Matt Carpenter: 2016 VEB Projections Results

Editor's Note: Two years ago, Site Manager Ben Humphrey asked readers to provide predictions for Cardinals baseball players. Last year, he renewed that request, and although Ben is in blogger retirement, we at VEB renewed the request to predict how the Cardinals will do. The answers are now in, although projections are still out on many players if you have not yet made one.

Matt Carpenter was the first player we requested predictions for this coming season, and it should come as no surprise given the time and Carpenter's popularity that we received more results for Carpenter than any other player. We received 335 responses for Carpenter which is an incredible amount.

In the original post, we said,

...

The Cardinals third baseman put up another great year last season, leading the team in home runs. Here are last year's stats:

Ben Markham discussed Carpenter's projections, and Joe Schwarz just did great work breaking down Carpenter's strikeouts. Carpenter is 30 and had a bit of a slump last season after being sidelined for exhaustion. The exhaustion is unlikely to factor in this season, but Carpenter should get plenty of playing time, likely once again at leadoff, although a move down in the order would create some RBI opportunities. While I will not post the projections from Steamer and ZiPS that are available at FanGraphs in case some of you would rather go in blind or believe it is cheating (it's not), but I will link to his player page at FanGraphs in case you feel like it would be of some assistance (it will). Cardinals ZiPS can be found here.

...

As is usually the case, the community at VEB is considerably more optimistic than the other projections, essentially believing that the Carpenter from 2015 will show up again this season. For comparison, we used ZiPS, Steamer, the FanGraphs Depth Chart Projections (FG DC), and Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA. As noted below, PECOTA uses a higher level of replacement player causing a lower WAR (WARP in this case) than if everyone used the same replacement level.

Thank you to everyone who filled out projections. We really appreciate it. Complete results for Carpenter are available here.