The initial team projections are posted here. A more thorough walkthrough of how I put the individual ones together is in the Matt Wieters post here. The components I'm looking for are playing time (plate appearances), batting line (BA/OBP/SLG), and fielding.

Today we're looking at right-fielder Nick Markakis.

Playing Time:

Markakis plays a lot - he's averaged over 700 plate appearances the last four years - but I'm not going above 625 PA for anyone (even usually healthy players sometimes hit the DL). It's entirely possible that Nick gets to 700 PA again, in which case his value would get a small bump up.

Batting:

The initial team projections are posted here. A more thorough walkthrough of how I put the individual ones together is in the Matt Wieters post here. The components I'm looking for are playing time (plate appearances), batting line (BA/OBP/SLG), and fielding.

I was hoping to have all the starting position players done by this point, but the flu interceded (ironically leaving plenty of time to write but no brain-power with which to do so). To today I'm just getting to center-fielder Adam Jones.

Playing Time:

Jones has a career high 621 plate appearances last years, after missing more significant amounts of time in each of his previous two full seasons (~515 PA). Perhaps it's a bit optimistic, but I'm going with 600 PA for 2011.

Batting:

There are many players in the majors who don't walk very much, and this tends to come through in their on-base percentages, unless they hit for sensational batting average (Ichiro comes to mind). Sometimes though, even a low OBP can be a little deceiving. For example - the player that inspired this post - Adam Jones.

Jones is still a relatively young guy with a lot of tools, but his lack-luster plate discipline has been his main Achilles heel. In 2010, he hit .284/.325/.442; putting up below league average OBP despite a batting average almost 25 points above. And yet even that low OBP doesn't tell the full tail of Jones' issues with patience at the plate, since a large part of his isolated OBP comes as a result of 13 hit by pitches (the 8th highest total in the majors).

Take them out - leaving Jones with only 23 walks (3.7% walk rate) - and his OBP would have been just .310. That's not to say that getting on base via the HBP is just a fluke - Jones did have 7 in each of his previous full seasons, and Craig Biggio famously bumped his on-base numbers by getting plunked a whole lot - but it does warp our conceptions of a player's skill set somewhat when just looking at his slash stats.

Where did Jones rank among the guys who got the biggest (relative) bonus from taking one for the team in 2010? Check out the graph at Beyond the Box Score.

The initial team projections are posted here. A more thorough walkthrough of how I put the individual ones together is in the Matt Wieters post here. The components I'm looking for are playing time (plate appearances), batting line (BA/OBP/SLG), and fielding.

Today we're looking at the Orioles' "new" left-fielder; Luke Scott.

Playing Time:

Since coming over to Baltimore and becoming a full-time starter (more or less), Luke has been pretty consistent with the playing time; 536 PA, 506 PA, 517 PA. He'll sit every now and again, and maybe go on the DL for a stretch. 525 plate appearances fits right in there.

Batting:

One thing I commonly hear when discussing the Orioles, their progress, and their chances of contention, is that things would look so much brighter if they were in another division*.

* I'm ignoring the NL since the level of competition there is generally much lower than the AL - or, at least, has been recently - and would perhaps require different team building philosophy. That is, the Orioles in the NL Central this year might have been smart to go after some big name players in an effort to win 85-90 games this year and in the next few years.

This tends to take two forms:

(1) If they were in another division they'd be more likely to make the play-offs
(2) If they were in another division they'd win more games

These may seem like the same idea, but they're not. (1) I think is pretty clearly true, as far as the divisions stand now. The Yankees came in second place in the AL East last year, but would have finished first in the Central or West. The Red Sox finished second in 2009, and though their 95 wins would have been behind LA's 97, they would have taken the Central in a walk (the Twins and Tigers ended 162 games with 86 wins each). The preceding couple of years played out similarly - to win a division title recently, one needs to beat two 90+ win teams in the East but only one (or zero) 90+ win teams in the Central or West.

In the AL East, the Orioles need to build themselves into a 90-95 win club and hope to catch a break or two to even compete for the division. In the Central or West, coming into the season as an expected true talent 90-95 win club makes you a prohibitive favorite at the moment. So yeah, moving to another division would up the team's chances of making the play-offs.

Point (2) though, is a little different. It posits that the O's moving to the Central or West would actually see a significant increase in raw win total, by virtue of not having to play their unbalanced schedule against the tougher AL East teams. I don't think that's really true, after looking into the matter at Beyond the Box Score last year*:

In the last week or two I've had multiple people tell me they're not too familiar with the statistics I tend to use and ask various questions - mostly about Wins Above Replacement (WAR). I've taken to adding a little glossary link at the bottom of each post based on which stats were used therein, but expounding more thoroughly on WAR seems like a fair idea. Luckily, there are numerous great primers on the stat around the interwebs, so I'm going to crib shamelessly from them (and I'm pretty much just sticking with the position player side). If anyone has any additional questions - big or small - please leave a comment and I'll try my best to explain more/better.

Reggie from Baseball Press was nice enough to have me on his podcast this past weekend to discuss the Orioles' off-season and how the team looks for 2011. Check it out.