Forget who asked the question, or why. Just consider the question on its own merits.

Top. Men.

Thanks for the kind words. We are happy to provide it to all. Be sure and tell your friends.

The ebook should be ready tomorrow sometime. Just to recap, almost everything in there is available in the Top 10s on the site, so you can look at those immediately.

It's not easy to make matrixes of numbers legible on a Kindle.

It is virtually all on the site. If you don't want it in a convenient e-book or printed format, this product is probably not for you.

Thanks! We hope you enjoy it. In general, the less data PECOTA has to work with, the less I'd bet on its projections--but then that's true of any system. We're planning looking at this very issue more closely as the year goes on.

We've got our top men on it. It will be soon.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

To follow up on what Jason said, most of the book content has already been published and is available to Baseball Prospectus Premium subscribers. The things you'll get in here that you can't anywhere else are * Top 101 Prospects of 2013 rankings, write-ups, and notes in a single place--you can get all these individually from Baseball Prospectus 2013 and the website, though. * In the paperback, full statistical treatment of all 300 Top 10 Prospects including PECOTA projections for both 2013 and 2014. We won't be publishing this in any other form.

He's #2 in the Cleveland Top 10 in the book. We will update the top 10s on the site to match the Top 10s in the book. However, we won't do that for a couple of weeks.

I blame Juan Segura.

Please try it again. We are having a heck of a time keeping these online but we'll keep working on it.

Please give the link another try... sorry about that.

now that's a great idea.

No problem, jfranco77--we don't want to adversely affect the financial planning of our subscribers, so we'll just set a $65 cover price on the new book.

Fixed PWARP, thank you.

me too. Wearing the Offspring T-shirt to work tomorrow...

Hrbek's statue is very slim-ifying. I approve of this trend.

Well, I don't want to leave the kids out in the cold, with no Rob Deer merch of their own. Only one of them can have the autographed game-used bat.

Barry, the "hidden" comment floor is -4, but if it makes you feel any better, hidden comments are quite widely read at BP.

I have over 600 Rob Deer cards. This piece reminds me that I need to account for them in my estate planning.

Who? Production error, sorry about that. Helton's 2013 player comment and statistical workup will be freely available on his player card soon.

we are working on the second set of PECOTA information, the percentiles included.

SQL is a top five life skill. You can do so much with it even if you're only mediocre at it like I am.

Thanks--this is fixed.

Just to follow up on what Joe said, I can confirm PECOTA does attempt to project playing time based on previous performance, but it has no access to depth chart data--the book is at the printers before many of those decisions are made. We implement a 250 PA floor so there aren't a bunch of double-digit plate appearance projections for guys that aren't projected to play very much.

thanks--fixed.

Thanks for letting us know what you think, everyone. Please keep it coming--we are taking notes for BP2014.

Fixed, thanks.

Sorry about that--got OF, LF, CF, and RF lumped together correctly now. Thanks for letting us know!

Sorry--we would like to bring it back but we aren't going to be able to get it done in 2013.

A quick note on player comments, in response to a few questions we've gotten: the 2013 player comments are written and will be available in the soon-to-be-released Baseball Prospectus 2013 book and e-book. We aren't going to be able to publish these comments on the player cards until after the annual's sales season.

Glad to hear it. If anyone else has any trouble accessing anything, please email cs@baseballprospectus.com and we'll get it sorted. Thanks!

It is only good if you don't use the google.

You left a comment. :(

We all are.

I give this troll 3/10.

I understand Steve Buechele is available.

Here they are: http://bbwaa.com/voting-faq/

This one was free. Please tell your friends to come look. You'll need a Premium subscription for most of them. Thanks.

Thank you Richard. I appreciate the kind words and hope you enjoy the rest of the off season slate.

Its an action shot!

Typically my thinking about questions like this stops after your second sentence.

You are very welcome. Thank you for voting!

sorry, please try again. you can see all the voting at http://www.baseballprospectus.com/other/iba2012/ thanks!

Actually, *this* is why we run Manager voting--so we can have questions like this.

Because Greg Spira wanted to, essentially. I don't disagree with your point that the best way to get MOTY is to manage a surprise contender.

The system is troll-able.

its too bad it isn't a week ago--you could have appeared biased in the Internet Baseball Awards

Prepare to act on the question, everyone... the Greg Spira Internet Baseball Awards are coming soon.

Devastating comment.

We wrote about this in 1997... as far as I could tell it was about as egregious as it sounded. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=366

There is certainly risk in claiming a player. The Red Sox could pull back anyone they put on waivers, or they could work out a deal with the claiming team. They could also let a player go, and he becomes the claiming team's responsibility without any requirement that they negotiate further.

The Dodgers didn't necessarily claim Beckett and Crawford.

