2006 in Review- Freddy Sanchez

Now that 2006 is over, I'll be looking at one or two Pirates and their 2006 season each day. I'll look at what we expected, what we got, and what that might mean for the future. I may or may not assign a meaningless grade to their performance. Today: Freddy Sanchez.

2005 key stats: .291/.336/.400 with 26 doubles, 5 HR, and 35 RBI
2006 PECOTA: .276/.333/.380 with 25 doubles, 5 HR, and 45 RBI
2006 key stats: .344/.387/.473 with 53 doubles, 6 HR, and 85 RBI

Sweet Jesus, this is why we don't put all our eggs in the "computer projection basket." There's very little I can say about Freddy's season that I haven't said before, so let's take a different look at things. In his Q&A today, Dejan says this about Freddy:

Player who performed above and beyond: Freddy Sanchez, the monarch for life of the told-you-so crowd, but we are all liars if we say we thought he would be this good.

I don't disagree with that statement for all (especially since I lead the "told-you-so crowd" on most days of the week), so instead let's ask ourselves this: No one expected this kind of season from Freddy, but should we have?

We can start with the end of last season. From the end of August on (about the point when settled in as an every day player) Freddy went .300/.347/.436. That's pretty damn good over a not insignificant amount of time. It puts his OPS at .783, which was almost certainly better than what Joe Randa would've given us. It's also true that Jack Wilson batted .306 and had an OPS of .746 over the same timespan which would indicate that it's certainly not a big enough sample size. But then again, we knew that about Jack Wilson at the time. What did we know about Freddy? Not much. He'd only played one year in the minors with us and was coming back from a foot injury the whole time, not giving us much to judge a guy on. If we look back to the last time he was healthy in AAA (with the PawSox in 2003), he put up a line of .341/.430/.493 in 58 games. The year before that he went for .328/.403/.437 in 80 games at AA Trenton and and .301/.350/.432 in 45 games at Pawtuckett.

So, back to the question at hand, could we have seen this coming? The answer is still probably no. Unless you count 58 games at AAA, no one could've seen a batting title and an .860 OPS coming. But a .320 batting average and an .800 OPS wasn't an unreasonable expectation, and I think it's still more than almost any Pirate fan looked for from him (I can't find a preseason projection for Freddy on this site, it's entirely possible I may have been lazy and stuck to the pre-season starters, Charlie didn't do a community projection for him either as far as I can tell, though he mentions preseason expectations of Sanchez here). While a repeat of 2006 is almost certainly out of the question for Sanchez, I don't think a .320/.360/.430 line is either, and I certainly wouldn't have a problem with something like that.

Stats from the Baseball Musings Day by Day Database, Yahoo! Sports, The Baseball Cube, and my trusty copy of Baseball Prospectus 2006.