2013 Preseason Prediction #4 – Victor Martinez

It's hard to tell exactly what to expect from Victor Martinez this year. He's got two things against him, #1 he missed all of last season due to an ACL injury and #2, he's 34 years old and exiting his prime, so it's likely that he'll start to decline, especially after catching for the majority of his career. However, he's going to (hopefully) be restricted to DH duties only this year and he hasn't shown any sort of decline in his stats, so a batting line of something similar to his career average could also be expected.

In Martinez' most recent season (2011), he had a BABIP of .343. This could be attributed to a batting average of .843 on line drives, according tobaseball-reference. This number was at.737 and .725 the previous 2 years, so it's likely that he won't be as lucky on line drives in 2013. When and if this number regresses to about his career average of .316, his overall average will also drop from its .330 mark in 2011.

Tiger fans may also remember that Martinez was very good with runners in scoringposition in 2011, hitting .394/.442/.548. For his career, Martinez has hit .319/.406/.467 with RISP, which (aside from his OBP and thus IBB) isn't much different than his career average of .303/.370/.469. Predicting RBI numbers is a crapshoot, but it's likely that he won't be as good with RISP as he was in 2011 and combined with having Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder knocking a ton of runs ahead of him, Martinez' RBI number will probably be lower than the 103 total of 2011.

Overall, I'm going to be pretty optimistic on Victor Martinez, but it wouldn't surprise me to see him not reach these numbers.

Experts' Predictions/Projections:

	AB	AVG	OBP	SLG	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K
Steamer	442	0.294	0.358	0.456	14	66	2	44	52
Oliver	507	0.288	0.351	0.432	14	69	1	50	59
ZiPS	406	0.286	0.342	0.431	12	64	1	34	47
Bill James	534	0.303	0.369	0.457	16	91	1	54	62
CBS Sports	560	0.305	0.361	0.479	20	99	1	49	59
ESPN	510	0.312	0.358	0.457	14	89	1	40	44
MLB.com	496	0.306	0.361	0.442	10	84	0	-	-
FanGraphs' Fans (19)	530	0.302	0.350	0.449	15	79	1	42	55

Update: 4/1

My Prediction:

	AB	AVG	OBP	SLG	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K
2012 Prediction	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
2012 Actual	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
2013 Prediction	526	0.310	0.360	0.445	12	75	0	43	52

Fantasy Impact: Martinez is an interesting case. In some leagues (like Yahoo) he's catcher-eligible. In others (like ESPN) he's only eligible at UTL. If he's catcher-eligible and you missed out on the elite catchers and it gets to about the 8th-9th round and Martinez is still there, grab him. If he's only UTL-eligible, he's much more boring and I'd wait until about the 20th round.