We did revise the playoff odds a little bit recently... Colin has more about that here. At the same time we re-ran the odds from the start of the season on with the updated methodology. According to the graph and report, Boston's gone from about 7% on Aug 13 to about 3% on Aug 20, hence the deltas. We'd have given them about a 35% chance using the current odds process on the data we had at the start of the season. I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question... hopefully that answered it?

Thanks. That's sort of a compressed view of the leading team's line. We have some pretty significant limitations on what we can put in there, unfortunately. Give clicking and dragging a range of dates a try, though.

the Rays are regularly assessing everything in baseball, in addition to rolling.

I vote for Ben Lindbergh.

using Internet Explorer? we will get it fixed, but apparently the fix isn't simple and there's a lot of stuff ahead of it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

oops, fixed thanks

fixed, thanks!

It is now available: Statistics > PitchFX Hitter Profiles. Thanks!

Yes, we will add a direct link to these from the player cards. Will reply to myself here when its done.

Sure we'll link it up. I'll reply to myself here when its done.

hi there, we're looking at the server problem now. sorry about the download issues.

fixed, thanks!

please email us at support@baseballprospectus.com . we are reading and responding to inquiries over the holiday weekend.

Jason Kendall was such an amazing player before the injury.

This is not what this website was established to argue against. John's just laying out salary expectations for Cano, not making any judgment about if he is or isn't worth the money.

hi, just to follow up on what Joe said, the readers of this site vote comments up and down. I think censorship implies that BP had something to do with the comment ratings on this (or any) comment and want to make sure people know that this is not the case. We are doing research on a better way to express the injury projections and consider it an important feature. Thanks.

i think so--updated, thanks.

have a look at the Clutch Performer pdf, Agent007. The statistical introduction will give you an overview of WARP and its various components. Thanks.

The number is your cool ranking.

fixed, thanks Brandon

thanks! this is done.

we would have included him if he was suggested last week!

oops--I missed him in Baseball Prospectus 2012. He should not be here. His inclusion gives Joe Terdoslavich fans who don't want to pay for the book a serious amount of leverage.

fixed, thanks

we will get that fixed as well.

Fixed, thank you.

Thanks Dodger300, Odorizzi is fixed and the pdf is updated.

this year's foreword seems to be polarizing.

come back tomorrow and it'll be all ready for you.

Coming Thursday. Thx

which annual are you thinking, stewbies? I'll have to go back and see how we did it... because I don't remember that. We did used to use Clay Davenport's defensive statistics, which center around 100, and I could see that looking like games played per position.

Llarry, I can try.

The app is almost ready... it should be available very soon, sometime this coming week, it sounds like. Maybe even Monday.

We're unable to update the Kindle version, sorry. This will be a standalone PDF.

No problem. We have asked our publisher for an update on that availability and we'll let you know. Sorry for the delay.

We are working on them!

We do have some top prospects in the supplement. We'll post a player list soon.

Thanks, we're looking at this.

Well, the stars and scrubs chart was a visual representation of information that we do currently have, but we don't have it all rolled up in a chart. Does that answer the question?

hi there. We switched graphing solutions and have not recaptured a lot of the old PECOTA charts. We are planning on releasing charting upgrades throughout the year. Thanks.

hi, we're still finishing the comps stuff... everything else should be up there now. thanks.

Thanks for the comment. If I remember correctly we've never provided that before. We can look into adding that somewhere.

We can look at these case-by-case--email jobs@baseballprospectus.com with your info and tell us what you are interested in doing.

Thank you for all the excellent things you have done for BP, Steve, and best of luck on your future endeavours.

Shoot. Our plan to pay our people better included monetization of traffic via annoying slideshows.

hi there. This is a result of the third point on the list that Rob mentioned. The pitcher WARP calculation had a bug in this year's version of PECOTA.

LynchMob, we do have some PECOTA results analysis that we're planning on running next week. Thanks!

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

The effect of this bug was to slightly deflate NL pitcher performance, and the projections in the book were affected by the bug. Softy Electric is also correct, and in general projections will improve over time and the latest projections from the site will always be better than the projections in BP2012.

http://www.snopes.com/sports/baseball/ripkencard.asp

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.

We are looking at the manager stats issue and will have something on it soon. Thanks.

hi Jivas, I tried to explain what the comparables actually are below. Thanks.

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.

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.

LinkedIn has an annoying tendency to start sending you mails they think you'll be interested in at various times without you indicating this interest. They've decided you are interested in baseball, or Joe Hamrahi is in your network, or someone who is in Joe Hamrahi's network is in your network, or etc. I have had the same thing happen to me in a different field. What I did to resolve the problem is click the opt-out link at the bottom of the email. If you find this unacceptable, please do let LinkedIn know.

