| Re: Fantasy help needed
One of the guys that BP's projection system has a lot of trouble with is Ichiro.
The computer takes a look at Ichiro's numbers, sees a lot of singles, very few walks, and little power, and assumes that he's been lucky thus far. After all, players can generally control their walk rates, strikeout rates, and their power numbers, but the biggest year-to-year variation comes on BABIP (batting average on balls in play...which is basically hits minus home runs, divided by at-bats minus home runs and strikeouts).
BP's program assumes that a guy who hits a ton of singles and not much else must have gotten lucky for all those balls to have dropped in for hits. It doesnt have the benefit of the human eye to see that Ichiro is a unique case. But most players tend to follow certain patterns, and their performance can be reasonably estimated using their age, ballpark, teammates, walk rate, strikeout rate, power, and probably some other factor that determined BABIP, such as goundball/flyball ratio and/or line-drive rate
Crazy stat I heard recently: Last year, Ichiro had 200 singles for the second time in his career. In the entire history of baseball, no other player has even done it once. |