Bid prices

A Nathan Mourns…

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Everybody knows about Joe Nathan, the man with the most saves in baseball the last six years, who has a tear in his ulnar collateral ligament. The problem right now, for me, is that I’m preparing updated projections for the Patton Software and there is no way to know whether Nathan is out for two months or two years. You see, the odds of Nathan getting back onto a field after rehabbing from surgery are real long, so the first medical approach is to wait a couple/few weeks, try to strengthen the supporting muscles, and see if he can pitch through it.

Not many do, but if he can, then he might get a few months of the season in and have some value this year. If he can’t, he has no value this year at all, and no value next year either. So, what should I do with his projection? And what should I do with the interesting set of relievers in the Twins’ bullpen, any of whom might actually be able to do the job if given the chance?

Let’s call what I do “pussyfootin’,” because it’s a lot like the gait of Violet, the cat that just walked over my keyboard and curled up on the back of my desk and didn’t knock over a thing (and only introduced a few typos along the way). I’m careful, thoughtful, and when I’m clear I leap. And, like Woody Allen, I always usually (yeah, right) land on my feet.

In the new set of projections I cut Nathan’s projection in half, to 35 innings pitched, and I bump his ERA and WHIP up just a bit, then cut his bid price down to $10, which I don’t think I’d pay if I was drafting tonight, but I do think someone else would bid $11 if I did. $10 isn’t likely to be the bid price in two weeks, when we’re supposed to know more, but it does reflect the market now. I don’t think you want Nathan, but you don’t want someone else to get him too cheaply. There is too much we don’t know.

My first impulse after Nathan’s injury was to bump up Jon Rauch’s projection, giving him most of the saves, but while I still think he has to be the favorite to win the job, because he did some time in the past as a closer in Washington, he’s not a lock. I made him $9 at first, because he can earn that as a middle reliever even if he doesn’t get the job, but I’ve now knocked him down to $7 because, well, there are too many alternatives to assume that he will get the job, and too many questions about his work last year to be confident he’ll hold the job if it is given to him.

Matt Guerrier is usually cited as next in line after Rauch, but even though he was a closer in college and has been an excellent middle reliever–other than in 2008–he doesn’t profile as a closer. He doesn’t blow guys away, in other words. I’ve bumped him up to $4 (he earned $15 in 2009) and allocated him some of the saves sliced from Nathan’s line. I think that’s safe, even though he doesn’t have closer upside.

The guy everybody likes for the job, talentwise, is Pat Neshek, who missed most of the last two years following a 2008 breakdown that led to TJ surgery. He’s healthy now, but still working his way back. He’s got an interesting sidearmed delivery that is deceptive and brings lots of movement. Historically, he hasn’t had much of a platoon split. The issue is whether he is really back. Chances are the Twins aren’t going to throw him into the fire immediately, so I give him a few of the saves and a bid of a couple dollars in the new version. You have to be aware of him, but he’s still a long shot at this point.

The other closer-quality pitcher on the Twins’ staff is Jose Mijares, who is the only lefty in the Twins’ pen right now. Even if that situation persists he could get some saves, but he won’t get a lot of saves. I added a couple of saves to his projection, but kept him as a $1 bid. He won’t go for more until the Twins add a lefty to their pen.

Saves are a tricky business. Any pitcher going good can get saves, but we can see with our own eyes that not everyone is able to keep going good when the pressure rises. There are some who say that Mijares is a choker, but his Leverage Index (see baseball-reference.com) shows that he performed best in the toughest situations last year. Until we’ve seen a big enough sample, it’s impossible to really judge a pitcher’s readiness for the role, but easy to understand why guys in high leverage jobs lose their jobs before they can prove that they are victims of the random thing.

Projecting player performance is a tricky business. The talent evaluation part is fairly straight forward, but projecting playing time is usually the difference between a good and bad projection. While pussyfootin’, I try to split the difference, to balance the expression of talent with the possibility of opportunity. Those of us drafting next week are going to have to make catlike choices when it comes to selecting the Twins’ closer. My adjusted bid prices are an attempt to equalize the odds of success vs. price for each player.

Ps. There was speculation today that the Twins might move Francisco Liriano to the pen, maybe even the closer spot, given their situation. This isn’t an obvious move, but if Liriano is struggling as a starter it seems like a natural next step. That, of course, screws all the values above, all of which will be updated next time no matter what happens.

Forecaster and Handbook are out!

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I got my copy of the Baseball Forecaster about 10 days ago, but closing the magazine meant not cracking it, even though I’ve got a short bit in it (which happened to run here first, about WHIP v. WH/9), until now.

Ron’s lead essay is very smart. It’s about how wrong we are about players, year after year, and he wonders why we pursue exacting but nearly always wrong projections. Then he comes up with something new, called the Mayberry Method.

There’s a lot to like about the way the MM summarizes a player’s skills in a descriptive way. Yet despite it’s simplicity, I’m not convinced it is going to catch on. New stuff often doesn’t, even when it has real merit. On the other hand, the benchmarks MM describes so succinctly are becoming increasingly entrenched as leading indicators, making me wonder why–if we’re getting better at defining leading indicators–we’re not getting better predicting breakouts.

