Quick summary: I test the ZiPS and Marcel projection systems to see if their errors are larger for players with larger platoon splits. A first check says that they are not, though a more nuanced examination of the system remains to be conducted.

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First, a couple housekeeping notes:

• I will be giving a short talk at Saberseminar, which is a baseball research conference held in Boston in 10 days! If you’re there, you should go—I’ll be talking about how the strike zone changes depending on where and when games are played. Right now I’m scheduled for late Sunday afternoon.
• Sorry for the lengthy gap between updates; work obligations plus some other commitments plus working on my talk have cut into my blogging time.

After the A’s went on their trading sprees last week at the trading deadline, there was much discussion about how they were going to intelligently deploy the rest of their roster to cover for the departure of Yoenis Cespedes. This is part of a larger pattern with the A’s as they continue to be very successful with their platoons and wringing lots of value out of their depth. Obviously, when people have tried to determine the impact of this trade, they’ve been relying on projections for each of the individual players involved.

What prompted my specific question is that Jonny Gomes is one of those helping to fill Cespedes’s shoes, and Gomes has very large platoon splits. (His career OPS is .874 against left-handed pitchers and .723 against righties.) The question is what proportion of Gomes’s plate appearances the projection systems assume will be against right handers; one might expect that if he is deployed more often against lefties than the system projects, he might beat the projections substantially.

Since Jonny Gomes in the second half of 2014 constitutes an extremely small sample, I decided to look at a bigger pool of players from the last few years and see if platoon splits correlated at all with a player beating (or missing) preseason projections. Specifically, I used the 2010, 2012, and 2013 ZiPS and Marcel projections (via the Baseball Projection Project, which doesn’t have 2011 ZiPS numbers).

A bit of background: ZiPS is the projection system developed by Dan Szymborski, and it’s one of the more widely used ones, if only because it’s available at FanGraphs and relatively easy to find there. Marcel is a very simple projection system developed by Tangotiger (it’s named after the monkey from Friends) that is sometimes used as a baseline for other projection systems. (More information on the two systems is available here.)

So, once I had the projections, I needed to come up with a measure of platoon tendencies. Since the available ZiPS projections only included one rate stat, batting average, I decided to use that as my measure of batting success. I computed platoon severity by taking the larger of a player’s BA against left-handers and BA against right-handers and dividing by the smaller of those two numbers. (As an example, Gomes’s BA against RHP is .222 and against LHP is .279, so his ratio is .279/.222 = 1.26.) My source for those data is FanGraphs.

I computed that severity for players with at least 500 PA against both left-handers and right-handers going into the season for which they were projected; for instance, for 2010 I would have used career data stopping at 2009. I then looked at their actual BA in the projected year, computed the deviation between that BA and the projected BA, and saw if there was any correlation between the deviation and the platoon ratio. (I actually used the absolute value of the deviation, so that magnitude was taken into account without worrying about direction.) Taking into account the availability of projections and requiring that players have at least 150 PA in the season where the deviation is measured, we have a sample size of 556 player seasons.

As it turns out, there isn’t any correlation between the two parameters. My hypothesis was that there’d be a positive correlation, but the correlation is -0.026 for Marcel projections and -0.047 for ZiPS projections, neither of which is practically or statistically significantly different from 0. The scatter plots for the two projection systems are below:

Now, there are a number of shortcomings to the approach I’ve taken:

• It only looks at two projection systems; it’s possible this problem arises for other systems.
• It only looks at batting average due to data availability issues, when wOBA, OPS, and wRC+ are better, less luck-dependent measures of offensive productivity.
• Perhaps most substantially, we would expect the projection to be wrong if the player has a large platoon split and faces a different percentage of LHP/RHP during the season in question than he has in his career previously. I didn’t filter on that (I was having issues collecting those data in an efficient format), but I intend to come back to it.

So, if you’re looking for a takeaway, it’s that large platoon-split players on the whole do not appear to be poorly projected (for BA by ZiPS and Marcel), but it’s still possible that those with a large change in circumstances might differ from their projections.