Baseball Prospectus

[AcidRock23]

Holy crap, this is like Fantasy Baseball Crack!! Just reading the intro and flipping around to look at a few players' listings... well worth the $12.00 at Amazon...

[BobbyRoberto]

I agree with much of what was said above. Their projections are definitely lower than others. I have a spreadsheet with projections for each player from all of these sources:
Bill James Handbook
Ron Shandler's Forecaster
Rototimes
RotoChamps
ZiPS
PECOTA

and PECOTA's projections are the lowest, generally, especially in forecasting playing time. That said, the Fantasy Baseball portion of baseballprospectus.com ups the playing time projections.

PECOTA was originally designed specifically for pitching and I think it does the best job out there for pitchers.

As for the book, if you love baseball, it's a must read. For fantasy baseball purposes, they do have a paragraph or so about each player that can sometimes contradict the PECOTA projection. So, where PECOTA might see Oliver Perez as having an ERA well over 4.00 this year, the comment on him is much more optimistic.

[warrick95]

I'm not sure what to think at this moment.

Let me get this straight...basically, the Prospectus uses prior statistical evidence from a player, along with statistical evidence of players relevant to him (age, workload, etc.) to best predict a players' stats the upcoming year? So, that's why some of the PECOTA predictions are somewhat conservative with cumulative stats, due to injuries and stuff hitting.

Now, in actuality, you COULD just do some ratios to increase cumulative stats to the number of ABs you believe a player will receive, correct?

Like Bobby mentioned, the PECOTA projections sometimes differ from their scouting reports, so it's probably a good idea to read those, too.

I'm still torn with what I think about the Prospectus. I've never been a huge fan of projections based solely on prior statistics, but I haven't heard anything but positive comments about this book.

[Wozzyck]

The 2005 PECOTA cards and fantasy projections are now up:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/