Nov 13 2005 12:11 PM
From today's New York Times...
Based on this, Omar might want to think twice before throwing $40 mil over 4 years at our friend Mr. Wagner...
November 13, 2005
Keeping Score
Predicting Futures in Baseball, and the Downside of Damon
By ALAN SCHWARZ
INDIAN WELLS, Calif., Nov. 11 - Thad Levine was distracted. As Levine, the assistant general manager of the Texas Rangers, conversed one evening at last week's Major League Baseball general managers meetings, his eyes kept wandering to an enticing packet of paper sitting on a nearby coffee table: the 2006 Pecota Projections.
For the growing number of baseball executives bent toward statistical analysis, a certain anticipation builds every off-season for the release of what is known simply as Pecota, Baseball Prospectus's überforecast of every player's performance the next season. Most front offices have an employee who consults it - particularly during the free-agent season. "Signing someone to a three- or four-year deal is a risk-management business decision," Levine said, leafing through the pages. "This tool does a fantastic job of managing expectations for what the player will do for you."
What separates Pecota from the gaggle of projection systems that outsiders have developed over many decades is how it recognizes, even flaunts, the uncertainty of predicting a player's skills. Rather than generate one line of expected statistics, Pecota presents seven - some optimistic, some pessimistic - each with its own confidence level. The system greatly resembles the forecasting of hurricane paths: players can go in many directions, so preparing for just one is foolish.
Take Johnny Damon, the Red Sox center fielder considered one of this off-season's most attractive free agents. Pecota examines many factors beyond his raw statistical record - the effect of playing in hitter-friendly Fenway Park, Damon's age (32), power and speed, even his height and weight - and compares him with every major leaguer since 1949, identifying the trajectories others have taken and assessing the probability Damon will follow them.
The system forecasts Damon to have about a 25 percent chance of posting an on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) of .829 next season, but also a 40 percent chance of declining to .761. This is because players like Damon have maintained their performance only for about one year before beginning a consistent, decided decline. In other words, buyer beware.
Pecota is less pessimistic toward shortstop Rafael Furcal, who at 28 has a better chance of maintaining his performance level. (Though the system suggests that middle infielders age more quickly than classic sluggers.) A relative sleeper could be found in outfielder Brian Giles, who despite being 35 has the kind of skills - excellent power, speed and a fine batting eye - that tend to age relatively slowly.
Pecota was developed four summers ago by Nate Silver, a 24-year-old Chicago financial consultant. "In some ways it was boredom," Silver said. "If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy." (Its official name, Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, joyfully boils down to the last name of Bill Pecota, a former major league utilityman.) The projections are anticipated enough among some executives that Silver has received e-mail messages saying, "Hey, are the Pecotas done yet?"
Though the system naturally cannot predict all player fluctuations, it succeeds more than most. Last winter, it identified Jonny Gomes, a relatively unknown Tampa Bay Devil Rays outfielder, as having an excellent chance at significant improvement. Gomes hit .282 with 21 home runs in just 101 games. It also foresaw even greater production from established players like Andruw Jones, Derrek Lee and Dontrelle Willis.
Pecota helps quantify the danger of long-term pitching investments, and points out which types of arms tend to project best. The strongest indicators of future performance are rates of strikeouts, walks and home runs, but also ground ball-to-fly ball ratio and even body type.
As for this year's free-agent pitching market, Silver sees a fine future for A. J. Burnett, an enigmatic 28-year-old right-hander. Burnett projects to have a 3.65 earned run average next season, but also has a 15 percent chance of blossoming into a Cy Young award candidate for several seasons. Of the two most intriguing relievers available, the veteran Billy Wagner and the less-known B. J. Ryan, Pecota chooses Ryan as the better long-term investment thanks to his age next season (30 to Wagner's 34) and several other peripheral factors.
Pecota's focus on looking several years ahead is what catches executives' eyes most at this time of year - and helps temper what is often unfounded optimism about players' chances of improving.
"Sometimes you have a guy with a track record, a guy in his early 30's, and when he declines we act like we're shocked," Levine said. "And we don't want to look at a 26-year-old who does X and think that in two years he's going to do two-times X. This helps us stay grounded."
No organization uses Pecota in a vacuum, instead incorporating it with other projection techniques like traditional scouting reports. But a decade after Bill Pecota retired, his name is growing more prominent each winter.
"Everyone in baseball is in the guessing business," the Mariners executive Dan Evans said. "This makes it a little bit less of a guess."
E-mail: keepingscore@nytimes.com
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