Sorry man, had to post it. The title of the article was "Don't Start Believin'"
April flukes:
April flukes:
Spoiler [+]
For a good definition of the word "crazy," one needs to look no further than April statistics in baseball. Usually, unexpected starts are the flukes they appear to be. However, there are cases in which surprising April performances are an indication of a changed man, such as Cliff Lee in 2008. After his terrible 2007 campaign, Lee's 5-0, 0.96 April in 2008 turned out to be the start of bigger things.
This season is unlikely to be much different than most other years in baseball history. While most players will start to perform the way they've been expected to, there will be a few who either can't get out of the hole they dug or have continued their torrid April paces. Getting a lot of useful information out of April performance is difficult, but with more information tracked than ever before, our chances of correctly separating flukes from reality are increased.
We've done that for this season's April surprises, running rest-of-season ZiPS projections and projected season-long totals for each player. The ZiPS projection system, in order to calculate rest-of-season projections, uses a method generally referred to as statistical inference in order to predict statistics going forward. The takeaway here: While we should never get too worked up over a few weeks of games, the new information does have some value in predicting what comes next.
Albert Pujols, St. Louis Cardinals (2011 stats: .239/.288/.433, 4 HR, 10 RBIs)
For pretty much any other player, this would be a mildly disappointing start. For Pujols, the default MVP pick at the start of practically every season he's played, it's quite unusual. When was the last full month Pujols put up an OPS worse than .721? Never. Not counting Pujols' June 2006, when he missed significant time due to a strained muscle, the worst month of his career to this point was his .793 OPS in July of his 2001 rookie campaign.
The Cardinals shouldn't be too worried here, as there's a lot of evidence suggesting that we're just looking at a run of bad luck. Pujols' contact percentage is actually above his career average (91 percent versus 86), and his percentage of strikes swung at and missed (3.8 percent) would tie the best mark of his career, so he's certainly not been helpless at the plate. The most common culprit in flukes is batting average on balls in play (BABIP), and Pujols' slow April appears to be a classic example of this phenomenon. With a more normal BABIP than his current .211, Pujols would be looking at a considerably less ho-hum line in the neighborhood of .310/.370/.500 right now.
The news isn't all good for Pujols. His relatively mediocre performance to date is still going to be part of his seasonal line, and given that we can't just expect him to have an extra hot streak to balance out the numbers (this is known as the Gambler's Fallacy), it's going to slightly depress his end-of-season totals. Pujols' coming off his worst season, albeit what would be a career year for most mortals, could be enough to make teams think twice about offering eight years, $240 million to a 32-year-old Albert.
Pujols' rest-of-season projection: .308/.412/.583, 34 HR, 96 RBIs (Total: .299/.398/.565, 38 HR, 106 RBIs)
Jered Weaver/Dan Haren, Los Angeles Angels (combined 8-0, 1.30)
No, they're not going to combine to go 50-0 this season with a Bob Gibson-esque ERA, but their fast starts this year are helping dispel the questions surrounding both pitchers. In Haren's case, his 4.60 ERA for the Arizona Diamondbacks last year raised enough issues that the Angels were able to steal him for Joe Saunders and a few middling prospects.
Despite going only 13-12 last season for the Angels, Weaver had a true breakout season, setting a career K-rate high by nearly 30 percent, and the question going into 2011 was whether he could maintain such a large improvement. A lot of fluky pitcher performances are fueled by BABIP, a quite volatile statistic for pitchers, but improvements and decline due to strikeout or walk rates have more staying power. While Haren and Weaver have low BABIPs that will come up over the course of the season, their 58-11 K-BB ratio is strong evidence that the Angels will continue to have two aces in their rotation.
Dan Haren rest-of-season projection: 13-10, 3.56 (Total 17-10, 3.24)
Jered Weaver rest-of-season projection: 12-10, 3.57 (Total 16-10, 3.27)
David Freese, St. Louis Cardinals (.360/.389/.529, 2 HR, 9 RBIs)
David Freese
Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesCardinals fans should be careful about getting too excited over David Freese's hot start.
Freese was playing well for the Cardinals last year, hitting a very respectable .296/.361/.404, but ankle problems shut him down at the end of June. Freese's loss was one of the contributing factors to the Cardinals' fade down the stretch last year, as the team got next to nothing out of replacements Felipe Lopez and Pedro Feliz.
