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February 13, 2013

Pebble Hunting

Fun with 2013 PECOTA Comparables

by Sam Miller

My sense is that, of all the fields in the PECOTA spreadsheets, the one least likely to help you in any way is the comparables column. When you see a projection for a player’s WARP, or his OBP, or his games played, you’re getting usable, valuable data. You can go win a fantasy league with it. You can impress that girl you’re dating with your intense knowledge of Delmon Young’s future. You can use all the free time that you’ll have after that girl stops returning your calls to learn a new language. Super usable.

The comps field, though, isn’t. Sometimes it’ll trick you into thinking it’s usable:

but as I understand it, the comps field isn’t really meant to be usable. To get any meaningful information, you’d really need to see all of the player's comps, not just three, and you’d have to be a computer, not some dumb human with a dumb human brain. It’s the least usable part of that spreadsheet and it’s easily my favorite.

The rest of the spreadsheet is about predicting the future. The comps field is about the past, and it’s about storytelling. Weird and disjointed storytelling. Inscrutable, experimental storytelling that makes you feel smart for reading it but a bit dumb for not totally getting it. Put another way: The PECOTA spreadsheet you just downloaded is like an Ikea instruction manual, and tucked into that instruction manual is a Thomas Pynchon novel. Awesome.

These are my favorite stories in this year's spreadsheet, and relevant excerpts from Thomas Pynchon.

The players who get a Barry Bonds comp
"Pirates has become famous for his Banana Breakfast. Messmates throng here from all over England, even some who are allergic or outright hostile to bananas, just to watch--for the politics of bacteria, the soil's stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of, having seen the fruit thrive often to lengths of a foot and a half, yes amazing but true." —Gravity's Rainbow

There are, of course, three comparables listed for each player in the spreadsheet. For Marc Krauss, those three are: Bonds, Lucas Duda, and Ben Grieve. If you ever find yourself making too much out of one comparable, just remember that list of three. Bonds, Duda, Grieve. In three names, PECOTA has allowed for virtually every possible career path.

Krauss was part of Houston’s return for Chris Johnson last year​—part of the return, mind you, so adjust your Chris Johnson-sized enthusiasm downward a bit. He’s more often compared by humans to Adam Dunn, in two of the three annuals he has appeared in and in no fewer than four (now five) articles on our site.

Most Bonds thing: Hit .414/.514/1.000 in a short stint at Double-A after joining Houston
Least Bonds thing: Hit .123/.203/.123 in a slightly longer stint at Triple-A after joining Houston

Jerry Sands is the other player who gets a Barry Bonds comp. Sands is interesting because Barry Bonds was one of his three comps last year, too. (Brandon Belt and Marcus Thames also got Bonds tags before 2012.) Sands is also interesting because

The players who get a Ken Griffey, Jr. comp
"clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes" —The Crying of Lot 49

As our glossary entry on comparables notes,

All comparables represent a snapshot of how the listed player was performing at the same age as the current player, so if a 23-year-old hitter is compared to Miguel Tejada, he's actually being compared to a 23-year-old Tejada, not the decrepit Giants version of Tejada, nor to Tejada's career as a whole.

The players who get a Griffey comp are from all sorts of stages of Griffey's career, and listed together might win a Six Word Novel contest:

Starling, Taveras
Harper
Trout
Hamilton
Ibanez