Drafts

Cardrunners: My first auction of the year

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I joined a new high-stakes 5×5 AL only auction league this year. Some of the prize money is put up by a poker education site, cardrunners.com, and some by the participants, who are a mix of fantasy experts, professional poker players, and financial pros. There are only 10 teams, but you can spend your money on all 28 of your rosterable players (you don’t have to, there is a draft when all teams are out of money). This changes the endgame some, as Rotowire’s Chris Liss notes in his post at Rotosynthesis (where he also posted the draft results).

Another wrinkle is that you can buy NL players. I spent some time trying to figure out what Adrian Gonzalez would be worth, and considered throwing him out early, but someone (I don’t remember who) beat me to it. My back of the envelope calculation was that a 50/50 chance for half a season of Gonzalez was worth a blank $8, though that calculation would change as the auction progressed. As teams recognize their strengths and weaknesses it might make sense to bid more for the high risk play. The gambit of coming out early could mean a bargain. In fact, I bumped a $3 bid to $4 and Daniel Dobish, Dave Gonos’ partner, muttering “I’m not letting him go to someone for free,” bid $7 and won him. Not a huge risk, but a nick in his budget he’ll feel if Gonzalez doesn’t come over.

There was a similar calculation in my most uncharacteristic moment in the auction. After adjusting my prices for the smaller league I was pleased in nearly every case but one (there was also a blip in the late early part of the auction where the price of outfielders who steal, namely Ichiro and Denard, went for scandalously low prices) that they were accurately describing the action. The difference came with the catchers, where huge draft inflation persisted all night. The action players, at least the guys who won the high-priced catchers through most of the auction, were the non-experts. They took Mauer to $40 and Victor Martinez to $35, and Napoli and Suzuki to $18. Even at the low end, guys I had listed for $2 were going for $5. Matt Wieters name was called fairly late, but there was still plenty of money around. His price surged past my $16 bid limit, but I had money to spend and when the bidding slowed at $20 I bid $21 and won the sophomore backstop. The move effectively changed my team from Nolan Reimhold and two scrub catchers to Wieters, Jose Guillen and a scrub who turned out to be Brayan Pena.

I don’t remember who had the penultimate bid on Wieters, but if it was one of the Cardrunners boys my brash reach means I wrecked the purity of a position-scarcity experiment, with the so-called experts buying cheap catchers and the so-called amateurs buying the pricey ones. All of them, as noted before, were inflated.

This morning I ran the projected stats of all the teams using the CHONE projections, mostly because I have Chone Figgins on my team. The key is to avoid testing your team using your own projections, since they naturally flavor the players you pick up. I don’t want to give up any competitive edge this exercise offers in its details, but I’m delighted to share for posterity the final standings, which surely won’t look anything like this next October.

TEAM PTS
Phipps 62
Carty 56
Rotoman 53
Hastings 51
Chad 50
Gonos 49
Wiggins 49
Eric 46
Liss 40
Erickson/
Sheehan 38

Since these include active rosters and reserves, and NLers Gonzalez and Ricky Nolasco, and Chone’s projections are generous with the playing time, upping the value here of guys who may not even play, they should be taken with a grain of salt. But they’re a start while we wait for games that matter.

The Rotoman’s Regulars League Draft

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Sunday night we held the seventh annual Rotoman’s Regulars League draft. The league is a 20 team Yahoo 5×5 league. Rosters are 20 deep (four reserves), so 400 players are taken. This is a very tough league with very smart, tough competition, both in the draft and all season long. And the all season long part is crucial. Though the league has weekly waiver claims it has daily ups and downs, so maximizing one’s reserve list and streaming players and pitchers on off days is essential. I made a respectable showing the first year, but each subsequent year things got worse until I decided to take a break. I hate sucking. This year I decided to return. I missed the guys and in spite of my suckiness at it, I like the format a lot.

How’d I do? Sucky. Here’s the team:
Jorge Regulah Roster

Here’s what happened:

1. Miguel Cabrera (1B): The seventh pick overall comes after the big boys, but before you can legitimately go after someone like Mauer or Lincecum. I mean, you could, but it doesn’t feel right. So, I went after the guy I think is the best of the big boys who isn’t a big boy. He’s the right age, he’ll be helped having Johnny Damon hitting ahead of him (but maybe not Austin Jackson), and he has a lot to live down after last year’s disgraceful exit.

2. Pablo Sandoval (3B): Waiting 26 picks for a second guy is frustrating. All the obvious names went off the board. I didn’t want an outfielder and I don’t trust Mark Reynolds or Ben Zobrist at this point, and I had a first baseman already. So, it was Sandoval for me. He’s young, so maybe there’s upside, but he plays on a crappy team offensively in a bad ballpark for hitting, so he’s risky, too.

