2013 Community Projections: A fitting farewell from Jacoby Ellsbury

Jacoby Ellsbury is a Red Sox no more, but he left on a pretty great note. One of the biggest contributors to Boston's turnaround 2013 season, Ellsbury ended his Red Sox career the same way he started it: by winning the World Series.

It's impossible to complain about Ellsbury's season. Coming in at 5.8 WAR--by the valuations of both Fangraphs and Baseball Reference--the speedy centerfielder was one of the American League's most valuable position players. That being said, a quick look back at our projections shows it was possible to dream bigger.

Particularly when it comes to RBI and power, we missed big time. There was still some hope that Ellsbury would show up in all his 2011 glory, leading to an average guess of 18 homers and a .466 slugging percentage. Perhaps as a result of that, our RBI guesses came in, on average, at 77.

I expect some of that had to do with hope. After 2012, even knowing the Red Sox were, as a whole, in a much better place, we still needed to believe that 2013 was really in play for Boston. Obviously, that ended up being the case even without a monster year from Ellsbury, but at the time the return of his MVP-like form was an easier path to see.

For all that, though, in the land of batting average and OBP things went quite a bit better. So much better that the average guesses were .297 (off by one point!) and .359 (off by four). In that, at least, the group had Ellsbury pegged.

Our winner for the day has to be Soxdude7 with his two exact hits and one near-miss, but close behind him are Jviveney and Sologub, who came close on all three parts of the triple slash--frankly a better indication of in-season production than the other figures.

Congratulations, Soxdude7. For your prize: I will not poke fun at your username.

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