What the heck, now is as good a time as any to revisit pre-season projections. I know, OPS and ERA aren’t the end-all and be-all, but they’re good enough for government work…
| OPS | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Player | BJ | CH | MA | MI | ZI | DS | Act |
| Statistics are courtesy of FanGraphs and are through games of May 29, 2008. Click on column head for more info about projection system. | |||||||
| Josh Bard | 785 | 741 | 791 | 728 | 767 | 767 | 540 |
| Adrian Gonzalez | 839 | 840 | 842 | 810 | 862 | 879 | 894 |
| Tadahito Iguchi | 760 | 737 | 756 | 723 | 751 | 732 | 657 |
| Kevin Kouzmanoff | 882 | 796 | 789 | 740 | 837 | 858 | 741 |
| Khalil Greene | 762 | 764 | 752 | 747 | 742 | 773 | 599 |
| Scott Hairston | 833 | 740 | 769 | 721 | 722 | 794 | 714 |
| Jim Edmonds | 830 | 766 | 782 | 739 | 784 | 756 | 498 |
| Brian Giles | 820 | 777 | 783 | 732 | 773 | 789 | 815 |
Gonzalez and Giles are doing as well as or better than expected; Iguchi, Kouzmanoff, and Hairston are underperforming; and Bard, Greene, and Edmonds aren’t even close.
| ERA | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Player | BJ | CH | MA | MI | ZI | DS | Act |
| Statistics are courtesy of FanGraphs and are through games of May 29, 2008. Click on column head for more info about projection system. | |||||||
| Jake Peavy | 3.23 | 2.99 | 3.23 | 3.48 | 2.99 | 2.81 | 2.91 |
| Chris Young | 3.34 | 3.39 | 3.51 | 4.31 | 3.32 | 3.23 | 4.50 |
| Greg Maddux | 3.60 | 3.91 | 4.30 | 3.94 | 3.92 | 4.09 | 3.76 |
| Randy Wolf | 3.87 | 4.04 | 4.85 | 4.75 | 5.03 | 4.18 | 4.59 |
| Justin Germano | 4.40 | 4.11 | 4.24 | 4.14 | 4.24 | 4.62 | 5.98 |
| Trevor Hoffman | 2.80 | 3.41 | 3.60 | 3.88 | 2.53 | 3.21 | 4.58 |
| Heath Bell | 3.10 | 3.18 | 3.55 | 3.18 | 2.89 | 2.76 | 2.37 |
| Cla Meredith | 3.51 | 3.25 | 3.73 | 3.39 | 3.26 | 2.97 | 4.33 |
| Joe Thatcher | – | 3.67 | 3.86 | – | 2.96 | 2.86 | 7.45 |
Bell is outpitching his projections; Peavy, Maddux, and Wolf are doing what everyone expected; and Young, Hoffman, and Meredith have been worse than projected; and Germano and Thatcher have been a complete disaster.
Three guys are doing better than the experts expected, four are about where they should be, and 10 aren’t meeting their projections (half of those are failing in spectacular fashion). Yep, that could be a problem…
Nice work Geoff. It will be interesting to revisit this at the end of the year and see which system was the most accurate.
People have criticized Towers for poor contingency planning but it’s pretty difficult for a team with the Padres payroll to come up with viable options for half the team, especially at SS, CF and C.
I guess the good news is at least some of the underperformers are bound to improve, right?
#1@Anthony: Agree completely, and this is very much in line with what I’ve been saying for a while. I don’t think it’s fair to pin this year’s disaster on the FO. Everyone thought the team would be better than this. Hopefully they’ll overachieve the next 2/3 of the season to get back to these projections.
Meaningless trivia but I still dabble.
The ’88 Padres giving me hope and reason to believe !
The 1988 Padres started the season (55 games in) at 20-35 and ended up finishing at 83-79.
In line with JP’s comment at #3 … don’t look now but the Drinos are out of last place and could be in third by the end of the weekend, in striking distance of the mediocre Dodgers and D’Backs. And this is after what we all can agree have been two very poor, very snakebitten months of baseball.
Kouz and Greeney are coming around, Peavy sounds like he’ll be back soon, Carlin and Barrett have been an improvement over Bard, Bryan Corey has been a beast, Headley is on the way to maybe add some pop … I for one am not giving up.
The Giants series is huge and going to be tough.
They just swept the Snakes.
Interesting to see that most of DS picks are close to ZiPs. Thanks, Geoff.