2008 USSM/LL Community Projections
It’s back – we are once again joining our efforts with Jeff Sullivan and his crew over at Lookout Landing to give you guys the opportunity to create the 2008 Community Projections. We’ve spent a lot of time over the offseason talking about the different projection systems and how they think the Mariners are going to do this year, but this is your chance to make your voice heard. Using the wisdom of crowds approach, we happen to think that the combined readership bases of USSM and LL are quite knowledgeable about this organization, and have some real insights into how the individual players, and thus the team, might perform.
As has been shown in different analysis studies, a large group of informed readers can do just as well or better as the best projection systems out there. This isn’t just fans wishcasting into a spreadsheet; each of you has some valuable piece of information, and when we combine all those pieces into one big pool of knowledge, we come up with a fairly reliable estimate of what’s going to take place in 2008.
So, I encourage you to participate and take it seriously. You have something to offer, and this is one of my favorite things we do every year. The results will be a lot of fun to look at, and we’ll be doing posts on what the community expects from individual players as we go through spring training.
Should you choose to participate (and I hope you will), this year is going to be a little different than the last. Instead of emailing out links to individual player sheets, we’re going to send you a form with drop-down menus for every relevant player. It will look like this. You’ll have a while to fill it out, so don’t worry if you can’t do everyone in one sitting. Here’s how you do this: enter your data, and when you’re done with each pair of players (one hitter + one pitcher), click ‘Submit’. Then use the drop-down menus to advance to the next pitcher and hitter in the list. You can’t do more than one pitcher and hitter at a time, so don’t try. It’ll bungle things up, and that won’t be fun for Jeff and I when we try to interpret the spreadsheet later on.
Once we have all the projections, we’re going to plug the data into Diamond Mind and run some season simulations (using ZiPS data for other teams) to figure out what the community thinks of the Mariners as a team. This is the part to which I’m looking forward the most.
Want to participate? Great! Here’s how:
(1) Send an email to communityprojections@gmail.com with “Sign Me Up!” in the subject line from the email address you want us to send the form to
(2) Receive the form (will happen within 24 hours of your request)
(3) Before you begin filling out the form, check out this spreadsheet as a reference. This spreadsheet includes 2007 data for every player and an area for you to input some test data to see just what you’re projecting. (For example, the form doesn’t have an area that automatically calculates BA/OBP/SLG, so in order to make sure your numbers make sense, run them by this spreadsheet first.) If you want player data from earlier years, everything’s available in the player splits at Baseball-Reference, the greatest website in the universe.
(4) Within a week, submit your projections. If there are certain players that you don’t feel like projecting, skip them.
After we’ve sent out the forms and given people time to fill them out, we’ll begin to publish the results of the community projections here and on Lookout Landing. We’re also going to take your projections, plug them into the Diamond Mind event tables, and run some simulations based on your projections, which will give us a good idea of how well you think this team is going to perform, even though we’re not asking you to individually predict the team’s overall performance.
It should be a fun project, and it will be much easier to contribute this year with a form that can be emailed to anyone. So, if you’re interest in participating, send that email to communityprojections@gmail.com with Sign Me Up! in the subject line. We’ll send out the form on a daily basis, so you should have it within 24 hours of signing up.
Any questions, feel free to post them in the comments.
Comments
24 Responses to “2008 USSM/LL Community Projections”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Just so you know, the link to the email is broken. It’s a href link and not a mailto link. Didn’t stop me from copying and pasting the address to my gmail, but you might want to fix it.
Hopefully fixed.
Shouldn’t we be looking at 3 year averages, rather than just ’07, as a reference point?
For the Diamond Mine simulations, what will you be using for the projections for the other teams? (It would be kind of cool to hook up with Athletics Nation and the Halos guys and whatever website follows the Rangers, etc, and get all the fans to project their teams and then pit them head to head)
Did we ever have a post reviewing the projections for ’07 compared to the actual results? (If we did and I missed it, I apologize)
#3
No, it would not be cool to meld with the Halos guys. Halos Heaven would project a 130-32 team. Heh.
