If you want to win your fantasy baseball leagues, you need to have the best projections on your draft day. I spent the last two days telling you who had the projected hitters most accurately last year and pitchers too. I’ve generally found in that research that combining projections is the most accurate way to go so I previously would simply average the main projections for a combined projection in the early years of Mr. Cheatsheet. While those provided a certain level of accuracy, I eventually sought to improve upon that by looking at each stat on its own and trying to develop the optimal weights of each projection for each and every stat.

After crunching lots of numbers and drinking lots of coffee, this led to a Special Blend of projections that would look at pitcher’s strikeouts and, for example, take 35% from the Steamer projections, 20% from the Fangraphs Fan projections and 45% from the MORPS projections. It would continue by applying different weights for each of the other stats such as earned runs or saves.

With these various optimized weights, it vastly improved upon just simply combining the projections. I find that these Special Blend projections have outperformed most other projections out there. However, looking at last year’s results, I learned quite a bit and made a few changes to the weightings for this year and, in addition, have opted to project playing time in a new manner that I think will improve the results greatly. I tested it out by applying these changes to last year’s Special Blend and they jumped way up in analysis of the best projections of the year.

All of that being said, it’s time to see the new and improved 2016 projections! First, I must thank the sources that go into my Special Blend and those sources are:

If those sources did not exist, my Special Blend would not exist so many thanks to them for all of their hard work in generating their initial projections.

The 2016 Projections

In the projections below, you’ll see a few hundred hitters and pitchers broken out. You may not see certain players listed in there though that you’d expect to see. That is the case when one of the six sources listed above did not provide a projection for that player. Most commonly, they may not have a projection on the Fangraphs Fans site yet as that has the smallest number of players projected. When that’s the case, I cannot do my special blending so I have to leave that player off the list. I’ll update this Special Blend a couple more times before the year starts as more players get projections added.

I’ve listed the 2016 projections below but you can see a full view of them by accessing them through the Google Doc here and you’re able to download them directly from the Google Doc as well. In this sheet, there’s a tab for Pitchers and Hitters and they both include a column for a calculated WERTH roto value (position-adjusted or not) for a standard 5×5 roto league. That WERTH value is the calculation of how far above average that player is across the five main roto statistics for your rotisserie leagues.

Projections last updated on 04/02/2016