An Exercise in Hopeful Caution: The Young Cubs and PECOTA 10-Year Projections

There are lots of exciting things about the Chicago Cubs this season, and in my opinion the most exciting among them is this: Despite their sizable and ever-increasing odds of making the playoffs (86.3 percent, as of this writing), fans have every reason to believe that the 2015 major-league baseball season will be the Cubs’ worst  in the immediate future. The observation underpinning that cheery conclusion is simple enough: the Cubs have an incredibly impressive—perhaps unprecedented—collection of cost-controlled young talent in the major leagues right now, and those players will in all likelihood improve as the years wear on.

But to what degree? And with what consistency? I don’t know the answers to these questions, and if you do, you ought to be making money off of that knowledge somehow, not reading this piece. (And are you sure your forecasting ability is limited to baseball? Go predict a natural disaster and save some lives, whydontcha?) The closest I can get to an answer is by making use of BP’s 10-year PECOTA projections.* They’re the result of a lot of work by a lot of smart people, and are as good a resource as we have for understanding what the Cubs’ young talent might look like going forward. They’re also not publicly available (yet), so this is the only place on the internet that you’ll see them. Let’s take a look, shall we, at what PECOTA has to say about some of the Cubs’ young hitters. I’ve chosen to look at Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, Kyle Schwarber, and Jorge Soler.

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(1) Javier Baez, 2B

Baez is, at this moment, the most mercurial of the prospects on this list. He’ll flash light-tower power at times, and show off a whiff rate to rival a hurricane at others. This season was meant to be his shot at redemption—and it still might turn out that way, if he’s called up for the stretch run—but he’s been slowed by a hand injury and has been inconsistent at Triple-A Iowa to date.

That’s … not bad. I know it looks underwhelming, but that’s just because we all have visions in our heads of Baez turning out to be the next coming of … well, there’s not a lot of comps for him. As Jason Parks noted a few years back, Baez’s 90th percentile projections is a “unicorn”: a Gold Glove middle-infielder with 40-homer power. In any event, the 16.3 WARP Baez is projected to produce over the next nine seasons is more than all but 12 second basemen have produced in the last nine seasons. You’ll take that, for sure, but with his makeup and work ethic, I’ll take the OVER on these numbers. Never bet against work and raw talent, when combined. (I should note that this feeling is not entirely my own: my colleague Stan Croussett has been saying this for years.)

(2) Kris Bryant, 3B 

Bryant has been doing good things so far this season. Barring a late surge from Matt Duffy or Jung-ho Kang (or even Joc Pederson), he’s on track to win the National League Rookie of the Year award. Baseball America recently ranked him as the third-best NL defender at the hot corner, and it’s quite possible that he’ll finish in the top 20—among all players—in fWAR when all is said and done. That’s all wonderful. But these projections will blow that out of the water. You might want to sit down for this.

Here’s a list of all the players in major-league baseball who’ve produced more WARP over the last nine seasons than the 53.5 PECOTA projects Bryant to produce over the next nine: [    This space intentionally left blank.    ]. Yep, nobody. Let me repeat that again, for emphasis: nobody. As far as PECOTA is concerned, Bryant is in a class by himself. He doesn’t have quite the best projection among all MLB players going forward (Mike Trout, for example, is at 66.3—stupid sexy Trout) but he’s way up there. Just because it’s so improbable that any player succeeds consistently at the major-league level, I’ll take the UNDER on these projections. That doesn’t mean I won’t be delighted if he meets or exceeds them.

(3) Addison Russell, SS

Russell’s had sort of an intriguing season. There weren’t many who expected him up before the stretch run, but then injuries to Mike Olt and (especially) Tommy La Stella, combined with the Cubs’ newly-legitimate aspirations toward contention, necessitated his call-up less than a week after Bryant’s. Since then, he’s played brilliant defense, hit at an acceptable level (improving, lately), and pushed Starlin Castro to the bench. Does PECOTA think he’ll be able to keep it up?

Not really. And that’s sort of intriguing, because it’s a good example of a conflict between what human evaluators see, which is an incredible set of tools and a high floor, and what PECOTA sees, which is middling performance at the big-league level. With talent this high, I tend to side with the humans. I just don’t see Russell limiting himself to the equivalent of one Mike Trout season’s worth of performance (10.1 WARP) over the next nine years. I’ll take the OVER, in deference to his incredible skills, strong work ethic, and young age.

(4) Kyle Schwarber, C/OF

“Sing in me, muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending.” If Baez is a unicorn, then Schwarber is a narwhal: an animal which actually exists right now, but still has the weird horn thing. Catchers who can hit like Schwarber are a rare breed indeed. The ones who do it for a while have their names remembered, and eventually end up in Cooperstown: Bench, Piazza, Posey. What Schwarber has done since his second call-up (at the All-Star break) is nothing short of brilliant, and PECOTA likes him to continue his success going forward.

That all adds up to 47.9 WARP over the next nine years, which is brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that were it not for the looming shadow of Bryant, Schwarber would look like the cornerstone around which this team will be built. (If we ignore Anthony Rizzo, who we haven’t even talked about here.) Here, I think the projection is just about right, maybe even a little on the low side, as it assumes he’ll play mostly in the outfield (which is where he’s played for most of 2015). Schwarber is a highly intelligent hitter who understands exactly what pitchers are trying to do to him. That’ll hold up, even if he moves off of catcher as the years wear on and his knees wear down. For this one, I’ll take the PUSH.

(5) Jorge Soler, OF

Here’s a thing Jorge Soler does really well: hit the ball very hard. His mean exit velocity of 92.7 miles per hour is in the top ten among NL hitters (minimum 150 plate appearances), and it seems that even his outs speak loudly. He’s had some injury issues, mostly with the lower half, and that’s held down his playing time a little. It’s hard to believe, but Soler has had only a little under 1,200 stateside plate appearances over the last four seasons; contrast, for example, with Baez, who’s had about 1,900 over the same period despite injury issues of his own. Point is, Soler isn’t a finished product yet; he still needs reps to develop into who he’s going to be.

Who he’s going to be, hopefully, is a lot better than this. At just 8.8 projected WARP over the next nine seasons, the man nicknamed George Solar is the Cubs prospect who PECOTA takes the dimmest view of. I don’t really believe it. Maybe you don’t believe that the power will ever fully develop into the 30-homer pop that’s always been the dream, but the plate discipline has been there pretty consistently, and the defense in right field isn’t half bad. I’ll take the OVER, definitely, though maybe not by as much as you’d think.

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Let’s summarize: I’m taking the OVER on Baez, Russell, and Soler, the UNDER on Bryant, and a PUSH on Schwarber. Any way you slice it, though, it’s good news. All the usual caveats apply, of course: projections aren’t perfect, even good ones; injuries happen; players fail to develop; players become prohibitively expensive. But all other things being equal, you’ll always take a better projection over a worse one, and the Cubs have some of the best projections in the business at the moment. That’s a very good thing, and is just another cherry on top of what has been a beautiful season in Chicago.

* A caveat from an earlier piece: You’ll notice that there’s a lot of ups and downs in the projections: that’s because these projections are based upon the top two or three most-comparable players to the player whose performance is being projected. This means that if one of those players had a bad year in, say, their age-34 season, so will the projections. Over the course of a career, however, PECOTA smooths out these bumps so that the overall WARP total remains accurate.

Lead photo courtesy Charles LeClaire-USA Today Sports.