FanPost

PrOPS

Erik's post on futureredbirds.com today regarding Yadi was about how he has been unlucky for most of his big league career according to PrOPS. PrOPS stands for Predicted OPS and takes into account K, BB, HR, LD, GB and FB rates to predict what a player's OPS should be (sort of a DIPS for hitters):

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/introducing-props/

I thought it would be interesting to look at how our hitters last year did in OPS - PrOPs. A highly positive number suggests the player may have been lucky last season, a negative number that he may have been unlucky. Here are the numbers:

http://tinyurl.com/2mnmc2

Kennedy -0.127
Spiezio -0.056
Edmonds -0.052
Molina -0.040
Rolen -0.026
Wilson -0.022
Taguchi -0.015
Duncan -0.014
Ryan -0.006
Miles -0.005
Eckstein -0.004
Encarnacion .011
Ludwick .020
Pujols.024
Ankiel .025
Schumaker .120

So it looks like Kennedy is due for a bounceback, his PrOPS last year was .699, still not very good, but better than his abismal .572 OPS. The only guy who looks like he got really lucky was Skip. I found it interesting that Ryan ended up right where he should have been considering the CW that he was playing over his head at the ML level last season. Numbers for new additions include Glaus (-0.058, fairly unlucky) and Izturis (-0.064 for PIT and -0.107, both fairly unlucky).

I should add that two types of players that I can see consistently underperforming in OPS - PrOPS are very slow players (fewer infield hits) and players that don't have at least gap power (fewer fly balls turning into doubles), but I don't have any numbers to back that up.