King Felix, unique
I’ve been kicking around what to say about this, but… the new PECOTA cards are out, and if you look at Felix Hernandez… well, let me take a step back.
To over-simplify, PECOTA takes a player and uses a bunch of criteria to find similar players in baseball history to compare them to, and then looks at what those guys did the next year. So in doing this, it comes up with a score on how well it did finding similar players.
From the glossary:
Similarity index is a gauge of the player’s historical uniqueness; a player with a score of 50 or higher has a very common typology, while a player with a score of 20 or lower is historically unusual. For players with a very low similarity index, PECOTA expands its tolerance for dissimilar comparables until a meaningful sample size is established (see Comparable Players).
Historical anamoly Ichiro (who the system predicts will be out of baseball in 2010) gets a 19.
Felix gets a 1. 1.
#50–and my favorite tautology “Ireland at war will never be at peace†I guess that’s OT.
yah, but I sure could hear it stated as a Fairly Obvious Fact.
it’s less tha a week for pitchers & catchers…. sigh. hey, the MLB spring training page now has an Opening Day countdown! oh, and an AL West overview, with Tom Singer projecting the M’s in 2nd place in the division….
msb- I am surprised that Singer doesn’t see better things for Texas. Though its nice to see Seattle not relegated to the basement automatically.
The team with obvious weakness is the Angels. Their offense has some big holes (basically everyone except Vlad).
I’m not sure I’d be so down on Texas, and I also don’t think Washburn and Everett are positive additions and Singer seems to.
Still, if things break right, the M’s probably do have a shot at second. After Oakland, the division looks weak.
Note that Singer, in his AL East overview, predicts Toronto to win that division. So I’m fairly confident I don’t trust his analysis.
From Singer’s article…
Moyer and Washburn should be a potent left-left punch around King Hernandez, especially at Safeco.
Moyer’s 2005 xFIP: 5.17
Washburn’s: 5.01
Their FIPs are pretty close to each other as well. I’ll be thrilled if they both end up with Moyer’s 2005 ERA (4.27), combined. While that would be a big improvement over the Franklin/Sele debacle of 2005, I’m not sure it wins a division, or gets you in second place.
xFIP normalizes HR/FB by park, right? What about hits and runs for FB in play? Doesn’t safeco affect? I belive the THT annual points this out. They should have lower ERA’s than even xFIP (which park neutralizes the HR/FB if IIRC). Doesn’t mean they’ll be good, just pointing that out.
I’m personally expecting ~4.5-5.00 for most of our rotation, with the backend being 5+. Better than last year, but mostly because of the King. Maybe a little bounce back from Joel, but not to his peak, to his expected performace. Now if they had gotten some LF defense …