For example, look at CAIRO this year and you’ll notice Reds prospect Billy Hamilton at $25, although he probably won’t see the majors this year. Stephen Strasburg is projected to pitch 55 innings, good for $7.

Clearly, something needs to be done to lower the value of minor leaguers like Hamilton that won’t sniff the majors. Something else needs to be done to bump up the value of guys like Strasburg who are coming off of an injury. That’s why the past couple of years I’ve added the option to the Price Guide to apply playing time adjustments to give a more realistic picture of 2012 values.

I’ve made a first pass at playing time projections for 2012. Lots of guys like Hamilton are projected for either 0 AB or 0 IP, removing them from the rankings. Strasburg now shows up with 149 IP, lifting him to a $23 player by CAIRO. (That seems high, but I think that’s due to optimistic rate projections rather than optimistic playing time.)

I’ve noticed that the playing time adjustment causes more money to shift toward pitching, probably more than is realistic. It also has sent catcher values into the stratosphere, which is also not going to reflect real drafts. Those are both usual tendencies for the Price Guide, but I’d like to damper them if I can.

I’ll keep tweaking the numbers as the spring progresses. There are a few low-impact guys that still need projections (e.g. Jose Lopez, Alejandro de Aza). If you notice any questionable omissions, please let me know.

This is illustrated in some of the biggest drops after the change:

Chase Utley
Kendrys Morales
Johan Santana
Kevin Slowey
Marc Rzepczynski

Picking up time, mostly due to recent Spring Training news, include:

Brad Emaus
Dustin Ackley
Mark Trumbo
Mike Morse
Will Rhymes
Rick Ankiel
Brent Morel
Brandon Beachy

I’ll update everything in a couple of days as the votes even out.

Steamer is the work of J. Cross and a team of high school students. But before you disregard this as a simple high school project — Steamer’s pitching projections were the best performing in 2010. Better than CHONE, ZiPS, CAIRO, and Marcel. This makes me sad after seeing their projection for Daniel Hudson (4.45 ERA, 1.42 WHIP), who I’ve been hyping all spring based on his otherwise favorable projections. Needless to say, though, these are quality projections comparable to or better than the others available here.

The only reason Steamer hasn’t got much publicity here is because they have typically been released after much of the fantasy drafting season. It’s fortunate for us that they’ve managed to push them out much earlier in 2011.

Note that these are currently not part of the composite projections. I’ll work them in if I get the chance.

I’ve talked about this feature in the past, and a reader suggested I add it as a category to the blog. I thought that was a great idea, so now you can click Greasemonkey Scripts to the left to see past posts about this, including screenshots of the scripts in action. I encourage you to check out those posts if you haven’t tried out this feature before and want to find out more.

The same reader asked how to have two (or more) scripts to handle multiple leagues with differing configurations — for example having different scripts for two different Yahoo leagues. I actually don’t think I’ve made a post about that, although I may have explained it in emails and comments. In Firefox, just go to Tools – Greasemonkey – Manage User Scripts and click Edit for the script you want to change.

In whatever text editor (e.g. Notepad) that pops up, you should see a line near the top like this:

@include        http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/*

Change that line to include your league ID:

@include        http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/b1/000000/*

…where 000000 is your numeric league id. (It should be the same as the URL to your league homepage.) Make sure you keep the “*” at the end. Save the file and close, and the script should only apply to that particular league. Repeat those steps for the scripts for your other Yahoo leagues as well.

The process is similar for CBSSports and ESPN. On CBSSports the include line will be something like:

@include        *leaguename.baseball.cbssports.com/*

…where leaguename is the name of your league. (Once again, it should match the URL of your league homepage.)

ESPN will be this:

@include        http://games.espn.go.com/flb/*leagueId=00000*

I’ll be happy to explain more in the comments if anyone has questions about this.

Basically, instead of checking boxes for the stat categories your league uses, you enter a point value for each stat. Values can be positive or negative and can include decimals. The Price Guide then totals everyone’s projected points, applies a positional adjustment, and then converts to dollar values.

I can’t find any sort of standardized setup for points leagues, so I know the default is pretty atypical (judging by the excessive love of catchers). If you know what values are normal for a points league, please let me know.

And if you notice any problems with or have any suggestions for the new version, feel free to email or comment below.

Here’s what I’ve done:

- I started with FanGraphs’ Community Forecasts for Plate Appearances (PA) and Innings Pitched (IP). I lowered the pitchers’ totals across the board, though: They seemed too high by 10-15%. FanGraphs, however, is missing lots of players who would need to be projected for fantasy baseball.

- Next, I checked the depth charts for every team at MLBDepthCharts.com. I added every player who showed up on a team’s projected roster. Those that didn’t have a FanGraphs projection I gave a base projection of 350 PA for hitters, 140 IP for SP, and 45 IP for RP.

