Projection update process.....

[echristian]

Long time happy HQ subscriber and this year noticed a number of my players playing / trending pretty far below their projections. What spurred this thought is that On-roto toy box projects me to finish first in ERA and besides my ace - Christopher Sanchez my starters are Rea, Mlodzinski and Chandler. Have to imagine the ERA projections for these three are inflated? Just curious on when / how HQ updates projections as the season progresses vs the first publish from the Forcaster last fall. Is this a systematic weekly adjustment to every player as the seaons builds added historical stat accumulation and performance or is it a manual deep dive one player at a time by an HQ writer?

[RAY@HQ]

Long time happy HQ subscriber and this year noticed a number of my players playing / trending pretty far below their projections. What spurred this thought is that On-roto toy box projects me to finish first in ERA and besides my ace - Christopher Sanchez my starters are Rea, Mlodzinski and Chandler. Have to imagine the ERA projections for these three are inflated? Just curious on when / how HQ updates projections as the season progresses vs the first publish from the Forcaster last fall. Is this a systematic weekly adjustment to every player as the seaons builds added historical stat accumulation and performance or is it a manual deep dive one player at a time by an HQ writer?

Great question, and a good time of year to ask it...

It's mostly an automatic process. During the season, the balance-of-year projection is a blend of the preseason baseline projection and the YTD performance. As the in-season sample grows, the weight on the YTD part of the calculation increases and the weight on the pre-season projection decreases.

This is designed to be a gradual, gentle process. Take Chandler as an example: his 5.14 ERA/1.56 WHIP for YTD is brutal. But, partly because he's been so bad/inefficient, that's only a 42 IP sample. His preseason projection was 3.85 ERA, 1.16 WHIP. But his balance-of-season projection is now (only) 4.10 ERA, 1.20 WHIP... which seems very optimistic given how bad he's been so far. But again, that's by design... we don't want the system to be just totally forgetting about the preseason projections just because of what's happened over the first ~8 weeks of a 26 week season.

Occasionally I will go in and make a manual override to the projections. But that's pretty rare. (And also probably justifiable in a case like Chandler, where he's just looked so utterly lost with zero command.)

[echristian]

AH! Makes total sense! Appriciate the explination! Yeah I have a reliver on my reserve that just came back to health and I can drop one of these three. Really torn between the upside and terrible walk rate of Chandler vs the expected very average Rea. lol

[RAY@HQ]

AH! Makes total sense! Appriciate the explination! Yeah I have a reliver on my reserve that just came back to health and I can drop one of these three. Really torn between the upside and terrible walk rate of Chandler vs the expected very average Rea. lol

I still like Chandler long-term, but seems like he really needs a Triple-A reset. I would think that's coming soon. I'd keep Rea and dump Chandler.

[bluester]

Interesting thread; Ray, how do you handle a guy like Jordan Walker; big-time pedigree and some excellent metrics; several years of poor performance but now almost two months of excellence? Is this a case for manual adjustment? Thanks.

[RAY@HQ]

He's getting to that point, yes. I don't think I've made any manual adjustments yet this year, but we're getting to the point now with hitters (Walker has 200 PA) that I'm willing to start tinkering. I'll generally wait a bit longer with pitchers.