They aren't done yet, but we will update when we know more.

linkedin sends irritating email. I get some on a regular basis I don't seem to be able to unsubscribe to. We don't market at all through social networks unless you friend us, subscribe to us, follow us, or whatever mechanism is appropriate on your part to indicate interest.

I believe it's going to be $9.99.

there are up to three weeks remaining before the app is available. hopefully it will be quicker than that. thanks

up to three weeks remaining in production.

The tables needed to be split up to display on a kindle. Does that explain what you are seeing?

Rob, we're not sure yet... I'll post an update to this thread when I know. Thanks!

Sorry you're having trouble with the ebook... please email us at cs@baseballprospectus.com with the details and we will let our publisher know.

I will check and update here. Thanks.

Hi, this is still in production. I will see if we can get eta from publisher.

Hi. We haven't heard about the tables being garbled.

Where are you seeing this? Definitely contact whoever sold you the book, but we're happy to check if we can. Thanks for buying!

Thank you to our editor Eric Nelson and everyone at Wiley for the numerous formats offered this year. We're very excited about it too.

Thanks! I updated the text.

SS/Sim is in the PFM.

the csv is sortable in any standard spreadsheet. You can use the 'POS' column to get position. Is that what you are looking for?

we don't yet but we'll announce when we do.

The Feb 11 spreadsheet has 1B. Thanks.

Rob just added 'display by batting order' and 'display by fielding position' buttons, so now you can see the hitters either way. Please let us know what you think.

Sorry, I shouldn't have promised a date so close to PECOTA release. We're still reviewing the data and deciding on the best way to present it. Thanks, and have a great weekend.

you bet--this may be related to Devin Mesoraco not being in PFM, which another commenter reported above. We're looking at it.

hi, we're looking at this. Thanks.

That's weird--we're looking at it. Devin Mesoraco's projection is in the spreadsheet if you need it immediately.

That is Kemp's actual projection.

Sorry about that--we'll check it out.

We'll be publishing some test results on PECOTA tomorrow. We hope they help allay your concerns.

hi, please see this comment. Thanks!

hi Ron, good question http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?context=6&category=true

Sorry, we expected to have it ready this morning but some of the changes we made ended up causing some confusion. The playing time estimates themselves are done and reflected in the PECOTA spreadsheet, and we'll have depth charts and PFM ready asap.

hi, we'll have those up soon. Thanks.

we have been working on Darvish and the other Japanese imports. We will have him in there soon.

Hi all, we've got a post up on current Fantasy status... we'll keep it updated as events warrant. Please drop by http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15999 if you've got a fantasy question or comment.

We will have updates on Upside, 10-year projections, etc soon.

Yes! We are working on this right now. We're not at the point we can say exactly what we'll be able to do with it, but we should be able to update you soon.

No, you'd be alright bemoaning his accomplishments. Bob Dylan is awful.

best of is behind schedule but coming soon... thanks.

good idea! we are looking at it now.

We sure did. We have no idea if its useful or not.

Sure--we'll get that removed.

Thanks everyone--sounds like it might be browser specific and I don't use FF anymore. Please send us a note when you see this and we'll get it sorted.

there's a lot of love in this room.

Our current search only searches text from articles, and as we've expanded to other types of content it doesn't cover them. A revision of the search function has been on our list for a while but we'll see if we can make it work better for you incrementally.

Sorry, we were not aware of this issue. You should always get both total and new comment count for any article (provided there are new comments). Could you please email relevant details to cs@baseballprospectus.com and we will try to fix? Thanks.

We will have an update on PECOTA, PFM, fantasy status by early next week.

We will have an update on PECOTA, PFM, fantasy status by early next week.

Thanks for asking. Unfortunately, there won't be any "bundled" sales of the various flavors of book; each product will be sold separately.

Thanks for asking. I've actually learned a lot about this through the Best of Baseball Prospectus Vol 1 process. It is probably difficult to convert an ebook to a PDF, as the ebook won't have page numbers or headers and footers. The Baseball Prospectus 2012 ebook is also going to have a layout that's optimized for readers, which will almost certainly necessitate some elements moving around. It is very easy to convert a physical book to a PDF, provided you have the source files. Then the question becomes, is it worthwhile to set up sales and support for the PDF? That all depends on how many people would actually buy it.

Thanks for asking... I'm hoping I'll be able to finish the Best Of conversion in the next two weeks.

We're working on those translations now... more on them soon.

This article is free for all--please point your friends and relations at http://bbp.cx/a/15826 (or use the sharing buttons at the top of the page). Thanks!

Amazon is often conservative about shipping estimates for as-yet-published books, but Baseball Prospectus 2012 is on schedule and should ship around the same time it has historically, if not earlier.

thanks Lloyd... we don't want anyone to be disappointed at the change while it's still in process.

