Projecting the 2012 Cubs: Right Field

In Projections by dmick8928 Comments

The Cubs signed DeJesus on November 30th to a 2-year guaranteed contract with a 3rd year option. He's guaranteed $10.5 million over the contract. I think a couple of the reasons the Cubs chose DeJesus is quite simple and I mentioned them in that article.

DeJesus played RF for 116 games last season and played 8 games in CF. He’s a damn good fielder so it’s not surprising the Cubs have signed him. They need to improve the defense and DeJesus does just that. While his Total Zone last year was -1, defensive metrics aren’t exactly reliable over just one season. The previous three years his Total Zone was 9, 15 and 13. His UZR the last 3 years has been 16, 2.5 and 7.5. His DRS last year was 10. The guy can field.

The Cubs have also sucked at running the bases. DeJesus has been worth 16 runs in his career on the bases according to UBR. He was worth 2.7 last year. According to Baseball Prospectus’ baserunning metric, EQBRR, he was worth 1.3 in 2011.

This team has sucked defensively and on the bases for a long time and this improves the Cubs in both areas. He might just be the team's best baserunner already and is almost certainly the best fielder. Kosuke Fukudome was no slouch on defense either so the Cubs remain above average defensively at the position.

DeJesus is coming off a down year offensively, but added over 10 runs on defense and running the bases. Overall, he was a 2.2 fWAR player a year ago. Total Zone thought he was average on defense and his rWAR was only .6. He had been worth somewhere between 3 and 4 rWAR the previous 5 seasons so we should expect him to regress toward that. Below are his projections for 2012.

Projection PA H HR BB SO avg obp slg wOBA
CAIRO 524 127 11 45 80 .274 .343 .413 .334
Guru 386 90 7 30 59 .260 .323 .379 .312
PECOTA 593 149 11 49 87 .274 .342 .404 .328
Oliver 623 147 12 51 95 .267 .334 .402 .325
Bill James 466 115 8 42 73 .271 .349 .399 .327
RotoChamp 523 127 10 48 83 .267 .346 .402 .331
Dav-Marcel 494 118 8 45 75 .262 .338 .381 .317
Steamer 608 142 12 54 95 .265 .340 .404 .339
Marcel 492 116 9 40 77 .265 .334 .694 .324
Average 523 126 10 45 80 .267 .339 .431 .326

We projected 504 plate appearances from DeJesus, which would make him worth 1.4 WAR (+1 baserunning and +5 defense).

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  2. bubblesdachimp

    From keith law on fantasy

    Why would I draft any Chicago Cubs player this season?
    Self-loathing?

    I admit that’s not remotely fair. Matt Garza is good, so is Starlin Castro, not that you needed me to tell you either of those things. I’ll reserve judgment on Jeff Samardzija until I see him in person, but reliable evaluators tell me he’s a different guy this spring, with a better slider and just better overall command, both of which were real weaknesses for him in the past. Brett Jackson might be a 15 HR/15 SB guy if he gets the playing time, although I am concerned his average will be held down by chronic issues with contact.

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  3. mb21

    http://www.chicagonow.com/cubs-den/2012/03/jeff-samardzijas-switch-to-starter-shows-some-old-fashioned-outside-the-box-thinking/

    My comment…

    John, thanks for the link back to Obstructed View. Great work here.

    FWIW, I don’t think any statistical analyst would say that stats answer the entire question. I’ve been reading them for many years now and for a long time they’ve said it’s half the picture. As tangotiger likes to point out, look at stats and scouting as different lenses. To get the best picture of a player you combine the two. The larger the sample size the less valuable the scouting is and vice versa.

    I wouldn’t really call this decision outside the box thinking. It’s something organizations have done for years including Jim Hendry. There’s also no doubt that those you spoke to are right in that dramatic improvement happens, but I’d ask those people how often they’ve been right about which players they thought improved? We hear it every year. Scout A talks about changes to someone’s game and then we see the same player. Every once in awhile there is a change, but most of the time the scout was simply wrong.

    This doesn’t mean you ignore scouting. You can’t. It’s as valuable as stats, but the information is only valuable when it’s detailed information. A scout saying “I think this guy has turned a corner” isn’t detailed information. It’s an opinion and it deserves some weight, but why has he turned a corner? Objective analysis includes some subjective opinions, but as few of them as possible. What is it about Samardzija that has improved? Is his fastball a mph faster and showing some movement? Is his slider biting more? Do the batters appear to be more confused by what he’s throwing? There are many other questions of course, but it’s that detailed information that is added to the mountain of statistical information to create one picture of the player.

    If you combine Scout A’s opinion about this you may as well include Statistician A’s opinion about it too and then you end up with an old-school front office making decisions based entirely on opinion rather than objective analysis.

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  4. Rice Cube

    @ mb21:
    I liked your post and will follow that up by wondering exactly what it was that the scouts saw. I mean, you have McLeod and Boehringer who seem to be able to sniff out the good players with not just instinct but mountains of data so it’d be interesting to know if they’re tracking arm slot, pitch location, movement etc rather than just going on a hunch.

