2019 Projections

This article, one of the best I've read on the topic, discusses in great depth how clubs do their own projections with much more information than the public projections such as Zips have available. There's a lot of pooling of "similar" pitchers and hitters to build up richer data sets. That's done using nearest-neighbor analysis. The idea is to create an array of key variables, and to find which players are most "like" each other by simply computing the distance of those variables, one from the other, for each two-player combo with those variable distances summed for that combo. After that's done for all relevant two-player groupings, you'll have a list of those distances. Choose some cutoff point at the bottom of the list where that total distance is small and you have what you presume are similar players. Again, this is something that was simply not possible without the availability of enormous amounts of cheap computing power and the invaluable datasets provided by the newest technologies such as KinaTrax and Blast. Not a problem these days. The brave new world of baseball projection.

The Ringer really seems to be building up its baseball chops.

Considering projections tend to regress heavily to the mean, I’m pretty bullish on the Sox rotation. I think Rodriguez and Price in particular might be significantly better than projected. Price’s velocity was ticking up at the end of the year, and he obviously pitched well in the postseason. His CH probably needs more representation in his mix, the cutter less. But overall I like where he was at. Rodriguez keeps taking incremental steps towards being a TOR guy, he looked like a 2 for much of last year, and given his youth (he’s on the cusp of what is historically a pitcher’s prime, from essentially 26-29/30), and evolving stuff, I could absolutely see him taking a real step forward, health permitting, to 1a status (think 2017 Pomeranz with a few more innings and slightly better numbers across the board). I think they’re a little light on Barnes (he’s gonna become a beast if he can stay consistent), and maybe Eovaldi (his cutter makes him simply a different, better pitcher than the one on which those projections are based). But it’s encouraging to see Brewer projected so well. He could be a nice sleeper. They’ve got some trade value in that ‘pen with Hembree, Workman, and Thornburg/Smith depending on health/recovery.

I have no clue where to put this but it's interesting:

Eh, Mookie Betts isn't really a fair comparison for Javier Baez. Baez is obviously a free swinger, but he's dangerous on pitches outside the zone like few others. Imagine if Alfonso Soriano was actually a competent middle infielder. He'll probably bounce between his 2017 and 2018 production for a number of years, but I can't really see being unhappy with the 2017 production. And he has three years before free agency.

Agree. To paraphrase an 80s slogan - "I WANT MY OBP!"

LOL, 80's ?

I take it you've been out of the states for a while...