Last week, Fangraphs ran a great series called Positional Power Rankings where they ranked each position by organization one by one. The series analyzed the entire position for each organization including the projected reserves playing time as well as any minor leaguers who are projected to get called up. ZIPS projections were used to project the offense, while the expected fielding ratings came from the FAN's projections. These numbers were mashed together with each writer's expected plate appearances and a rough approximation of expected WAR was created. They were then ranked and each position was given its own post. I thoroughly enjoyed the series, but wanted to take it a step further.
Since I am a one man operation, I don't have the time to put together a projection for each player on each team. And since Fangraphs just did that, I don't see any value in re-creating it. What I do think could be interesting is to take these WAR projections from the Fangraphs series and use them to create a projected WAR for each team. By doing that we should be able to project the number of wins for each team for the upcoming season. Considering that a team full of replacement level players would win about 48 games, we'll use that as our baseline. Every WAR that is projected to be earned by a team will be added to our baseline to come to our projection of wins for each team.
There are a lot of season previews out there. Some go team by team, and others go by division or league but I haven't seen one that tries to project the WAR for each team to figure out their projected place in the standings. I will admit before going into this that things usually don't go as planned and I don't have any idea how accurate these projections will turn out to be. But I think it will give us a good idea of where each team stands at this point in time.
I'm going to start with the AL East to get an idea of where the Orioles stack up. After that, we'll see how much of the AL we can get through. Please provide any feedback in the comments.
I would like for you to name every position the O's have a positional advantage over the Yanks. Thanks! Great job with the site!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback.
ReplyDeleteThe only positions that the Orioles project to be better than the Yankees are catcher and shortstop. Matt Wieters should be better than Russell Martin and JJ Hardy is projected to be better than Jeter. That may be surprising but it shouldn't be. Jeter's just not that good when you include his bad defense.