TSN: Pinto: After trades, stat work says Tigers still trail Yankees, Red Sox

Holy Hypodermias!  A Mitchellist-free article!

Players with career years likely will fall back to their career norms. Hitters with off years in ‘07 likely will improve. Older players might decline because of age, while someone like Cabrera still is young enough to expect improvement.

There are a number of such prediction systems available for players. One of the oldest is published in the Bill James Handbook every year, and those numbers form the basis of the prediction.

One of the tools available at BaseballMusings.com allows the analysis of lineups. Cyril Morong, Ken Arneson and Ryan Armbrust used hidden Markov models to determine how many runs a given lineup would score given each player’s on-base average and slugging percentage. As a side effect, it also can determine the best lineup for a team. Their work was incorporated into the lineup analysis tool.