2007 Community Projection

All right, it's taken some work, but I've finally gotten around to tallying up all the individual results, converting them to run values, and working these into a total team projection. Many thanks go out to Tangotiger for his mathematically perfect run modeler, without which this would've been a hell of a lot more difficult.

A few assumptions had to be made along the way. Since we didn't project everyone on the roster, I had to take a blind stab at how the other guys (bench, back of the bullpen) are going to perform. For the bench, I plugged in the average 2006 pinch-hitter performance. It's not very good, but then neither is our bench, so it works pretty well. For the other pitchers, I assumed a replacement-levelish 5.75 RA. Number of extra at bats/innings were determined by subtracting what we projected from the average 2006 total team at bats (5607) and innings pitched (1437). Finally, since the run modeler doesn't included HBP, I included those as walks. It's not perfect, but it's close enough, and it's better than excluding them entirely.

There are other details, but we can talk about them later if you're curious; all anyone really cares about here are the results, so let's get right to them. So you know, there are two projections, because there were two different ways of calculating runs allowed - (1) simply adding up the RA, or (2) entering all the other numbers (doubles, triples, strikeouts, etc.) into Tango's run modeler. The two give different values, so we've got two different projections.

W/L is based on the Pythagorean equation.

Projection #1:

RS: 787
RA: 750
W/L: 85-77

Projection #2:

RS: 787
RA: 805
W/L: 79-83

Look about right to you? Looks about right to me. Solid offensive team with a suspect pitching staff, a group capable of being crippled by a single injury. I could go into more detail, but this is exactly what we've been talking about all winter long, so anything I'd say would just be repeating myself.

Mariners. A's. Tomorrow night.