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One of my favorite pastimes of late winter and early spring is perusing the various projection systems' forecasts for the St. Louis Cardinals. There hasn't been meaningful baseball in a good long while and opening day feels a ways away yet, so the black and while of what might come to pass is a welcome distraction from the reality that there are no real-life, meaningful games to watch (even if spring exhibitions are on the near horizon). Whether it's ZiPS, PECOTA, or Steamer, the projection systems use complex mathematical formulas and regression models. Fangraphs also has a Fans projection system, which is generated simply by asking fans to submit their predictions for a given player in the season to come. That was my inspiration last year for the VEB St. Louis Cardinals community projections.
It was a lot of fun to see how the VEB Community's collective predictions formed a projection for each player. You can see how the VEB Community fared as compared to the spreadsheets here. We received a lot of positive feedback from folks, so I thought we'd give it a whirl again this year. (Hopefully we're a bit more accurate as a collective when it comes to predicting 2015 than we were 2014.)
I thought we would start out with one of my favorite Cardinals: Adam Wainwright. After an injury-plaged 2014 that was quite good despite a nagging elbow issue, Wainwright is entering his age-33 season. What can we expect from the staff ace in 2015? You can review Wainwright's stats at Fangraphs or Baseball-Reference. VEB's 2015-15 offseason posts on Wainwright can be found here, if you want to dig a bit deeper before submitting your predictions.
This year, we're spicing things up a bit for the pitchers by adding Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP). Pretty exciting, I know.
I'm going to accept submissions for a week, so please share yours:
Update: As of March 24, 2015, we are no longer accepting Adam Wainwright projection submissions. You can find the results posts for the VEB Community projections here.