How accurate were our Steamer Projections?  Which system or combination of systems should we use to prepare for our fantasy baseball draft?  Thanks to MGL’s work we already know that Steamer had great success projecting pitcher quality in 2010 and less success projecting batter quality.  Here will we attempt to discover why some systems are having more success than others by breaking hitting and pitching performances into components.  This should also serve as a follow-up to our analysis from a year ago.

Full Disclosure

As the creators of Steamer Projections you may be justifiably skeptical of our ability to serve as an unbiased judge of projection systems.  In an attempt to allay your concerns we are making our data set available here so that anyone can check our data or pursue their own analysis.

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After an apparent breakout season in 2009, Adam Lind regressed somewhat drastically trying to follow it up in 2010. The idea of Lind being able to play left field was all but completely abandoned in 2010 and he served as the team’s primary DH for much of the season. That was a move that couldn’t be argued against heading into 2010 because his defense was well below average and he looked to have a good enough bat to bring solid value from a DH role.

That however, is not what happened last season as Lind went from being a 3.5 WAR player in 2009 to a -.3 WAR player in 2010. His health had nothing to with the drop in production either, Lind played in 150 games last year after playing in 151 in 2009. The drop came entirely from his bat as his batting runs above average fell by 40 runs, from 35.9 to -5.9. Moving almost exclusively to DH actually helped his fWAR in 2010. His fielding and positional adjustment cost him 22.4 runs in 2009 but only 17.2 runs last year.

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