Acuna and the 40/40 Club

B

BeanieAntics

Arbitration Eligible
Its going to be tough, but very possible, for him to get to the 40 stolen bases necessary to gain entry this season. However, there was a really interesting article on Fangraphs about Acuna's journey to accomplish this feat:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/ronald-acuna-and-the-40-40-club/

Something from the article that I found kind of interesting were the ZiPS projections for him over the next 10 years. ZiPS projects Acuna to have 7.8 40 home run seasons and 2.2 seasons of 40 stolen bases. That means that it is very possible that Acuna could become the first person to achieve 40/40 seasons multiple times.

I've always found these arbitrary milestones to be kinda silly, but these projections really do show just how insanely special this guy is. Its gonna be a lot of fun to look back on his statistics 20 years from now to see what he accomplished.
 
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I liked the chart that showed zips projections for him to finish with the 6th best power/speed combo. Also interesting is that it gives him an outside chance to join Bonds as a 400/400 member. To get there I he's going to really rack up the steals in the early part of his career. But yeah Ronald seems poised to be one of those rare players with an elite combo of power and speed. And so far that's translating to results on the field. Just an amazing talent.
 
thewupk said:
I liked the chart that showed zips projections for him to finish with the 6th best power/speed combo. Also interesting is that it gives him an outside chance to join Bonds as a 400/400 member. To get there I he's going to really rack up the steals in the early part of his career. But yeah Ronald seems poised to be one of those rare players with an elite combo of power and speed. And so far that's translating to results on the field. Just an amazing talent.
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We can only hope he refrains from the same diet that his idol Miguel Cabrera had.
 
Zips projections are trash. Show me a projection system that predicted Acuna would be this good this soon back when he was in AAA. Now that Acuna is getting close to a 40/40 season it projects he could do it some more in the future. Wow. Bold prediction. I wonder what the projected Heyward after his rookie year.




All that said Acuna has 15 sb in 30 games since the ASB. So 41 games and he needs 12. Seems doable.
 
cajunrevenge said:
Zips projections are trash. Show me a projection system that predicted Acuna would be this good this soon back when he was in AAA. Now that Acuna is getting close to a 40/40 season it projects he could do it some more in the future. Wow. Bold prediction. I wonder what the projected Heyward after his rookie year.




All that said Acuna has 15 sb in 30 games since the ASB. So 41 games and he needs 12. Seems doable.
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Umm, ZiPs was projecting Acuna to be a star years ago...

You just weren't paying attention.
 
Looked up his 2018 zips projection. .269/.321/.452. 101 RC. So it projected an average hitting CF for Acuna in 2018.


Jason Heywoods zips projection after his rookie year... .281/.393/.490. Zips like the caveman projection system. It tells you **** that should be obvious.
 
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cajunrevenge said:
I was basing it on his projected 101 RC+. It certainly sold him short quite a bit.
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Obviously a projection system that is trying to project out a prospect who hasn't made his debut is going to have to factor in a bust rate to some extent, which will drag down the median expected outcome for that player. ZiPS projections are just trying to show what a player's 50th percentile outcome would look like. Luckily for us, it looks like Acuna has hit his 90th+ percentile outcome relative to those 2018 projections. Now that he has a larger MLB sample, ZiPS can be more aggressive in projecting his future out and the larger the sample gets the more accurate the projections should get.
 
So in other words their projections of prospects is worth nothing. Any idiot can look at Acuna and his stats and project him to get slightly better with age, peak around 27-29 and then slowly decline into his 30's. I dont even need to look at his zips projections to know that's what they project.
 
cajunrevenge said:
So in other words their projections of prospects is worth nothing. Any idiot can look at Acuna and his stats and project him to get slightly better with age, peak around 27-29 and then slowly decline into his 30's. I dont even need to look at his zips projections to know that's what they project.
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That's not what I said at all. I said that the projections are going to be less stable and they are going to factor in a broader range of outcomes than for an MLB veteran. That doesn't make them useless and it doesn't support your notion that ZiPS projections are trash in general. In fact, they usually do a pretty good job long term.
 
The projections are definitely not useless. I think they're most useful when comparing players and prospects, say the projected future WAR of 2 different prospects. Having said that, if a poster on here came and said they thought after this year, Acuna would have multiple seasons of 40 HR and would also get to 40 steals a couple times, it would be met with a, 'Wow, thanks for the super helpful prediction!'

They're obviously just using the numbers players have put up, which everybody has access to. They have a much better system of comparing to all past players, which is helpful...but it's also not like it's some kind of brilliant system. The fact that they have to account for bust rate and all possible outcomes is a good way to build a prediction model, but it also means it's going to be accurate pretty close to 0% of the time for any player with little to no MLB time.
 
cajunrevenge said:
So in other words their projections of prospects is worth nothing. Any idiot can look at Acuna and his stats and project him to get slightly better with age, peak around 27-29 and then slowly decline into his 30's. I dont even need to look at his zips projections to know that's what they project.
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I would be very interested in seeing your projection system applied to all professional baseball players.

Let me know when you publish. Thanks!
 
I developed a projection system that hasn’t been wrong yet. I have tested it on 500 former players and everyone was projected correctly.

I won’t tell you how but I can say what I call it. 20/20
 
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