Notice: Trying to get property 'display_name' of non-object in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/src/generators/schema/article.php on line 52
keyboard_arrow_uptop

We've just rolled out some updates to the player cards:

  • we've updated contemporary player photos and team logos, and we've now got historical player photos courtesy of Dave Davis (for example, have a look at our Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson cards).  Thanks, Dave!
     
  • you'll see a couple of new graphs replacing the old ones on the PECOTA cards.  The graph entitled "Beta Value" is actually WARP by year.  Please let us know if you have any trouble seeing it in your browser, as it is about as different as possible behind the scenes from the old ones.
     
  • you'll find "book" WARP and the other statistics used in Baseball Prospectus 2011 on the cards.  We're continuing to add more of these to the cards and the rest of the site.  We will be using these statistics in the cards and reports going forward.
     
  • you'll see "Standard" and "Recent Performance" tables first on the card.  These have a lot of overlap, but "Standard" doesn't have minor-league lines yet and "Recent Performance" only goes back to 2007.  A few columns are also different.  We're just including both for now so you'll have the most information we can give you, but we'll be combining these into a single table soon.
     
  • Baseball Prospectus' Team Injury Projection expanded line, if available.  You'll see the player's outlook across three different time periods, and days lost to injury per year since 2004.  This feature is available to Premium subscribers only (except for San Francisco Giants player cards–see Freddy Sanchez and Tim Lincecum for examples)
     
  • Baseball Prospectus' Injury History records, if available.  Corey Dawkins' exclusive injury database powers our Team Injury Projection series, and now you'll see everything we know about every player.
     
  • Jeff Euston's Compensation details, if available.  All the information that Cots Baseball Contracts is famous for, expanded, re-formatted, and updated for 2011.
     
  • a new Fantasy section, with Marc Normandin's Fantasy Tier Rating and the latest dollar values for common-format leagues from the Player Forecast Manager.  This feature is available to Premium and Fantasy subscribers only (except for San Francisco Giants player cards–see Mark DeRosa and Jonathan Sanchez for examples)
     
  • a register of updated PFM values as they become available, and the best Scoresheet information available anywhere, including the re-formulated SS/SIM.  This feature is available to Premium and Fantasy subscribers only (except for San Francisco Giants player cards–see Pat Burrell and Barry Zito for examples)
     
  • PECOTA percentiles for hitters and pitchers.  All PECOTA information is available to Premium and Fantasy subscribers only (except for San Francisco Giants player cards–see Aubrey Huff and Cody Ross for examples)

We are working on the following features:

  • 10-year projections will be available this week.
     
  • comparables, Upside, and updated MORP are in process but we do not have an ETA yet.

We're looking forward to releasing additional updates soon, and thank you for your patience.

Thank you for reading

This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.

Subscribe now
You need to be logged in to comment. Login or Subscribe
eliyahu
3/21
Thanks very much for this. For some reason, I cannot see the percentile breakdowns -- have they been made available yet? To be clear, the "breakout" and "improve" likelihoods appear in percentage forms, but I don't see what the 90th percentile performance looks like relative to weighted average, etc.
rawagman
3/21
Concur - looks very good, but the percentile info is not there for me either.
morpheusq
3/21
Ditto
Guancous
3/21
The percentages do not show up on an iPhone for Starlin Castro.
rbross
3/21
thanks for the update. I hate to complain because I know (1) how awesome all this is and (2) how much work you put into it. But this is the third year in a row that the player cards (and for my purposes, upside) are rolled out too late as far as fantasy baseball purposes. I was under the impression that the mistakes that had been made in the past had been corrected and this year would be different. Did something go wrong again that resulted in such a late arrival? Or should we expect upside figures to be released this late every year? Because honestly, if the latter is the case I don't think I will resubscribe for next year. BP offers a lot of other things, but as someone in a 100% keeper league where we only draft prospects, upside is invaluable.
zstine1
3/21
i agree with bob. one of the reasons i suscribe to BP is the upside predictions. i love BP, but i can get fairly comparable 1 year predictions for free elsewhere. i am seriously considering not resuscribing until next if/when the upside update is available before my draft.
tbwhite
3/22
I agree as well. It feels like web site content is delayed because of the book, which I suppose would be because of fear that the web site would cannibalize book sales. Personally, since I always buy the book and subscribe to the web site I would be more than happy to pay up front for a book/web site subscription so that I can see the content ASAP, and then send me the book whenever you get around to it. But the last two years have been ridiculous, PECOTA is perishable guys, it's worth less every day that you don't publish it.
dpease
3/22
Sure, we can go into detail. Please give me a day or two.
markpadden
3/22
Can you also address the inflation of wins projections for pitchers? E.g., why every single Mariners pitcher is projected to have a .500 record or better when the team is projected to be 70-92. Obviously, at this point, there is no way one can trust your pitcher win-loss projections. But I would like to hear why this issue has not been fixed or even so much as acknowledged by BP in the five weeks since it has been pointed out.
HugeShoulderpad
3/21
I don't like the "beta" graph...the warp info is less useful from a fantasy perspective. For me the old graphs showing relative performance in several categories told me a lot more about the players than this combined measure.

