Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
I play in the American Dream League with the tech writer Steven Levy, whose team is known as the Random Hackers.
Another writer (of this excellent book, among other things)
Even if you don’t know who Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Martin Luther King are, or Bowie Kuhn for that matter, let Bruce fill you in with this delightful shaggy dog story.
John Thorn, basesball historian, has an amazing tale about Woodrow Wilson, the 28th US president, who as a boy appears to have spent 1871 creating a fictional version of the National Association season that year.
Found in the Woodrow Wilson collection at the Library of Congress was a handwritten end of season account, including box scores, that mimicked similar actual accounts published by Henry Chadwick.
The attention to detail is amazing, and maybe a little scary. Read Thorn’s story for all the details, including an account of the “newspaper’s” sale by the auction house that is today called Southby’s, which attributed the piece to Chadwick himself.
UPDATE: The linked story was originally published on February 24, 2014, but I just came upon it today. If you liked this story, you may like this one about the baseball game Jack Kerouac invented as a boy.
The New York Times has a surprisingly engaging photo essay about elbows, Tommy John surgery, and the scars that are left behind.
I first learned about it from industry friends, who pointed to a story in today’s New York Times. The story originally broke in a discussion forum at Rotogrinders.com.
It seems a Draft Kings employee who writes about ownership percentages (how many Draft Kings players rostered particular NFL players in any given week) at Draft Kings finished second in a Week 3 contest at FanDuel and took home $350,000.
This same DK employee had accidentally published the ownership percentages before the DK games had locked that same week, demonstrating that some individuals have access. This wasn’t known before.
Big fantasy tournaments have thousands of entries, and there is a competitive advantage in avoiding commonly-rostered players. So the first question is whether the employee was using his Draft Kings information at FanDuel?
The second question is who actually has access to his information and, while they’re not allowed to play on the sites they work for, do they use it to play on other sites?
The answers are, perhaps not unsurprisingly, murky. Daily fantasy sports is an unregulated (so far) business. And while that seems likely to change, for now players are reliant on their trust of the game makers themselves.
The website legalsportsreport.com has an excellent What we know now about the situation, which attempts to answer all the questions raised here.
It’s hard for me to believe that these games are intentionally crooked. There seems to be too much money to be made for them to cut corners, but it is also true that if there is a way to get an advantage somehow someone is going to figure it out and take it. Which is why the legal gambling industry works hard to maintain a squeaky clean reputation. Trust is important.
Trust is unraveling in DFS, today, and the operators are going to have to work to earn it back.
My friend Ron Shandler does a good job describing the daily fantasy game in this story at Shandler Park, about a near-win in Tout Daily at FanDuel last week.
The question is whether he did better because he put more time and effort into making those picks. It looks to me like you can certainly make bad picks by taking guys who don’t play that day, for instance, but there is so much variance from day to day that the reasonable picks (Bour versus Adams, on any particular night) are essentially a crap shoot.
Once you throw out the bad picks, the way the games play gives winners the illusion of control, while losers can only wish they’d picked better.
Former Cub Adrian Cardenas has a piece at the New Yorker’s website about the mental issues that come up for players playing baseball. There’s a much bigger story out there, but he does a good job of mixing his personal story with a wider perspective.
Last year we linked to the Fantasy Baseball Team Name Generator, which makes up fantasy baseball team names from MLB and player team names, and random memes in the zeitgeist, or something like that.
There is a new and updated version of the Generator up now, in case you’re in need of a name.
The LABR Mixed Draft was held this week, and Josh A. Barnes makes an excellent point over at FakeTeams about how to make use of it. In a nutshell, ignore the guys who went higher than expected, since those picks may be the ravings of a single lunatic, but look closely at the guys who dropped below expectations. These are the guys the experts are collectively cool on.
While fine tuning my projections, I’m going to take a closer look at some of these guys, like Adam Wainwright, Josh Harrison, Felix Hernandez, Justin Upton and Mark Trumbo, today over at PattonandCo.com. Read Barnes’ story, for sure, and stop by at Pattonandco.com to get another take.
As the clock counted down to the end of the Super Bowl Sunday night, the announcers speculated that maybe Bill Belichick should stop the clock, to give his team a chance to march the length of the field after the inevitable TD. But Belichick didn’t.
I would like to say that I assessed the situation and determined what the right thing to do was, for everyone, but mostly riding on the giddy head of Jerome Kearse’s insane catch moments before, all I was thinking was that the Seahawks were going to win in a most improbable manner. No way could they fail, I was thinking.
After the interception the social media blew up with astonishment that the Seahawks didn’t give the ball to Marshawn Lynch, and let him run for a touchdown. That seemed like the safe thing to do, and it certainly would have covered Pete Carroll’s ass, but Matthew Iglesias explained on Vox yesterday why throwing the ball on second down made good sense. In short, and ignoring the significant third possible outcome, a pass would have led to a Touchdown or a stopped clock, which would have allowed the Seahawks, if they didn’t score, to either run or pass on third down—since they had only one timeout left. In other words, by passing, the Seahawks would have time for three plays. If they ran they would have had time for two (or would be obliged to pass on third down, with everyone knowing the pass was coming).
Now, this is kind of true, but not only didn’t Pete Carroll use this explanation after the game for his decision, but such rational thinking about the situation gets in the way of game theory, and the need to mix it up in order to keep your opponent off balance.
Justin Wolfers explains in today’s New York Times that good and effective strategy depends on randomizing one’s choices. If the best choice is to run, and you always run, your opponent will defense against the run and running will no longer be your best choice.
Which raises the interesting question: If Belichick is so smart, shouldn’t he have realized that the Seahawks better strategy was to pass? And if he realized that, wouldn’t he assume Pete Carroll would also realize that? And, if Pete Carroll thought passing was the better strategy and he assumed that Belichick would also assume so, wouldn’t he be obliged to change up his plans and call for a run?
It’s important to remember that game theory helps us figure out the competing motives, but before time runs out a decision has to be made.
That it was to pass was fine, I think, but I wonder about throwing the ball into the middle of all that stacked defense. Why not throw over the head of a receiver running to the corner after a play action? Or have Russell Wilson roll out and throw if a receiver was open, with at least the option of carrying the ball in if they were defensed?
What we know for sure is that, no matter what the coaches were thinking, Malcolm Butler saw what was happening and stepped up at the right time. Nice play.
Grantland’s Bryan Curtis visits baseball historian John Thorne, and surveys the literature of baseball is dying stories. The first one dates from 1868.
In a HardballTalk story from September, Craig Calcaterra showed the fallacy of  current baseball is dying stories, over and over and over.