Shouldn’t we be looking at 3 year averages, rather than just ‘07, as a reference point?
I don’t really want you guys just taking three year averages and using that as your projection. I could do a three year average on my own. The reference point is to give you an idea of how many of each type of raw input (singles, triples, strikeouts, etc…) go into a specific type of batting line. Maybe you have a pretty good belief that you think Ichiro’s going to hit .340/.380/.440, but do you know how many singles/doubles/triples/home runs that works out to over 650 at-bats? The reference point spreadsheet is supposed to help you with that.
For the Diamond Mine simulations, what will you be using for the projections for the other teams?
The ZIPS projections.
Did we ever have a post reviewing the projections for ‘07 compared to the actual results? (If we did and I missed it, I apologize)
Jeff posted them at Lookout Landing.
Dave or DMZ,
When I click submit, nothing changes. Is that right, or should the forms refresh?
I’ve never done something like this before. I don’t want to submit my projections multiple times and screw this up. It just seems weird that when I click submit, it doesn’t seem to load or anything. So do I just put in the numbers, click submit, then just change the drop down to the next player and change the numbers?
Any help you can offer would be appreciated.
Hmmm. I liked last years version more, but this is still okay. Thanks for doing this Dave/DMZ et all.!
Yeah – I’m not sure how this is supposed to work. Do I fill out the projections for Bedard and Ichiro, hit “submit”, then go back, go to Felix and Vidro on the drop-down, fill in their projections, hit “submit”, go back, etc.?
sorry, I didn’t explain that part very well.
The drop down boxes allow you to pick one pitcher and one hitter per submission. After you hit submit, for those two (and it’s probably easiest just to go in order, so you start with Bedard and Ichiro), then you go back and refill out the form for the next two (Felix and Vidro), then on to the third pair, etc…
And while this might not be quite as aesthetically pleasing as last years, it will be much, much easier on us, especially since we don’t have to worry about someone randomly deleting records this time around.
Awesome, I’ve already done my own set of projections a while ago so I’ll just translate them into here.
Wow… [ot]
[ot, also, Rizzs]
[ot]
With regards to these projections, I’ve seen people point to the 2nd half of the season last year for Bedard and Silva mentioning that they each turned some sort of corner. Silva because he began throwing a new pitch and Bedard… I don’t know why.
Is there any reason to look at the 2nd half of their seasons as sustainable? Or is it more likely the result of a small sample size/hot streak?
OT? What’s that?
It means your post is off-topic. This isn’t a game thread.
Small sample size, I think…because you certainly do see some variation through the normal level of play from year to year….
This version is harder to use (since it doesn’t calculate AVG/OBP/SLG for us on the fly, thus telling us when we’ve made an obvious mistake), but I can see how it would be easier to use from your end.
Never mind. I’m an idiot.
You should be using statistics from multiple years. That way if somebody had a fluke year last year you can determine whether or not there will be any regression toward the mean.
The point of the spreadsheet isn’t for you to look at the numbers and just put last year’s stats in as the projection. It’s a reference to help you convert raw numbers into a statline. That’s it. You should be doing the regression to the mean yourself.
It looks like the spreadsheet that we are to use for reference isn’t loading. It’s a blank URL. Am I missing something?
So, let’s say a fellow, while doing a projection for a newly acquired starting pitcher, somehow managed to leave the ‘singles’ field blank. Hypothetically, of course.
Would it be best for said gentleman (or lady, as the case may be,) to chalk it up as an object lesson in carelessness, or would it be beneficial to the nature of the study for this individual to re-do the projection?
We’ll be purging out the projections that appear to be mistakes (or are just patently ridiculous, such as the projection that has Ichiro getting 295 hits), so if you did one in error, just fill out a new one.