BP Unfiltered

Will there be an xlsx file associated with the PFM data posted? In years past there was a download link at the top of the PFM that would allow a raw data download.

Are we going to be able to download the PFM file like we have in previous years? Thanks.

I may be overlooking something, but it looks like it's running the PFM using 2010 projections.

Any plans to update the weighted means spreadsheet with depth chart data?

Noticing that Brett Gardner isn't on the Yankees depth chart or in PFM.

Otherwise very excited for another year of BP tools, thanks!

hmmm....6x6 with Holds and OPS. No pitchers are projecting any Holds. And OPS "feels" underweighted (and SBs overweighted)---either that, or Rajai Davis is a stud even in OPS leagues.

All of a sudden, in trying to access the Pirates ... this message & similar message for all other teams. What ??

Why does PECOTA have the Pirates projected to lose 91 games in 2011?

I'm receiving a message saying they I have to subscribe to see the Depth Charts, even though I am a subscriber and I am currently logged in. Anyone else with this issue?

not listing quality starts

Thankfully all those bugs were ironed out prior to release. Fortunately the perfectionists are all over it.

Obviously the Yanks to be the power & the glory ... they have to use only eight players in their lineup ...

Sorry, the Yanks can do it with ... seven ... no CFer or LFer needed . ...

Suggestion for 2012: Net saves = saves - blown saves

Wow, how much nicer is it for the PFM to save your leagues instead of saving the bookmarks elsewhere? Great tweak!

Nothing happening for me when I click on "Submit PFM Parameters." Odd.

QS no longer in parameters....not recording hits in hitting category

the hits for batting are not recording in the points system only....rotiss ok....still no QS category listed

Fixed, thank you.

I thought I saw Holds in the pitcher categories a while ago, but maybe it's me. Could we have that added?

Thanks BP.

Is there a way to remove a player that has been checked off as kept? Last year I accidentally marked Wesley Wright instead of David Wright and I had to input 199 players again.

Victor Martinez is projected to hit only 4 HR with under 20 runs and RBIs?
thats the way it shows up on his player card too
i dont think it was adding in his expected playing time at DH properly

Colin when I substitute "hits" as an offensive category for the typical BA in a 5x5 league I get numbers for all hitters on the other 4 categories except hits. If I leave it at BA, it does give me a BA.

What's wrong with hits as a category and are the zeros across the board affecting auction values

Problem solved never mind

Holds and quality starts used to be categories. That was good.

On the depth charts, WARP is shown as NA.

When entering keepers, the players checked as mine keep reverting to a price of 1 dollar. Can this be reviewed please.

Auction. It'll show the correct price for a bit, but as I continue to enter more keepers, it reverts to a dollar... I can then remove and re-add my keepers, but it inevitably reverts again.

Last year I was able to sort PFM output by player name; this made plugging in keeper salaries much easier. I can't seem to find this capability on this year's version. Am I missing something?

Pitcher W-L records, especially for bad teams, are in dire need of correction. Looks like you may have neglected to factor in their expected run environments, team-wise.

Also perhaps a half-dozen PT% oddities, which I noted in their respective team depth chart comments.

Great to see PFM again!

Would be even greater to have holds and QS back, too. Thanks!

1. Kila Kaaihue is going to be a star!
2. Also would be happy if you could add quality starts and holds.
3. Is Total Bases coming out weird? When I ran it they were really low, like 168 or something for Pujols, etc.
4. Nice to see you again, PFM.

If you turn on user-centric inflation and SGP and get rid of the SO category, all pitchers are valued at $1.

Someone needs to figure out how to get a minimum innings choice into the formula. It makes a huge difference on the value of middle relievers (and thus pitching) if you need to make 1000 or whatever innings as a Roti team.

PFM Total Bases projection

Nishioka Tsuyoshi 234
Ichiro Suzuki 187
Martin Prado 182
Carlos Gonzalez 182
Ryan Braun 181
Michael Young 180
Hanley Ramirez 180

(Pujols: 19th at 168, two slots behind Omar Infante.)

Meanwhile, here's Jay Jaffe's take on Tsuyoshi three days ago.

"... and let's just say that the initial outlook on their new middle infield—Japanese import Tsuyoshi Nishioka (no PECOTA yet, though his stats and scouting reports don't compare favorably to Kaz Matsui) and Alexi Casilla (.235 TAv, -0.4 WARP)— may make them miss Little Nicky Punto."

Uh ... huh?

I do not see a "Download CSV" button anywhere. Am I just missing it?

