For those of you asking about this year’s Baseball Prospectus Fantasy product, I’m happy to announce that fantasy content is starting to roll in. We’ve just posted the first iteration of the PECOTA Weighted Means spreadsheet.
Over the next couple of weeks, expect all of the material you’ve used in the past–the PECOTA player cards (including player comments from Baseball Prospectus 2008), Will Carroll’s Team Health Reports matrix, Player Forecast Manager, and Team Tracker–to be completely updated for 2009 and re-released. Keep an eye on the Fantasy page for update notifications.
We’re also making a major change to our Depth Charts product. Clay Davenport will be providing frequent, accurate updates to playing time estimates as circumstances change during spring training. When coupled with the PECOTA projections, I’m confident that this year’s depth charts will be an essential tool for informing your fantasy draft.
Great! I'll go put a pot of coffee on, it's going to be a long night.
Christian Guzman 11th in projected VORP?!? No, not on the Nationals, in all of MLB! That makes projecting the 2008 Rays to be a 90-win team or the Wily Mo Pena projection from 3-4 years ago look like play-it-safe picks.
Yeah the Guzman projection is pretty dumb. I think the reason for it is that PECOTA only uses the last 3 years of their career and in the period of time Guzman has only had 804 ABs and has had a 280 eqa. They need to do more regression to the mean or look back at more years when there is only 804 ABs counting towards his projection.
So basically add that with him still being in his prime and probably getting some favourable comparables and you come out with a extremely good projection.
Improvement over last season for Guzman? Why on earth does PECOTA not see his last 1 1/2 years as a fluke? He's at the END of his prime, for pete's sake.
PECOTA sees Pedroia's career, looks at last year, and goes "fluke". PECOTA then sees Guzman's career (or last 3 years of it), and goes "not fluke".
There's no way he gets 649 PAs. Also, for some reason I thought that line, with those PAs, would give him a higher VORP than 59.6. Is he playing in all hitters' parks?
IIRC, PECOTA is saying that Wieters will perform at the major-league equivalent of that level, but not saying that all of that performance will actually occur in the majors. Still a wow, tho'.
The first version of PECOTA basically says, "If Player X is in the majors all season (even guys who were in A-ball all last season), here's the number of at-bats I think he'll get, and here's how I think he will do in those at-bats." Later iterations (and things like the Depth Charts and Player Forecast Manager) take things like playing time and likely level of play (AA, AAA, MLB, etc.) into account.
My God. That Wieters projection jumped out at me. Nate Silver is nowhere near as optimistic about Chris Davis as anyone else. Please post any other curiosities in this thread.
PECOTA isnt falling for those minor league BAs... about time. Davis looks like he's going to have some contact issues. Looks like a .260-.270 hitter to me, at least initially.
Wow, only two Yankees in the starting lineup with OPS's above .800 (Teixiera and A-Rod)? Seriously? Damon, Jeter, Posada, Nady, Cano all look extremely low. Pitching looks good though. But with that mediocre of an offense and below average defense overall, it looks like things may get tougher in the Bronx this year.
even the pitching doesn't look that great. outside of the high hopes for aj burnett (roughly 200 innings 3.80 era), cc's season will be his worst since his age 24 season, joba's line looks good but the yanks will need more than 120 innings of him, pettitte's is decent, but pecota absolutely hates wang and hughes (334th in VORP for hughes - whereas clay buccholz is rated 63rd??). the bullpen should be pretty sick though. rivera, ramirez, veras, and robertson all did well.
I don't see why the hughes predictions is so shocking. For all of last year he was either on the dl or pitching horribly. Although Buchholz had a bad year in the majors he did alright at Pawtucket. This stands in contrast to Hughes who got creamed in triple AAA last year. There aren't many pitchers who get knocked around in the minors one year, and are then projected to be decent starters in the majors the next.
first of all, i didn't say it came as a shock. just something of interest that I would love to know the proper reasoning behind. second of all, hughes didn't get creamed in triple a. he had better k and bb rates than buchholz, and equal HR rates. they had the same big league results, same minor league peripherals, so i don't see why you have to raise an issue with my post. also, your reasoning has little to do with the likely explanation because buchholz's rate stats project only slightly above hughes; the real difference in vorp lies in the 164 (!?) innings for clay and only 84 for phil.
You just answered your own question. Buchholz has shown the ability to stay reasonably healthy (134.2 IP last season, 148 IP in 2007), while Hughes has not (69.2 IP last season, 110.1 in 2007). PECOTA says pitchers that have had similar workloads and results at the same age as Buchholz have thrown more innings the following year, while pitchers with Hughes' profile throw less, whether that's because of injury or because the system sees them as relievers.
