PECOTA. WAR. BABIP. And many more. Some are basic and some are heavy on the math. Some are used just on a player and others can be used to project how a team will perform. But all of them try to take the statistical noise and turn it into something useful.
Today we are going to start looking at Boston and New York, position by position and their likely starters. And we will be using ZiPS to see how they stack up against one another.
ZiPS is used over at fangraphs.com. (Aside: fangraphs.com and baseball-reference.com are two incredible sites for baseball stats). Rather than trying to explain it, I will just use their explanation here:
ZiPS - The work of Dan Szymborski over at Baseball Think Factory, the ZiPS projections uses weighted averages of four years of data (three if a player is very old or very young), regresses pitchers based on DIPS theory and BABIP rates, and adjusts for aging by looking at similar players and their aging trends. It’s an effective projection system, and is displayed at FanGraphs for off-season and in-season projections.
That's pretty straight-forward. DIPS is "defense-independent pitching statistics" which measures the effectiveness of a pitcher only on statistics that don't involve other fielders. In other words, it only cares about what the pitcher has direct influence over. BABIP stands for "Batting Average on Balls In Play".
So what we hope ZiPS will do is give us a relatively accurate look at how a player will perform in the future based on their performance in the past. It's not perfect but ZiPS has been pretty reliable.
So with all that in mind, let's look at the likely starting catchers for the Red Sox and Yankees.
Boston: Christian Vazquez
2015: 115 G | 102 H | 38 RBI | .246 BA | .305 OBP | .328 SLG | .633 OPS | 1.8 WAR | Cost per WAR: $277,777 | Age: 23
New York: Brian McCann
2015: 124 G | 110 H | 74 RBI | .249 BA | .316 OBP | .431 SLG | .746 OPS | 3.1 WAR | Cost per WAR: $5,483,870 | Age: 30