Is there any way to change the league "position counts" once they've been submitted? There doesn't seem to be an edit function there, and I'd hate to re-input everything I already have because of a minor tweak (# of RPs)

I just entered all of my league parameters, which among other things, include 13 teams and 1 catcher per team. PFM is only returning 11 catchers in the result which does not seem to make any sense.

OK -- I don't know if you want to call this a bug, but RPs seem to be unrealistically undervalued by the PFM -- even in league with saves as a category -- unless you explicitly set a number of RPs in your league format.

This strikes me as odd: If saves are a category, it should be enough to list 9 "pitchers" and the value of the highest rated RP should be more than a couple of dollars....

Wasn't like this in previous years.
(PFM user since 2004)

Any chance UPSIDE will be ready soon?

Haven't seen any big discrepancies for hitters, but some very weird results for pitching. My league's pitching categories are IP, W-L, ERA, WHIP, K, and a combined relief category (SV+HD-BS) that I did not enter into PFM.

Under these parameters, Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee had auction values in the middle of the pack, just below Josh Beckett, Wandy Rodriguez and Phil Hughes. Their projections were better across the board in all scoring categories, which suggests there is something wrong with the auction value algorithm.

Incidentally, Kila looks to be this year's Colby Lewis (can he really be as good as the projections?) It'll be interesting to see what the magazines and other projection systems say. And here I am at work without my Bill James BIS projection thingamawhoozie. I think I feel a cold coming on . . .

Thanks for including MLB_ID on the csv file. This is a great help.

TAv shows up as EQA on the download csv file.

I accidentally left the settings to MLB and it showed Pujols @ $50, which feels about right for my draft. However, when I changed it to NL-only, it bumps him down to $39, any idea why?

Spring is close! Yea!!!!!! Thank you for all the hard work.

My Roto league uses a $100 base rather than the normal 260. Previous versions of PFM allowed an easy change but the new one does not. There's boxes there to adjust but when you change to 100 you get error msgs. I've tried playing around with it but have been unable to get it to change to 100. Looks like a glitch.

I've got the problem (believe mentioned above, too) where the salaries for my players (my players only - not other teams') get reset to $1 after saving.

Love the depth charts, but I have a problem philosophically with posting only WARP values. I realize you are using WARP to compute estimated standings and that makes sense, however, many people are accessing these for help with fantasy baseball. Since WARP includes your calculation for defensive value, it is less useful to almost all fantasy formats. In every fantasy league I'm in, defense is either ignored completely (standard roto), or computes defense completely differently than your WARP calculations (Scoresheet). So, if I use this to rank players, I need to find a way to back out the fielding numbers. A column of just the hitting portion of WARP based on playing time estimates is what is really needed. (wouldn't VORP suffice?). Obviously, this is not an issue with pitchers.

A bug:

When using SO as a hitter's category, PFM also credits the hitters with the same number of K's but as a pitcher's K category.

Any idea on when QS will be up?

Also, I am curious about k/9 as a category is it weighted to IP? I prefer to use it rather than SO since my league has an innings cap, which makes strikeout efficiency a better measure of value rather than total strikeouts.

It seems like the new WARP has a much higher Replacement Level than traditional WAR. I calculate 723.5 WARP over all players in the database with playing time expected. A replacement level team is about 57 wins. I seem to think this is about 10 more wins than WAR at Fangraphs. Was that the intent?

No IP WARP
P 447 43534 328.9
Pos 403 179637 394.6
723.5

WARP/Team 24.1
Replace W 56.9
Replace W% 0.351

Was just in PFM and it's not working. I click off the first 5 or 6 players with salaries, then hit update. It takes the guys off, but nothing shows in the "taken" field.

Then I try again, click off 5-10 more guys, then hit update. This time, it just goes back to the beginning with no players removed and they're all on the list.

You guys have major bugs EVERY year when you launch it. It's getting pretty frustrating. I guess I'll come back in a couple weeks and maybe it will work then,

Can you add a K minus BB pitching category?

Just ran the PFM and see that QS and Holds have been added, which is awesome, but that the values for QS and Holds for all pitchers are zero.

This I don't understand:

With zero keepers selected for my own and other teams, when switching from "0 - user centric inflation" to "1 user centric inflation" the values of players shift.

But if there are no keepers selected, shouldn't the values stay the same?

(Auction / NL only / 4 x 4 / SGP on / use infation "yes")

The WARPs listed for some part-time players seem to be off by a factor of ten or more. Viciedo of the Chisox is listed as -2.2 WARP, despite only 108 plate appearances, making him -11 or -13 WARP over a full season, while putting up Mike Jacobs-ish numbers. Ben Revere's WARP seems to be similarly off. Don't know what happened there or if it affected team PECOTA projections.

