BPro: Pease: Reintroducing PECOTA

And as they walked on
Through troubled times…
What’s so funny bout Pease, love & understanding PECOTA?

Welcome to PECOTA week here at Baseball Prospectus. All week, we’ll be running content on the state of our projection system, covering where we’re at and where we’re going. To kick things off, let’s pull back the curtain and have a look at the history of PECOTA production, which should answer a lot of questions readers have asked.

...We eventually produced a release of our standard Fantasy package, and there were some tantalizing big-picture advantages to the new PECOTAs versus the old—the more automated process and better integration with Clay’s raw stats meant we could run PECOTA projections and cards for over twice as many players as we did with the Excel process, for example. Still, it was late, there was understandable uncertainty about the product, and we ended up giving Fantasy subscribers the free Premium upgrade and extended Premium subscribers by a month for the trouble… and it was such a hectic time I don’t think we actually announced this. Enjoy the free baseball coverage, folks; when we screw up, we try to make things right, and the suits can’t stop us from doing it because we are the suits.

We’ve continued to push out PECOTA updates throughout the 2010 season, but we haven’t been happy with their presentation or documentation, and its become clear to everyone that its time to fix the problem once and for all. The year 2003 seems like an eternity ago; we’ve undergone a huge amount of change since then, and so has the competitive marketplace for baseball analysis. We want PECOTA to be hands-down the best baseball performance projection system in the world, and over the next few days we’re going to break down what we’re going to do—and what we’ve already done—to get there. Stay tuned.