How to use the long form Profile Generator
This is the original process used to generate a player PID profile when the software was first developed. It is more laborious than the Quick Profile Generator but does give you a bit more control of how historical results are interpreted. Because this process is more complicated, it is broken down into several phases on the website which you can follow along with down below.
The automation assumes that you have access to Fangraphs or another baseball site that will allow you to either cut and paste or download a set of individual at bat results into an xls Excel spreadsheet. The example I have here uses Fangraphs because it’s pretty handy, easily available, and free. The idea would be to go into Fangraphs and display the detail play log for a player for a period of time. The profile generator doesn’t care what that period of time is and you can use any bias or fudge factor that you want.
For example, when running late season 2014 Pirates simulations, I chose to ignore April and May at bat results for pretty much everybody because they didn’t really reflect what was going on in August and September very much. Sometimes it can be enlightening to make several player profiles using a ‘hot’ profiles, a ‘cold’ profile and a ‘career’ profile and run the simulator with different combinations of these profiles to see how much difference that makes in the outcome. The profile generator allow you to do that though it takes some work.
Please be aware, though I only gave explicit instructions for Fangraphs, any site or source of data that has at bat result data in a way that has some kind of identifier which shows what type of result it is can be made to work. You’d need to generate a different Results Classification spreadsheet but it would work ok. I can help you with that if you contact me at the ‘support email’ address on the About Us page.
The profile generator process happens in several stages. Follow each of the links below to get a more detailed review of each stage.
The first step is to capture the raw ‘at bat’ data so it can be used to generate the percentage profile for the player in question. To see how that can be done with Fangraphs, follow the link below:
How to Capture Raw At Bat Data (from Fangraphs)
Second step is to create a blank Profile file. Only need to use this to create an empty profile file for the first profile. It can contain as many profiles as you like once you have one started. Use the following link to see how that’s done:
Generate an Empty Profile File
Third step is to set up and run the profile generator using an existing profile file, raw data spreadsheet, and classification spreadsheet.
The final part of this section is a full end to end sample run of the Profile Generator using data that is available on the Downloadable Example Files page.