Reds 2011 Projections (Offense/Defense)

Welcome.  A week later I am getting to what I promised: Reds 2011 Projections.

First, some background.  As I mentioned before, FanGraphs is an awesome website.  One of its particularly awesome features that I am utilizing in this post is fan generated player projections.  Here's how it works...

(1) Select a number of dropdowns
(2) Submit

It's that simple.  Let's take a look at an example (click on the image for a larger view):

Here we have Joey Votto, probably the funnest player for Reds fans to project.  You can see my entries above.  A few notes...

1. Most entries are actually ranges.  This certainly allows for some wiggle room, and makes it more feasible that casual fans are predicting very specific stats for players they may or may not know very well.
2. FanGraphs gives you the player's stats for the last several years, making it much easier to have an entry for say, Strikeout %, something no fan keeps track of (though of course our idea of how high or low it should be is influenced by what we see from the player with our eyes).
3. This is still an inexact science.  They ask for batting order, which for Votto is easy, but what about Brandon Phillips.  Will he bat 2nd most often, or 6th?  Well, it's impossible to know, so you make your best guess and go with it.

With all that being said, without further ado, let's take a look at my 2011 offensive projections (ordered by WAR, descending)...

Lots of things going on here.  First off, it's interesting seeing where everyone lands from a traditional stat perspective.  From a Wins Above Replacement standpoint there are some things to note as well.  Let's go through them (I'm in a bullet sort of mood for this post, apparently)...

• Not surprisingly, Votto ends up with the most WAR, and I think his numbers look reasonable, to me.  I have his HR total going down slightly, just because I don't see Votto as a pure power hitter, and in general, his 2010 season was so sensational that I think some regression to the mean is in order.  I do think he can sustain an OBP at or above .400.

• Stubbs nets as many WAR as Bruce, likely because of his baserunning.  Again, this is based on a series of guesses (made by me) and assumptions (made by FanGraphs).  If you ask me straight up, whose OBP will be higher in 2011, Stubbs or Bruce, I would say Bruce.  But I have looked over my entries several times and both look reasonable to me for AB, Walk %, etc, and the results are what they are.
  
  That being said, these are two young players that I think have as much uncertainty surrounding them as any Red in the lineup.  Any Reds fan knows what Bruce is capable of, but when it's coming and to what degree is anyone's guess.  Bruce could hit 40 homeruns next year.  He could hit .300.  But I'm not basing my projections on that possibility.  Stubbs also has great potential.  If he cuts down the strikeouts a bit and keeps the power and speed, watch out.

• There's an Oakland A's blog called Baseballin' On A Budget that did a similar exercise in December.  He gives a few caveats that also apply here.  One, as I said before, is that it's really hard to predict this stuff, so for the most part I tried to stay fairly conservative.  Two is that it becomes difficult to get the total number of ABs and innings pitched exactly correct.  With my current results, I have over 5300 ABs for the season... probably a little high.  Innings-wise I'm just over 1300, which is probably a little low.  OK, because I'm sure there are several fringe guys that will end up pitching a handful of innings that I didn't capture here because they're in AAA or something of the sort (and will likely be at or around replacement level).

I'll let you gander at the rest.  There's only so much to pre-address and to be honest I started this post last night and mostly just want to get it out there.

Bottom line?  According to my entries, the Reds offense (and defense) figures to produce 26.8 WAR in 2011.  A decent figure.  Just to give you an idea, the 2010 offense (and defense) produced 33.3 WAR, best in baseball (the Reds actually underperformed their WAR in 2010, but that's a topic for another post).  This included well over 4 wins that can be attributed to the defense, which was 4th best in baseball.  My projections were conservative on defense because the trustworthiness of such metrics are still up for debate, so there is definitely potential for the Reds to outperform my projections in that area.

Since this post got be pretty long (and time consuming), I've decided to separate the pitching projections into another post.  Expect that out in the near future, where I will also talk about the projected WAR for the entire team and what it means as far as expected win total.  For now, take some time to digest, go visit fangraphs.com, and feel free to comment with any thoughts or suggestions you may have.