Community Projection #1 Released
Dave · February 5, 2007 at 8:43 am · Filed Under Mariners
If you signed up to be part of the community projections, you should be receiving the invitation to edit the Google Spreadsheet for Kenji Johjima in the next few minutes. When adding people to the contacts list, I missed a few, so a couple of you guys aren’t going to get this initial email – drop us a line and we’ll get it out to you.
If you missed the announcement on Friday, you can read this post and send us an email to join the fun.
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21 Responses to “Community Projection #1 Released”
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Thanks for mentioning it here, Dave. I don’t always check that GMail account, so this was a great reminder.
I’m really interested to see what we come up with. Since you’re polling primarily M’s fans, I suspect we’ll see optimistic projections, overall.
Really cool experiment.
Hey guys,don’t add your predictions above the stat headings. Go down to the end of the list. The rate stats are already programed based on what you put in for ab’s, hits, etc…
Since you’re polling primarily M’s fans, I suspect we’ll see optimistic projections, overall.
Overall this is likely true, but it’s not true across the board. I think as a whole we’re pessimistic on a number of players — every starting pitcher not named King Felix, Vidro, Bloomquist, Sexson, Rivera.
Jared, that was my bad. I can’t seam to “click” on the next open line. I’m not sure why but the only tab that gives me anything but a black screen is the revision tab. I added that line at the top by typing “blind” on the black edit tab. If someone can add my predictions in the proper place for that would be great…
I find it interesting that so many people are worried about the people on these sites being over optimistic…based on what I’ve read throughout here it seems that most people on this site are much more realistic and even closer to pessimistic than optimistic.
If you were polling casual Mariners fans…then you might worry about overly optomistic. However, as stated in the earlier thread the author of Wisdom of Crowds would argue that things would be much, much closer than you imagine…no matter who you poll
I say Willie Bloomquist hits 50 home runs.
When I was filling out my projection, I noticed that I was predicting a lower SLG for Johjima than anyone else had up to that point. And I thought I was being pretty generous for an overworked 30 year old catcher.
Perhaps we’ll only be optimistic on the players we like. Felix, Ichiro, Johjima, Doyle (oh… right).
Is it fair game to comment on the players here, or does that start to bias the projections?
Anyway, was looking at Johjima’s 2006 and noticed a bizarre platoon split. Vs. lefties he was 263/315/325 (640 OPS, 0 HR) and vs. RHP he hit 298/337/487 (824 OPS, 16 HR). Somewhat common for a left handed hitter, by Jo is a righty, isn’t he? Anyone have his splits from Japan?
Ichiro also has a significant reverse platoon split. Maybe it’s a Japanese thing…?
Hideki Matui’s three-year splits (2004-06) show a normal, thought not very significant, platoon split. Kazuo Matsui’s a switch-hitter, so no help there. So Taguchi… VERY slight reverse, probably not even significant. Tadahito Iguchi has a reverse as well.
Am I missing anyone?
I would guess (but could be wrong) that a reverse platoon split, or an absence of a sizable platoon split, would be more likely with a right-handed hitter. Right-handed hitters face a much higher percentage of right-handed pitchers during their development than the percentage of left-handed pitchers faced by southpaw batters. This is probably even more true at younger ages, because as a player moves from youth ball to college and/or the minors and on to MLB, lefties would be favored in the selection process (this is probably most apparent in the jump from high school to the minors or college). This is all speculation but would make sense in view of what I understand to the relative amounts of right-handed and left-handed persons in general and in various levels of baseball. It’s Monday, so I hope that baseless speculation and theorizing is allowable.
This is a great idea, and I’ll be curious to see how accurate the wisdom of crowds turns out to be at predicting stats.
Just out of curiousity (since work’s in a big methodology kick lately, so I have it on the brain), is there something in the methodology here to squeeze out the obvious fakes? If my three-year old niece happens to find my logon open and thinks Bloomquist will finish with 100 triples (or something similar that would be significant enough to skew the stats a point or two), would that be weeded out? Or is the assumption that an equal number of negative projections would balance something like that out?
Crap like that gets eliminated. Think of it like a subjective Q Test.
I went for the positive for my projections. Thanks for this. Can’t wait to see the graphs.
One belated suggestion: Is there any way to set the first line, the one that defines the categories, so that it is always visible at the top when you scroll down the entries? I know this can be done in Excel, but I don’t know whether Google has set their spreadsheets up so this can be done.
Whhops, I just figured out that individuals can set it that way for themselves. Never mind!
Re: reverse platoon splits, that’s an interesting point about the quantity of RH pitchers faced, but I’ve always assumed the opposite. Since being LH is a commodity in baseball in and of itself, a reverse platoon split for a truly phenomenal LH batter like Ichiro is theoretically possible–to my mind, at least–because LH pitchers as a group actually aren’t as good. So to me a LH hitter who somehow managed to be unaffected by the handedness of the pitcher in terms of how they hit (if that’s actually possible, I think it’s easy for us to imagine that Ichiro would be that guy) would over the course of their career be better against LHP than RHP. And you couldn’t say the same for a RH batter.
But I could see for a year, maybe, Johjima might have the chance to become a little more accustomed to MLB RHers than LHers. Probably just looking at a sample size issue though. It’s certainly interesting that none of the Japanese imports have shown a sizeable standard platoon split, though. It makes me think something about the training or development of players there emphasizes hitting same-handedness more or something like that. Or we’re only getting the cream of the crop, and they don’t have big platoon splits, but I don’t really see why that would necessarily be true.
I just checked the stats desperate hoping that Rivera was at least better against lefties than righties.
But he’s not. Rivera can’t hit lefties at all.
Rivera can’t hit at all, at all.
I knew that, but I was hoping his stat line would say something like .087 against righties and .157 against lefties, in which case there might be a way to employ the two more efficiently.
But there isn’t.
#17 — I wrote a post about this a few months ago, actually. Strangely, Kei Igawa and Akinori Iwamura both showed big reverse platoon splits this past year, and they’re lefty. And Johjima and Iguchi have both shown reverse platoon splits as well. But, it’s not a general trend in Japan as far as I can tell, most players there have normal platoon splits if at all.
I’m not sure what it indicates that the MLB-hopping guys tend to fit this reverse profile, though.