The big news in Cleveland sports Tuesday was the hiring of Paul Depodesta by the Cleveland Browns. As the Chief Strategy Officer, the former baseball executive will head the analytics department in hopes of contributing to the turnaround of the hapless franchise.
Much like what the release of Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball did for baseball, the hiring opened up the eyes of the NFL to a world called analytics. Moneyball is the well told story of how the Oakland Athletics used analytics, much of it driven by DePodesta, to gain an edge on their competition, never mind that Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, three aces in their prime, were starting about 100 games a year for the A’s. Oakland hired DePodesta from the Indians, where analytics had been in full bloom, and where the franchise was a hothouse of front-office talent.
What Depodesta helped pioneer and turn mainstream brings one of the respected projection systems for public use: Fangraph’s ZIPS projections. The Indians 2016 Fangraph’s ZIPS projections were released last week. Please refer to the aforementioned link for the actual numbers. There is no need to repeat them here.
Projections obviously have flaws and are not perfect. Two years ago, Corey Kluber won the Cy Young award despite the fact that his pre-season projections weren’t even close to his final numbers . Whether the result of poor fielding or some other variable, a number of the Indians top pitchers receive more promising FIP- projections than ERA- ones. For example, both Carlos Carrasco and Kluber are forecasted to record a combined 70 FIP- but only 79 ERA-.
Closer Cody Allen is projected to post an ERA that’s eight points higher than his FIP-, this despite how relievers commonly outperform their fielding-independent numbers. The Indians bullpen was among the league’s top-third in 2015 and, given the forecasts here, it would appear to profile closer to average for 2016.
Understanding how ZiPS’ position-player forecasts reveal the Indians actual strength as a club is the key to understanding the projection system as a whole. It’s a challenge this season because of the unknown health of Michael Brantley, as he underwent surgery on his right shoulder following the season. The original prognosis called for Brantley to return in April. More recent reports, however, suggest that Brantley might not be ready until June. The article goes on to say that
“…ZiPS has no knowledge of Brantley’s injury either way, projecting the him to record more than three wins over the the course of a full season. He might be capable only of producing half that total.”
ZiPS is less optimistic about Francisco Lindor’s 2016 campaign, calling for regression in his plate-discipline and batted-ball numbers. Still, the computer expects Lindor to lead the Indians position players in WAR.
A lot of the statistics that are used in baseball summarize and analyze the past. If you want to know how well a batter performed last season, you can look at his wRC+ and have a good sense of the season he had. But sometimes you want to know about the present and the future. For that, you need a projection. Simply put, projections are forecasts about the future.
A projection, in general, is the best estimate of a player’s true talent for a given period of time. Your beliefs about how good a player is qualify as projections. In the world of advanced stats, we talk about projection systems, which are statistical models that take players’ past stats, age, and other factors to predict how a player will perform in the next game, upcoming season or entire career.
Projection systems are certainly imperfect. They’re just estimates at the end of the day. Projecting a .400 wOBA doesn’t mean you would make a $1,000 bet on that player running a .400 wOBA exactly, it means that’s the best guess for how that player is going to perform. On average, some players will do better and some players will do worse. Projection systems cannot account for luck and random variation (even if they perfectly captured the player’s talent), so they are never 100% accurate. Instead, these systems are best viewed as an estimate of a player’s current, underlying true talent level. If a player is projected to hit for a .370 wOBA, that suggests the system believes he has a talent level of a .370 wOBA hitter.
I know not everyone reading this article trusts projection systems, particularly ZIPS, especially when they are forecasting things that we don’t want to be true. It’s natural to want to discard prior information when it doesn’t align with what we want to believe, and often, the forecasts serve as a wet blanket alternative to enthusiasm and excitement. What’s to like about a system that takes the fun out of breakout performances, or tells us that we need to be more patient with the guy who just looks terrible every time we watch him?
Projections are used strictly for entertainment purposes. Within the game, though, they are used to forecast payrolls and rosters. It’s always important to know exactly what question you’re asking. In baseball, one of the most difficult distinctions for many people is difference between how a player has performed and how the player is going to perform.But it all comes down to the question. You might not care very much about predicting the future or approximating true talent. If you only care about past value, you can stick to the raw stats. But if you want to say something about how well a player is going to perform and what their true talent is, you want a projection.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
