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2021 Diamondbacks Projected Pitching

Explanation of the Table

The Table below shows two lines for each pitcher and for the team as a whole: Actual and Projected. The Actual lines are just what it says: the actual stats for this season to date; the Projected lines want a little explanation.

The projecting has two steps. The first is simple: for each man, we calculate the ratio of his current-season-to-date BFPs (Batters Faced Pitcher, the equivalent of Plate Appearances for batters) to his career BFPs, then multiply all his career stats by that ratio to get what one might call his “raw” career-performance data pro-rated to his current-year number of BFPs. So, as a hypothetical example, a man with 5,000 career BFPs and 250 BFPs this season would have a ratio of 250/5000, or .050; so, if he had yielded, say, 1215 career Hits, his raw projected Hits number for this season would be 1215 x .05, or 61 (if the calculated number is fractional, as with 60.75, we round it off to the nearest whole number).

That much is simple and, we hope, clear. The second adjustment takes a little explaining. It derives from the fact that—for a team or for an individual man—the number of BFPs that will be had for a given number of Outs made (which is to say “innings played”) depends exactly on the on-base percentage: the higher the on-base percentage, the more BFPs the man or team will see in any given number of innings.

To clarify: imagine a staff with a great .250 on-base percentage; that number means that, on average, one man in four that they see at the plate will get on safely. The converse of that is that three men in four will make out. (For simplicity’s sake in this elementary example, we ignore outs made on the bases.) So, in an average inning, the batters, to make the three outs that constitute an inning, will send 4 men to the plate. If we next imagine a staff with an equally absurd .500 on-base percentage, only half the batters it faces make an out: thus, to make the three outs that define an inning, the batters would have—again, on average—to send 6 men to the plate. So (as should be intuitively obvious anyway), for a given number of innings, a higher OBP means more PAs.

The consequence of that is that each man’s “raw”stat projections, which were based on his BFPs for this season, are slightly inaccurate, because his—and the team’s—BFPs would be different (perhaps higher, perhaps lower) from what they are if all the men were performing at their career rates. To correct for that, we calculate each man’s career "outs rate" (all Outs made per plate appearance, which does include outs made behind him on the bases) and multiply it by his percentage of the staff’s total BFPs; we then sum up those outs rates to get a projected team Outs rate, and from that—holding Outs made (which, again, is just innings played) constant—we can reckon the projected team BFP total. We can then adjust each projected stat line by the ratio of expected team BFPs to actual BFPs (which normally yields a number fairly close to, but not equalling,1.0), giving us the true projected stats for each man and for the team.

(For this season for this team’s pitching, the adjustment factor, rounded to three decimal places—the actual calculations use many more decimals— is 0.973)

Incidentally, that last adjustment is the reason that even rookies, whose whole “career” is just the current season, can have “adjusted” lines that differ slightly from their actual data lines, and why the TPP numbers here may differ slightly from those on other pages here.

You can see the overall “win-capability” of the team (its wins projected from these team numbers and the corresponding team batting numbers) at our “Projected Team-Performances” page.

The Table

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This page was last modified on Monday, 21 June 2021, at 1:39 pm Pacific Time.