- The last step is the hardest, and the one where I’d appreciate your input. I need to go though and bump up guys above the baseline if they will realistically get more playing time. I need to add minor leaguers who won’t be on a team’s opening day roster but who do have a chance at a midseason callup. This is going to be a tedious process of looking at each player’s recent history and adjusting their 2011 playing time to a realistic projection.

So if you have a favorite team, you might glance through the projections to see if you can find any particularly egregious mistakes.

First off, I apologize to those who have sent me emails over the past couple of months, most of which have gone unanswered. I’m afraid at this point I can’t go digging back through to reply to them all. So, if you still have a question or a problem to report, please email me again. I will be trying to reply to everything sent from this point forward.

Secondly, I hope to write a few posts this week accessing how well the projections did in 2010. I have a feeling the preseason dollar values did very well this year. I’m planning on highlighting some of the successes and see if there’s anything to be learned from the failures.

1. Steamer projections have been added.

Steamer is a set of projections produced by Jared Cross and co., who have also done some recent forecast evaluations. I’m not adding it into the Composite projections for this year, but I probably will next year (especially if I can get my hands on it earlier).

Unlike most of the projections which aren’t expecting Aaron Hill to repeat his very good 2009, Steamer has him at $19 in a standard league. Other Steamer sleepers: Nolan Reimold ($17), Colby Lewis ($16), Brett Anderson ($21), and Stephen Strasburg ($17).

It has no interest in Jair Jurrjens ($1) or Matt Cain ($1), however. I’ll try to remember to check back in October to see how the picks played out.

2. The composite projections have been updated with the final community forecasts.

Voting closed today on the Community Forecast project. In fantasy terms, there hasn’t been a whole lot of change since Monday, but a few players have seen a small increase or decrease:

David Murphy -$7 (+5)
Chris Davis $5 (+4)
Aaron Hill $11 (+3)
Jose Reyes $15 (+3)
Coco Crisp -$6 (+3)
Juan Uribe -$8 (+3)

Landon Powell -$11 (-3)
Ryan Church -$12 (-3)
Carlos Santana -$9 (-3)
Corey Hart $0 (-4)
Jesus Flores -$14 (-5)

Oakland, Texas, and Washington were still low on votes last time, so their players were some of the bigger movers on this update.

It looks like Mets fans are feeling more optimistic about Jose Reyes‘s maladies, as he climbed $3 in the past few days. Corey Hart, on the other hand, is shedding value (down $4) after a terrible spring could cost him a starting job. Although Chris Davis has gained some ground, I’d wager that if voting continued he would probably end up where he started. The Rangers’ acquisition of Ryan Garko means Davis might be losing some AB.

There are a few new names showing up as well, most notably:

Aroldis Chapman -$3
Hisanori Takahashi -$7
Jim Edmonds -$15

3. You can now enter keeper prices without saving stats.

One of the most common questions I am asked is how to enter keeper prices. That’s because that feature has been hidden in with “Let me edit these projections.” But things have changed:

Also, some of you had asked about entering keeper prices without saving the stats as well. Up until this point, it couldn’t be done. Now, you can actually transfer a keeper list across projections to compare, for example, what CAIRO and ZiPS think of your choices.

There have also been a few minor Price Guide bugs cleaned up, like QS and E showing up incorrectly on the Composite projections and inflation prices being left off of Excel.

Dan has graciously allowed me to include the ZiPS projections as an option in the Price Guide, where they are available individually and mixed in with CHONE and CAIRO (Composite projections). If you find the ZiPS projections useful, I encourage you to donate a little to Dan to help keep these free. A ton of work goes into making these, and the only credit I can take is as a middle-man.

I’ve also recently updated the CAIRO projections to version 0.4 and CHONE to the freshest 2/28 spreadsheet. Throwing ZiPS in a blender with those two new releases gives a new look to our composite projections that admittedly makes me a little uncomfortable: Joe Mauer has moved into the #1 spot as the projected most valuable hitter for 2010. I think this is due to not only the quality difference between him and the last catcher picked, but also to a difference in quantity. The playing time adjustments indicate that good catchers play more often than bad catchers, even starting at DH or 1B on days they aren’t catching.

In a 1-catcher league, the difference is not as pronounced. But with two starting catchers, the combination of qualitative and quantitative advantages puts a huge gap between Mauer and guys like Ivan Rodriguez and Nick Hundley. I’d be interested if someone has any suggestions for making these rankings stick a little bit closer to reality.

I just got a heads-up that the Greasemonkey script for ESPN is currently out-of-order.

ESPN switched around all of their player IDs, which broke the script that inserts dollar values onto their league pages.

I’ll need to update the IDs for a thousand or so players to get it back up and running. So if anyone happens to have already compiled a bunch of ESPN player IDs, I’d love to know about them.

I’ll let you know when everything is fixed.