3. Brian Roberts (2B): I was glad he was around. I wanted a middle infielder who ran. What I didn’t want was a guy who’d had his first workout of the spring hours before because of a bad disk in his back. I’d read about his problems earlier in February, but somehow missed the reports of escalating malady. If I’d known I would have taken the aging statesman, Derek Jeter. Roberts says he’ll be okay, so there’s that, but players aren’t doctors. My fingers are crossed. And I took a 2B in the reserve rounds, just in case.

4. Denard Span (OF): Okay, time for an outfielder, because there were no appropriate shortstops or corners. I added three to my queue: Andre Ethier, Andrew McCutcheon, and Denard Span. All three were available as my turn approached, but then they went down on order: McCutcheon, Ethier, and–on my turn–Span. The guy I missed was Hunter Pence, who I like a tick better, but the reality is that I like Span more than most, and I got him.

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The Forecasters Challenge 2009–revisited again

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The Forecasters Challenge 2009

Tom Tango said today he’ll be running the Forecasters Challenge again in 2010. The primary judging will come from the Pros-Joes format, which is described in the link above. The idea, basically, is to have each pro draft against 21 inferior lists. In last year’s challenge my projections ranked 3rd using this method.

For the record, using the 22 pros against all the other pros, my projections ranked 5th.

In the head to head scoring system, I was second division.

Overall, Rotoworld and John Eric Hanson seemed to score the best.

San Diego State 2009 Baseball Statistics

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SAN DIEGO STATE OFFICIAL ATHLETIC SITE

I was writing the profile of Stephen Strasburg for the Guide tonight, and chanced to visit the San Diego State baseball stats site. Strasburg’s line is incredible, which is why we’re all salivating over him, but the curious fact is that every player on the site has a link to a player page except Strasburg.

I don’t have time to investigate now, but it would seem that SS has pulled a BB (remember when Barry Bonds removed himself from the MLBPA licensing agreements, so he could make his own deals?), or else San Diego State doesn’t want to pay the bandwidth charges for all the people looking to read Mr. Strasburg’s bio.

The Forecasters Challenge 2009–final results

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TangoTiger.net

I’ve written about Tom Tango’s Forecasters Challenge here before. Tom asked many of us to contribute our preseason rankings of baseball players based on a metric he devised to calculate a player’s contributions on the field. His plan was to run thousands of drafts from these lists. The team that performed best would be judged to be the best, most useful projection system.

There was lots to like in this approach, though as Tom details in the report linked to here, there were also some surprises. He writes about some of the key structural ones, which have led him to run other iterations of the drafts, trying to find a format that gives a more nuanced judgment of the relative lists.

There are three other points that I think should be made.

First, there is a good chance that the weighting between hitting and pitching is off. This is certainly true of my team (which finished fifth of 22 in the original contest). Whether this is because I weighted hitting and pitching the same, which I did, or because I didn’t discount pitchers for their unreliablity, which I didn’t, or because I just undervalued hitters, something was off. Looking at the two components individually, which Tom has said he will do, should help us better understand how the original contest worked.

Secondly, not everyone used straight projections. Some systems weighted for position scarcity. This wasn’t prohibited, so I’m not complaining, but when it comes time to analyze the results it should be understood that in at least a few cases sardines are being compared to mackerels. A simple correlation of all the projections systems to the final actual ranking would be of interest.

Thirdly, as Tom notes about how Marcel handles players with no ML playing time, all systems use a sort of generic noise projection for the marginal players. This means in a correlation study that the noise can overwhelm the estimates of what players expected to have regular playing time will do. For this reason, I don’t think it would be a bad idea for Tom to run the drafts using a 12 or 15 team league format, so that not every projection system is in every league. This would mitigate the problem of small ranking differences being exagerated by the draft procedure, and may give us a better result. His head-to-head matchups are interesting, too, especially since so many ranks changed dramatically, but another angle of analysis on the data would certainly help us figure out what is better.

These notes are not meant to be critical in any way. Tom’s enterprise has thrown off a whole bunch of interesting data, which I hope he will keep returning to all winter long. Once the magazine is done I expect to dig in, too. He deserves a mountain of credit for conceiving this project and seeing it through. Ideally, we’ll be able to do it again next year with a better idea of what we’re going for. Thanks Tom!

Why Scott Boras Isnt As Evil As You Think He Is

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Deadspin

One reads a lot of crap analysis about sports (well, and other stuff too), but this is totally on.

It doesn’t mean that Boras isn’t a problem in the context of organized MLB baseball, but why would us fans choose to side with the owners and their uncounted stores of money, rather than the players, who make the game we like to watch with their talent?

Origins of Major League Starting Pitchers, 2008 –

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 Minor League Ball John Sickels looks at all the starting pitchers with 10 or more win shares in 2008 and looks at where they were at when they stepped over to the professional game. First rounders have a big edge, but what stands out is that successful pitchers come from everywhere.

A similar list tracking the last 20  or more years would be of great interest, if anyone has time tomorrow (or the next day), since the list itself isn’t exactly objective. I would assume that the way scouts and organizations work has changed over the years, and this would be reflected. Or, more tantalyzingly, maybe not.