The percentiles are not there for me either.
HugeShoulderpad
3/21
I do like the new menu across the top that shows specific information however. Kudos for realizing the cards were starting to get cluttered and making it easier to get just what we want.
morpheusq
3/21
I do like the WARP overview, but it'd be nice to still have the old skills graph somewhere too.
dpease
3/21
sure thing--we'll add more graphs to the card but we wanted to make sure people could see them first.
ndemause
3/21
Percentiles should all be there, under "2011 Forecast" if you scroll way down (or less way down if you click on the "PECOTA Only" tab first).
rawagman
3/21
The breakout/attrition/collapse, etc. rates are there, but not what that means in terms of 10/20/30/....80/90th percentiles for the player projections.
morpheusq
3/21
I have the same thing. I'm using Google Chrome, if that matters at all.
ndemause
3/21
Bizarre, since they show up for me (in Firefox and Safari, anyway - I don't have Chrome installed on this computer). Do you folks not see "2011 Forecast" at all, or is the first item beneath it the breakout/attrition/collapse data?
BenFeldman
3/21
not seeing them in firefox, chrome or safari

I see nothing beneath breakout/att/coll data
granbergt
3/21
Same here.
rawagman
3/21
I also use Chrome. There is no section entitled "2011 Forecast". There is projected playing time (depth chart projection data) and then the "Diagnostics" section.
ndemause
3/21
Okay, this sounds like it's likely a permissions problem, then. Hang tight, everybody, while we scramble the tech team.
dpease
3/21
we're working on this--sorry about that
dpease
3/21
please try again--you should see them now. thanks!
rawagman
3/21
Got it - thanks!
That being out of the way, there's no way that Travis Snider has a 0% breakout rate.
gaphitter75
3/21
Will the old "Splits" graph be added later?
dpease
3/21
we'll have some form of these, yes
nils707
3/21
Looks great!
ScottBehson
3/21
The injury history information is spectacular.
Your presentation of historical and past stats is much improved.
Thanks.
cavebird1
3/21
Apologies for a misplaced comment, but I can't get the direct reply links to work. I am stuck at work with only Explorer and I cannot see the percentile data either. Strange that it would show up on some browsers and not others.
oregontribefan
3/21
For what it's worth, typing in 'Brandon Belt' leads to the player card for Jimmy Rollins.
dpease
3/21
we'll get this fixed.
dpease
3/21
fixed! http://www.baseballprospectus.com/card/card.php?id=BELT19880420A
ccweinmann
3/21
I can see "2011 Projections" but it only includes IP, ERA, WHIP, SV, W, L and WARP for pitchers, and for hitters AVG, HR, R, RBI, SB, tAV, and WARP. No upside, no percentile breakdown, and no other stats like OBP, SLG, etc. The player cards are supposed to contain this information, right?
dpease
3/21
the projections are in a couple of places. the summary is next to a player's photo, and you can see the rest if you scroll down to "Projected Playing Time", which is about halfway down the card.
ccweinmann
3/21
Thanks. "Projected playing time" is actually at the very bottom for me under "fantasy beta", and it doesn't have a lot of the basic info. Why not just extend the "recent performance" table down one row to include a "projected" row? Or replace "standard", which is redundant with "recent performance", with "projected"?

Also, I'm not seeing percentiles. I take it this is being worked on?

dpease
3/21
You should see percentiles now.

We may adjust the placement of different data sets on the card--we know the projections where they are now is a bit of a departure from previous placement.
markpadden
3/21
Yes, injury, compensation and fantasy sections should be at the bottom. 2011 forecasts should be up much higher.
geefsu
3/21
Whoa, what happened to five-year or ten-year value projections? That's why I'm a subscriber. Am I missing something? You used to provide forecasting for WAR & $-value. Am I missing it? Are you still providing it?
Thanks.
dpease
3/21
10-year projections will be available this week.
jessehoffins
3/21
are you dropping the davenport translations?
dpease
3/21
we will have full translations. however, they won't necessarily match what the Davenport Translations, and we don't yet have an ETA. sorry for the inconvenience.
geefsu
3/21
Thanks & sorry; I didn't see that bullet point in the article. Started shooting before before aiming. My bad!
acflynn
3/21
Not relevant, but there's no way to comment elsewhere, and direct messages to BP unanswered:

When is the PECOTA spreadsheet going to be updated????
dpease
3/21
Sorry for the confusion. In the past we have run new projections when we were tinkering with the system or needed to add players. We haven't done either of those things this year--thus the projections haven't changed at all and no new spreadsheet has been generated.

