Expectations vs. Reality

This is interesting.

Baseball Prospectus, which many of us use in our draft day preparations and is a highly respected sabermetric-style guidebook, publishes their PECOTA projections on players every year.  Their book states, "All PECOTAs represent a player's projected major-league performance."

Here's their "projected major-league performance" for the the Flemingos in 2013:

BP PECOTA AVE OBP SLUG OPS Posey .295 .367 .471 .838 Hosmer .276 .331 .444 .775 Bonifacio .262 .322 .359 .681 Andrus .276 .341 .369 .710 Middlebrooks .258 .299 .452 .751 Davis .249 .332 .457 .789 Trumbo .259 .305 .477 .782 Fowler .274 .364 .429 .793 Heyward .258 .346 .446 .792 Hicks .234 .324 .356 .680 .264 .333 .426 .759

Here are some relatively current (yesterday or today) numbers for the Big Pink machine:

		2013 Actual
	AVE	OBP	SLUG	OPS
Posey	.225	.328	.347	.675
Hosmer	.242	.359	.273	.632
Bonifacio	.192	.232	.346	.578
Andrus	.206	.275	.270	.545
Middlebrooks	.182	.220	.436	.656
Davis	.173	.271	.346	.617
Trumbo	.323	.354	.468	.822
Fowler	.263	.344	.667	1.011
Heyward	.127	.262	.273	.535
Hicks	.044	.157	.044	.201
	.198	.280	.347	.627

And here is the difference between the two (red means performing poorer than expected and black means better):

		Difference
	AVE	OBP	SLUG	OPS
Posey	.070	.039	.124	.163
Hosmer	.034	.028	.171	.143
Bonifacio	.070	.090	.013	.103
Andrus	.070	.066	.099	.165
Middlebrooks	.076	.079	.016	.095
Davis	.076	.061	.111	.172
Trumbo	.064	.049	.009	.040
Fowler	.011	.020	.238	.218
Heyward	.131	.084	.173	.257
Hicks	.190	.167	.312	.479
	.066	.053	.079	.132

Where I have totals at the bottom of each of these charts - they are not totally accurate from a statistician's point of view because I just took the column total and divided by 10 (the number of players) - so part time players Hicks and Bonifacio have their stats weigh as much as Posey and Heyward who will play full time.  And the formatting is limited due to limitations related to the blogging software...

But these numbers do show that the Big Pink Machine is off to an unexpectedly rocky start hitting wise...


And as a postscript - if there is anyone out there actually reading this, I'm not  as worried about the Big Pink Machine's hitting as my recent posts might lead you to believe.  It's early, it's a small sample size,  players have slumps and it's pretty amusing that all of the Flemingos (with the exception of Trumbo and Fowler) got off to such miserable starts.  Other than Hicks, I don't think any of these  guys are destined for the minor leagues to solve their problems.  They'll be playing in the majors and part of the second half Flemingo explosion that will result in our fourth SLUBA crown!