Archive for Projections

The baseball community — owners, scouts, fantasy analysts et al. — is slowly learning how Cuban hitters plucked from the Cuban National Series (CNS) perform in Major League Baseball. Unfortunately, the sample size is not increasing very quickly. The common fantasy owner is helplessly resigned to rely on a) scouting reports, and/or b) his or her own eyes, probably via a batting practice video uploaded online. Ideally, a Cuban hitter’s salary would serve as a proxy for what one could expect offensively and defensively from his imported bat and glove, but the market, and the information that defines it, is far from perfect.

The market for Cuban hitters is a pendulum, but rather than coming to rest, it is in full swing: hitters such as Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Jose Abreu, who are all but locks to fulfill the value of their modest contracts and then some, have plumped up the market for international signees. The Diamondbacks’ Yasmany Tomas, therefore, should not be compared to Abreu simply because the average annual values (AAV) of their contracts are almost identical. The dynamics of this particular market are nebulous, changing with every transaction.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t compare Tomas and Abreu statistically. Comparing the CNS and MLB performances of hitters more recently signed out of Cuba can still give us at least a faint idea of how we can expect Tomas to perform. This is my hope, at least. I’ll be the first to admit the analysis that follows is not as rigorous as I wish it could be, as the sample of contemporary, fantasy-relevant Cuban hitters who recently played in the CNS simply lacks breadth.

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

Today’s Pod Projectionee is Cuban rookie Yasmany Tomas, who I drafted in last week’s LABR mixed league. It’s hard enough projecting Major League veterans and even more difficult forecasting rookies with only minor league data to rely on. But trying to predict exactly what a player with no professional experience in a stateside league might do is a true shot in the dark. So this was a challenge and one I would like to share with you.

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

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Last year for my FG+ article I created a methodology to find unheralded prospects similar to Ben Zobrist and Matt Carpenter by looking at recent minor league walk, strikeout and extra base hit numbers. I named my metric ZOBRIST and it performed better than I expected. I identified 10 players to watch for during the 2014 season and few had good MLB seasons like Kole Calhoun, Marcus Semien and Scott Van Slyke. I have decided to look again for similar players in 2015 with a few changes to the evaluations.

One issue I noticed when I went back and looked at the data was how one of the three traits (power, walks and strikeouts) could hurt the hitters chances for success. A hitter could have no strikeouts, a ton of walks and zero power so they could rate high with my metric. The problem is that the complete lack of power would get exposed in the majors. I needed to set a minimum level for each of the three stats. I use Chris St. John’s minor league walk and strikeout values and a replace level power numbers to set a minimum baseline each hitter must reach.

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The keeper deadline for ottoneu leagues is upon us (midnight on the night of 1/31 – tonight!), and that means it is time to start auction prep in earnest. As I have the past two years, I am going to help out with my auction values for all four ottoneu formats.

Also as per usual, I made a couple tweaks to the approach this year.
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Earlier in the week, I went over how I set up a for a draft (Part 1 and Part 2). Last night I participated in the draft set up by Howard Bender and his Mock Draft Army.  The pre-draft work I normally go through may seem a little tedious, but after the dust settled, I look to start the season in good shape.

The draft was fairly standard 5×5 league with 23 rounds and 15 teams. The draft participants consisted of nine industry experts and six non-experts. I will give some thoughts on my draft results (full results), my final roster and the projected finish.

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Well, it is finally time to move on and show how I finish setting up for a draft (Part 1). I was hoping the following article was going to be in two parts and have a little more detail and polish. Instead I am have been dealing with a fan error on my computer and a pile of oil under my car. Neither is really resolved. So with a borrowed computer, I will step through the rest of my procedure. Let me know if you have any questions.

Note: For reference, here is my spreadsheet I used to get the initial SGP values and has the rest of the sheets referenced in this article.

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Over the last couple of weeks a few of my fellow writers here are FanGraphs have been going over some draft strategies. This week, I am going to step through my exact process for a draft. On Thursday night, I will be joining a few fantasy writers for a 15 team mock draft. Over the next few days, I will go through the exact process I normally use to set up for a draft. If one of the other drafters steals borrows my info, fine. This is actually more a way to show you my process for drafts.

First off, I will be following the procedure I set out last season in this three part series. There is quite a few good links in those articles for the procedures I use.

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If you’ve been wishing current Steamer projections were turned into fantasy values, wish no more, as I have done the work for you.

Below you’ll find the top 100 players for next year based on current Steamer projections, calculated using the evaluation system explained and updated on this site some time ago. The valuations are built for $260 budgets and standard 5×5 roto fantasy leagues, where only one catcher is started. Players are listed at their primary positions from 2014. The “obp$$” column in what the players are worth in an OBP format, in case you’re more interested in that sort of thing.

If you would like to view the rankings for all 7334 players projected by Steamer, please peruse this spreadsheet, for it is far too large to be posted on these hallowed pages.

Both the top 100 and the spreadsheet were updated at 10:55a ET to reflect a previous error.

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This past season, I introduced a xBABIP equation which uses Inside Edge’s hard hit rate and player speed. Well, I have been a little slow on any updates. I have finally gotten around to getting all the 2014 values in one place.

When creating the xBABIP values, I found it correlated more to the next season’s BABIP then any other easily created formulas. Here are the 2014 values with some thoughts on some individual players.

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