Below are the early playing time projections from the survey that just over 50 of you completed. Thanks a lot for taking the time. I've made a few adjustments and I'll explain those shortly.

The total plate appearances total just under 5400. We need 500 additional plate appearances, which was just too many for me to make adjustments here. If I took the percentage of PA's and scaled it to 5900, far too many hitters had too many plate appearances. I've left these as is. When we get closer to the start of the season (middle of spring training or so), we'll do another survey. I'll probably do it position by position so that we can get about 695 PA per position plus some pinch hitters. So keep in mind in any future projections I do that we're missing about 500 PA.

When I ran the survey, I included "CF to be named later." I'm pretty sure most of us were thinking about Marlon Byrd here since we knew the Cubs were likely to sign him. The average projection system is around 530 plate appearances so 553 is more than realistic in my opinion.

Our projected IP for the starters was 963. We need only 940 so I adjusted each pitcher down based on the percentage of projected innings pitched. It didn't make much of a difference as we only needed to get rid of 23 innings. For example, the average IP for Zambrano was 198.

As a group, we projected only 426 innings. We need 505 from the relievers. So we needed 79 additional innings. I took the 10 players on the list above with the fewest IP and added 7.9 IP to their total. If I would have made adjustments to all of them, Marmol and Grabow both end up near 80 innings and that just isn't going to happen.

I'll apply these projections to the various projection systems that are currently out in the coming weeks. We should begin to get a much better idea where the Cubs stand.