Everyone likes more choice, am I right? With respect to that, I am pleased to announce we have two new sets of fantasy baseball projections for Draft Buddy. Draft Buddy is our custom rankings and draft tracker tool, and is free to download (free membership required). The projections are ATC by Ariel Cohen and THE BAT by Derek Carty.

Both sets of projections are available on FanGraphs, so I reached out to each of Ariel and Derek to ask if we could use them in Draft Buddy for our members. Each guy said, “for sure”. Awesome! Please give them a follow and thank you via Twitter @ATCNY and @DerekCarty.

ATC

ATC stands for Average Total Cost and it is an average of various baseball projections, but not a straight average, which is what I believe Zeile from FantasyPros is (already included in Draft Buddy). Ariel is an actuary so he is no stranger to crunching numbers and calculating probabilities. ATC weights particular projections from each system more or less based on their historical accuracy. For example, lets say Steamer has historically been excellent projecting stolen bases. ATC will then more heavily weight stolen base projections from Steamer in the average.

In Ariel’s article on RotoGraphs from 2017, introducing ATC, he compares his methodology to Nate Silver’s presidential election forecasting. I asked Ariel specifically about playing time, as this is an area of fantasy baseball forecasting I am paying more attention to lately. He said the playing time is derived in a similar fashion – a weighted average of playing time from other projections, based on historical accuracy.

Read more from Ariel at RotoGraphs, here and here.

THE BAT

Celebrating its second year at FanGraphs, THE BAT for season long is an extension of Derek’s original work, THE BAT created to project single game outcomes for daily fantasy sports. That is kind of like when I created Draft Buddy way back when for fantasy football, and then a bunch of you asked for a fantasy baseball version, and here we are today.

Derek is a sabermetrics guy, and as such, integrated many variables into his model. Whereas ATC is more like Zeile, THE BAT is more like (big picture) Steamer and ZiPS. Read his RotoGraphs article about THE BAT for more detail. I found this section particularly interesting:

Player stats are backwards-adjusted to account for all of the individual circumstances they’ve faced in the past in order to gain a truer estimate of a player’s underlying talent level. On the season-level, that underlying talent is then forward-adjusted based on the circumstances the player will face for the remainder of the season.

Playing time for THE BAT is similar to the Depth Chart projections at FanGraphs – based on projected lineup and staff input – plus some adjustments. Free agents are not currently included but should be soon.

If you are interested in THE BAT in-season, especially useful for DFS players, it is available at RotoGrinders.

Projection Pal

Now you are wondering how to get ATC and/or THE BAT into Draft Buddy. It is easy. Not as easy as selecting it off a drop-down list and clicking Update Projections in Draft Buddy, but the next best thing.

Did I mention Projection Pal is ready for the 2019 season? I did in last week’s baseball members newsletter, but otherwise this might be the first time. You can download Pal and use it to import projections to Draft Buddy.

Projection Pal is a necessary tool for importing projections to make sure the data you are trying to import matches the correct players in Draft Buddy. Otherwise, the prior year stats and other projections will be misaligned.

With respect to ATC and THE BAT specifically, I uploaded Projection Pal files that already include each of these sets of projections. Links to each are on the Draft Buddy download page. To get either set in Draft Buddy follow these steps:

1. Download the Projection Pal file for ATC or THE BAT
2. Open the Pal file, and open your copy of Draft Buddy
3. Make sure the filename for your copy of Draft Buddy matches the filename on the setup tab in Pal (it should by default)
4. Go to the hitters Raw tab and click the Copy to Draft Buddy button
5. Go to the pitchers Raw tab and click the Copy to Draft Buddy button

After you click the Copy to Draft Buddy button for each of hitters and pitchers, there should be a short wait before it copies over the projections and takes you to Draft Buddy where you can review the imported projections. Then to use these projections in your cheatsheets, go to the options tab, adjust the default allocation key, and hit Compile Cheatsheets (action tab).

Projection Updates

ATC and THE BAT projections were pulled last Thursday, January 31st, from FanGraphs. I won’t necessarily be able to follow the same update schedule for ATC and THE BAT as the other projections, but it is pretty easy to update yourself. Download the latest CSV from FanGraphs, copy the data over the existing data in Projection Pal, check your row numbers and column headings, and click Copy to Draft Buddy, again. Or give me a nudge and I will see what I can do.

Thanks Ariel and Derek!