Preliminary Mariner Pitcher Projections

Is that how it works?

And throws closer to 150-170 innings before getting shut down

I’m loving it. If two of the five break out we could be an above .500 team. Sweet.

His Tacoma ERA is alarmingly high, especially after clearly dominating all other minor-league levels. But all of his other stats—including WHIP and K/9—fit nicely with his career totals. I have to assume that the number of runs allowed during the relatively small sample of innings do not indicate his efficacy. Also, his runs allowed and earned runs allowed are exactly the same, meaning he pitched through errors, which can be a problem in the minors.

-The mix of 200 IP for MR feels like more innings will go to the good guys and less to the slop guys… 100 for each batch feels low. I’m thinking 1.2 or 1.3 WAR total.
-Vargas feels low. I’d slot him in the mid-to-high 1’s for W/150, and a 2ish WAR.

A lot of the times I think people are over optimistic when projecting pitchers but I think you did a good job of intelligently regressing guys stats and coming up with reasonable playing times. Some people think the bullpen projections might be a little low but I’d expect a couple of guys in our pen to bomb and be below replacement level.

Is this about what you expect, or are you hedging between Erik being healthy for 2011 versus another injury-plagued season for him?

I’d see Vargas a little bit higher. Bedard is hard to project but I don’t see him putting up that 1.3 WAR number. I’d expect to see either a ~2.5-3ish WAR from a healthy Bedard or somewhere around 0-1 if he’s not. I’d also hope that the bullpen would produce more with the combination of Leuke/Cortes/League but they’re all young so I’m probably being too optimistic.

Is it unrealistic to to see League as a potential breakout 1.5-2 WAR reliever if he starts using the splitter more this year?

until you try to place him in the context of a capable rotation and how high his WAR really is. Probably something everyone’s thought already but it frequently hits me. Consistently surprisingly amazing.

I look at everyone in the rotation after Felix and see an RRS meltdown. PTSD.

To me, these look a lot more realistic overall than the hitters’ projections did. You have Hernandez too high, for sure – pitchers that performed as well as he did last season rarely maintain such a high level next year, although he will still be good (I’d say 5 WAR, although I’m no less prone to biases than anyone else). You’re probably too bearish on the bullpen, actually, although it certainly won’t be worth eight wins or something; two or three WAR seems reasonable. The remainder of the starting rotation, at least as a whole, seems pretty accurate. I’m definitely curious to see what ZiPS and other systems have to say, though.

So too low.

You’re predicting 225 IP and 6,0 WAR. That would be a third consecutive Cy Young caliber season. While that is certainly possible, I’d be a little less optimistic and say about 200 IP and 5,0 WAR.

I believe I will defer to your expertise

Combining the pitching and hitting projections, the M’s are looking like an 81-82 win team. It also looks like we could improve the most by removing French and Pauley’s SP innings and replacing them with a quality starter. So trading Aardsma’s salary for anything becomes huge, because then we could offer 12 million/2 years for someone like Francis. Another starter could greatly improve our playoff odds.

Otherwise it looks fine to me.

I think at the start of 2010 people tended to overestimate (not the stat savvy people like Dave Cameron, Matthew and Jeff) how good or not-bad our offense would be because we were lucky to some extent in 2009.

Now it is probably the opposite. It will be easy for folks to underestimate the offense for 2011 (unlike Matthew who gave a 19.9 WAR prediction) while overestimating the pitching.

Vargas and Fister probably overperformed in 2010 and we may be in for another bad surprise if we count on them too much in 2011.

starter IP seems a bit low, and this may push the WAR total higher. Looks like the average starter IP last year was in the 95-1000 IP range, compared to the 870 you’ve got. This means we’ve got more reliever innings and fewer starter innings. Broadly, that would tend to push the total WAR projection down, as the M’s had a terrible pen the past few years, but in this case, I think it might make things a bit optimistic.
If we’ve got another 100 IP or so to allocate between David Pauley and the Chris Seddon/Yusmeiro Petits of the world, I think it’s highly likely that we’d end up with some negative WAR, like you’ve got for the bottom of the pen. Of course, taking innings away from the pen might cancel this out… but I’m not sure. The problem (as you alluded to) is that it’s essentially impossible to forecast the pen, especially the middle relievers. Dan Cortes could lay waste to the league or he could throw up a -1 WAR and I wouldn’t bat an eyelash at either result. All in all, I think the starter WAR is a bit high, the reliever WAR is basically dead on (for what that’s worth).