Projecting the 2012 Nationals, Part 1: Ground Rules & Starting Line-Ups

In keeping with the prophetic nature of the blog, I promised you all some projections about the 2012 Nationals. As you might imagine, trying to see the future is a fair bit of work, and I wanted to be able to walk you all through my reasoning step by step, so I’m going to break my analysis up into a 4-post series.

And because this is about baseball, after all, I’ll break it down in a baseball-like fashion. Imagine yourselves in Davey Johnson’s shoes, stepping out towards home plate at Nats park, line-up card in hand, ready to meet the umpire and the opposing manager. You’d have to discuss the ground rules first, and then exchange line-up cards. That’s what we’ll be doing in this post: sketching out the outlines of my method and telling you just who’s in the starting line-up.

Ground Rules: What Are We Doing and How Are We Doing It?

A baseball team’s winning percentage can be estimated fairly accurately using Bill James’s Pythagorean win expectation formula:

 This is of course pretty intuitive, particularly in its simplified form on the right. The team that scores more runs than it gives up will win a baseball game. A 162-game season is thus just a day in the [ball]park, but in macrocosm. Our calculations feel pretty much like watching a ballgame, too:

1. Figure out who makes the team.
2. Watch the top of the inning: how many runs do the pitchers give up? To do this, we’ll need a stat called FIP, or Fielding-Independent Pitching.
3. Still in the top of the inning: how well is the team defending? To answer that, we’ll need an esoteric stat: UZR, or Ultimate Zone Rating [Yes, I know it's a dumb name. The sad thing is that if Sabermetricians were more articulate, they'd be baseball writers--and thereby deprive us of their statistical insights].
4. Finally, at the bottom of the inning, we figure out if the home team can score more runs than the visiting team did in the top of its inning. To find that out, we’ll need wRC, weighted Runs Created.

Projections should be pretty straightforward, right? There are a couple of pitfalls. UZR is notoriously unstable, and needs at least 3 years of data to be any good at all in calculations like this. Because we’re dealing with a pretty mixed bunch of ballplayers here, I can’t just use career UZR figures and take an annual average. Jayson Werth’s figure would have to be divided by 9, while Danny Espinosa’s would only be divided by 2. To even things up, I’ve decided to use a four-year average of each of the stats above. That gives just about enough of a sample size, I think, to be useful. It’s also fair: the four-year moving average sweeps from 2008 through the end of 2011–good news for Jayson Werth, who gets to include his phenomenal run with the Phillies with his near-abysmal 2011 campaign.

The Starting Lineup: Meet your 2012 Washington Nationals!

With today’s acquisition of veteran relief pitcher Brad Lidge, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Hot Stove League is at an end. Without further ado, meet your 2012 Washington Nationals! [All of the data here, by the way, is from Fangraphs.]

Starting Rotation

Pitcher Name	2012 IP (Projected)	FIP (2008-2011 Average)	Remarks
Stephen Strasburg	160.00	1.87	Strasburg’s coming back after Tommy John surgery, so he’ll be on an innings limit, just like Jordan Zimmermann was in 2011. I’ve set his limit at 160 innings, around about where J.Z. was limited last year.
Jordan Zimmermann	180.00	3.59	Now that J.Z. is healthy again, I’ve allocated him what I feel is a fair load for a starting pitcher.
Gio Gonzalez	200.00	4.06	Gio’s had a few 200 IP seasons, and he comes billed as an inning-eater, so I’ve given him a heavier IP load.
Chien-Ming Wang	180.00	4.35	Wang is also coming off a long injury. I wonder if giving him a regular starting pitcher’s load isn’t a bit ambitious. Also, Wang gets hurt by my somewhat arbitrary 4-year window. His career FIP is really 4.04, but for now I’m going to accept the 4.35 number because…
John Lannan	180.00	4.57	Lannan’s FIP is really really high compared with the rest of the rotation. I’ll get a lot of flak for putting him in the rotation at all, especially from Detwiler’s (4.30 FIP) partisans. On a wholly subjective level, though I think Lannan’s pitched well enough for long enough to land a spot in the rotation. Detwiler, to me, anyway, seems to have a much harder time the second and third time through an opposing batting order, but I don’t have any data to confirm that at the moment.

Bullpen

Pitcher Name	2012 IP (Projected)	FIP (2008-2011 Average)	Remarks
Ross Detwiler	63.2	4.30	Long relief.
Tom Gorzelanny	98.1	4.64	Long relief.
Craig Stammen	61.0	4.23	Middle relief
Sean Burnett	62.0	4.20	Middle relief
Brad Lidge	60.0	3.72	Middle relief. Lidge figures to be a 6th-inning pitcher to get to Clippard & Storen. Also, as far as I can tell, Lidge has never had a plate appearance, so he doesn’t mess with my offensive calculations.
Henry Rodriguez	72.2	3.22	Middle relief; alternate closer; last-ditch pitcher in losing efforts.
Tyler Clippard	72.2	3.61	Clip’s 2008-2011 FIP is better than his career FIP of 3.91
Drew Storen	73.0	3.29	Closer.

Starting Position Players

Note on position players: because UZR is calculated per-position, players will appear more than once on each table. In effect, it’s like having lots of players, one at each position, on defense, but having them form like Voltron into a single batter for offense. Also, I’ve omitted the pitchers’ offensive numbers from these tables–they were getting too cluttered, anyway. Don’t worry, I’ve factored the pitchers’ offensive contributions, such as they might be, into my final projections, but it would be tiresome to list them here. Also, UZR ignores defense from pitchers & catchers, so you won’t see any UZR numbers by Ramos or Flores.

Player	Position	UZR 2008-2011	wRC 2008-2011 annual average	wRC/PA 2008-2011 annual average	2012 PA (projected)	2012 wRC (projected)
Adam LaRoche	1B	4.30	65.50	0.132658	600	79.59
Danny Espinosa	2B	3.00	22.50	0.116883	600	70.13
	SS	-0.20
Ryan Zimmerman	3B	30.20	83.25	0.151158	600	90.69
Ian Desmond	SS	-13.70	33.25	0.102151	600	61.29
	RF	-0.70
	2B	-2.80
Michael Morse	LF	-6.90	37.75	0.161670	600	97.00
	1B	-3.50
	RF	-7.50
	3B	0.40
Roger Bernadina	CF	-8.40	22.25	0.100112	400	40.04
	RF	-4.10
	LF	6.60
Jayson Werth	RF	17.40	95.25	0.154941	600	92.96
	CF	0.00
	LF	-1.60
Wilson Ramos	C		15.75	0.121857	400	48.74

Bench Players

Player	Position	UZR 2008-2011	wRC 2008-2011 annual average	wRC/PA 2008-2011 annual average	2012 PA (projected)	2012 wRC (projected)
Mark DeRosa	RF	6.10	44.50	0.129927	400	51.97
	LF	2.70
	SS	0.00
	1B	-1.20
	2B	-2.80
	3B	-4.50
Steve Lombardozzi	3B	1.10	0.25	0.031250	350	10.94
	2B	0.10
	SS	-0.90
Jesus Flores	C		13.25	0.101727	300	30.52

Unless something unusual happens in the next couple of days, I don’t see the Nats’ opening-day 25-man roster looking too different from this. How will they do in 2012? Stay tuned for the next part of my 2012 projection series, Top of the Inning: Pitching, Defense, and Runs Allowed.