SPECULATOR: Ignoring playing time

Veteran readers of the Baseball Forecaster know that projecting players with any sort of accuracy is hard—a 70% accuracy rate is about the best we can do—but projecting playing time before spring training even starts? Even harder. Heck, we don't even know if half the teams will have a DH this year… and it's almost February.

We admit as much on our Stats and Projections page. From our section on "How the Projections are Created":

The more difficult part of the process is assessing playing time (PT). PT expectations are fluid, changing constantly based on what we expect to happen on any given day.

So what if we just ditch playing time for now, and speculate only on our skills projections? By normalizing playing time and prorating hitters...

Almost!

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