THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Szym has his MLE’s up on Baseballthinkfactory as well.

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/oracle/discussion/2008_minor_league_translations/

He’s ahead of my pace, having done more players in the low minors and pitchers as well.

How do Rally’s compare to BPro’s?  To Szymborski’s?  Is this an area where smart people will agree or an area where a lot needs to be figured out?

I’ve looked at a few of Szym’s, and I don’t see a huge difference.  Not sure about BPro.

Methodology is similar I think.

Here are mine (AA and AAA only) for the above guys in OPS, where league average major league OPS is .758.

0.914 Jeff Clement
0.891 Jay Bruce
0.781 Denard Span
0.879 Kila Kaaihue
0.790 Adam Lind
0.767 Matthew Joyce
0.840 Max Ramirez
?? Matt Wieters
0.785 Christopher Davis
0.735 Sean Rodriguez

And guys aged 25 or older:
0.891 Russell Branyan
0.896 Nelson Cruz
?? Paul McAnulty
0.826 Micah Hoffpauir
0.780 Mike Hessman
0.797 Dan Johnson
0.765 Joe Mather
0.808 Mike Aviles
0.770 Chris Shelton
0.790 Dewayne Wise

Park and league factors make a huge difference in MLE’s.  My guess is that where you see a big differences among analysts, it is due to the park factor they are using.  Other than that, an MLE is an MLE.

Denard Span is A+ for fielding among Fans.  If the above MLE is indicative of his overall minor league history, dude should be a mainstay for a long time.  If it’s a blip, then we’ve got another Endy Chavez…

Span has played half the year in MLB, and he’s played almost exactly as well as the MLE. His previous years are nothing close to this good, so a projection will rate him much lower.