As Ron says in the piece, we may be smarter now than we were 20 years ago, but that may not be such a good thing.

Steve Moyer always gives us so-called experts a copy of the hot-off-the-press Bill James Handbook at First Pitch Arizona, for which I am very grateful. Not that I wouldn’t buy it, I have many times, but this way it ends up in my hands even sooner.

The book continues to grow, with increased focus on the defense awards and rankings, focus on baserunning skills, and the ever useful park factors. I’m a great fan of baseball-reference.com and fangraphs.com, both of which I use all day long, but I sit and read the Bill James Handbook, poring over its pages as if it were a ripping good yarn, which in many ways it is.

I’m glad for both these books and recommend them highly.

Most Valuable Unwanted Hitters

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As with the recently posted pitcher’s list, these are the hitters that went unwanted by Patton and Fenger in this week’s software release with the highest projected value (by me).

  • Norris Hopper, CIN
  • Joe Koshansky, COL
  • Ryan Raburn, DET
  • Brian Barton, STL
  • Michael Aubrey, CLE
  • Frank Catalanotto, TEX
  • Oscar Salazar, BAL
  • Johnny Estrada, FA
  • Brian Barden, STL

A much different sort of list than the pitchers. I’m not sure what that means. Maybe those guys are expecting the young hitters to make their teams and be eligible, unlike the pitchers.

For a change of pace, here is a list of the guys they give prices to, that I haven’t been able to bring myself to make projections for:

  • Henry Blanco, SD
  • Brad Wilkerson, BOS
  • So Taguchi, CHN
  • Raul Casanova, NYN
  • Chris Gomez, BAL
  • Jolbert Cabrera, BAL
  • Jason Lane, TOR
  • Angel Pagan, NYN
  • Kevin Cash, NYA

If these guys are still in the running for jobs next Friday they will get projections.

Top Earning Pitchers with No Bid Price

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I’m working on this week’s update for the Patton $ Software and Data and found a category that might be of interest. These are the pitchers that neither Alex nor Michael have put bid prices on, who I have given the highest valued projections. I guess this is really a reflection of my prejudices this year filtered by Alex and Mike’s bids. If they think they’ll be around on draft day they aren’t on this list:

  • Tommy Hunter, TEX
  • Ben Sheets, FA (Texas likely)
  • Wade Davis, TB
  • Jeff Neimann, TB
  • Daryl Thompson, CIN
  • Ian Kenneday, NYA
  • Kevin Mulvey, MIN
  • Jon Niese, NYN
  • Tommy Hanson, ATL
  • Anthony Swarzak, MIN
  • Kyle McClellan, STL
  • Casey Janssen, TOR
  • Dustin Mosely, ANA
  • Eduardo Morlan, TB

Make of this what you will. Or can.

Jon Williams on Alex Rodriguez

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Advanced Fantasy Baseball: Surgery to Cost at Least 10 weeks

I get a feed of fantasy baseball stories, and this is one that just came over. I knew A-Rod was thinking about having surgery tomorrow, but this was the first I’d heard he’d decided to go ahead. It does seem he’s come up with a compromise, which might get him back on the field sooner this year, at the cost of further surgery next winter. All of which, as Jon Williams suggests, you need to know.

But I refer to this story here because Williams calls A-Rod a “renowned wuss” and talks about how he expected him to have a bad year this year because of all the attention focused on him following his PED admissions. Big Jon says, “I was leaning toward predicting a bad season for A-Rod because of the pressure on him to perform under the close eye of the media while enduring the boos of fans. He has responded poorly to this in the past and it will be increased by a factor of at least ten this season.”

Are these two things true?

The only reference I could find to A-Rod being a wuss was a story about how he fainted when his wife gave birth to their first child. This story came up last spring, as the couple hurtled toward divorce. A-Rod missed the birth of the second child, last May, when his plane got in just a little late, so we don’t know if he’s toughened up or not. In any case, I always thought wuss meant you were injury prone and didn’t play with little hurts. Rodriguez played with hip pain last season, apparently, and showed no signs of jaking. He’s had injuries over the years, but hasn’t lingered on the DL that I recall, and doesn’t have a reputation as injury prone. I wouldn’t make any decisions about A-Rod based on him not trying.

As for his clutchness, he really was horrible last year. But clutch performance is always measured through the filter of the small sample. Take a look at his Clutch Stats last year and you see that he was about the same Late and Close, 2 outs with runners in scoring position, and with the game within four runs, with about a .875 OPS. The one exception came Late and Close, where he was a weak .790. The issue here is that he had only 83 PA Late and Close. He also only had 74 PA with a greater than four run lead. In those at bats his OPS was 1.241! What a bum.

