Nate Silver, the Pecota Guru from Baseball Prospectus did a pre-season 2007 projection for Josh Hamilton.
The trouble is that PECOTA uses data from the past three seasons (2004, 2005, and 2006). And Hamilton hasn’t played baseball in the past three seasons. Well, that isn’t quite true: he got a handful of at bats in what amounted to a rehab assignment in the New York-Penn League last year. But that isn’t very much to work with.
So what I did instead was to run a PECOTA based on Hamilton’s last three good years worth of data — 2000, 2001, and 2002. I took the 2004 projection from that retro PECOTA and plugged it in as his actual 2004 stats. And I left 2005 and 2006 blank, to indicate that Hamilton has missed a ton of development time.
| BA | OBP | SLG | HR | R | BI | Josh Hamilton |
| .266 | .365 | .609 | 6 | 12 | 13 | April 2007 |
| .254 | .306 | .409 | 10 | 38 | 39 | Pecota for 2007 |
To give Nate Silver some slack, projections depend heavily on how much playing time a player is to recieve. His projection is based on just over 300 plate appearances which is in the range of a part time player. Hamilton has forced his way into everyday play. If Josh continues on his current pace, you are talking about Rookie of Year Numbers.
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