Over the next 6 weeks we'll be posting the various projections for the Cubs players.  We did the same thing last year and unfortunately far too few of the players lived up to their expectations.  Let's hope the opposite is true in 2010, because the Cubs are going to need to get a little lucky next year.  Soto's 2009 projections were wildly optimistic (5.3 WAR).  He didn't even come close to that.

Before we start, I wanted to link to a few articles here at ACB.  The first one is the expected BABIP of the Cubs players in 2009 compared to their actual BABIP.  The second is berselius' crude estimation of Soto's expected BABIP and what his batting line would have been had he not been so unlucky.  The last one is the estimated playing time that we projected for the Cubs players in 2010.  We'll run that same survey again toward the end of spring training and make the necessary adjustments to the projections at that point.

The projection systems that are currently available are CHONE, CAIRO, Bill James, the Fans, and CBS.  Marcels, Pecota, and THT aren't yet available.  CHONE, Bill James and The Fans are available on Fangraphs.  CBS projections can be found here.  The CAIRO projections are available on Replacement Level Yankees Weblog.

For catcher defense, I used this post from 2008 on Beyond the Boxscore and this one from Driveline Mechanics in 2009.  I've taken the average of those two years and rounded to the nearest whole number.  I've used Baseball Prospectus' EQBRR for baserunning.  I used 2007, 2008 and 2009 EQBRR.  I took a weighted average (5-4-3) and rounded to the nearest whole number.

Now that we've gotten those 600 links out of the way, let's take a look at what the projections say for Soto.

Berselius found a wOBA of .340 last year with his crude estimation.  It would have been closer to .345 or a bit higher using his xBABIP.  This projection seems more than realistic. Below is his value.

If Soto plays up to his potential here, there's a very good chance he gets more than 506 plate appearances.  He had 563 in 2008 so if he stayed healthy that's probably about what he'd get.  We projected 506 for the time being so we're sticking with that. Soto is a pretty bad baserunner.  He'll be somewhere between -2 to -4 runs.

3 WAR is a huge difference from his 2009 projection.  It's still pretty good for a catcher though.  Especially when you factor in the upside.

UPDATE ON 1/10 @ 9:30 PM

I realized I was not including reached on error in the wOBA projection.  I'm unsure if the projection systems include it or not.  They're not listed in the stats they provide so I wasn't including it in the average, but there's real value in them.  They're roughly equal in value to a single and are important because reaching base on an error is a skill to some extent.  So, what I've done is this: take the career average reached on error per 100 plate appearances and applied that to the projection.  If Joe Smith averages 1 ROE per 100 plate appearances and is projected to get 400 PA, he's projected to get 4 ROE.  I've also included stolen bases and caught stealing.  If a projection system doesn't include those, I took the average of the ones that did.  I can't remember if some didn't include SB/CS numbers or not.

Just so you know, here is the formula I've used: wOBA = (-.47*CS + .2*SB + .72*BB + .75*HBP + .9*1B + .92*ROE + 1.24*2B + 1.56*3B + 1.95*HR)/PA

This is what I get for Soto:

There was something wrong in my initial calculation before I even included the ROE.  This obviously changes Soto's value projection.

I'll post an update to Lee's projection tomorrow morning.

UPDATE ON 1/11 @ 9:30 AM

I found one more error.  I couldn't get the wOBA's to match fangraphs for the ones they have.  MO pointed out my obvious error.  I was including all walks as non-intentional.  The wOBA should be .359 (I've changed the two tables I posted last night just above) and the value should be 3.3 WAR.