I have been working hard to get my projections fine-tuned to where they are ready to go and I can incorporate them into my rankings while the season is still fresh in my mind. I must say that the hitting projections I have are pretty much already done and exactly where I want them. The much trickier part is creating projections for starting pitchers when a lot more variables such as injury risk are brought into the picture, making starting pitching by its nature unpredictable from year to year. I’m excited to say that my pitching projections are now very close to being usable and useful, and am pleased with the progress I’ve made in the last few weeks. 

What I’m finding is that the nature of projections is that they aren’t going to be perfect, and while they are very useful I can’t just blindly follow my projections either when I rank players. What I’m learning is how to balance that with the nuance of rankings, especially at starting pitcher. If it was ever that clear cut and easy, then everyone would do it and have the same, perfect rankings. I say that because I am learning myself that hitting projections are also much safer and more valuable than pitching projections, because of all the variables that have to be accounted for when ranking starting pitchers. Since this nuance and balance must exist, I think it’s a good idea to have my projections ready to go when the season ends and then rank based on the whole picture while my thoughts on the season are still fresh in my mind. I thought for my post this week I wanted to try my best to forecast my future plans, and that I’m not going to simply stop working just because the season is ending. There is a lot of work I still want to do with my projections once the season ends, and I honestly can’t wait for the opportunity to do that. What I want eventually is to have rankings in my articles and then talk about those rankings. It’s difficult to have rankings that include pitchers and hitters, but I’m going to attempt to do that as well as have the separate rankings too.

Another development for me is that I want to be able to correctly value players for trades and have a metric that compares players to each other in a way that truly measures how irreplaceable a player like Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani is to a fantasy team. Being able to measure the impact of a single player that’s only taking up a single roster spot and being able to use it to my advantage fascinates me, where simply having a value where three players simply combine for a better index than one player doesn’t necessarily mean much. In this context, I’m trying to measure the value of the production a player like Judge provides in a single roster spot while being able to measure if trading the best player in a deal is ever actually worth it. Just because two or three other players can combine for the same production doesn’t make them a worthy replacement, when really it should be viewed as what players you are also going to have to drop, and which players is the person acquiring him able to add with the freed up roster spots. All of those variables are the reason I’ve always viewed it as a no-brainer to always acquire the best player while also giving away more players than I get back. It allows me to pick up the best available free agents and pair those with whoever I’ve acquired, and is why I’ve always had that mentality. I want to be able to measure exactly that and run through what the scenarios are and if it helps make my team better, and if it does, by how much. Even if I figured out it’s not always the correct decision to get the best player, I’d still be glad to find that out in order to get better at trading. I have a consistency index that I’m incorporating into my projections, and believe I can use that number in a way to measure player value in roster construction in evaluating trade scenarios. I am confident I’ll be able to figure it out, and it’s another one of those off-season projects that I look forward to working on and solving. I am thinking of it in a similar vein to trade value charts, except I’ll have one that’s actually useful that I agree with. It will also be points-league specific, just like all of my projections are. A good rule of thumb to make sure a player evaluator is working properly is if Judge and Ohtani are at the top. If that’s not happening then it’s immediately obvious that something is wrong.

To wrap up, even if I don’t post as much now that the season is coming to an end, I still plan to release something at least once a month in the off-season, and take advantage of that extra time between posts. I hope to make more progress and breakthroughs in my work than I typically do between posts, so that when I release something it will be something I’ve worked longer on and spent a lot more time on. Right now I enjoy the work I do creating metrics and projections more than anything else, and I want to be able to incorporate more of what I work on daily so that my writing doesn’t feel completely unrelated. I think posting less will allow me to work on that and release content that is useful to anyone in a points league.