I thought I’d mention that the Bill James Handbook projections on FanGraphs have been updated with the latest and greatest.

“… many things happen during the offseason that change playing time for the coming season. That’s why we produce The Bill James Handbook: Projections Update with cutting-edge projections reflecting changes through the last couple days of February.

We adjust projections for many reasons, including:

-Playing time adjustments
-Free agent signings (including four Japanese rookies)
-Trades
-Injuries
-Ballpark changes”

I think FanGraphs has three of the four rookies in the database now with the exception of Daisuke Matsuzaka. He’ll show up next time he makes a spring training start. For those who can’t wait, the Bill James Handbook has him at 19-2 with a 3.13 ERA in 190 innings.

As always, if you’d like to dice, slice, and sort the Bill James Handbook projections to your heart’s content, you’ll have to purchase them here.

While we’re on the topic of projections, I’d like to give a quick shout-out to the new Hardball Times 2007 Season Preview. Besides the great commentary on teams from many of your favorite bloggers, it has player projections through 2009. I’m still digging in, but it’s full of fun and useful stuff.

You may have noticed the Win Probability numbers have changed slightly. Don’t panic! There have been a few changes, for the better.

First off, we’re now using Tangotiger’s updated win expectancy tables which are no longer a flat 5.0 Runs per Game environment. Instead, we’re using the home team’s league, average run environment. This now puts batters and pitchers on “equal footing” and you should now be able to accurately compare batters and pitchers using WPA.

Second of all, we’re also using Tangotiger’s run expectancy tables to calculate Batting Runs Above Average (BRAA) for both batters and pitchers. Once again the run environment is set at the home team’s league, average run environment.

Next to BRAA there is a column titled “REW”, which stands for Run Expectancy Wins. This is a replacement for OPS Wins because we no longer need to estimate wins in a context neutral environment since we’re now using run expectancy.

Finally, Clutchiness has been shortened to Clutch (Clutchiness was excessively long) and is calculated as WPA/LI – REW.

Update (3/4/2007): Clutch has been switched back to being calculated with OPS Wins. More on this later.

Typically players remain in the same order, but their values have changed slightly. Batters should be slightly more valuable and pitchers slightly less valuable based on WPA scores.

Don’t worry Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues; you have not been forgotten. 2007 Spring Training stats are now included in the FanGraphs player stats pages. Unfortunately, the stats are very basic. But, at least you can get a feel for how your favorite players are doing.

These will be updated nightly and Spring Training leaderboards should be up sometime tomorrow.

Just thought some of you might be interested in an article I did for SI.com about the four different projection systems available on FanGraphs.

It looks at which players the systems are in agreement with and which one’s they’re at odds on using OPS and ERA.

“Everyone expects [Ryan Howard] to be very good, but there’s certainly some question about how great he’ll actually be. At least CHONE and ZiPS seem to think Carlos Delgado is in for a rather steep decline next year, while the other two think he’ll keep chugging along at his .900+ OPS.”

Anyway, take a look if you get a chance; I thought some of the differences and similarities were quite interesting. You can find the article here.

As promised, the Minor League Leaderboards are up! It’s worth noting that instead of the actual minor league team, the leaderboards show the affiliated team in their respective league. Also, qualified batters are 2.7 plate appearances per game and pitchers 0.8 innings per game. Other than that, just pick a league and sort/filter away!

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make these better, just send us a note and we’ll throw it on the to-do list.

After some painfully annoying work, we’ve managed to integrate the full set of 2006 Minor League stats into FanGraphs. Our plan is to eventually backfill minor league stats for all major league and minor league players. We’ll also have nightly updates for Minor League stats during the 2007 season.

Our plan is to have Minor League leaderboards (in the usual FanGraphs style) up and running by the end of the week. Additionally, we’ll be figuring out the best way to include the Minor League stats in the season graphs.

As always, please let us know if you have any problems, comments, or suggestions!

Dan Szymborski was kind enough to let us post the ZiPS projections he provides to Baseball Think Factory. Here’s a bit about ZiPS:

“Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors – many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2007. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production – a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future. “

Just like with the Bill James projections, we’ve used the Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage, Runs Created, Runs Created/27 and ERA supplied in the original file instead of calculating it ourselves.

I’m fairly certain this will be the last addition to the projections this season, which leaves us with a grand total of four projections (Bill James, CHONE, Marcels, and ZiPS) to choose from.

As always, if you notice any problems or errors, please let us know and we’ll do our best to fix the problem immediately.

In addition to the Marcel & CHONE projections, the projections from the Bill James Handbook are now available in the stats pages courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions. They will not be available in the leaderboard format on FanGraphs, but you can purchase them from Baseball Info Solutions here.

Just a quick note about how the projections are integrated: Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage, ERA, Runs Created, and Runs Created/27 were left as-is from the Bill James Handbook and were not calculated using the projected raw statistics; unlike the Marcel and CHONE projections.

This will probably be the last set of projections we add, unless someone else volunteers to throw their hat in the ring.

The 2007 Marcel & CHONE projections are now available in the regular stat pages. They will remain there until the 2007 regular season starts and will then be hidden to make way for the real 2007 stats. You’ll still be able to use the “Show Projections” button to see the stats after they are hidden; they just won’t be visible by default.

We’ve also added Balls and Strikes for batters, and corrected a bug in the daily split graphs.

Hopefully you won’t find the projections intrusive to your usual stat browsing. Please let us know what you think, especially if you don’t like it.

Both Tom Tango and Chone Smith were both kind enough to let me post their 2007 player projections.

The Marcel (the Monkey) Forecasts are “the minimum level of competence that you should expect from any forecaster.” You can read exactly how they’re computed here: Marcel Methodology.

Chone Smith, on the other hand, has put a great deal of time and effort into his CHONE Projections. You can read more about his projection system and efforts here: Chone Projections.

There are two things I should make note of: I have used the FanGraphs positions for filtering by position where we have the player in our database. There are a number of minor league players in CHONE that aren’t in our database (yet) and for their positions we use those supplied in CHONE’s original file. And for the Marcels, we took the average of projected earned runs and base runs-earned runs and used that to display ER. This was how ERA was calculated in the original file anyway.

While I’m at it, there have been a few excellent discussions of projection systems recently:

The Hardball Times’ David Gassko did five part, Projection Roundtable, II, III, IV, V.

And Tom Tango recently asked “Who’s Smarter Than a Monkey?” followed by an insightful discussion in the comments.