It's that time of year! Just a few short weeks until pitchers and catchers report! And since UG suggested I take the reins, I might as well make it happen. In the past, Cheat has picked a handful of players and submitted them for community input. That was probably a well considered approach, but I'm going to shoot for the moon. This year, we're doing the whole team, position players first.
I'm not sure how well this will work. Google doc forms are a lot more limiting than I expected, so I split it up into three different forms - wOBA, defense, and plate appearances. Given those three, I should be able to put together WAR projections for every player with a reasonable number of projections.
Brief explanation and projection forms after the jump!
It may be necessary to explain the use of wOBA. I know that's not the universally preferred stat for offense and I wouldn't have used it if g-docs were more flexible. I'm limited to g-docs, that's what I know. My coding ability is non-existent. That said, anyone who wants to can figure out wOBA. If you want an in-depth explanation, check out my primer here. Further explanation can be had at Fangraphs Saber Library. The short explanation is as follows:
wOBA is a rate stat, like on base percentage, that expresses how many runs a batter manufactures per plate appearance. It weights PA results (walks, singles, doubles, outs etc.) based on how many runs that result is worth on average. Singles are worth less than doubles, but more than outs. Home runs are king. The stat is scaled similar to OBP, so that .330 is about average. .360 is good, .300 is bad. Adam Dunn has hit .384 wOBA for his career, while Omar Vizquel has hit .313. For our purposes, a .330 wOBA will be considered average.
If you have a triple slash line in mind and want to convert that to wOBA, it just takes a little arithmetic:
(1.8*OBP + SLG)/3 ~ wOBA
For defense, if you're familiar with UZR, you can make this work. 0 is the positional average. +5 is above, -5 is below. Please make your rating compared to the position listed. I listed Adam Dunn at 1B because I thought that would be interesting and we already know he's a terrible, terrible outfielder. Teahen and Vizquel are listed at 3B because I want to see what the community thinks of them compared to Morel. The rest are where you'd expect.
The last form is plate appearances. This is perhaps the most useful of the projections in question. Playing time is the holy grail of quality projections and good rate stat projections can be completely undone because they don't account for injury risk, how likely the manager will take a shine to the player in question, etc. It's where we as fans can add the most to the discussion.
The forms: