While one of my favorite publications, the Baseball Prospectus Annual, hasn’t yet come out, the website has released their PECOTA projections. PECOTA cards to fun to look at so I thought it’d be worthwhile checking out first basemen Prince Fielder’s PECOTA card to see what we find.
The first thing you have to like is the weighted mean average line. There you find Fielder hitting 28 homeruns with a very nice .292/.373/.531 line. Even more optimistic are his breakout rate (40%) and improve rate (77%) which makes his 75th percentile line a little more probable. There you have Fielder hitting 31 homeruns with a line of .305/.388/.562. Not too shabby for a kid who’s going turn 23 in May.
Boog Powell and Kent Hrbek are Fielder’s two most comporable players at this point in his career. David Ortiz is third and he’s the only other guy with a similarity factor at or aboe 40.
Even cooler is the five year forecast. It’s 30 homerun seasons and WARPs above 5.0 across the board after 2007. And while BP and PECOTA are never perfect, they seem to do a pretty good job. They predicted Ryan Howard’s breakout season for one so when the book comes out, I’m interested in seeing what they have to say about Fielder.