The .918 OPS Freese has put up in the first three weeks of the season has been impressive, but how much of that will he keep? In this case, Freese's improvement is almost entirely due to his .457 BABIP. Even if Freese came down to the .376 BABIP he had in the first couple of months of last year, a number that in itself is unlikely to be sustainable, Freese's numbers crash to about a .750 OPS. Freese will be acceptable at third base the rest of the year, but we're probably not seeing a breakout season out of him.
David Freese rest-of-season projection: .272/.329/.416, 9 HR, 48 RBIs (Total: .284/.337/.430, 11 HR, 57 RBIs)
Trevor Cahill, Oakland Athletics (2-0, 2.49)
Cahill may seem like an odd choice as a surprise candidate, seeing as how he had a 2.97 ERA last year, but there were statistical reasons to think Cahill would experience a drop off from his 18-win 2010 season, most notably his 4.19 FIP stemming from a 5.4 K/9 rate, which is extremely low for a top pitcher. So far this season, Cahill is up to a 9.6 K/9, a number unlikely to be a pure fluke even in just four starts, and his FIP this year, 2.78, is more in line with his actual ERA.
While "he's going to throw his improved curveball more this season" is just as much a spring cliché as "he's in the best shape of his life," Cahill's actually been doing it this year, throwing his curveball 50 percent more often than he did in 2010. This has been enough to drop the percentage of batter contact on Cahill's pitches out of the strike zone from 70 percent to 56 percent so far this season. The computer's still skeptical, but I think this is one case in which the player will beat the machine.
Trevor Cahill rest-of-season projection: 11-12, 4.04 (Total: 13-12, 3.85)
Vernon Wells, Los Angeles Angels (.169/.217/.231, 0 HR, 2 RBIs)
While Angels fans can be happy with the performances of Weaver and Haren, I doubt a single person in Anaheim is currently having warm feelings about the four years and $83 million remaining on Vernon Wells' contract. In 69 plate appearances this season, Wells has looked generally helpless, hitting more like a pitcher than the extra bat the Angels thought they were getting. Even giving Wells his usual BABIP -- .220 this year and .287 for his career -- he'd still only be hitting about .230/.280/.290 thus far in 2011. Wells probably isn't done, but his performance is bad enough to take expectations for the season down another notch.
Vernon Wells rest-of-season projection: .252/.305/.416, 16 HR, 63 RBIs (Total: .243/.295/.395, 16 HR, 65 RBIs)
This season is unlikely to be much different than most other years in baseball history. While most players will start to perform the way they've been expected to, there will be a few who either can't get out of the hole they dug or have continued their torrid April paces. Getting a lot of useful information out of April performance is difficult, but with more information tracked than ever before, our chances of correctly separating flukes from reality are increased.
We've done that for this season's April surprises, running rest-of-season ZiPS projections and projected season-long totals for each player. The ZiPS projection system, in order to calculate rest-of-season projections, uses a method generally referred to as statistical inference in order to predict statistics going forward. The takeaway here: While we should never get too worked up over a few weeks of games, the new information does have some value in predicting what comes next.
Albert Pujols, St. Louis Cardinals (2011 stats: .239/.288/.433, 4 HR, 10 RBIs)
For pretty much any other player, this would be a mildly disappointing start. For Pujols, the default MVP pick at the start of practically every season he's played, it's quite unusual. When was the last full month Pujols put up an OPS worse than .721? Never. Not counting Pujols' June 2006, when he missed significant time due to a strained muscle, the worst month of his career to this point was his .793 OPS in July of his 2001 rookie campaign.
The Cardinals shouldn't be too worried here, as there's a lot of evidence suggesting that we're just looking at a run of bad luck. Pujols' contact percentage is actually above his career average (91 percent versus 86), and his percentage of strikes swung at and missed (3.8 percent) would tie the best mark of his career, so he's certainly not been helpless at the plate. The most common culprit in flukes is batting average on balls in play (BABIP), and Pujols' slow April appears to be a classic example of this phenomenon. With a more normal BABIP than his current .211, Pujols would be looking at a considerably less ho-hum line in the neighborhood of .310/.370/.500 right now.
The news isn't all good for Pujols. His relatively mediocre performance to date is still going to be part of his seasonal line, and given that we can't just expect him to have an extra hot streak to balance out the numbers (this is known as the Gambler's Fallacy), it's going to slightly depress his end-of-season totals. Pujols' coming off his worst season, albeit what would be a career year for most mortals, could be enough to make teams think twice about offering eight years, $240 million to a 32-year-old Albert.
