THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Yappin’ Joe Sheehan?

It looks like Joe Sheehan has decided to put out his Bloomberg List.  You know, those yappin’ talking heads who will tell you which stocks will rise over the next 6 to 12 months, which of course they won’t put their own money on, allowing them to not retire early, and then give us another list in a month.  And on and on it goes.

Now, how am I supposed to evaluate Joe here?  The Marcels seem like a good fit.  The 9 hitters that Joe mentions (the 8 plus Francoeur) are expected by Marcel to perform at these levels: 4633 PA, 1116 H, 388 XBH, 556 RBI, 612 R, 86 SB, 20 CS, 421 BB, and 765 K.  (If someone wants to work out the Chones, Bill Jameses, MGLes, Voroses, Shandlers, THTes, and PECOTAs, I’d be much obliged.)

Since Joe is calling them breakout candidates, we should see big movements on these numbers, right?  Those guys are expected, by Marcel, to hit .272.  What’s Joe saying?  He isn’t, but let’s make them .300.  That’d be a nice breakout, especially for the breakouts of all breakouts.  Their OBP is .344.  Let’s say they should have an OBP of .375.  Marcel says .436 SLG.  Let’s make our breakout guys .480.  That’s basically a 10% bump across the board.

If Joe is still writing on Oct 1, 2008, this means that either the gang of 9 breakout candidates did exactly like Marcel said they would, or that he didn’t put his money where his mouth is.  Or the breakout of all breakouts would only give a 5% bump.  Or 1%?

Disclosure: I correspond with Joe on occasion.  Though, that may change very fast pretty soon.  I don’t mean to pick on Joe.  It’s just that he’s much too smart to put out a list like this.  So as not to single out Joe, I’ll comb through all the forecasters, and come out with their “gang of 9 breakouts of all breakouts”, and see if any of them can beat Marcel by more than a hair.  Since Joe was nice enough to not pick out really young players, I’ll set the candidate list at anyone with a Marcel reliability of 0.70 or higher.  (Jason Kubel was 0.73.) That’s 327 hitters to choose from.