We're about 1 week away from opening day and everyone has an opinion on who should make the team, who's going to regress in 2012, and who's gonna dominate. So lets put those opinions to the test and compete in a little prediction contest.

The basic format is that everyone can pick 5 Royals players who they think are going to outperform their projected numbers. Additionally, every month we'll each pick one player who is going to outperform his projections for just the month ahead. And, at the end of the year, I'll tally up the results and we can finally determine who is truly the smartest one in the room.

Scott has provided a number of projections for the starting pitchers. Lets use his weighted average (wtd AVG) figures to judge our predictions:

The wtdAVG is the weighted average of the averaged ERA and FIP projections from CAIRO, ZIPS, and PECOTA. If you want more details, check out the original post which is linked above and/or this link which describes FIP.

And here are the average projections that I calculated for the batters based on CAIRO and ZIPS (apparently you have to pay to get the PECOTA projections, and that ain't happening, but if a kind soul wants to send me the data, I'll gladly incorporate it and update before the start of the season). Lets judge the prediction based on the hitters' wOBA (explanation here) unless there is public outcry in favor of OPS:

As for scoring, I'm not 100% sure about the best way to score this, but I think you should get credit for a correct prediction and BONUS! points for how correct you were, so 1 point for correctly predicting that a player will overperform, and then extra points for how much that prediction over-performed [for example, .42 extra points if Paulino has a 4.00 AVG, or .5 extra point if Cain has a .315 wOBA (actual wOBA - projected wOBA multiplied by a factor of 50)].

So, if you want to test your GM skills, make your 5 yearly predictions below in the comments.

-LS