Fan Projection Targets: 12/2/2009

Today’s targets are: Kelly Shoppach, Josh Johnson, Jake Peavy

Yesterday, our three targets were Jay Bruce, Ricky Nolasco and Edwin Jackson. Let’s see how they fared:

Jay Bruce ended the day with some 200-plus ballots cast and it seems everyone is pretty optimistic about him having a much improved season with a .358 wOBA and somewhere right around 3 WAR. The interesting thing here, though, is that there are apparently only eight Reds fans who visit FanGraphs, and they expect him to have a considerably better year with a .373 wOBA and 4.4 WAR! They project his defense to continue at high levels with an UZR of 7.4 compared to 3.2 for non-fans.

However, fans are not expecting a repeat for Edwin Jackson and instead have projected him for a healthy dose of regression. Everyone thinks the walks will go up, the strikeouts will go down a bit, and the ERA will jump back over 4. Tigers fans think he’ll fare slightly better than non-fans, but everyone seems to be on the same page.

And finally Ricky Nolasco, who is always a hot subject for debate, continued to be controversial in the collective fans’ minds. Now, we don’t have really enough data to run a full study, but generally, fans are torn between two buckets when filling out their ERA selection. Nolasco’s ERA voting was 24% for 3.00-3.49, 46% for 3.50-3.99 and then 25% for 4.00-4.49. Everyone thinks he’ll continue to strike out over 8 per 9 innings and nearly everyone thinks he’ll walk under 2.5 per 9, so no one is questioning his peripherals, but his actual results continue to be a big question mark.