**UPDATE 5:25PM** I went through and added the value of each player in terms of 2008 Free Agent value, according to the FanGraphs and, I believe, Tom Tango's methodology. Our payroll, the the ether-world of theory, would be $144.07...as it stands right now. I'm sure there will be some corrections downwards, because we look too good right now.
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**UPDATE 3:30PM** Some adjustments to base running and fielding have been made, along with a new measure for SP ERA next year (per Sky's suggestion). The base running measures are from BPro and the SP ERA is a weighted measure of the last three years worth of each SP's tRA* (the weights were not uniform for Moehler and Wandy). The adjustments leave us at 82 projected wins, but I'm going to overhaul the wOBA's on offense and I believe Sky is looking into the nuts and bolts of his formulas.
The one thing that we're missing is more insight into what doesn't look/feel right about these projections. This is intended to be a community projection system...so we need community-wide input.
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SkyKalkman, of Beyond the Box Score, has issued a challenge for fans and bloggers of each team to come up with projected WAR—thereby projected records—for their teams this offseason. If you mozy on over to BTB, you'll see the current returns and it's quite impressive for it being the holidays and the commotion having just started two days ago.
After emailing Sky back and forth (read: pestering and pleading for help in the areas I was woefully ignorant in) Sky graciously allowed me to be a test dummy for a generic spreadsheet he created that has standardized values for positional adjustments and weights for WAR. I went through and averaged together Bill James' and Tom Tango's projections for offense; made some educated guesses, using UZR data from FanGraphs, for defense; kind of guessed on the base running effects (BPro and Bill James have some good stats to look at for truly quantifying these) and PA and playing times at positions; used tRA* from Stat Corner for SP ERA (Sky requested a luck/park neutral stat of some sort), and Bill James and Tom Tango averages of projected FIP for relievers. The current projections are rough to say the least.
However, as a community of diehard Astros fans we hold the kind of collective knowledge necessary to hone and refine this projection to near perfection. At the bottom of this post is a link to my filled in spreadsheet in Google Document format. Take a gander at it, mull it over, look at some projections, and then leave your corrections/additions in the comments. We'll keep playing around with it until it's gold. If you want your own copy of the spread sheet, hit me up by email (it's on my profile) and I'll send you a copy. This should be fun and slightly up lifting. So far I have the Astros pegged at about 79 wins next year and I don't have the bullpen or the starting rotation fully accounted for...but I also don't have the bench fully accounted for either...
Finally, look for the Astroiest Bracket to be released on New Years day. It'll be a 32 entity battle royale, with some fancy polls that allow you to vote on the first 16 match-ups all in one post.
As promised, the first pass at projecting the 2009 Houston Astros.