Are the numbers based on 2010 projections or
2011 projections? The numbers you provide on the output
seem to be 2010 projections

Marc (or someone else), can somebody comment on the QS situation. There's been a number of comments left here so I assume you guys are working on it, but no one your end has responded to any of the comments here. At the moment it's no longer available as an option. I assume not forever. Any idea on when we might expect it to return (with stats)? Minutes, hours or days?

Maybe this isn't that big of a deal, but there still doesn't appear to be a simple way to download the csv file for all players. Are there plans to add a simple procedure?

If not, can you let us know the correct way to set the parameters so that we can be assured of getting all players downloaded?

Thanks for your help.

Please respond to holds / quality starts question. Thanks

Can we start getting in to particular player projections here? In particular, why is Evan Longoria projected to hit .264 when he is a career .283 hitter, has never hit below .272 in a season, and has increased his average every year in the majors, ending last year at .294.

His OPS (among other things) seems quite lower than it should as well.

PFM is broken. I trust you guys are working on it? It would have been nice if this was throughly beta tested BEFORE you went live with it. Changing it on the fly 2-3 times a day is not a good thing.

Think this is a bug:

Starting point: Auction / use inflation - yes / user-centric inflation 1

After taken players are entered for both other teams & my team, if I change "user-centric inflation" to "0 - none", my taken (keeper) players disappear. They are neither in the list of other team's keepers nor are they in the available player listing.

If you sort the batters by descending WARP, and select the players with enough PA to get you to 180,000, you will get about 570 wins, which is just about correct.

How about putting important product release information where it belongs -- on the home page and on the Fantasy page?

Why is every announcement relegated to BP Blogs (beta)? Announcements are not blog content, and for that matter, how is a blog in "beta?"

We posted an update tonight that updates the interface for setting points values and should rectify the issues reported regarding point values not working or being reset to zero for output and downloading text files. We hope that the interface improvements make using the PFM for points leagues much more enjoyable. Thanks!

I'm trying not to be a jerk about this. My primary league uses holds and quality starts and is drafting right now. Last year, PFM included these categories. I have been assuming this year's PFM would has well. First, you ignored the various questions about whether / when those categories would be added. Then, you said they would be added today, but I haven't seen them. All of this has appeared in comments so that I find myself searching through comments to find out the status. A straight, timely, and logically located answer, would be helpful.

Is it possible to include quality starts as a category for analysis. My league uses quality starts. Believe it or not, there is a small group of us out here who think wins are dumb. Crazy right?

When might we expect to be able to download the raw data directly? And a suggestion: a hard link to the raw data (as opposed to a button we have to click) would be great, so members can automate downloading PFM updates. Thanks!

Probably too early to say, but any initial thoughts on the Miggy Cabrera DUI/alcohol issue and impact on his 2011 season?

Discussed this above, but there's two things with PFM that still bother me and I'd appreciate if it could be addressed:

1 -- Despite Ben's assertion, I find it very hard to believe that the top closers are worth no more than $2-$3 in leagues with saves. Yes, despite limited impact in other categories. Doesn't align with any other valuation system (including the PFM from 2004-2009)

2 -- Can we please get the ability to adjust league position requirements just like we can with other categories (e.g. salary allocation) after a team is uploaded? I really don't want to have to input 200 players every time I want to see how valuations differ when I use 2 RPs vs 3, etc.

Thanks.

PFM keeps "forgetting" kept players I've entered the salary for. I've tried many times, saving along the way. Very frustrating.

Sorry...I have a ton of questions. First year using this

First, how does the PFM handle straight draft leagues? I'm a little suspicious, because I'm still required to enter a budget even if I select the "Straight draft" option. If I'm in a straight draft league, can I just think of the PFM-generated dollar values as the relative values (with dollars as an arbitrary unit) of the players in the draft? And if so, it seems strange to me that when I scale down my total budget, hitters' budget, pitchers' budget, and minimum bid by the same constant factor, the ranking of players by dollar value changes. Am I misunderstanding something? Any clarification would be awesome.

Also, I feel like I'm missing/overlooking some features. I'm reading others' comments about being able to check off keepers and other selected players, but I don't appear to have that option. Anyone have any idea what the issue is?

Where is SSIM? Usually in the past scoresheet scores is a catagory.

