Apologies

I deeply regret to announce that this blog will be shutting down for an indefinite period of time. Certain things have come up in my life over the past month or so that have made it impossible to satisfactorily maintain this page. I'm very sorry to anyone who may have been looking forward to reading my blog this season after reading the small sample of work I posted last year. I was certainly looking forward to writing about my favorite pastime. If all goes well, maybe I will get this blog back up and running over the summer. For now, I'll leave you with my top 15 offensive players for 2010 based on my wOBA projections. Across from left to right: Name / Team / Position / Age / Career wOBA / 2009 wOBA / Projected 2010 wOBA.

2010 First Basemen

Here we go with my top 12 offensive first basemen for 2010. As you might notice, first base looks like it will clearly be the deepest position this year. As always, comments are appreciated.

2010 Catchers

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Baseball season again! ...well I guess not quite yet. I know it's very early, but I'm going to be starting to return to my regular weekly schedule soon. I will also begin to release some of my pre-season rankings for fantasy baseball, starting today. These rankings are based on my wOBA projections, which I worked on throughout the winter. I will go by position, starting with the incredibly shallow catching position.

There are a few things to note about the small chart below. First of all, I am showing my top seven catchers in order from highest to lowest projected wOBA for 2010. This is a projection, not a garauntee. There are things that even a statistician cannot forsee or predict. From left to right, the columns are: name, age, team, positions the player is eligible for, 2009 wOBA, my 2010 wOBA projection, and Bill James' 2010 wOBA projection.


Hopefully I will post again this weekend with the top first basemen for 2010. I promise I'll have all the positions up in about a month. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a post or email me. Either way, I'll try to respond in a day or two. I provided a very brief synopsis of my projection system in my January post, which should appear a little farther down on this page.

Thanks for reading.

Designing a Projection System: Introduction

Happy new year to everyone! It's hard to believe that it went by so quickly. What's even harder to believe is that pitchers and catchers will be reporting to spring training in less than 7 weeks. Before we know it, opening day will be here.

My big project for this off season is designing a model for projecting wOBA for hitters and opponent wOBA for pitchers. The model is essentially set, but the actual projections are still in progress. In the coming weeks I will post more about the projections as the project develops in the coming weeks, and hopefully I'll release my final wOBA projections by late March. But right now I'd like to focus on what I have come up with so far for the model.

When constructing this model, I considered the following factors both necessary and practical for use in a projection system:

1. Recent past performance (previous season's wOBA)
2. Average past performance (career wOBA)
3. "Luck" in recent past (previous season's BABIP compared with xBABIP)
4. Age

Of course, there are many other factors that one could take into account, but in the interest of practicality, I decided to try and keep this a simple as possible without comprimising reasonable accuracy. Ideally, I would regress wOBA over each individual player's entire career, personalizing each player's projection much more. However, using 2009 wOBA as a starting point, regressing towards career wOBA, and then adjusting for luck and age gets me well within the "reasonably accurate" range.

I'm very sorry, but I'm not going to release my exact formula...at least not yet. I will provide a bit of a teaser here, though. Below are three players' 2009 wOBA, Will Buckley projection, and Bill James projection.


I'll be posting again soon, hopefully, with some results. Thanks for reading!