2023: YEPS EOY PROJECTION FOR RONALD ACUÑA JR.

It must be a Friday serendipity thing--both Joe the P. and Jayson Stark did the genuflect dance for Ronald Acuña Jr. in their mass missives today. We have less mass, but we'll do something with the uber-talented Braves sparkplug that neither of them bothered to do...

...which is to create a projection for what Acuña's stats will look like at the end of the season (or End Of Year, abbrev. EOY, which, as you can see, fits better in our title: so now you know--just in case you were wondering). 

How do we do that? We dust off our old YEPS tool (YEPS, or Year End Projection System, a fancy name for a spreadsheet-on-steroids we fashioned back before the turn of the century). 

There are a lot of these around now--you can probably go to Phangrafs (our spelling!) or Baseball Savonarola (we'll let you figure out just who/what that is...) and get something very, very similar. But we like our bathtub gin systems, which keep on ticking as the progenitors of such analogous oddly-named tools: ZIPS, Marcel the Monkey, and--our favorite--SWAG (Semi-Wild-Ass-Guess). 

But just a few words about how YEPS works. Take year-to-date (YTD) data, combine it with whatever form of prior career data you think is credible and/or relevant; proportionalize the combined totals, make adjustments for projected playing time, leaven the data a bit more by examining/applying various underlying trends (such things as relative BABIP--you know, batting average on balls in play), flip the switch and turn on the fake blender sounds (which will fade after about thirty seconds--if not, vacate the premises immediately...), and then--sneak a peak at the result.

And here they are...

Because we used Acuña's total career data for the projection, the BOS (that's balance of season,,,) numbers more strongly match his career total prior to 2023. (As of 2022, Acuña's career slash line was .277/.370/.517. YEPS, using career data that is maybe eight times as much as his current 2023 data sample, suggests that he'll produce a BOS slash line of .282/.366/.523. When that's translated into game stats--AB, R, H, D, T, HR, RBI, SB, CS, BB, SO--it all gets added to the YTD stats and you get the raw numbers you see in the second line of the chart. 

An argument can be made that we should de-emphasize Acuña's 2022 stats due to the aftereffects of the injuries he suffered in 2021. There are several ways to do that, with the simplest being to take it out of the calculation entirely. When we do that, Acuña's projections improve--he hits 40 HRs, strikes out more (oddly, his off-season in '22 was accompanied by a sizable reduction in his strikeout rate...), and his slash line adjusts upward to .303/.389/.562. 

SO those two calculations give you a range of result to look for when the 2023 season has concluded. The one we've shown above, with all pre-2023 career data, is a bit more conservative; the one that removes the 2022 off-year is more optimistic. We'll come back to this at the EOY to see if YEPS has a SBCIH of being right.

And if you don't know THAT acronym--well, just look to your left....