Points Leagues: Projections, The Gold Standard

If they made fantasy baseball’s version of Monopoly Money they’d have to put Paul Goldschmidt‘s face on one of the higher denomination bills. Who is he? He’s the guy that put the “go” in Goldschmidt. He’s also that guy that has finally taken the top spot in projections from perennial favorite, Mike Trout. Even though he has never finished the regular season with the most fantasy points, everyone’s favorite Angel Fish has been projected to do so since 2013. And until this season, after Clayton Kershaw, he would have been my first pick had I the opportunity. In 2016 my previous statement is no longer true. Truth be told, when you factor in position-based value above replacement, I would probably select five or six players before I opted for Mike Trout. As for who those players would be, after Kershaw and Goldschmidt, I’ll save the rest for an upcoming post in which I use position adjusted replacement to collectively rank all hitters and pitchers in one long list.

If you thought it was going to be Bryce Harper at the top of this list, you would have been wrong. Close, but not quite. He’s third behind Goldschmidt and Trout. But here’s the catch. Even using the exact same projections, your list will likely differ than mine. The reason for this is that all scoring systems are not created equal. A league that awards two points instead of one for a stolen base or fails to subtract for a strikeout will have a different final result. It’s the laws of math doing their thing.

Let me make a blanket statement. I think projections are potentially as misleading as they are useful. It’s a dangerous, and awfully difficult, game to play. Most of us have a hard enough time with much simpler tasks. It’s like predicting the weather weeks in advance. Good luck with that. But at the end of the day, we all need projections. I probably should have said “want” instead of “need”. Projections reassure us. It’s a false sense of reassurance, but we don’t care. I use projections as a guide line. A conversation starter if you will. Just one piece of the puzzle.

Projections are nothing more than opinions. In some cases they are rather well informed and meticulously calculated opinions, but for every such specimen you have something the resembles vomit on paper a la Scott White. Every year I like to quote Harry Callahan when I reference projections. In The Dead Pool he said “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one“. Once again, thank you Dirty Harry.

Well, here’s my opinion. I have written some code to help me formulate my opinion. Then I take said opinion and average it out with about ten other opinions that believe hold some weight. Carry the one and here are my projections.

These projections assume the following scoring system:
RUN (+1), RBI (+1), 1B (+1), 2B (+2), 3B (+3), HR (+4), BB (+1), KO (-1), SB (+1), CS (-1)

I have attached a spreadsheet containing the full projections at the bottom of this post. Within you will find a worksheet labeled “Scoring System”. You can edit that to reflect your league’s scoring system. Once you have done this you will need to re-sort the “FPTS” column on the “Hitters” worksheet in descending order to re-rank the players.

I actually do believe that Paul Goldschmidt will be the top fantasy hitter in points leagues. As for the next twenty or so it sure does seem like the typical cast of characters. The players I am most excited about are Mookie Betts, Manny Machado and Carlos Correa. They’re young, they’re good and they’re poised to produce more than their fair share of points. In all honesty we have no idea how the season is going to shake out. For all we know Miguel Cabrera could play a full season and run away with the points title.

My next post will focus on pitcher projections. After that I will generate my position and overall rankings. If you want to find my positional rankings today just use the filter feature in Excel on the “POS” column. That stands for “position” in case you were wondering. The “piece of shit” column was intentionally left of this spreadsheet. Besides, that would be a true/false kind of data set. I just don’t have the time to rank how much or how little of a POS a player is on a scale of one to ten, where one is Paul Goldschmidt and ten is Robinson Cano (based on last season’s performance).

Here is the spreadsheet containing the full projections.