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PECOTA Loves Wieters

At least relative to the rest of the league. On the WARP leaderboard, after Albert Pujols and Hanley Ramirez  comes Matt Wieters, projected at 7.9 WARP. If I were an oddsmaker, I would put that one at "highly unlikely". Here's why:

I'm a fan of Wieters. He's awesome. Perhaps the best prospect in baseball in years and he's almost certainly bound for stardom and glory, but being worth ~8 wins above replacement is extremely difficult. This year only Albert Pujols, Chase Utley, Chipper Jones, and Hanley Ramirez came within a half win of 8.

Even if you assume Wieters will get 20 replacement value runs, 22 positional, and 10 defensive, you still need him to be worth 27 offensive runs to equal 79 runs above replacement. Wieters hit worth ~28 offensive runs in Double-A and ~26 in High-A, so he's done it before, but assuming he spends minimal time in Triple-A and then leaps right into fulltime major league duty in the American League East, should we really expect him to be the best offensive catcher next year?

This is not a PECOTA-only problem, and frankly I still wonder if WARP's replacement level baseline still isn't a bit too low, but this is one of the more the most glaring cases of a projection system overestimating a player. And to think, this is simply the weighted mean.