by Daniel Gettinger

At The Book Blog, Tango has organized a project that uses the “wisdom of the crowds” approach to project playing timefor players across the league.  He lists the 40-man rosters provided on mlb.com, and asks fans to guess how many innings each player will play/pitch. 

Oddly, Padres fans have “not been able to nominate enough innings for their pitchers,” and Tango is stumped.  With only 1197 innings projected for the entire staff, the Padres would be unable to finish an entire 162 game season (1458 innings if the team pitches 9 innings in every game).

Personally, I am not too surprised.  After Peavy and Young, there is extreme uncertainty regarding who will pitch for the team in ‘09.  Most of the pitchers on the 40-man roster either have little major league experience, or have not had much success in the majors.  Sabermetrically inclined fans have learned not to expect much from these type of players, as most of them will not pan out.  Therefore, when projecting innings pitched from individuals such as Shawn Hill, Wade Leblanc, Kevin Correia, and company, The Book Blog readers are likely to error on the low side (especially since the depth chart is so fluid) even if they know the Padres as a team will have to allocate a full season of innings.

A second issue is the ommission of Walter Silva.  As it stands, Silva is expected to earn a spot in the starting rotation.  Of course, even if you are quite optimistic about Silva, the total innings pitched for the team still falls short.

Another possible explanation is small sample size.  Perhaps Padres fans have not filled out enough projections to have meaningful data.  This is where you all come in.  If you have a few minutes, head over to the Padres section of the survey, and provide your projections.