigned to rely on a) scouting reports, and/or b) his or her own eyes, probably via a batting practice video uploaded online. Ideally, a Cuban hitter’s salary would serve as a proxy for what one could expect offensively and defensively from his imported bat and glove, but the market, and the information that defines it, is far from perfect.

The market for Cuban hitters is a pendulum, but rather than coming to rest, it is in full swing: hitters such as Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Jose Abreu, who are all but locks to fulfill the value of their modest contracts and then some, have plumped up the market for international signees. The Diamondbacks’ Yasmany Tomas, therefore, should not be compared to Abreu simply because the average annual values (AAV) of their contracts are almost identical. The dynamics of this particular market are nebulous, changing with every transaction.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t compare Tomas and Abreu statistically. Comparing the CNS and MLB performances of hitters more recently signed out of Cuba can still give us at least a faint idea of how we can expect Tomas to perform. This is my hope, at least. I’ll be the first to admit the analysis that follows is not as rigorous as I wish it could be, as the sample of contemporary, fantasy-relevant Cuban hitters who recently played in the CNS simply lacks breadth.

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