Looking at baseball projections may be one of my most enjoyable hobbies. As a fantasy nut and legitimated blogger, by virtue of being here, I love slicing and dicing a player's projected line; comparing the strenghts and weakness of each system, trying to devine where the truth lies.
I have really come to trust PECOTA's projection system (for hitters)–especially after I read this interview with Nate Silver (PECOTA's father). Perhaps my favorite part of PECOTA are the Breakout and Collapse rates and the Beta scores they give each player.
Something that caught my eye, since player cards are available now, was Ty Wigginton's beta score on his projected line. It's a 2.00. I can't remember if I've ever seen a 2 before (1 is PECOTA's most confident assertion of where a player will be). Maybe it's because Ty Wigginton is heading back to the AL East and PECOTA isn't comfortable predicting how he fares facing off against Burnett, Sabathia, Kazmir, Shields, Garza, Beckett, etc., but it's not confident in his weighted average triple slash of .272/.335/.477. It thinks that it's waaaaay to lenient on him.
I know that Wigginton would be a valued commodity for us this year, but the difference in losing Wigginton is less than a win according to PECOTA, and it's not very confident in saying that either. So that begs the question, did we really lose too much in losing Wigginton?
On an unrelated note, this weekend I'm going to go through and readjust the Community Project project to include PECOTA's projections for our hitters...so we'll see how that goes.