The 2010 Fan Projections!
For those of you who have been hanging around FanGraphs since at least last season, you’ll know that we carry various projections in the off-season, which are for the most part generated by computer programs.
This off-season, in addition to carrying the various computer generated projections, we’ve teamed up with Tangotiger of insidethebook.com to give you, the fans, a chance to generate your own projection line for each major league player. Hopefully our collective brains will be able to pinpoint things that computer systems don’t.
With that said, let me give you all a quick tour of a projection ballot:
Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.
After you’ve selected a team, there are 8 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2010, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.
That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.
As with all new features, we hope everything is bug free and we test things as much as possible, but if you do notice any issues, please let us know.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
This seems like a promising feature. Thanks for setting it up.
How do you want us to handle catcher defense? Should we estimate a value, or just treat it like UZR and ignore it?
You can definitely go ahead and project catcher defense if you like, but it’s not required.