BCB Community Projections: Catchers

I am back like I forgot something, here to guide you through the community projections for the second consecutive year. Things will be a bit more relaxed this year, there is no major Beyond the Boxscore WAR project as the background for the projections. I'll still try to find out what the team projected win total looks like when we're all done, and we will take a shot at projecting playing time as a percentage, to get a pretty accurate picture of what the team looks like going into the year. It's not just a projection, it's a talent evaluation, because it is the best guess as to how good each player actually is. 

So today we start with the catchers. The backup spot is a big mess right now. George Kotorras and Matt Treanor will look to win the backup spot, and Angel Salome and Jonathan Lucroy are also in the mix. There's no telling if the Brewers would send Lucroy back to AA, or demote Salome to that level, or have them split time at AAA, or have one of them serve as the backup catcher in the majors, or trade one of them. So with that in mind I think we will keep this one basic and just have everyone project a line for GREGG ZAUN, and his percentage of the share of total playing time at catcher. That amounts to about 620 total plate appearances for the catchers. 

So here's your critical information about Zaun. He's a 39 year-old catcher. ZiPS has him at .243/.345/.373, and CHONE projects him for .230/.332/.368. A player with Zaun's track record is not going to have a whole lot of volatility in his projection, so we're starting out with a boring one. But hopefully we can get plenty of input and create an accurate picture of what the BCB community thinks he will contribute in 2010. 

I have a new toy to play with this year for these projections, it's called Google Forms and it's a part of Google Docs. Just go to this nifty little form linked right here and answer the four questions. I can even edit the background style. It's not difficult, just type in your projections for the three rate stats as a decimal to three places and the percent of playing time at catcher. All of that information is gathered in a spreadsheet, which is nice because then I do not have to spend several hours copying all of the projections into a spreadsheet by hand.

The comment threads on these projection posts can still be an area for discussion on the projections, and you can certainly post your projection in there if you would like to do so. As always, I'll be around to answer questions left there as well.

**Finally, as far as I can tell, there is not a way to limit the amount of entries per person. So unless you can achieve personal gain from skewing the data by entering your projections multiple times, I ask for one entry per person, please.