Some 2010 Projections

For those of you who are (justifiably) distrustful of the Bill James projections but still want to look at some numbers, the 2010 CHONE projections are live. For hitters, anyway. Here are the Mariners, here are the free agents, and here are the Yankees, in case looking at the Mariners didn't make you sad enough.

The first thing you should do here - as one should do with pretty much any forecasting system - is ignore the Ichiro projection. It's a well-known fact that forecasting systems hate Ichiro, and I mean literally hate him, in that they have a built-in hate factor that program creators activate for Ichiro because they feel threatened by his improbability. It's my understanding that CHONE took all the hits it stole from Ichiro and gave them to Prentice Redman.

Eventually Ichiro will decline and a few forecasters will give each other high-fives for nailing it, but it doesn't count when you project decline every year. It's like the computer version of me and Raul Ibanez. .305/.338/.400 isn't unreasonable - Ichiro did hit .310/.361/.386 as recently as 2008 - but just because it's possible doesn't make it a good projection, because projections are supposed to fall in the middle of the next year's probability distribution, and a .738 OPS is towards the bottom of Ichiro's. Feel free to bump that up a fair bit in your head. It'll help paint a slightly better picture of our currently miserable offense.

Among Mariners currently in-house, you'll notice that Jose Lopez forecasts well, while Franklin Gutierrez comes out looking a little worse. The former strikes me as optimistic, given the things I've talked about before with regard to Lopez's power, but the latter seems fair, given that Guti probably overachieved a little bit in 2009. But hey, he's young, so who knows? Not a lot of love in there for Michael Saunders or Matt Tuiasosopo, which you can believe in, or not believe in. Overall, man, do we need help. The Russell Branyan line looks good, but that won't be enough on its own.

Most optimistic projection of the bunch? Greg Halman's .193/.242/.334 with 17 walks and 147 strikeouts. Halman just ran a 29/183 ratio in AA. Methinks the decimal in "17" was put in the wrong place.