CRAP: Collegiate Regression Analysis Projection (2016 Draft)

Live look at how CRAP data is processed.

Baseball is a game for the math obsessed whether you ponder on runs batted in or the spin rate of a slider.  In the past decade, the number of data points have exploded in the public forum.  That data are almost exclusively recorded from Major League Baseball games.  That has trickled slightly down to the Minor League sphere.  Amateur baseball though has simply raised itself up to where we were a couple decades ago with MLB.  We know the basic counting statistics.

Projecting performance with high resolution data can be troublesome.  Replace that with the low resolution collegiate data, the process becomes more problematic.  Combine that with twenty year old players whose distance between their current package and their final one can be rather vast, you have a difficult task in front of you.  This led me to experiment with minimal expectations to try to see if we can glean anything of use from a projection model for collegiate players.  The resulting model is named Collegiate Regression Analysis Projection (CRAP).

CRAP is a rather limited model with great uncertainty.  I used player, park, and team data from collegiate seasons 2012-2014 and paired it with professional data from 2013-2015.  Professional data was further translated so that everything was measured to the league average of the Carolina League (High A ball).  That is all this model knows.  It knows players who were drafted, signed, and played in a professional league the year after their career ended.  It does not know what happens beyond the following season.  All it knows is the current year and the next, trying to connect all of those performance data points for each individual player.

Some limitations include never considering players who were unable to play professionally for whatever reason.  There is also some limitation on conference data.  This system leans heavily on the ACC, Pac10, SEC, and the Big 12 or whatever they call themselves this minute.  I also have no knowledge of any player's defensive ability.  The model assumes they perform as an average defender at those positions.  Finally, there is no consideration of how a player performs with a wood bat.  I did a secondary adjustment for performance at the Cape and for Team USA.  That adjustment is a bit weak as we are getting pretty far down the rabbit hole from the original data.

Anyway, here is the collegiate position player board, which considered players in Baseball America's top 100 from a few weeks back (it has changed a bit).  If you want a player not mentioned here, let me know and I will try to post an addendum.

CRAP 2016 Draft Board (College Position Players)
Avg/OBP/Slg are 2017 HiA Projections
20-80 scale is unadjusted for wood
20-80+ is adjusted for wood

PLAYER	POS	AVG	OBP	SLG	20-80	20-80+
Kyle Lewis	OF	.290	.424	.473	61	69
Will Craig	3B	.291	.413	.483	63	59
Zack Collins	C	.294	.446	.467	69	59
Heath Quinn	OF	.278	.376	.459	51	58
Sean Murphy	C	.273	.378	.414	51	54
Matt Thaiss	C	.295	.392	.428	54	54
Nick Senzel	3B	.281	.374	.421	47	53
Corey Ray	OF	.276	.360	.425	46	51
Chris Okey	C	.270	.368	.419	51	48
Bryan Reynolds	OF	.268	.369	.429	48	45
Anfernee Grier	OF	.265	.349	.403	41	39
Nick Banks	OF	.255	.324	.391	35	35
Jake Fraley	OF	.261	.349	.367	34	33
Ryan Boldt	OF	.249	.310	.362	29	31
Stephen Wrenn	OF	.246	.314	.361	29	31
Bryson Brigman	SS	.257	.323	.343	30	30
Buddy Reed	OF	.233	.318	.354	31	30
Bobby Dalbec	3B	.214	.292	.346	28	29
Errol Robinson	SS	.245	.309	.339	28	28

Below are the rankings for CRAP and BA's current rankings of college level position players.  I did not include some of the other players who have moved into the top 100 since I scraped the list a few weeks ago.

CRAP 

 

Ranking	BA
Kyle Lewis	1	1
Will Craig	2	8
Zack Collins	3	4
Heath Quinn	4	9
Sean Murphy	5	12
Matt Thaiss	6	5
Nick Senzel	7	2
Corey Ray	8	3
Chris Okey	9	11
Bryan Reynolds	10	6
Anfernee Grier	11	10
Nick Banks	12	16
Jake Fraley	13	13
Ryan Boldt	14	14
Stephen Wrenn	15	19
Bryson Brigman	16	15
Buddy Reed	17	7
Bobby Dalbec	18	17
Errol Robinson	19	18

As it stands, the Orioles are largely connected with Buddy Reed who stands high on the Baseball America rankings, but who is highly suspect on the CRAP rankings.