Super-early PECOTA projections are now available for Beta review at:
https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/extras/pecota/
Enjoy! And please feel free to post comments here, or use the contact email page if it's not a good discussion topic:
Rob McQuown: 
Colin Wyers:
*** Yes, we know Jose Bautisa's projection seems low. 🙁 We ask that you focus on other players for now, please.
*** I noticed just now that the table isn't rendering very well in IE, but should be fine in Chrome or Firefox. Sorry for inconvenience.
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
Meanwhile, Eric Arce, another one who has yet to play above Rookie ball, is projected for 20 - albeit while scraping Mendoza, an equal number to J.P. Arencibia.
Also, I am curious to learn more about how fielding projections are made. Some odd numbers - particularly among first basemen, who seem universally low.
Is there a reason only six guys out of 135 are projected for over 450PA? - and no one below that mark.
I also find it curious that young pitchers like Drew Hutchison and Justin Nicolino have better projected FRAs than Ricky Romero.
All that said, it's awesome to get these things cracking. Thanks, and happy new years
I'll take a look at the other players you identified this afternoon, thanks.
Anyway, please focus primarily on rate stats for now... though if you know a player is retired or similarly unavailable for 2012, it can't hurt to mention him, so that we are sure to capture that. (This means you, Brad Ausmus!)
As Colin mentioned, playing time will be adjusted as things start to shake out over the next few months...when we can actually figure out who'll be playing 1B and LF for the Padres!
1. Plainly mistaken projections for older minor leaguers.
2. Very flat aging curves.
3. Baffling comps, which were not done the way they were claimed.
4. Projections for people who were out entire seasons were wildly optimistic.
5. A wide variety of technical errors, reducing confidence in the projections considerably.
Let's take a look:
1. I called this the "Kila-Bowker problem." Nate knew about this problem, and adjusted for it in later versions of PECOTA, harshly degrading projections of level-repeaters. Kila didn't get a projection in this Beta, but Bowker did and while it lacks the spectacular nature of last year's projection, it's still high.
Matthew Brown is a good example of this - he's projected to hit 239/299/405 for the Twins; I suspect he's out of baseball after OPS'ing 650 at Rochester in limited time last year at the age of 28. It's my guess that something significant has been done about Kila-Bowker, but not quite enough.
2. The aging curves appear to me to be too flat. Chipper's projected at 285/382/455. Chipper has hit below .285 in each of the last three years. Is PECOTA going back four years? I believe earlier versions only used three years. Either it is going back four years, or it is permitting hyperoptimistic views of older players, or both.
3. There's no way to tell if the comp issue has been fixed that I could find. Comps for prospects and minor leaguers of any ilk were seriously befouled.
4. There are multiple projections for people who were gone last year (Lowell, Bradley, Glaus, off the top) and while there will be no way to demonstrate this since they're permanently gone, the projections look optimistic to me.
5. I didn't look at everything. I have hopes that this early start will lead to fewer pitchforks and torches.
I am, to be sure, pleased that you are crowdsourcing this early, because the process the last two years didn't work. I appreciate the opportunity to help. It is my firm hope that BP remembers the lessons of its past; BP put out articles using PECOTA's projections on Kila and Bowker without once saying, "These projections are obviously nonsense." That is not good.
BP has also claimed that the new PECOTA is better than Nate PECOTA. Perhaps this is so, but when the comps don't work right, the level-repeating adjustment is gone, and PECOTA is losing to Marcel rather than beating it, it causes doubts. This iteration of PECOTA appears to have some improvements, but it also raises some questions.
I hope this has been helpful.
--JRM
There are some very curious projections. Torii Hunter's got a brutal projection. It might be that Chipper and Helton (who also got a cheery estimate) are outliers.
Where Chipper is projected to do better than he has in the last three years, Hunter's expected to be significantly worse than he was over the last three years, inclusive of 2011, which was his worst year. Chipper's expected to have an OPS 19 points higher than his best year of the last three.
If there's a good reason for this, that's great. (Genuinely great: If this diffentiation is correct, PECOTA has an advantage over other prognostication algorithms of which I am aware.) I can't imagine this is entirely due to using data from four years ago, but you know the system better than I do.
--JRM
I've made some rather dramtic changes to the way minor leaguers are handled in PECOTA; once we've gotten past the beta testing stage I hope to spend a lot more time explaining those changes and why I made them. I found Kila's forecast in the viewer (he may have snuck in late - I've been iterating PECOTA once or twice a day as feedback comes in and I make changes to the code), and he's got a projected line of .234/.347/.401 with a .275 TAv. I'll look at Brown in particular, though, thank you.
Right now PECOTA is going back five years, although the down-weighting of prior seasons gets greater as you go further back. (What I mean to say is, it's not a linear progression - the importance of Y-5 stats relative to Y-4 is a lot less than Y-2 relative to Y-2.)
Bryce Harper's first comp is Roger Marquis, who is kind of famous for his single, unsuccessful plate appearance in the majors. B-ref shows his age-19 season as hitting .227 with a slugging percentage of .315, with unknown walks. His age-18 season was the single PA previously mentioned.
Nelson Mathews is the second comp; he hit .294 with a .419 slugging in his age-18 season, mostly in B-level ball. (This was when there was D, C, B, A, AA, and AAA. The low-level leagues survived on selling games to locals.)
The third comp is, amazingly, John Paciorek. Paciorek hit a productive .219 for Modesto in his age-18 season. If you're using his age 19 season, he hit .135.
Jesus Montero's first comp is Marc Hill. That's not possible.
Machado comps to Tom Carroll (presumably Tom E. Carroll) and there's the same problem there.
Mike Trout projects to hit .204/.261/.281. (ZiPS says .267/.338/.414.)
If you're right about all these things, I congratulate you. But I don't think you are.
--JRM