But everyone knows that 74 PA or 83 PA doesn’t tell you anything about a player. How has A-Rod performed throughout his career (I’m assuming that you don’t grow less clutch as you get older) in clutch and non clutch situations? His low OPS came in 2 Out with Runner in Scoring Position (.889). His high OPS came in one run games (.981). What I learn from this is that A-Rod is okay in the clutch, that he doesn’t so much fold under pressure as look a little less comfortable facing it, and so his effort looks like much less than his results. Would he have folded this year if he wasn’t hurt? 

I would suggest that A-Rod played under intense pressure last year, after the contract fiasco, the revelations about his private life, the breakup of his marriage, an apparent dalliance with an older woman who was also a celebrity, plus the pain in his hips. He’s never looked clutch, I have to admit, and was particularly unclutch last year, but it’s hard to draw a hard lesson from that experience. I’m happier saying that A-Rod is a great hitter who doesn’t always look like he enjoys being the man. That disconnect, it seems to me, is going to exaggerate his shortcomings. 

Oh, as for this year and next, what’s in store for A-Rod? If the doctors are right he’s going to miss about six weeks of the season to post-surgery rehab, and probably another few weeks to extended spring training getting game ready. A mid-June return seems reasonable, and as Jon Williams correctly says, this isn’t the whole fix, it’s a patch job, so he probably won’t be 100 percent if all goes well.

My advice on these sorts of things is to be conservative, if you’re in a good position, and take a chance if you’re in a weak one. In keeper leagues, it’s easy to figure this out, because you can judge everyone’s keeper lists. If you have a good keeper list you don’t want A-Rod unless his price drops below $20, and even then it might be a mistake. The cost to you if he fails isn’t worth the risk. In the software I’m going to cut his output nearly in half. 

As a startup draft/auction strategy it gets a little tougher. A rule of thumb might be, if you end up with Johan Santana in your mixed league draft, target A-Rod many rounds later. But it doesn’t have to be Santana. He’s just going to be the most expensive of the risky guys and the first one to go. Look for other cheap but big upside players and make a team of them. Emphasis on cheap. 

The flaws in A-Rod’s personality are obvious, and it’s hard not to pay attention to them. But the obvious evidence of his talent and work ethic seems way more important. He’s hurt and we have to deal with it, but we’ll do a better job of that if we don’t overamp A-Rod’s demons. He’s worth the risk for the right teams this year and next.

The Fantasy Baseball Price Guide —

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Last Player Picked

Mays Copeland has made a player rater. He has explained how he derives the values of the rater, and how he prices those values. He’s made some software that makes it easy to customize those ratings and prices for your league. He has also, most impressively, created an interface that allows the user to use a variety of projection systems (Marcel, CHONE, ZIPS, others I’m forgetting, and even a composite of them all) to create a list for their league’s format. 

The problem? The smell test. I ran the numbers for my Tout Wars NL league and the answers stunk. JJ Putz was named the fourth most valuable closer in the NL, by virtue of his 19 saves (!). F-Rod ranked first, with a projected 35 saves. The cloud, it seems, doesn’t always compute. Will Albert go for $49, as the PG suggests? In a word, no. But that isn’t the mistake (it is only a symptom).

Bid prices are different than projected values. Ignoring this truism means imagining that Johan Santana might be worth $48, as the LPP site suggests, but we all know that is wrong, even if Johan is healthy, which he may not be.

The problem is that there is no automatic pricing system based on projections that is going to properly price players for auction. Why? Because projections are, inevitably, 25  percent (or more) wrong. Even my projections aren’t perfect. We value projections because they fix for us what a player is expected to do, but what matters are the prices everyone else is willing to pay. And how our expectations stack up against them. That market evaluation is where the heavy lifting of draft prep comes. It combines the information in the projection with our assessment of risk, and filters it through our knowledge about the league we play in.

A system that projects Santana for $48, when he will not go for more than $38 in your league, is failing to properly allocate $10, compounding the effect of the error.

I dig Mays Copeland’s efforts, and maybe he isn’t selling the Pricing Guide as a list of bid prices, but rather as a way to compare different sets of stats (projected and real), though that wasn’t what I took away. My problem is that when he disses other sites, like the rototimes player rater, he offends me. Actually, he makes me an enemy. It isn’t that the rototimes rater is perfect, it isn’t, but it’s a lot better than anything Mays has come up with. His strict adherence to category scarcity blithely ignores the way people actually play the game. 

From the spirit of his site, I would think Mays would find ways to improve the rototimes rater. but instead he chooses to diss it and promote himself. That would be okay if he got it right. Mays hasn’t yet.

Update: I went back and checked his 2008 prices, figuring that would be a better test of the Price Guide. It is better. The Putz problem is a result of the projections, not anything the pricer is doing wrong, but he’s still giving Steals and Saves full value, so he prices Mariano Rivera at $49 last year. That is probably correct in a math sense, but doesn’t reflect the way the game is played. Also, his 2008 stats have Matt Holliday in the AL, which makes them useless for evaluating what actually happened last year. So, an interesting efffort showing some promise, but there are kinks to work out.