If PECOTA or some other system like it would simply factor in MLE (Minor League Equivalency) there would be no problem.

Kendry’s playing time in the majors has been sporadic, especially last season. His long 2006 stretch was after almost no AAA seasoning.

Morales has not had a traditional development in the sense that it can be quantified in a measurable manner that renders a prediction by traditional methods even possible.

because its obviously not in their best interest to tell you

hes on my fantasy team and that would be a disappoint

They give the average and a Top 15% and Bottom 15%, right?

They are covering their bases. Kendry doesn’t walk much, so the Isolated walk rate seems pretty reasonable. But that SLG will be quite a bit higher.

PECOTA is banking on him not hitting for a high average, while Acuda and others expect him to hit .280 or higher. I think that PECOTA has as good a chance as being right as Acuda and the like – you just don’t know. .253 is low, but I could see him hitting .260-ish – that wouldn’t be too much better than PECOTA on the OBP front, but again, that SLG is way too low.

I tend to think that he is going to turn in a decent season – but nothing earth shattering. His lack of plate discipline will cost him with big slumps…

Something like .270/.315/440 seems like a fair prediction.

He could perform better and get somethings like: .290/.340/.460 and then you have a decent player.

Splitting the difference between those two is probably fair: .280/.330/.440. That is a .770 OPS which isn’t great, but about what Kotchman was producing at the time of the trade last year – that’s about what I expect to see this year. Best case scenario is that Kendry puts up a couple of GA-like seasons (vintage 2002 or 2003) at his peak – but time will tell.

Acuda is threatening to mutilate and decapitate all people associated with PECOTA!

They must at his average batting second. He won’t be batting second.

Morales walks so rarely, he going to have to get lucky (I hate having to use the “L” word) and have a BABIP above average to be effective.

Morales’ shot at being an average offensive 1st baseman rests on his ability to hit .300 over a large sample size. I think that’s far more possible than PECOTA gives him credit for, if not overwhelmingly likely.

I like to think of projections as averages instead of predictions. PECOTA is really just taking a weighted sum of the possible outcomes, but you lose information in the process. Like, suppose that PECOTA’s sentient hyper-optimized player similarity algorithm decides that Kendry Morales has a 50% chance of being Jeff Mathis (.200 AVG) and a 50% chance of being Howie Kendrick (.300 AVG). Then his projection for next year would be:

AVG = (50%)(.200) + (50%)(.300) = .250

It looks like PECOTA is predicting that he’ll be Gary Matthew Jr, when actually he has a 50% chance of hitting .300, which I think we can all agree is much better than Gary Matthews’ chance of hitting .300. True, he has a 50% chance of totally sucking, and this is reflected in the lower projection, but you lose sight the optimistic side of the evaluation. In reality, there’s probably no chance of Kendry Morales hitting .200 over 400 or 500 ABs—if he was doing that poorly, he would be removed from the lineup after 200 or 300 ABs (Scioscia only lets his mancrush Jeff Mathis get away with hitting less than his body weight). But PECOTA can’t account for these higher-order effects and just computes anyways.

Projections for young players are going to be screwed up like this because there is such a wide range of possibilities. Technically, it’s not screwed up: this is how it’s supposed to work, but it’s much more reliable for experienced players who have already established levels of performance over the years.

I don’t let it bring me down.