I’m pretty sure this is not what Sky never intended this when he created this spreadsheet, and I’m warning you ahead a time to not make this into something I haven’t said, but if you go over to tab 5 you’ll see the Peak Translations tab for current farmhands only.

First of all, I should probably remind you what Peak Translations are. According to Clay Davenport, they are:

Applies a typical aging pattern to the regular translation, to try and assess how good the player will be at his peak. Peak generally means somewhere around age 27; however, since the components of offense don’t age at the same rates (speed decays earlier than power, for instance), and since players don’t have the same mix of those components, the actual peak age has some variability, as early as 25 for pure speedsters and as late as 30 for sluggers. The adjustments for pitchers are considerably more sketchy; the very idea of a typical aging curve relies on predictable, steady changes in performance, while pitchers tendencies are dominated by essentially unpredictable point impacts, most commonly either injuries or developing a new pitch. All in all, though, the peak translation is an important tool for me to assess prospect status.

I probably left out some of your favorite pet prospects in favor of mine, but for the most part I tried to stick with those who either have been in Baseball America’s Top 30, Sickels Top 20, KG’s Top 11 or our own rankings at one point.  Say it’s 2011 and this somehow, someway manages to be THE team and all these players peak according to their translations from this past season at the same time, it’s a 91 win team. I’d say the odds of something like that happening are like .0000001%, but it an interesting thought.

I think the more interesting part of this exercise is how many wins above replacement each player translates to be based on their stats from last season. You can get an visual picture of what AZ was talking about in his recent “Positional Scarcity” column and why I’m higher than some on both Anderson and Kozma, despite their overall lack of “wow” factor.

Now for some explanation, clarification and otherwise random thoughts:

• For the defense I used for the most part their FRAA on the Peak Translation page, other times I just guessed or I may have docked a run or two. In Freese’s case, I left his rather enthusiastic FRAA alone. You can dock or add as many runs to a player in your mind to get a clearer idea of his WAR.
• For baserunning, I honestly just guesstimated with the scouting reports in mind.
• For pitchers, I used ERALF, which is luck-free ERA.  Clay Davenport says it is essentially the same as DIPS. It is quite unfriendly to Jess Todd.
• I used the peak translation for where the player had the lion share of his plate appearances/innings pitched.
• No 2008 draftees other than Wallace, and with him I honestly just fudged on his numbers. No players are included that didn’t play on a full season club, either, obviously.
• I think in the grand scheme of things,  Colby and Jones’ slugging % will swap.
• Freese fans will get happy.  Craig fans, too.
• The Daryl Jones controversy rages on. Jones believers will love it, pessimists will decry there’s no way he’s a 5 WAR player even at his peak. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, I presume.
• Yes, I know that Jay doesn’t have the arm to handle right field. Neither does Jones. Colby does, but he will not budge. The picture is what the player’s value is at their peak as a corner OF. Don’t worry about who is where, the positional adjustment for LF/RF is the same.
• TINSTAAFAITCS. That’s There Is No Such Thing As A Future Ace In The Cardinal System. Jaime Garcia might be a decent #2 on a Cardinal team, however.
• Hill, Cruz and Descalso may be flying under the radar.
• Jason Motte looks high in his team mugshot.
• I like bullet points.

You can say peak translations are flawed because they only take into account one season, and that’s right. I’m thinking when PECOTA comes out we could run through a similar exercise and see what we come up with. But for now it gives you something to visualize when it comes to a players’ potential worth in while he is in his peak, and if you disagree, I’m pretty sure you can just cut and paste and put it into Edit Grid and play around with it to suite your own intuition.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 1:18 am and is filed under peak translations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.