Table of Content
There is only one Blue Jays player, Josh Donaldson, offered by Westgate . His over-under is 33.5, which falls in the middle of the projections for his season. ZiPS projects him with 32, while Steamer has him at 35 and Depth Chart has him at 36. Courtesy of mlb.comBy not having guys like Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge in this competition, makes for a wipe-open contest.
In 2016, Cespedes played in 132 games and hit 31 homers. Last season, he played in just 81 games, exactly half the season, and hit 17 homers. Lingering hamstring and quad injuries are not something a 32-year-old wants to deal with. It also doesn’t help that he plays in the NL and is forced to play the outfield.
World Series Predictions
Also, his hard-hit percentage—which was around 39% over his first two seasons—dropped to below 33%. This is likely responsible for his HR/FB dip of nearly 3%. On Sunday, the Westgate Las Vegas Superbook released a slew of props for the upcoming MLB season including individual home run totals. Chicks dig the long ball and so do I. Let’s take a gander at all 40 names listed and find a few offering value. Baseball Prospectus came out with the lowest average difference at 7.6 wins.
The top seed is Milwaukee first baseman Jesus Aguilar (+500), another breakout NL star in 2018 who also won the Final Fan vote to be added to the NL All-Star roster. Aguilar has an NL-best 24 homers at the break and faces No. 8 Rhys Hoskins (+700) of the Phillies. Harper is the +240 favorite as the No. 2 seed and opens against Atlanta first baseman and NL MVP candidate Freddie Freeman (+700), the No. 7 seed. Freeman isn’t a huge power guy, topping 30 homers once in his career and no Brave has ever won the Derby. They win the 2018 World Series in 12.4 percent of simulations, virtually identical to what their 7/1 odds would imply. Oddsmakers list the Cubs at 7/1 to win the World Series 2018, while their over-under for total wins is set at 93.5.
Colorado Rockies |
He’s played six seasons so far and has surpassed this total twice. Of the two divisions I watch the most, they all overpredicted the entire AL Central and underprojectd the Red Sox and Yankees in the AL East. Baseball Prospectus came closest to projecting Tampa Bay’s strong season. They all missed badly on Oakland, Milwaukee and Atlanta. They mostly got the orders of finish correct, apart from the teams mentioned above. Let’s look at how the players performed compared to the projections.
It has five of six division winners repeating — that’s the Dodgers, Cubs, Nationals, Astros and the Indians with the Red Sox being the exception. AL wild-card teams, according to the projections, would be the Red Sox and Mariners. NL wild-card teams would be the D-backs and either the Cardinals or Giants, who are both projected at 84 wins. So that’s five of six playoff teams in each league that are the same. • As for Shohei Ohtani, the biggest prize of the offseason, PECOTA projected both of his roles. As a pitcher, it has him with a 3.45 ERA in 24 starts, good for a 9-7 record.
Team Standard Pitching
With that said, I have to imagine he’ll hit at least 35 homers again this year. None of these systems seems to stand out from the rest, plotting them together derives fairly tight clusters for each team. It would be interesting to study other years to see if the betting the full slate of unders nets a profit each time or if there are particular teams that under- or over-perform against their projections .
Harper will be the fan favorite, of course, but doesn’t really seem excited to participate. Baez is the kind of guy who will eat this atmosphere alive and has a great power swing. Bregman is a sneaky pick and should get by Schwarber in the first round. Hoskins also has the swagger to excel in this, but has a tough first round matchup with the NL Home Run leader.
We can also calculate the average difference between the projected win total and the actual win total for all 30 teams among the four groups. We’ll use the absolute values, treating negatives and positives the same, otherwise they’ll cancel each other out in the final calculation. Here are the initial projections for home runs. The players shown are those offered for over-under betting by Westgate Sports Book in Las Vegas.
Roughned Odor’s horrible start to the season, along with some injury time, also landed him on this list. In most cases, the data points for each player are clustered within a reasonable range, which makes the odd cases stick out. Near the bottom, there’s a wide range of projections for Yankees first baseman Greg Bird. ZiPS and Steamer don’t project him a full season of plate appearances, so when FanGraphs’ Depth Chart system applies nearly 600 PAs to his projected output, it likes him for 31 home runs. • PECOTA’s playoff field for 2018 looks pretty similiar to 2017.
Instead, we'll go with Colorado Rockies rookie Ryan McMahon as the pick to pace NL rookies. And with Chapman hitting alongside Khris Davis and Matt Olson in the middle of the Oakland lineup, the A's have an offense that could really surprise some people this year. Matt Chapman launched 36 home runs between Double-A and Triple-A during the 2016 season. An offseason trade to the Toronto Blue Jays could change that. An offseason trade to the Milwaukee Brewers could mean an offensive explosion is coming in 2018. The 27-year-old posted an .886 OPS with 14 home runs in 298 plate appearances in the first half, before he was slowed by a strained hamstring in the second half.
On Aug. 1 last season, the AL West, NL East and NL West races were done, with the leaders holding leads of 13 or more games. By Sept. 1, Cleveland had an eight-game lead in the AL Central. Westgate also presented its over-under lines for wins last week. Our data also includes Bodog’s over-under lines and the projections from FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus. While we are looking at projections, let’s look at how the sports books compare with the analytics projections for team wins.
Each batter gets four minutes to hit as many homers as possible with thirty seconds of bonus time awarded for two home runs that travel at least 440 feet. The batter with the most home runs advances; there’s a 60-second swing-off if any two are tied. Stanton could be expected to benefit from hitting inside a more productive lineup in New York, but he’s also switching leagues, which can have an effect. In 527 interleague plate appearances in his career, he has only 23 home runs. A whopping 46 players are projected to hit 30 or more home runs this season, per Dan Szymborski’s projections, one fewer than there was in 2000, a major league record. But there are eight others who are tabbed for 29 home runs this year, so that record is also in jeopardy.
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