One of the biggest questions in any fantasy league is always: how will a player fare with his new team? Will he flounder, a-la Jason Bay with the Mets, up his value like Josh Hamilton with the Rangers, or simply have equal value to the year before? Answering those questions can be the key to winning any league, and is especially important in AL or NL only formats. 

Let’s take a look at the cross-over players to the American League this season, starting this week with the biggest name of them all: Albert Pujols.

Another thing to take away from this table is that the Angels’ park factor was significantly swayed by their incredible defense, which weighed in as the 2nd best defense in all of baseball last year – only behind that of the Tampa Bay Rays. This is all extremely in favor of Albert Pujols, as it seems that after accounting for team defense, the Angels stadium may actually be a much better place to hit than those numbers show, and Busch Stadium may be much worse.

Lastly, let’s compare Pujols’ 2011 season to his outlook for 2012. People seem to gloss over the fact that Albert Pujols was supposed to miss 4-6 weeks last year due to a non-displaced fracture of the left radius bone and his arm, but he came back in 2 weeks and managed to play in 147 games last season. It is a true testament to his skill that a feat that incredible isn’t talked about continually when he’s mentioned. Despite his injury, Pujols managed a .299 average and 37 homers.

On my site RotoAnalysis.com, one of my colleagues, Charles Kurz, and myself created leader boards for a formula for Expected Batting Average on Balls in Play called xBABIP (developed by Fangraphs’ Jeff Zimmerman) and sorted through it for trends, which will go up on the site later this week. One of the most prevalent trends that we found was a correlation between Home Run per Fly Ball rate, and players outperforming their Expected Batting Average on Balls in Play. Well, this relates to Albert Pujols for a few reasons, not the least of which is that he put up a normal BABIP of 34 points below his career average and 19 points below his previous career low. So, even on a basic level, Pujols got extremely unlucky with his BABIP, and transitively his batting average.

However, when that is combined with the fact that his xBABIP was about 11 points higher than his actual BABIP (meaning he should have hit about 11 points higher in an average year), and the trend that players with high HR/FB rates consistently outperform their expected BABIP (Pujols was 19th in MLB in HR/FB among players over 300 Plate Appearances) then we can expect extreme upwards batting average regression for Albert to the tune of likely upwards of twenty points this season, meaning I’d project him for at least a .315-320 average.

Overall, the degree to which the Angels have a pitching park has been overstated, the degree to which the Cardinals have a hitters park has been vastly understated, and Albert Pujols’ combination of bad luck and playing through injury has been preposterously understated.