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David Freese Community Projections Results

What I can tell from the results of our David Freese Projection Two-for-One: That nobody trusts Freese to stay healthy, and that everybody is excited to see someone other than Aaron Miles and Felipe Lopez's Ghost soaking up at-bats as his replacement. Collectively our heroes hit .270/.331/.414, which is an OPS 90 points higher than the third basemen collectively managed in 2010. Freese accounts for 115 games worth—he played 70 in 2010, so this is an improvement—while you projected 51 games for everyone else. 

The extra 45 games of Freese are big deal enough, even though his .278/.341/.435 line isn't so OBP-heavy as he managed in his rookie season. (He also pops 14 home runs and drives in 64 in this scenario, which looks a little more like a real season than his punchless debut.) 

But it's the way we projected his replacements that makes the difference. Despite Nick Punto's .247/.321/.322 career mark, the replacements collectively look a lot like Randy Winn here: A .245/.314/.373 line, which means that Punto is either benefiting from dinger camp as we speak or too busy covering Skip Schumaker to spend time at third after David Freese is struck by a decommissioned satellite while rounding the bases in Johnson City.

That .128 isolated-slugging makes me think that the Craigen is at least briefly unleashed in community-projection-universe; Punto was the runaway winner of our poll on the topic, with 60% of the vote, but Craig picked up a healthy 22% of the vote on his "anybody can play second base, and third base is even easier" platform. 

This kind of production from Freese and the Puntettes would be a major improvement over what we saw last year, something like two wins if I did my Runs Created math correctly. It would also be slightly worse than what the National League as a whole hit at third base last year. This kind of improvement is possible when you give Pedro Feliz 35 games at third in which to hit .212/.230/.254.

(Pedro Feliz fun fact: That's approximately what the 1884 Kansas City Cowboys of the Union Association hit. They were put together in a hurry after another team collapsed midseason in a league that was basically one giant vanity project and finished the season 16-63 before disbanding. They played 51 different players; you probably could have just walked on, if you were interested. They might have made Feliz try out.)