SubscribeWe’ve played about one month of games so far. For a standard league, here are the players with the largest gap between their year-to-date performance and their preseason dollar values according to the composite projections:
| Player | Proj. | Act. | Diff. |
|---|---|---|---|
| CC Sabathia | $38 | -$6 | -$44 |
| Cole Hamels | $30 | -$12 | -$42 |
| Brandon Webb | $30 | -$6 | -$36 |
| Chien-Ming Wang | -$1 | -$35 | -$36 |
| Josh Beckett | $21 | -$14 | -$35 |
| Jose Reyes | $38 | $3 | -$35 |
| Rafael Perez | $3 | -$31 | -$34 |
| Vladimir Guerrero | $22 | -$12 | -$34 |
| Jimmy Rollins | $26 | -$6 | -$32 |
| Matt Holliday | $30 | -$1 | -$31 |
| Hanley Ramirez | $40 | $10 | -$30 |
| Geovany Soto | $20 | -$9 | -$29 |
While the top of the list is SP-heavy, there seems to be a reasonable representation of hitters and pitchers here. Brandon Webb and Vladimir Guerrero get a partial pass because of injuries, but everyone else here has earned a spot on this list fair and square.
Should any of these performances have been expected?
There were plenty of concerns this spring about the 2008 workloads for CC Sabathia and Cole Hamels. The Brewers rode Sabathia hard down the stretch, not afraid to pitch him on short-rest. Including three rounds of postseason play, Hamels had a frighteningly high number of innings pitched last year.
Those were concerns that the projections didn’t really account for, but I imagine smart owners factored in some extra risk and lowered their max bid for those two pitchers. (I didn’t draft Sabathia or Hamels in any of my leagues this year, for what it’s worth.)
On that list, I see no reason to hang on to either Chien-Ming Wang or Rafael Perez at this point in the season. Wang didn’t even project above the replacement level, and Perez is the sort of middle reliever that only gets drafted while you’re waiting on guys like Scott Downs and Ryan Franklin to emerge.
Other than Wang and Perez, I don’t think you can bail on any of these players. I would imagine that most of those players end the season closer to their projected values than their current values.
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And almost on cue, Hanley Ramirez hits two homeruns and boosts his earnings $4 overnight. Matt Holliday gets the same jump after launching a 3-run shot last night.
I’m not worried about these guys.
If you want some ideas to improve your Calculator and make it more useful during the season you can import the new ZIPS projections, they’re updated throughout the season (i think the first updated one can about a week or 2 ago) to account for progression/injuries/regression ect. I think it would be great for your site.
@MV: I had seen the in-season ZiPS. I think it’s especially cool that FanGraphs is putting it on their player pages:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/in-season-zips-projections
I wasn’t sure how useful they would be for fantasy dollar values, though. It CC was projected to be worth $38 at the beginning of the season and was worth -$6 over the first month, we can pretty guess that his new projection will be somewhere around $30.
Does a revised projection tell us anything we wouldn’t deduce from the two values we already have?
I know fangraphs has it but the advantage with this site is that the fangrpahs one’s are hard to use. You have to click on each individual player and you can’t look at like all the 3b’s at once for example. And no that’s not how the ROS projections work there actually all recalculated. For example the ROS projections for C.C are better than their original projections.
Pre-season:3.30 ERA 7.55k/9
ROS: 3.13 ERA 7.96k/9
As you can see the projections are actually all recalculated by his computer and at least for C.C probably take into account that April is historically his worst month.
In the end it’s up to you but I think it’d be very useful.
Reading over what I said I’m not sure If I was clear enough. The Rest of Season projections are actually brand new calculated projections.
For example look at Nelson Cruz’s ROS theirs a huge improvement because it accounts for his ability to perform at a high level now.
@MV: I show ZiPS projecting 3.07 ERA for Sabathia before the season and now projecting a 3.33 ERA based on (and including) his poor April. That’s a change from a $45 prediction down to about a $34 one — about what intuition would tell you if you knew he has been worth -$6 to date.
Even at the beginning of the year, ZiPS and the other projections were pretty confident in Nelson Cruz performing at a high level. He goes from $17 to $20 based on his solid start, which also doesn’t seem surprising to me.
Anyways, I’m not opposed to adding the in-season updates. I just wasn’t sure if they would be worth the effort to add.
I will put in a big time vote for adding ZiPS Rest of Season (ROS) Projections. Yes you can get an intuitive feel for how much a player is worth by eyeballing their preseason value and their current season but ZiPS ROS provides a much more accurate calculation of their true value (after all isn’t that why we’re using LPP – we could always eyeball player’s preseason value but LPP gives us a much more accurate evaluation). I think ZiPS ROS allows people to get a better idea of how much they should adjust their perception of player valuation.
I know I’ve personally always had trouble adjusting my thoughts on how good a player really is. Last year I had Kinsler and really appreciated how well he performed but I was really surprised that his performance had taken his value all the way up to a second round player. Having ZiPS ROS combined with LPP would be an awesome way to verify or question my gut feelings on a player’s current value.
BTW they now have ZiPS in-season projections in sortable format for all players. http://www.fangraphs.com/projections.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&type=rzips
BTW MV – You’re reading it wrong. ZiPS preseaon projection for Sabathia was 3.07. His Rest of the Season Projection is 3.16 (based on the fact that he has pitched poorly the last month – ZiPS, and all similar computer projections, have no clue that Sabathia pitches poorly in April). His ROS of 3.16 plus his 3.94 so far is why ZiPS projects his FINAL season (ZiPS Update) ERA to equal 3.33.
Not to make more work for an already fantastic site, but I whole-heartedly agree with this:
(after all isn’t that why we’re using LPP – we could always eyeball player’s preseason value but LPP gives us a much more accurate evaluation)
I’ll look into adding the in-season ZiPS.
I’d prefer to find some way to have the projections updated dynamically each day as the season progresses (like FanGraphs). If not, I can probably at least add the monthly updates.
Which do people think would be more useful: Dollar values for the entire season (actual + projected rest-of-season) or just the rest-of-season projections?
That’s awesome. Daily updated projections like Fangraph’s would obviously be the best. Fangraphs might even help you implement it since they seem pretty open and have referenced your site a bunch (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=%22Last+Player+Picked%22&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=20&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=fangraphs.com&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images).
For fantasy use I think ROS is the only important stat. To see how well a player has done you would just use 2009 stats. ROS would help you figure out who should be best in the future. Updated Season Projections would just be confusing for fantasy use.
I think the only use for the Updated Season Projections is for real baseball, i.e. to figure out who will win MVP, Cy Young, etc.
I concur with Chris that ROS is the best. Updated Season Projections has some utility in that it’s a little easier to get a snapshot of a player’s keeper value for next year, but ROS dollar values are probably more important for most users.
Mays, can’t say enough about the site. Keep up the great work.
I concur with Chris as well. Rest of Season projections is by far the most valuable. Nobody on the internet has a free site that does rest of season projections converted into dollar values.
Also, I agree with the others, this site is the best!
Another thought… those scripts that you have that put the $ value based on season so far into the fantasy web sites could then be upgraded to provide two values. $ value so far (as current) and $ value projected for Rest of Season.
That would be very, very, very cool.
I don’t use those scripts right now, because it is looking back and I need to look at value moving forward. But to have both there would be amazing value.
Another vote here for ROS values. And thanks again for the greasemonkey scrips. So very cool…