Minor League Ball Community Projection: Gary Sanchez, C, New York Yankees

A popular feature early in the development of Minor League Ball was the “Community projection.” I want to revive that as it was a good way to encourage discussion and thinking about a player while also building up a sense of community among the site readership.

The concept is simple: I name a player, and you give me the statistics you expect him to post in 2017 in the comment thread below. Then when we get a fair number of entries we tally it all up, then compare it to what actually happens and see how we did in comparison to reality, as well as in comparison to the projections run by more sophisticated systems (ZIPS, PECOTA, etc.)

The first player we did was Andrew Benintendi of the Boston Red Sox: the results are here. The second player was Josh Bell of the Pittsburgh Pirates; we are still taking entries for that one.

Today let’s do Gary Sanchez of the Yankees, not a rookie of course but an exciting young player.

Project the following numbers for Sanchez for 2017:

games, at-bats, runs, hits, doubles, triples, homers, walks, strikeouts, HBP, steals, caught stealing.

I will calculate the resulting slash line on a spreadsheet if you don’t want to do it yourself.