The Musings Marcels projections provide a way to predict league leaders in various categories for 2024.

The Marcels show only three batters reaching a .300 BA for the next season. Luis Arraez comes in at .322, Freddy Freeman at .307, and Ronald Acuna at .303. Bo Bichette tops the AL with a .299 mark.

No surprise that Juan Soto tops the OBP column at .415, the only hitter projected at .400 or better. A number of batters group together in the high .380’s, including Freeman, Aaron Judge, Ronald Acuna, and Bryce Harper.

The Slugging column belongs to Judge at .585, with Shohei Ohtani second at .563, although how much playing time Ohtani gets in 2024 is anyone’s guess. Yordan Alvarez at .556 is a more likely second pick, with Matt Olson looking like the best in the NL at .530.

Freeman edges out Arraez 170 to 167 in total hits, with the top five hit leaders all coming from NL teams.

Kyle Schwarber looks to be in line for another league HR total with 39 projected dingers. Matt Olson comes in second at 37, Judge at 36, Pete Alsonso at 35, and Ohtani at 34.

It looks like Los Angeles will be double city as Freeman with 39 and Mookie Betts with 34 top the list. Betts is tied with his former teammate Rafael Devers. Devers looks to lead the AL in the category, with Jose Ramirez right behind him at 33.

Triples belong to the Young as Corbin Carroll and Bobby Witt Jr. project to seven each. Witt plays in a great triples park, and it would be nice to see him push 20 triples in a season.

No one comes close to Juan Soto in walks, as he is projected to draw 118 free passes. Kyle Schwarber is next up at 89. Alex Bregman and Adley Rutschman topping the AL with 76 each.

Eugenio Suarez looks like he’ll lead the majors in strikeouts, projecting out to 182. Kyle Schwarber comes in next at 179. Note that among the very high K players, Schwarber is the only one who post overall excellent numbers. A number of them do post good isolated power, but that comes at a cost of low OBPs, as they make a lot of outs.

Musings Marcels player projections for the 2024 season are online. Musings Marcels 2024 cover batter projections, while Musings Marcels Opposition Batting 2024 covers pitchers.

Marcels are a very simple projection system that does very well with very little effort. There are no adjustments for parks, for example, yet they do very well from year to year. Start planning for your 2024 fantasy team now!

The 2023 batting Musings Marcels live here. These are based on Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey projections. The idea is to base projections only on the batter’s last three season, with no adjustments for parks or other variables. It turns out year over year to be as accurate as other forecasting systems. It’s also easy to produce from a simple database of batting stats. Feel free to copy the spreadsheet for the 2023 fantasy drafting needs.

The Marcels also provide a look into how the 2023 season may shake out. For example, the batting races look like they would be won by Luis Arraez and Trea Turner, depending on which league Turner joins. Freddie Freeman is the only other batter expected to hit .300.

As far as getting on base, Juan Soto projects to lead the majors by a mile with a .426 mark. Freeman takes second at .390, with Aaron Judge right behind at .386. Depending on where Judge signs, that might lead the AL.

Judge comes out on top in Slugging Percentage at .583, with Mike Trout behind him at .560. The sure National leaguer at the top would be Bryce Harper at .524. Note that Shohei Ohtani ranks seventh at .519. We’ll see if the Angels for once can build a team around those two stars.

As far as the counting stats, Judge projects to once again lead the majors by a wide margin, 43 home runs to 35 by Kyle Schwarber. My favorite category, doubles projects to be a tie between J.D. Martinez and Ketel Marte at 36. Finishing out the long hits, Ahmed Rosario projects to lead the majors in triples with six, with six other players projecting to five.

As far as getting on base, Trea Turner projects to lead the majors with 172 hits, with Bo Bichette right behind him at 169. For walks, the Marcels predict 118 for Soto, with Judge a distant second with 80. Mark Canha tops the Hit By Pitch list with 22, Ty France and Anthony Rizzo second at 19.

Patrick Wisdom projects to 170 K, the most in the majors, with Eugenio Suarez right behind at 168. Arraez project to striking out 11% of the time, the lowest in the majors. Others projecting to low K rates are Stephen Kwan, Wander Franco, and Alejandro Kirk. These are young players to watch as they could take a run at a batting title.

The Marcels also give you a good way to compare free agents. There are a number shortstops available this off-season. Here are their projected slash lines:

• Trea Turner – .304/.354/.493
• Carlos Correa – .278/.356/.456
• Xander Bogaerts – .291/.362/.462
• Dansby Swanson – .264/.325/.445

Good luck with your fantasy teams next season, and I hope these help.

With the end of the 2020, this blog presents Musings Marcels, Tom Tango’s simple but effective predictors for the upcoming season. There are two spreadsheets, Marcels for Batters and Marcels for Pitchers, which models the opposition batters. Feel free to download for your fantasy drafts, and feel free to share with your friends.

The numbers reflect batting and pitcher over a 162 game season. To get a decent estimate of plate appearances, I multiplied 2020 PA by 2.7 (162/60). The numbers look reasonable to me, but I’d love to hear your opinion.

You can find Tango’s original work here.

I added a sheet called ShortSeason to both the Musings Marcels 2020 spreadsheet and the Musings Marcles Opposition Batting 2020 spreadsheet. The new sheet pulls data from the original sheet, and multiplies the counting stats by 60/162. If you desire to sort the ShortSeason sheet, sort the main sheet, and the sort will be reflected on the short season version.

Basically, the rates are all the same, the counting stats have been compressed.

I missed this earlier this year, but Musings Marcels held their own against other, more complicated prediction systems. I found this paragraph most interesting, however:

Averaging the projections might be a great idea. The “Average” row in the above table is exactly what you would expect: the accuracy of the average of all four systems. It beats all four systems in four of the five categories, and fell short of only Steamer in the fifth. One would expect that an average would rarely be egregiously wrong; it’s surprising to see that the average also tended to be closer to right than each individual projection. This could be a quirk of a single season of projections, but at the very least, it seems to say that the brute-force method of resolving differences between the projection systems is credible.

I worked for a few years in information retrieval. What was becoming clear at that time was the aggregation of multiple search engine results did better than any one individual search engine. The weaknesses tended to wash out, so I’m not at all surprised that an average of the four projection systems does better than any one individually. I suspect this will work for WAR as well. Take three different versions of WAR, average them together, and you probably get a more accurate view of a player’s value that any with any single WAR measure.

The fantasy season fast approaches, and yesterday a friend wrote:

Last year you sent me an excel spreadsheet of the projected stats for the hitters in MLB. Thanks in part to my drafts, I had one of the most successful fantasy baseball seasons ever. Any chance you could do a repeat performance?

They have been out for a while, but you can download the Musings Marcels here.

I just added OPB and slugging percentage columns to the Musings Marcels 2013 batting spreadsheet.