Philip Hughes ERA at Scranton last year was 5.90 with WHIP of 1.48. Clay had a 2.47 ERA with a 1.21 WHIP. Even though they had similar walk, K, and HR rates, the fact remains that Triple A batters beat on Hughes like a red-headed step-child. A pitcher with 5.90 ERA is getting creamed by the batters.
Did I miss the announcement of BP's new association with ESPN? Here I am with my morning coffee, opening up the WWL's homepage and there are words like "PECOTA" "Jay" and "Jaffe" all over the main page. Freaky.
PECOTA's the only system I've seen so far that doesn't have Jose Reyes regressing. You've got him at .309/.374/.478. I wonder if the AVG increase is due to the projected park-factor for Citifield or just development. I'd be curious to see how the different systems are accounting for Citifield, New Yankee Stadium and new parks in general.
Regardless, a .370OBP Reyes is a tantalizing notion for a Mets fan.
PECOTA *hates* the Red Sox' hitters. All of them. It thinks:
A) Pedroia's breakout was a fluke
B) Youkilis' breakout was a fluke
C) J.D. Drew's rebound was a fluke
D) Ortiz' decline is for real
E) Jason Bay's decline is starting
F) Jed Lowrie's injury-induced 2008 indicates his performance going forward
G) Lowell won't rebound
The chances of all or most of these things happening are pretty slim.
A) Pedroia still gets a very good projection, and his upside score is very high. There arent many 2B with better projections.
B) Youkilis is projected for a great line.
C) This is like the best line PECOTA has given J.D. Drew in years.
D) Ortiz is still projected as one of the better hitters in baseball.
E) Jason Bay's projection is still an excellent hitter.
F) Jed Lowrie - okay, he doesnt get a great projection but it still ranks pretty good among SSs.
G) Lowell got a very good projection! In fact, his PECOTA in 08 had his 09 season as .282/.341/.437 with 12 HRs. PECOTA has him for .272/.332/.442 with 14 HRs this year. Considering his injuries that's pretty good.
H) If the Sox players perform like this they will be one of the top few teams in baseball.
I) Have you looked at many players around baseball? PECOTA liked the Sox plenty. Take a look at how its killing the Yankees if you want to see it "hate" a team. Im a Boston, fan too - so Im pretty excited that its validating what Ive been saying about the Yankees. I was actually pretty pleased with the Sox projections, to tell you the truth.
Maybe I'm just not used to the increased replacement-player level. The VORP values for these guys are much lower than expected. But Pedroia's projection is slightly inferior to what he did in *2007*, let alone 2008. Youk's is slightly better than what he did in 2007, but nowhere near 2008. Ortiz is projected to basically repeat last year's production (which was an injury-plagued year).
I realize some of these projections are seemingly in line with previous PECOTA projections--but shouldn't PECOTA be computing based on actual seasons, not previous PECOTA projections.
Is BP going to re-run past years' PECOTAs with the new replacement-level value? I'd like to see the difference.
Every time I try to fight these projections I end up looking silly because PECOTA is awfully smart. Last year I was fighting the rather bleak Miguel Cabrera projection but his OPS was right in the middle his 40th and 50th percentiles (with more HRs, more Ks, and fewer walks but you get the idea).
So Christian Guzman is officially the sleeper of the year.
Did some very fast & filthy team calcs. Seems like Red Sox & Yankees battle it out (sorry, Rays) and are relatively evenly matched. Indians over the Twins in the Central (White Sox not close), and a not-good Angels edging the A's in a very weak West.
The NL seems to project with several teams surprisingly at or above the Red Sox/Yankees level (unless I don't know what I'm doing, a distinct possibility, maybe a near-certainty, altho' I did make adjustments where PECOTA has the wrong team for Holliday, Teixeira, etc, and did remove Manny, Dunn, Sheets, etc in calculating their former teams' numbers). Mets as class of the majors, edging the Braves, Phils a bit farther back. A very close three-way central race among the Cards, Brewers, and Cubs. D'backs edge Dodgers (not counting Manny in Dodgers totals). And seems like adding Manny might be sufficient to throw SF into that race.
Most curious - how strong NL teams look overall. Nate, shift in league-strength, or am I completely clueless?
The player's team isn't updated this early when these come out. I'm almost positive it was that way last year. I seem to recall Renteria being under ATL and not DET then...
Right, there will be updated spreadsheets in due course, as well as the cards. And these will gradually pick up both team changes and roster changes more generally.
