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March 18, 2013

Pebble Hunting

Eight Predictions About Mike Trout

by Sam Miller

Everyone knows you can’t predict baseball. What this article presupposes is... maybe you can?

The first key to getting forecasts right is simply stating them in terms of likelihoods, and hoping nobody does the math on the long-term accuracy of such forecasts. As long as I give each prediction a greater than zero percent chance of happening and less than 100 percent chance of happening, I can’t be wrong. So let's go make some correct predictions!

50 percent confident that: Trout will outperform his PECOTA projection. 

Which is, for the record, .288/.354/.467, with 21 home runs, 45 stolen bases, a .300 True Average and 5.2 WARP.

30 percent confident that: Mike Trout will be worse than he was in 2012, Miguel Cabrera will be better than he was in 2012, and Trout will still finish higher than Cabrera in MVP voting.

The first clause is probably uncontroversial. The second should be: Cabrera’s .332 True Average in 2012 is a perfect match for his True Average over the past five seasons, and is considerably worse than it was in 2010 (.353) and 2011 (.355). PECOTA projects a very similar season (.327 TAv) for him. But if he repeats his 2012 performance—even if he tops it by a bit—he’s nearly as likely to lead the league in no Triple Crown categories as he is to win the Triple Crown again. Meanwhile, Trout will close sportswriters’ Clubhouse Chemistry gap simply by being a year older, perhaps benefiting from a narrative about his role in the Angels’ post-Torii Hunter clubhouse. And the Angels are unlikely to miss the postseason again.

85 percent confident that: Mike Trout won’t go 40/40.

This might be underconfident, since I’m essentially saying with 15 percent confidence that Trout will go 40/40. Trout hit 30 home runs in 2012 (plus one in Triple-A). There were 32 players who hit 29, 30, or 31 homers in a season from 2009 to 2011, and only one of them hit 40 in the following season. Jumps from 30 to 40 are a pretty big deal. 

PECOTA isn’t expecting anything close to 40 from Trout, which is rational enough: before 2012, Trout had never hit more than 11 at a level or 16 in a season. But the question is whether Trout’s power is like most outliers—a product of a variety of circumstances but likely to regress—or one of the rare ones that signifies a trend. Bet against the trend, in most cases. But bet on uncertainty for Trout.

There are 15 other players in baseball history who have hit at least 20 home runs in a major-league season while at least 20 years young. Of those 15, perhaps two could be said to have seen their power show up all at once in the big leagues:

These hitters were playing at a wide variety of levels when they hit their previous career highs, from Class C to the major leagues, but the unsurprising conclusion is that most hitters with power have demonstrated power before. No big shock. Among the seeming exceptions: