CHONE & Marcel Projections

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.





David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

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