As Zephon mentioned yesterday, Dan Szymborski’s ZIPS system has come out with its 2010 numbers for Arizona. It’s the last of the “big four” public projection systems [Bill James, CHONE, Marcel, ZIPS] to go to press, so that means I can begin work on the Communiry Projections. Those will be starting after I finish the 2010 preview by position series, so likely about when pitchers and catchers report. For the moment, however, let’s just extract the basic numbers and see what ZIPS has to say about our everyday players next year
The good news on first eyeball is, ZIPS projects six everyday players to have an OPS+ of 100 or better in 2010. This would be a marked improvement on last season, when we had 3 1/2 there - Mark Reynolds, Justin Upton, Miguel Montero, with the half being Ryan Roberts. The first three are projected to repeat, though the numbers for the trio all show a slight regression, of between three and ten OPS+ points. This is something njjohn mentioned with particular regard to Upton, in the RF preview piece: all the projections for him see Upton slipping. I think it’s because - and this goes for Montero and Reynolds too - 2009 was his first “good” season, and the ones prior to that still carry enough weight to drag down the numbers, countering the expected aging improvement.
Joining them in the 100+ club, ZIPS says will be our two new arrivals, Adam LaRoche and Kelly Johnson. The former is projected to bounce back almost exactly to the 2008 level, with ZIPS believing last year to have been an aberration. After two consecutive years of 122 OPS+ for LaRoche, Dan hardly sticks his neck out when he predicts a figure for Adam in 2010 of…122. Particularly encouraging, ZIPS also expects Conor Jackson to make a strong recovery from valley fever, and return to the kind of numbers produced from 2006-08. This joins the other systems, which have similar OPS expectations to the .798 from ZIPS [in the range .783 for CHONE to .806 for Bill James].
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1. CW hits the pinata for the candy Posted: January 21, 2010 at 05:33 PM (#3443138)ZiPS doesn't know Conor Jackson had valley fever. And if it did know he had valley fever it would surely say "I had valley fever once -- that'll teach me to spend a night with a hooker in Vegas."
Where ZiPS dings Jackson is in its playing time projection that isn't a playing time projecting by (not) projecting him to 356 PA.
Nick Piecoro has an interesting blog entry on this topic (among others)...
If only there was some way to combine Haren's first half with Johan's second half.
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