For some reason, can't reply to Tango above, so I'll comment here:

Initially, when I plugged in saves as one of the five standard pitching categories but didn't specfy that I wanted relievers on my roster (instead opting for the standard nine pitchers w/o specifying relievers) the most valuable relievers came out as $2-3. I found this unrealistc, yet Ben said that he didn't think this was a bug. Regardless, it now has the top relievers n the $17-$20 range -- whether I specify 7 SPs and 2 RPs or 9 SPs, so this seems to be fixed.

Also, kudos to Ben and the team for enabling the adjusting of the positions requirements after initial output -- much appreciated.

Overall, despite rough first week of launch, PFM looks better than ever. Now about those player cards.....

Thanks for adding VORP to the pitching categories, but I don't think it was added to the hitting categories.

Still checking to see if we will be able to download the entire database easily. This would be helpful for those who do not play in leagues that have these parameters (probably most of all Scoresheet leagues).

Thanks for your help.

Would there be anyway to create a Saves+Holds combo category? I play in a roto league where they are combined. Simply selecting both categories individually would throw off value.

For completeness, I'm posting a comment, to close the loop on that particular means of notification--I have put together a formal updates page for PFM, complete with its own comments. I have also added the downloadable CSV and TAB data files for the entire dataset to the landing page (see links at the top), and added a comments section to the help document. We made a few other small tweaks, including adding some statistics and such as well. Check out the updates page for more:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/pfm/updates.php

Is there any possibility of optionally adding each player's MLBAM ID to the info displayed/outputted to CSV and TAB?

That would make the PFM a lot easier for me to use alongside the full PECOTA spreadsheet.

Thanks for adding the RAW CSV download! Much appreciated!

Any chance CGs could be added as a category for pitchers. I asked last year but to no avail. Not sure how easy or hard that tweak would be.

Thanks for the RAW CSV download!

Thanks for the download files.

I"ll add my sincere thanks for the download files. My homemade Excel-based software can finally automatically download RAW PFM data and interpret it properly without any work from me (like it already could with Baseball HQ and other data). Fabulous!

Thanks again for all the work. It works great.

Just a general question - will you post on the update site when depth charts are adjusted? Is there a set schedule that will be followed or just adjusted as things change?

ETA for player cards?

Another request for Complete Games (CG) and Shut Outs for pitchers.

Our 16-team roto league weights OBP, HR and R more than RBI and SB. For example, the top team in HRs gets 32 points, while the top team in RBI only gets 16, etc. So, a high OBP/HR guy like Kevin Youkilis is very valuable in our league. Same idea on the pitching side. Is there any way or does anybody have any suggestions for how to model this in PFM. Thanks.

Thanks for the download files.

I'd also like to see the SS/Sim values.

Thank you.

there have been several requests but no comment on the timeline for the return of upside? i am trying to decide whether to resuscribe or not before my draft.

We have posted version 2.2, which includes a custom player pool option under league used, allowing you to select a custom subset of MLB teams to be used as your player pool.

Is there a way to use PFM to rank my players based on particular categories, but also download all of the player info? For example, I want to rank my pitchers on W, Saves, ERA, WHIP and Ks, but would also like to download to excel IP info so I can do a Ks/9 IPs calculation as well. Any thoughts? Thanks.

Bug I've just stumbled on...

When opting to display players with negative value, everyone shows up in the order expected (from highest to lowest $$$ value) when the PFM first loads.

If I manually click to sort by the $$$ column, however, the sort ignores the '-' sign completely, ordering players by absolute value.

E.g., with my current settings, I'm seeing Marcus Thames valued at $-23.31 but ranked directly between Aaron Hill at $23.39 and Justin Morneau at $23.28.

Google yields this potentially-related bug report:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1833234&group_id=162528&atid=824138

another potential bug...
my league has a $26 budget with a $0.10 minimum bid instead of $260/$1. whenver i try using $26 money, $0.10 bids, $18 for hitting, $8 for pitching the prices come out very skewed compared to the $260 budget (ie not 1/10th of the price when set to $260/$1/$180/$80). it is not a big deal for me since i can just divide the $260/$1/$180/$80 prices by 10, but may cause problems for leagues with strange budget settings.

Don't now where else to ask this . . . Can anyone give me an ETA on the Player Cards? When will the 2011 cards be published?

By chance is PECOTA/PFM over-penalizing Colorado pitchers for pitching in Coors?

Without exception, the Colorado pitcher rate stats in PFM seem high relative other forecasts.

Here are ERA/WHIP projections from PFM. I won't list other systems (i.e. marcel, oliver, etc) comparable projections, but from my quick review they are uniformly lower than these:

Ubaldo: 3.94 / 1.38
Hammel: 5.06 / 1.48
de la Rosa: 5.01 / 1.50