Granderson homers now, but will he continue?*
posted in 2008 Spring Training |Curtis Granderson hit a home run and the Tigers beat the Blue Jays, 4-1, to remain undefeated in Spring Training.
But the interesting question I saw at Baseball Prospectus today is, is Curtis Granderson a top 10 center fielder? Keeping in mind this was coming at it from a fantasy perspective, the answer was “no.” The actual subscription-only article ran at BP a few weeks ago — he was edged out by Ichiro if you’re curious — but it was recently quoted in BP’s free blog, Unfiltered, so I’m going to pass on their reason why — because it’s a pretty good one to remember going forward.
There are problems in Granderson’s future though, if you look at both his batted-ball data and his PECOTA projection. Granderson had a .391 BABIP and a 22.1 percent liner rate last season, two numbers that would be really hard to maintain. His batting average on line drives was .846, and he also managed to hit .277 on grounders and .306 on fly balls. Those numbers are all higher than what is normal, and all of them figure to come down a bit this season. Adjusting his season line for the expected BABIP puts him at .252/.311/.502, assuming all of the missing hits are singles.
My italics. Granderson is an exceptional player who consistently beats what people predict of him, but I’m pretty sure he’s not going to repeat that .391 BABIP. (.300 or so is what’s considered average.) And I’m going to make a good guess that he’ll cut down his strikeouts a bit and maybe find a way to hit lefties a bit better than last year. But even if that comes true, I think it’s going to be hard to duplicate last year. PECOTA put his predicted OPS at .800 or so, which you can’t scoff at. Still, as BP said:
By both BABIP regression and PECOTA, Granderson is in for a hell of a fall production wise in 2008.
Fortunately, like I said, that’s only fantasy baseball’s analysis and we know there’s a lot more to Granderson’s game than just what he does at the plate. I think it will be interesting to see how his game changes year to year. But it’s something to be aware of going forward.
* Obviously batting average on balls IN PLAY kinda has little to do with balls that fly out of the playing area… I guess I reached a bit on that title.
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