PECOTA hates the Royals: The hitters

How will Bobby Witt, Jr. perform? Will Carlos Santana rebound? Can Salvador Perez continue his power barrage? The answers lie within the circuitry.

The owners may have robbed us of the annual rite of Truck Day and the opening of training camps, but thank god they don’t have control of the computers crunching the various projections that are released each spring.

On Tuesday, it was PECOTA Day at Baseball Prospectus. They haven’t projected their team win totals or standings yet, but they did unleash the master spreadsheet of hitters and pitchers and how they’re expected to perform. If the owners ever unlock the gates. The festivities of PECOTA day actually extend all week.

To celebrate, let’s highlight a few fun numbers for select Royals hitters. One of the cool things about PECOTA is they break down their projections into percentiles of probability. It ranges from best case to the worst case scenario and everything in between. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll split the differences and use their 50th percentile projections.

Like most of the articles at Baseball Prospectus, access to the PECOTA spreadsheets requires a subscription. I heartily recommend purchasing one if you have the means. Especially if you’re looking to dominate your fantasy league.

Carlos Santana - 109 DRC+

DRC is Baseball Prospectus’ catch-all offensive metric, similar in the vein to OPS and wRC. Like those other stats, adding a plus at the end normalizes it to the rest of the league, giving a scale where 100 is league average and anything above that number is a percentage better than the average. So in this case, BP is projecting that Santana’s overall offensive production in 2022 will be nine percent better than league average.

There’s actually a lot to unpack on this number of a 109 DRC+. For starters, last year, despite all of his second half struggles, Santana wrapped the season with a 104 DRC+. Still above average (ever so slightly), yet it was the worst offensive showing in his career.

Santana will be playing in his age 36 season in 2022. Here’s how he’s done according to DRC+ since he turned 30.

I included OPS+ and wRC+ in the table for reference against DRC+. Also, the 2022 season is obviously the projection. For wRC+, I used ZiPS at FanGraphs. There is no projection on OPS+ that I found.

DRC+ takes into account a player’s walks and strikeouts as a skill. Even though Santana saw a career-low 13.1 percent walk rate, his 15.5 percent strikeout rate was one of his better seasons at avoiding the whiff. That factors in to Santana performing above average offensively according to DRC+.

The most troubling aspect of this number is it’s projected to lead the Royals in 2022.

Salvador Perez - 28 home runs

That’s a decline of…opens up calculator app…20 dingers!

Perez, as you know, tied the franchise record for bombs hit in a single season last year with 48. That factored out to a home run every 13.85 plate appearances. In Covid-shortened 2020, he clubbed 11 home runs, which was a dinger every 14.18 plate appearances.

The point being, since missing all of 2019 recovering from Tommy John surgery, Perez has found a consistent power-hitting groove.

PECOTA projects Perez to average a home run roughly every 21 plate appearances. That would be quite a decline in power production—his worst output since 2016 when he was coming off back to back work in October. And at the age of 32, it would be alarming in that it would likely herald the beginning of his decline phase—and an extreme one—of his offensive career.

I don’t think we’re ready for that.

It’s probably unrealistic to expect Perez to improve on his home runs per plate appearance rate like he did in 2021. However, it seems unlikely (i.e. if he’s healthy for the entire season, or as healthy as a regular catcher can be) that he would tumble like the above projection.

Maybe this will turn you on…Two of Perez’s three comps by PECOTA are Ivan Rodriguez and Ted Simmons.

Nicky Lopez - .336 OBP

You know the story…In Lopez’s first two seasons, he came to the plate 594 times and posted a .279 on base percentage. He was the de facto second baseman going in to Spring Training in 2021, but played himself off the big league roster with a rough camp. After the injury to Adalberto Mondesi, Lopez found himself back in Kansas City and enjoyed a relevatory offensive season.

Lopez’s offensive performance was buoyed by a .365 on base percentage in 2021 in 565 plate appearances.

This is where I am left to wonder about these projection systems. Not to pick on PECOTA because it’s certainly not an outlier when it comes to Lopez and his projected on base percentage for 2021. It’s that when a young player sets an early baseline and then blows past it, the tubes and switches aren’t quite sure what to make of it.

In Lopez’s case, his rise in OBP comes via a .347 BABIP.

PECOTA hangs a slightly above average .301 BABIP on Lopez for 2022. That, combined with an above average walk rate is how they arrive at his projection.

But here’s the deal. BABIP doesn’t stabilize for hitters until they have 800 batted ball events. Lopez, with 901 balls put in play for his career, just crossed that threshold. So based on his first three seasons in the majors, we can say with a decent degree of confidence that Lopez will should post a BABIP of at least around .305 to .310. Unless…his dramatic shift in approach means we should throw out his first two seasons of data. He was clearly a different hitter in 2021 than we had seen in his previous two seasons. Is that sticky? Can we expect him to reap continued improved numbers based on this?

Computers don’t do that, however.

Bobby Witt, Jr. - .249/.311/.432

Boo this computer.

What kind of circuit board takes the best prospect in baseball and spits out those kind of offensive numbers? A 98 DRC+ for our Bobby? Blasphemy!

Here’s the deal…projection systems routinely have a great deal of difficulty projecting prospects, simply because they lack major league experience. We think we know how Witt Jr. will handle a promotion to the majors, but we don’t know for certain. And that variance is always engrained in projections that have an aversion to conducting any kind of hype train that may be barreling down the tracks.

My advice, take it with a grain of salt.

If you don’t want my advice, ZiPS is projecting .268/323/.454 for Witt Jr.

Bobby Witt, Jr. - .273/.346/.542

That’s Witt’s 99 percentile projection. Where he bashes 26 home runs, scores 75 runs and drives in 75. He has a 137 DRC+. He’s probably the Rookie of the Year and the Royals are likely playing in October.

Clearly, this is the correct projection.

If you have a specific question about a player not covered, drop it in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.