Wisdom of the Crowds Projections 2013

[Curtis Pride]

I have done this the last few years for my league draft. For example, here's last year's post: viewtopic.php?t=438317&hilit=wisdom+crowds

The concept is to aggregate/average out a bunch of projection systems to come up with a a new projection. This is based off the "Wisdom of the Crowds" mentality where predictions of a wide range of lay people are typically more accurate than any single prediction of experts. Fangraphs has been doing a lot, and every player page now has composite projections - unfortunately, you can't download them all, so I had to do it myself.

I would typically average 6-10 different sources of projections (Marcel, ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, Chone, Oliver, etc. etc. etc.) to come up with a new projections. It was a really time consuming effort to ensure every player's name was listed consistently, and re-order (and sometimes calculate) all of the categories on every set of projections.

Glad to say, that I don't need to do this anymore because other sites are finally doing it for me. I only post this in case someone comes in to FBC and searches for the WOC 2013 projections and think I died.

There are two places that are doing it:
1. Fantasy Pros - http://www.fantasypros.com/mlb/projections/hitters.php# I like how they do it in that you can choose to not include sources you don't like (maybe for whatever reason you think CBS projections are crap)
2. Roto Champ - http://rotochamp.com/baseball/PlayerRan ... on=Catcher You need to go to each position to download the projections here, and they don't show as many categories as FantasyPros does, but it should get the job done.

These guys putting this content out (for free) will save me at least 20 hours of draft prep this year. So thanks to them.

[J35J]

[stevethumb]

wow pitching must be gonna be dominant in the NL in 2013...

only 2 hitters are projected to score over 100 runs and only 4 hitters for 100 RBIs...last year there were 9 hitters w/99+ RBIs

HMMMM >>> the wisdom of the crowd has billy hamilton stealing 48 bases this year...REALLY ? hey millions of people liked AVATAR too..so much for crowd wisdom

[Curtis Pride]

cherry pick all you want, but I would put aggregation of multiple sources up against anyone, including you.

And if Billy Hamilton actually gets 400 AB, stealing 50 bases is not really all that surprising. Everth Cabrera stole 44 in under 400 AB last year, and he's not nearly as prolific a base stealer as Hamilton

[stevethumb]

just pointing out some oddities...

13 NL hitters hit .300+ in 2012
the 'crowd' has 4 over .300 for 2013

and you win in fantasy by cherry picking..if you draft using strictly ADP, you end up just as it says , "average"
finding outliers is integral to roto success..

if you draft bhamilton expecting 48 SBs this year, you will be sorely disappointed

[Ender]

wow pitching must be gonna be dominant in the NL in 2013...

only 2 hitters are projected to score over 100 runs and only 4 hitters for 100 RBIs...last year there were 9 hitters w/99+ RBIs

HMMMM >>> the wisdom of the crowd has billy hamilton stealing 48 bases this year...REALLY ? hey millions of people liked AVATAR too..so much for crowd wisdom

While I don't put much faith at all into these wisdom of the crowd rankings you are looking at it completely wrong. Projections are not predictions. No team in MLB should be projected to win high 90 games yet at least a couple of them will win that many. No team in the NFL should ever project to winning 14+ yet most season one team does win that many. There is always going to be a couple teams that beat their projections every season.

No hitter in the current MLB player list should be projected to hit 42 HR IMO yet I would be shocked if nobody hit that many. No starter should be projected to win 20 yet there almost always will be a 20 game winner, etc.

[Curtis Pride]

just pointing out some oddities...

13 NL hitters hit .300+ in 2012
the 'crowd' has 4 over .300 for 2013

and you win in fantasy by cherry picking..if you draft using strictly ADP, you end up just as it says , "average"
finding outliers is integral to roto success..

if you draft bhamilton expecting 48 SBs this year, you will be sorely disappointed

All of these projections are the result of regression. So all of the best players are going to be projected to have worse seasons than they would if fully healthy and fully productive. The totally unproven rookies are often projected to have better seasons.

Even playing time is regressed, which is why Billy Hamilton is projected for 400 AB, while only have like 5 people are projected to have over 600 AB, while in real life 30 people do it every year. It's not trying to predict playing time, and it's also not trying to predict each individual person's numbers. You need to look comparatively of say Buster Posey vs. Carlos Santana

[Skin Blues]

Yes these are mean projections, not absolute predictions. If there are 50 guys with a mean projections of a .285+ BA, then ~half will be above their mean projections, and ~half below. The guys finishing above their mean projection will do so to differing magnitudes, so you might get a dozen guys above .300 while only one or two actually have a mean projection that high. Same goes for every other stat. Just look at a normal distribution curve and then think about the fact that there are like 500 hitters with significant playing time every season.