Minor League Ball Community Projection: Josh Bell, 1B, Pittsburgh Pirates

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.)

We got the process started yesterday with Andrew Benintendi of the Red Sox. You can still contribute your Benintendi projection in that thread and I’ll get it tallied up tomorrow. In the meantime, let’s start the next player, Josh Bell of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Project the following numbers for Bell 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.