Projections from Bill James

[JET15]

Fangraphs has the Bill James projections for next year. Without making any moves, our numbers are projecting out worse. Below is last years' OPS, the OPS projection and the percentage change. The good news is that BJ has Gamel going up 171%. While that sounds great, it's really a 17% drop off from Prince. I wonder if we can get 2 win shares out of him if he's full-time at first. Gamel's numbers against lefties have been declining, not improving.

Casey should be improving by 17%, but that's hardly the "bounce back" that Doug is probably hoping for given the dismal 2011 CM had. What's striking is that nearly everyone is dropping. BJ must think we overperformed. I don't think it's player age, not across the board like that.

Lucroy .703 .721 3%
Kottaras .771 .761 -1%
Fielder .981 .956 -3%
Gamel .302 .818 171%
Weeks .818 .808 -1%
McGehee .626 .732 17%
Betancourt .652 .673 3%
Braun .994 .953 -4%
Gomez .679 .672 -1%
Morgan .778 .707 -9%
Hart .866 .826 -5%
Hairston .727 .692 -5%

On the pitching side, I looked at BJ's FIP numbers. The last column is change again, with positive an improvement and negative a decline. He only projects Yoga improving on 2011 from the rotation. Saito and Braddock have the biggest jumps. The biggest drops are Hawkins and Loe. Off the cliff declines.

Gallardo 3.59 3.31 8%
Greinke 2.98 3.23 -8%
Marcum 3.73 4.01 -8%
Wolf 4.29 4.36 -2%
Narveson 4.06 4.24 -4%
Saito 3.40 3.05 10%
Hawkins 2.76 3.58 -30%
Rodriguez 2.72 2.72 0%
Axford 2.41 2.41 0%
Braddock 4.70 3.51 25%
Estrada 3.67 3.76 -2%
Loe 2.80 3.99 -43%

I tried to correlate the changes against last year's WAR. Assuming Fielder, Counsell and Kotsay are gone, the team WAR drop is 5.9 points