Thanks John... we have an in-depth examination of PECOTA comparables coming this pre-season.

our hard-working writers are going to take the rest of 2011 off... I'm expecting we'll have something to say about the relief pitching prospects the White Sox got in 2012, but for now--they're relief pitching prospects! Have a happy and safe New Year, everyone.

(and I also think you have a wonderful display name)

I think this is a wonderful idea.

tell your friends! this one's free so they can all read it.

we've added "Transactions" to the links at the top of every page. Thanks!

its in there now!

to follow up on this you can click the Baseball Prospectus logo on the top left of any page to get back to the homepage.

There isn't one, but we will add one.

Its true--our nefarious goal is to increase sales.

I could hear the swearing from the Padres chapter author from here... Baseball Prospectus 2012 will account for this trade.

It will be there, but it'll take some additional time to make it there. Wish we could get it there sooner.

Greg, we've done some preliminary work on the ebook, but we didn't want to wait on releasing the other stuff while we finished it. Its definitely in the plans.

having the best beta testers pays off for us again--thanks everyone. What do you all think of the product? How'd we do on size, ratio of old/new content, additional value provided by re-formatting and re-packaging everything, etc?

Thanks for the comments--we've already included some of them in the editing. I was planning on submitting the books tonight for final print but unfortunately it doesn't look like that will happen.

thanks, Juris. That isn't currently in there but we'll take a look. I think we've got plenty of material for Volume 3 if people like 1 and 2.

ScottyB, would it ever. I have been unable to get Amazon to list the book before we submit it. If anyone at Amazon is reading this, I'd love to talk to you. We're finishing it up right now and will be submitting for printing very soon. Thanks.

They'll be available at bn.com if history is any indication. Theoretically this book is in the right program with our publisher to make it to brick-and-mortar bookstores at some point but I think we'll have to do pretty good sales numbers for that to happen.

it would be awesome to make some of those.

thank you. Please email me your address, dianagram--we are sending you a set for Christmas

It will definitely be there--I would hope in time for Christmas but we can't guarantee it.

we might not have the most commenters on the internets, but we have the best commenters on the internets. Thanks everyone.

Richard--the paperbacks should be at other outlets in a few weeks.

please click 'found' instead of Matt Swartz, or you can go here http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10096

The link to the results is at the top of the article, or you can visit http://www.baseballprospectus.com/other/iba2011/iba_results.txt directly. For more information about the awards please visit the IBA home page at http://www.internetbaseballawards.com/ Yes, you can vote (or you could have). We require any level of BP account to vote, but a Basic (free) account would be sufficient.

thanks--fixed

IBA results are coming soon.

if you have an account please click 'manage my profile' in the blue login bar on any page, and there is an option for newsletter subscription.

good options for tlr at 2 min, 54 sec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-S-eeInJVk&t=2m54s and 3 min, 25 sec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-S-eeInJVk&t=3m25s

me too!

ScottyB, here's yours: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/iba/81a8 When you go to bbp.cx/iba, hopefully you're sent to your ballot?

Sorry--you'll have to re-vote one of your ballots and then it'll be there.

Sorry about that... please reload and give this another try.

coming soon, promise

Yes, they're coming soon.

you can use the URL: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/odds?oddsdate=2011-07-31 change the oddsdate to find the odds on any day of the 2011 season. we'll have a better way to do this up sometime pretty soon.

we're waiting until then to raise the base subscription price!

If we don't think a stat expresses anything useful we're not going to go out of our way to include it.

darn it, I did forget to mention that we remembered the Cardinals this time.

thanks for reading!

no, it wouldn't be a limited offer if it were retroactive. We are offering interested new parties and loyal subscribers the option to add a year of BP to their account for about a 20% savings. If you don't expire for six months you can still purchase at the lower price now.

we don't guarantee Hit List will be published at a certain time any day, but its coming. Thanks for your attention and patience.

You should not be seeing such an ad at BP--no sound or "site surveys" rolling over the content. Please send us any detail about the ad's content by using the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of any page and we'll get it pulled. Sorry for the inconvenience.

There were, for teams without games played the previous day--we'll handle that a little differently starting Monday. Thanks!

thanks so much for the kind words!

nothing to do with fantasy... WiQ was not getting very many readers. Firefly ran for 1.5 seasons or so? WiQ for 10x that.

We are hoping to release the new Hit List next week.

You're the first we've heard from--anyone else having a problem with the colors? Thanks!

thanks for the version info! It's a general incompatibility between the library we're using for that functionality and many flavors of IE, I believe.

that's very strange. let me see why.

thanks for the reports. We do have specific problems with some of the comment functionality (plus/minus, post reply) in some versions of IE, but everything on the compensation page should work for virtually any recent browser--please give us a holler if not.

there's an IE specific problem with that functionality--sorry about that.

