We've just rolled out some updates to the player cards:
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We've added Top N Comparables to the player cards. Any player who has a PECOTA projection should have comparables. We generated 100 and then dropped the ones who didn't play the next year. The Similarity Score is back, and Similarity Index returns as well.
We've had a lot of questions about comparables this year beyond "When will they be here?" Many of the comparables in Baseball Prospectus 2011 that look a little different than they have historically can be traced to our decision to use only major-league comps for players. There are only so many 21-year-old catchers in the major leagues, for example, and they often turn out to be pretty good players, hence the problem in generating comps with this strategy. We'll be reviewing this policy going forward.
The comparables are presented similarly to last year's, except that we've made them clickable. This feature is available to Premium subscribers only (except for San Francisco Giants player cards—see Freddy Sanchez and Tim Lincecum for examples)
- We've added Upside By Year to the player cards. Anyone who has a PECOTA projection should have an UPSIDE score listed. We computed UPSIDE by adhering closely to the glossary definition, but we broke it out per year, as we started doing in 2010. UPSIDE is based on major league runs above average for each comparable player, and this year we were able to run it over a player's top 200 comparables. This feature is available to Premium subscribers only (except for San Francisco Giants player cards—see Pat Burrell and Barry Zito for examples)
We've also made some progress on the remaining components of the projections:
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The ten-year projections were supposed to be released last week; apologies again for the delay. We saw the opportunity to release the comparables and Upside first. I'm going to try to refrain from forward-looking statements of any specificity, but they are our top priority.
- We are planning on releasing revised MORP in a few days.
While we're on the subject of the Fantasy product, I wanted to clear up something we've been seeing in comment threads and email and plainly haven't been doing a good job of communicating. We have not released a PECOTA Weighted Means Spreadsheet since the the initial release. In previous seasons, we'd run PECOTA updates during the preseason either to add players whom we hadn't projected originally (such as a fringe minor leaguer going bananas in spring training and pushing his way into the picture on the major-league team) or because we were tinkering with the settings. The former was a requirement only when we were running in Excel—in the last couple of seasons, we've simply generated projections for everyone (roughly 6000 projections per year). As for the latter, we haven't touched PECOTA's inner workings since we released the original WMS.
We decided not to include the projected playing time in the WMS this year for a couple of reasons. First, it wasn't there originally, and we heard from people who were confused when we added it. Second, we had a lot of higher-priority issues to work on, so we decided to add a button in the PFM that subscribers could click to download all of the data in CSV or TAB format. Our intention was that users who wanted the playing-time-projected numbers could download them there at any time.
We've changed around virtually all of the other statistical processes on the site, and we've been squashing some bugs as we've found them in some of the fantasy products. For example, we recently had too many wins listed for Seattle pitchers on the depth charts and in the PFM. We've resolved most of those issues, and we've also added checks to ensure that they don't re-occur wherever we've been able to do so. We're aware of the issue with Trevor Hoffman's 2007 WARP scores not matching in the "Standard" and "Recent Performance" tables on his player card, and we'll be addressing that shortly.
Thanks again for your continued patience. More is coming soon.
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His comps seem to suggest way more than 21 dingers.
That's not what the forecast line is saying.
The percentile forecasts are based on the key "total value" rate stat, in this case True Average. What the percentile line is saying is that his expected True Average (given the expected quantity of PA - if you lower the projected PA, the range of the percentiles increases) should be within his 90th and 10th percentile 80 percent of the time.
What the component batting line at each percentile represents is ONE way for a player to achieve the forecast TAv at that percentile.
Wright is actually a great historic example of this - he hits 10 dingers one year, 29 the next, and his TAv moves five points between the two seasons. Yeah, there's a 52 PA difference between the two, but that's not going to give you 19 extra HR at the same TAv. What we see is that the wild swing in HR was offset by difference in walks, doubles and singles (it's a 24 point swing in batting average). The variance for each component of the batting line is higher than the variance of the total value of the batting line, because the variance of individual components will cancel out to some extent when you aggregate.
In Wright's particular case, if I look at the raw components going into his forecast and look ONLY at the variance in home runs on contact, the range between his 50th and 90th percentile forcast is something like six home runs, given his expected opportunities. Now obviously it's a bit more complicated than that - you also have to factor in the variance of his walk and strikeout rates as well. (Not just in terms of numbers of opportunities, but how the number of opportunities affects the variance of the home runs per contact.)
Rest of the cards look great.
I'll go out on a limb and say that Mike Trout's 10-year upside exceeds that of Orlando Cabrera, even if Pecota disagrees.
It's not just Trout, though Trout looks to be the most severe case. Wil Myers, who has great comps, has terrible upside ratings, too.
Colin said more than once that minor league players would get more minor league comps, and instead the use of only MLB comps for MiLB players has appeared to foul up the projections short- and long-term for young and old. (John Bowker's first player card comp is Will Clark, and his long-term upside exceeds all actual prospects, I think. His 10-year upside, for instance, exceeds that of Trout, Montero, Freeman, and Hosmer combined. By a lot.)
You've made some helpful statements on these points (as here) and in my view it's important that you continue to concede the errors that have been baked in this particular cake. Fixing this for 2012 ought to be prioritized.
--JRM
I fear the 10-year projections for prospects (probably the single most valuable output of this whole process) will be ruined by this policy.
Everett Williams has no comps on his player card, while Mickey Mantle was his top comp on the weighted means spreadsheet.
Here's a fun one, Nick Franklin had top 3 comps of Adrian Beltre, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. His new top 3 comps are Tim Foli, Ed Brinkman and Robin Yount. Consequently, the player compared to Hall of Famers now looks like he is projected to be out of the majors by 2015(since he has no upside beyond 2014, and even an old guy like Bobby Abreu has upside out to 2018).
Is there any comment on the projection for Longoria to have the worst year of his career ?
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.
The only place to get consolidated info on minor league prospects in the WMS, and as noted above multiple times there *do* seems to have been updates to player data (at least as reflected in the player cards).
Also, the case of Nick Franklin is interesting - as noted above his comparables changed quite dramatically between the WMS and his current player card, but his projected stats for 2011 remain essentially unchanged. ???
david wright, pujols, fielder, votto, braun, holliday, utley, ramirez, uggla, ethier, bowker, beltran, soto, CarGo,
which name does not belong? what is with pecota's continued love affair with bowker? since he is within a week of my age, i appreciate that pecota thinks he is still young enough to have my upside, but pecota is getting like a stalker with him.
Do you plan to put the 10-year UPSIDE figures in the PFM? The "question" I believe UPSIDE best answers is this: what is the potential quantitative value of a prospect in relation to other prospects? This is a measurement that is virtually unique to Baseball Prospectus. In my eyes, it's the greatest feature BP has to offer. It's what distinguishes it from Baseball America, Fangraphs, etc. But with just one-year figures available for comparable purposes, UPSIDE loses its applicability to prospects.
Moreover, is BP able to guarantee that these figures (in whatever form) will be rolled out about a month and a half sooner next year? As many people have already noted, they are practically worthless for fantasy players, having been issued at such a late date.
My subscription expires in a couple weeks and I'm thinking seriously about not resubscribing for the first time in three or four years.