For many years running now, I’ve run a yearly evaluation of the projection systems for fantasy baseball purposes, including most recently the evaluation of the 2019 results and my three-year study of projection performance. I took 2020 off – 60 game projections are too noisy to put the same stock in. The goals, as always, are to evaluate the best projection systems on a per-category basis for the purposes of fantasy baseball, and to determine the best possible mix of projections (separated into rate stats and playing time) as we look ahead to ‘20. The correlation (R squared) numbers are most useful in my opinion, as they show what would happen when you create rank-ordered lists of players based on these stats. Two updates in approach this year:

1. I’ve added a projection system called “All”. It literally just evenly mixes all of the systems included in this study, and it’s actually quite good. This was also used as the base system to select the player pool from, which is more fair than previous approaches.

2. My recommended “Big Board Mix” this year is an average of the new ‘best’ mix (determined from 2021) and the previous weightings from my 3-year study. In this way, I am now basically taking a projection-system-style approach to projecting the projection systems. This was introduced in part due to the extremely good performance of The Bat X in ‘21.

You can find details of the player pool, definitions of stats, and the breakdown of weights for my Big Board mix down in the ‘Fine Print’ below! Note that I’m including both the “BB Mix ‘20” (uses weights defined before 2020) and the new “BB Mix ‘22” (the ‘best’ weighting of 2021 systems, defined during this study).