Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images It’s PECOTA week at Baseball Prospectus, diving deep into their flagship projection system. It cleverly shares a name with nine-year major league infielder Bill Pecota, but also is an acronym, standing for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. Among the difficulties this year with projections is how to handle a truncated 2020 season that was 37 percent of a normal season’s length. Jonathan Judge tackles that and other questions, and in doing so used Clayton Kershaw, whose strong history (one ERA starting with a three in the last 12 years) gives more of a sense of certainty compared to White Sox pitcher Michael Kopech, who has more variance in his projections: