St. Louis Cardinals projections: At the 2015 season's three-quarter point, how have the Cards performed relative to their VEB forecasts?

The St. Louis Cardinals played their 121st game of the season last night. That means the Cardinals have completed 74.6% of their 2015 slate of games. El Birdos face the Padres in their 122nd game tonight. Completion of that game will mark the 75.3% point of the season. Using simple rounding rules, I figure we're close enough to the three-quarter mark of the season to see how the individual Cardinals' stats compare to their preseason VEB Community projections.

First, a refresher on the preseason VEB Community projections. Every year, various publications, websites, and sabermetricians put out preseason projections for the forthcoming MLB season. They often use complex formulas with many inputs. At VEB, we've started an annual tradition of injecting the human element into projections. Rather than use a specific formula, we ask our readership to submit their predictions for Cardinals players and we calculate the average. That gives us the VEB Community projection for each player. You can view all of the 2015 VEB Community projection posts here.

You may notice that some players are not shown in this post. I excluded players who have missed the bulk of the regular season (i.e., Adam Wainwright and Matt Adams) because they aren't setting any sort of statistical pace. That being said, I've included Matt Holliday and Jon Jay since they played more than Wainwright or Big Mayo despite their multiple trips to the disabled list. This even though it's an open question whether Holliday or Jay will take more plate appearances over the remainder of the 2015 season than Adams.

We also did not do projections for relievers other than closer Trevor Rosenthal (who represents the first reliever projections we've ever done) or bench players. Consequently, Randal Grichuk, Mark Reynolds, Peter Bourjos, Pete Kozma, etc. are not featured. After the injury-plagued season the Cards have had this year, I think we're going to have to do more preseason projections next year.

Yadier Molina

Kolten Wong

Matt Carpenter

Jhonny Peralta

Matt Holliday

Jon Jay

Jason Heyward

Lance Lynn

Michael Wacha

Carlos Martinez

John Lackey

Jaime Garcia

Trevor Rosenthal

Correction: The original version of this post contained an error in Peralta's chart. It incorrectly showed Peralta's wOBA as exceeding the VEB projection by eight points rather than being eight points below it. The post's Molina chart also had the incorrect home-run percentage. The charts have been corrected.