2022 Special Blend Projections for Fantasy Baseball

As I noted previously on this site, this year is a bit weird for both me and baseball itself. I still felt it would be valuable if I could produce my Special Blend projections for another year and, thankfully, I was able to pull it off. If you’re new to this site and my projections, I’ll do some explaining in a moment about why I think they are so valuable and unique.

But, first: I have to do my little promo for a film contest that I’m in the running for. I’m a filmmaker in my day-to-day life and I pitched a film idea about my state of North Carolina. It’s being considered for the final spot in a larger contest and is now for a public vote to determine if I get it. The Cheatsheet family has completely humbled me lately by voting up my video idea and helping me get a big lead.

If I win the contest, I’ll get a big budget to make the thing into a professional short film and bigger things could happen from there. So, I’d appreciate it if you could take one second and go to the festival voting site here and click the vote button for my film idea called “The State That Heals”. Thank you to everyone who has helped me already. Words can’t properly express my gratitude.

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What Are Special Blend Projections?

In the past, I’ve annually analyzed the various projections to show their strengths and weaknesses. While I won’t be able to do that full comparison of all the projection systems this year, I’ve done that analysis for over a decade now and I have a pretty good handle on what each projection system excels at. Every year, the Steamer projections are really hard to beat but there’s always a bit of variance about which projections end up performing the best for fantasy baseball purposes. That’s why creating a safer aggregation system can be so helpful.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of the legends in baseball analytics, Tom Tango confirmed the power of such aggregation in a Twitter exchange I had with him years ago.

“We’ve known aggregation is the best since the very beginning. I showed as much 10-15 years ago when I’ve been testing these things.”

My system does that sort of aggregating but on a more scientific level.

The idea of my projections is that I assign a certain weight to the various projection systems and those weights vary for each statistic. From there, I create individual aggregations for each statistic across the board, based on the historical analysis that I’ve done for a decade now. For some of the stats, I also found that expected statistics (xStats) or previous year statistics can help increase the accuracy of the aggregation. When all is said and done, these are the sources that get used in my aggregation:

• Steamer
• ZiPS
• Clay Davenport
• Fangraphs Depth Charts
• THE BAT
• 2022 xStats that I calculated
• 2021 actual stats

I do a specific mix of those projections for each statistic and magic is created.

The 2022 Projections

Though I’m posting the projections below for you to browse through, you can better access them by viewing them on this Google Sheet. The Google sheet is locked for editing so you’ll need to click Make A Copy from the File selection to use it for your own purposes (you can also click Download within there too). You’ll see in the projections that I also included the players’ projected WERTH value for a standard league format. The WERTH value is essentially the combined z-scores of the five standard roto categories for that player and a way of showing how valuable a player is in a rotisserie league.

I should have one more post in the coming days for the 2022 season before I go back to resting up and such. For now, enjoy the projections and another fantasy baseball draft season!

Projections last updated on 04/02/2022
Access the Google Sheet here