Make your 2016 Royals player predictions

One internet based offseason thing I like is Tom Tango's crowdsource scouting report for each individual player. In it, he asks baseball fans to build a scouting report for the defensive prowess of each player.

Baseball's fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

So we're going to try something similar here for the Royals players specifically. However we aren't going to do just defense or just offense, but instead the overall value of a player based on their wins above replacement (WAR). For the purpose of this exercise we'll look at FanGraphs measure of WAR described as:

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player's total contributions to their team in one statistic. You should always use more than one metric at a time when evaluating players, but WAR is all-inclusive and provides a useful reference point for comparing players. WAR offers an estimate to answer the question, "If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a freely available minor leaguer or a AAAA player from their bench, how much value would the team be losing?" This value is expressed in a wins format, so we could say that Player X is worth +6.3 wins to their team while Player Y is only worth +3.5 wins, which means it is highly likely that Player X has been more valuable than Player Y.

For batters it's relatively straightforward when adding together all the underlying metrics; batting + fielding + baserunning + position essentially with an adjustment for replacement level.

However for pitchers it's a bit more complicated. Since we are using fWAR we are ignoring ERA since in my opinion (and Fangraphs) it's not the best indicator for measuring a pitchers talent.

In order to match up with the theory behind WAR for position players, FanGraphs has traditionally used a context-neutral statistic (Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP)) in order to express a pitcher's value to their team. Here are a couple reasons why:

● FIP strips away the influences of team defense, focusing solely how variables that a pitcher has control over.

● FIP also involves considerably less regression than other ERA Estimators like SIERA and xFIP, making it a better measure of value added. While SIERA and xFIP estimate a player's hypothetical home run and BABIP rates based on different criteria, FIP uses a player's actual home run rate in its calculations.

● These factors make FIP a good middle-ground option. It strips away the impacts of defense and measures a pitcher's skill, but it doesn't merely regress away abnormal results. If a pitcher should have allowed 20 home runs (based on his regressed home run rate) but actually gave up 30 home runs, he was a less valuable pitcher to his team than a stat like SIERA or xFIP would have you believe. Those two stats are better at predicting the future, but FIP is better at capturing past value.

Now an argument can be made that with the Royals defense, pitchers can outperform their FIP in regards to their ERA. However this argument loses focus a bit as we are trying to measure the pitchers 2016 talent.

So below, I've listed the current nine main position players, five starting pitchers, and three main relievers.

A few notes:

1) This list is of course incomplete players wise. Though the bulk of the 2016 roster is in place there are of course a few pieces missing that will come in due time. This exercise will be revisited again after Spring Training.

2) Assume the player receives a full season of playing time and adequate health other than the usual tear of daily games

3) Here is a basic and loose breakdown for players when trying to benchmark their WAR

Batters:

5+ wins: MVP level caliber

3-5 wins: All Star player

~1.5-3 wins: average player

0-1 wins: Below average player

Pitchers:

5+ wins: MVP level caliber

3-5 wins: All Star player

~1.5-3 wins: average player

0-1 wins: Below average player

0 wins: replacement level

Relievers

~2+ wins: elite level closers/relievers (Craig Kimbrel, Wade Davis, Aroldis Chapman)

~0.5-1.5 wins: average to above average reliever - 7/8th inning guys (Tyler Clippard, Kelvin Herrera, Junichi Tazawa)

~0-0.5 wins: middle relievers (Luke Hochevar, Al Alburquerque, Franklin Morales)

As you'd expect, relievers don't really ever rack up high level win values because they usually top out at 60-70 innings per year or 1/3 of a starters normal innings. So think of relievers compared to their scale of other relievers. I imagine this will be the toughest task of the bunch but I didn't want to exclude relievers.

Even if you don't believe in WAR, use the above breakdown of win levels to assign a prediction to a player. Will they have an all-star level season? Average season? Etc...

All 2016 projections are courtesy of Steamer

Salvador Perez

Year	PA	WAR
2013	526	3.7
2014	606	3.1
2015	553	1.6
2016	520	3.1

Eric Hosmer

Year	PA	WAR
2013	680	3.2
2014	547	0.1
2015	667	3.5
2016	649	2.4

Omar Infante

Year	PA	WAR
2013	476	3.1
2014	575	0.5
2015	455	-0.9
2016	399	0.2

Alcides Escobar

Year	PA	WAR
2013	642	1.1
2014	620	3.3
2015	661	1.5
2016	641	1.5

Mike Moustakas

Year	PA	WAR
2013	514	1.2
2014	500	0.6
2015	614	3.8
2016	599	3.0

Paulo Orlando

Year	PA	WAR
2015	251	1.0
2016	516	-0.1

Lorenzo Cain

Year	PA	WAR
2013	442	2.7
2014	502	4.9
2015	604	6.6
2016	628	3.7

Jarrod Dyson

Year	PA	WAR
2013	239	2.5
2014	290	3.1
2015	225	1.8
2016	546	1.6

Kendrys Morales

Year	PA	WAR
2013	657	1.3
2014	401	-1.8
2015	639	2.1
2016	626	0.8

Yordano Ventura

Year	IP	WAR
2013	15.1	-0.1
2014	183	2.4
2015	163	2.7
2016	195	3.3

Edinson Volquez

Year	IP	WAR
2013	170	0.9
2014	192	1.0
2015	200	2.6
2016	185	1.7

Danny Duffy

Year	IP	WAR
2013	24.1	0.5
2014	149	1.9
2015	136	1.2
2016	153	1.1

Chris Young

Year	IP	WAR
2014	165	0.0
2015	123	0.9
2016	168	-0.4

Kris Medlen

Year	IP	WAR
2013	197	2.6
2014	-	-
2015	58	0.5
2016	172	1.7

Wade Davis

Year	IP	WAR
2013	135	1.4
2014	72	3.0
2015	67	2.0
2016	65	0.9

Joakim Soria

Year	IP	WAR
2013	23	0.2
2014	44	1.4
2015	67	0.4
2016	65	0.5

Kelvin Herrera

Year	IP	WAR
2013	58	0.5
2014	70	1.2
2015	69	0.6
2016	55	0.5

Polling will close Friday with the result posted next week