Dan Szymborski released his ZiPS projections for the Pirates yesterday, and they are not pretty. ZiPS is much less optimistic about the team’s chances this year than CHONE. I created a new projected wins spreadsheet, substituting OBP, SLG and ERA numbers from ZiPS in place of the projections from CHONE. Fielding projections are still from CHONE, and base running value is still based on last year’s Baseball Prospectus numbers. Projected playing time remains the same.
Based on ZiPS, the Pirates are projected to win 60 games, well down from the 71 wins I ended up with using the CHONE projections. The have just a 29% chance of avoiding 100 losses, and the chance of finishing .500 is only 0.0315%. Ouch.
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FYI, The Book’s Tango recently took a look at comparing projection systems for 2008, to see how they did compared to each other, because a THT writer did a comparison and gave him the data so he could do it using his methods. Tango came to the conclusion that CHONE’s projection was the best of the major freely available systems.
If I recall right, ZIPS did OK too, just not as good.
And from my personal standpoint, I’ve found the ZIPS Giants projections to be on the low side too. The way I generally regard them is ZIPS is like the low end, Bill James is the high end, and now CHONE is the most likely point.
That should give a nice range, though ZIPS is not always the low projection and vice-versa for Bill James, that just works in a general sense in that with the three forecasts, you have a high middle and low. It is just that Bill James has a rep for being too optimistic and I’ve felt that ZIPS was too pessimistic, at least for the Giants players.