Time to change my bookmark - I was going straight to the team listings and until the last few posts, I had no idea that Dave Cameron (and Eric Seidman) were writing regularly for Fangraphs.

I think that there's some problems with prOPS, but Nick sounds like the guy that Bill James would use in the New New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract's "the Aughts in a Box" in the section "Could I do this career over?"

I thought this was going to be about Nick Swisher - he's also currently putting up the highest LD% of his career - 23.9% - and the lowest BABIP of his career - .246.

It’s not perfect, but if you want to see a list of guys who are due for a regression to the mean, the extreme ends of the PrOPS leaderboard is a good place to start.

According to PrOPS, Nick Johnson’s batting line so far should be something like .336/.493/.549. It’s actually .216/.392/.432. The difference between his results and the expected results is 120 points of batting average, 100 points of on base percentage, and 130 points of slugging percentage. PrOPS thinks Johnson’s been something like the 5th best hitter in the National League in April, putting him just behind some guys named Burrell, Utley, Pujols, and the aforementioned Chipper Jones.

I’d say it’s safe to say that Nick Johnson is just fine.

I'm surprised Cameron didn't look at PrOPS in his recent article about Jack Cust. PrOPS has Cust as the third most underachieving player in MLB, even more so than Nick Johnson. His PrOPS is .273/.458/.403.

Of course, Cust also led MLB in underperforming PrOPS last season (a neat feat with a .912 OPS), which probably points to PrOPS' flaw of not taking speed into consideration.

Props is not very useful. You are adding some good information like line drive rate, but ignoring a lot of other things that contribute to a batter's end results. It has been shown to be much less predictive than a simple Marcel (while other projection systems are right about even with Marcel, at least for guys with a big league track record).

Yes, Nick Johnson has been unlucky but what is Props supposed to be telling us? That he should be hitting .336? That's not right. If you want the best guess for what Nick will hit to the end of the season, go with Marcel, which says he'll hit .290 or something like that.

I was going straight to the team listings and until the last few posts, I had no idea that Dave Cameron (and Eric Seidman) were writing regularly for Fangraphs.

We're each writing twice a day, Monday-Friday, and then we each put up one post per weekend. Toss in Marc Hulet's 3-4 posts per week on the minors, along with Appelman's posts, and yea, I'm a little biased, but there's a ton of good content going up on fangraphs every day.

I'm surprised Cameron didn't look at PrOPS in his recent article about Jack Cust. PrOPS has Cust as the third most underachieving player in MLB, even more so than Nick Johnson. His PrOPS is .273/.458/.403.

Each post has its own point of interest. To me, the most interesting thing about Cust is his strikeout rate, so that's what I talked about. The most interesting thing about Nick Johnson, right now, is the disconnect between his LD% and his BABIP.

Props is not very useful.

Depends on what you're using it for.

It has been shown to be much less predictive than a simple Marcel (while other projection systems are right about even with Marcel, at least for guys with a big league track record).

Sure - if I was trying to project Nick Johnson for the rest of 2008, I wouldn't use PrOPS. No disagreement here. I just wasn't trying to do that.

Yes, Nick Johnson has been unlucky but what is Props supposed to be telling us? That he should be hitting .336? That's not right. If you want the best guess for what Nick will hit to the end of the season, go with Marcel, which says he'll hit .290 or something like that.

Why is it "not right" that he should be hitting .330+ right now, even if that's not true talent level? We can believe simultaneously that Johnson's likely to hit .290ish for the rest of 2008 and that the swings he took in April should have resulted in a batting average in the .330 range. I'm not suggesting that he's going to sustain a 28% line drive rate for the rest of the year, or that it's more predictive than a projection system. I'm simply pointing out the huge disconnect between his early season results and the underlying performance, which I find interesting. To me, that's what PrOPS was designed for, and in this kind of case, I think it's the right tool for the job.

Sure - if I was trying to project Nick Johnson for the rest of 2008, I wouldn't use PrOPS. No disagreement here. I just wasn't trying to do that.

Fair enough.

Why is it "not right" that he should be hitting .330+ right now, even if that's not true talent level? We can believe simultaneously that Johnson's likely to hit .290ish for the rest of 2008 and that the swings he took in April should have resulted in a batting average in the .330 range.

I don't think that's necessarily right. There's more that goes into his BABIP than line drive, contact, and GB/FB mix. His traditional batting stats incorporate more of this, such as speed, but also introduce more variance/luck in small sample sizes. Still, traditional stats used correctly give you a better idea of what he should hit than Props does. Saying that he should have a sample BA of .336 based on Props, I don't see anything to back that up.

If Nick was a batter with average speed, and was hitting his line drives at an average velocity, then maybe we could say he should be hitting .336 or so. (Maybe one of these days hittracker can tell us that). But his actual average tells me that in addition to bad luck, he's probably hitting softer line drives than typical, or is too slow to beat out a lot of ground balls, or both.

But his actual average tells me that in addition to bad luck, he's probably hitting softer line drives than typical, or is too slow to beat out a lot of ground balls, or both.

It's probably some combination of all of them. I'd like to see the hard/medium/soft breakdown on the line drives, also the breakdown between LD/fliner-LD/fliner-fly (all of which are lumped into the LD category, IIRC).

-- MWE

fliner-fly

Flava Flav's brother, right?