Analysis

PECOTA released: Who do they like? Who do they not?

February 8, 2018

An exciting day for projections nerds everywhere, as Baseball Prospectus has released their PECOTA projection system for 2018. While some people are getting excited or annoyed at the various win projections, I’ve been poring over the individual player projections to find the ones that PECOTA loves and hates. I’ve set the Steamer projection system as my ‘baseline’, as they’re the earliest-released and most-trusted system, and I’ll use the Big Board’s PA and IP in both cases. Let’s do five of each. Here’s what I found (I’ll show the PECOTA projections below, and you can check them out side-by-side with Steamer at this link)

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Player Valuation Tip #8: Draft Undervalued Players

March 17, 2017

Tip #1: Know where player values come fromTip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch splitTip #3: Value your Picks and Make Preseason TradesTip #4: Draft with tiersTip #5: Use xFantasy, the xStats projection systemTip #6: Use aging curves for keeper/dynasty leaguesTip #7: Use the best projection systems Draft week is here, or nearly here, and right around now everyone is poring over their

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Player Valuation Tip #7: Use the best projection systems

March 11, 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
Tip #5: Use xFantasy, the xStats projection system
Tip #6: Use aging curves for keeper/dynasty leagues

Entering now into part seven 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!

 

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Player Valuation Tip #6: Using aging curves for dynasty/keeper leagues

March 8, 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
Tip #5: Using xFantasy, the xStats projection system

One of the most oft-discussed and most subjectively-answered fantasy baseball topics is “Who do I keep?” Fantasy baseball players intuitively understand the idea of aging, at least qualitatively. Older players are less valuable, given that their performance is more likely to decrease due to both injury and ineffectiveness. But how much is age worth, really?

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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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