Projecting Next Year's Stats

[mkoss]

Hi everyone. I was wondering if anyone has a good method for projecting next year's stats for players. I have been reading quite a few articles online and I know that I do not want to use two or three year averages because those have been proven to be worse than just using last year's stats. I figure that getting a good stat projection is the most fundamental aspect of preparing for a draft/auction. Obviously no projections can be 100% correct, or even 90% correct. But, if you had projections that were even 80% correct you would easily win your league.

There are a ton of sites that will sell you their projections, but I want to put something together myself. Or, if I could find a site that gave free projections, I could adjust them were I feel they are wrong. Does anyone know if there is a place to download free projections?

On a tangent: would anyone be interested in putting together a little group to invent a projecting algorithm? I have all the stats we could possibly need but I think it would be better to have a group of 5-7 people working to tweak the algorithm (the more brains the better). We could set up an open-source type projecting service. Anyone interested?

Thanks for reading this rather long-winded post.

Michael.

[sry828]

What are your ideas so far, if you don't mind my asking?

[mkoss]

Well, I have a couple ideas:

1) I want to do an analysis of every baseball player ever to see how age affects every stat. For example, an average major leaguer loses 10% of his homeruns between ages 34 and 35 (this is just an example, not something I'm stating as fact). I want to do this for every stat so we have some way of taking age into account when projecting stats.

2) I want to normalize each year's statistics for park factor, then adjust them back for whichever team the player is playing for. For example, adjust Preston Wilson's stats for playing in Florida for last year, project his stats for this year based on those normalized stats, then increase them for the "Coors Effect."

3) I want to do an analysis of every player who has switched leagues to see how much that effects a player's stats.

Those are the ideas I have come up with so far. But that is the point of wanting to get a group of stat-heads together. I have my own ideas and opinions, but I'm not sure they are correct I'm open to any suggestions.

Michael.

[Arlo]

I love this idea, and hope that lots of people add their input to this project.

We've created a separate forum for developing this idea - let the brainstorming begin!