Tigers WAR Projections

Wins Above Replacement have caught on like wildfire around the blogging community thanks to Fangraphs popularizing the method. With this in mind, and a handy spreadsheet from Sky Kalkman, I entered in the PA projections from Marcels. This put me over the recommended "outs" limit on the spreadsheet, so I adjusted various positions (with each position equaling 700 PA's), to get the outs as close as I could (wound up with ~60 more outs than the "goal" is).

The spreadsheet can be found here. What we get is a projection of 81 wins. The trickiest thing about this is getting playing time right. I was thinking of just going with a percentage breakdown. For instance, at 1st base, give Miguel Cabrera 85% of the PA's (which would be 595) and the guy who I think will be doing more of the backing up at 1st, Jeff Larish, the remaining 105 at first, but I'm just not sure if that's the route I would like to go (probably doesn't make a lot of difference). To get the wOBA for hitters, I imported the CHONE Tigers Hitters projections, and used (OBP*1.75 + SLG)/3 since I didn't find wOBA listed in the CHONE projections.

On the pitching side, like Bill, I chose to go with Fernando Rodney and Bobby Seay in the bullpen with a bunch of replacement level relievers after that. There's just too much uncertainty surrounding it.

So, right now, we're looking at a .500 ballclub until the holes get filled in in the bullpen. Adam Peterson of Twinkie Town, has put up projections for each team in the AL Central and he's got the Tigers at 87 wins this coming year -- good for 3rd behind Cleveland (92) and Minnesota (88), while clipping the Royals (81) and the White Sox (79). He did make the disclaimer that he knows more about the Twins than the rest of the division (naturally, as he's a Twins fan, just as I wouldn't know as much about the Twins situation being that I'm a Tigers fan and follow them more closely than the other AL Central foes). I like his forecast better simply because it accounts for more wins, but we differ in our results because he actually filled out the bullpen with Joel Zumaya, Aquilino Lopez, Clay Rapada and Freddy Dolsi where as I just used replacement level guys to fill it out.