2025 Special Blend Projections for Fantasy Baseball

As humans, we have a fascination with trying to predict the future. I think it’s the skill that we all subconsciously wish that we had. Alas, without supernatural means to do so, humans are left analyzing the past and present as a way to guess at future possibilities.

In the world of fantasy baseball, that’s what we’re left to do as well. Now, an average human being could look at baseball stats and try to make guesses about how those stats influence future results. We may look at a player’s age and his performance last year and just kind of assume the player will produce a similar but slightly different result than last year based upon their increase in age. That’s simple enough. However, humans are prone to have biases, and most humans can’t instantly do advanced mathematical reasoning in an instant to come up with a plausible semi-accurate projection for a player. That’s where the nerds come in to help out.

Starting with simple projection systems such as Tom Tango’s the Marcel a few decades ago, there have been people trying to decipher the meaning of past statistics and what they mean for a player’s upcoming performance. As years went by and more data became available, projections improved and became more accurate. We’ll never be able to truly know how a player’s upcoming season will go but we can at least have proper expectations for players because we have so much data and such great analysis in this modern analytical era.

Now, where do my “Special Blend” projections come into play with all of this? Well, simply, it piggybacks off the work of others and averages out the best projection sources while weighting them for each individual statistic based on which projection is historically most accurate at each stat. Simple as that. But, let me break it down a bit more.

The History of the “Special Blend” Projections

Personally, I first stumbled into the world of baseball projections when the only options were projection sources called Marcel, CHONE, CAIRO and PECOTA. While I’m oversimplifying things, the basic idea of these projections was to take the last three years of a player’s performance and weight the most recent years more heavily and then apply some aging regression. Despite the relative simplicity of such a model, it proved fairly successful in giving a baseline for expected performance over the upcoming season.

As the years went on, more projections came about including Steamer, ZiPS, The Bat and many others. They were able to use more advanced statistical techniques and more advanced baseball statistical data than the previous systems and we entered the golden age of baseball projections.

And, really, we’ve stayed there for about a decade. The projection systems have all found their groove and delivered reliable performance annually. The only way to really improve upon these projections at this point was to… aggregate them.

So, that I did. Initially, I just averaged all of the projections together and noted that this increased their accuracy based on my research and I was satisfied with that. Over time, I began to think harder about this though because I started to analyze the success of each projection system because I knew some projection systems were better at projecting certain stats. The only reasonable solution was to make a “special blend” that accounted for this. Because I spent years analyzing which projections were best annually, I had the data to properly weight the projections based on their strengths. From there, the Special Blend was born.

Combining Projections In A Thoughtful Way

My Special Blend isn’t actually my “own” projections in the traditional sense. Instead, I’m taking the hard work of others who designed complex projection systems and figuring out a way to average those projections together in a thoughtful way. The sources that I use in my aggregation are:

• Steamer – Known for strong overall reliability across multiple statistics
• ZiPS – Particularly strong at projecting power metrics
• Clay Davenport – Offers unique perspective on player development
• Fangraphs Depth Charts – Excellent for playing time projections
• THE BAT – Superior for rate statistics
• 2024 xStats that I calculated for advanced analysis of last year
• 2024 actual stats to ground it in recent performance

Each stat, from Walks to Doubles, has its own special weighting based on my research into which of those sources are best at each stat. With that in mind and with my projections in hand, I’m able to create a magical special blend of projections each year.

The 2025 Projections

As I am rolling out my new website this year, I am also happy to be able to host the projections on this website now instead of within an external Google sheet. The 2025 edition features enhanced accuracy for relief pitchers and improved playing time estimates for rookies based on my latest research. In order to access my projections, just go to the Projections tab at the top of this page and you will see a table with everything laid out for you, as well as the ability to download the projections as a .csv file for yourself.

As always, you can use these projections within my Excel cheatsheets as you conduct your draft. Within those sheets, you can get WERTH values that are more customized to your league settings.

Good luck and have fun!