2020 Special Blend Projections for Fantasy Baseball

Fantasy baseball projections offer you a nice saftey net in your drafts. They shouldn’t really be the sole source of your research, but when in doubt they’re a good way to find safe picks along the way. My cheatsheets certainly have these sort of projections baked into them, so it’s important that you’re using accurate projections if you’re basing your draft upon them in any way. In a recent article, I analyzed the accuracy of various projection sources for fantasy purposes. My Special Blend of projections took the top spot as far for hitters but needed some work when it came to pitchers. Once again, I found myself back in the lab to make tweaks and deliver an even better blend of projections for 2020.

My Special Blend projections take data from a variety of free projection sources on the market and also use xStats and stats from previous years. For years, I have been running linear regression analysis with all of these sources each year to figure out what has the best impact on the actual results in a given year. I use that analysis to apply specific weights to each relevant statistic for hitters and pitchers. Each stat gets its own weighting from the various sources that I use to come up with the very best special blend possible.

Each year, I’ve continued to adjust and perfect that blending process to make it as good as possible. But, at the end of the day, I couldn’t do this crazy experiment without the people who create those actual projections that are used in here. The full list of sources in this aggregate are:

• Steamer
• ZiPS
• Clay Davenport
• Fangraphs Depth Charts
• THE BAT
• 2020 xStats
• 2019 Actual Stats

Without them, there’d be no Special Blend to begin with! There wouldn’t even be an Average Blend! There’d be nothing. So many thanks to them first and foremost.

The 2020 Projections

After many days of figuring out the best possible weightings for 2020, I’ve settled on my final product. You can see all the glorious 2020 projections below, but you can download them for yourself by accessing them through the Google Doc here. Do note that there are separate tabs for pitchers and hitters. You’ll notice that the projections also include a calculated WERTH roto value for each player based on a standard 5×5 roto league format. The WERTH value is a z-score that calculates how far above or below average a player is in the main roto stats. If you want custom WERTH values for your specific league settings, check out my Excel cheatsheet where you can input your league settings.

One Final Note

These projections were added into my cheatsheets as a quick update. I will be adding a more proper update this week that will address some bug fixes and suggested changes. I will announce on Twitter when they are available.

Projections last updated on 07/21/2020