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ST. LOUIS — It’s that time of the year again, when baseball projection models wearing names that look like spilled Scrabble tiles have churned out their annual numbers, and major league rosters have taken shape enough to attempt to cruise through the forecasts. If you are a Fangraphs enthusiast, you roll with Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS. Prefer Baseball Prospectus? Then it’s the Nate Silver creation known as PECOTA, which stands for — deep breath here — “player empirical comparison and optimization test algorithm.” The former, ZiPs, tries to project future performance using past performance while ad…

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