Yesterday, we talked about Nelson Cruz and how his frankly bizarre late-career surge makes him especially hard to project. If the historical similarity scores bring a bunch of players with only slight resemblance to what Cruz’s career arc looks like, you’re not going to be all that confident in the result. This is a very different spin on the Ichiro problem – that PECOTA never knew what to DO with Ichiro, because his historical comps were all dead-ball era players. That’s just going to happen with every player at some tail end of the distribution.
Franklin Gutierrez, though… We’re not even looking at a distribution.