Introducing the “Stare at Each Player’s Baseball-Reference Page for 30 Seconds” projection system and applying it to the Cardinals’ hitters for 2024

You are cordially invited to play along at home

Image: DALL-E

As someone with a passing interest in both baseball projections system and simplicity as a guiding principle, I am undertaking an experiment for the 2024 season before us. Said experiment involves forecasting players via a system that almost anyone can use. 

It says here that projecting baseball performance should not be the sole province of those with a mastery of advanced quantitative analysis and working familiarity with coding languages that have names like “Snapdragon” and “Chilitext.” Since I remain there for those with nowhere left to turn, please permit me to introduce the “Stare at Each Player’s Baseball-Reference Page for 30 Seconds” projection system. Genre trends demand that we come up with a business-forward acronym for it, so henceforth it shall be known as the SEPBURP30 projection system. 

While the full name of the system plainly doubles as user instructions, some elaboration is in order. Here goes nothing: 

• Conjure up the player of note’s page on Baseball-Reference.com. 

• Start your 30-second timer before you begin staring at it. . 

• Using that B-Ref page survey whatever you like about the player. Age and performance trends from recent seasons are fine starting points. Games played and innings pitched may of course be semi-accurate proxies for more detailed injury information. 

• If you wish to navigate other B-Ref sub-pages for the player in question – for instance, the minor-league register for a player with less of a major-league sample or an “Advanced Stats” page – then you are free to do so. However, load times count against your 30 seconds. Proceed to other pages at your own peril and with full submission to the whims of the jurisdictional load-time gods. 

• You are not permitted to tab-hop over to Baseball Savant or Fangraphs or Baseball Prospectus or any other (very excellent and highly useful) site. The point is simplicity and the power of semi-snap judgments. Also, going to another site would have a corrupting effect on the name of this system, which, again, is SEPBURP30. 

• Prior knowledge of the relevant player or players is of course admissible so long as you don’t acquire it in the direct service of improving your SEPBURP30 projections. 

• After the 30 seconds is up, you must immediately document your projection for the player. No further rumination is permitted, and you are also forbidden to go back and revise the projection later. 

Will this system prove accurate? Pshaw: Almost certainly not. However, I do anticipate that the “effort level to accuracy” ratio will be best in class – i.e., lowest – and that’s the most important thing of all. 

The author will now put the system into practice by using it to project the performance of the Cardinals’ core hitters in 2024. That group includes the presumed starter at each position plus some notable reserves. I’m going to do this using OPS+. 

I favor that measure of offensive performance, at least for these purposes, because it is both somewhat advanced and mostly quick-and-dirty. For those unfamiliar, OPS+ is a hitter’s OPS, or his on-base percentage added to his slugging average, adjusted to reflect league and home-ballpark conditions. It’s scaled so that 100 is average, and anything more or less than 100 is that many percentage points better or worse than the league mean. For instance, in 2023 Tommy Edman had an OPS+ of 91, which means his park-adjusted OPS was 9% worse than that of the average major-league hitter. Meanwhile, Jordan Walker had an OPS+ of 114, which means his park-adjusted OPS was 14% better than the MLB average. Also, I’ll be taking a stab at games played or, in the case of reserves, plate appearances. I’ll also throw in home run projections/guesses for starters. 

Before we begin, let me say that, yes, I used a timer on my phone to ensure I did not violate the immutable 30-second law. Also, each player will be helpfully and lovingly linked off to his B-Ref page so that you may indulge in your own SEPBURP30 projections and even share them in the comments if you wish. After all, there is no single official SEPBURP30 projection. There is only what you or I or anyone else comes up with by using the system. That makes this of, for, and by the people, which is as intended. Onward, with the confidence of the willfully deceived.