Feature Focus: PECOTA Weighted Means Spreadsheet

Note: this piece was originally published on July 11, 2013.

Welcome back to another installment of Feature Focus! I’m your host, Richard Kiley. (We spared no expense.) This week, I want to talk to you about the PECOTA Weighted Means Spreadsheet.

To download the PECOTA Weighted Means spreadsheet, simply go to the Fantasy dropdown on the navbar at the top of any BP page:

If you’re a BP subscriber (you are a subscriber, aren’t you?) that link will download an Excel spreadsheet. The most common way to open those is with Microsoft Excel. If you don’t have Excel, however, there are several alternatives:

• You can download the free Excel Viewer for Windows.
• Users of Mac OS X v10.7 (Lion) and newer can use Preview, which comes preinstalled
• You can download one of several free Excel-compatible spreadsheet programs, like Gnumeric, LibreOffice, and OpenOffice
• You can import the spreadsheet into Google Docs or Office Web Apps and view it in your web browser.

The first sheet is an informational page, containing the latest date updated, the copyright notice, information about the playing time forecasts and a link to the PECOTA glossary. For players who are in the depth charts (that is, expected to play in MLB), we use their Depth Charts forecast from the moment the spreadsheet was published; all other players have automated playing time forecasts based on their past playing time, both major and minor league. This means that summing values out of the PECOTA spreadsheet will vastly outstrip the amount of playing time we actually expect in MLB for the season; if you want team totals, you need to use only the values for players who are in the depth charts (which will have a “T” in the DC_FL column in their respective sheet).

The next sheet contains hitter forecasts. Several columns are links; you can click on a player’s BPID to view his player card, his team to view the team’s Depth Chart page, or his MLBCODE to visit the player’s page at MLB.com. The spreadsheet also displays a player’s official stats, and several rate stats computed from those. Please bear in mind that the rate stats are rounded separately from the counting stats, so a player’s hit totals may not reconcile exactly with his listed batting average, for instance. We also show the key value stats we use for hitters at BP—True Average, Baserunning Runs, FRAA, VORP and WARP. Then come the PECOTA diagnostics, based on the percentiles.

Much like the hitters sheet, the pitchers sheet contains hyperlinks for player cards and the team’s Depth Chart page. We have a variety of official (and essentially official, like Quality Start) stats, along with our value stats and PECOTA diagnostics. If you're wondering about projections of rest-of-season performance, you can find those on the player cards.

That’s all for this week. Have requests for additional PECOTA spreadsheet features? Or have a feature at BP you’d like to see highlighted? Leave a comment below.