Life In The Cell

Lookin’ at Chone

No, I’m not referring to Chone Figgins, the subject of never ending White Sox’ trade rumors; I’m talking about Chone Smith’s projection system. If you want to get a little bit of background on it, take a peek here. His projection system is pretty damn good, I would say just a notch below BP’s and significantly better than Marcel. With that in mind, I figured it would be useful to take a peek at a few of his projections for some White Sox’ hitters (only the hitters are out right now).

Paul Konerko 142 G, 25 2B, 28 HR, .263/.359/.478

I’m really only going to look at these stats when doing analysis, because, to be frank, the rate stats are the most important and the most reliable. The counting stats are subject to a lot more guess work and can be influenced greatly by luck.

By a way of comparison, last year Paulie’s line looked like this: 122 G, 19 2B, 22 HR, .240/.344/.438

So by this projection, Chone is predicting that Paulie will rebound a bit from last season. The counting stats look nice, but notice that that production is predicted in 20 extra games of play when compared to his actual production last year. It’s encouraging to see that all his rate stats are up. Chone takes into 4 year’s worth of data, which for Paulie is pretty discouraging. In the last 4 years, he’s seen his OPS+ reach a career high 136 and subsequently fall each following year (134 to 116 to 102). Yes Paulie will be a year older, and probably a little worse due to that year, but Chone is predicting that last year’s mediocre performance wasn’t due solely to the aging process and he will therefore hit better this coming season. We can only hope so considering the Sox look to have potential offensive black holes at 2nd Base, 3rd Base, and CF.

Alexei Ramirez 118 G, 22 2B, 17 HR, .286/.324/.473

As we all know, Alexei is a complete wild card. We don’t know if last season represents peak performance, a point upon which to improve upon or what. There is such little data to go off of, that it would seem that a projection is useless. I’m more interested in this projection to see what unbiased systems think of the Missile. I think he will improve last year due to greater familiarity with the league and playing in America, as well as a more concerted effort to take walks. Considering his stats last year:

136 G, 22 2B, 21 HR, .290/.317/.475

It seems that Chone believes that last season represents his peak performance or at least a baseline for him moving forward. Either that, or the projection system has been completely thrown off by the fact there is only 1 season of data. PECOTA’s projection of Alexei will be more interesting to us since they employ player similarity scores to model their projections. I just wanted to draw attention to Alexei since he represents a rather rare case in carrying out projections.

Brian Anderson .237/.297/.396

Jerry Owens .259/.324/.331

Shockingly enough, Chone predicts Jerry Owens to be a much better hitter than Brian Anderson. Yes, BA is well ahead in slugging, but the most important rate stat, by far, is OBP; some say it’s 3 times as important as Slg. Looking at the stats, more closely, Owens does hold a significant advantage in OBP in the majors. In ‘07 when Owens played in 93 games, he had an OBP of .324 which isn’t good by any means, but is better than the .290 OBP Anderson posted in ‘06. I thought the projection systems would be a bit more favorable to BA since he’s only 26 and presumable still has time to grow, but these numbers insist that Owens will be a significantly better offensive threat. This doesn’t mean that he should definitely be the CF, though. Anderson is still a much, much better fielder, so Ozzie will have to weight the value of BA’s defense vs. Jerry’s offense.

Finally, I want to look at Carlos Quentin, because is a god amongst mere mortals. Also, I’m curious to see how optimistic the projection systems are of him. Without looking, I think they are going to temper enthusiasm and look at his last season as a bit of a fluke. So I’m expecting the numbers to drop a little bit.

Carlos Quentin 130 G, 26 2B, 23 HR, .268/.367/.487

Compare those numbers to last year: 130 G, 26 2B, 36 HR, .288/.394/.571

Chone has tempered the results by quite a bit. It’s convenient for the sake of comparison that he played as many games as Chone has him pegged for next season. To be honest, I think Quentin will put up similar (but a little bit better) numbers to last year. Nothing about his performance seemed flukish to me. Had he gotten out to a great start and progressively gotten worse, the I would think perhaps he’s in store for a regression next year, but that isn’t quite what happened. He did start out on fire, but then he had his worst month of the season in June, hitting .266/.381/.468. Then in July, he hit .275/.345/.608 followed by .322/.464/.667 in August. He had nearly identical amounts of plate appearances in each three of those months. Yes, his August numbers seem a little absurd, but they seem to show that after struggling, Quentin was able to adjust and dial it back in, which gives me hope that he can recreate a season equal to or greater than last season.

Down the line, probably after the PECOTA numbers come out, I’ll post my predictions for each Sox’ player in terms of numbers. This, though, was a small exercise to just take stock of what some of the projection systems are predicting for the White Sox.