There is no actual baseball being played anytime soon, but we can at least imagine what players might do with the release of Baseball Prospectus’ 2022 PECOTA projections this week. PECOTA stands for “Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm” and was developed by Nate Silver twenty years ago. It has been tweaked and modified over the years, but essentially it projects future past performance based on past performance and what we know about player development.
PECOTA has often been accused of “hating” the Royals, which isn’t true of course. Like our own Hokius, PECOTA is a cold, unfeeling algorithm that is stripped of personal biases.