Pick Your Projection: 2017 Red Sox Edition

We are less than a week away from real, actual, meaningful Red Sox baseball. This is undoubtedly very exciting, but the proximity to the season also means we only have a few more days to obsess over player and team projections. How many wins are to be expected? Will that number be enough to win the division? Who is appears poised for an emergent season? Who will regress after a strong 2016?

At the end of last week, Ben Carsley gave insight into Baseball Prospectus’ projection for the Red Sox, which, derived from PECOTA, has the team going 87-75 and claiming top spot in the American League East. But BP isn’t the only projection system in town. For example, the folks at FanGraphs have the Red Sox pegged for an AL East winning 91-71 record; slightly more favourable than BP’s projection. The FanGraphs projection comes from the Steamer and ZiPS systems, which, given the four-win difference at the team level, must differ from PECOTA for at least a few of the players. As such, I explored which Red Sox players have the largest discrepancies between the systems.

In order to make fair comparisons between systems, it is necessary to evaluate them for a common playing time. While it is certainly interesting if the projection systems expect different amounts of playing time for a given player, that difference will be reflected in their counting statistics (e.g., wins above replacement (player) [WAR(P)]). This can make it appear as though there are large differences in expected performance, when there actually are not (other than accumulating playing time). As such, I think lining things up makes comparisons between projection systems a little cleaner. With this in mind, for what you see below the hitting projections are scaled to be per-600 plate appearances (per-450 for catchers), and the pitching projections are scaled to be per-200 innings pitched for starters and per-65 innings pitched for relievers. These playing time figures can be debated, but they are intended to represent a season’s worth of time and therefore a decent baseline.

We’ll start on the hitting side. In most cases the three systems project the players in very similar ways (i.e., within one WAR(P)), but here are the Red Sox players (who will be regulars on the big league squad) for whom there is at least a one-win difference:

It turns out the differences for these players are largely driven by how the systems view the players’ defense. This makes assessing the differences considerably more difficult, as the defensive metrics that go into these systems can vary wildly in how they evaluate actual on-field performance (e.g., Dustin Pedroia last season), let alone anticipated performance. For example, all three systems expect Xander Bogaerts to be an above-average hitting-shortstop to similar degrees, but while Steamer and ZiPS project him to be a slightly below average defender (-1.8 and -2.5 fielding runs, respectively), PECOTA is really down on his defense, projecting -8.8 fielding runs above average (FRAA). The opposite situation explains the variation in Andrew Benintendi’s projections: PECOTA essentially views him as a center-fielder playing left-field, and therefore has him contributing 17 FRAA, but ZiPS, which also likes the outlook for his defense, only has him at 5.8, and Steamer projects him to be slightly below average (-0.7). Oddly enough, Jackie Bradley Jr., the team’s actual center fielder, is given the worst defensive projection by PECOTA (1.0 FRAA), while Steamer (7.1) and ZiPS (4.9) expect much better. Finally, nobody expects Sandy Leon to continue his Babe Ruth act from 2016, but only PECOTA projects his defense to be below average.

Obviously it remains to be seen which system will project the Red Sox’s (and other teams’) hitters most accurately, but in the meantime we can get an idea of the range of possibilities by looking at the average projection, and the best (highest) and worst (lowest) cases. Here is that exact thing for what I expect to be the everyday lineup (last year’s performance is included as a reference point):

There is almost a 10-win swing between the best and worst case projections, just in the everyday nine. Getting 25 wins above replacement from this group would be great. Keep in mind that a replacement level team (i.e., 0.0 WAR(P)) is expected to win around 52 games, so the best case scenario from the everyday lineup already gets the Red Sox in the neighbourhood of a .500 record. And that is without considering the bench, or the pitching.

With that said, we should consider the pitching side of things. The pitching comparisons are especially tricky due to the fact that the WAR metrics are calculated quite differently between FanGraphs (FIP-based) and BP (DRA-based). Regardless, here are the Red Sox hurlers for whom there is at least a 1-win difference:

The rotation! While to this point I have been focused on relative differences, it is worth noting that these projections are strong. The worst of the group is Eduardo Rodriguez’s at 1.8 WARP, which is fine. For the most part the differences are between PECOTA and ZiPS. As you can see, for each player ZiPS is the high-man, with PECOTA as the low-man and Steamer in the middle. This pattern is a result of the way the metrics are calculated, and makes examining the differences hard. With the exception of Fernando Abad, these three projection systems have very similar expectations (i.e., < 0.5 win difference) for the probable Red Sox relievers. But as the table above shows, when it comes to the rotation, Red Sox fans should be rooting for the ZiPS projections to best represent what will happen this coming season.

In the end, barring major injury – I am not including David Price in that category yet – the Red Sox appear to have a clear path to the division crown. But as is evident from this little exercise, the range of outcomes is considerable. We can keep this all in mind over the next six months, but regardless of which system turns out to be most accurate, it will be nice to have the players out on the diamond playing again.

Photo by Steve Mitchell – USA TODAY Sports