We're not sure where we're going to put it yet, but you can use the green bar below the login line for the short term. Thanks!

you should already be able to sort by any of those columns just by clicking one. its not going to work until the page finishes loading, though.

thanks. Jeff Euston will explain the payroll status in his intro article, coming soon.

thanks for the feedback. You should be able to get to everything Cot's knows about a player on his player card, but let me see if we can get something about the player's current contract in here.

thanks--we're still cleaning up the page frame, but you'll be seeing it other places soon. We do not have service time in here--I will see about adding it.

We will certainly announce then and go into some detail about how they were generated.

We should have a new reliever stat report ready for you fairly soon. We're still talking about the various components. Sorry for the delay.

I'd like to comment on the timing of this article, and our abrupt retirement of SIERA. Earlier this year, Matt Swartz sent me and email saying that he wanted to take SIERA somewhere else. I told him that we didn't have a problem with that. I also told Matt that we planned on running SIERA for the rest of 2011, and that we would be retiring the stat after that. When Matt recently announced that he was re-publishing SIERA at Fangraphs, we were fine with that, and it didn't change our plans at all. What we weren't expecting was for SIERA to be re-formulated and published under the same name. The Internet now has two different sets of numbers attached to the same stat name on two different websites. This is absolutely certain to generate unnecessary and frustrating confusion on the part of people who aren't closely following the topic. Now we can expect questions: why doesn't your SIERA match their SIERA? Theirs is newer, and they say it is better--why are you still running old numbers? Which SIERA am I expected to use? This is not a position we want to be in. At this point you can argue that SIERA itself suffers when there are multiple versions floating around. We weren't sure what we were going do about an ERA estimator when we decided to retire SIERA, but faced with the prospect of playing a contributing role in a confusing system, we decided that changing our timetable and replacing SIERA immediately was the right thing to do. Our options at that point were to quietly replace SIERA with something else or to announce what we were doing. We decided that Colin should fast-track his SIERA retirement article and we would use that to announce the change. When the article was ready on Friday, we posted it.

Thanks for the feedback so far, all--and John's right, this is more of an alpha thing, but we didn't want to change the name of our testing user group.

That's right, actually--we've just released them to our Beta testers. Please have a look and let us know what you think, folks, and thanks again for your patience.

We were happy to include in negotiations with our partners at ESPN the rights to display the content we were creating for them to our own subscribers. The way we look at it, they're paying us (and the individual authors) to write more for you.

we're expecting those to be completely populated in April.

emailed you...

ensuring that comments can be left for the Adjusted Standings

dang, we missed a great opportunity here...

Definitely--sorry, that's what the TAB and CSV buttons are for. I should have mentioned them earlier.

PA has been added to the bio box for the projection. We'll get those projections higher on the cards as well.

players generally don't show up in team tracker until they've played in the majors but we should certainly have his projections on his card--we'll get it fixed.

This was something we did for the book, but we haven't done it for the website.

you bet--more graphs are coming to the cards. If anyone's having any trouble seeing the WARP and fantasy graphs on a current player's card, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks!

Oh, in the annual--I thought you meant the current cards.

Sorry to reply to myself but in answer to your question about availability, we're finishing recapturing all of these processes. That's what took so long this year but it's all going to be exactly the same next year (other than any improvements we make in the interim, but we're not going to rewrite it again) so we should finally be quite early with our data.

hi there, you can use the "Raw CSV Data" or "Raw TAB Data" orange buttons at the top of either the PFM or the depth chart home page to download all the raw playing-time-adjusted data that the PFM uses. Sorry for the lack of clarity on that.

We could put 10-yr UPSIDE in the PFM, yes... what we did is compute UPSIDE fairly close to the original definition (though its by year, not 5-year) but what I'd really like is for us to figure out the best way to answer the question UPSIDE was designed for with the information we now have available to us.

I'm not sure, but I'll check and re-reply.

We're looking at Trout--I agree those numbers don't look right. We're not listing any comps for him either which is another part of the problem. (Of course, he's not the easiest player to find comps for.)

Which version of IE? Thanks for the note--we'll get it fixed.

I'll get an answer on this.

hi there, 1-year UPSIDE is available in the PFM spreadsheet. Please have a look. That's different than classic UPSIDE, of course, but rather than exactly match the former definition we wanted to look at the question that UPSIDE is trying to answer and see if we've learned anything we can apply in the last few years.

Really? Like who?

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.

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.

They'll be back very soon.

We'll have more graphs soon--not sure which ones yet.

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.

Sure, we can go into detail. Please give me a day or two.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/prospects/ please email us at cs@baseballprospectus.com with any other questions

fixed! http://www.baseballprospectus.com/card/card.php?id=BELT19880420A

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.

we'll have some form of these, yes

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.

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?

please try again--you should see them now. thanks!

