BP Unfiltered

thanks for the update. I hate to complain because I know (1) how awesome all this is and (2) how much work you put into it. But this is the third year in a row that the player cards (and for my purposes, upside) are rolled out too late as far as fantasy baseball purposes. I was under the impression that the mistakes that had been made in the past had been corrected and this year would be different. Did something go wrong again that resulted in such a late arrival? Or should we expect upside figures to be released this late every year? Because honestly, if the latter is the case I don't think I will resubscribe for next year. BP offers a lot of other things, but as someone in a 100% keeper league where we only draft prospects, upside is invaluable.

I don't like the "beta" graph...the warp info is less useful from a fantasy perspective. For me the old graphs showing relative performance in several categories told me a lot more about the players than this combined measure.

The percentiles are not there for me either.

Percentiles should all be there, under "2011 Forecast" if you scroll way down (or less way down if you click on the "PECOTA Only" tab first).

Will the old "Splits" graph be added later?

Looks great!

The injury history information is spectacular.
Your presentation of historical and past stats is much improved.
Thanks.

Apologies for a misplaced comment, but I can't get the direct reply links to work. I am stuck at work with only Explorer and I cannot see the percentile data either. Strange that it would show up on some browsers and not others.

For what it's worth, typing in 'Brandon Belt' leads to the player card for Jimmy Rollins.

I can see "2011 Projections" but it only includes IP, ERA, WHIP, SV, W, L and WARP for pitchers, and for hitters AVG, HR, R, RBI, SB, tAV, and WARP. No upside, no percentile breakdown, and no other stats like OBP, SLG, etc. The player cards are supposed to contain this information, right?

Whoa, what happened to five-year or ten-year value projections? That's why I'm a subscriber. Am I missing something? You used to provide forecasting for WAR & $-value. Am I missing it? Are you still providing it?
Thanks.

are you dropping the davenport translations?

Thanks & sorry; I didn't see that bullet point in the article. Started shooting before before aiming. My bad!

Not relevant, but there's no way to comment elsewhere, and direct messages to BP unanswered:

When is the PECOTA spreadsheet going to be updated????

The cards will be interesting baseball history. Just leave them as that. Adding projections and fantasy content 10 days before Opening Day is a waste of resources.

Will you have the "skills" graph (used to be at the top right) and the stars/scrubs graph (lower left) this year? I see they are no longer part of the card. If so any idea on when? These two were very valuable from a fantasy perspective to understand the skillset and future potential for a player. Thanks!

At least I'm getting more articles than ever (/end sarcasm).

Some honest advice, just give up on PECOTA - which the stats have shown has been at best in-line with the other systems out there since Nate Silver left. I don't think anyone takes its output seriously anymore anyways. And, if the player card are going to be a week before the season every year, just focus on the articles, cause every other website gets their projections and data out there weeks and months earlier and these cards have almost no value this late in the game.

I think BP has failed to recognize the increase in quality content out there on the internet these days.

Is there an ETA on the 10 year projections ?

Any word on the status of the "skills" graph (used to be at the top right) and the stars/scrubs graph (lower left)? Thanks.

Perhaps I missed this from a while ago, but what ever happened to the list of the Top 100 comps? I loved that feature.

Also,

There is a HUUGE discrepancy between the weighted mean projections and whats listed on the depth chart. What gives?

It is the last weekend of the season. The 11th hour has long since past. For years, I've staunchly defended BP against the reputable "upstarts" every step of the way. "BP is the granddad of 'em all."

It appears the joke is on me; "granddad," old, slow, and past its prime.

With my current subscription expiring in nine days and still no 10-year projections it is a very sad day for me.

Once is an aberration, but the issues with PECOTA the last few years were to be resolved over a year ago.

I feel naive, but I guess I didn't realized at the time how vital Nate was to the entire operation.

Although I agree with everything else you have said here, I don't necessarily agree that this is bad management. They have had almost six months since a meaningful game was played to get this done, yet it isn't. I must give them the benefit of the doubt and presume that it isn't because they didn't try, but must be because they can't since not trying is far worse than not being able to. Either way, the long-term PECOTA projections were an important reason for me to be a member, and now that they no longer exist, I feel like BP has left me more than us leaving BP.

We will have card updates tomorrow.

I was working on a longer explanation for the delays, but that's a good way to not get it completed quickly, so I'll try to sum up very briefly here.

We weren't as prepared for the complexity of what we tried to do this off-season as we thought we were. All of our translations and projections (and many of our statistics themselves, as you know if you've read the statistical introduction from Baseball Prospectus 2011) were re-built from the ground up with contemporary components on BP hardware. Where before we had individual BPers running all sorts of different processes on different machines, we've now got 98% of our stuff in SQL and Perl running on a dedicated server that many BPers can get to.

We put too much on Colin Wyers' shoulders this offseason, which is why you haven't heard from him in quite a while. We expected to make up some time with the transition of the database and processes to the central server, but that took a lot longer than we'd budgeted schedule-wise and because of that, we weren't able to leverage the efforts of the rest of our technical staff like we had planned.

When you look at where we are now structurally versus where we were in late March of 2009 and 2010 I like to think there are reasons for optimism, but I regret some forward-looking statements I've made in the past so I don't want to make any here, and I certainly understand it's cold comfort for those of you who were counting on the features we've been unable to release so far. I wish we'd been able to produce all of the components of the projections when they were reasonably expected.

Dave, this isn't meant to be flipped or sarcastic, but is it tomorrow yet?

I hope to contribute a worthy response if I get the opportunity; no time right now. It's March 29th. This is the third year I did not receive anything remotely close to what was promised.

I understand it is no small endeavor, bit it sounds like six months (off-season) would never be enough time to deliver.

That simply was never the case when Nate was involved,