2010 PECOTA Projected Standings

Baseball Prospectus has released the first version of their projected 2010 MLB standings. Unlike me, they've got the Yankees penciled in for third place. Where CAIRO has the Yanks projected at 102-60, PECOTA says 93-69.



PECOTA and CAIRO are basically dead even on the offense. They're projecting 917 runs and CAIRO says 916. The big difference is the runs allowed. CAIRO says 695, PECOTA says 789.



Here's how the pitching projections differ.

Name	cIP	cR	pIP	pR	dIP	dR
C.C. Sabathia*	215	89	207	95	8	-6
Javier Vazquez	201	86	199	97	2	-11
Andy Pettitte*	173	93	191	106	-18	-13
A.J. Burnett	167	82	175	111	-8	-29
Joba Chamberlain	155	82	144	78	11	4
Chad Gaudin	88	48	101	66	-13	-18
Philip Hughes	70	28	59	30	11	-2
Mariano Rivera	67	18	55	22	12	-4
Alfredo Aceves	57	27	50	26	7	1
Sergio Mitre	56	34	30	21	26	13
David Robertson	56	26	60	29	-4	-3
Edwar Ramirez	42	23	30	16	12	7
Damaso Marte*	37	17	40	22	-3	-5
Jonathan Albaladejo	12	7	40	21	-28	-14
Boone Logan*	7	4	45	28	-38	-25
Royce Ring*	22	11	0	0	22	11
Romulo Sanchez	19	12	0	0	19	12
Mark Melancon	15	8	0	0	15	8
Zachary McAllister	0	0	31	20	-31	-20
Total	1459	695	1457	789	2	-94

cIP: Projected IP in CAIRO

cR: Projected runs allowed in CAIRO

pIP: Projected IP in PECOTA

pR: Projected runs allowed in PECOTA

dIP: cIP minus pIP

dR: cR minus pR



The CAIRO IP are based on the last set of Diamond Mind simulations I ran, averaged over 100 seasons so they don't line up with what the CAIRO spreadsheet, and they need to be tweaked further. I didn't realize Burnett was only pitching 167 innings, for example. However, if you look at where things differ, it's primarily with Burnett and Gaudin in terms of rate of performance, and then in how many innings they're allocating to people like Boone Logan and Jonathan Albaladejo.



Digging a little deeper into what these numbers say, PECOTA isn't displaying total runs allowed so I divided the total 789 runs allowed in their standings by the 673 projected earned runs on the team depth chart to reverse engineer it. Right off the bat this looks off, because the ratio is 1.172. The typical ratio is generally 1.08. In fact, this is really, really, really screwed up. Since 1946, there have been 1507 team seasons. I'm using that cutoff to remove the small glove/ deadball era and the WWII era where you had players who didn't belong in the majors to get closer to the modern error rate. In those 1507 seasons, there have been 59 teams that had a RA/ER ratio that high or worse. So they're either predicting the 2010 Yankees to allow unearned runs at a rate that has happened at a rate of 0.03915063 in the MLB team seasons since 1946, or they screwed something up.



They have some smart guys over there, so my guess is it's the latter. As someone who screws up his spreadsheets constantly, I can understand that. I left a comment over there asking for them to elaborate. So don't worry about these yet.