If you want to win your fantasy baseball leagues, you need to have the best projections on your draft day. I spent the last two days telling you who had the projected hitters most accurately last year and pitchers too. I’ve generally found in that research that combining projections is the most accurate way to go so I previously would simply average the main projections for a combined projection in the early years of Mr. Cheatsheet. While those provided a certain level of accuracy, I eventually sought to improve upon that by looking at each stat on its own and trying to develop the optimal weights of each projection for each and every stat.
After crunching lots of numbers and drinking lots of coffee, this led to a Special Blend of projections that would look at pitcher’s strikeouts and, for example, take 35% from the Steamer projections, 20% from the Fangraphs Fan projections and 45% from the MORPS projections. It would continue by applying different weights for each of the other stats such as earned runs or saves.
With these various optimized weights, it vastly improved upon just simply combining the projections. I find that these Special Blend projections have outperformed most other projections out there. However, looking at last year’s results, I learned quite a bit and made a few changes to the weightings for this year and, in addition, have opted to project playing time in a new manner that I think will improve the results greatly. I tested it out by applying these changes to last year’s Special Blend and they jumped way up in analysis of the best projections of the year.
All of that being said, it’s time to see the new and improved 2016 projections! First, I must thank the sources that go into my Special Blend and those sources are:
If those sources did not exist, my Special Blend would not exist so many thanks to them for all of their hard work in generating their initial projections.
The 2016 Projections
In the projections below, you’ll see a few hundred hitters and pitchers broken out. You may not see certain players listed in there though that you’d expect to see. That is the case when one of the six sources listed above did not provide a projection for that player. Most commonly, they may not have a projection on the Fangraphs Fans site yet as that has the smallest number of players projected. When that’s the case, I cannot do my special blending so I have to leave that player off the list. I’ll update this Special Blend a couple more times before the year starts as more players get projections added.
I’ve listed the 2016 projections below but you can see a full view of them by accessing them through the Google Doc here and you’re able to download them directly from the Google Doc as well. In this sheet, there’s a tab for Pitchers and Hitters and they both include a column for a calculated WERTH roto value (position-adjusted or not) for a standard 5×5 roto league. That WERTH value is the calculation of how far above average that player is across the five main roto statistics for your rotisserie leagues.
Projections last updated on 04/02/2016
Chuck
03/11/2016 at 9:49 PMNo matter which projections I select, Corey Kluber, Lance Lynn, Jon Lester and quite a few other pitchers (who are likely to be kept or drafted in our deep league) have no projected stats.
Luke
03/11/2016 at 11:07 PMDo you have the latest version I released yesterday? That should have fixed that issue.
D
03/12/2016 at 11:43 AMI have same issue
Luke
03/12/2016 at 5:51 PMI fixed this in the Auction sheet just now. I’ll check out the others. The version of the auction sheet that has this resolved is v1.13.
D
03/12/2016 at 10:00 PMthank you! These sheets are amazing.
Joe R.
03/22/2016 at 2:16 PMFirst, these sheets are amazing! Really excellent work.
But also, I still see quite a few RP’s that are missing stats. Is that intentional?
I’m personally stuck on how to think about drafting or buying RP’s when their value is so much lower than others at that same ADP. Should you base you’re decision to draft/buy on the Pos WERTH then? If I just pick based on the $Value I’m getting terrible value for my pick and would essentially punt the saves category. Something feels wrong about that since they really are going higher in ADP.
Thanks!!
Luke
03/26/2016 at 12:09 PMHey Joe. Yeah, it’s not intentional to leave out the RP’s. These projections are a collection of projections from other sources and the Fangraphs Fan projections are missing a lot of players unfortunately. And, yeah, it’s kind of up to you how to value RP’s. I typically value them lower anyway due to the uncertainty of the position but the Position-Adjusted WERTH is likely what you’d want to use there.
Neal
03/12/2016 at 8:36 AMI want to use this list to set my Yahoo 5×5 roto pre-draft ranks. How do I combine the two lists?
Kyle
03/14/2016 at 4:38 PMIt seems like your new v1.13 cheat sheet is missing statistics for many RP’s
Luke
03/14/2016 at 4:43 PMYeah, it’s the same list of pitchers you see in this post here by default (not all of them have projections… that is the case when one of the six sources listed above did not provide a projection for that player). In the Settings, change to a different projection source like Steamer if you want more players projected than the Special Blend.
Andy
03/22/2016 at 12:42 PMHey Luke
Great stuff on the site! Do you still envision posting an update to the Special Blend before the season? Thanks!
Luke
03/26/2016 at 12:08 PMHey Andy. It just depends if I get more of the data in that I use for these projections. I was hoping I’d get more players projected from the Fangraphs Fans to use in here but that number hasn’t really changed unfortunately.
Glenn
04/02/2016 at 10:13 AMJust found your site, very interesting stuff. One question regarding your updated projections…you have Storen down for more saves in 2016 than Osuna. Does that reflect the fact that you believe Storen becomes the closer before too long? Thanks.
Luke
04/02/2016 at 10:18 AMHey Glenn. Great question. The tricky part with my projections is that I’m relying on a combination of other sources for them. For Saves, I use three sources and two of them haven’t updated yet based on the Osuna news. In my mind, I would bump up Osuna to ~30 saves.