MLB Hitters Philthy Projections for 2020 Season

Something I’ve toyed with for a while now is making my own raw stat total projections. I play in a number of alternative fantasy baseball scoring formats, and really the only way to do valuations for all the different league types is to have raw projections to plug into a scoring system.

This offseason I studied how to do it and built these out by hand. What you’re seeing is the first result of that work. It is a base method that’s in place that will allow me to tweak things each offseason.

The Philthy Projections will favor hitters who have a history of hitting the ball hard, hitting a large percentage of line drives, and hitting a lot of barrels over the last three seasons.

You’ll see that as a result, these projections will create higher and lower BABIPs than the standard publicly available projections. The projections freely available on FanGraphs tend to cluster around the same point. These will provide you with an alternative.

These are skill projections showing what a player could produce given a ‘full time’ job for the shortened 2020 season. It assumes that a full time player will play 54 games in 2020.

Here’s a brief overview of the method:

  1. Collect the raw player stats from the last three years. For hitters with minor league and/or NCAA stats in the last three years, those stats are translated using a minor league equivalency process.

  2. The raw stats get neutralized by handedness to remove the effects of the player’s home park.

  3. A weighted three-year average of the neutralized stats are created using Tango’s Marcel 5/4/3 method.

  4. The weighted three year stats are regressed toward league average. For hits on balls in play, a player’s three year batted ball profile (Soft/Medium/Hard hit balls and LD/GB/FB%) is used in the regression. For home runs, Statcast barrel rate is used in the regression.

  5. The regressed stats are placed in to the player’s projected home park for 2020.

  6. The regressed and park-adjusted stats are then age adjusted.

Here are the full MLB Hitter projections for all players listed on each team’s active roster on their Roster Resource page. Feel free to scroll around on the page, but there are options at the top of the table to save this as an Excel table or .csv file as well: