The Accuracy of Projections–the hitting optimizer

I participated in my first auction last night, the Cardrunners League, and because we’re using CBSsports.com to run the league, you can easily get a chart with the projected stats for each team. I did that and learned that according to the CBS projections my hitting is mediocre (uh-oh, and they’re not as negative on Grady Sizemore as they probably should be) and my pitching is pretty good. Overall, it looks like 75 points or so for my team, which I’ll take.

But then I found on the CBSsports.com site, a story by Al Melchior and a widget that lets you graphically compare the CBSsports projections and the Accuscore projections. The differences are striking, and a good reminder that projections give you a very limited amount of information.

You can find out more about my draft at Patton and Co, in the Kevin Gregg discussion.

Top Earning Pitchers with No Bid Price

I’m working on this week’s update for the Patton $ Software and Data and found a category that might be of interest. These are the pitchers that neither Alex nor Michael have put bid prices on, who I have given the highest valued projections. I guess this is really a reflection of my prejudices this year filtered by Alex and Mike’s bids. If they think they’ll be around on draft day they aren’t on this list:

  • Tommy Hunter, TEX
  • Ben Sheets, FA (Texas likely)
  • Wade Davis, TB
  • Jeff Neimann, TB
  • Daryl Thompson, CIN
  • Ian Kenneday, NYA
  • Kevin Mulvey, MIN
  • Jon Niese, NYN
  • Tommy Hanson, ATL
  • Anthony Swarzak, MIN
  • Kyle McClellan, STL
  • Casey Janssen, TOR
  • Dustin Mosely, ANA
  • Eduardo Morlan, TB

Make of this what you will. Or can.

Patton & Co. is Free

Patton & Co.

Sign ups have been slow and we don’t know why. If you haven’t signed up please let me know your thoughts. If you tried it out and stopped using it I’d like to know why, too. I’m constantly impressed when I get over there about the information on players, so I feel like the product has a use, especially since the level of postings has been really good.

Now, there will be no pay mode until well after the season starts (and I personally think the model works better with no pay mode at all, at least for the comment database, so I’m arguing for that).

So please check it out if you haven’t, and let me know what your problems are if you have and stopped. Write to askrotoman(at)gmail.com.

Thanks.