And the later PECOTAs will also reflect adjustments based on updated depth charts, will still aren't up.
Still, it's a good idea to call out omissions or errors, to help that correction and updating process.
Ok, more things driving me crazy (all of this is based of VORP)
1) Anyone notice that the best DH is Milton Bradley even though he's listed as being in the NL
2)The best Right Fielder is Jayson Werth, who has never had 500 at-bats in a season, and was 13th for right fielders in VORP last year. Then the person trailing him is Elijah Dukes who was 18th in VORP that season.
3) Pedroia is way underrated, by these projections
Like I'm hoping that I got the month wrong and this is an April Fool's gag
I had the same thought. Another one is 151 games for Wieters--all at catcher. Even accounting for the fact that PECOTA will give players full-seasons at a position, if they've not missed time in the past, that is ridiculous. A limitation of the projection system?
Usually, catchers are comped to catchers, but there are no good comps of any real sort for Wieters; Pecota's chosen non-catchers as the best comps. (Wieters SimIndex is zero, meaning the comp list isn't really similar to Wieters at all.)
Since the comps are non-catchers, it's projecting playing time consistent with non-catchers. This is actually fixable, I think, and I'd guess that we'll see an adjustment for this by Pecota 2011.
Some of the people posting to this thread need to remember something about these projections:
1. They're based on historical patterns among similar players. Historically, players with a career start (and body type) like Pedroia's were more often than not playing over their heads. Look at the cloud of comparables -- "A lucky two first full seasons in the majors" is a lot less rare than "star 2B on the rise". This projection gives him 1 chance in 6 of further breakout, and a 50/50 chance of being the player we've seen (overall) so far in his career. Does that sound so wrong?
2. The variance in these predictions is huge, partly because the variance in real player performance is huge. What fraction of players end up performing between their 40% and 60% levels? Not as many as you'd hope. Over a whole team, this mostly averages out over a season.
People throw the word "breakout" around a lot, and tend to mean that a "breakout" season reflects a new level of ability. But the vast majority of big improvement years are had by players who combined being actually improved with being lucky. Part of PECOTA's job is to separate the part that was new ability from the part that was luck; it does that by looking back in history to see how much of the new level "sticks", on average, for players of a similar type and established peformance.
I am really mad at myself for not ordering Premium a few years ago, I didn't think I was missing mich with the Baseball Prospectus Fantasy product. Wow was I wrong!
A few observations of my own after my initial browsing:
1)Lowrie is ranked 9th in OPS for SS (below the immortal Jerry Hairston?). Its his lack of projected playing time that knock his VORP value down.
2)PECOTA loves Jody Gerut. 2nd in OPS and 4th in VORP among CF's. Between that and the Guzman projection, it seems like there isn't enough regression to the mean taking place for older players with limited PA the last 3 years.
3)I traded for Adam Jones in two leagues this off-season, and was pumped when I read Kevin's comment about him in the Orioles top prospects article. Top 3 comparables are Dawson, Burks, and Evans. Sweet.
4)Does anyone else think that if Mussina saw his projection (3.67 ERA, 18th in VORP for SP), he'd rethink his decision to retire? Looks like Jeff Kent made the right decision however.
5)Good news for Rany and all those other Royals fans out there. Billy Butler has one of the higher break-out and improve percentages among players already in the majors, and his top comparables seem to imply the power is coming eventually as well.
Playing off the Butler observation, and looking at the other extreme, Ichiro, Bradley, and Jeter are among the notable players with high collapse rates. (What would that mean, in Jeter's case?) Zambrano has a relatively high collapse rate among pitchers.
So in Chicago, factoring in Bradley and the "optimistic" Harden projection, as well, it would appear there's a lot of fate tempting going on up there...
They probably forgot about him. He was in Low A last year so he still probably at least 1 1/2 seasons before he gets a shot at the majors. Now Austin Jackson is puzzling, don't know how they could leave that out.
Anyone have any advice for a new-ish fantasy baseball player about how to use this data? For instance, one question I have is whether people feel like VORP can be used to compare players between positions for draft purposes.
One piece of advice: what's valuable in a fantasy league isn't what's valuable in real life. Look at what earns points in your league, and use the specific predictions of those stats to guide your draft. VORP is useless in most fantasy leagues, because it doesn't match up well with where the points are.
The Player Forecast Manager is the only tool you'll need. You can input your league settings in at the front, and it will create a set of dollar values that you can use in either auction form or in a straight draft. You can also tell it mid-draft who is on your team and who is on everyone else's team, and it will give you a list of the best available players according to what it projects your players' statistics to be.
