Projections From Those Smarter Than I: Catcher

Player projections are always a fun exercise, so position by position, let’s have some fun going through a few of the various projections for the White Sox. Most of us don’t have the math skills to develop our own systems so when interested, we end up relying on the other geniuses that do have such abilities. For ours I’m using Bill James and RotoChamp via FanGraphs and PECOTA via Baseball Prospectus. Even the best projection systems are imperfect. Obviously players are people and there are so many variables that go into a player’s performance that can’t be truly predicted. I’ve read that a “perfect” projection system can be up to 60% accurate. Which is pretty low considering how many people lean on this data for their fantasy teams. I suppose it beats tossing darts at numbers on the wall.

Anders wrote an AJ projection recently had and asked for him to hit .280, 7-10 HR and 45-50 RBI. That’s pretty close to what an average of the 3 projections used show.

What I’m enjoying about these is the fact that all 3 seem to be allowing for a nice slice of playing time for Flowers. There’s nothing great about the projections but if it turns to reality (particularly that .474 slugging that James like Flowers for) we’re in good shape. When October rolls around, the more innings that Flowers has logged the better he’s performed over the season. I’ve got a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I think of the 2013 and 2014 seasons, but if we could go into those comfortably knowing that we have a solid catcher, I can be ok.

The most amusing thing is that each system has AJ stealing one base. I wonder if the actual system spit out 0 and each of them, after the algorithms finished, thought aloud, “that guy is tricky enough to steal a base on his own,” and put a tally in that column.