The $40 Million Man Vs. That Slugger From The World Series Champions

For this prop I looked at three things. The Poisson distribution for Ryan Zimmerman and Chase Utley based on their total bases from each game played this season and last season, their actual proportion of games with 'N' total bases from those seasons, and a Poisson distribution based on their career statistics against the opposing pitcher. Those results can be seen in the clickable image below.

The first two graphs show that neither player is much more likely to record a small number of total bases, and that Utley has around a 1 in 20 chance of having a big game with 5 total bases. Zimmerman really has no chance of recording 5 or more total bases. Interestingly, Zimmerman had a double, or two singles, in just over a quarter of his games in the past two seasons. Utley is a good home run hitter, however, with 4 total bases in over 10% of his games. The stats that make me lean towards Zimmerman are the batter vs. pitcher stats. For the third graph I looked at each players' slugging average against the opposing pitcher and multiplied that by 4, as 4 is a high estimate on the average number of at bats per game. This 'average' was used to generate the Poisson distributions. In these one can see that Zimmerman is more likely to hit big off of Myers than Utley is off of Olsen. One home run by either player should wrap it up, so I choose Zimmerman with strong reservations. Good luck!