Nate Silver on Fantasy Baseball

Baseball Prospectus | Unfiltered

I should probably check what I posted last March, but I don’t remember reading this insightful Nate Silver piece in BP Unfiltered last year. And if you didn’t read it then you should.

If you play fantasy baseball in a league with other people who think and pay attention, Nate’s VIP plan makes a lot of sense.  I don’t like Nate’s use of the phrase “leading indicators,” however, when it comes to player projection.

Walk rate and strikeout rate and home run rate aren’t leading indicators. They can help identify periods where a player’s other stats are out of whack with expectations, and should regress to the mean. But a player whose walk rate goes up one year isn’t likely to improve in the future, which would be the case with a true leading indicator.

Escaping the data panopticon

Prof says computers must learn to “forget”

This is not the place for this comment, but this is my place.

I believe that forgetting is an important part of moving on, of being able to compromise in very construtive ways. So I’m pretty sure that this prof’s heart is in the right place.

But I think the issue is much less nuanced. If we have a good and verifiable record of everything all of us do, our public behavior will have to conform to that model. Our lack of information in the past offered countless opportunities for operators to game the system, but if we know who we all are and who everyone else is, all sorts of trusted (and fair) endeavors become possible.

I think much of what the past was built on was a duplicity, and that is going to be impossible going forward. How quickly that’s going to reshape the world is exciting possibiltity today.

Very exciting.

The Jock Exchange

Michael Lewis on ProTrade

I wrote about ProTrade a couple of months ago, or you would probably better say that I linked to it. I was impressed by the software and the user experience, but to tell the truth I haven’t been back.

Michael Lewis’s story in the premiere issue of the new Conde Nast business magazine about ProTrade suffers from some boosterism, but you can also call that enthusiasm and conclude that he’s right. The future in sports projecting will be culling increasingly sophisticated information from the crowds. ProTrade didn’t invent this business, by a longshot, but they’re very nicely positioned to take advantage of it.

I haven’t been back to ProTrade after my initial foray. But Lewis’s description of all the funny money, the emotional backing, that a sports exchange will draw into its market,  is provocative.

The only problem is that a whole lot of die hard financial folks also happen to be sports fans, too. So what happens when Merril Lynch starts a Football Trading division?

Last Patton $ on Disk 2007 Update is Live

Ask Rotoman News

For those who have been tracking the P$oD07 updates all spring, the final one was posted last night. It includes the Patton software, merge files for those looking for updated bid prices from Alex Patton, Rotoman, and Mike Fenger, my latest (and last) projections for the year, and text lists and an Excel file for those who simply want the stuff.

Thanks to all of this year ‘s and future customers. May you kick butt all season long.

Patton $ on Disk 2007 March 22 Update is Live

Ask Rotoman News

The newest data is posted for purchasers of the Patton $ on Disk 2007 program. There are also Excel spreadsheets and text files, for those who don’t want to learn a program, but want Alex Patton and Rotoman’s 4×4 bid prices, or Mike Fenger’s excellent 5×5 bid prices.

But don’t buy the program because you want to see Jon Papelbon changed from a starter to a closer. I’ve stubbornly projected Papelbon as a closer (albeit a cheap one) all spring. Sometimes you just know a brain trust is going to come to its senses.

Patton $ on Disk 2007 is now available

www.askrotoman.com

For those who swear by it, the release of POD07 is a big day. We’ve been squashing some bugs the past week, as it were, and everything seems to be working okay now. So, if you want the software that has my projections, Alex Patton’s and my 4×4 bid prices (actually mine aren’t in yet, but they will be by the March 1 update at the latest) and Mike Fenger’s 5×5 bids, lightning fast operation and a myriad of ways to incorporate your own ideas into the mix with ours, now is the time.

There will be updates on March 1, 15, 22, 29 and April 5. Getting all the projections and bids balanced to league budgets and up to date is a constant project for us, and the data develops as spring training progresses.

I encourage you to visit the discussion board over at alexpatton.com, to ask users about the software and your expected uses of it.