The player forecast manager is pretty good, but you definitely need to take the projected playing time with a grain of salt. Logan Morrison will not get 600 at bats this season, but it gives you a basis for valuing him (and other prospects) for future seasons. ;-)
Everyone's talking about hitters- I've got a freakish pitcher projection: Javier Vazquez, 8th best VORP among pitchers, better than Peavy! Or how about Rich Harden throwing 182 2/3 IP for my Cubs- 5 more than aforementioned Peavy. And Derek Lowe- 20th best, far ahead of Volquez, Matsuzaka, Lester, and Duchscherer. Crazy like a fox? I'll take a flyer on both of them in my fantasy auctions.
Vasquez has a habit of pitching worse than his peripherals would suggest. Shifting to the NL should help his numbers some, but I would be wary. His K/B and K rates are great but he gives up the long ball way too much. That ERA will kill you.
The last two years, the Project Scoresheet predictions have been added to the Player Forecast Manager way too late for league drafts. Any chances of getting that part out in time for drafts?
I've searched the BP Glossary and found a definition of UPSIDE, but still not certain how to interpret it. My best guess is "as of today, this is how much player X has left in the tank." For example, given the choice, I should prefer to have Evan Longoria (316.1 Upside) over Alex Rodriguez (185.8 Upside). Is this the correct interpretation? Thanks!
Its just a rough measure of perceived upside (the term as you would regularly use it) based on how the player's top comparables (which is the major part of how PECOTA works - comparing players based on numerous factors in common) performed.
I guess you could look at it as a loose measure of how likely a player is to perform above average based on his comps... of course, there are more learned minds than I on this site, so take it fwiw...
Take a look here (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5836) and scroll down to the "All About Upside" section. That might help you understand what PECOTA's "Upside" score means.
The SB projections are always tricky to me...are any of the relative no-names at the top of PECOTA's list actually going to get 500+ PAs at the ML level? Eric Young, Corey Wimberly, Derrick Robinson etc?
Amusing fact of the 2009 Pecota's. Three of the Jays top 4 catchers (Rod Barajas, Michael Barrett and J.P. Arencibia) have Joe Oliver among their top 4 comparables. I take this to mean that in ten years, Arencibia will be expected to contribute something like what Barrett and Barajas are expected to contribute now. Also - maybe Arencibia will have a career like those guys.
If your team has a young catching prospect and you can be told he would have a career like either Rod Barajas or Michael Barrett, I suppose it could be worse. How many catchers are viable MLB regulars for 6-7 years?
Kelly Johnson is projected to under perform Kinlser in PA, runs, HR, RBI and steals. Kelly Johnson is projected to hit .003 higher (.287 to .284) and draw 9 more walks. Kelly's OBP is projected at .370 to Kinsler's .355, but Kinsler has a slightly better SLG. However, KJ has a VORP of 41.2 (22nd overall) compared to Kinsler's 34.9 (35th overall).
Mock Draft Central ranks Kelly ~165. CBS has him #203 overall, ESPN has him at 214 overall. Kinsler goes in the 2nd or third round of most drafts, but Johnson can be had in the 17th round.
Some other crazy VORPs: Christian Guzman (#11), Carl Crawford (#279 - right near utility man Ruben Gotay), Ichiro (#291), Josh Hamilton (#86), Alex Rios (#199).
It seems that drafting your fantasy team based on VORP is a terrible strategy.
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Great! I'll go put a pot of coffee on, it's going to be a long night.
Christian Guzman 11th in projected VORP?!? No, not on the Nationals, in all of MLB! That makes projecting the 2008 Rays to be a 90-win team or the Wily Mo Pena projection from 3-4 years ago look like play-it-safe picks.
Yeah the Guzman projection is pretty dumb. I think the reason for it is that PECOTA only uses the last 3 years of their career and in the period of time Guzman has only had 804 ABs and has had a 280 eqa. They need to do more regression to the mean or look back at more years when there is only 804 ABs counting towards his projection.
So basically add that with him still being in his prime and probably getting some favourable comparables and you come out with a extremely good projection.
Improvement over last season for Guzman? Why on earth does PECOTA not see his last 1 1/2 years as a fluke? He's at the END of his prime, for pete's sake.
PECOTA sees Pedroia's career, looks at last year, and goes "fluke". PECOTA then sees Guzman's career (or last 3 years of it), and goes "not fluke".
I just don't get it.
Christian Guzman, 2nd round draft pick!
Umm, can you say typo??? I'm sure this will be fixed.