Minor League Ball Community Projection: Andrew Benintendi

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.)

For example, back in the spring of 2010 we did a Community Projection on then-rookie outfielder Jason Heyward. The community projected a .280/.361/.473 slash line with .834 OPS in 490 at-bats.

The actual result was .277/.393/.456 for an .849 OPS in 520 at-bats. Not far off.

And indeed it was actually closer to the final result than most of the simulations and projections run by computer: PECOTA had him at .273/.343/.450, .793 OPS; ZIPS at .275/.341/.429, .770 OPS; and CHONE .258/.324/.416, .740 OPS. Only the Bill James projection at .303/.371/.465, .836 OPS was closer to the actual result than the community projection.

So let’s do this again. We’ll start with Andrew Benintendi of the Boston Red Sox. Project the following numbers for Benintendi 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.

I will add my own projection into the mix but I don’t want to influence your thinking so I won’t post it until we have a bunch of entries.