Minor League Ball Community projection: Byron Buxton, OF, Twins

A popular feature early in the development of Minor League Ball was the “Community projection.” So far for 2017 we’ve done Andrew Benintendi of the Boston Red Sox, Josh Bell of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Gary Sanchez of the New York Yankees. Most recently we did Dansby Swanson of the Atlanta Braves. Let’s do a few more hitters then switch to pitchers.

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.)

Today let’s do Byron Buxton of the Minnesota Twins, not a rookie, of course, but a young player who hasn’t established his genuine level of performance yet. For purposes of this exercise, assume he stays healthy all season and that his playing time is entirely due to how well he does, or does not, play.

Project the following numbers for Buxton 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.