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.

10-year projections will be available this week.

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.

we'll get this fixed.

we're working on this--sorry about that

sure thing--we'll add more graphs to the card but we wanted to make sure people could see them first.

Please try that link again--sorry for the confusion.

As Brandon said, you'll work from the comfort of your own bunny slippers unless you're close enough to a BP staffer to get them their drycleaning. No hard deadline, but we have a limited number of openings and we tend to get a lot of applicants every time we post something like this.

he was a horribly busted #1.

Ensuring that comments can actually be left for the Playoff Odds Report...

we haven't updated the player card projections for 2011 yet. Sorry for the confusion.

I doubt it, but we'll try.

I think we got this fixed.

Padres had one player with OBP above .350 last year, and there are compelling reasons not to bat Adrian Gonzalez leadoff.

Full voting results will come with the AL wrapup.

Fixed, thanks

it was--more on that later today

Fixed, thanks!

I would love to have all of those guys back in the fold. We don't think our readers would love the multiplier to the Premium subscription price that would be required.

I didn't mean to give the communication problems we had this year the short shrift. Colin will be enumerating specific changes to our production process going forward this week which I believe will resolve your concerns, but please do let us know after you see what he has to say.

In addition to what was said in the article itself, I would put this thought in the "If I only knew then what I knew now" file.

http://www.trollandtoad.com/pd1721141.html?associateid=97_7 Some of those old-school Avalon Hill games were just awesome when one could round up enough players. I remember a Civilization/Advanced Civilization game that lasted about 12 progressively goofier hours.

Bring one of those "Scream" voice disguisers for the scout to use.

fixed, thanks!

We know you have questions and we will get you more information just as soon as we possibly can.

great suggestions! please comment rate them accordingly. I've heard that the maverick publisher of Joe's book thinks industry standard precious dozen-word subtitles are ridiculous.

don't forget Benji Gil for RoY!

We almost never delete comments. Joe is speaking for himself, not BP. Thanks, everyone, for your comments and suggestions, and for reading.

fixed, sorry about that

hi... we're working on the blog integration. for now you can use the links at the bottom of the blog posts (more [title], etc) and the paging elements at the top and bottom of the post to go to others in the series, but we've got a lot more to do there. we should have blogs completely locked in by the end of the month. we just didn't want to hold off introducing them since we had a lot of good content to get readers immediately. thanks.

I think that's exactly right. Most of the web either shuts down or produces minimal content on the weekends.

yes it is--stats will be updated soon. sorry for the delay.

please send us a screen shot or advertiser name if you see one--we're not supposed to have any. Sorry about that.

fixed, thanks

fixed, thanks

We have a lot of stuff we're working on adding to the cards. They should soon have a lot more information than the DT and PECOTA cards used to.

yes, current year stats will be on the new cards as they were on the dt cards.

you bet--thanks for the comments 1. mostly true--however, the PECOTA historicals have minor-league lines and some different stats available, and we didn't want to remove them entirely until we were closer to completely replicating that data in the rest of the card. 2. the easiest way to do this is to find a guy who played on that team from the index and then click 2009 CLE on his card. we'll have a team browser in there soon.

So far today, PFM loads and the rest of the site are behaving much better, so the changes we made last night, coupled with the completion of most fantasy drafts, might have resolved the issue. We served about 25% as many PFM sessions as articles this month, and our article traffic wasn't low. That's never happened before. We're going to be better prepared for something like that next year. Sorry again for the delays.

people using the PFM in realtime is almost certainly the issue. Not that you shouldn't be able to do that--of course you should--but we just had an awful time keeping up. There are several different directions we could take the tool which would make it much more useful for that, and we're talking them over.

sorry for the massive slowdown--we will make it up to you.

it is certainly our expectation that the worst is now behind us, but we'll make sure it's not a problem next year. glad you were able to make use of it this weekend.

The drop rate accounts for comps leaving baseball. We could roll those into the projections as below-replacement-level, but considering the drop rate and the future projection in concert is almost certain to be more useful and interesting to the average person.

We initially did do comps for every year. People didn't like the long-term output, and it took a lot longer to generate. We're now doing it the way PECOTA has always done it--once, up front--and we'll definitely be doing some further research on this topic.

Comps are done once, that is true.

Yeah, uh... no, I don't really care to comment about that.

We want sortable stats all over our cards, but we didn't make a bigger announcement of this because like you, I'm not sure if they have any value at all in the PECOTA tables. Nevertheless, they're there, and if anyone comes up with a good use for them, please let us know!

It may not be gone forever--we'll have a look as the dust settles.

They are, but not for long. More on this later.

10 year performance graph has percentiles--red is 50th--while the 10 year projections are weighted mean. We need to make this more clear.

hi there, which browser and os are you using? can you send us a screencap at cs@baseballprospectus.com? sorry for the inconvenience.

