PECOTA was originally developed by Nate Silver, who has since gone on to far greater fame (and likely fortune as well) as a political number cruncher, with his website FiveThirtyEight.com. You don’t really need to get into the details of what makes PECOTA tick. But according to Baseball Prospectus, there are three elements to the system:
- Major-league equivalencies, to allow us to use minor-league stats to project how a player will perform in the majors;
- Baseline forecasts, which use weighted averages and regression to the mean to produce an estimate of a player’s true talent level;
- A career-path adjustment, which incorporates information about how comparable players’ stats changed over time.