2011 Community Projections Review: Josh Hamilton

Josh Hamilton blew our minds in 2010.  He won the AL MVP and his 180 wRC+ was the best single season offensive performance in Texas Rangers history.  His slash line was staggering as a .359 / .411 / .633 for a 1.044 OPS in 571 PA.  The only complaint was that it was a second year in a row missing significant time with an injury.

The projections expected a very strong offensive performance, but close to what mere mortals are capable of with a .955 OPS and acknowledging Hamilton's fragility with only 588.6 PA.

Within the first two weeks of the season another saw 2011 as the third season in a row Hamilton suffered a significant injury, limiting his PA to 538.  Offensively Josh was solid with an .882 OPS, well below LSB's projected .955 and much closer to Josh's 2008 where he had a .901 OPS in a good, but not great, year.

Both ZiPS and Marcel were extremely close to projecting the type of year Josh would have, not having the bias of seeing Roy Hobbs come to life and accounting for the sharp spike in performance compared to Josh's previous years.  Something to bear in mind next year when projecting Mike Napoli.

Using a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) approach [lower is better] the top and bottom individual projections have LiamP at the top of the projections and James Welch at the bottom.  Liam's 0.87% RMSE was the best non crowd sourced projection of 2011... and given his anti-jinxing methods: bad news.

Everyone's rankings can be found in this Google Spreadsheet and the top and bottom 5 shake out as: