BATTERS: Big seasons in 2011

Last month, the Batting Buyers Guide examined hitters who had very poor seasons in 2011, looking at which of them might be most likely to “regress to the mean” of their weighted average performance from 2008-10.

This exercise lets us apply Ron Shandler’s “Extreme Regression Drafting” team-construction approach, which says to find players who significantly over- or underperformed their historical norms in Year X, and expect them to regress to those norms in Year X+1. So we grab underperformers who look set to regress upwards, and avoid overperformers set to regress downwards.

As with last time, we started by finding the batters whose 2011 seasons varied sharply from their norms, this time by doing far better than their norms...

Almost!

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