The spreadsheet does not include playing time adjustments from the depth charts--for those, subscribers can generate a CSV from the PFM with any statistics you like. Does that meet your needs?

rawagman
3/21
It would if there was an option to show ALL players.
dpease
3/21
you can set minimum dollars displayed to something very low--i use -99--and that'll show you everyone. I just got 854 players in the csv using that method.
Guancous
3/21
The TAB export moves the file Notepad. This makes it much easier to copy and paste all the data in Excel.
dpease
4/01
Definitely--sorry, that's what the TAB and CSV buttons are for. I should have mentioned them earlier.
o2bnited
3/21
You can download the entirety of the PFM dataset from the landing page with the buttons at the top--no need to include or exclude stats or players.
markpadden
3/21
The spreadsheet should show upside ratings...
zstine1
3/23
there ARE no upside ratings to show.
garthhewitt
3/21
The cards will be interesting baseball history. Just leave them as that. Adding projections and fantasy content 10 days before Opening Day is a waste of resources.
markpadden
3/21
Better late than never. But I think we could all use a coherent explanation of what happened over the last four weeks. I am pretty shocked, given the magnitude of the issues last season, that the apparent bugs preventing a timely production of long-term projections were not addressed before spring training.
jdouge
3/22
Indeed. All the cards are good for now is looking back at how bad my drafts were, according to PECOTA. The injury ratings are nice, but too late. It's especially unhelpful to have SSIM scores only now that I'm at round 33 in my Scoresheet drafts.

The timing is really amazingly poor, especially given that the delays over the last two years were excused by promises of a speedier process . . . this year. Or was that supposed to be last year?

And still no upside score for long-term keeper leagues. Unless I'm missing something, there's really very little left that makes PECOTA stand out from an increasingly free crowd.

/rant
acammarano56
3/22
Will you have the "skills" graph (used to be at the top right) and the stars/scrubs graph (lower left) this year? I see they are no longer part of the card. If so any idea on when? These two were very valuable from a fantasy perspective to understand the skillset and future potential for a player. Thanks!
bb10kbb10k
3/22
Yes, please: The skills graph and the splits chart were the two quick-look bits I went to when comparing players during drafts. ETA?
jpjazzman
3/22
At least I'm getting more articles than ever (/end sarcasm).

Some honest advice, just give up on PECOTA - which the stats have shown has been at best in-line with the other systems out there since Nate Silver left. I don't think anyone takes its output seriously anymore anyways. And, if the player card are going to be a week before the season every year, just focus on the articles, cause every other website gets their projections and data out there weeks and months earlier and these cards have almost no value this late in the game.

I think BP has failed to recognize the increase in quality content out there on the internet these days.
jpjazzman
3/22
Although to be fair, the player cards are MUCH improved. It still doesn't change the point that they have limited use this late into spring training though.
tbwhite
3/22
yes, they are much better, I mean who needs comparable players, the 10 year projection, upside, etc when we have player pictures ?
zstine1
3/23
i think a lot of people work from the spreadsheet anyways.
tbwhite
3/24
Is there an ETA on the 10 year projections ?
acammarano56
3/24
Any word on the status of the "skills" graph (used to be at the top right) and the stars/scrubs graph (lower left)? Thanks.

dpease
3/28
We'll have more graphs soon--not sure which ones yet.
eliyahu
3/24
Perhaps I missed this from a while ago, but what ever happened to the list of the Top 100 comps? I loved that feature.
dpease
3/28
They'll be back very soon.
jessehoffins
3/25
Also,

There is a HUUGE discrepancy between the weighted mean projections and whats listed on the depth chart. What gives?
dpease
3/28
The most likely answer is playing time--the rate stats should be similar but the counting stats could be way off. Does that explain it?

You can download the latest playing time projected PECOTAs by clicking the "Raw CSV Data" or "Raw TAB Data" buttons in the Player Forecast Manager, and we just added those buttons to the Depth Charts homepage.
sahmed
3/28
At a glance, the rate stats do seem very similar, but the WARP are way off.

