Having missed nearly a full season before his comeback heroics in the World Series, the Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber presents a problem for projection systems.
How do you project a young player with a track record of only half a big-league season, all but five at-bats of that coming in 2015?
The ZiPS projection system at Fangraphs.com sees Schwarber as approximately the same hitter he was in 2015, when he had 273 plate appearances, hit 16 home runs and batted .246 with a .355 on-base percentage and .487 slugging percentage for an .842 OPS.
For 2017, ZiPS projects him at .243/.337/.504/.841 with 28 homers in 461 plate appearances.
Projections aren’t predictions. They’re formulas based largely on what other players with similar track records have done. Performance in the last three or four seasons — which dates to the minor leagues, in Schwarber’s case — is weighted heavily.
Normal aging patterns are taken into account. Schwarber made an immediate impact at 22, and the Cubs and their fans are hoping for more at 24.
Schwarber’s case is complicated by that gap of most of a year, which was caused by torn ligaments in his left knee suffered in an outfield collision with Dexter Fowler. Projection systems try to factor in comparisons to other players coming back from serious injuries.
ZiPS was developed by Dan Szymborski, whose work can be found at ESPN.com, as well as at Fangraphs. In an exchange of emails, Szymborski explained how ZiPS deals with the injury issue.
‘‘ZiPS has a generalized injury model based on historical performance of players with various injuries relative to projections,’’ he said. ‘‘Now, every injury is different, but we have enough data on injuries that we can draw some conclusions at least based on the basic type of injury.
‘‘In this case, ZiPS knows that he missed more than 120 days with a knee injury and uses past knee injuries of 120 days as guidance. It’s not super-aggressive or anything — the data are not as robust as you would want in an ideal world — but it does shade the projection down a bit from what it would be otherwise.’’
The PECOTA projection at baseballprospectus.com is similar to ZiPS’ projection, with Schwarber at .248/.347/.477/.824 with 31 homers. Projections in the annual Bill James Handbook show a step up at .268/.376/.491/.866 with 32 homers.
Some of the uncertainty shows up in strikeout and walk rates. In 2015, Schwarber walked in 13.2 percent of his plate appearances and struck out in 28.2 percent. ZiPS projects a dip to 11.7 percent walks and an increase to 30.6 percent strikeouts.
That’s not entirely because of injury. Schwarber’s 2016 ZiPS also saw a dip to 11.1 percent walks, but it also saw fewer strikeouts at 26.8 percent. Had he never been injured, the 2016 projection was for .250/.337/.496/.833 with 32 homers. And he’d now have that full-season base to build on.
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