True--we're not totalling the two lines for IP. We'll get it fixed. Thanks.

OK, just click his name now--all links go to new cards

sorry about that, buffum--since we're about to move the cards out of beta, I'll update that link in a few.

Hi all. All pitchers have now been published. Rather than reply to each individual comment, Mike Juntunen is right about his observations of the system overall. On the specific topic of long-term projections, PECOTA will ignore dropped seasons altogether, rather than factoring them in. If you see a player whose long-term projections look optimistic, keep in mind that his drop rate determines whether he'll be in the league at all that year. Nate explains it better than I do here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=7189

hi--the beta squad is looking at them now. we should roll them out early this week.

coming Sunday morning... thanks

Understood--the cards certainly present a much wider selection of information than the one-year weighted means (or 50th percentile) projections. Let me put it this way: if most of the value of the fantasy or premium subscription for our subscribers who use our stats for draft prep is rolled up in the PECOTA cards, we surely need to work on an additional product offering, because I can't imagine that being efficient.

Nobody's content with the way the PECOTA rollout went this year, ourselves definitely included. I've apologized for it personally, and will continue to do so. We were in a hard place, and we made some estimates of difficulty and execution that turned out to be optimistic, and if we had the ability to go back and achieve a more normal rollout, we certainly would do that. We're not done talking about the PECOTA process and the lessons we've learned from it yet, but our top priority is getting the PECOTA package completely released.

Understood--the timing is certainly not what we planned, and I am sorry for the delay. If the one-year projections are not enough for your draft prep, or if you have any other questions or concerns, please send me an email at dpease@baseballprospectus.com anytime.

This is correct--that's an artifact, we changed it a while back, and we'll change the note to match. Sorry about that.

Name will definitely be in the final card page title.

I had LASIK ten years ago. No problems other than slight haloing at night for the first few months, and my vision is still outstanding.

Please see http://www.baseballprospectus.com/events/?date=d3-30-2010

They're all in there now--sorry about that.

You can always click the BP logo in the upper left to get back to the front page in the new layout. We've got a breadcrumb beneath the button bar in the header, and there's a smaller logo link in the footer. Will those fill your needs here?

Sorry about that--we switched to a new back-end on March 3. We've changed the front-page links--now you can click 'more' to get to previous posts in the new format, and there's a separate link for stuff written on March 3 or before.

The parent comment had as its lead 'the comparisons appear designed to show the newer PECOTA is better'. They weren't--they were what we had to publish. More coming.

That's an interesting idea!

Clay Davenport will be updating the playing time projections every other day through the start of the season. Keep in mind he's doing it based on his guesstimates of how much playing time each player will get throughout the course of the season--that means he might be allocating considerable playing time to a player who isn't slated to start, if he thinks the guy who is starting the season at that position isn't up to the job and won't last long. We do have internal discussions about playing time that become part of Clay's updates, and John provided a bunch of info earlier this month on that front.

If a player has a depth chart playing time estimate, we use that. If not, we use the PECOTA projected playing time. We thought this would be the best solution, but it is confusing and we haven't figured out how to make it less so.

I have never, ever agreed with 100% of the projections from any projection system I've ever seen. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. As they say, that's why they play the games.

To follow up on this--I'm not much of a natural marketer, but the reason we haven't been more forthcoming about serious issues in the 2010 projections is that we're not aware of any serious issues in the 2010 projections. Seriously. If you are in a non-keeper league, as far as I know there's no reason you shouldn't be able to make use of the projections in the book, or the ones released on the site in late January, to inform your draft strategy. The long-term projections (and, by extension, the upside), the comps, the weighted means, the percentiles--we've had problems with all of those to some degree, and we're still working on fixes. But if what you'd generally use is the output from the PFM, none of those are relevant.

If you really think that we're trying to pull the wool over your eyes by producing test results that we've massaged, or made 2009-specific changes only for the purpose of passing tests on 2009 data, please send me an email and I will refund your money. We've had serious execution and communication problems this year, and I must again apologize for those, but I'd sooner go out of business than resort to something like that.

We don't know. The weighted means (at least for 2009) have more bias than the fiftieth. We're going to have to look at it more closely.

I abjectly, completely apologize for the problems we have had with this process this year. Honestly, it kills me that we've had these issues. We so appreciate your support, and we want to bring you the best. I've been working on that message in a larger format, with more background included. In the meantime, I understand and agree with many of the points people are making here. We're working hard to make things better than ever, and I'm sure we'll get there, but it's been much more difficult than we anticipated. If you want to send me an email about PECOTA, or anything else, I'm at dpease@baseballprospectus.com.

We'll get them in there. Thanks.

