Analysis

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).

For many years running now, I’ve run a yearly evaluation of the projection systems for fantasy baseball purposes, including last week’s evaluation of the 2019 results. Two potential issues I’ve run across with these studies are 1) year-to-year variance and 2) small sample size. To attempt to address both, I’m back again, this time with an evaluation of performance across the last three seasons (‘17-’19)! This study combines the datasets from each of my last three yearly studies, studying how well each system projected the top ~300 fantasy players (the ones that met the playing time minimum) in the 5×5 categories by both R squared and RMSE.

As we all hunker down with our spreadsheets in preparation for draft season, it’s time for my favorite yearly tradition – evaluating the projection systems! 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. Additionally, this year I’ve pulled up a list of players that each system was ‘in’ on – both the ones that were big wins, and the ones that completely tanked in ‘19. In this study, I’ll focus on the most commonly used projections – the same ones that appear in the Big Board: Steamer, PECOTA, ZiPS, ATC, The Bat, FanGraphs Depth Charts, and FanGraphs Fans. I’ll also include my recommended Big Board mix from 2019, which was a weighted average of the best systems. And finally, I’ll also define a new recommended Big Board mix looking ahead to 2020!

As we all hunker down with our spreadsheets in preparation for draft season, it’s time for my favorite yearly tradition – evaluating the projection systems! Forgive the somewhat abbreviated post in comparison to past years’ analyses, but trust that all the same meticulous analysis is here as always. 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 ‘19.

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: Customize your Projections
Tip #5: Draft with tiers

Entering now into part six 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. As a testament to how important this is, people have been asking me about this piece for weeks – wait no longer!