Rox Talk - Season Predictions

Back in January I did a little study on Win Shares, a summary of my conclusion was:

"...based on this little exercise it looks like LA has the early club house lead. They had a bunch of good acquisitions in Andrew Jones and possibly a full season of Schmidt. The unknown factor is the Japanese pitcher Kuroda. San Diego has a lot of offensive holes to fill with losing Cameron, Giles, and Bradley and trying to make this up with Iguchi, Hairston, and Edmonds (who is old!). Haren doesn't solve Arizona's offensive woes (although their young players should start to hit being a year older). What about our Roxs? Well with full seasons from Jimenez and possibly Morales along with a year older Hirsh the pitching should stay fine. The only real hole is 2B. Can Nix get 8 - 12 Win Shares this year (to make up for Matsui's 14)? I think the Roxs will be fine even with the rivals additions."

So that was last year, which really means nothing for the upcoming season! When I did fantasy baseball I used to dig up all the "projections" that people threw out there. Last year I used these projections to try and determine how many wins the Roxs would eke out (the impetus of this study was because Vegas threw out what I thought was an extremely low over/under for our Roxs last year at ~75 wins). Using ZiPS, Chone, Marcel, and the Baseball Forecaster, I determined the Roxs would win about 83 wins (too bad I didn't get to Vegas to bet last year).

So with my thoughts turning to Spring, Vegas usually releases their over/unders for the new season and with the usual no love, the Roxs were given an over/under of 83.5. Now you can't put too much weight in this number as Vegas sets it with the desire to get as many people to take the over as they do the under. It is somewhat an artificial number but does serve as a good starting point especially when you look at what some of division competition is...D-backs are at 87.5, Dodgers at 86.5, and the Padres at 84.5. Where is the respect for the NL Champions? Obviously Vegas is in reality while many of us Roxs fans are still hungover from their miraculous run last year.

The one number, above, that means the most to me is Dodgers at 86.5 (since my Win Shares study showed they had some decent talent returning talent and some good winter acquistions). And with these additions, I also forgot to mention during the Win Shares post that they have a new manager in town, Joe Torre. I believe this was their most important acquistion and will make a world of difference. I think the D-backs will continue to be in the mix due to their pitching but last year they were really a .500 team (allowed more runs then scored) who won a lot of close games. Unless they can score, their duo of Webb and Haren won't mean anything. And finally the one number that floors me is San Diego's. They lost a tremendous amount of scoring capability and didn't exactly add alot of young scoring talent or bring in some bigtime offensive guys. Also throw in the park they play in and I just don't see them winning 84 games.

So that brings us to the Roxs...what do the numbers say? This year I again looked at ZiPS, Chone, Marcel, and added James and PECOTA. Below is a summary of the data. To determine the offense, I took the standard position players with Nix at 2B and four bench players and for the pitchers I took 5 starters (Francis, Cook, Jimenez, Morales, and Hirsh) and threw in Wells, Buchholz, and Corpas. Since most of these projections don't take team at bats into context, I normalized their runs based on the average at bats and runs scored from 2002 - 2007. For pitching I did the same as relief pitchers are difficult to assign at the beginning of the year. Once this normalization was finished I used the Pythagorean expectation to determine the number of expected wins for each projection (used the power of 1.83 rather than 2 as this shows a better correlation).

So what does all this mean? Well a pretty good spread of wins from a low of 77 to high of 93. The average was 84 wins and doing a 95% confidence on the data (take this with a grain of salt since we only have 3 - 5 data points) and based on the projection data the Roxs have a 95% of winning between 82 and 87 games!

Obviously a lot of assumptions are in this calculation. In 2007 the Roxs scored 860 runs and yet none of the normalized projections reach this level for 2008. The big reason for this is the unknown 2B factor. Matsui scored 84 runs last year and Nix is only projected to be in the 50s. In addition with a stabilized line-up with Tulo's pop for an entire season, my hope is the Roxs can score more than 860 runs (the highest total ever is 2000 when the Roxs scored 968 runs!). Unfortunately if the offensive is a bit conservative then the pitching assumptions are probably a bit aggressive. Last year was the best pitching year in franchise history with only 758 runs given up. This was a testament to a good bullpen especially with losing 3/5ths of the pitching staff. If the pitchers can stay healthy then the skies the limit but can we really have as great of a bullpen this year?

So I predict an 85 win season with the Roxs finishing in second to the Dodgers. The D-backs will be neck and neck with the Roxs all year and will finish third with Padres and Giants finishing 4th and 5th in the division.