Furthermore, Community Forecasts are likely better than the rest in terms of depth charts / playing time.

If I had to go with only one, I’d go with the Community.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/spring2008/columns/story?columnist=crasnick_jerry&id=3302059

, Erik Bedard is going to put up huge strikeout totals this year.

Ah, but there’s the fun of it: all of that thought on your part results in one projection. Someone else thinks he will get injured, puts in a low projection, and so on, and so on, and so on, and the end wisdom you get contains who knows what… and works. (or doesn’t work)

Yeah, but we know that NO ONE projected 50 innings on the season, yet we also know there is in fact a reasonable chance that Bedard will get hurt and pitch only 50 innnings. And that makes sense – in all likelihood, he won’t miss 3/4 of the season with an injury, so no one should “project” that. However, that possibility should, I think be factored into any projection. It’s the same reason people accuse PECOTA and similar systems of being overly conservative. Most projection systems include the non-zero possibility of collapse. For example, Bedard has a 10% “attrition rate” according to PECOTA, which means that by that system there is a 10% chance that his playing time will decrease by 50% relative to his previously established baseline.

Anyway, maybe most people did knock 5-10% off of Bedard’s innings pitched to account for serious injury. But, if they did, they sure assumed a healthy Bedard would pitch a ton of innings.

If a pitcher is healthy in one year – as Bedard was last year – and you assume no change in talent or luck from year to year, you still should deduct a hefty percentage from his totals in your projections to deal with serious injury.

Bedard wasn’t healthy last year: he missed the final month of the season because of a strained right oblique, which is why he only had 182 IP. And why I don’t expect him to exceed 180 this year, either. That shouldn’t affect his rate stats much, though — unless he tries to “pitch through it” — just the counting stats.

(Though I do like the “Contender Tautology”: contending teams have players that play well; players that play well turn teams into contenders. Lather, rinse, repeat.)

On the fangraph site, they give predictions of Bedard’s won/loss totals by four “experts” (including Bill James) and none of them have him winning more than 13 games. James has his record at 13-11. It’s not clear if these projections were made before Bedard was traded though.

That’s what I’ve always found so awesome: you can’t really reverse-engineer what people are using to do their projections.