Author name: HarperWallbanger

Examining ATC, the composite projection system you’ve never heard of

March 3, 2017

FanGraphs threw me a real curveball this week, publishing a new projection system on their website that, to my knowledge, has never been publicly available before. Named “Average Total Cost”, or ATC, this system is a composite projection that makes use of historic stats and several other projection sources, weighting each of them category-by-category based upon historical accuracy of each system in each category (described in full detail here by creator Ariel Cohen). Annoyingly, they have not made past years’ projections available, so at this point it’s hard to evaluate how accurate the system is! But, composite systems generally perform quite well, and so I’ve gone ahead and loaded this guy into the newest version of the Big Board and put it through its paces.

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ZiPS released: Who do they like? Who do they hate?

February 24, 2017

Dan Szymborski has slowly released his team-by-team ZiPS projections over the last couple of months, but this week FanGraphs finally posted the full 2017 set. I’ve been poring over the individual player projections to find the ones that ZiPS loves and hates. I’ve set the Steamer projections as my ‘baseline’, and I’ll use the FG Depth Charts PA and IP in both cases. Let’s do five of each. Here’s what I found (I’ll show the ZiPS projections below, and you can check them out side-by-side with Steamer at this link):

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Player Valuation Tip #5: Using xFantasy, the xStats projection system

February 20, 2017

Tip #1: Know where player values come from
Tip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch split
Tip #3: Value your Picks and Make Preseason Trades
Tip #4: Draft with tiers

Back in December, I introduced “xFantasy” through a series of blog entries over at the FanGraphs Community blog. At its inception, xFantasy was a system based on xStats that integrated hitters’ xAVG, xOBP, and xISO in order to predict expected fantasy production (HR, R, RBI, SB, AVG). The underlying models are put together into an embedded “Triple Slash Converter” in Part 2. Part 3 compares the predictive value of xFantasy (and therefore xStats) vs. Steamer and historic stats, ultimately finding that for players under 26, xStats are indeed MORE predictive than Steamer! Those three pieces served as a starting point for what would eventually be included in this year’s Big Board as the xFantasy projection system, which has since been covertly expanded to pitchers, translating scFIP, xBACON, xOBA, xK% and xBB% into xFantasy pitcher stats (more info coming soon). Until now, I’ve included it in the Board without much in the way of explanation, so today is my first stab at that, with the hopes of also offering some recommendation of how fantasy players might apply xFantasy in their efforts to prepare for upcoming drafts this spring.

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Can xFantasy beat the projections?

January 16, 2017

Last month, I introduced the xFantasy system to these venerable electronic pages, in which I attempted to translate Andrew Perpetua’s xStats data for 2016 into fantasy stats. The original idea was just to find a way to do that translation, but I noted back then that the obvious next step was to look at whether xFantasy was predictive. Throughout last season, I frequently found myself looking at players who were performing below their projection, but matching their xStats production, or vice versa, and pondering whether I should trust the xStats or the projections. Could xStats do a better of job of reacting quickly to small sample sizes, and therefore ‘beat’ the projections? Today, I’ll attempt to figure that out. By a few different measures, Steamer reliably shows up at the top of the projection accuracy lists these days, and so in testing out xFantasy, I’m going to pit it against Steamer to see whether we can beat the best there is using xStats.

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Triple Slash Converter

December 21, 2016

More info to come in a forthcoming Fangraphs Community post… You can use the tool below to convert a projected triple slash line (AVG/OBP/SLG) to a fantasy line (HR/R/RBI/SB/AVG).   A few optional things can be used to improve the projected fantasy line… Batting order: Must be an integer between 1 to 9. Determines overall

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HWB is back

December 5, 2016

Ladies and gents – the ramp up to 2017 draft season has begun! The first Big Board 2017 ranks go live today, and I present them this year with greater swagger than ever, as the reigning champion of the top division of Reddit’s premier-league style “Sultans of Stats“. In the past year, I’ve also graduated from

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Draft Week is Here!

March 27, 2016

… And in order to prep for it, I’m bringing together a sort of ‘Draft Day Survival Guide’ for y’all. First, the Player Valuation series all in one place for easy reading: Part 1: The Hit-Pitch SplitPart 2: Draft with TiersPart 3: Value your PicksPart 4: Use the Best ProjectionsPart 5: Target Undervalued Players (IF, OF,

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Target Undervalued Players (2016)

March 22, 2016

Part 1: The Hit-Pitch SplitPart 2: Draft with TiersPart 3: Value your PicksPart 4: Use the Best Projections As we enter Draft Week, it’s time to really get our stuff together and figure out draft plans. This last player valuation tip is the most obvious, and easiest to do on your own if you have the

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Use the Best Projections (2016)

March 7, 2016

Entering now into part four of my preseason player valuation series, we arrive at one of the more important decisions of the preseason: deciding which projection system(s) to use. Evaluating projection systems is well-trodden ground, as documented by Will Larson over at the Baseball Projection Project. This year, I’ve only yet seen analysis of the 2015 projections over at Beyond the Box Score, and in that case it was not a specifically fantasy-focused analysis. Each of the projection systems changes and iterates their methodology year over year, and so we can always stand to learn more by analyzing the most recent year’s results.

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