(Photo courtesy of David Richard/USA Today Sports)
(Photo courtesy of David Richard/USA Today Sports)

A little less than a week after we wrote about Steamer’s 2015 projections for the Tampa Bay Rays, Baseball Prospectus released their PECOTA projections for the upcoming season. While many saw Matt Silverman’s off-season moves as detrimental to the organization, in the present tense, the PECOTA projections are surprising to many; finding the Rays leading the AL East, alongside the Boston Red Sox — both of whom are projected a mean average of 86 wins. While it may not be enough to silence the doomsayers at the moment, the PECOTA projections offer a fairly optimistic glimmer of hope for Rays fans.

How will the Rays win the East? Here are a few highlights from Baseball Prospectus*:

PECOTA 2015 AL East projections. (Courtesy of Baseball Prospectus)
2015 AL East PECOTA projections. (Courtesy of Baseball Prospectus)

PECOTA projects the Rays to be, well…the Rays 2015. That is, they’re projected to be dominant thanks to pitching and defense. Their projected 638 runs allowed is second best in the American league (just behind Seattle) for fewest runs given up, while the Nate Silver curated system projects Tampa Bay to score 681 runs — 15 more than Steamer’s projected run total of 666. The projected combined .250 BA/.320 OBP/.387 SLG slash line is similar to the .247 BA/.323 OBP/.386 line suggested by Steamer. Overall, the Rays true average (Tav; a measure of total offensive value scaled to batting average) of .268 is significantly higher than both the projected combined batting average, and the team’s 2014 combined batting average.

Of course any offensive prowess will be dependent upon Evan Longoria and Desmond Jennings, and newcomers Asdrubal Cabrera and Steven Souza.

Souza, the teams newest outfielder (and replacement for Wil Myers), has the third highest projection with a .261 BA/.336 OBP/.458 SLG slash line — vastly better than the numbers projected by Steamer. Incidentally, PECOTA’s .254 BA/.319OBP/.435SLG projection for Myers ranks lower than that of his replacement. As for Ben Zobrist’s heir apparent Nick Franklin, he projects to post a fairly productive season, while PECOTA posits he’ll spend more time at second base than either Cabrera or Forsythe.

In a recent piece for DRaysBay, friend of the blog Ian Malinowski brought up a few points to consider when talking about the expected David DeJesus/John Jaso DH platoon,

Probably incorrectly, PECOTA predicts David DeJesus to receive the majority of plate appearances in left field, while Souza receives the majority at designated hitter. It slots John Jaso in as the third option at DH (receiving fewer PAs than both Souza and DDJ). Given DeJesus’s advancing age and declining range, it’s likely that Souza will play in the field more often than not. This should improve the team’s defense while opening up the spot at DH for Jaso (a better hitter than DeJesus). This simple shuffle could make the real Rays better than their PECOTA projection.

Unfortunately we weren’t given a good indication of how many runs the pitching staff could relinquish in 2015 by way of Steamer. However, with PECOTA, we find Alex Cobb and company giving up 638 runs — 110 fewer than the Red Sox.

PECOTA projects great performances from Cobb and Drew Smyly, and better than average performances from Chris Archer and Jake Odorizzi. Nate Karns and Burch Smith are also projected to positively contribute toward the Rays’ predicted league leading win/loss record. If runs allowed totals speak to anything, the rotation stands in stark contrast to the expectations of all of the teams in the AL East, most notably Boston.

To that end, Malinowski also noted,

The current PECOTA projection only is based on only 160 innings pitched by a productive Drew Smyly, and only 40 innings pitched by a productive Matt Moore. It’s easy to envision a world where both of those guys eclipse those totals, making the Rays run prevention better than the already high expectations.

There is one last category (in the chart above) that I haven’t touched upon yet, and that’s FRAA — fielding runs above average. According to the Baseball Prospectus, FRAA is an “individual defensive metric created using play-by-play data with adjustments made based on plays made, the expected numbers of plays per position, the handedness of the batter, the park, and base-out states.” In other words, the biggest difference between FRAA and similar defensive metrics is the data and philosophy used. While other metrics analyze zone-based fielding data, FRAA focuses on play-by-play data, focusing on the number of plays made compared to the average number of plays made by a player at said position.

PECOTA (by way of FRAA) pegs Tampa Bay’s defense to save 28.3 runs above average — the second best in baseball, behind only the Royals. When compared with the other teams in the AL East, the Rays out-rank their closest competitor (Baltimore) by 14.2 runs, and Toronto by 36.4. The seeming downgrade in defense — thanks to the losses of Zobrist and Yunel Escobar — appear to have little-to-no effect on things.

As I wrote in a previous piece, projecting an upcoming season is not an exact science. Neil Paine (538 blog) put things in perspective,

…But they can never be perfect. There’s a statistical limit to how accurate any projection about a team can be in the long run. Years ago, sabermetrician Tom Tango researched the amount of talent and luck that go into team winning percentages and found that chance explains one-third of the difference between two teams’ records. That makes it hard to predict how many times a team will win over a season. The smallest possible root-mean-square error (a mathematical way of testing a prediction’s accuracy) for any projection system over an extended period of time is 6.4 wins. In a single season, forecasters can — and do — beat an RMSE of 6.4. But whenever that happens, it’s due to luck. The amount of random variance that goes into team records makes the 6.4 barrier literally impossible to beat over a large number of seasons. Over time, no forecaster’s system can ever do better.

It goes without saying, the Rays could end the season playing relevant ball in October, or reconfiguring the roster once more.

Despite the high expectations levied by Steamer and now PECOTA, it’s interesting that sites like Bovada don’t reflect the same — the current odds of winning the World Series stand at 12/1 for Boston and 66/1 for the Rays. Then again, the Tampa Bay seems to rise to the occasion when it is the underdog. With everything that’s gone on over the past few months, it would be safe to call the Rays the underdog. In the end it’s nice to hear people, other than Silverman, champion the Rays. Perhaps the Rays front office is smarter than the Keith Law’s or Jon Heyman’s give them credit for.

*A full projection is available at the Baseball Prospectus site with a paid subscription.

Noteworthiness

  • In evaluating the off-season’s biggest winners and losers, Jon Heyman (CBS Sports) not only called the Rays management the biggest “losers,” but went on to say owner Stu Sternberg should sell team.

Not only did they lose beloved manager Maddon, resourceful GM Andrew Friedman, ultra versatile infielder/outfielder Ben Zobrist and young power-hitting Myers, they continued to make no progress in their efforts to get out of the The Trop, one of the two worst baseball stadiums still extant. What’s more, at a St. Petersburg city hearing local politicos ripped some Rays decision makers, suggesting perceived haughtiness didn’t help their cause while rejecting the team’s request just to look around elsewhere in Tampa/St. Pete. The other sports franchises in Tampa are locally owned. Maybe it’s time for the Rays to follow suit.

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