The other day, I asked everyone to give their predictions for Jose Reyes in 2005. Below you will find the aggregate of those predictions, along with a handful of other popular projections:
AB BA OBP SLG SB
Amazin' Avenue Community 476 .289 .325 .419 40/48
PECOTA (Baseball Prospectus) 418 .262 .304 .374 29/36
ZiPS (Dan Szymborski) 351 .288 .327 .396 33/38
Marcel (Tango Tiger) 318 .289 .308 .434 17/20
Bill James Handbook 577 .272 .305 .390 60/72
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Minor League Ball Community ??? .277 .327 .415 37/xx
John Sickels Experimental ??? .268 .309 .380 43/xx
The community at John Sickels' wonderful Minor League Ball made predictions of their own, which I have included in the table above. That community had one of the more optimistic projections. I have also included Sickels' own "experimental" projection, though I have no idea what his projection methodologies are. John doesn't think Reyes will hit too well.
Our community seems to be pretty optimistic about Reyes this season, projecting an OPS of .744 with 40 stolen bases at an 83% success rate. Compare that to PECOTA, the least optimistic projection, sporting a .678 OPS. Let's hope our instincts are more accurate, at least in this case, than PECOTA's multitude of complex projection algorithms.
Tango Tiger's "Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System" is particularly optimistic about Reyes' hitting for power this year, though it predicts the fewest number of at-bats of any projection listed. Tango describes how the Marcels work:
Not.
Actually, it is the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible. So, that's the allusion to the monkey. It uses 3 years of MLB data, with the most recent data weighted heavier. It regresses towards the mean. And it has an age factor.
Regardless of Tango's faith in the system, it's always interesting to see how different algorithms make different predictions. Interesting to geeks like me, at least. We'll be sure to revisit this topic come October and see how everybody did.