[A Brief Prologue Of Sorts]
A little while ago my pickup basketball game started tracking players’ win/loss records. We finally had hard numbers about our performances. But I stare at the spreadsheet that gets sent around and no story emerges out of it. Some of the best players in our game have losing records, and I’m sure it’s not that they’re stealthily bad.
We pick teams via a secret draft conducted by two roughly equal team captains. The better a player is, the higher they’ll get drafted, and the better they’ll have to play to justify that pick. So improving as a player—as I’m pretty sure I have—doesn’t really improve one’s record. My record just stays around .500, nothing particularly inspiring or despairing about it. The only way to improve my record would be to constantly improve faster than people can notice, so that my performance is constantly ahead of expectations. That feels unsustainable.
[The Main Body]
Every year Baseball Prospectus puts out projections (“PECOTAs”) for every baseball player. “Projection” is another word for “expectations.”
It’s not hard for a baseball player to outperform expectations for a year. If the projections are calibrated right, about half or all players will do so. (And half will be worse.) But outperforming expectations over and over and over and over again is much harder, because beating your expectations one year increases your expectations for the next.
So in 2017, Aaron Judge outperformed his expectations by 5.1 wins above replacement (which is called WARP at Baseball Prospectus). That is, I believe, the second-largest outperformance by any hitter in any season since then, behind Shohei Ohtani’s 2021. Judge’s staggering leap forward as a ballplayer that year was real and persistent. In the six years since then, his OPS+ and WAR-per-game-played have been almost exactly what they were in 2017. But expectations went up, too—such that he has underperformed his PECOTA projections four of the six seasons since. Such that when he can’t keep improving his career bests and single-handedly lead the Yankees to the playoffs, it qualifies as a test of his character.
But can anybody do it? Can anybody beat expectations year after year, indefinitely?
I looked at every hitter’s performance against projections in each season since 2017. If a hitter produced more WARP than the projection—even a hair more—I counted it as defying expectations. There are three repeat outperformers worth mentioning, and a fourth worth putting a picture in this article for.
Miguel Rojas, the Dodgers shortstop, has out-WARPED his PECOTA projection in each of the past seven seasons, the only hitter who has done that.
Dansby Swanson, the Cubs shortstop, has out-WARPED his PECOTA projection in each of the past six seasons.
Sean Murphy, the Braves catcher, has out-WARPED his PECOTA projection in each of the past five seasons.
There are a few others who have done what Murphy and Swanson have done, but these three are strong examples of particular types of persistent overperformance:
[Bullet Point] Rojas was a fringe big leaguer when the window for our query opened, and he’s never risen much above that: A glove-first shortstop who can’t hit very well beyond the smallest samples. As his 2022 Baseball Annual comment read, Rojas “gives you exactly what you expect.” But that’s really a trick of perception. He actually gives you about 20 percent more than you expect, either with the occasional batting average spike or with some late-career defensive improvements, both of which enable him to exceed playing time estimates and outperform his WARPs even in down years. He has never, at any point, been projected to be an average (2.0+) WARP player, and yet in those seven seasons he has been almost exactly average every year, and is now a genuinely elite defender. “It’s probably fair to say that he’s reached the end of the line as a starting shortstop,” Rojas’ 2023 BP Annual comment read, and yet here he is at the end of the season, one of this worst hitters in baseball but still the starting shortstop for a 100-or-so-win club. Not what you expect!
[Bullet Point] But Rojas is no star. Dansby Swanson more closely fits the slow-burn-to-stardom trajectory. After a disastrous 2017 that could have knocked his career entirely off track, Swanson improved his power each of the next three years. Around the time he finally plateaued as a power hitter, he made dramatic defensive improvements, which made him one of the two or three best defensive shortstop in the game over the past two years. (For good measure, last year was also his best baserunning year.) For most of the past seven seasons, PECOTA has projected Swanson to be around the 150th or 200th best position player in the game. This year, he finally upended those limited expectations; he was projected to be the 57th best position player. Next year, he’ll be higher still. And over the past six seasons, only two hitters—Shohei Ohtani and Ronald Acuña—have outperformed their projections more (by total WARP) than Swanson.
[Bullet Point] But if Swanson was a slow burn, then Sean Murphy’s straight-line-up trajectory has been even less ambiguous. Murphy’s five seasons, in one phrase apiece:
September call-up showed immediate power in a brief look
Power-hitting rookie drew tons of walks in his first season as everyday player
Power-hitting walk-drawer became the best defensive catcher in majors
Power-hitting walk-drawing elite-defensive catcher cut way down on strikeouts
Power-hitting walk-drawing elite-defensive contact-hitting catcher added 2 mph to his average exit velocity
His WARP this year will likely drop slightly from last year, but only because he plays fewer games for the stacked Braves than he did last year for the sad A’s. (By Baseball-Reference’s WAR model, he has set a new WAR career high each season of his career.)
But the answer that most appeals to me here is actually Freddie Freeman,
who outperformed his PECOTA projections every year from 2017 through 2022, and who is arguably having his best year this year. At least, it’s his best year by Baseball-Reference’s WAR, and by FanGraphs’ WAR, and if we exclude the shortened COVID season it’s his best season by comprehensive offensive stats wOBA and OPS+ and wRC+.
Alas, he won’t join Miguel Rojas in the seven-times-defying-PECOTA club, because a) PECOTA had very high expectations for him this year and b) Baseball Prospectus’ WAR model isn’t as impressed by Freeman’s offense this year as the other WAR models are. His 2023 WARP will likely fall juuuuuuuust short of his projections, barring a massive weekend series against the Giants. But most people won’t see it that way. Most people will remember this as one of Freeman’s best years, and might consider it one of baseball’s amazing achievements that Freeman is still improving at age 34.
That Freeman has outperformed expectations throughout our window is way more impressive to me than Murphy and Swanson and Rojas doing so. Those players started with low expectations. Rojas wasn’t much of a player; Swanson had thus far failed at the major league level; Murphy was still in the minors. But in spring 2017, Freeman was already a star. He was already projected to be the 33rd-best player in baseball. He wasn’t young (he was 27) and nobody thought he was still finding himself—he had six full seasons in the league and two top-10 MVP finishes.
Indeed, and here’s maybe the most incredible part: Freddie Freeman had already outperformed his projections in, arguably, all six previous seasons in his career.
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