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Yet another new PECOTA spreadsheet was released today. Special thanks again goes out to Colin Wyers and Rob McQuown for continuing to enhance and update the product. Fantasy and Premium subscribers can download the spreadsheet by clicking here.

​Highlights from the latest update:

  • Sacrifice Hits (SF), Sacrifice Flies (SF), and Double Plays (DP) have all been added to the batters' spreadsheet, and Quality Starts (QS) are now included on the pitchers' spreadsheet.
  • Both batter and pitcher spreadsheets now contain hyperlinks to player cards and team depth chart pages.

We will continue to make tweaks and adjustments as necessary and will soon be publishing a FAQ article that addresses many of the comments and questions surrounding PECOTA.

 

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xophdxo
2/15
is SP Yu Darvish TEX listed?
not able to find him in the pitcher's tab
joechris96
2/15
No, we're still working on the Darvish projection along with other Japanese and Cuban players. We'll have an update on them soon.
dowder
2/15
Love going through these PECOTA predictions. Any chance there could be another category listed? My league uses batting average against as a counting stat. It would be great if this was included in PECOTA.
cwyers
2/15
You can get this in the PFM, we'll look at adding it for the next spreadsheet release. Our pitching projections feature full batting against projections, so the capability is there, it's just a matter of knowing what stats people are interested in seeing.
polishwonder
2/15
Thank you for adding slugging percentage against in the PFM. Your response to my request was great. I believe both batting average & on base percentage against have also been added to the PFM.
jivas21
2/16
I know I'm not the first to point this out, and I'm intentionally bringing this up in a low-traffic thread, but young players are only being compared to major-league players. If you sort the position players on age, every single 19-year old is compared to Robin Yount, Wayne Causey, and Ed Kranepool.

I understand that an immense amount of work must have gone into converting PECOTA from Nate Silver's initial Excel spreadsheet-palooza and in maintaining/updating the process since - and I respect the hell out of everyone at BP who's gone through this every year - but simply put, PECOTA hasn't been "right" since it left Nate's hands. There are a few tangible issues - the one raised here and another I repeatedly raised in a Beta testing page (and over e-mail) a couple of years ago that was ignored - and many more intangible "that just ain't right" issues (e.g. Rockies' position players last year).

At this point I use PECOTA as just another data point to provide a forecast (among the swath of other projection systems), and when PECOTA provides an outlier I assume it's the result of an error rather than some prescient bit of information (e.g. the famous Wily Mo Pena forecast or Brandon Webb's insane comparable list the year he got called up).

I've been pretty patient with the process - at least I think I have been - but at this point I'm just sad. I've given up hope.
mcquown
2/16
We realize it undermines the credibility when the 3 listed comparables don't pass the "sniff test", but mostly that's a matter of the filtering decisions used, which we've been working on - part of why the Player Cards (and the long lists of comparables) aren't live yet. We'll keep people posted when there are updates, but I wanted to let you know that we are aware of the fact that certain players end up with very odd-looking comparables on the PECOTA spreadsheet, and are taking steps to see how they can be improved.
jivas21
2/16
Rob,

As always - BP's willingness to make the process transparent is appreciated, as is the hard work to try to get this right.

Regarding the comparables issue - leaving other issues aside for now - the sticking point for me is less that some comparables are clearly wacky, but that the *projections* are influenced by the errors in those comparables. The comparables obviously drive some portion of the projections, and because this one visible element of the system is clearly wrong, our confidence in the projections themselves is reduced. Given the presence of other issues over the last 2 years, for me personally my confidence in the projections is REALLY low.

Again, I almost feel guilty discussing this openly. I've just reached the point where I've lost all confidence that Nate's old PECOTA system - a system which I trusted to tease some meaningful relationships out of the data that weren't being picked up elsewhere - will return.
dpease
2/23
hi Jivas, I tried to explain what the comparables actually are below. Thanks.
cwyers
2/16
Some explanations on how the comps are used:

What we do first is come up with a “baseline projection” that takes into account a player’s past performance, accounting for some regression to the mean. (We break it down based on components, so that a player with a high strikeout rate is treated differently than a player with a low strikeout rate, even if things like batting average are the same.)

Once those baselines are generated, we find comparable players to those baseline forecasts (as well as to some attributes not reflected in the baselines, such as age, position, height and weight). We look at the performance of the comps going from their baselines to the following season to come up with composites-based age adjustments (internally to PECOTA this is referred to as a “cage” forecast). We assess the reliability of the composite-based aging curve, and use that to regress it towards a generic age adjustment for players at that age (we refer to this as a “genage” adjustment). The less reliable a composite-based age adjustment is, the further it’s regressed.
AirSteve01
2/16
I can trace my loss of confidence in the comparables back to the point where minor leaguers were taken out of the potential comps list.

I'm sure there were valid reasons for doing so, but still -
I'd rather know a guy is comparable to some minor-league shlub I never heard of than have the implication out there that Justin Christian is Manny Mota, or Everth Cabrera is Derek Jeter, or Koby Clemens is Mark Teixeira, or every 19 year old in the minor leagues is Robin Yount (or perhaps Ed Kranepool).

