Baseball, foretold
Crack the spine of this year's Baseball Prospectus
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The existence in physical form of Baseball Prospectus 2009—a floppy, 650-page mass of a book filled with prognostications and analysis of a season of baseball to be—is something of a mystery. With the period between the old season and the new one now shrunken down to just a few months, the Prospectus’ crack staff has precious little time to prepare a volume and then unleash it on the stat-head masses. And if the time crunch weren’t enough of a head-scratcher, consider that the results are available in more detailed form on the enterprise’s subscription-based website. There, armchair scouts and numerically inclined fantasy-baseball GMs can get virtual PECOTA “player cards” for their favorite sluggers and hurlers, and even download a ready-made spreadsheet with all the names and numbers, which they can then break down, torture, and reconstitute with their favorite statistical analysis program.
PECOTA, for those not yet wise, is the analytical lodestar of Baseball Prospectus (it stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) and the computer program takes months to churn out uncomfortably accurate projections for more than 2,000 major and minor leaguers. PECOTA was developed in 2003 by Nate Silver—who before becoming better-known as a political blogger was BP’s chief resident nerd—and it utilizes the kind of raw computational force usually reserved for hedge-fund models and genome projects.So what, then, justifies the presence in print of this year’s Baseball Prospectus? Is it, as so many publishing types wish, the feel of the pulpy paper in one’s hands? Maybe. But the smarter money is on the contributions to the book by BP’s writers, who complement all the calculus with pithy commentary and good old-fashioned scouting. Their introductory essays and marginal notes aren’t available on the website, and they add much context, humor, and “what’s it all mean?” synthesis for more casual fans who might be left dizzy by the quantitative onslaught.
In that spirit, here’s a summary of what BP has to say about the impending seasons of the Yankees and the Mets, so that you Deciders might make a more informed decision about taking out loans to finance a pair of bleacher seats in each team’s new stadium.
NEW YORK YANKEES
Post Mortem on 2008: BP thinks that the end of the 13-year streak of postseason appearances by the Yankees was mostly luck: “They just had one too many things go wrong.” One of those things was the loss of world-class catcher Jorge Posada to a shoulder injury. Posada’s at-bats were taken instead by journeyman catcher Jose Molina, whose -11.3 VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) is an elegant number that expresses the fact he contributed nearly 12 fewer runs to the team than any random minor-league catcher available for the Major League’s minimum salary would have.
Bright spots for 2009: The Prospectus unsurprisingly gives the Yanks’ big off-season acquisitions—including studs C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and Mark Teixeira—high marks for making the team “simultaneously better and younger.” It also thinks the trade for White Sox first-baseman/outfielder Nick Swisher, who had just a God-awful season last year, is a great “buy low” deal, as they project him to have a 67 percent chance of improving significantly in 2009. Ditto for the noodle-armed Johnny Damon, who in 2007 looked positively washed up but is expected to turn in his second straight solid year.
Downside: Age and aberration. The Prospectus thinks the underwhelming 2008 performance by youngsters Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera is closer to genuine than were their flashes of brilliance in previous years. Cabrera, whose power never really developed, “will need to contend for a batting title to avoid itinerant fifth outfielderdom.” And Hideki Matsui, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez aren’t getting any younger. On Jeter—the closest thing New York sports has to an untouchable—BP is especially brutal: “By 2010, Jeter’s glove won’t play in the infield and his bat won’t play anywhere else.”
Bottom Line: The bad outweighs the good. BP calls it an 87-75 season for the Yanks, which almost certainly will not cut it in the hardest division in baseball. “Twenty feet’s worth of premium free-agent starter only partly masks an aging lineup and a shoddy defense.”
Downside: Age and aberration. The Prospectus thinks the underwhelming 2008 performance by youngsters Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera is closer to genuine than were their flashes of brilliance in previous years. Cabrera, whose power never really developed, “will need to contend for a batting title to avoid itinerant fifth outfielderdom.” And Hideki Matsui, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez aren’t getting any younger. On Jeter—the closest thing New York sports has to an untouchable—BP is especially brutal: “By 2010, Jeter’s glove won’t play in the infield and his bat won’t play anywhere else.”
Bottom Line: The bad outweighs the good. BP calls it an 87-75 season for the Yanks, which almost certainly will not cut it in the hardest division in baseball. “Twenty feet’s worth of premium free-agent starter only partly masks an aging lineup and a shoddy defense.”
NEW YORK METS
Post-Mortem for 2008: BP figured the Mets were 500-1 favorites to make the playoffs at one point in September of 2007. They didn’t. On September 12, 2008, the Mets were a 92-percent lock for the post-season. They then lost 10 of their last 17 games and missed out again. If “cursed” is just folksy jargon for the tendency to find oneself the victim of low-probability catastrophes, the Mets might just be cursed.
Bright Spots for 2009: The left side of the Mets infield, with Jose Reyes and David Wright, is quite easily the best in baseball. Last year, Reyes became the second shortstop in history with 50-plus steals and 70-plus extra-base hits in a season. Wright tied a Mets single-season record for RBIs. Together they’re projected to create 141 more runs than would a pair of anonymous replacements. On the pitching side, Johan Santana is still Johan Santana, and the Mets added not one but two top-tier closers in the off-season in the form of J.J. Putz and Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez.
Downside: The rest of the Mets’ pitching staff is a rogue’s gallery of unproven young arms and journeymen, head cases and stunning mediocrities. It’s enough to make Mets fans miss the departing geriatric pitching tandem of Pedro Martinez and Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez. Behind Santana, K-Rod, and Putz, it’s a bunch of no-names and question marks.
Bottom Line: BP projects the Mets at 89 wins. With division rivals Philadelphia projected for 93 wins, that means the Mets will probably have to set their eyes on the Wild Card. But with Reyes and Wright on the uphill side of their primes and Santana, Putz, and Carlos Delgado on the downhill side of theirs, the Mets “will never have a better opportunity to win a World Series with their current core than they do now.”
