First Projections for 2014

My first run (that I’m willing to talk about) of projections for the coming season is now up on the 2014 Projected Standings tab. They have also been used to create a new Playoff Chances Report. And, of course, the individual projections that go into are available, again on the Projected Standings page.

To build these projections, I:

1) Run a computerized projection scheme, using the last three years of player performance compared against a database of all players’ four year performances. The algorithm attempts to find the most similar players, in terms of age, position, build, and performance, and the top 20 players are noted on the individual player cards.

2) Take those performances, and enter them into a very large spreadsheet, where I fill in expected playing times for all of the players. Every team, every position has to equal 100%. There have to be 162 pitching starts. Generally speaking, a) no position player gets more than 90%, and pitchers are mostly capped at 32 starts; b) rookie starters don’t get more than 80%; c) players I don’t think can hold the job all year certainly get less; d) the playing time estimates from the computer tend to carry a lot of weight. I normally set a sure starter to the 5% playing time level that first passes their projected PA, while innings are usually held under the computer’s values.

All of the statistics in the spreadsheet get rebalanced and weighted. Players on teams with high OBAs will get more plate appearances. Defense trickles back into pitchers hits (and runs) allowed. The league as a whole has to come out equal to the league totals of last year.

Current free agents won’t show up here – no team, no projected playing time. Their projections are still available on the “All hitters” and “All pitchers” downloads.

Getting to some of the players takes a deep depth chart. I’ve prepared some that you can find under the 2014 Spring tab, under “dts”. Every team has three files in there. One is a dt file, which contains the translated statistics, 2009-13, with the computer-only 2014 projection, for all hitters in that team’s system; another is a pdt file, which does the same for pitchers. The “orgdt” file just has the 2014 projections for all players on the team, sorted by position and projected WARP, like the one here for the Nationals. Kind of works as a very deep depth chart for all teams, although I can’t swear that aren’t players showing up on the wrong team (especially for players who have been released – there’s a decent chance they still show up for their old teams). That’s just for these depth charts – I am reasonably certain that every player used in the major league projections is actually a member of their team. The one exception might be Matt Garza, who I have already written into the Milwaukee rotation.