Take Chad Billingsley: Same IP, H, BB, K, HR, but the depth chart (and player card "beta value" graph) lists 2.9 WARP. The weighted mean lists 4.3.
geefsu
3/25
It is the last weekend of the season. The 11th hour has long since past. For years, I've staunchly defended BP against the reputable "upstarts" every step of the way. "BP is the granddad of 'em all."

It appears the joke is on me; "granddad," old, slow, and past its prime.

With my current subscription expiring in nine days and still no 10-year projections it is a very sad day for me.

Once is an aberration, but the issues with PECOTA the last few years were to be resolved over a year ago.

I feel naive, but I guess I didn't realized at the time how vital Nate was to the entire operation.
tbwhite
3/25
6 days left for me...if I want broken promises, missed deadlines, and deliverables undelivered I can find that for free lots of places, I don't need to pay for it.
geefsu
3/26
The silence is deafening.
tbwhite
3/26
You've got that right. This is just Bad Management 101, a little bit of transparency would go a long way, although since this seems like a repeat of last year(actually it's even worse than last year) I guess they are probably correct if they think transparency wouldn't elicit much sympathy at this point.

I've been here a long-time though, and my natural inclination is to support BP. Had they actually delivered on some of the things that were mentioned 6 weeks ago when PECOTA first came out I'd be more patient now. But to my knowledge no one ever did post anything about Evan Longoria's bizarre projection after a staffer said they would look into it. There was a note that Colin was going to write something about the bizarre comps that people were noting on the PECOTA spreadsheet, again nothing. Oh well, just 5 more days.....
jjschwar
3/27
Although I agree with everything else you have said here, I don't necessarily agree that this is bad management. They have had almost six months since a meaningful game was played to get this done, yet it isn't. I must give them the benefit of the doubt and presume that it isn't because they didn't try, but must be because they can't since not trying is far worse than not being able to. Either way, the long-term PECOTA projections were an important reason for me to be a member, and now that they no longer exist, I feel like BP has left me more than us leaving BP.
dpease
3/28
We will have card updates tomorrow.

I was working on a longer explanation for the delays, but that's a good way to not get it completed quickly, so I'll try to sum up very briefly here.

We weren't as prepared for the complexity of what we tried to do this off-season as we thought we were. All of our translations and projections (and many of our statistics themselves, as you know if you've read the statistical introduction from Baseball Prospectus 2011) were re-built from the ground up with contemporary components on BP hardware. Where before we had individual BPers running all sorts of different processes on different machines, we've now got 98% of our stuff in SQL and Perl running on a dedicated server that many BPers can get to.

We put too much on Colin Wyers' shoulders this offseason, which is why you haven't heard from him in quite a while. We expected to make up some time with the transition of the database and processes to the central server, but that took a lot longer than we'd budgeted schedule-wise and because of that, we weren't able to leverage the efforts of the rest of our technical staff like we had planned.

When you look at where we are now structurally versus where we were in late March of 2009 and 2010 I like to think there are reasons for optimism, but I regret some forward-looking statements I've made in the past so I don't want to make any here, and I certainly understand it's cold comfort for those of you who were counting on the features we've been unable to release so far. I wish we'd been able to produce all of the components of the projections when they were reasonably expected.
geefsu
3/29
Dave, this isn't meant to be flipped or sarcastic, but is it tomorrow yet?

I hope to contribute a worthy response if I get the opportunity; no time right now. It's March 29th. This is the third year I did not receive anything remotely close to what was promised.

I understand it is no small endeavor, bit it sounds like six months (off-season) would never be enough time to deliver.

That simply was never the case when Nate was involved,
dpease
3/29
Sure--I posted about Comps and Upside in a new post so more people would see it.

2012 will be the first time in years that we are using the same code and processes that we did the previous year, and I'm really hopeful that'll solve the delays we've had. I wish I could offer something more concrete.

Please feel free to reply in the comment thread(s) or send me an email if you want to discuss this further, your choice. Our responsiveness has not been very good, mainly because we're trying to concentrate on the releases as much as humanly possible, but now that we're getting close we will do a better job.
geefsu
3/30
Dave, I was referring to the 10-year projections. First pitch is about 26 hours away.

Thanks for the offer; I may e-mail you, but I think BP will have to make me some guarantees or an awfully sweet offer to me. I've loyally ponied up the last three years' subscription fee & BP did not deliver a product remotely close to what was reasonably expected, for a few years now.

I certainly can't be confident in 2012 promises. That would make me a masochist, a fool, or both.

I wish I could because all of this both saddens & angers me.