FanPost

Contest - predict the Red Sox' first half OPS's

Last year at this time I launched a contest on these pages - predict the first-half OPS's of the probable Red Sox position players. It was fun and easy to do, so I figure, let's do it again!

As last year, there are no prizes, other than the respect and admiration of your peers. I will post the results at the midpoint of the season and declare a winner.

Don't worry about whether a certain player will get any plate appearances or not. Results will be weighted by each player's number of major league plate appearances over the first half. Players who don't play on the major league team won't factor into your score.

What do you think the major league OPS's of these Red Sox players will be through the first 81 games of the season? (Barring cancellations, that will be all games from March 29 through June 27; 39 home games and 42 road games.) Players are listed here in order of expected number of plate appearances, with the most on top. If this becomes the actual order after 81 games, that means the players at the top will have the highest impact on your score, and the players at the bottom will have the least impact on your score (or zero if they don't have a plate appearance). We'll only be counting their OPS in games played for the Red Sox - if one of these players changes teams, their plate appearances for the new team won't factor in.

Mookie Betts
Andrew Benintendi
Xander Bogaerts
J.D. Martinez
Rafael Devers
Jackie Bradley Jr.
Mitch Moreland
Hanley Ramirez
Eduardo Nunez
Christian Vazquez
Dustin Pedroia
Sandy Leon
Blake Swihart
Brock Holt
Marco Hernandez
Sam Travis
Tzu-Wei Lin
Rusney Castillo

To enter, just add a comment to this post containing the above list of players, with your predicted first-half major-league OPS for each player to the right of the player's name.

There was a little confusion about how to properly submit an entry, so here's an example using the current ATC projections. Last year the projection systems all did better than the best of us humans, so we might all do well to use these numbers as a reference. ATC is a Nate Silver-esqe intelligent amalgam of other projection systems, so it seemed like a good choice to put here, but other projection systems can give numbers quite different from these.

Mookie Betts .861
Andrew Benintendi .820
Xander Bogaerts .781
J.D. Martinez .963
Rafael Devers .816
Jackie Bradley Jr. .777
Mitch Moreland .764
Hanley Ramirez .785
Eduardo Nunez .774
Christian Vazquez .701
Dustin Pedroia .773
Sandy Leon .675
Blake Swihart .622
Brock Holt .661
Marco Hernandez .694
Sam Travis .710
Tzu-Wei Lin .670
Rusney Castillo .711

Entries should be posted as comments to this article before the first pitch of the first game of the Red Sox season. Because you wouldn't want to miss out on the big big prizes just because you missed the entry deadline ...