Pujols' rest-of-season projection: .308/.412/.583, 34 HR, 96 RBIs (Total: .299/.398/.565, 38 HR, 106 RBIs)
Jered Weaver/Dan Haren, Los Angeles Angels (combined 8-0, 1.30)
No, they're not going to combine to go 50-0 this season with a Bob Gibson-esque ERA, but their fast starts this year are helping dispel the questions surrounding both pitchers. In Haren's case, his 4.60 ERA for the Arizona Diamondbacks last year raised enough issues that the Angels were able to steal him for Joe Saunders and a few middling prospects.
Despite going only 13-12 last season for the Angels, Weaver had a true breakout season, setting a career K-rate high by nearly 30 percent, and the question going into 2011 was whether he could maintain such a large improvement. A lot of fluky pitcher performances are fueled by BABIP, a quite volatile statistic for pitchers, but improvements and decline due to strikeout or walk rates have more staying power. While Haren and Weaver have low BABIPs that will come up over the course of the season, their 58-11 K-BB ratio is strong evidence that the Angels will continue to have two aces in their rotation.
Dan Haren rest-of-season projection: 13-10, 3.56 (Total 17-10, 3.24)
Jered Weaver rest-of-season projection: 12-10, 3.57 (Total 16-10, 3.27)
David Freese, St. Louis Cardinals (.360/.389/.529, 2 HR, 9 RBIs)
David Freese
Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesCardinals fans should be careful about getting too excited over David Freese's hot start.
Freese was playing well for the Cardinals last year, hitting a very respectable .296/.361/.404, but ankle problems shut him down at the end of June. Freese's loss was one of the contributing factors to the Cardinals' fade down the stretch last year, as the team got next to nothing out of replacements Felipe Lopez and Pedro Feliz.
The .918 OPS Freese has put up in the first three weeks of the season has been impressive, but how much of that will he keep? In this case, Freese's improvement is almost entirely due to his .457 BABIP. Even if Freese came down to the .376 BABIP he had in the first couple of months of last year, a number that in itself is unlikely to be sustainable, Freese's numbers crash to about a .750 OPS. Freese will be acceptable at third base the rest of the year, but we're probably not seeing a breakout season out of him.
David Freese rest-of-season projection: .272/.329/.416, 9 HR, 48 RBIs (Total: .284/.337/.430, 11 HR, 57 RBIs)
Trevor Cahill, Oakland Athletics (2-0, 2.49)
Cahill may seem like an odd choice as a surprise candidate, seeing as how he had a 2.97 ERA last year, but there were statistical reasons to think Cahill would experience a drop off from his 18-win 2010 season, most notably his 4.19 FIP stemming from a 5.4 K/9 rate, which is extremely low for a top pitcher. So far this season, Cahill is up to a 9.6 K/9, a number unlikely to be a pure fluke even in just four starts, and his FIP this year, 2.78, is more in line with his actual ERA.
While "he's going to throw his improved curveball more this season" is just as much a spring cliché as "he's in the best shape of his life," Cahill's actually been doing it this year, throwing his curveball 50 percent more often than he did in 2010. This has been enough to drop the percentage of batter contact on Cahill's pitches out of the strike zone from 70 percent to 56 percent so far this season. The computer's still skeptical, but I think this is one case in which the player will beat the machine.
Trevor Cahill rest-of-season projection: 11-12, 4.04 (Total: 13-12, 3.85)
Vernon Wells, Los Angeles Angels (.169/.217/.231, 0 HR, 2 RBIs)
While Angels fans can be happy with the performances of Weaver and Haren, I doubt a single person in Anaheim is currently having warm feelings about the four years and $83 million remaining on Vernon Wells' contract. In 69 plate appearances this season, Wells has looked generally helpless, hitting more like a pitcher than the extra bat the Angels thought they were getting. Even giving Wells his usual BABIP -- .220 this year and .287 for his career -- he'd still only be hitting about .230/.280/.290 thus far in 2011. Wells probably isn't done, but his performance is bad enough to take expectations for the season down another notch.
Vernon Wells rest-of-season projection: .252/.305/.416, 16 HR, 63 RBIs (Total: .243/.295/.395, 16 HR, 65 RBIs)