We're looking at this. Thanks.

we have included the projections printed in Baseball Prospectus 2010 as the second lines in the error reports above.

now: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10226

Perhaps! Who knows, maybe readers will like the game--feel free to search for it and check it out as far as I'm concerned. But "I love that game, it's my favorite baseball game ever"... come on, that's like me saying "I love Baseball Prospectus, it's my favorite baseball website ever" on some other site. Caveat searchor, and if you don't think the response was strong enough, feel free to use your comment rating abilities accordingly!

The parent message is brought to you by the developers of Out of the Park Baseball.

this is coming today.

thanks--this is really hard to do with our current front page, which is why we have the rolling title format that we used to use with Unfiltered, but we'll have a better system in place soon.

we still haven't worked out exactly how these will end up working. We'll have all the appropriate features available for them soon, though. Thanks!

sorry--that broke in some browsers a while back. it's on our list.

this is correct--we haven't updated the linker to point at 2010 cards yet. will do so soon. thanks.

Mike, can you send us your newsletter at cs@baseballprospectus.com? Thanks.

Thank you for the kind words, bmcgehee, but to everyone who thinks we shouldn't have released the cards without checking them more closely: I agree, and would probably feel the same way in your place. We made a mistake, and we're working to fix it.

They don't. Player card data only, unless Colin comes back with bad news.

Please see this update on the ten year projections: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=1528

hi all, We're collaborating with Nate on this, and we'll update you the minute we have something. It is our top priority.

good question--I don't know! I'll see what we can find out.

That's correct--they're pulling from the same data.

Please keep in mind that Wiley has exclusive rights to publish the comments, as well as the rest of Baseball Prospectus 2010, for a year. It's not a matter of us not being willing to publish them online--we simply do not have the right to do so.

The playing time projections come from our Depth Charts, behind which a real person is looking at team context and estimating where a team will allocate its playing time. PECOTA is projecting Rajai Davis' playing time based on his part-timer status over the last few years. Especially for anyone who has been riding a bench or otherwise missed time over the last couple of seasons, you'll want to use the Depth Chart playing time projections instead.

that's correct--we got it backwards.

Honestly, not sure. We'll have an ETA soon and try like the devil not to miss it. Now that we've made it through an entire card production run with all the new moving pieces we have, it should be quicker than the hitters were.

The comments from the annuals? You see through 2009, right? We can't publish the player comments from Baseball Prospectus 2010 until 2011--our publisher quite reasonably would have an issue with that. I'd surely like to get more player-specific content on these cards, though, and we're talking over ways to do that. There are comments from some years missing, and it's a goal of ours to get all those filled in in 2010 as well. Another thing we'd like to do is add comment threads for each player card. We're looking at how to implement that.

whoops! we'll fix this. thanks for the catch.

oops--my mistake. this has been fixed.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?search=sssim

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?search=SSSIM

SSSIM is in there--please have a look.

Folks, didn't want it to get lost in the shuffle above, so: SSSim is now available--please have a look if you're of a Scoresheet mind.

I believe so... we'll be posting a post-mortem explaining some of the issues we've encountered over the last few years. Also, I am still waiting on my copy of Duke Nukem Forever. Demos look great though! Seriously, I apologize again for the delay.

SSSim is now in WMS and PFM! Please have a look, and thanks for your patience.

Hello--the 2/24 update has been posted. Clay will be dropping by as soon as he can to touch on specific questions; running the update kept him occupied throughout the day. I can tell you that Upside has been adjusted to more closely resemble the scale of previous years. To get this information into the cards, we're going to have to re-run some of our backend stuff. They won't be ready until about noon Pac tomorrow. I'm really sorry for the delay.

UPSIDE questions--we'll get you an answer asap

Let's revisit this after we get the above stuff out the door, but we'll definitely do it soon.

that's an interesting request. we'll see what we can do.

PECOTA cards/PFM/depth chart update note coming sometime soon.

I guarantee Amazon has no idea that my order was associated with BP, nor would they care if they knew. I just put in the old personal credit card info and clicked 'submit' the same as anyone else. Any implication that friends of BP are getting their orders first was unintended. (After all, anyone posting here is a friend of BP!) What we can tell you is that there are many people we've heard of that are having their orders filled, and we're not just relying on second-hand reports because some of ours have been shipped too.

We've gotten multiple reports of Baseball Prospectus 2010 shipping from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I got email from both outlets that my orders shipped earlier today. We want everyone to get their books as soon as possible, but please keep in mind that we aren't dealing with Amazon, BN, or any other outlet directly and we have never been successful in our attempts to influence their fulfillment process in the past. Do contact them directly if you have questions or concerns--that's one thing that *has* worked for people. (If nothing else, you might get a $10 credit like coleman did.)

There will be a lot of new content. We'll have plenty more information for you on down the line as the book progresses.

That's correct.