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  7. mb21

    @ Rice Cube:
    I don’t think there’s that much to it, RC. These scouts are supposedly good at their job, but like GW has said before, the different in scouting talent is probably pretty small. It’s not like McLeod is doing something any of the others aren’t. If he was and it was successful every other organization would do it. The scouts the Cubs are basing this decision on are no different when it comes to talent than the ones they’ve had before. They’re reaching their decision in the same way. McLeod is a scouting director. i don’t want him to be influenced by stats. He should turn in the scouting data to the GM and the stats department should turn their data in. Then the GM makes a decision. in this case, I think it’s really simple: the Cubs pitching sucks and F7 had a good ERA last year and throws hard. I’d be surprised if there’s anything to it more than that. This is an example of the organization letting Sveum do what he wants or it’s an example of the front office ignoring statistical data in favor of scouting.

    Neither decisions are necessarily bad. Sometimes it may be that you’re better off weighing the stats significantly lower than other times. Maybe they think this is one of them. I have no idea, but I think people are trying to look too much into this decision to make sense of it in terms of the new, progressive front office. This same front office did stupid things in Boston and San Diego and they’re going to do stupid things in Chicago. Maybe this is one of them. Maybe it’s brilliant, but it will be brilliant in the same way it was brilliant that the Cubs managed to get 2 WAR from Glendon Rusch after he was the worst pitcher in baseball the year before.

    I’ve said before that I trust this front office will make more good decisions than bad decisions and I still believe that, but they’re going to make a lot of bad decisions. They’ll make the same stupid decisions that Hendry made. They’ll make Hendry look like a genius at times. They’ll make Hendry look retarded other times. In the end the hope is that he is better than Hendry and better than the others in the NL Central.

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  8. mb21

    Also, my guess is that the new front office wants their scouts to have as little statistical data as possible. I’d even bet they discourage their scouts from looking at stats. If you allow a scout to look at stats they are going to influence his opinion. That’s not what you’re paying a scout for. You pay them for the type of information the stats guys can’t give you. You pay the stats guys for the info the scouts can’t provide or can’t provide as well. You don’t want a stats guy’s opinion of the player’s work ethic and you don’t want the scout’s opinion of his strikeout to walk ratio.

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  9. josh

    @ josh:
    I can put something together for you, but it won’t be for a few days (maybe not until next week). FWIW, the standard deviation of wOBA uses the following formula:

    sqrt(wOBA*(1.1-wOBA)/PA)

    1 SD for a player with a .330 projection and 500 plate appearances is this: 0.023.

    So according to the link you provided, that player’s 90th percentile would be .360. That’s roughly equal with BP’s percentile increase for Castro whose mean projection is 685 PA.

    Okay, so I was trying to conceptualize it in terms of the general formula for standard deviation, whereas that formula is a step ahead of me and has solved it in terms of wOBA. I don’t know either formula well enough off the top of my head to see how they got that formula exactly, but I’m pretty sure the league average wOBA must be used to derive it. The whole idea of standard deviation is to measure an average of how much each value varies from the mean. But whatever, I’m probably overthinking it. I just like to know where they get this stuff, because I’m a nerd.

    So to me what that is telling you is that the most likely outcome of Castro’s season is .330, and the 90th percentile would tell you sort of an optimistic projection. On the high end, you might expect that performance, but with lower probability anything above that is increasingly unlikely, black swan event etc. You don’t really need to know any of that to calculate it, I just like to sort it out.

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  10. GW

    josh wrote:

    I don’t know either formula well enough off the top of my head to see how they got that formula exactly, but I’m pretty sure the league average wOBA must be used to derive it.

    it’s from the binomial distribution. percentiles predicated on that number thus implicitly assume that the mean is accurate.

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  11. josh

    @ GW:
    OK, I kind of recall that. It’s just been so long since I had stats, I can’t recall all the details. So basically, it’s because these baseball stats measure discreet events, you can estimate a probability distribution easily. Something like that?

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  14. GW

    the point I was making is that percentiles based on that standard deviation don’t have anything to do with the uncertainty of the woba estimate itself.

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  15. josh

    @ GW:
    Right, so they’re estimating a sort of generic probability distribution. If Soto and Castro had the same wOBA, it would give the same distribution, regardless of how you arrived at that number.

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  17. bubblesdachimp

    @ Berselius:

    I read it more as a scouting piece then anything else FWIW.

    Also that is the first time in history he has every said antything nice about Shark…

    Maybe he has turned a corner?

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  25. Berselius

    mb21 wrote:

    Why would Lopez and Miller make the roster? They both suck.

    Lopez could make the roster as the long man in the pen (or could get bumped by Bullpened Randy Wells). Miller could because managers love stockpiling LOOGYs, and it’s not like Scott Maine is blowing anyone away.

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  26. mb21

    @ Berselius:
    I just assumed the Cubs would carry one LOOGY and if they did carry a 2nd it would be Maine. Gaub would probably be next up. I’m looking forward to the Samardzija starts in which he gives up 6 runs in 2+ innings and is then relieved by Lopez who gives up 8 runs in 2+ and exits to Miller who allows a dozen while not recording an out. Good times.

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  27. bubblesdachimp

    I think they both do make the roster. Sveum has been implying it quite a bit..

    also

    William Ladson ‏ @washingnats Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
    Stephen Strasburg will be the #Nats’ Opening Day starter.

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