AL Projections

[daburt]

I was entering the information on the teams in my league in order to get an idea
as to the standings. I got some curious results. I've done 9 out of 12 teams and
only one team has a WHIP over 1.30 and no team has an ERA over 4.00.
I've played fantasy baseball for 14 years and in most years it unusual to have
three teams below a 1.30 WHIP and two or three under a 4.00 ERA.

I ran totals on the numbers for the AL projections and based on those projections,
the American League ERA is 4.0746 and the WHIP is 1.3221. In 2005 the American
league ERA was 4.35 and 1.36. Either we are going to have the biggest pitching
renaissance since Bob Gibson was pitching or the projections are off and way
too optimistic.

[RAY@HQ]

daburt, I'd expect that a good chunk of the delta will be accounted for by the redistribution of playing time. As higher-skilled pitchers get hurt and lesser-skilled guys come out of bullpens or the minors to replace them, those guys with lesser skills will rack up more innings than we expect, put up some really bad ERAs, and the league total will drift back toward traditional levels.

The innings distribution we project does not represent how innings will eventually get distributed, in other words. But we can't predict who's going to get hurt (usually), so my guess is that accounts for most of the delta.

[Michael@HQ]

There's also got to be a significant regression to the mean. We know that pitching is harder to predict, which is one of the reasons we spend much less than 50% on pitching.