We would like to ask our fellow readers to with a monumental task (for us) this preseason. A few months ago I created a spreadsheet that could predict a team's win total know the underlying talent level and published an article on it at Fangraphs.
What we would like from you our readers to try to fill out the data the best you can for the team you support, follow or have an interest in. Then bring back the final data (Pitcher WAR, Hitter WAR and expected Record) and we will create a league projection for the season knowing the expected talent level and expected playing times for each team. Let us know in the comments if you are working on a team and if some teams aren't taken, we will see if we can get some help from the team's associated SBN Blog. Thanks again for your time, let us know if you have any questions and here are the instructions for filling out the Spreadsheet
Instructions
- The formatting, by going to Google Docs and back, gets stripped off (e.x. The wins go to 10 decimal places, 1 would probably do). Feel free to format all the columns for easier readability.
For projection information use whatever method you find most convenient. Fangraphs, Baseball Think Factory and Baseball Prospectus all have 2011 player projections available.
Fill in the data in the yellow and/or orange boxes. The rest of the boxes have formulas in them and if one is changed or deleted, all the values could change. From uploading and downloading it a few times, the color formatting doesn’t transfer so you may need to compare the online and downloaded sheets to see which columns need to be filled out.
Fill out the lineup section with name and projected OBP with what you think will be the most common lineup. This information is used to generate an approximate number of PA for the team. The team’s PA will be at a maximum value since the best lineups number were used. This season is just to get an idea on the number PA.
The next section is used to determine the amount of WAR from the position players. In this area, you can either fill in the player’s OBP and SLG -or- the players wOBA. For handling multiple players at a position, just make sure that that the number of games add up to 162
In the UZR/150 cells put in the players lifetime UZR/150 for that position. Sometimes the UZR/150 can be extremely high for the position and a value of 20, positive or negative is league leading or lagging value, so the values may need to regressed towards 0 quite a bit.
Catcher defense can/should be set to zero.
To account for inter league play, the pitchers will bat in 9 games during the season for AL teams and NL teams will need to account for DH for 9 games also.
Once the data in the second section is filled out, go back to line 7 and 8 and make sure the Projected and Calculated number of PA are the same. Adjust the individual player PA as needed.
In the pitcher’s area, the player’s Name, Innings Pitched and projected ERA/FIPs/xFIPs need to be entered.
The total innings in the past 3 seasons have 1444, so the total innings from the pitchers you have need to equal this number.
Now the Leverage Index column need to filled out. This column can be filled out will all 1s and the total win values will remain close to the same final value compared to if pitcher’s values are filled out. If you want to fill out each value, here is an article on the the subject and some general rules to follow 1) Ace closers has an LI of 2 usually 2)Main setup men usually has an LI of 1.3 3)Your decent starters will have an LI of 1 4)Bad starters will usually have an LI of .9 as they will be pitching from behind in quite a few games. 5)Mop up relievers will have values less then 1.
If you put in LI values for each pitcher, the value labeled Total LI needs to be as close to 1444 (the total innings pitched) as you can get.
If you want to do a NL team, you will need to swap the data in cells C71 and C73 and also in cells L71 and L73.
