The 2012 Mariners and 90-Win Potential: Having Fun With Optimistic Projections

5.4 wins is all we're asking, Dustin.

Hello there, Mariners fan! I am assuming that if you are reading this you are most likely a fan of the Seattle Mariners Baseball-Playing Club. As a Mariners fan, you probably feel a tad bit uneasy about the upcoming season, and for good reason. Did you see this team last year?! How about the year before that?! Throw in the fact that since the opening of the 2011 campaign the team has traded away two highly successful, cost-controlled young starters and failed to sign any hundred million dollar home run boppers, it’s hardly a suprise that many a fan remains unconvinced that this club is on the right track.

After years and years of Bavasi shitstorm and the 2010 “believe big” flop, it’s hard to blame any Mariners fan who is skeptical of Jack Z’s youth movement. How do we know these players won’t flame out! For all we know, the 2012 Mariners could feature Jeff Clement at 1st, 2nd, 3rd, DH, left, and catcher. Young players are volatile and don’t have the warm-and-cozy years worth of hard data we love to look at when projecting future performance. Jesus Montero is the team’s top prospect going into this season and Jesus Montero is by all accounts amazing, but one can’t help but remember that a couple years ago that spot was filled by Michael Saunders, and I don’t want to talk about Michael Saunders right now because I don’t want to cry right now. Point is, young players are tricky to project, and when you’re a fan of the team that produced Jose Lopez and Yuniesky Betancourt you likely tend to disregard optimistic projections for the young core.

But ignoring the optimistic projections isn’t any fun. It’s anti-fun. Considering the very, very real possibility that the 2012 Mariners will be a last place team is not fun at all, so instead lets consider a slightly less real possibility: the Mariners have the talent on board right now to be a 90-win team. In the current AL West that’s still probably not a playoff team, but it’s certainly a contender. The problem with considering the 90-win potential of this roster is that it’s a stretch. It’s a big fat stretch, but it’s not beyond reason. Don’t believe me? Just ask the FanGraphs Fan Projections.

The FanGraphs Fan Projections are the Ned Flanders of projection systems. According to the FanGraphs Fan Projections the sun will shine 365 days a year and dolphins are currently doing backflips in Lake Washington. Oh, and the Mariners offense has improved by 20 wins since last season. Not 20 runs, 20 wins.

This, says everybody, does not seem realistic. Not one bit. You know what doesn’t seem realistic? The 2011 M’s offense. The highest wRC+ amongst regular players was 117, shared by Dustin Ackley and Mike Carp over a combined 689 plate appearances. The average AL OPS in 2011 was .730, and aside from Ackley and Carp the only regular to best that mark was Casper Wells, who checked in at .742 over 116 trips to the plate. The 2011 Seattle Mariners offense was so amazingly below average that it’s easy to forget that Mike Sweeney’s .802 OPS and 124 wRC+ from 2010 would have been top marks last year, just as they were that year. That team had a .637 OPS, which last year shot all the way up to .640. The Mariners are coming off two seasons of being absolutely amazing in the worst way possible. If we can believe that the last two years really happened, then we can believe anything.

So in the vein of believing anything, let’s just believe that the FanGraphs projections for the coming season are spot-on. Just for fun, let’s pretend it’s the last day of the season and we are marveling over how spot-on the fan crowdsourcing results were. Below is a table showing what these projections think of the 2012 Mariners. This group of position players is not going to be the same all season long, but let’s just pretend it will be. Also, let’s just use OPS and WAR because I am not a mathematician and I like big easy numbers. To the big easy numbers!

One can’t help but notice that this projected team is nothing short of massively improved despite a minimal number of personnel moves, as the only new names are Montero, Jaso and Guillen. The fan projections are predicting improvement from every returning 2011 Mariner except Carp and Ryan, who are expected to stay more or less the same. This can be attributed to young players developing and claiming more plate appearances, as well as bouncebacks from veterans Ichiro, Gutierrez and Figgins. The 2011 Mariners offense combined to produce 5.1 WAR, last in the majors by soooooooo much. The most optimistic projection system I can find sees them producing 27.7 WAR this year, an improvement that would likely result in Jack Z’s election as governor. Last year 27.7 position player wins would have ranked tenth in baseball, just behind the Tigers and just ahead of the Royals. To recap, the Mariners had the 12th-best pitching staff in baseball last year which has led fans to regard our run prevention unit as the team’s glowing strength. Consider a Mariners team where the offense actually outproduces the defense. I told you this would be fun!

What’s crazy about these numbers is how entirely possible they seem. Justin Smoak has bummed a lot of people out so far in his Mariners tenure, but does anyone think he’s truly incapable of a low-800s OPS? I’m willing to bet that there are plenty of fans who find this projection to be pessimistic even, given the flashes of promise he showed last year on either end of the season. Ichiro making a rebound not to stardom, but to respectability? Seems like a perfectly reasonable projection for a guy who has historically been a pain in the ass for projections.

So what we have here is a projection system that thinks the Mariners offense will be not only competent, but above-average. Woah! Let’s look at what the same set of projections has to say about our pitchers:

*These projections are completely made up. I just made them up, just now! These projections are based on nothing aside from optimism because this is a post about optimism. If Jason Vargas can be projected to provide 2.4 wins, then what’s stopping me from calling for a slightly higher number from a pitcher with higher upside? If League’s a 1 WAR closer then why not predict twice that contribution from some assortment of Kuo/Camp/Sherrill/Wilhelmsen/Delabar/Ruffin? Like everything else in this post it’s a bit of a stretch, but that’s the point. So I’m going to proceed as if nothing fishy ever happened here.

These back-of-the-napkin scribbles tell the story of a 19.2 WAR pitching staff, up from last year’s 17.5. That’s good. Last year’s staff was good, this year’s staff may be a tick better. This isn’t really all that hard to believe, especially considering the possible midseason addition of Danny Hultzen or James Paxton and the thrilling wild card that is Hisashi Iwakuma. Yeah yeah, a couple seasons ago we had a thrilling wild card called Ian Snell, but let’s sweep that corpse under the rug, too. This is a post about optimism! This post about optimism puts the 2012 M’s at 46.6 wins above replacement level. Again, the 2011 Tigers minus a few wins. The point of this post is that the FanGraphs Fan Projections see the Mariners as directly comparable to the Tigers team that ran away with the AL Central and beat the Yankees in the playoffs last season. The FanGraphs fan projections see the 2012 Mariners as something close to a 90 win team.

It’s critical to remember that while most projection systems are created based on all-considering formulas and thousands of simulations, these are just an average of guesses. There is no control for park effects in these numbers. There is no mathematic formula driving these projections, just a bunch of educated guesses. People are more optimistic than computers, and this projection essentially represents a scenario where nothing horrible happens. As baseball fans, we all know that horrible things happen all the time. These projections don’t anticipate any major collapses or negative WAR performances. They don’t doubt Franklin Gutierrez’s ability to return from debilitating illness or Mike Carp’s ability to replicate his breakout 2011 over a full season’s worth of plate appearances. Everything breaks right in these projections, which is why they’re so fun.

In 2001 we saw what can happen when everything breaks right, and there’s no doubt that even eleven years later a little bit of that magic “what if?” dust still floats in the Safeco Field air. These projections are by no means an estimation of what will happen, but an estimation of what might happen in a world where world peace reigns supreme and Albert Pujols pulls an Adam Dunn. Anything is possible! So cling to these projections, convince yourself of their plausibility. Because when facing a season that begins with the general manager saying “let’s not kid ourselves,” the least we can do is indulge in a little optimism.