In the spirit of projection season, I punched in the Brewers CHONE projections into Sky Kalkman's user-friendly WAR spreadsheet to see the results. We already have a nice Brewer spreadsheet with the 2009 Marcel projections (here, by jhmoore), but another one can't hurt-- and I wanted to expirement a little.

My spreadsheet uses the CHONE projections for wOBA and ERA for each player. Baserunning is factored into Fangraphs wOBA, so I left that column blank. For defense, I used a player's career UZR/150, plus a little common sense-- factoring in age, potential for improvement, etc. So, for example, Cameron's fielding wins is .6, it's .7 career and was about 1.0 last year. In general, I tended to lean toward average. For the catchers, there aren't any metrics I trust, so I just gave Kendall +.5 and Rivera -.5.

Innings pitched and PAs are mostly my judgements. I kicked Gallardo and Parra up to 175 and 170 innings, put DBush at 190, and Suppan at 175, which he threw last year. I'm not going to give 160 innings to Chris Capuano here, so I allocated 50 for him. CHONE projected him for a 4.20 ERA and his Marcel is 4.50, but neither know he's recovering from a second ligament surgery. I bumped it up to 4.80, which seems pretty accurate to me if he's healthy enough to pitch in the bigs.

For the 3B platoon, I used 250 PAs of Hall with a .350 wOBA, which is about his career vLHP, and credited Lamb with a pretty baaaa-d .330 wOBA vRHP in 400 PAs. Hall is listed again as a shortstop, with a .290 wOBA. This assumes that no shortstop is added and Hall plays at 3rd vLHP with an occasional game vRHP at short. If a replacement level SS is added, or McGehee is on the roster, the prodcution should be about the same, as that line from Hall is exactly replacement level.

The bullpen is difficult to project. The names at the end are pretty much interchangeable without having much effect on the overall win projection, so don't worry too much about the individual guys. I did kick up Julio's projection-- CHONE has him at a 3.99 ERA, I put him at 4.4. I also pushed up Dave Bush to 4.4, I personally don't think his 4.18 last year is sustainable, and CHONE apparently does.

Finally, at the top, there are 3 extra tabs. The first shows the effect of adding Sheets if he's able to throw 160 innings at his CHONE-projected 3.8 ERA. This slides McClung into the bullpen, which helps there as well. The second shows what would happen if Sheets were to have a season similar to 2008, with another 200 innings but a slightly higher 3.5 ERA. Finally, the last tab shows the impact of a Braden Looper type pitcher with 180 innings and a 4.6 ERA.

You'll notice the win total projections seem high, but you have to realize that projecting Parra and Gallardo for 170+ innings is quite optimistic, and CHONE expects all the major hitters to rebound quite nicely. It also assumes no injuries whatsoever, so any pitcher or hitter going down would lower the projection substantially. To illustrate this, if you made a spreadsheet for every team, the league average would be above .500, which obviously isn't the case. However, CHONE seems to like us and the chances of putting a respectable team on the field this year. So don't go saying that I think the Brewers will win 89 games; I'd predict closer to 86 right now, but there's plenty of room for optimism in 2009.

Thanks to Sky Kalkman for the template, once again.

If you see anything wrong in the spreadsheet, or think one of the wOBA, ERA, PA, IP, or LI projections are off, let me know and I'll revise this thing.