Here are the NEIFI team projections for 2011.  I wanted to get these out before the PECOTA depth charts storm the blogosphere (incidentally, PECOTA this year looks absolutely awful... I can't go into too much detail since it's subscriber-only, but suffice it to say that it appears to be broken in every way imaginable.  The MLEs are wrong, the aging patterns don't make sense, up is down, day is night, Ruben Gotay is projected to outhit Colby Rasmus).

I have the projected rosters broken down by division, with additional tabs showing all the players sorted by WAR.

Projected rosters are intentionally oversimplified, because it's infinitely easier to deal with a 25-man roster than to worry about everyone who might see action.  As a result, you'll see strange things like Johan Santana and Brandon Webb listed in their respective teams' bullpens... I did this because I couldn't give either of them a rotation spot (Santana because of his injury, Webb because NEIFI only projects him for 51 innings), but I didn't want to completely ignore them either.  The projected rosters are generally generous toward the teams, i.e. the best players are projected to get the most playing time... the only exceptions to this are cases where it's clear that the team is determined to give playing time to guys who don't deserve it.  The Diamondbacks' bench is an example of this; I could have dug up guys from their minor league system who are better than Blum, Mora, and Bloomquist, but since those three are making seven figures each, their roster spots aren't in jeopardy.  Regardless, the depth charts themselves aren't that important... any reasonable tweaks you can think of won't move the needle for a given team by more than a win, two wins at the absolute maximum.  I can get almost identical results just by totaling up the projected WAR of everyone in each organization, without worrying about allocating playing time at all.

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the WAR numbers for Rockies hitters on the NL West page and on the "Players" page don't match... this isn't an error.  It's because of the Coors hangover effect, which depresses our hitters' value.  Tulo's value as a Rockie is 5.33 WAR... with another team, with no hangover effect to worry about, he'd be at the 5.64 WAR shown on the "Players" sheet.  The latter number is his true ability.

Similarly, the WAR values for relievers on the "Pitchers" sheet reflect their true ability, whereas the values on the division sheets are adjusted for leverage.  This is why Street gets significantly more WAR than Belisle or Betancourt, even though their ERC projections are really close.

I should also add that the projected bullpens include quite a few potential starting pitchers.  If you see a guy listed in the bullpen and you want to know how he'd do as a starter, just add 0.85 to his ERC projection.

Enjoy!

As promised earlier today, I went through and collected all the arbitration salary data I could find for this winter.  Here's the spreadsheet, with my WAR projections, the projected salaries, and the actual salaries (or the figures submitted by player and team, for those who haven't yet agreed to terms): https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AjCZOpYYLVwqdEVmUjlmdllXUWZZWEJzdjE5R2JibVE&hl=en&gid=0. That sheet should include everyone who is arbitration-eligible and projects above replacement level... I couldn't find the salary data for about 20% of the guys on the sheet, but that's okay, adding them in later won't meaningfully alter the results.

Basically, this winter's data jives quite nicely with what I found two years ago.  Back then, I came up with a formula which estimated the proper salary progression as 27/41/65% of free agent value for players in their first, second, and final years of arbitration. And as you can see from the spreadsheet, the values for this winter are 27/39/64, virtually the same.  (Yeah, I'm lumping super-2s and normal first-year arb-eligible guys into the same category for these purposes... you can play around with the numbers yourself if you want, but trust me, it makes very little difference).  This gets us to 99% accuracy or better for each service time class, taken as a whole.

One thing that absolutely needs to be emphasized, though: this formula is not meant to be a really accurate predictor of how much money a particular player will make in arbitration.  The reason for that is simple: arbitration awards aren't based on WAR projections, they're based on past performance.  And not only that, they're based on a horribly inaccurate view of past performance, which overvalues HR, RBI, and saves while undervaluing defense (this is why Prince Fielder gets $15.5 million and Rickie Weeks will end up around $6 million, even though Fielder only projects half a win better than Weeks).  What this formula is designed to do is to provide a general guideline for how WAR translates into arbitration dollars, to provide something accurate in place of the standard but unproven 40/60/80. In other words, this is a rule of thumb, nothing more.  But it's a pretty good rule of thumb, I hope.

By way of introduction for those who don't know me: I've been doing my own projections since 2003.  I thought I'd take the time to put together a little guide to the science of player projections: what they do, what they don't do, and how to evaluate them.

The core of every system: the multi-year weighted average

The mechanics of all projection systems are quite similar: you take a weighted average of the player's past 3-4 years of performance, adjust it for age, and voilá, there's your projection.  Where the systems differ is in 1) the relative weights given to each year, 2) the aging patterns used, and most importantly 3) the minor league equivalencies used.

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