It's that time of year again and starting tomorrow you can begin making wild projections about your Texas Rangers! To increase the excitement (and participation), the community member with the best (lowest) score across all players will win a Texas Rangers player t-shirt in the size, color and player of their choosing.
A few notes:
- Scoring has changed and will now be done by taking the number of standard deviations away from the actual result for each category on each player. For example, the Michael Young PA projections were all over the place last year because of speculation on his position, playing time and factoring in his age. The standard deviation for his PA was approximately 80. There was very little variance for Elvis Andrus, everyone pretty much agreed on how much he would play and the standard deviation for his PA was 30. If you were off on Young's total PA by 40, your score would be 0.50 for that category as being half a standard deviation off. But if you were off by 40 on Elvis Andrus, your score would be 1.33. This will better accommodate the different scales and variances for each category and player so that PA and IP doesn't dominate the scoring as much as last year. It also provides greater reward for doing well on a high variance player.
- Your final score will be the average of all categories on all players.
- For any player that you do not submit a guess for, you will receive the same score as whoever submitted the worst score for that player.
- For hitters the categories are the same: PA, AVG, OBP, SLG.
- For pitchers the categories have changed slightly: IP, ERA, K/9, BB/9, HR/9. In previous years the accumulated totals were used for K, BB and HR but we will be using the value per nine innings rates for 2012 to not double count the IP impact.
- This year will include a handful of relief pitchers. There will be 11 or 12 position players and 8 or 9 pitchers for the projections. Some players may change depending on what happens during spring training.
- Each weekday at noon the next player projection post will hit and will stay open for seven days.
Good luck to everyone, I hope we get a lot of participation for those sweet, sweet crowd sourcing values.