I mean, if a guy walks like a Stubby Clapp and talks like a Stubby Clapp, is it really helpful to have someone tell me the dude's comp is Robin Ventura?

As a keeper-league drafter, I want to know when I'm in danger of getting the Clapp.
swarmee
2/17
Is there a way in PFM to have it just inflate the values based on the following formula?
New$$ = Original$$ x (DollarsRemaining/ValueRemaining)?
I set centric inflation to '0' and inflation 'YES', however, of the remaining players, Closers keep creeping up the dollar value rungs once all my keepers have been added. Originally only one closer was worth more than a certain player, however now 4 closers are. With centric inflation set to '0', shouldn't the ranking of all remaining players in the auction stay constant?
o2bnited
2/23
The inflation is a bit more nuanced than what you imply here (a scalar factor) but it's not so much different that you should see drastic reordering of players unless there's a pattern to the players that have been taken. In addition to updating the available dollars, PFM is also looking at adjusting the "replacement level" of each position based on which players have been taken and how many are left to be taken, league wide (but not specific to your team).

If you still have concerns, please contact Customer Service and provide a description with the link that has the cid at the end, like cid=12345. You can get this by saving the league settings, which will allow us to pull it up and see exactly what you see, so we can get to the heart of the issue. Thanks!
johnjmaier
2/20
Can Chris Sale's projection be correct? His ERA starting this year will stay the same as it was when he was a reliever in 2011? His k rate will actually increase slightly? I am a huge fan of Sale but this seems like a best case scenario, maybe his 90% performance, not the expected weighted mean. Please take a look at this projection. Thank you!
spencerja78
2/22
Where can I find the multi-year projections on the individual PECOTA cards? Is this still a feature? I've searched in vain.
markpadden
2/22
Apparently not available yet. No one at BP seems willing to commit to an ETA. (Last year, they were delayed until after the season had started).
dpease
2/22
They aren't done yet, but we will update when we know more.
fairacres
2/22
I get it that "the model is the model" but when BP the book comes out and Troy Tulowitzki's comps are Joe Millette and Craig Gerber and Hanley Ramirez, and Justin Upton's are Gene Hiser, Carlos Quintana and Jason Werth, I mean, that is just non-sensical. How is someone supposed to interpret the comps?

And, there seem to be many player comments that are like the one for Ubaldo Jimenez - where the gist of the comments is positive ("Tribe will be glad they locked him up with affordable options!") but the 2012 projections have him regressing from what was a down year in 2011 (yet the author calls him an "ace" with a projection of 10-8, 3.86, WAR 1.5 . . .and comps of Jared Burton, Aaron Heilmann, and Ray Narleski. Jared Burton??? He pitched 164 innings in his entire career . . . Ubaldo is at 916 and counting.



dpease
2/22
Thanks for buying the book.

Last part first, we don't mind occasionally deviating from the projection in the player comment. The writer might have a different expectation and that's fine with us. Also, player comments written about the projected lines are boring.

A projected player's PECOTA comparables are the players that are the most similar to him in power on contact, contact rate, walks and strikeouts, height, weight, handedness, and position (for hitters) or start/relief split (for pitchers). This can result in some pretty dissimilar-quality players. We are planning on offering some more detail about that part of the process.
jberkon
2/22
How would this result in dissimilar-quality players? If Player A had similar power, contact rate, walk rate, strikeout rate, height, weight, handedness, and position to Player B, I'd think that Players A and B would of similar quality.
dpease
2/23
I'm not sure that follows. A hitter with a lower power and contact rate could be similar across the board otherwise and be a very good comp to an all-star despite being a pinch-hitting washout, i would expect.
jberkon
2/22
Also, again, I think the concern here is not that a BP analyst is expressing a different opinion than PECOTA, but that there's something wrong with PECOTA so that even BP analysts don't feel comfortable relying upon it. The fact that the projections on the website are not always consistent with the projections in the book doesn't bolster our confidence.
dpease
2/22
Most of the book is written without access to the projections, so its not so much a matter of contradicting (or reinforcing) the projection as not referring to it at all. This is how the book has always been produced. We do hope to have the projections done earlier next season.
derekdeg
2/22
Could someone give me some insight into Marmol. Why does PECOTA rank him so high and his projected numbers are way different than anywhere else?

Thanks in advance for the info.
xophdxo
2/28
when is the next PECOTA spreadsheet release? it has been about 2 weeks.
xophdxo
3/01
are any PECOTA spreadsheet updates coming? i have a draft approaching and need an ETA
dpease
3/02
we may miss comments posted on old articles, sorry. Please email us at the contact us link if you require this type of assistance.

You can always get to the latest Fantasy updates in the right sidebar of

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/

the spreadsheet was updated on Feb 29, and here's the link to download it directly

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/download.php?resource=PECOTA2012
xophdxo
3/05
understand you guys are working on 1000 things at once

Feb 14 i asked about SP Yu Darvish TEX

still waiting on him and "other japanese and cuban" projections

(hoping)