The Pod Projections are back! My projections are based on the methodology shared in my eBook Projecting X 2.0, and the process continues to evolve and improve.

2017 Pod Projections Index:
Lance McCullers
David Dahl

Who would make for the perfect hitter to be Pod Projected? The one with the biggest difference between the Fans and Depth Chart projections, of course!

Biggest diff between fans & depth charts:
1) Broxton
2) CSeager
3) TimA
4) Drury
5) CHernandez
6) Yoan
7) Eaton
8) GaryS
9) Bryant
10) Votto

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) February 28, 2017

The Fans projections are notoriously bullish, but sometimes they rightly believe in a breakout, whereas the projection systems are programmed to forecast severe regression. Keon Broxton is no Spring chicken and is already 26 heading into the 2017 season. But he got his first chance to play regularly last season and made the most of it by posting a .343 wOBA, displaying both power and speed, excellent plate patience, and playing fabulous defense. Naturally, everyone is skeptical, though the Fans are far less so than Steamer and ZiPS. What about the Pod Projections, you ask? Let’s find out!

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Over the past week, I have collected information on how spring training closers battles have worked out from 2013 to 2016. Today, I go over the results. It’s now time to release the tables.

The first set of data shows how the team’s initial closer fared.

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With relievers now available, our first run of every position is posted so I’ve compiled those rankings into a handy-dandy spreadsheet! It will be updated in March when we update the positional rankings.

Enjoy!

Click here for the spreadsheet.

FYI: This post is updated from 2016’s version, hence the older comments

We’re going position by position this week and next with our initial roll out of rankings. We will update these in March based on Spring Training activity and injuries.

We’re using Yahoo! eligibility requirements which is 5 starts or 10 appearances. These rankings assume the standard 5×5 categories and a re-draft league. If we forgot someone, please let us know in the comments and we’ll make sure he’s added for the updates. If you have questions for a specific ranker on something he did, let us know in the comments. We can also be reached via Twitter:

• Paul Sporer
• Jeff Zimmerman
• Mike Podhorzer
• Brad Johnson
• Justin Mason
• Al Melchior

There will be differences, sharp differences, within the rankings. The rankers have different philosophies when it comes to ranking, some of which you’re no doubt familiar with through previous iterations. Of course the idea that we’d all think the same would be silly because then what would be the point of including multiple rankers?! Think someone should be higher or lower? Make a case. Let us know why you think that. The chart is sortable. If a ranker didn’t rank someone that the others did, he was given that ranker’s last rank +1.

Key:

• AVG– just the average of the seven ranking sets
• AVG– the average minus the high and low rankings
• SPLIT– the difference between the high and low rankings

Previous Editions:

• OF
• SP
• 1B
• SS
• 3B
• 2B
• C

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There are elements of baseball that the casual fan pays attention to and there’s the Tampa Bay Rays. The lack of notoriety that the Rays experience, as an organization, likely resulted in a lack of attention toward what was actually a stellar year for third baseman Evan Longoria, in terms of the power game. While he experienced some regression from the previous couple of years in certain aspects, his ability to make impact contact ranked among the game’s elite at the position. The concern moving forward, in addition to the regression he experienced in those certain areas, is whether we should expect the power to remain intact.

In terms of ownership, there were some drawbacks to Longoria’s game in 2016, something that was an obvious result of a change in approach. His walk rate dipped for the fourth consecutive year, falling to 6.1%, the lowest of his Major League career, as his 48.8% swing rate was the highest mark of his career. His Contact% fell to 75.4, his lowest mark since 2009. Subsequently, his on-base percentage dropped to the lowest in his career as well, at just .318. His strikeout rate wasn’t an overwhelming concern, though, as at 21.0%, it came in less than a full percentage point above his career average, even with that newfound aggressiveness at the plate.

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Champions League B, an Ottoneu league in which all owners must have previously won an Ottoneu league, had its inaugural auction draft last weekend. First-year auction drafts are compelling and informative, especially when the league is made up of skilled and experienced owners. Theoretically, in first-year auctions, all players should be purchased at or near their actual value. There shouldn’t be too much obvious surplus or too many colossal overpays.

Bargain hunting is a delicate endeavor in a first-year auction. Owners can hunt for potential bargains by targeting players coming off down seasons. Andrew McCutchen comes to mind. So does Yasiel Puig. Buying such players can be risky, because their recent poor play may be indicative of future performance. However, it can also be rewarding, because if the player bounces back he may return more value than his price warrants. Having so-called surplus assets is one of several keys to success in Ottoneu.

McCutchen and Puig saw their value decline because of uncharacteristically poor performance on the field. Another type of player to target when searching for surplus is players coming off injuries. Two specific examples are among the most compelling and potentially undervalued fantasy assets in the game. They’re the same age (29), and they play on the same team. They have remarkably similar career numbers and both had season-ending injuries in 2016. Below are the career totals for underrated co-stars A.J. Pollock and David Peralta: Read the rest of this entry »

Last year at this time, I wrote about a little league called BARF, which is the Bay Area Roto Fantasy league. For those of you not in the know, this is an industry league that I helped organize with my friend RBar Tod owner of the Wreck Room in San Francisco. The idea was to bring together a collection of analyst from the San Francisco Bay Area for a live competitive draft and league.

Year One was a raving success, outside of the fact I finished in fourth place. Danny Zarachy of Giants Pod won on the last day of the season by half a point, but most importantly, the participants really seemed to want to do it again.

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We are pleased to announce a new projection system, “ATC”, is available on FanGraphs. It can be found on the projection pages and is also available in the auction calculator.

Today we are introducing to the public, the Average Total Cost Projection System (ATC Projection System). The system gets its name from the fact that it “averages” many projection systems together.

The ATC system does not simply take a straight average of all the projection systems. Instead, each system accounts for a different weight for each statistic for which it projects (The weights are based on historical past performance). For example, System A might be given a 20% weight for batter homeruns. but just a 5% weight for pitcher strikeouts. System B might have a 10% weight for HRs, but just a 2% weight for Ks. And so on. The ATC system incorporates ZiPS, Steamer, FanGraphs FANS and other freely available projections, plus prior MLB statistics over the past 3 seasons. There are, of course, some manual edits made along the way, mostly for playing time projections, as we get closer to Opening Day.

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It’s officially ottoneu auction season, and with it comes the auction preparation process. I’m in more ottoneu leagues than I can count on two hands, so I’ve developed a sort of system to help me get ready for my auctions. Part of that system is the ottoneu surplus calculator to get a league wide view of teams and keepers, another part is manually creating dollar values using projections, but the final piece of that system is collecting actual auction results to get a sense of how the market of ottoneu owners is valuing players. I’d rather not spend $12 on a player I think is worth $15 if I know I can get a similar player for $10, so having average auction price data is akin to using draft ADP to decide when to wait on (or reach for) a certain player. Let’s take a look at the ten best hitter “bargains” and “reaches”.

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Today, I continue the comparison of my Pod Projections to Steamer in various fantasy categories, this time identifying players I believe have stolen base upside. My stolen base projections are calculated using a proprietary metric I developed that is revealed in Projecting X 2.0. Essentially, it’s a stolen base attempts per opportunities ratio and I use historical rates to guide my projected rate.

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