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12/16/2004: "Baseball Projections 1: Pedro Martinez"
I wrote a rather fictional account of Pedro Martinez's four years with the Mets on Tuesday, then came back to Earth a little bit with the statistics I used in the Daily News graphic.
Why not take that a step further?
So, today debuts a new series on this site, Baseball Projections.
Here's how it works, using the example of Martinez, who's the first subject of this project. Pretty simple, really.
I start off at Baseball Reference's Pedro Martinez page and find the 10 most similar players to him through the age of 32. I then get the stats from each of those players during their 33-year-old seasons and weight them according to the similarity score, plus Pedro's 2004 season weighted by 2000 and his 162 Game Average weighted by 838, which is 162 less than 1000, because I feel like it's important to give the career stats a little credence. I then take the average of those weighted scores, de-weight them, and voila! Like anything else, it's impossible to predict the future, but it gives us something to base expectations on. The formula is probably a little too simplistic, but it's easy enough to understand, which is important, and we'll see whether or not I tinker with it between now and opening day.
My basic premise here is that they've been playing baseball for over a century, and over that time, just about every possible career path has manifested itself in the major leagues. Is it possible for someone to break the mold? Of course, just look at Barry Bonds -- even if he did get a little BALCO help in breaking it.
Could Pedro, or anybody else, for that matter, have a great year in 2005? Sure. Could he fall flat on his face? Absolutely. But Pedro Martinez is not on Star Trek -- he is going where many men have approximately gone before: he'll be a 33-year-old pitcher on Opening Day with a career record of 182-76 and a 2.71 ERA. Roger Clemens had 182 wins when he was 33, Lefty Grove had 71 losses and Juan Marichal had a 2.70 ERA.
Where to go from there? Well, here's my projection for Pedro in 2005: 15-9, 215 IP, 79 ER, 60 BB, 164 K, 3.31 ERA.
You can get a closer look at the stats leading to the projection in this Excel File.
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