Braves sign Sean Rodriguez

Just to make it clear, I think Rodriguez is fine if he is a strict platoon guy with Peterson at 2B and logs some back-up time at other positions. I do think he's a slight overpay and if his presence makes Albies expendable in the brass' collective mind, someone needs to keep Coppolella away from the psychotropics.
 
smootness said:
I get that, but Rodriguez with a sub-.700 OPS? I seriously doubt it.
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Career OPS of .693 across almost 2000 ABs, and a "breakout" year at age 31 that spanned 300 ABs?

I think a .700 OPS projection is perfectly understandable. If he wasn't recently signed by the Braves you wouldn't even think twice about calling last season a clear outlier.
 
Enscheff said:
Career OPS of .693 across almost 2000 ABs, and a "breakout" year at age 31 that spanned 300 ABs?

I think a .700 OPS projection is perfectly understandable. If he wasn't recently signed by the Braves you wouldn't even think twice about calling last season a clear outlier.
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I wouldn't expect it to continue, but a clear mechanical adjust lends to the hope and possibility.
 
Enscheff said:
Career OPS of .693 across almost 2000 ABs, and a "breakout" year at age 31 that spanned 300 ABs?

I think a .700 OPS projection is perfectly understandable. If he wasn't recently signed by the Braves you wouldn't even think twice about calling last season a clear outlier.
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That's not true. I already thought he took a step forward last year.
 
zbhargrove said:
Not really. Projections are rarely correct
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This is a giant misnomer about projections and it's something that ZIPs, steamers, etc. do a poor job presenting when discussing projections. Projections should present a range of probably outcomes based on standard deviation. Mainly because each player is going to have a unique variance hence an .800 OPS projection for Dansby isn't the same as an 800 OPS projection for Freddie.

One other thing, the odds of a player performing exactly to their projections are extremely low. It's simply the most likely outcome amongst thousands of other outcomes.
 
chop2chip said:
This is a giant misnomer about projections and it's something that ZIPs, steamers, etc. do a poor job presenting when discussing projections. Projections should present a range of probably outcomes based on standard deviation. Mainly because each player is going to have a unique variance hence an .800 OPS projection for Dansby isn't the same as an 800 OPS projection for Freddie.
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I don't know what "unique variance" might be, but I think different classes of players have different variances. Young pitchers, old hitters, etc. So there is more uncertainty for certain types of players. I think that is widely accepted. By the way, the players with the most uncertainty about performance are not necessarily the ones with the biggest risk. The biggest risks tend to be the ones with big long-term salaries.

The numbers given by Steamer and other projection systems is the expected value of the various possible outcomes.
 
nsacpi said:
I don't know what "unique variance" might be, but I think different classes of players have different variances. Young pitchers, old hitters, etc. So there is more uncertainty for certain types of players. I think that is widely accepted. By the way, the players with the most uncertainty about performance are not necessarily the ones with the biggest risk. The biggest risks tend to be the ones with big long-term salaries.

The numbers given by Steamer and other projection systems is the expected value of the various possible outcomes.
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what I mean by unique variance is that every single player carries their own personal variance even within a class of player. Which is why comparing projections against other players is really silly.

The numbers outputted by the projection system is the mean projection over a simulated sample size (maybe 5000? Depends on the system). Each simulation would produce a curve of simulated outcomes for each player. And to my point of misconception is the mean isn't what's important, it's how wide or which direction the curve is skewed that is meaningful. I.E. Trout is going to be really narrow while Puig's would be really wide. That, in my opinion, is more informational than the mean.

Re the Braves, we will have one of the wider curves of any team due to the number of young players on the team. Meaning a 75 win projection for the Braves isn't the same as a 75 win projection for the White Sox. What's interesting is that there appears to be a trend of younger teams "outperforming" their projections which suggests that these distributions should skew positively.
 
chop2chip said:
what I mean by unique variance is that every single player carries their own personal variance even within a class of player.
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Yes, there is an individual effect. But how would one go about estimating such a thing. I suspect the individual effect is not constant from season to season. So player A's individual effect (including his individual variance) at age 25 might be very different from his individual effect at age 30. To estimate variance you need multiple observations. And by definition you only get one observation of individual effect for each player.
 
nsacpi said:
Yes, there is an individual effect. But how would one go about estimating such a thing. I suspect the individual effect is not constant from season to season. So player A's individual effect (including his individual variance) at age 25 might be very different from his individual effect at age 30. To estimate variance you need multiple observations. And by definition you only get one observation of individual effect for each player.
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It's possible. Granted it requires making assumptions such as an assumed aging curve because you're right that it's impossible gather multiple observations from the same player under the same circumstances. The fact that we know with greater certainty what Mike Trout is versus Bryce Harper despite the similar age and sample size is an example of us intuitively understanding individual variance.

FWIW, I think ZIPs does an amazing job and Szymborski bases every assumption that he inputs into his model off historical trends/precedence. I wish we had access to the range of outcomes (maybe we do?) so that we could better understand what these projections actually mean.
 
I Think some of the projections offer the higher and lower ends of their projections. Maybe it was BPs PECOTA projections, and I'm not even sure they do them anymore.
 
Enscheff said:
I Think some of the projections offer the higher and lower ends of their projections. Maybe it was BPs PECOTA projections, and I'm not even sure they do them anymore.
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It's not about the endpoints. I don't think that's the argument chop is making. Large outliers will typically always exists in any large sampling of results.
 
nsacpi said:
Mississippi is one of the tougher hitting environments in the minors. Something to keep in mind with respect to Albies and Dustin Peterson as well.
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The downside of that is that we should temper our expectation for some of the pitchers that did well on that team.
 
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