BP Unfiltered

David Wright hit 29 home runs last year. His 90% Pecota projection is for 24, and his mean projection is for 21. Que?

Dave, the lists at the bottom of the player pages that links back to BP articles has not been showing up in IE for me since this weekend. Not sure if it's just me.

Rest of the cards look great.

Thank you for continuing to address this. Do you plan on placing the "skills" graph (used to be at the top right of a player's card) and the "star/scrub" graph (used to be towards the bottom on left) back into the playing cards? I felt these two pieces of data gave a very good and very quick tell on what PECOTA thought of the player, where it felt that player's strengths are and what it felt was the ceiling for the potential of that player. All with a quick glance of these two charts. It also distinguished BP from a lot of the other data out on the internet. This was uniqu and valuable IMHO. Thanks again.

Dave - Thanks for providing a response to the questions about comps for younger players. But I still have a more general, and perhaps related concern, about the projections for those younger players. For players 25 and younger that already have big league track records, the projections seem so low as to be at odds with everything I thought I knew about growth curves -- for instance, Evan Longoria projected to do worse this year than he did in any of the previous three years in the majors, even those he is approaching his peak performance years in terms of age. Absent some explanation for these projections, I have simply ignored the PECOTA forecasts for younger players, and suspect that some other readers may be doing the same.

Were the comps re-run between the release of the weighted-means and now ? I looked at a few of the interesting comps from the weighted means release and there are big differences. For example, Jaff Decker's top 3 comps were Carlos May, Curt Blefary and Willie Mays in the weighted means spreadsheet. Now, May and Blefary are gone from the list of comps. Both were still major leaguers, so they wouldn't have been dropped because of that. Willie Mays is now in a tie for the 6th best comparable with Decker, instead of 3rd as he was in the spreadsheet. Also interesting is that many of Decker's comps appear to be speedy centerfielders like Mantle, Mays, Vada Pinson, and the Brothers Upton. It would be interesting to know how the comps factor in position, especially for older players where the data only shows they played OF, but not where in the OF.

Everett Williams has no comps on his player card, while Mickey Mantle was his top comp on the weighted means spreadsheet.

Here's a fun one, Nick Franklin had top 3 comps of Adrian Beltre, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. His new top 3 comps are Tim Foli, Ed Brinkman and Robin Yount. Consequently, the player compared to Hall of Famers now looks like he is projected to be out of the majors by 2015(since he has no upside beyond 2014, and even an old guy like Bobby Abreu has upside out to 2018).

Is there any comment on the projection for Longoria to have the worst year of his career ?

Any particular reason to use a new nomenclature for league/level on the player cards? "1A" "1B" "1C" "3A" etc seems to be almost intentionally opaque. Why not use the standard designations? Sure, maybe you need 1 more character to fit LoA, HiA, AAA, but it'd add clarity.

So is there a way to filter all of the upside scores on a spreadsheet now? I understand not wanting to re-release an entire pecota spreadsheet update, and while I'm glad Upside is back in some form, the value to me was to filter out and highlight specific players with the most and note that on my draft list value page. I can't go through every player card individually to get there. This is just another method I used to use to find that rare talent early that I may have overlooked for keeper leagues. It looks like it is too late this year to get it back, but next year I'd appreciate it if you could go back to providing that on the spreadsheet.

Of course the issue with using the PFM is that only players that are projected to get playing time in the majors are included.

The only place to get consolidated info on minor league prospects in the WMS, and as noted above multiple times there *do* seems to have been updates to player data (at least as reflected in the player cards).

Also, the case of Nick Franklin is interesting - as noted above his comparables changed quite dramatically between the WMS and his current player card, but his projected stats for 2011 remain essentially unchanged. ???

I kind of wonder how, every so often, a comparable will show up for a 20 year old when that comparable was not in the minors or majors at age 20.

Thanks for the update. I hope the process has been cleaned up enough to roll out the "upside" figures sooner in future years and also include it on the spreadsheet. Like shmooville, it was one of the factors I used to sort on. Since my drafts have now already occurred it is almost of no use to me for this year except for the occasional trade evaluation.

top 14 in NL in 2011 upside:
david wright, pujols, fielder, votto, braun, holliday, utley, ramirez, uggla, ethier, bowker, beltran, soto, CarGo,

which name does not belong? what is with pecota's continued love affair with bowker? since he is within a week of my age, i appreciate that pecota thinks he is still young enough to have my upside, but pecota is getting like a stalker with him.

Glad to see this stuff is up and running.

Do you plan to put the 10-year UPSIDE figures in the PFM? The "question" I believe UPSIDE best answers is this: what is the potential quantitative value of a prospect in relation to other prospects? This is a measurement that is virtually unique to Baseball Prospectus. In my eyes, it's the greatest feature BP has to offer. It's what distinguishes it from Baseball America, Fangraphs, etc. But with just one-year figures available for comparable purposes, UPSIDE loses its applicability to prospects.

Moreover, is BP able to guarantee that these figures (in whatever form) will be rolled out about a month and a half sooner next year? As many people have already noted, they are practically worthless for fantasy players, having been issued at such a late date.

My subscription expires in a couple weeks and I'm thinking seriously about not resubscribing for the first time in three or four years.