If Things Go Right: D-backs Position Players

Yesterday, we tried looking to the recently-released PECOTA projections from Baseball Prospectus a different way: using them to come up with a “reasonably optimistic” best case scenario for the D-backs this season. The PECOTA projections we see are a “weighted mean” of a range of outcomes the system can foresee for particular players, with projections in 10 percentile increments, all the way from a 10th percentile projection (90% chance he does better) to a 90th percentile projection (90% chance he does worse). The playing time was divvied up according to this depth chart and the playing time percentages in has for each player.

With the pitching staff already under our belt, let’s take a look at position players. First — here are the “real” projections that PECOTA has right now for the hitting/fielding complement of the team:

First off: Jake Lamb, son! As Jeff explored on Tuesday, projections seem really, really down on A.J. Pollock, which is really odd: in addition to totaling 5.4 WARP last year, Pollock nearly matched this 2.3 WARP projection with 2.2 WARP in 2014 — despite playing in only 75 games. One side effect, though, is that PECOTA ends up looking very optimistic at the even-less-proven Lamb. Hey — you may not agree that Lamb is a top 3 position player for the D-backs. But why? In 107 games last year, Lamb added more than 10 runs of value defensively according to BP’s Fielding Runs Above Average metric, and it’s far from alone. Lamb finished the year with a 12.9 UZR/150, just a hair behind Beltre among all third basemen last year. It’s probably time we started thinking of Lamb as the equal of David Peralta — he may not threaten for quite as much offense, but he almost certainly makes up for it with his defense.

You wouldn’t guess it from Pollock’s projection, but you would from those statements about Lamb: defense is a very big part of the team’s projected WARP overall. In addition to the boost for Lamb, the entire infield gets a boost of about 5 WARP overall just from defense — and that’s enough for Nick Ahmed and Jean Segura to be projected as league average players (which is not too shabby).

The D-backs are a young team. Paul Goldschmidt has a gaudy 6.0 WARP projection, which is actually a pretty big step back from his 9.2 WARP 2015, and conservative even in the context of his MVP-quality performance in 2013 (7.5 WARP) and injury-shortened 2014 (4.8 WARP). Still, with the team’s youth comes a short track record, particularly for Yasmany Tomas, who has little time in the organized minors. There seems to be little to know risk of age-related flameouts among any of the projected position players, and lots of identifiable room for growth: Ahmed, to grow into hitting as he has in previous minor league stops; Segura, to use the pinball nature of Chase Field to pad his stats better than Miller Park’s short dimensions could; Tomas, to go from ass-kicking lessons to ass kicking; Peralta, to loft the ball just a little bit more; and especially Lamb, who would see his value skyrocket with better offensive success, and who could be unfettered from platoon limits the way Peralta was last season.

But hey, that’s part of why we’re looking at 70th percentile projections in the first place.

More of the same, no? The only starting player to have come close to doubling his production with the 70th percentile projections is Tomas, unless you count Welington Castillo, who started out behind the eight ball with a -0.7 projection above. The one win boost for Tomas here would have a particularly weighty effect, although with the lowest “reasonably optimistic” projection at a position other than the hard-to-upgrade catcher position, Tomas’s left field could be the best bet for an upgrade if push comes to shove. The Tomas contract makes marginalizing him nigh on impossible, especially since it would all but guarantee that he would decide not to opt out of significant $32.5 million he is currently owed for the 2019 and 2020 seasons. Still, the D-backs have been ruthless about the Contention Window—a time share definitely seems possible.

With Ender Inciarte gone, however, it’s Socrates Brito filling in a lot of the blanks in the outfield—and Peter O’Brien who probably serves as the outfield Plan B in the event of injury or should the D-backs feel the need to mix things up. The 0.5 WARP here as a 70th percentile projection for O’Brien? That’s with only 100 plate appearances. Before you scale that up to 3 wins in your mind, though, note that the 0.5 is unaffected by defense—the majority of O’Brien’s playing time in the BP depth charts comes from pinch hitting, with no defensive adjustment at all. Banking on him as a league average defender in either corner outfield spot seems like it might be more optimistic than even this 70th percentile exercise.

Another big takeaway from the 70th percentile numbers: that’s a damned good infield, no? It wouldn’t take much, considering that the D-backs’ actual replacement level in the infield is above replacement level, either in spurts with Phil Gosselin, or in longer stretches, with Brandon Drury. Chances are that not all four of the starting infielders will beat these 70th percentile numbers, but—chances actually are very good that at least one of them will. With Gosselin and Drury in the fold, the D-backs could end up being in a position to get a remarkable 12+ wins out of the infield alone, all by capitalizing on destiny’s winners and cutting losses extremely well with better than expected replacements.

Even with the weird Pollock numbers, fairly conservative Tomas 70th percentile WARP and crater at catcher: this “reasonably optimistic” outcome would be pretty damned impressive. The weighted mean projections have the D-backs position player contingent at 17.2 WARP. The “reasonably optimistic” version, even after scaling back to the same number of plate appearances, is nearly 24 WARP — about five and a half wins better than the 78 win projection that PECOTA gives us for the team right now.

The look at the pitching staff found a 70th percentile “reasonably optimistic” advantage there of just over eight wins. If we dared to combine them both: between 91 and 92 wins for the team this year. If the D-backs run the table with the projections, they look like a very, very good team. Of course, it’s not like there’s a 30% chance of that outcome; all of those chances stack, and hitting on all of them would be like hitting the lottery. We’ve also seen a couple of 70th percentile numbers, though, that seemed like they were not optimistic enough for “reasonably optimistic”: those of Zack Greinke and Pollock, certainly. If the D-backs hit on some of these 70th percentile numbers, they could still look in this context like a playoff team. A real chance of a real chance is a real thing.

We’ve come all this way, though, we might as well take a peek at what truly winning the lottery would look like. The 90th percentile projections:

Now we’re really cooking. Pollock looks a lot more like the player we expect him to be, but still well short of his actual outcome in 2015. Meanwhile, PECOTA is suggesting here that however unlikely (well, like 10 to 1 unlikely), getting All-Star level performances from both Peralta and Lamb really is possible this year, albeit with playing time a little bit different than we probably expect right now. Segura is not far behind with a total that he actually has tallied in 2014, considered a down year.

Oh, and at first base is a Golden god nearly as good as the guy who manned first for the D-backs last season.

One of the best parts is that the dice do not get cast all at once. In at least one outfield spot and at least two infield spots, if the projected starters are coming in under projections instead of over, the D-backs have just enough depth to mix in a player who still offers at least some upside: Peter O’Brien as a risk/reward candidate in the outfield, Brandon Drury in the infield offering a better potential profile than Chris Owings probably ever did. Only at catcher is there a lack of better-than-replacement backup plan; if Peralta can play a passable center field, O’Brien can replace any one starter in the outfield, and there’s more than enough positional flexibility now in the infield for Drury to be the de facto replacement for any of Ahmed, Segura, Lamb or even Goldy.

To bottom line it: there are lots of ways for things to go right for the D-backs this season, although you can see a 90+ win team only if you squint. As executed, the Contention Window plan can work. It’s not long now before we start to find out if it will.